Jacobin

“We’re Fighting a Mean-Spirited and Antidemocratic Attack on Public Education”

2019-02-22T15:45:58Z

Oakland teachers aren’t just fighting for a living wage and better working conditions. They’re fighting against the closure of dozens of schools, which would pave the way for the privatization and destruction of public education.

Oakland teachers on strike on February 21, 2019. Joe Brusky

On the first day of the Oakland teachers’ strike, I met up with Oakland teacher and union activist Tim Marshall at the rally downtown. Marshall has been an Oakland public school teacher for twenty-two years. He sits on the organizing committee for the Oakland Education Association (OEA), the teachers union that’s fighting for a living wage, smaller class sizes, more student supports, and an end to school closures. He’s also a cluster leader, in charge of organizing union activity at a handful of school sites. And he’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), having joined in the big post-Bernie membership wave.

Marshall and I peeled off the rally and settled into a restaurant called Ed’s Cheesesteak. From our booth, we could hear more than five thousand teachers chanting and singing outside City Hall. Before the interview began, Marshall got a phone call from a leader at one of his school sites. “It’s a propaganda war right now,” he told the organizer on the other end. “That’s why you take attendance. We need to show that we shut it down.”

Marshall hung up and pulled out an app on his phone that showed attendance percentages at schools across the city. Many of them were in the single digits. He pointed to one, a major aberration with a thirty percent attendance rate. “This is a problem,” he said. “We’ll be sending DSA members out to this picket tomorrow morning to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

I talked with Marshall about the Oakland teachers’ fight, the role of billionaires in dismantling public education, what’s so undemocratic about charter schools, and the right of every student to an equitably funded school that reflects and responds to the community where they live.

After the interview, we walked outside to find nurses from the California Nurses Association chanting, “Without teachers, we wouldn’t be nurses!” and elementary school children chanting, “Get up, get down, Oakland is a union town!”

Meagan Day

In January, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) announced that they were considering closing twenty-four of the district’s eighty-six public schools. Since then, opposition to school closures has been integrated into OEA’s demands, alongside the original three: a living wage, smaller class sizes, and more student support staff.

In the media, the school closures issue is getting less attention than the other three. I heard a segment on the radio this morning that neglected to mention it. But in a way, it’s the framing demand, because it’s the greatest threat to public education in Oakland.

What is the district threatening to do, and what’s their broader agenda?

Tim Marshall

The district recently announced the official closure of two schools, one in the hills and one in the flatlands, but both are part of a massive downsizing plan that they have, a blueprint for the district that is similar to what’s called the portfolio model.

The portfolio model is a model in which districts pit schools against each other, assess them based on criteria that are not necessarily the criteria of the community, and close the underperforming ones, ultimately reducing the number of schools in a public school system. Proponents of this model speak about schools in the language of corporate competition: investments, bargaining chips, productive and non-productive assets.

The district meant to phase this in, but word got out and now Oakland parents are up in arms about their kids’ schools being closed. The people on the school board are defending it as a cost-cutting measure, which is not true even according to their own internal documents, which we’ve seen. It doesn’t save them a substantial amount of money. It only makes sense if you understand that it’s part of a bigger plan, which is to hand over closed schools to charter school operators and/or sell off properties to developers to transform and gentrify Oakland.

Meagan Day

In the public sector, austerity is only superficially about saving money. California has the highest concentration of billionaires in the nation, and we could end austerity in public education in a heartbeat.

But there are two main reasons this doesn’t happen. First, rich people control our political system and fight tooth and nail for tax breaks for themselves. And second, austerity is a pretext for privatization, which promises to make rich people even richer. Can you tell me how that works in education?

Tim Marshall

That’s right. Oakland has already closed over a dozen schools in the last decade, and those schools have almost all been replaced by charter school operations. Partly that’s because of Proposition 39, which is the charter school law in California, and partly it’s because of the school board’s own bias and their plans to encourage privatization.

This is a long-standing policy of the district. In 2003, they proposed giving away thirteen of their own schools to the charter school companies. I was one of the organizers who went out to those schools, told teachers and communities what their rights were, and talked to them about how to fight back, and we saved eleven of those public schools.

But those schools were severely underfunded, were labeled underperforming as a result, and are on the chopping block again. So our union has taken up ending school closures as a key demand, one we’re trying to bring to the bargaining table.

We’re inspired in part by the incredible resistance from the community at Roots International Academy. Teachers, parents, and students at Roots have been fighting the closure of their school for months.

Roots is is a small, underfunded school in East Oakland. It serves students in the Havenscourt neighborhood, one of the poorest in Oakland. Almost all of the students are black and brown. These students are being punished for predictably low test scores, even though what test scores measure most is poverty, lack of access to resources and support.

The district offered a couple of alternatives when they announced they were closing Roots. One is something called a “golden ticket” which supposedly gives students entrance into a better school someplace else in Oakland. That could mean a charter school or a public school in the hills.

Not only are the students unlikely to be able to physically get to these schools, but it undermines the idea that students should be able to go to a school in their neighborhood, one that reflects and unifies their community, is funded equitably, and offers a high-quality public education.

Another option the district floated is a public school site thirty-two blocks away, down International Boulevard, which is a dangerous walk for anybody. A lot of these students don’t have money for the bus both ways every day. It’s an area of high crime and high sex trafficking, so to send middle-school age students down that street for thirty-two blocks is lunacy.

Meagan Day

But that’s not really what’s going to happen, anyway. Roots has a physical school structure, and it won’t sit empty for long. A charter school will probably just open up in its place and many of those kids will end up going there, right?

Tim Marshall

Very likely. And though it’s unconfirmed, we think we already know the charter school company that’s thinking about coming in.

Meagan Day

Let’s talk about the stakes. If twenty-four schools are closed in Oakland in the next few years, who wins and who loses?

Tim Marshall

The community loses. Charter school companies win, and the billionaires who are funding the school privatization movement win.

And not all of them are charter school operators, they’re just ideologically committed to dismantling public education. The Koch brothers are smart. They understand what’s at stake. They understand that by pushing this agenda, they will break unions as they have done in cities like New Orleans, which has no public schools left and therefore basically no union presence in education.

And they know that they can dismantle the social expectation of quality public education for all. They want to subject education to free-market principles, and usher in an era in which all schools, teachers, and students compete against each other for survival.

Meagan Day

You mention the Koch brothers because their money swirls around in the education reform movement?

Tim Marshall

Yes, and when they’re not directly involved, there are always other wealthy libertarian types. Like Netflix founder Reed Hastings who has thrown a lot of money into local school board races.

Meagan Day

Reed Hastings has even said that charter schools are preferable because they have “stable governance” instead of rotating school boards. Of course the very reason we have school boards is so they can be elected, democratic, and accountable to the public.

As it stands, the democratic nature of school boards is compromised by the fact that billionaires like Hastings throw so much money into school board elections. The solution to that is to get big money out of those races. But a guy like Hastings envisions instead a libertarian dystopia where all decisions about education are made by private corporations behind closed doors.

Tim Marshall

That’s why charter schools are their dream. Charter schools are all about public funding and private control. They are not subject to the same transparency laws. They don’t have the same kind of oversight and accountability — even the nominal accountability that we hope for in Oakland and don’t always receive. But at least we can set that demand. Nobody can set that demand on the board of a private charter school company and expect it to be met.

Neighborhood schools are given over to these fly-by-night companies, and they can stay or leave, unionize or not. Communities lose their right to demand specific outcomes, and to affect change inside of a school system.

For a long time I taught third grade at an elementary school in East Oakland. It went through this process of being condemned as a failing school. We fought to demand that it stay open, and we transformed it into a new school. We had to give it a new name, but the staff remained intact mostly, and we fought successfully to preserve the rights of the community that we had worked so hard to build relationships with.

Those rights would not have been respected by a charter school. For instance, I’m a bilingual teacher and we provided bilingual education. The community decided that’s what they wanted, the teachers supported and provided that. But a charter has no obligation to listen to the community. They don’t have to listen to anyone besides CEOs.

Worse yet, charter schools often accept kids who don’t speak English well or kids with special needs or behavioral problems, count them at the beginning of the year and receive funding for them, and then over the course of the year “counsel them out.” That means pressuring their parents to take them out of the charter school, so the school’s test scores will remain high and they will attract more customers. It’s called dumping.

Meagan Day

Public education is a labor movement stronghold in an anti-union political climate, and it continues to represent the idea of a universal public good in an increasingly individualistic and privatizing world. To what extent is the assault on public education a form of retaliation for these transgressions?

Tim Marshall

To a great extent. We all know that union density and union membership in the United States has fallen off precipitously, especially in the last two or three decades. But billionaires aren’t content. They see that public-sector unionism is one of the last bastions of an organized working class, and a defender of the rights not only of union members but also the democratic rights of the broader community. And that’s an obstacle. They want it all. They want the whole pie.

In education specifically, Oakland is a laboratory in which privatizers have been successful at establishing a foothold, and getting their ideas to become prevalent among school board members and high-ranking members of the administration. To do that, they’ve needed to delegitimize the public school system. And in order to make their case, they’ve starved us into austerity.

That’s why they pack us into classrooms, it’s why the heat in my room only occasionally works, it’s why the windows don’t close properly during smoke days caused by devastating wildfires, it’s why there’s mold in the classrooms, it’s why there aren’t enough adults to safely staff most of the schools, it’s why there aren’t enough nurses or counselors, and so on.

Meagan Day

A terrible consequence is that in pointing to the effects of austerity to delegitimize public education, the privatizers have actually persuaded some people in social justice circles too. I’ve heard people who care about racism, for example, justify charters by talking about the “harm that the public school system has done to black and brown kids,” not realizing that what they mean is the harm that egregious underfunding has done to those kids.

I think that’s what you’re getting at — that part of the privatizers’ strategy is to make public education seem not worth defending. To make us feel like there’s something flawed, maybe even something dangerous about public schools, and to get us to give up on the idea.

Tim Marshall

It’s like the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA was created with a piece of progressive legislation, but it’s now being run into the ground on purpose by Trump to pave the way for shutting it down altogether. The same is happening in many cities across the nation to public education.

Public education is ours. The fight for public education is a fight by and for the working class, from the earliest attempts to build something like it in Massachusetts in the 1830s and 40s, through the desegregation fights of the 1950s and 60s, continuing into these fights today to preserve public education for all — not for a few, not for a talented tenth, but for everyone.

In Oakland there is literally a chief officer in charge of “innovation,” but what she’s really in charge of is innovating us out of existence, closing schools and transforming them into charters. Those charters may or may not be innovative on their own, but I’m telling you that they are undemocratic, they are often corrupt, and they are not the key to providing quality public education for all.

Meagan Day

You’ve taught in Oakland public schools for twenty-two years, and before that you taught for a few years in Los Angeles and Chicago. You’ve also been fighting to correct course for a long time, alongside some very dedicated teachers who care deeply about public education. I’m sure it’s been both inspiring and demoralizing. What’s different about this moment?

Tim Marshall

I was a bilingual instructional aide in Los Angeles when I was a college student. There I met some people who became instrumental in the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) reform movement, including some young kid everybody was talking about named Alex Caputo-Pearl, who is now the president of the union and led their phenomenally successful strike last month.

And then in 1992 I went to Chicago and worked for a short time as a substitute. There I worked with members of what would eventually become the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), which led their groundbreaking strike in 2012. Back then, the victories of 2012 were just a gleam in their eye. Just like in Los Angeles, they had a dream of organizing a rank-and-file resistance to a union misleadership and of connecting community struggles to labor struggles.

So I’ve been familiar with reform efforts inside teachers’ unions for many decades. And I will say it has sometimes seemed like a long and lonely struggle. But this moment is different. People who aren’t us seem to be understanding what’s at stake.

There’s more sympathy for the labor movement in general from the public, and there’s more support for strikes within the labor movement. This strike, for example, has seen a lot of support from our AFSCME and SEIU brothers and sisters, just to name a couple.

I think the additional wild card has been these young people. The young people of our union are much more fearless resisters against their principals. They’re also much more vulnerable, because the rents are rising and the reality of being a twenty-five-year-old teacher is not the same as when I did it. They never paid us well in Oakland, but rent in Oakland used to be cheap.

And the support of younger socialists has been crucial. It’s not like how it used to be, with radicals isolated in their unions, the residual effects of the Cold War and red-baiting forcing them to disguise their politics. DSA is much more out front.

The role that East Bay DSA has played has been really welcome in the union. There are DSA members who are teachers on the organizing committee, and there were DSA members out on picket lines all over town this morning. In the lead-up to the strike DSA has cosponsored events with the union and taken on a huge logistical burden to make them happen. Bread for Ed, a massive fundraiser to feed kids during the strike, would not have happened without DSA. Much of the solidarity school organizing would not have happened without DSA.

The other day I had an exchange with our union president Keith Brown. I said, “Thank you for all you do,” and he responded, “No thank you brother. You brought the squad.” And by the squad he meant DSA.

The union leadership understands that the messaging of this fight can’t just about bread and butter for teachers, it also has to be about building better community schools and fighting off a mean-spirited and antidemocratic attack on public education. So that perspective was already there in the union.

But the union leadership has been very appreciative of the role DSA has played, and the cross-fertilization of ideas between the union leadership and DSA activists has helped our messaging take on a new character, emphasizing class struggle against the billionaires.

It’s going to help us in this fight if we can link the struggles of the community to the not-so-secret plans of billionaires and privatizers to dismantle public education. The socialist vision is helping stiffen our resistance to that plan. And I think it’s resonating with all these people right outside of this restaurant.

Rojava Is Under Existential Threat

2019-02-22T15:29:09Z

Donald Trump’s announced withdrawal from Syria would actually entrench US imperialism in the region — and open up the Kurds' revolution in Rojava to extermination and colonization.

Local residents speak with a Kurdish soldier while an oil well burns in the distance on November 10, 2015 near the town of Hole in the autonomous region of Rojava, Syria. John Moore / Getty

With local elections and another contest against his electoral nemesis, the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), just around the corner, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is wasting no time rallying the country around a common cause: destroying Rojava. “A strategic alliance with the US can only be possible if we wipe out terrorists from the north of Syria,” Erdoğan declared in December. “We have done so in Afrin and in Shengal. We have buried them in the trenches they had dug and we will continue to do so. If they don’t leave, we will make them disappear because their existence disturbs us.”

Erdoğan is itching to wage war across the border, against the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the enclave commonly known as Rojava. The revolutionary region’s political program shares many similarities with the HDP’s electoral platform in Turkey, which promotes egalitarianism, peace, and radical democracy.

As for the messages that Erdoğan is telegraphing to the public, they are threefold. Domestically, to the Turkish nationalists and his coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Erdogan sells the old war against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant Kurdish group). He does so by flattening all distinctions between the PKK and its civic sister in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which leads a pluralist coalition in Rojava. To the ISIS-crazed global media, Erdoğan is selling the security discourse of the “war on terror” by promising to create an ISIS-free “safe zone” right through Rojava, which also buys him favor with the European Union’s anti-refugee membership.

And to the Middle Eastern and Western left, Erdoğan sells his agenda as an anti-imperialist one, portraying the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Rojava’s self-defense forces — made up of Kurdish, Syriac, Arab, and Christian units, among others — as a US lackey. This he accomplishes by smuggling in the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF), the second-largest NATO army, as an alternative to the US presence in Syria, justifying the war against Rojava as, somehow, a war against imperialism.

But rhetoric aside, the facts are this: Erdoğan is clamoring to continue Turkey’s ongoing ethnic cleansing project, extending his tentacles from Afrin into the rest of Rojava. Donald Trump’s announced withdrawal from Syria does not amount to an end to US imperialism in Syria — it simply transfers the maintenance of long-term US interests to its proxies in the region. And the region’s Kurds, long colonized by multiple powers, have once again been caught in the middle — trying to fight for their liberation while grappling with the cruel realities of geopolitics.

A Colonial Handover

How would the US relate to the Syrian Kurds and Turkey under Trump’s withdrawal?

In a 2017 report, James F. Jeffrey, the Trump-appointed special representative for Syria engagement, prescribed a change of course.

“Turkey, a NATO member, sits on prime real estate . . . of central importance for U.S. policy in southern Europe and the Middle East,” Jeffrey observed. However, Washington’s “mishandling of the Syrian civil war, along with its tilt toward the PYD in the fight against IS in eastern Syria, risks forcing Turkey ever more into the Russian camp.” To remedy this risk, Jeffrey promoted a “transactional reordering” of relations with Turkey and the wider Middle East, hoping to appease Erdoğan’s drive for “Ataturk-like power.” For example, “the United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass,” or adopt a bilateral “model like the US-Israel arms sales relationship to ensure” smooth sales of the costly “F-35” program. If Washington reaches “an agreement with Turkey on its northern Syrian safe zone that would support the Turks and their Syrian opposition allies with advisory teams and airpower . . . and refuse to recognize PYD autonomy, much of the rancor in the current relationship would dissipate.”

That’s one plan. Then there is National Security Advisor John Bolton’s alternative five-point plan, which proposes what amounts to another “safe zone,” this one manned by the Kurdish National Council’s (ENKS) Rôj Peshmerga militia, the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq (which has strong ties to Erdoğan’s party). Bolton’s plan is favored by the establishment in Washington because it would shift political decision-making in Rojava to the safe neoliberal center. Air support from a potential KSA-UAE-Egypt alliance would then mollify the worries of some Arab states, as well as the Israeli military, about further extension of Iran, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s reach in Syria. Here, the United States would save face by not “abandoning the Kurds” and slow down ongoing talks between the PYD and Assad, while retaining de facto control over North and North Eastern Syria.

Either way, the US withdrawal hides a grand strategy to further entrench US imperialism in the region. Americans are not leaving Syria. They’re simply transferring their interests to NATO members and allies. And since the TAF is not even prepared to replace the US Army for such a mission — given the purges the TAF’s personnel has experienced since the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016 — the United States would have to offer “substantial military support, including airstrikes, transport and logistics.” In other words, deeper US military involvement.

Unfortunately, this basic fact has escaped some on the Left, who have taken the purported US pullout at face value and, at times, been willing to believe alternative truths about the revolution in Rojava or dismiss its participants as pawn on the imperialist chessboard. Take, for instance, the infamous 2015 Amnesty International report about alleged human rights abuses by the SDF, which the UN has since debunked. Amid the cacophony raised by this charade, Erdoğan’s expansionist project disguises itself as “anti-imperialist” to silence the real leftist program — the one in Rojava.

More fundamentally, the ready celebration of what is in fact a colonial handover suffers from a lack of awareness about the histories and specificities of oppressed peoples’ struggles in the Middle East against the region’s neoliberal and imperialist states.

Kurdistan, a Colony

Adopting Frantz Fanon’s words, we can say that for the Kurd there is only one destiny: to become a non–Kurd. Assimilation or disappearance has been the colonial reality of the so-called “Kurdish Question” in the Middle East since the beginnings of the modern nation-state, particularly in Turkey and Syria.

The plans for a “safe zone” controlled by Turkey would involve resettling millions of Arab Syrian refugees, currently in Turkey, in Rojava’s Kurdish areas near the Turkish border. The Erdoğan regime, known for pushing neoliberal policies driven by the twin profit motors of construction and energy, have put housing projects for the settlers on the colonial agenda to boost the Turkish economy. The scale of it would be staggering.

In fact, such a colonial-settler project surpasses, in both size and scope, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s 1973 completion of the original “Arab Belt” project, which deported 140,000 Kurds from 332 villages in Rojava over ten years to Syria’s southern desert regions, replacing them with twenty-five thousand Arab families in forty-one “model villages.” Demographic engineering lies at the heart of colonial Turkification and Arabization policies that have dominated the region’s political and social realities, from Syria to Turkey and then to Iraq and Iran, against Kurds and Armenians among others.

In the case of Turkey, the state has always attempted to integrate and homogenize the dissident Kurdish regions in its territory into a common cultural stream, first by invading their traditional home places and then by razing them to create spaces of control and discipline. For example, after the 1938 Dersim massacre, which saw tens of thousands killed following a Kurdish uprising against state repression, the Turkish state redistributed the remaining Kurdish population of the area to various majority-Turkish cities. The Turkish state employed the same approach again in the 1990s, when the military burned down more than four thousand Kurdish villages, displacing the entire rural population of the majority-Kurdish Southeast. In both cases, the Turkish state’s primary aim was to domesticate those resisting its aggressive Turkification policies.

Scholars like Ismail Beşikçi, a sociologist of Turkish origin, have shown that the Turkish state’s institutionalized policies against its Kurdish population exhibit a “genocidal character.” Beşikçi also argues that despite the political appearances and differences between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the four nation-states share the cooperative goal of denying their Kurds the right to dignified existence, forging the Kurdish Question in the process — or in his words, the “international colony of Kurdistan.”

The colonial reality of the Kurdish Question, however, is not limited by its territorial determinations and histories either; it is not reducible to the division and allocation of predominantly Kurdish lands in the early twentieth century to the newly born states of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by imperialist powers. The international colonization of Kurdistan must be understood as a continuum that appears in how citizenship is defined and distributed by state powers across the Middle East.

In Turkey, the state traditionally considered Kurds “pseudo-citizens” who stood outside the boundaries of the Turkish nation, only granted citizenship rights (and an assimilated Kurd identity card) if they relinquished their mother tongue, history, and identity. Beşikçi recalls an ironic scene from the martial law court of Diyarbakır, Turkey, in 1971, where “persons who spoke Kurdish and not even one word of Turkish were said to be Turks, despite the fact that the courts were forced to hire interpreters to communicate with the accused.”

Historically, Kurdistan has therefore been a sort of hybrid colony — assaulted by the various colonial practices of four nation-states, intertwined with the geopolitics of imperialist powers.

“Playing One’s Own Game”

The Kurdish liberation movement is marked by the contradiction that, as Gramsci put it, “whatever one does one is always playing somebody’s game.” He added: “The important thing is to seek in every way to play one’s own game with success.”

Statelessness is one such hurdle. In Syria, a special census, decree No. 93, ordered in 1963 by President Nazim al-Qudsi, stripped 120,000 Kurds of citizenship. By the onset of the Syrian revolution, the descendants of this group numbered more than three hundred thousand, divided into the two extra-legal categories of ajanib, or foreigners, and maktumin, literally undocumented migrants in their own country.

Kurds have tried to make the best of this situation, orienting their strategy and theory toward overcoming it. Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish liberation theorist, developed his theory of Democratic Confederalism as one rooted in statelessness, which Syrian Kurds took up as a framework for grassroots organization in the decade preceding the Syrian revolution.

Öcalan’s writings on women’s liberation in the Middle East are no less Machiavellian in both strategic foresight and liberatory aptitude. He regards women’s emancipation “as a tool to destroy the structures of feudal Kurdish society,” where “women were at the bottom of a tribal hierarchy.” He recognizes that “feudal family and tribal structures presented an obstacle to [political] recruitment” and so “breaking down the established patriarchal social order would allow for the emergence of a new society in which women would take part equally.” (The destruction of the patriarchal family structure is doubly important, since the TAF arms and co-opts conservative Kurdish tribes in its war against the PKK.)

The implicit and explicit contradictions of this agenda only underscore the agency and remarkable accomplishments of the Kurdish women’s revolutions in Turkey and Syria. A gender distribution ratio in government, local feminist courts, a social contract that women have played a central role in writing and executing, indigenous and autonomous communalism — all are part of the feminist program in Rojava.

The danger in this Gramscian game, however, is that one might become too prone to playing another’s game. For example, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has maintained military bases and airports in Rojava throughout the civil war, since it handed control of Rojava over to the PYD at the outset of the Syrian revolution. (So sure was Bashar al-Assad of continued Kurdish subservience that he even left some guns behind, so the Kurds may fend for themselves.)

One might call this development inevitable, given the PYD’s mistrust of the Turkish-backed opposition umbrella organization, the Syrian National Council (SNC). But it was a position that only alienated the Syrian opposition, who then refused all PYD overtures to join opposition talks on Syria’s future — and who, save for the too-late and even-then-ambiguous Kurdish Issue Charter, had refused to recognize Kurdish demands for federalism. In fact, it is another one of the flaws of some parts of the international left that it continues to condemn the Kurds for refusing to embrace the Sunni and Arab vision of the Spring in Syria.

The PYD’s brief spring of autonomy came to a near end in 2014, when a well-armed ISIS found its way well into the gates of the city of Kobane. Here, the United States entered the Kurdish picture, seeing that its support for a failing Free Syrian Army (FSA) only amounted to a handover to ISIS of the military equipment it supplied to the FSA via Saudi intermediation – weaponry lost to ISIS in battle after battle. US airstrikes against ISIS positions in Kobane then enabled Rojava’s People’s and Women’s Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) to mount a resistance that has since become known as the Stalingrad monument of the war against ISIS.

Of course, the US deployed the narrative of a “war on terror” only as a pretext to attach itself to the PYD/YPG, and as a means to preserve its many interests in the Middle East, one of which is to obstruct the Iranian Shiite Corridor — a path laden with missile depots and stretching from Iraq to Western Syria to the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, ending right at Israel’s doorstep. In return, the YPG sought to wipe out ISIS by taking over oil fields in central Syria that funded the group’s reign of terror. In the process, the logistical necessities of driving ISIS out of Rojava also rendered the YPG/J dependent on the US’s might and tact. Add to such military exigencies the severe psychological impact of the atrocities committed by ISIS in Kurdish-majority areas, and it becomes evident that in the formation of the SDF in 2015, under US supervision, we are dealing with a situation in which Rojava’s revolution — built on confederalism and radical democracy — has been pushed toward an anti-ISIS and pro-security and territorial insurrectionary discourse.

Now, with the end of the war against ISIS and with US positions firmly anchored in Syria, the restoration of the status quo in Syria returns the Gramscian Rojava to the status of the odd one out, once again. And having put aspects of its internationalist project on hold, in favor of an understandable drive for security, Rojava finds itself dispensable and replaceable by any bully with a bigger gun — such as Turkey, who can lay claim to securing the remaining pockets of ISIS in Syria. Perhaps, then, the political lesson here is that if a revolutionary force engages in a “war of maneuver” with the aid of a hegemon, it should not lose sight of how that hegemon might be engaged in a careful, atrocious “war of position.”

The SDF’s alternatives to the US’s plans are less clear cut. Damascus’s Russian-dictated reaction to the list of ten reconciliation demands put forward by the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the SDF’s political wing, has been lukewarm. Assad is likely weighing the perils of making peace with an armed and organized Rojava in a postwar scene where he will already have his hands full with the reconstruction capital pouring in from Arab states. But after the bloodbath and the chemical bombs, he must also be wary of another resurgence from Syria’s repressed Sunni majority, who kickstarted the revolution and who live between the Damascus strongholds and Rojava. Maintaining Turkey’s Kurdish problem might deter Turkey from sponsoring future revolts, while keeping a leash on Rojava.

As for Trump, his administration will likely seek a deal between the PYD and Turkey that aims to pacify Turkish fears by driving a wedge between the YPG/J and their PKK forbears in Turkey.

What the International Left Should Do

The people of Rojava have fought for their revolution, and their victories have been significant given the challenges. Without an amenable leftist state or party to aid them, their options were simple: die, or die. They have refused that result, fighting instead for a new state of life and politics.

What can the international left do to aid them now, at this crucial juncture? We should support shutting down arms sales to the Turkish state, including from Germany, England, and, of course, the United States. We should staunchly oppose the economic blockade Turkey has imposed on Rojava: items entering from Rojava’s border with Iraq are restricted to no more than the bare necessities of sustenance. Here, the international left could raise the costs of the Turkish embargo on Rojava by highlighting its counter-revolutionary character — an old imperialist measure also imposed on other revolutionary enclaves, such as Cuba — or circumvent state actors altogether by organizing direct international aid to Rojava’s people via leftist parties and sympathizers.

Unfortunately, the news from Rojava rarely makes it to the mainstream media, buried instead in a swamp of propaganda and fake news produced by Erdoğan’s cyber army. The news of the ethnic cleansing in Afrin has not been given center stage in the media, anywhere, for more than a year. So the international left must become a louder voice against the perpetuation of humanitarian disasters.

Both the United States and Russia should get out of Syria, and the international left should pressure the Assad regime to settle for a democratic program of the country’s transition to confederalism. It is crucial that a neutral and international peacekeeping force guarantees the peacefulness of such a transition for all inhabitants of Syria by barring the expansion of interventionist states already present in Syria, such as Turkey and Iran. Returning control of the province of Idlib, occupied at the moment by al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, to a local civilian administration, is integral to such a transition plan. Finally, the international left should support the HDP’s peace process in Turkey, so that Erdoğan’s war machine is deprived of preemptive pretexts once and for all.

Rojava, the site of a remarkable peoples’ revolution, is on the brink of colonization and extermination. The international left must stand against it.

From Faculty to Factory

2019-02-22T13:07:43Z

In 1990 Albania’s students were key to bringing down a decrepit regime. Today, they are fighting the order that replaced it.

Tirana, Albania, September 2015. Albinfo / Wikimedia

Over the last three decades students have played a mythical role in Albania’s ruling ideology. They are portrayed as the key actor in the overthrow of the “socialist dictatorship” in 1990–91, and thus at the origin of the promised new democracy. Yet despite this supposedly central role, there have been no major student protests in Albania since then. So, when twenty thousand students gathered in front of the Ministry of Education in early December 2018, there was widespread shock — even among the protesters themselves.

In protests lasting for three weeks, there was a radicalization of both students’ demands and their collective imaginary. If on day one the mass of protesters sought the withdrawal of a government decision to charge those who failed their exams, by day two the demand was free higher education, and a radical democratic reorganization of university life. They soon won major concessions, including a 50 percent cut in undergrad tuition fees.

But large sectors of society wanted something more from the students: for them to bring about the Big Change, a cataclysm that was hard to define but in which great hopes were invested. It’s not that workers or poor Albanians identify with the students’ own conditions, as such. But the protests certainly did raise the political expectations of the social majority, except the 1 percent of oligarchs. The old myths of 1990–91 fed hopes that the students would form a new anti-systemic movement or political party.

Higher education is, then, once again the battlefield between neoliberal capitalism and the resistance against it. But these hopes of a broader change are yet to be realized. If the old Albania created after the fall of bureaucratic socialism seems to be dying away, the task is to understand on what social formation it rests, and whether its transformations are capable of creating something new.

From Bureaucratic Socialism to Peripheral Capitalism

The importance of the student protests owes not only to Albania’s particular social formation, but also the crisis from which it emerged. The country’s peripheral capitalism built on the ruins of the previous bureaucratic socialism, but also partly inherited its productive infrastructure and social composition. Most importantly, in this peripheral capitalism there is no clear functional dividing line between the state bureaucracy and the emerging bourgeoisie.

Although heavily tainted by bureaucratic and despotic distortions, until the mid-1970s at least Albania’s socialism had a propulsive rhythm. It contributed to the partial industrialization and urbanization of a very backward country, to the emancipation of women and the spread of education and health care to the remotest parts of the country. It created a substantial working class almost out of nothing, on the back of capital accumulation from the collectivized peasantry and the grants from the Soviet Union (until 1961) and, most importantly, the People’s Republic of China (until 1976).

The stagnation of the 1980s and the deepening economic crises — followed by the very weak opening-up of the regime after the death of Enver Hoxha, president from 1944 to 1985 — led to growing discontent especially amongst the working class and intelligentsia. In 1990, students, as the most active part of the intelligentsia, took the initiative and started mass demonstrations against the socialist bureaucracy. But it was only after the working class of the main cities entered the scene in 1991 — by joining the students’ demonstrations and calling a general strike — that the bureaucracy gave in and accepted its political dismantlement and a transition to what at that time was called a market economy.

If the highest echelons of the socialist bureaucracy left the scene, this was not the case with its middle cadres. Most of them reemerged as the new political bureaucracy in the context of a newly established capitalist system. They were the main figures of the newly established political parties. More importantly, some of them — in concordance with the state apparatuses — were transformed into the new bourgeoisie. This was the most important and secure way of building a bourgeoisie, the others being capital accumulation through organized crime and economic entrepreneurship in its classical form (from small to big businesses).

The process of capital accumulation was triggered by mass privatizations. During the Stalinist-type of socialism, every economic activity or enterprise — to the smallest ones — was controlled by the state. In the 1990s all of the small and medium state enterprises were privatized. Except for some mines and the oil sector, the entire industrial base of the economy was not only privatized, but almost wiped out. Lamenting the outdated technology and lacking the necessary capital to regenerate them, the new owners just dismantled the factories, selling them off piece by piece. Ironically enough, what started as a working-class struggle against the bureaucracy soon produced mass unemployment.

In order to understand the level of deindustrialization, one could look at the number of industrial workers. In 1990 there were 339,000 industrial workers, while in 2004 there were only 79,000 In 2016, only 10 percent of employees worked in industry, while more than 40 percent still work in an almost precapitalist agriculture (the majority of the peasants are neither farmers, nor rural proletarians, but till their small plots of land using premodern tools according to the principles of subsistence agriculture). Below them there is an enormous mass of urban plebeians, a myriad of small vendors, permanent unemployed, precarious workers, self-employed, workers in very small businesses (one-third of workers are employed in enterprises which employ 1–4 people), etc.

Work dispersion has led to the obliteration of almost any kind of trade unionism. In 1991, 93 percent of the urban workforce was part of a trade union. In 1997 the number had fallen drastically to 12 percent. Nowadays it is so minute that nobody cares to count. A few years ago, the current prime minister, Edi Rama, invited a group of Italian businessmen to invest because Albania “fortunately lacks trade unions.”

Fortunately enough for the guardians of the new social formation, from the early 1990s onwards there has been a way out: emigration. Instead of fighting to defend their industries, the largest part of the Albania’s working class opted to work abroad, especially in Greece and Italy, where work remuneration was several times higher. Today almost one-quarter of Albanians are emigrants.

Despite its industrialization, even during socialism Albania remained mostly an agricultural country, where up to 60 percent lived in the countryside. In 1991 the state-run cooperatives were dismantled and a new agrarian reform divided land equally among peasant families. The agricultural infrastructure was all but destroyed, and the process of economic differentiation is still very slow; meaning that most peasants resist proletarianization and cling to subsistence agriculture. The countryside’s exceptional poverty explains the higher rate of migration abroad or towards big cities shantytowns.

From the early 2000 onwards, the process of privatization swept across what had remained of the state’s giant corporations, especially in the service and banking sector. Most of them are owned by foreign capital. Extractive sectors such as oil fields and chromium mines are also rented to foreign capital or joint ventures.

Trade liberalization and the opening of the economy have meant that the Albanian economy could have only a subordinate and peripheral function in global capitalism. Deindustrialization has paved the way for a kind of revival of manufacturing, which exploits low-skilled workers. The shoe and garment sector are expanding, subcontracted by foreign large corporations, where local bosses represent a kind of middle bourgeoisie. Wages and working conditions are miserable (a shoe and garment worker isn’t paid more than 200 USD a month). The same subcontracting logic also applies to the call centers, whose workers — mostly students speaking Italian — are paid an average 350 USD.

Above them lies a speculative economy, where the big bourgeoisie, in close concordance with the state bureaucracy, accumulates capital in various illegal and quasi-legal forms and invests it in construction, real estate, trade centers, TV stations, hotels, and restaurants. Organized crime, moreover, is one of the main sectors of capital accumulation. Previously engaged in criminal activity abroad, in the recent year mafia bosses have invested in marijuana production and traffic, bribed central and local authorities, and in a few years were transformed in respected businessmen — helping the main political parties to buy and capture votes. In return, some of them have been elected as members of parliament or mayors.

This big bourgeoisie lives off the state. They gain lucrative state contracts to build ill-advised public infrastructure — especially roads — which led to growing indebtedness to international financial institutions. After the IMF veto on raising debt-to-GDP ratio (currently on 69 productive), the government is trying to finance its clients in the speculative economy by public-private partnerships. Now that anything productive is privatized, the state is left to partially privatize its basic services — like hospitals, schools — or subcontract some of its basic activities (like customs).

Higher Education as a Prize and a Way Out

Higher education was one of the last islands to be engulfed by the new social formation’s capitalist logic. Its successful commodification, which went full-speed after 2013, was modelled on the similar transformations of the public health care system. And yet since 2014 public universities have also been the main site of resistance against neoliberalism.

Historically speaking, when the Communist Party took over in 1944, the illiteracy rate in Albania was 81 percent. There was a gigantic education and emancipation effort during the four and a half decades of socialist rule. In 1957 the first Albanian university (the University of Tirana) was established. Universities produced a qualified workforce for the emerging industry, state, and party cadres, and a plethora of employees in basic state service sectors (teachers, doctors, nurses, etc.). Graduating meant not only higher work remuneration, but also a more respectable social status. University admission was tightly controlled by the state and party authorities, where subjects considered disloyal to the party were discriminated against (although there was no written law preventing certain social categories’ admission in universities, students, in addition to good grades, needed a party recommendation to be enrolled).

Nonetheless, socialist industrialization and modernization, although extensive, was never deep. The most advance technology came from 1970s China. There was no computer-based industrialization or a cognitariat. Therefore, the university-qualified workforce and intelligentsia continued to form a marginal part of Albania’s socialist society. There were approximately 25,000 university students in 1990, in a population of more than 3 million.

In the early 1990s a democratization of university admission took place. Political discrimination was lifted. However, the weakening of state apparatuses, the disconnection of higher education with better-paid jobs and high social status, the continual expansion not followed by proper state financing, and the emergence of clientelist relations within the university and among professors and political parties led to the deterioration of the university system.

The growth of university admissions was slow until the early 2000s. The number of students in 2004 had reached no more than 43,000. From 2005 onwards the numbers skyrocketed, reaching the climax of 173,000 in 2013.

What happened? Firstly, the early 2000s saw the rise of private universities. They engaged in a predatory approach towards student recruitment, promising almost anything — from secure employment to abusively high grades. Secondly, the center-right Democratic Party government expanded public universities’ quotas in an attempt to postpone youth unemployment until after graduation and gained electorally by the initial enthusiasm of newly enrolled students. Naturally, there hasn’t been any increase in the public universities’ budget, meaning that tuition fees rose annually by 5 to 10 percent. Although the Albanian economy did not need much of a graduate workforce, the social desperation of unemployment and the normally illusory hope of using clientelist connections with political parties to find employment in the state administration led to massive enrolment.

These private, for-profit universities were made possible thanks to a 1999 law introduced by the center-left Socialist Party, then expanded considerably after the Democratic Party took power in 2005. There was a need for a new investment outlet for the capital accumulation of the 1990s, and private universities were actively supported by the government. Firstly, the latter lent or sold them cheaply important state-owned buildings, which were transformed in university campuses. (In the beginning, they were rented and then, after fulfilling the formal condition of investing in the regeneration of the building, they were privatized on preferential terms for the buyer). Secondly, it granted them tax privileges. In 2009 private universities were the sole for-profit enterprises which were exempted from the value-added tax. In those years the government asked long-employed teachers to hold a master’s degree and nurses to gain a bachelor’s degree as a condition to keep their jobs. That created an enormous effective demand for diplomas in private universities, where you could almost buy such a qualification.

Until 2013, the commodification of higher education affected only private universities. That year the newly formed Socialist Party government started an aggressive neoliberal reform in higher education. Private university bosses — also owners of construction firms, TV stations, or newspapers — asked for direct public funds. Inspired by the Chilean university reform during Pinochet’s rule and formally modelled on the British university reforms of the Blair era, this shift was based on the principle of financial competition between public and private universities, the control of the university boards of administration by government employees, and the reduction of student participation in university governing bodies. The student was considered as a customer, professors as wage laborers, and the university as a cost-effective institution. Advertisements in university campuses were becoming common and curricula were expected to transform in accordance with market needs. Impoverished public universities were forced to raise tuition fees, especially in master’s degrees, and start a plethora of new programs whose sole purpose was “to look interesting from a market perspective.”

The barons of public universities — rectors, deans, senators, old professors etc. — played the role of zamindars in colonial India. The “feudal” character of their rule supplemented and supported the partial commodification of public universities. They were the powerful enablers of this process, especially by subduing internal resistance.

Despite these efforts, the main problem of university life in Albania continued to be the unemployment and underemployment of graduated students. A peripheral economy doesn’t need a large stratum of intellectual workers. Conversely, the state administration is overly burdened. As time goes by, the number of disillusioned graduates and students grows. Some of them emigrate. Especially in the last years, a lot of doctors and engineers have migrated to Germany. (Annually, on average 150 doctors and 800 nurses migrate legally.) For the rest there’s only one solution: alienating work in call centers, where the sole required qualification is to speak fluent Italian. While a decade ago working in call centers was considered a temporary job, nowadays it is viewed as the most important horizon of intellectual employment.

Young students start working in cafeterias or other unqualified jobs from the first years of their study. Most of them come to Tirana (where the majority of universities are based) from peripheral areas of Albania. For them, graduating is the only hope of social mobility, the other being crime. Needy, poorly paid, thrown in a city where everything is expensive, most of the time discriminated against culturally — they are forming the new precarious proletariat. They are nonetheless mostly eager to learn. The internet and social media have an empowering potential, where young students could improve their foreign languages competence, learn from a wide world, and be inspired by student revolts elsewhere.

These were the social agents of December’s political upheaval. Protesters asked for everything, immediately. Almost all of the ideas and slogans of the leftist Lëvizja Për Universitetin’s (a student movement founded in 2014 to counter the neoliberalization of higher education) were embraced by the mass of students involved. What may, amidst the wider neoliberal ideological context, have looked like utopian demands rapidly became politically hegemonic. The center-right Democratic Party promised that once in takes power, it will implement a program of tuition-free higher education and serious financial support for poor students. Media pundits were forced to revise their political views, and move leftwards, at least during the peak of the protests. During the first three weeks of December the students totally paralyzed the government (Edi Rama was forced to fire more than half of his cabinet) and put the whole political system into a crisis. The shared demand called for an anti-systemic political alternative that would spring from the student movement.

In January, massive protests gave way to faculty occupations. The most distinguished site of resistance was the Faculty of Social Science, where for five weeks 200–300 students (10–15 percent of all students) have transformed its everyday operations. Boycotting classes, they have gathered in the faculty hall — improvised as an agora — and held discussions on almost any subject. Inspired by their students, the lecturers of this and other faculties also gathered in assemblies, for the first time in Albanian history. In solidarity with students’ demands, the lecturers of the Faculty of Social Science have mounted a three-day strike and are now holding assemblies together with the students in order to side-line the faculty’s official bureaucracy.

During these two months students have achieved a lot. They have managed to secure a 50 percent reduction in tuition fees for undergrad students and the promise that something will be done to improve their studying and living conditions. Though they did not explicitly demand anything outside the university realm, they also pushed the government to raise the official minimum wage by 8 percent and promise to withdraw from the most predatory aspects of public-private partnerships. However, there remains a lot to be done. Masters’ tuition fees have not been cut, student representation in university governing bodies has not changed, while the corpse of the higher educational law continues to stink.

Yet the students’ success also goes beyond specific demands. Their powerful movement has fractured neoliberal hegemony: in the streets you can hear ordinary people talking about the students’ struggle. And it has also raised common people’s expectations of what they themselves can achieve, as we saw in the oil refinery and shoe factory strikes in January. The student protests have been a historically important movement. But they are just the beginning of a long emancipatory process.

Dead Center

2019-02-22T11:56:06Z

The Labour Party defectors keep repeating the tired centrist refrain that the public is hungering for moderation. The whole history of the past generation shows otherwise.

Members of The Independent Group pose for a photo in London. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Nearly four years ago, the United Kingdom went to the polls. At the time, living in south London, I weighed up the options on my ballot paper. A Labour Party selling mugs with the slogan, “Controls on Immigration,” not traditionally a stirring socialist phrase; a leader who’d campaigned in front of an absurd eight-foot high concrete slab that ended up functioning as his own political tombstone; and a local candidate so center-right I ended up spoiling my ballot. The country seemingly felt similarly: what should have been an easy win for Labour instead became a victory for the Conservatives, and caused such turmoil in Labour that Jeremy Corbyn secured a surprise and thumping victory in the race for the party leadership.

The local candidate I deemed so undesirable as to deny him my vote this week left the party and created a new outfit that he insisted wasn’t a party: Chuka Umunna joined with seven Labour MPs and three Conservatives to forge a centrist party no one had asked for. The Liberal Democrats already exist, after all — and poll abysmally. Asked what they stood for, the new grouping championed austerity and the Conservatives’ previous public service cuts, oppose both nationalization (one of the most popular of Labour’s policies) and increases in marginal tax rates on the wealthiest, and oppose Brexit. In an interview with the BBC, former Conservative MP Anna Soubry said the group was in favor of “sensible policies for a stable economy,” a phrase utterly devoid of meaning: no party is openly advocating “absolute lunacy for a blazing garbage fire of an economy”.

But it speaks to the patronizing philosophical core of centrism: that conservatism, liberalism and democratic socialism are all mere distractions, and that a Frankenstein’s monster of a party combining the worst of all their aspects is what the public are crying out for. What have “The Independent Group” created? A party squarely of the establishment, almost designed by committee to appeal exclusively to career politicians and newspaper columnists.

Centrism and the Third Way carries with it a particular patronizing nasal tenor: melding selected tenets of socialism and capitalism, but openly challenging only the former, never the latter, is held to be simply a more “grown up” way of doing politics. The defeat of the Labour Right and the shock referendum result only amplified this peculiarly loud tendency in British politics. Obsessive Remainers invariably characterize themselves as exasperated adults, the only mature cohort left in politics, shouting into the wind like King Lear. Everyone opposed to reversing the referendum result is cast as a knuckle-dragging clod — regardless of whether they actually voted to leave or begrudgingly accepted the will of democracy after a binding referendum — with only centrists as the voice of cool, (always) middle-class reason.

The calling card of this particular type of centrist is a preternatural pride in the fact they not only work with their ideological opponents, but even count them amongst their close friends. Here, The Independent Group have taken this feature to its logical conclusion and left their original parties for a new shared home with their traditional ideological enemies. In 2017, newly elected member of Parliament Laura Pidcock told an interviewer, “whatever type [Conservatives] are, I have absolutely no intention of being friends with any of them. I have friends I choose to spend time with. I go to parliament to be a mouthpiece for my constituents and class – I’m not interested in chatting on.” The apoplectic centrist rage was phenomenal: an endless stream of professional commentators, political staff and casual political critic expressed absolute disbelief that Pidcock preferred friends of the same political background. Doing so, dozens of articles claimed, showed an immaturity ill-fitting for an elected representative. At no point did Pidcock say she wouldn’t work alongside Conservative MPs to attain important political goals — merely that she didn’t desire to spend her social life engaged in cross party banter.

Self-congratulatory public praise for your ideological enemies might be depicted as a mark of political sophistication, but it belies a particularly privileged position. You can rarely work together if they utterly despise you. Scrutinize the history of the Conservative Party and its hatred of the poor, single mothers, people of color, and many other groups comes to the fore like a brass rubbing. The limits of cooperation are set by these value judgments. The MP Frank Field was praised repeatedly for his commitment to working cross-party to combat poverty. Two points are worth examining here. First, he left the Labour party to become an independent after decades of being considered one of the most right wing politicians within the Labour fold. Second, there are different approaches to “combatting poverty,” and Field’s, which included housing poor families in shipping containers under bridges as a punishment, suited the Conservatives’ agenda by dovetailing with a mindset that blamed the poor for their own fecklessness, and offered “routes out of poverty” rather than the eradication of destitution and the more equal distribution of wealth. The Independent Group will only function as a party while they focus on opposition to Brexit as their core shared belief, fighting poverty and inequality simply will not feature in any mooted manifesto.

In British, and lately Irish, politics, the past few years have seen burgeoning interest in the prospect of a new centrist party to mop up those who have a vitriolic antipathy towards Corbynism, along with disillusioned Liberal Democrats and soft Tories. Finally, after endless plots, one has launched.

The MPs who have jumped ship and joined The Independent Group are adamant there is a gaping hole in politics that can only be filled with exhumed Blairism. Never mind that Miliband lost despite having every opportunity to win the 2015 general election, or that Labour experienced its biggest boost in membership and greatest share of the popular vote in recent memory because of the vitality of Corbynism. And yet these MPs are curiously reluctant to prove this appeal by doing the decent thing and moving to a by-election, standing as independents rather than Labour or Tory candidates. Joan Ryan, the MP for Enfield North saw her vote margin increase tenfold between the 2015 and 2017 general elections. The difference? A new leader of the Labour party. If Ryan genuinely believes her stunning individual performance as an MP is the reason for the huge boost, she should force a by-election and prove it. But she won’t: like fellow splitter Gavin Shuker, Ryan lost a no-confidence vote in her local party in September 2018. I was unable to read her tweeted resignation letter, having been blocked for suggesting that her calling local members “Trots, Stalinists and Communists” was disrespectful and bore no resemblance to reality. For now, the 11 MPs are more than happy to cling to their seats, won with Labour and Conservative money and the hard work of local activists, now abandoned for personal opportunism.

The drift is pure delusion. A small subset of people who may once have considered themselves left-wing, but have veered to the center and right as the result of advancing age and accumulated wealth, continue to cling to the belief they constitute a far larger demographic than reality illustrates, and have the media connections to agitate and publicize their vanity projects. The Liberal Democrats show what happens when centrism reaches power, as they did in 2010 with the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government: constituting a small minority, the only positive benefit they can claim to offer is to act as the brakes on socially ruinous policies. The reality is worse: centrists are simply whipping boys for the larger party. The best example of this Stockholm Syndrome is this anecdote from a former Lib Dem adviser, obscenely proud of having demanded a policy of charging for plastic grocery store bags, in exchange for agreeing to ruinous Tory-sponsored sanctions for the poorest on social security benefits:

The Lib Dems’ vote has collapsed and Miliband’s campaign failed — whereas a Labour party that proudly calls itself socialist, wants to renationalize utilities, make society fairer, and make low-paid workers better off has done far better electorally. Centrism fails because on the face of it, it tries to be everything to everyone, which invariably means favoring the rich over the poor. But it also carries with it a patronizing tone that pervades politics and alienates voters. Citizens know who they want to vote for, and it’s generally based on party and policies, rather than the name recognition of a mid-ranking London-based celebrity.

Centrism will always fail for as long as it attempts to sanitize conservative policies in the guise of a vanity project. Come polling day, the “Independent” MPs are in for a sharp shock.

A Season of Discontent

2019-02-22T10:56:10Z

Three months since the gilets jaunes protesters first blockaded roads around France, the movement has created a crisis in Emmanuel Macron’s presidency — and one that’s due to last.

Clashes between the police and the Yellow Vests at Opera, on December 15, 2018 in Paris, France. Veronique de Viguerie / Getty

Three months since the start of the gilets jaunes movement, everyone can agree that France is going through a decisive moment in its history. Despite the tireless efforts to repress, slander, and belittle the movement — and we have been told that it is on the brink of collapse ever since November — the yellow-vested protesters are still with us.

Every Saturday for fourteen weeks they have taken to the streets of towns around France in their tens of thousands. They have continued to occupy roundabouts and parking lots and to blockade malls, toll stations, and logistics hubs. They have organized assemblies and flooded social media and the press from all sides. And they don’t seem to want to stop there.

From the start there were the incredulous and the skeptical, irritated to see these “hicks” from la France profonde rebel against the rise in the fuel price or hostile to a “petty bourgeois” uprising supposedly directed by the far right. Today, they have been forced to recognize that the gilets jaunes movement has proven much more complex — and surprising — than it had first appeared.

Even three months since the first demonstrations, it is hard to tell exactly what trace this remarkable popular uprising will leave on French history. The neoliberal “center” and the far right will certainly try to take advantage, for their own purposes. But the gilets jaunes have also achieved a great deal already. Highlighting the dangers of Macron’s neoliberal utopia and attracting international attention to the scale of police violence, they have also opened up a historic possibility of change. They have built a popular movement based not on nationalism and a racist agenda on immigration, but new vision of democracy and solidarity.

A Violent Response

The least we can say is that the gilets jaunes have had no favors from Emmanuel Macron and his government. There have, of course, been formal concessions: in December, faced with the size of the movement, the government was forced to give up (for the time being) on its planned fuel tax hike, and indeed announce a clutch of measures designed to calm the storm. And compared to what the numerous social movements in the last ten years of French history have managed to win — i.e., nothing — we might think the gilets jaunes had chalked up a victory.

But it didn’t take protesters long to realize that the measures announced by the government (increasing the minimum wage by €100 a month, albeit to the cost of taxpayers and not employers; tax exemption for overtime; making employers pay an end-of-year bonus to their employees; cancellation of the CSG tax for pensioners who receive less than €2,000 a month) were just sand thrown in their eyes. These “crumbs” from the table fell far short of the movement’s demands for social and fiscal justice, wealth redistribution and a more direct democracy.

At the same time, the gilets jaunes movement has been confronted with a violence that has not been seen in France since at least 1968. Since November around 80,000 policemen, gendarmes, and members of special units have mobilized in order to “keep check of” the demonstrations across France.

Through the course of the protests tens of thousands of tear gas grenades and “flashballs” have been fired at demonstrators. One cannot stress enough how widely, and how abusively, these supposedly “non-lethal” weapons are used by police. The Interior Ministry’s own figures speak for themselves: so far at least ten people have died (one was directly killed by the “forces of order”), 2,100 have been wounded, 8,700 have been arrested, and 1,796 sentenced. And there have been 243 official complaints to the IGPN (police control board). Police violence has also struck at the most vulnerable, as well as street medics, journalists, photographers, and high school students, earning condemnation even from Amnesty International.

Despite these very serious incidents, Macron and his cronies seems to be digging their heels in. Far from questioning the social and economic policies that have stoked this popular anger, the government is betting on casting aspersions on the movement’s credibility, dehumanizing its participants and restoring order by force. The president, the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner and members of Macron’s party constantly speak of “hooligans,” “thugs,” and “troublemakers,” presenting the demonstrators as a hateful, xenophobic, and fascistic mob. Castaner’s dogged refusal to acknowledge police violence is stunning. Last month, as he called on French people not to demonstrate, he threatened: “those who demonstrate where the expected hooliganism is going on know that they are themselves complicit in it.”

But perhaps this is the gilets jaunes’ greatest success: for in recent weeks state violence has itself become a separate subject of discussion in French public life. After two months of dismal silence on the police violence against demonstrators, the media — which had up till that point only been interested in the violence perpetrated by “hooligans” — were forced to wake up. It now seems long since the days of the Benalla Affair, in which the public and the media seemed agitated not so much by the fact that Macron bodyguard beat up protesters, unleashing his fury against a man on the ground who had clearly been restrained, as by the fact he did this despite not being a policeman. For the first time, on radio and TV we hear intellectuals refusing to condemn protester violence and trying to explain it in terms of the social and economic violence that public policy has imposed on the population, as well as the forces of order’s own violent strategy. For the first time, the government is not succeeding in instrumentalizing violence to discredit the movement; rather, its own violence is helping to amplify the protesters’ message.

The gilets jaunes’ mobilizations against police violence and in support of its victims have had real effect. Hundreds of witness accounts, photos, and videos of wounded gilets jaunes circulated on social media even when the media were only interested in showing “hooligan” violence. In December, a video showing over a hundred high-schoolers in the Parisian suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie on their knees, hands on their heads, surrounded by police in riot gear, went viral on the gilets jaunes’ social media. The pose these teenagers were forced to adopt was picked up by the gilets jaunes, who made it one of the most photogenic symbols of their own protests. Women involved in the movement have been especially active in marching to denounce police violence. Several mobilizations like the movement’s “Act XII” — in which the procession through Paris was headed by those wounded in earlier weeks — achieved great media success. To break this silence was also to lift the veil on a violence that has been perpetrated for decades against oppositional movements and especially the populations of France’s poor, working-class and minority-ethnic neighborhoods. And it thus opens the way to a convergence between the gilets jaunes’ struggles and those of the urban poor and existing activist circles.

The Authoritarian Slide and Neoliberalism’s Crisis

Indeed, all this makes up part of the wider picture of an authoritarian slide under Macron’s government. This authoritarianism first targets anyone who fights against the powers-that-be. Anyone who has participated in the various “Actes” staged by the gilets jaunes knows it: you can no longer demonstrate in France without risking getting hurt, or worse. The police have even started systematically confiscating the masks, glasses, and serums indispensable for protesters faced with volleys of tear gas. The freedom to demonstrate is itself increasingly under threat, as it has been since the state of emergency was introduced in the wake of the November 2015 terror attacks.

Added to the police violence is the repression through the courts. Even jurists and legal scholars have expressed their growing worries over this turn. And with good reason: for the number of gilets jaunes arrested around the edges of the demonstrations for “preventative” reasons, as well as the number of demonstrators sentenced to jail time — sometimes just for Facebook messages — is truly stunning.

Press outlets have recently revealed that magistrates from the Paris public prosecutors’ office have received fresh instructions for police conduct when gilets jaunes are arrested. These measures involve the systematic creation of records on protesters and the abusive use of custody. The repeated judicial intimidation against certain figures from the movement who have become its symbols in the media — for instance, Eric Drouet, arrested several times in recent months — only aggravate this situation and intensify the popular outrage. Julien Coupat, a famous Situationist activist was detained for almost forty-eight hours because he had a yellow vest in his car (which is in fact compulsory) as well as paint-bombs and a builder’s mask. Meanwhile the 133 investigations opened up by police complaints board IGPN have little chance of leading to convictions.

The “anti-hooligan law” inspired by Castaner and supported by Macron’s LREM party and the conservative right was adopted by a large parliamentary majority upon its first reading on February 5. It promises to aggravate this situation. The law’s supporters say it wants to prevent violent actions on demonstrations and punish whoever commits them. Its authoritarian effects include the bolstering of police prefects’ power over that of judges, the creation of new special records on protesters, the extension of preemptive demonstration bans, the creation of a crime of hiding one’s face, as well as a presumptive offense of participation in a demonstration expected to lead to the damaging of goods or violence against individuals.

Like the “fake news” bill restricting the freedom of the press, the asylum and immigration bill which imposes harsher rules on the most vulnerable, a law designed to keep journalists’ noses out of business secrets, and the incorporation of the state of emergency into ordinary law, this latest text well illustrates Macron’s authoritarian slide. For other examples of this, we could look to such moves as the instructions for hospital staff to report the names of injured gilets jaunes (and even for a crowdfunding site to reveal who had contributed to the expenses of one protester filmed punching a policeman). Or, at a different register, the police raids on the offices of France Insoumise in November and, in more recent weeks, the left-wing news site Mediapart, following its revelations about disgraced Macron aide Alexandre Benalla and his dealings with Putin allies, Mafiosi, and Russian oligarchs. In that case the website’s staff resisted the raid, defending the secrecy of their sources and in turn winning support from other press outlets.

How can we explain this authoritarian shift, and the government’s dogged determination to “hold course” — even if this requires a repression more violent than any other in the history of the Fifth Republic founded some six decades ago? Why such a categorical refusal to take on board the gilets jaunes’ social, fiscal, and democratic demands? Even General de Gaulle, architect of this republic of often-monarchic hues, decided to resign after May ’68 and his disavowal by the French people in the referendum the following year. If Macron holds firm, stubbornly refusing to budge, it is because he in fact embodies neoliberal ideology better than any of his predecessors did.

The philosopher Barbara Stiegler recently reminded us that the “new” bit in the “neoliberalism” that has spread around the world in recent decades is that it is no longer content with laissez faire in the manner of classical liberalism. Rather, it seeks to impose a direction that society must follow; namely, a world led by the global market. The neoliberal utopia likes to imagine a world in which there prevail not brutal and predatory relations in which the biggest devour the smallest, but rather the refereeing of a fair competition in which everyone has equal opportunities to do to the best of their ability and show off their talents. Stiegler tells us that for the neoliberals this condition is the end of history, indeed the ultimate end of the evolution of life itself: an “end-state” that cannot be criticized or discussed. This end-state is the heart of the neoliberal utopia and demands the return of an invasive state which imposes a compulsory agenda on the entire society. The neoliberal state must drive humanity — by will or by force — to adapt to this new and “modern” environment.

This is nothing but a neoliberal “revolution.” Macron in fact outlined this very program during his presidential campaign, with his modestly-titled book Révolution. Here, Macron explained that France was suffering because it had failed to adapt to the “modernity” of the globalized economic order, more specifically because of its political system and institutions that were antiquated and ossified.

Yet today in France as elsewhere the contradictions within neoliberalism — and especially the growing concentration of wealth and the destruction of the environment — are fueling a popular suffering and an anger expressed in the rejection of these policies. This, resistance, in turn, forces the neoliberal powers-that-be to show their authoritarian nature even further. Faced with the popular uprising that has shaken France since the first blockades on November 17, and unable to recognize the fault-lines in its own doctrine, neoliberalism can only govern by violence.

A Great Debate, or a PR Coup?

In his speech on December 10, Macron announced the organization of a “great national debate,” which would allow all citizens to debate essential questions of national interest. On January 13 the president’s office published his “Letter to the French” in which Macron framed the debate around four “great themes”: taxation and public spending, the organization of the state and public services, the ecological transition, and democracy and citizenship.

The famous great debate began on January 16, and was meant to continue until mid-March, in every region of France. Citizens were invited to express their views via an online platform or else by local assemblies organized by mayors. This initiative was, to say the least, an unusual one. The president’s letter said that “no question would be off-limits,” while also stipulating that there would be no review of recent fiscal measures. There could thus be no question of restoring the Solidarity Tax on Wealth abolished by Macron’s government, even though this demand is at the heart of the gilets jaunes movement. Nor could there be any talk of establishing more progressive taxation by challenging the flat tax or the CICE program of tax cuts and exemptions for business. The only matter up for discussion was the reduction of certain taxes and “making savings,” where the gilets jaunes instead wanted investment in public and social services. Right away, it was clear that the terms of the debate would be set by Macron and members of his government, who would lead the discussions and collect the participants’ ideas before drawing the conclusions of all this the following month.

It didn’t take long for the gilets jaunes to understand that they were being ridiculed once more, and they declared in massive numbers that they would not take part in what they called the “great masquerade.” But since the debate was launched the government’s real intention has become ever-clearer. In fact, Macron was determined to turn the great debate into a PR campaign to insist on the neoliberal “end-state” mentioned above. Three months before the European elections, he is monopolizing media attention, with no sense of balance.

Mediapart has shown how the government has done everything it could to prevent the great debate being subject to the impartiality rules that should in principle apply to any public debate of this type, on the local as well as national level. Indeed, normally such a debate ought to be organized by an independent institution, the Commission nationale du débat public (CNDP), whose role it is to frame the debate in accordance with an ethics charter and democratic rules that are meant to guarantee independence, neuturality, transparency, and equal treatment and rights to speak. In the current “great debate” these principles are being trampled on. This does not as yet seemed to have caused any great stir in the ranks of the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel, whose role it is to regulate candidates’ space in the media, or the Commission des comptes de campagne, even though Macron is using public funds (many millions of euros) for what is effectively his own European election campaign.

Instead, state propaganda monopolizes both public and private media. Fine for Macron: even if he is boycotted by the gilets jaunes, who continue to be supported by a majority of the population (over 64 percent according to recent surveys), the president, who had reached fresh lows of popularity in the early stages of the movement, has now picked up six points, reaching a 34 percent rating. While the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National, formerly known as Front National) is still in the lead in voting intentions for this May’s European elections, this historic act of subterfuge is helping Macron regain strength.

Return of the Collective

All that does not mean that the gilets jaunes movement is done for. On the contrary, they have perhaps never had the wind in their sails as much as they do today. The mobilization has continued to aggregate new elements, from high-schoolers to students and social movements in the suburbs of the big cities, while also consolidating its forces over the weeks and months. While at first the relations between the gilets jaunes and trade unions were testy, union members soon came along to the roundabout protests and many unions showed solidarity, often thanks to the initiative and pressure of grassroots, trade-based or territorial structures. On February 2 a first “general strike” combined with a demonstration that united trade unions (the CGT, Solidaires, and some branches of Force ouvrière) with the gilets jaunes. It was a remarkable success, with more than 300,000 participants. The next national general strike uniting the gilets jaunes and the gilets rouges (“red vests”) has been called for March 19.

Far from Macron’s “great masquerade,” the gilets jaunes have instead organized their own great debate. Over recent weeks the movement has created new structures for itself, including a number of assemblies. This all began in December when a group of gilets jaunes in Commercy, a small town in the Meuse (to the East of Paris) launched two appeals for fellow protestors around France to create “citizens’ and popular” assemblies that could draw up “lists of demands.” They then proposed a national meeting that would bring together delegates from around France, in order to share the demands they had raised. As one appeal put it “Together, let’s create the assembly of assemblies, the Commune of communes. This is the sense of History, and our proposal. Long live power to the people, by the people, for the people!” This call was welcomed enthusiastically by many gilets jaunes across France, and hundreds of assemblies were organized in this cause.

The first “assembly of assemblies” was thus held close to Commercy on January 26–27. More than seventy delegations (most represented by a woman and a man) came from around France to explain their local experiences of struggle and their demands. Over these two days, gilets jaunes from cities like Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Dijon, and Rennes, but also la France profonde — the invisible, peripheral France from which the movement started out — created a genuine laboratory of political education and democracy. This is itself part of the movement, complementing the protests in squares, parking lots and roundabouts, and indeed the social media where ideas have now been exchanged for some three months.

An Age of Solidarity

The results of all this once again belie the accusations that have been advanced in media (and by the government) for months, presenting the gilets jaunes as somehow fascistic. The communiqué from the first assembly of assemblies describes the movement as “Neither racist or sexist or homophobic” but instead “proud to stand together, with our differences, to build a society based on solidarity. We are enriched by the diversity of our discussions, as hundreds of assemblies develop and propose their own demands. The[se demands] have to do with real democracy, with social and tax justice, with work conditions, with environmental and climate justice, with the end of discrimination.” Among the gilets jaunes’ demands and strategic proposals we find such measures as the abolition of poverty, the transformation of institutional life (referendums initiated by citizens, a constituent assembly, the end of elected officials’ privileges), ecological transition (to deal with energy precarity and pollution from industry), and equality for those of all nationalities (including for people with disabilities, between men and women, an end to the abandonment of poor districts, rural France, and overseas territories).

These are today among the issues most prominently raised by the movement. Of course, it is not wholly homogenous. The presence of far-right groups and personalities on the Champs Élysées and other protests ought not be denied or minimized, any more than the racist and homophobic acts that have tarnished some mobilizations. And certainly the media have made a big deal of these incidents. Some figures who have proclaimed themselves “leaders” and who have been boosted by the media, such as Benjamin Cauchy and Christophe Lechevallier, have links with Le Pen’s party or other far-right sects. However, their legitimacy is widely challenged within the movement’s ranks, and far-right activists are regularly chased off the demonstrations.

There are also countless opportunist bids to create a “gilets jaunes party.” Jacline Mouraud, a self-proclaimed “apolitical” figure who received great media exposure at the beginning of the movement, launched her own “Les Émergents” current, though she has in fact taken her distance from the gilets jaunes, which she now considers to have been infiltrated by extremists. Patrick Cribout, a gilet jaune from Nice, has presented a draft list for the European elections baptized the “Union Jaune,” an “apolitical and non-trade union” candidacy with a special focus on questions of immigration and sovereignty. A clutch of gilets jaunes led by another figure with great media exposure, Ingrid Levavasseur, have also decided to create a “gilets jaunes list” for the European elections, though on closer inspection we find that some of its candidates have links with Macron’s own LREM party, while others like Christophe Chalençon (who made his name in December as he called on the army to seize power) are highly controversial in movement ranks. Others have fed rows by deciding to meet Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Italian Five Star Movement and vice-premier in a government together with the far-right Lega. Unsurprisingly, Levavasseur ultimately announced that she was breaking with this list, instead seeking to set off “on the right foot” again. In fact, it seems that the large majority of gilets jaunes are opposed to the movement operating as a structured force in the European elections, which would also risk playing into the game of polarization (i.e., between “liberals” and “populists”) favored by Macron.

Faced with these complicated initiatives, the movement’s “insurrectionary wing” — whose most famous spokespersons are Eric Drouet and “Fly Rider” — have continued to oppose it taking on any electoral form. These are the most popular figures among the gilets jaunes, also because they prioritize mass mobilization and the weekly “Actes” (mass protests) in Paris and other big cities. Another gilet jaune — François Boulo, a young lawyer from the West of France — has been touring the radio stations and TV panels in recent days. This son of a small business owner, from a social-Gaullist family, Boulot certainly has a “petty bourgeois” profile, but he has gradually become accepted as spokesman for the gilets jaunes rallied in numerous groups in Rouen. He emphasizes the need for alliance with the trade unions, insisting that paralyzing the economy through strikes is the only way for the movement to succeed. He also stresses the need to challenge the European treaties, and especially their budget balance requirements and the functioning of the European Central Bank. He has attacked the tax reforms implemented by Macron and his predecessors, serving only the 1 percent richest French people to the detriment of public services and small businesses. He advocates the reinstatement of the Solidarity Tax on Wealth and the limitation of CICE tax exemptions program to small firms only.

In this varied landscape, it is difficult to say for sure what will become of the movement. But what we do know for certain is that it has had the great merit of accelerating the discrediting of the neoliberal limits on the possible, bringing questions of social and fiscal justice and citizen participation back into public debate. It has brought mass politicization, articulated counterproposals to the president’s own “debate,” and advanced a different conception of democracy as a vehicle for experimentation and shared education. Redefining society’s collective goals from below, this democratic upsurge stands radically opposed to the authoritarian-neoliberal insistence that popular sovereignty should be delegated to leaders and “experts.”

Today we stand faced with the political failure of the European project and the dominant political currents around the world, themselves mostly champions of the neoliberal utopia. In contrast to these latter, the gilets jaunes movement seems to be one of the only popular movements in recent years not to be built around nationalism and a racist agenda on immigration. For that reason alone, it remains an opportunity we must not let slip by — a historic possibility of change.

“I Love Chicago. I’m Gonna Fight to Stay Here.”

2019-02-22T10:03:03Z

Jeanette Taylor is a community activist on Chicago’s South Side running for city council. In an interview, Taylor explains why she participated in a month-long hunger strike to reopen a school, how to fight inequality in the city, and her vision for a working-class Chicago.

Chicago has seen an explosion of working-class organizing in recent years. Such organizing produces working-class activists, and Jeanette Taylor is one of those activists.

Taylor is running for a city council seat representing Chicago’s twentieth ward, on the city’s South Side. She has been involved in recent key battles, as she explains here, including the Dyett High School hunger strike, the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) 2012 strike, and the campaign demanding a community benefits agreement (CBA) as a condition of the construction of Barack Obama’s presidential library.

She has been endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America as well as the city’s leftmost unions like the CTU and United Working Families, a labor/community electoral organization.

On a recent break from canvassing ahead of the city’s February 26 municipal election, Taylor spoke with Jacobin managing editor Micah Uetricht. You can also read our interviews with leftist Chicago city council candidates Byron Sigcho Lopez, Carlos Rosa, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, and Ugo Okere.

Micah Uetricht

You grew up in Chicago, right?

Jeanette Taylor

I was born and raised in Chicago. I’ve lived on the South Side my entire life. I’m a mother of five. I am the daughter of a retired CPS clerk, who died two weeks ago, and a cab driver. I had my first baby when I was fifteen. By the time I was nineteen, I had three kids. So I went to school and I worked two jobs.

I went to Dunbar Vocational High School and Dauphin Tech to take a business tech class. I wound up working for H&R Block as well as at a bar — I was a bartender that didn’t drink.

Micah Uetricht

How did you get involved in community organizing on the South Side?

Jeanette Taylor

It started when my oldest boy went to school. My mother was a PTA mom, she was one of the first people to be on a local school council at Mount Greenwood Elementary. When I had a baby she was like, “You gotta do it. I’m not gonna do it for your kids. It’s your responsibility.” So I was on a local school council.

Micah Uetricht

This is the elected body of community members in schools that has some decision-making power about what goes on in public schools. Your mom said you had to be on the LSC?

Jeanette Taylor

Yep. I didn’t want to do it, but I did what I was told. For maybe the first four or five years, I was not an effective local school council member. I thought the principal knew everything — she was educated and I really didn’t know much, so I was like, “Yes, ma’am.”

Micah Uetricht

What changed?

Jeanette Taylor

When I did an LSC training through Chicago Public Schools, I didn’t learn anything. So a friend of mine suggested I look up the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO). I heard that they were troublemakers, but I thought, “I don’t care what they are — as long as they can help me with this training.” So I started training with a brother named Jitu Brown.

At the same time, the [possibility of Chicago winning the 2016] Olympics came up [in the late 2000s]. People were coming to our community, and they were talking about displacement. People had been buying property in our community. KOCO was one of the community organizations saying, “We need a community benefits agreement. The community needs to benefit from the Olympics.”

I realized that they were one of the only organizations to march on the International Olympic Committee [when its members came to Chicago on its official visit to assess the city], and ultimately they’re the reason why we didn’t get the Olympics. After that, I wanted to join.

At the same time, we were hit with the announcement about Mollison Elementary closing. We were like, “What? Why is it closing?” We weren’t the highest performing schools — we were right in the middle. But the district never talked about the fact that we never got the resources we deserved.

Mollison is in Bronzeville. It’s a gentrifying community. I was told by one of the people who bought a home there that they didn’t want their kids to go to school with my kids. This was a black person who had a little bit more money than me that moved into my community and felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I was like, “Oh, I’ll show you.”

So me and a couple of parents — three hundred parents — we went to CPS and made sure that they did not close the school.

Micah Uetricht

You were also part of the Dyett High School hunger strike. What was going on with Dyett, and how did you decide to take this very drastic step of going on a hunger strike?

Jeanette Taylor

[The school district] started talking about closing Dyett. We had heard conversations about it being proposed as a possible site for the Obama presidential center. And the only thing standing in the way of it was Dyett and some residents of Garfield Park.

When they first talked about a hunger strike, I was like “hell to the no.” Let’s do something else. I’ll even go to jail. But, you talking about not eating — that’s insane. But after I got kicked by an elected official when I blocked the city hall elevator doors [as part of a civil disobedience action demanding Dyett stay open], I had had enough.

So when they talked about it in May 2015, I was ready. But it was after two years of getting my ass kicked.

We cornered Rahm Emanuel at a press conference as he was opening up a new playground. We had told him, “If you don’t meet with us, we gonna bust up your press conference.” So he had one of his chief of staff take us in a room. I was telling him what the school meant and what had happened when they had closed the schools [in previous rounds of closures in Chicago]. It pushed the kids into violence. We knew what was going to happen if they closed the school.

He said, “Well, I’ll think about it.” And we were like, “Okay, you gonna think about losing this job. You gonna be working somewhere else. We gonna make sure that we let people around the city know this what you think of the black community.” I never had anything nice to say to him.

So we decided we were gonna go on a hunger strike. We met with the Little Village hunger strikers.

Micah Uetricht

This is the 2001 hunger strike in the Little Village neighborhood that eventually led to the creation of the Little Village Lawndale High School.

Jeanette Taylor

Yes. They went on a hunger strike and got a school built from the ground up. They are the people who told us what the hunger strike meant, what they got, how to take care of ourselves, some of the foolishness we were gonna deal with.

Micah Uetricht

I’ve never heard that part of the story before. You all were on this hunger strike in Bronzeville, historically the heart of black Chicago, focused on a school, Dyett. And you met with residents of Little Village, the heart of Mexican-American Chicago, who had successfully gone on a hunger strike focused on opening a school.

Jeanette Taylor

That’s always the lie, that black and brown people don’t work together. Yes, we do.

But the Dyett hunger strike would not have happened without the Little Village hunger strike. That’s just it. Anybody who was on that hunger strike could tell you that. They sat with us. The oldest lady who was on the Little Village hunger strike, I think she was eighty-six. She sat out there with us, explaining that it wasn’t going to be easy.

[Dyett eventually reopened in 2016, and the hunger strikers claimed the reopening as a victory.]

Micah Uetricht

How do you see the state of the city of Chicago as a whole today?

Jeanette Taylor

The city of Chicago has gotten rich off the backs of low-income and working families, predominantly in black and brown communities. We have a city of haves and have nots. And the haves are okay with us being have nots.

Micah Uetricht

There’s also been a strong working-class movement here.

Jeanette Taylor

Exactly. The movement made and pushed me. I don’t like doing all this, running for office and talking in public. That’s something I was molded into doing. I’m the person that likes to talk to people one-on-one, organizing behind the scenes. When I die, my gravestone will say “mama, wife, and organizer.” Because that’s the most important job in the world to me.

Micah Uetricht

You talked about Dyett and KOCO, which is part of a broad educational movement in this city that people most associate with the Chicago Teachers Union. How have you related to the CTU?

Jeanette Taylor

Of course. I was one of the parents who stood with them, who told other parents “don’t fall for what the district is saying — they don’t care about your children.” Their working conditions are our children’s learning conditions.

Micah Uetricht

Were you on the picket line with the CTU in 2012?

Jeanette Taylor

Oh yes, I was. I got pictures.

Micah Uetricht

Let’s talk about the 20th ward. It’s a majority black ward, with a population that is on average very poor, the product of decades of racism and housing segregation. On the other hand, it’s close to the University of Chicago. Parts of the ward will include the Obama presidential library, which stands to further the displacement of black people from Chicago. There’s simultaneous poverty and gentrification.

Jeanette Taylor

The twentieth ward is made up of Woodlawn, Washington Park, Back of the Yards, New City, and Englewood. It’s been disenfranchised. The University of Chicago has a long history of displacing folks in our community.

The ward as a whole is in jeopardy from the Obama library. All of a sudden, parts of the ward are getting clean, there are lights, they’re making it pretty. That’s not for us. That’s for selling it. They’re going to say you’re fifteen minutes away from the Obama center. Move in. The entire ward will be a victim of this placement if we don’t get an elected official who is willing to stand up and fight for this community.

Micah Uetricht

Can you talk about your own thinking about the Obama presidential library? I’m sure a lot of people on the South Side were very proud of Obama’s election in 2008 and still have a very high opinion of him. But his presidential library has this potential for massive displacement.

You spoke with him once about a potential community benefits agreement and he rejected it, right?

Jeanette Taylor

Yes. I asked him the question [at a community meeting announcing the library]. He kind of bounced around it a little, bit but then he turned around and said no, he does not support a community benefits agreement, because you’ll have organizations coming out of the woodwork and demanding he sign something with them.

I was upset. I didn’t like what he said. I was honestly in shock, because he is an ex-community organizer. He knows better.

I voted for Obama twice. I have nothing against the first black president of the United States. But when a person has the power to protect low-income and working families, and they don’t — if it’s Queen Elizabeth, if it’s Beyonce, I don’t care: we should always challenge it. Period. I’m not backing down off that.

Micah Uetricht

When you’re out talking to potential voters about the Obama library and the potential for displacement on the doors, what do they say?

Jeanette Taylor

In the very beginning, I got the question “do you hate Obama?” I said, “This has nothing to do with me liking him. This is about displacement in our community. This is about over a hundred thousand black folks being pushed out of Chicago.” I love Chicago. I’m gonna fight to stay here. That’s one of the reasons why I got in the race.

Micah Uetricht

You’re endorsed by a number of progressive groups: United Working Families, Reclaim Chicago, the Democratic Socialists of America. There are a dozen other endorsees on the UWF slate. There are four other people who DSA endorsed. What is the vision for that whole progressive slate of city council members?

Jeanette Taylor

Making Chicago into a true Sanctuary City. Winning a living wage. There’s so many. Getting rid of the gang database. Winning the CBA in this community but also for any big project that uses our tax dollars — think about all these big projects that come to the city, and the people who pay taxes and live in those communities never benefit from them. And making sure we tax the rich.

To win all of this, it’s not enough for people to vote for me — they have to go to city hall with me.

Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping

2019-02-21T17:11:40Z

MMT is billed by its advocates as a radical new way to understand money and debt. But it’ll take more than a few keystrokes to change the economy.

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Where Are They Now?

2019-02-21T16:44:57Z

The Hater Class

2019-02-21T16:39:57Z

As long as the upper middle class exists, it’s going to be at best ambivalent about our program.

Polls Tighten In Texas Senate Race Between Beto O'Rourke And Ted Cruz. (Photo by Paul Ratje / AFP / Getty Images.)

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The Whitlam Coup

2019-02-21T16:39:23Z

In 1975, the Queen’s loyal representative, governor-general John Kerr, decided he’d had enough of Australian social democracy.

The Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, and Lady Kerr, farewell the Queen and Prince Philip, who ended their Royal Tour and flew out of Perth yesterday. March 30, 1977. (Photo by Victor Colin Sumner/Fairfax Media via Getty Images).

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The Purgatory of Canadian Social Democracy

2019-02-21T16:35:49Z

If Canada’s NDP is to have a future, it needs to rediscover its militancy.

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Revisiting A Very British Coup in the Age of Corbyn

2019-02-21T16:19:23Z

It’s a reminder that the state is not neutral, and the ruling class has more than capital strikes at its disposal.

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The Soapbox, Issue 32

2019-02-21T16:29:12Z

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The Most Suspect Name in News

2019-02-21T16:09:33Z

Sarah Isgur Flores's whole career is based on shading the truth at the behest of the GOP. Bafflingly, she'll now be driving CNN's news coverage.

Sarah Isgur Flores (L) and Courtney Johnson attend the Glamour & Facebook Launch of Women's Initiative for 2016 Election at POV Lounge on March 24, 2016 in Washington, D.C. Kris Connor / Getty

“Donald Trump has again and again shown himself to be an authoritarian, a tyrant and a bully who’s corrupt and doesn’t deserve to be in the White House,” Sarah Isgur Flores told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on May 16, 2016. Seven months later she was swearing her loyalty to him and his agenda.

Few things better illustrate the empty spectacle of mainstream media grandstanding in the Trump era than CNN’s recent hiring of Flores to help run their 2020 campaign coverage. It’s not just that Flores has no news experience, or that her views are objectionable, though rest assured they are: it took keen-eyed commentators no time to pull up instances of Flores spreading debunked conspiracy theories about Planned Parenthood and grousing about the “liberal media,” including her new employer — or as she calls it, the “Clinton News Network.”

It’s also a fact that in hiring a partisan political operative, CNN has handed the running of news operations, which presumably is still meant to be about speaking truth to power, to someone devoted to skirting ethical lines in the service of that very power.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bad Statistics

Flores was the deputy campaign manager for former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s presidential run in 2016, the most notable feature of which was the brazen way it made a mockery of campaign finance laws. FEC rules forbid campaigns from coordinating with Super PACs, the vehicle through which wealthy donors are allowed to funnel unlimited amounts of cash to candidates in the wake of Citizens United.

The Super PAC supporting Fiorinia was called Carly for America, which was not only similar to the name of her campaign (Carly for President) but violated the ban on Super PACs using a candidate’s name. So they simply changed it by turning CARLY into an acronym for “Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You.” The logos stayed nearly identical.

Fiornia’s campaign skirted rules against coordination by making a public Google calendar that displayed her appearances weeks in advance, and by publishing the information the Super PAC needed in a press release. The well-staffed Super PAC would then show up early to every event and do all the things usually associated with a campaign, from staging to voter information-gathering, which her meager campaign staff lacked the manpower to do. Staff from each entity would communicate, go out for drinks, and their work would intermingle. One expert called the extent of the overlap “extraordinary.”

Flores herself was a staffer at the Super PAC who coincidentally ended up migrating to the campaign, which was definitely in no way coordinating its activities with the Super PAC. Ever the loyal underling, she would insist to the press it was all perfectly legal, while winking at the very obvious game being played. She praised the Super PAC’s work in emails (“from what we continue to see, Carly for America has been building one of the strongest ground games in the field”) and said things like, “We’ll continue doing our thing, but we’re thrilled that they’re doing theirs.”

All the while, Flores displayed the kind of casual disregard for the truth that makes for a quality political operative, but a lousy news editor. She would put out statements like this one, which, besides doubling down on Fiorina’s irresponsible use of the misleading Planned Parenthood “sting” video, played other games with the facts. Flores defended Fiorina’s frequent claim that she went “from secretary to CEO” — meant to evoke a rags-to-riches story that ignored Fiorina’s wealthy, well-connected parents, as well as the fact that she only worked as a secretary as a temp job before graduate school — by explaining that, yes, technically she once worked as a secretary, and then later she became a CEO. She waved away criticisms of Fiorina’s poor business record by claiming the executive had doubled her company’s revenues, something a number of critics pointed out was only true because of a 2002 merger with another company. In fact, the company’s overall profits declined.

It’s this kind of commitment to painstaking accuracy that no doubt put Flores on the radar for “the most trusted name in news.”

The Trump Pivot

Once Fiorina was out, Flores jumped to Ted Cruz’s campaign, where, as a frequent MSNBC talking head, she proceeded to savage Trump while denying he was a real Republican, calling him an authoritarian who “loves executive power.” As late as June, when asked by Willie Geist if there was “any chance he can bring you around,” Flores replied, “No.”

But somewhere between those appearances and the election, Flores presumably remembered she wanted a job in GOP politics. Her media talking points subtly shifted, dropping the attacks on Trump in favor of attacks on Hillary Clinton and cautious praise for things like the “wonderful job” Trump had done “sounding more like a politician,” or the way that he “speaks from the gut.” When Steve Kornacki asked her if Trump’s erratic behavior would prevent him from expanding his base, Flores pivoted to talking about “a weakness of the last eight years of the Obama administration” and of Clinton. “The Trump voters that I know are talking about how he’s highlighted the failures of this administration,” she said.

On another, August 18 appearance on Chris Hayes’s show, Flores was asked about Trump’s decision to hire former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, widely viewed as the mastermind behind Trump’s campaign, and a “white nationalist” who had made Breitbart into what he called “the platform for the alt-right.” Flores quickly played down Bannon’s role in the campaign and talked up who she called “by far the best surrogate for the Trump campaign,” Kellyanne Conway. “Steve Bannon basically came on as a senior adviser, but Kellyanne Conway, as far as we’ve been told, is running the ship,” she said.

There were other highlights from this period. Flores rightly complained about the way Democrats refused to accept Trump’s victory, before asserting that “we didn’t have recounts in 2008, saying that it was John McCain’s election and Barack Obama took it from him.” Chris Hayes pointed out this was exactly the argument underlying the birther movement, and the GOP’s successful assault on ACORN. To be fair, it’s hard to know if this is outright dishonesty or simply ignorance.

On Bill O’Reilly’s show, she claimed Obama’s retaliatory expulsion of Russian diplomats was an attempt to “throw dust in the eye of the transition team” because “Donald Trump will come in and do what he promised, which to undo all of these disastrous regulations, policies, foreign policy in particular.” She declared that Obama’s legacy was as a “foe to Israel,” a common right-wing talking point based on the handful of times Obama ignored the dictates of that country’s prime minister, but one completely divorced from reality.

All of this makes sense. Flores is a career operative who knew she would return to her industry once the campaign was over, and she subtly modulated her on-air talking points to comport with the GOP campaign. The trouble is, she’ll be in the exact same position while she coordinates CNN’s campaign coverage.

Defending the Indefensible

After prostrating herself before Trump, Flores was allowed to serve as the spokesperson for Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Her job was chiefly defending Sessions against any and all criticism.

When Sessions came under fire for his long racist history, Flores dismissed the accusations as a “smear.” Even as civil rights groups uniformly came out against Sessions, and NAACP members were arrested protesting his nomination, Flores waved away criticisms as “false portrayals” that were “tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited.” When 1,140 faculty members from 171 law schools wrote to oppose his nomination, she called it “just business as usual for the same far-left academics who trot out letters opposing just about any conservative or Republican.”

Flores proceeded to dishonestly defend a broad range of Sessions’s actions. When the city of Chicago pushed back on his attacks on sanctuary cities, Flores made the easily debunked claim that sanctuary policies lead to higher crime. She claimed that “chain migration” was a terrorist threat (it’s not) and that the system had to be changed to bring in “people with the highest likelihood to flourish in this country.”

Trump’s Muslim ban, she said, was “well within his lawful authority to keep the nation safe and protect our communities from terrorism.” The Trump administration’s report that attempted to link terrorism to immigration had been worked on by Sessions’s office, with Flores suggesting she herself played a role. “For those of us who were actually involved, this story is as bizarre as it is fictional,” she said in response to a story alleging that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t been involved.

Other notable actions by Sessions while Flores served him include his monstrous family separation policy (“The AG has been clear: We do not want to separate families,” Flores later said, even though Sessions had been very clear about his intentions) and his war on journalism. Sessions tripled the number of leak investigations, and after threatening to start subpoenaing reporters, seized a journalist’s email and phone records. Now his loyal spokesperson will be driving news coverage.

Flores may not have any news experience, but she does at least arrive at her position with CNN with media contacts. After lamenting in 2016 that she “couldn’t see how [Trump] moves away from the Breitbart audience,” Flores appeared to cultivate her own contacts with the outlet.

According to emails released by the Department of Justice, while Sessions was in the middle of a controversy around potentially perjuring himself, Breitbart’s Joel Pollak asked Flores, “Can I help?”

“Anything you can do to push back on the absurdity,” she replied. “Forwarding you our stuff so far.”

The result was this Breitbart piece, presenting the Justice Department’s talking points. “Let me know if there is more I can do,” Pollak told her.

It’s Always Been This Way

For those keeping track at home, Flores is an anti-Trump GOP operative who knowingly skirted the lines of campaign finance rules and played with the truth to help her clients, before quickly dropping her opposition to Trump, humiliating herself to join his administration, and eagerly disseminating his preferred talking points once he was the one paying her. CNN, a news channel presented by both Trump and itself as the leading arm of journalistic opposition to his administration, has now hired her to run their election coverage for the next two years, presumably before she spins back through the revolving door to become a full-time party hack again.

We shouldn’t be angry at Flores for her lack of principles. That’s what being a party operative is about: to fudge, dissemble, and obfuscate for the purpose of benefiting your client, who in her case has been the GOP. Rather, we should be angry with CNN, which, like much of the establishment media, feels the constant need to kowtow to the Right for the sake of viewpoint diversity, even as its bylines are almost entirely devoid of commentators anywhere to the left of Hillary Clinton.

CNN’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, defended the hiring because, “love it or hate it, political insiders have been joining newsrooms for decades.” That news outlets have simply internalized this as normal is exactly the problem.

Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers

2019-02-21T23:29:59Z

Oakland teachers are on strike today to defeat plans by the superrich to take over and dismantle their public schools.

Oakland students on the picket line. Meagan Day

The project of free market education reform is so widespread in America that many cities and states insist on claiming the title of “ground zero” of education privatization. Whether or not Oakland can claim that unfortunate title, it’s clear that the privatizers have made huge headway in the city: Oakland is now the city in California with the highest percentage of students in privately run charters, and the city’s school district is aiming to deepen its downsizing project by closing twenty-four of the city’s eighty-seven public schools.

Which makes the teachers’ strike that kicked off today in Oakland all the more crucial.

Stopping and reversing the privatization offensive will take mass collective action. It will also require understanding the billionaires and their political proxies who are behind these attacks on public education. Here’s a crash course on the powerful enemies of Oakland’s public schools.

The Rogers Family

Recently deceased, Gary Rogers was the CEO and owner of the multibillion-dollar ice cream company Dreyer’s. His Rogers Family foundation was and remains the largest financial contributor to GO Public Schools, a front group through which the ultrawealthy have funded the takeover and privatization of Oakland public education.

To ensure the election of pro-charter candidates to the school board in 2012, 2014, and 2016, Rogers teamed up with fellow billionaires including former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Walton Family, which founded Walmart, to spend millions dollars in campaign contributions. By all accounts, their investment has paid off. If the Rogers Foundation and GO get their way, well over 50 percent of Oakland schools will soon be charters.

The rich may be greedy, but they are not stupid. Rather than openly announce their hopes to bust unions and make profits in the $600 billion industry that is public education, Rogers and his friends have funneled their money into GO, which claims to be an organization to improve schools for Oakland students and parents. Its website affirms that “quality education is the path to opportunity for our kids and can interrupt historical inequity and oppression. Student needs drive our work.”

The irony of such claims is that, in practice, the spread of charter schools has greatly exacerbated educational inequities.

In Oakland, and across the nation, charters systematically cherry pick certain students, while leaving high-needs children — with disabilities, traumatic family backgrounds, or a lack of proficiency in English — to regular public schools. As such, it’s not surprising that privatization has greatly increased racial resegregation in Oakland: 19.2 percent of charter students are African American, compared to 29.5 percent in district schools.

At the same time, charters drain over $57 million in funds from Oakland schools yearly. This is why Oakland Education Association president Keith Brown has said that “the privatization of education is a blatant attack on our black and brown students.”

Eli Broad

Ever since the state takeover of Oakland public schools in 2003, the district has been led by a revolving door of apparatchiks trained by Eli Broad, the fourth-richest person in the United States, worth over $7.4 billion.

Though Broad has no professional experience in education, this hasn’t stopped him from using his immense personal fortune to impose his vision upon Oakland schools. After making a killing in the home building and insurance industries, he founded the Broad Academy in 2002 to train a new generation of privatizing school leaders.

By 2012, the center was boasting that it had “filled more superintendent positions than any other national training program.” In Oakland, Broad graduates include superintendents Randolph Ward (2003–2006), Kimberly Statham (2006–2007), Vincent Matthews (2007–2009), and Antwan Wilson (2014–2017).

The Broad Foundation has also directly influenced decision-making in Oakland by granting $6 million for “staff development” and paying for the salaries of no less than ten top administrators. Under the tutelage of Broad trainees, the number of students in Oakland charters has skyrocketed upwards to 30 percent.

Part of the reason why Eli Broad has, until recently, largely avoided public vilification is that he’s a liberal — as well as a major funder of the Democratic Party establishment, including leading lights such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer. “The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party,” Broad bragged to the Wall Street Journal. The unspoken subtext: billionaires like him do.

His trainees have also smartly draped themselves in the veneer of corporate antiracism. Former Oakland superintendent, and Broad Academy graduate, Antwan Wilson thus framed his corporate reforms — which, among other things, wrecked the district’s budget — as a means to achieve social justice.

Behind this rhetoric, however, lies a neoliberal ideology that blames public services and individuals for social ills like economic inequality.

As Wilson explained to the New York Times, he had a “visceral reaction” when he was told that fixing poverty was the solution to fixing education: “it’s actually educating [poor students] that gives them a chance to fix some poverty.”

Blaming underfunded public schools for deeply rooted social problems makes little sense, but it’s been a surefire ticket to the top for careerists like Wilson.

Bill Gates

With a net worth of $95.4 billion, Microsoft founder Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world, second only to Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Gates has also been a longstanding corporate education philanthropist. In 2017 alone he pledged to donate $1.7 billion to education over the coming five years.

In Oakland, Gates in 2015 spent over a million dollars to support GO Public Schools. And now he has stepped up his influence over Oakland by granting $10 million to the City Fund in July 2018. The goal of this grant, explained a foundation spokesperson, is to “support both high-quality charter schools in Oakland and school leaders in [the district].”

The City Fund is not just another foundation. It has positioned itself as the well-funded spearhead of a nationwide push to impose a “portfolio model” upon all major urban districts. In this system, schools compete with each other for survival — and those that don’t do well on metrics such as standardized testing get closed.

In a leaked presentation designed to attract corporate funding, the City Fund pointed to the entirely privatized New Orleans school district as a positive example to be emulated and it explained that “our goal is to make the model normal. After enough adoption we believe the model will transition from being a radical idea to a standard policy intervention.”

According to this presentation, only such a radical transformation in “every major city in America” would be capable of improving educational opportunities for children because all other attempts to improve schools have failed.

Yet as Matt Barnum notes in Chalkbeat, the data shows that two policies have been shown to be effective: racial school integration and increased school funding. Neither of these policies, however, correspond to the interests of the billionaire class.

This Gates-funded portfolio plan is already moving full steam ahead in Oakland. Late last year, new superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell announced her plan to close twenty-four public schools in the next five years. Protests have already erupted to stop the closure of Roots International Academy in East Oakland. Parent organizer Ady Ríos laid out the stakes to Majority:

They’re not targeting the rich with closures. They’re targeting us: the poor, the children that need the most. … We are behind the teachers one million percent. I won’t be sending my kid to school during the strike. We are holding to the light of hope that the strike will win, and the win will help Roots too.

Defending Democracy

As Bernie Sanders is so fond of pointing out, there is something fundamentally wrong with a system where a tiny handful of billionaires can use their immense fortunes to hijack the political process. The concerted offensive by Gates, Rogers, Broad, and their political cronies to impose their vision of privatization on public schools is anti-democratic in every sense of the word.

Fortunately, for the first time in decades, large numbers of working people are taking strike action to put an end to the unilateral dictates of corporate America. At its heart, the Oakland strike, and the national teachers’ revolt, is a struggle for democracy — for a society in which the working-class majority, not the superrich, determines governmental policy. As Oakland union leader Keith Brown said just before today’s strike, “only the power of the people can defeat the power of the billionaires.”

“This Campaign Is Literally Making Socialists”

2019-02-21T14:15:24Z

Ugo Okere is a 22-year-old Nigerian immigrant and democratic socialist running for Chicago City Council. In an interview, he describes his history as an activist, the smears he's faced from the incumbent, and why democratic socialism “is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”

Ugo Okere, a candidate for Fortieth Ward alderman in Chicago. Hanako Maki

Ugo Okere is a Nigerian immigrant and democratic socialist running for Chicago City Council in the city’s Fortieth Ward, located on the far north side. One of five candidates in the race, Okere is vying to unseat Alderman Patrick O’Connor, who has been in office since 1983.

O’Connor’s legacy on the city council is one marked by racism. In his first term, O’Connor joined a group of twenty-nine nearly all white aldermen who organized in opposition Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. More recently, O’Connor has painted Okere as an outsider in the community, referencing a flyer for a campaign fundraiser Okere attended that was hosted by Nigerian immigrants.

At twenty-two years old, Okere is one of the youngest aldermanic candidates in the city. He is running on a platform of fully funded public schools, affordable housing, lifting the statewide ban on rent control, and establishing a Civilian Police Accountability Council. He has been endorsed by the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

DSA member Spencer Chan recently caught up with Okere to talk about his background in organizing, the aims of his campaign, and why Chicago needs more democratic socialists in office.

Spencer Chan

You’re one of the youngest candidates running for city council. How did you get involved in activism, and what made you decide to run now?

Ugo Okere

Social justice was not a part of my life, activism wasn’t a part of my life, until I got to college. I had always cared about politics, but I cared about electoral politics. I saw it as different from activism — rather than how I view activism and electoral politics now, as part of the same apparatus for achieving the liberation of black, brown, and working-class people.

My freshman year of college was when the Black Lives Matter movement began. It was the first time that social justice became proximal to me. I knew that if I wasn’t taking part in the Black Lives Matter movement that [it could be] me that was in the grave with my parents crying over it on the 5 o’clock news. I knew I had to be a part of the struggle.

When you’re on a college campus and you get into these kinds of spaces, you also get pulled into all of the other activism that is going on. Because of that, I learned more and more about the movement for BDS on our campus, I learned about the wider realm of social justice. I knew I had to be part of the greater struggle for liberation for all marginalized people: “We ain’t free until we’re all free.”

I joined up with Anakbayan Chicago, which is an organization dedicated to the liberation of the Filipino people here in United States and in the Philippines. That was where I learned even deeper about the struggle for international solidarity and how a lot of the capitalist forces that subjugate us in the United States subjugate people across the world. After that, I became the chairman of Fuente del Sol, which is an organization on the Southwest Side of Chicago that [fights] for violence prevention and immigrant rights. In all that time, I was also gaining government experience. I was working in the Chicago City Clerk’s office, working for a congressional office.

After the [2016] election was over, I was with someone who was undocumented at the time. She was on the phone with me that night. She was crying, because she wasn’t sure about the future of her family and her siblings, who were also undocumented. I knew that it wasn’t enough for me to continue telling people to go out to vote. It wasn’t enough for me to continue to organize. We needed to have a government filled with people who care about workers — activists, organizers, nurses, teachers — so that government isn’t this thing where the people who are at the bottom are fighting with government to get the things that they need, but are working alongside government to make the world a better place.

And so I decided [to run], listening to Bernie Sanders’s call for people of color and young people and progressives to run for office at all levels of governments, not just president, Senate, or US representative. I wanted to make a change in my community and fight at the ground level to bring socialism from the bottom up.

Spencer Chan

The Fortieth Ward, where you’re running, is whiter and wealthier than many other communities in the city. How do the issues that are facing the Fortieth Ward relate to issues in less affluent parts of the city?

Ugo Okere

The biggest issue in the Fortieth Ward is affordable housing. That might surprise some folks because this is a more affluent area, a whiter area. But we also have to understand that the issue of class struggle, the issue of poverty, of the forces of capitalism weighing down on working people, hits all of us regardless of race. It is inequitable in the way it hits us, but it hits all of us.

In the Fortieth Ward, there’s a complete lack of affordable housing; the majority of the North Side has a complete lack of affordable housing. That has been allowed to happen because of the way we view affordable housing. We see affordable housing as something that should be relegated to the places where poverty is concentrated. I reject that notion. The reason that affordable housing is an issue in the Fortieth Ward is because rents are skyrocketing. People are being pushed out. We need to have affordable housing in all parts of the city.

Spencer Chan

In addition to housing, you also talk a lot about racial and immigration justice. Do you find it difficult to get voters in your ward to care about these issues? If so, how do you get these issues to resonate with people?”

Ugo Okere

Immigration and issues of race are very much in the news now in a way that they haven’t been before, because of how destructive the federal government’s policies are toward families that are black and brown and working class. That gives candidates at all levels the opportunity to hone in on that narrative and offer a vision for our immigration system and for how we treat people based on race.

What movement candidates need to do is use their campaigns as a vehicle to change the narrative of politics to one that fights for a city, a country, and a world that works for everyone. So, that is my charge on this campaign. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, regardless of how difficult it is. I will continue to do it, because that is what needs to be done.

Spencer Chan

Your opponent, Pat O’Connor, is no stranger to Chicago politics: he’s been in office for over three decades now. What has his record been like during his tenure?

Ugo Okere

Alderman Patrick O’Connor is the mayor’s floor leader. He has been floor leader for every single mayoral administration except for one, and that was Mayor Harold Washington, the first black, progressive [mayor] in Chicago.

The incumbent’s record is a record of doing the bidding of the capitalist class, of the 1 percent and the ultrawealthy, because the mayors who have served here have always been in support of a status quo where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. His role in that has been being the mover and shaker for these kinds of policies, whether it was selling off our parking meters or fighting to bring a $95 million police academy — talking about how great it’s going to be for the city, when residents know that it is not how our money should be spent. It should be invested in our public schools and our infrastructure and our economy.

His legacy has been one of constant investment in the rich and an ignorance of the struggles of black, brown, and working people.

Spencer Chan

The race you’re in is a crowded race. There’s five candidates total. I’ve watched several of the candidate forums, and it seems like O’Connor has gone out of his way to attack only you: once at a forum back in October, about your fundraising within Chicago’s Nigerian community, and most recently in an interview with the Sun-Times, where he contrasted his experience with yours, who he claims “has no work history, and lives in [his] parents’ basement.” Can you respond to his remarks, and why do you think he is singling you out?

Ugo Okere

It is disgusting to me that a sitting alderman would take pot shots at his constituents’ living situations. He also said in that Sun Times interview that I “know nothing.” What I do know is that Alderman O’Connor understands nothing of the plight of black, brown, and working-class people. If he did, he would understand that he is the reason that I can’t at this moment move out of my parents’ basement — because we don’t have affordable housing in our ward. It is clear to that Alderman O’Connor is completely blind to the economic situation that he has created in Chicago.

Why do I think he is attacking me? It’s because he sees the writing on the wall: one of the first interviews he did with the Sun Times, he talked about how now it’s popular to say that you’re a democratic socialist. He knows that his days are numbered. He knows there is a growing movement in this country that is not focused on any one political savior. It’s focused on a movement that is here to build a world that works for everybody.

O’Connor’s brand of politics has never been about working for everyone. It’s always been about enriching those who are already rich. And he’s scared. He’s scared that the power he has held through machine politics is going to crumble. And with the power of the people who are on the side of this campaign, I know that it is going to happen.

Spencer Chan

You’re running as an open democratic socialist. How do you define democratic socialism?

Ugo Okere

Democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life. Government is led by the people, not by big corporations, not by multibillionaires, and working people actually have control over who we elect to be our politicians, over how elections work, and over how our government is structured. People have the power.

It’s also about how our economy is structured. In a democratic-socialist society, the economy does not allow for profits to be concentrated in a few companies, in the hands of a few people, while everyone else is struggling. A socialist economy doesn’t allow for workers to work in unsafe working conditions and not be paid well enough and not be able to get paid sick time off.

Democratic socialism even extends to our relationships and how we treat each other. [It looks] at the world through a socialist-feminist lens, in how we treat people who are black, who are brown, who are femme, who are non-binary, who are gender-nonconforming, and who are working class.

To me, we’ll have achieved democratic socialism not when there is no conflict in the world, but when our societies are not governed based on power, but are governed based on the mutual understanding that everybody deserves a decent and quality life.

Spencer Chan

In your view, what are the differences in the goals of a socialist from a progressive?

Ugo Okere

Those distinctions are real. They’re real, because one part of the Left wants to reform the existing society that we have now. They want to make changes that will make life easier, that will make life not so bad.

But there’s another side of the Left that wants to radically transform the way the world works — not simply say that we can make some changes here and there and that things will be alright.

Spencer Chan

I mentioned earlier that the race you’re in is fairly crowded. How do you distinguish yourself from the other candidates? Do you use democratic socialism as a way to distinguish yourself?

Ugo Okere

Not necessarily as a way to distinguish myself from everyone else, but as a way to talk about why I push the policies I do and why I care about the polices that I do. I think our endorsement by the [Democratic Socialists of America] is enough of a distinguishing factor from the rest of the field.

DSA endorsed our campaign because of our commitment to fighting for a quality education for every single person in this city, because we want to make sure that every single person is housed and has a quality living situation, and because we want to make sure that every single person — whether you are an immigrant, whether you are black, you are brown, you are working class — has true sanctuary in this city.

Spencer Chan

How did you become involved with DSA? And what role is DSA playing on your campaign?

Ugo Okere

I joined the [Chicago DSA] Housing Working Group, which is working on larger campaigns like lifting the ban on rent control. That was my connection to DSA, and that is why housing is such a major center of our campaign platform.

One of the things I am proud of is that we didn’t just want an endorsement, we wanted to use our campaign as an apparatus to build democratic socialism in the Fortieth Ward and the city of Chicago and across the country. DSA is a comrade in that vision.

And I’m extremely proud that this campaign is quite literally bringing people into DSA who were not interested in being a part of the organization before. This campaign is literally making socialists, and I’m proud of that.

Spencer Chan

The Chicago chapter of DSA has endorsed four other city council candidates running this cycle, including the incumbent and socialist Carlos Ramírez-Rosa. What do you see as your relationship to these other socialist campaigns?

Ugo Okere

One of the most difficult things about having Alderman Ramírez-Rosa on the city council as the lone democratic-socialist voice is that it is a lot harder to build coalitions in the city. It makes it a lot more difficult for us to pass legislation that we want to see, and it makes it a lot more difficult for us to build power.

My relationship to the other candidates that have been endorsed is we are working to build power in our communities, to build power citywide and on the city council. I think that we have a unique opportunity to hold each other accountable to the issues that our movement is fighting for. It is not easy in the halls of city council to push back against the weight of the capitalist class, to push back against the strength of mega-corporations and the ultrawealthy, but with us all being there, it’s going to make every day on city council that much easier.

The Anti-Amazon Ground Game

2019-02-21T10:54:36Z

How New York City socialists and their allies combined electoral muscle with front-stoop politicking to keep Amazon’s headquarters out of the city.

Protestors unfurl anti-Amazon banners from the balcony of a hearing room during a New York City Council Finance Committee hearing titled 'Amazon HQ2 Stage 2: Does the Amazon Deal Deliver for New York City Residents?' at New York City Hall, January 30, 2019 in New York City. Drew Angerer / Getty

Last week, the Left in New York City won a stunning victory over the long-reigning corporate elite.

In late 2018 Amazon, enticed by a $3 billion sweetheart tax deal, selected the city as the site of its second headquarters, known colloquially as HQ2. The city’s powerful real estate interests were overjoyed, as tech hubs tend to bring white-collar workers and opportunities for lucrative speculative development. They welcomed the influx of well-heeled techies: there’s only so much money you can wring from people who make $40,000 a year, after all.

But working-class residents and local left activists surprised everyone by rising up in protest. They rejected the official line that the deal would bring jobs their way, reasoning instead that the jobs would be reserved for people wealthier than them, and they in turn would be subject to displacement.

The public outcry put New York politicians, fearful of their reelection prospects in the era of ascendant progressivism, in a difficult position. They responded by asking Amazon for concessions. Amazon scoffed and called off the deal. Good riddance, said the opponents.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke with two New York City residents and members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Karen Narefsky and Susan Kang, about how it all went down.

Meagan Day: How did Amazon decide to come to New York City, and why did the company change its mind?

Susan Kang

This deal was made in the fall of 2017, which was a very different time politically than in late 2018, when the deal was announced.

The deal was agreed upon in a backroom by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo. It would be one of these crowning achievements in Cuomo’s economic development strategy of trying to make New York attractive to private investment through subsidies. It would also be good for de Blasio, but in general Cuomo has been the lead on this. He’s been talking about creating tech hubs and that kind of thing throughout New York City for a while now, trying to make New York City another San Francisco or Seattle.

When the initial bid between cities for Amazon HQ2 was happening, there was a public letter that nobody really paid attention to that a whole bunch of New York elected official signed. It basically stated that New York welcomes Amazon, that New York City has all the infrastructure and the talent needed to really make Amazon HQ2 be functional and really shine. It really did reflect politics as usual in New York in 2017.

The Bronx and Queens Democratic Party machines and real estate interests had unified around a single person, Corey Johnson, and real estate donations basically ensured that he would become the speaker of the New York City Council. And so even though 2017 was one of the first years where public financing was made available — and there was an idea that that would make grassroots and progressive City Council candidates more viable and thus create a more representative body in diverse city council — what actually happened was that a white male from Manhattan, rather than like a progressive or a PoC or a woman, became speaker. That shows you how influential real estate and private developer interests were in city politics in 2017.

That was a very different time. I think none of the people who had signed onto the letter could have predicted the sea change that would happen by the time the deal got announced in late 2018. And that’s why they didn’t predict a significant popular backlash.

Meagan Day: But there was a backlash. Can you tell me what that looked like?

Karen Narefsky

There was a backlash for a number of reasons. There was a huge reaction to the tax incentives. People reacted very negatively to the idea that cities basically had to get on their knees and throw money at Amazon. When people saw how much money Amazon would be able to take advantage of in New York City, especially given the unbelievable wealth that Amazon already has, they were taken aback.

And additionally, displacement became a major concern. Immediately there was a huge reaction of joy from the real estate community about being able to turn the city into a tech hub. But there’s a huge immigrant community in Western Queens that’s at risk of displacement because of that.

There were a couple other factors too, like Amazon developing a facial recognition technology that they are sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And there was also a backlash from unions. There was some disagreement within labor, with the building service workers having worked out a deal where they would be able to [represent] people on the Amazon campus. But retail workers were very against it. They wanted Amazon to commit to union neutrality, which the company was not willing to do.

So labor issues, immigration issues, displacement issues, and people’s strong feelings about inequality in general all came together to spark the backlash. And politicians who had previously been on board with Amazon coming to New York City found themselves in a position where they had to respond.

Susan Kang

And Queens, of course, is where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. People there have shown that they are really upset about income inequality and are willing to take action about it.

Add to that the fact that Queens actually has a pretty established history of organizing to stop development that is perceived to be hurting the community and displacing existing residents to the benefit of private business and big corporations. A coalition of activists, many of whom are people of color, has some practice coming together to stop these kinds of developments, so they kicked into action.

It was this perfect storm, really. Queens has a strong network of PoC community organizers, and DSA was able to turn out in huge numbers to knock on doors. We were able to get together in a coalition really quickly when Amazon HQ was announced.

Meagan Day: Speaking of DSA, a handful of real estate agents bemoaned the deal’s unraveling and actually blamed socialists for it. Bernie Sanders has antagonized Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and helped turn popular opinion against him, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out strong against HQ2, DSA mobilized quickly. Seems like it’s a pretty fair characterization, no?

Karen Narefsky

Definitely the discussions that Bernie has started around not just Amazon but also Walmart and other large corporations has brought a lot of attention to the disparity between how much someone like Jeff Bezos makes and how much Amazon warehouse workers make and the way that they’re treated. I think that definitely contributed, along with how Bernie is sort of channeling a feeling that income inequality is not the way that it has to be.

There’s an attitude among a lot of politicians, especially people who have been in politics and been looking at urban development for a long time, that it’s like still the nineties and we need to just chase investment wherever we can find it. But increasingly, voters don’t think that way. Bernie is definitely channeling that, which has been helpful.

Susan Kang

As for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she made public statements about both subsidies and the way that Amazon mistreats its workers, how Jeff Bezos is not a very socially responsible CEO. I think those statements really had an effect in the new cycle, and helped activists feel energized.

But more importantly, it’s the fact that she won. Her race really changed the tenor of New York politics, and particularly in Queens. It set into motion a bunch of processes that opened up possibilities that weren’t there before. Taking on the political machine, affirming the value of movements, that had a huge impact.

Ocasio-Cortez’s district overlaps heavily with that of Mike Gianaris, who is the deputy majority leader in the State Senate. He’s a very conventional politician, but seeing the way Ocasio-Cortez’s victory played out, he has definitely started to understand that the winds are changing. So as soon as the Amazon deal got announced, even though his name was on the original letter, he put himself out there as being against Amazon.

Senator Gianaris actually announced at an event where DSA was present that he wouldn’t take any money from real estate developers ever again. He’s trying to align himself with Ocasio-Cortez and DSA. And he even ended up sending all of these glossy mailers to his own constituents, as if he were running for office, talking about how he didn’t support Amazon and all the things he was going to do to challenge Amazon.

Karen Narefsky

And when it comes to DSA itself, I think what is really notable about New York City DSA is how it’s made a major effort to work in coalition with other local groups, whether it’s around universal rent control or police accountability or working with labor groups. When it came to Amazon, DSA was able to mobilize the Queens branch and the citywide membership pretty quickly to actions organized by other groups. DSA just has so many people, and it was very important to be working as part of that coalition and sending those people to amplify existing organizing wherever possible.

DSA also sponsored a big town hall in response to the Amazon announcement, and it was a packed event. DSA also held its own canvasses, and other groups brought out their people to be part of it. And additionally, Amazon had a really weak response to all the criticisms, and DSA has a huge social media reach and was able to really publicize how insufficient that response was.

DSA being willing to work in coalition with other groups, and also having massive people-power and canvassing presence, it made a difference. Elected officials are also nervous that DSA could credibly primary them, which helps. But the main thing is just getting people out on the ground and really being able to spread a message about what economic development should look like in our neighborhoods and what kinds of jobs we should be creating.

Meagan Day: Some polls came out early on claiming that more New Yorkers were in favor of the deal than against it. Amazon supporters leaned on them very hard. What’s your take on that?

Susan Kang

Those polls didn’t matter. They were used to discredit a movement that was actually seeking to change the debate and engage with people, as opposed to a poll, which is like a thirty-second conversation and tells you very little about the controversy at hand.

By contrast, we would hit every building in a community. We didn’t care if they were likely Democrats, we didn’t care if they were voters or even citizens, we just spoke to people. And we didn’t say, “Hi we’re DSA and we’re against Amazon.” We would say, “Here’s the deal. Here’s exactly what the city is going to get. How do you feel about it?”

We had deep canvassing conversations, and we had wonderful responses from people, including those who initially felt like they were in support of the deal. There was much more preexisting support for a critical position than a survey might capture.

And I think people understood that our position was sincere, because it’s not like the pro-Amazon side was sending volunteers out in the cold, freezing rain. They were just sending glossy mailers. I got some of these glossy mailers because I live in Western Queens, and you know, they were asking us to lobby our electeds. They were asking us to do work for Amazon, as opposed to us actually going to people and meeting them in their homes and chatting with them about affordability in this community and the worries that they have. That made an impact.

Meagan Day: This is a pretty significant accomplishment. How victorious are you feeling?

Karen Narefsky

On the one hand it is a really important victory. I particularly think it’s incredible that people were were willing to push for outright rejecting the deal, rather than trying to get additional concessions from Amazon or push for more local hiring or whatever. It’s amazing that people felt confident to say, “No, this is not a good deal, we reject it altogether.” And it’s a remarkable victory for the Queens community and for New York as a whole in changing the way people think about how to shape development.

I will say, as a follow-up, that I hope people keep an eye on what Amazon and other companies are doing. Those subsidies that Amazon was slated to get are provided for in New York state law. Any developer can come along and get them. We have to pressure people like Mike Gianaris to get rid of these economic incentives, which started in the seventies and have been such a huge feature of the New York’s development landscape for decades.

And additionally, nothing prevents Amazon itself from continuing to buy property in New York and build up a presence here without all the fanfare. That’s essentially what Google has done. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon tries to do that, because there are a lot of advantages to them in being in New York, which they learned all about in the process of brokering this deal.

Susan Kang: That said, there’s a lot of galvanizing of energy and a lot of optimism right now, especially in Queens. People tend to think that the nexus of the future of left politics in New York City is in Brooklyn, but in fact a lot of it is going to be based out of Queens.

The Green New Deal Is the Only Realistic Option

2019-02-21T08:59:35Z

Liberals and conservatives alike love to decry AOC's Green New Deal as "unrealistic." But what's really unrealistic is continuing on the path of denial and incrementalism we're on now.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks as Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) (R) listens during a news conference in front of the U.S. Capitol February 7, 2019 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong / Getty Images

What’s scarier: an impending apocalypse, or the attempt to stop it? Before you answer that question, let’s have a look at some recent headlines.

A new study just released has found that global insect numbers are in free fall, with more than a third of insect species endangered, with the current course leading to the extinction of all insects by the end of the century, all of which would lead to the collapse of the natural world that we rely on to eat, drink, and live. The cause of this mass extinction is both climate change and the industrial agricultural practices that help drive it, including the use of fertilizers.

Another recent study has found that a third of the Himalayan ice cap, on which more than a billion people rely for water, is guaranteed to melt by the end of the century. This will contribute to the displacement and starvation of untold numbers of people.

Meanwhile, in Russia, a small town in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago has been invaded by more than fifty polar bears, displaced from their natural habitats. The town declared a state of emergency, put fences up around children’s playgrounds, and started driving workers to their jobs in military vehicles.

And just this month, the left-wing think tank IPRR released a report warning that the human impact on the environment has reached a “critical stage,” and that the current rapid environmental breakdown threatens to interact with our ongoing social and political crises to create a new “domain of risk” that could lead to “the collapse of key social and economic systems” around the world.

Pretty grim stuff. But the point here isn’t to fall into self-defeating hopelessness; rather, this should steel our collective resolve to enact the kinds of radical measures needed to mitigate and, hopefully, halt this crisis.

Yet it’s not this litany of alarming studies and developments that have some liberals and centrists terrified. Rather, since the unveiling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution, they’ve been more worried about the potential solution.

Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), accused the lawmakers of “attaching a laundry list of laudable proposals” to “the sails of fantasy,” and called the resolution an “unrealistic manifesto.” He warned that it “threatens to destroy workers’ livelihoods, increase divisions and inequality, and undermine the very goals it seeks to reach,” concluding that “it is a bad deal.” (The pro-fossil fuel LIUNA, like a number of other unions, fears the job losses that could come as a result of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that the resolution features a federal job guarantee and universal basic income for that very reason).

Preeminent liberal columnist Jonathan Chait echoed these words, calling it a “bad idea” filled with “empty sloganeering,” and chiding the lawmakers for putting in “unrelated proposals” for free college and a job guarantee. Chait argues that the resolution was simply thought up by “people who believe capitalism is the root of all problems,” and urges the Democrats to “com[e] up with some better climate change plans, fast.” Chait’s solution is to “look at building on and scaling up Obama’s successful green reforms,” a solution that falls far short of what scientists say needs to be done.

Slate‘s Mike Pesca was similarly scathing, calling Ocasio-Cortez, and by extension her policy, an example of “Trumpian, big swing, mega-MAGA hashtag, nonconstrained by literalism, post–reality-to-accuracy politics age.” He points to experts who point to 2050 as a more feasible target for getting to 100 percent renewable energy, and makes clear that his opposition is based on the fact that “having impossible goals might dissuade the public and discredit those proposing them.” He claims that FDR’s New Deal was never deemed “unrealistic” by experts.

This follows a legion of fact-checkers, politicians, and others who jumped on the proposal to declare it unrealistic and impossible from the get-go. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who invests in fossil fuels, declared he was “tired of listening to things that are pie in the sky, that we never are going to pass, are never going to afford.” Obama’s former energy secretary Ernest Moniz — the man behind Obama’s disastrous “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, and who is now a proud member of the board of Southern Company, one of the country’s largest carbon emitters — called it “unrealistic” and charged it “may impede our progress if it starts to leave behind key constituencies.” And everyone at this point remembers Nancy Pelosi derisively referring to it as the “green dream.”

With liberals like these, who needs the Right?

Here’s the thing: the resolution worked. Leave aside its fumbled rollout and the fact that the Right is now dishonestly peddling fear-mongering claims that the plan would abolish air travel and cows; the US right, which serves as the political arm of polluters and other moneyed interests that prefer to let humanity go extinct than curb their profit-hoarding, was always going to turn any attempt to deal with climate change into the latest culture war, regardless of the plan’s actual substance.

The Green New Deal resolution was an opening gambit, intended both to kickstart a debate about curbing ecological collapse, one that our entire society was avoiding, and to create an expansive, ambitious starting vision that would finally force specifics on the issue into the political discourse. Some individuals at least understood this.

And that’s exactly what it did: its release was immediately followed by a flood of columns about the resolution, evaluating its merits, discussing where it falls short, how it can be improved, and what areas future legislation will need to focus on. It’s sparked constructive criticism from the Left, taking issue with its pragmatic refusal to insist on keeping fossil fuels in the ground and continuing reliance on nuclear power, and from the Right, with Bloomberg’s Noah Smith injecting an international dimension to his own vision of the Green New Deal and grudgingly accepting that some social democratic policies were necessary to help it succeed politically.

Meanwhile, it’s instructive to look at what industry shills are writing. In the Hill, Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation — part of the Koch-backed right-wing State Policy Network, which is associated with the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council and has been funded by Exxon Mobil in the past — calls the 2030 target “an impossible goal” before outlining in strict policy terms his reasons for thinking so. “It will take decades to reach a 100 percent renewable electricity generation, if we ever do,” he concludes.

It should be little surprise that even the mouthpieces of the Kochs are sounding indistinguishable from the liberal voices highlighted above. Outright climate denialism in the style of Trump is now increasingly gauche, not to mention untenable. After using it to run out the clock for decades, denialists have become the sober and serious realists who say it’s unfortunately now too late to deal with the crisis properly. Prominent liberal voices who wring their hands about the resolution’s ambition should ask themselves if this is really who they want to sound like.

The fact is that Ocasio-Cortez’s and Markey’s Green New Deal follows closely in the footsteps of FDR. Roosevelt’s New Deal was far vaguer than this resolution when he campaigned for the presidency in 1932, though he did call for “bold persistent experimentation” to get the United States out of the Depression, as well as “a larger measure of social planning.”

True to form, his New Deal was a hodgepodge of disparate, sometimes contradictory and self-defeating, programs, of which the greatest and most lasting accomplishments — establishing Social Security, empowering unions with the Wagner Act, creating the minimum wage — had nothing directly to do with solving the immediate crisis at hand. Sound familiar?

Roosevelt’s program, too, had its detractors. One of his Republican opponents, Walter Edge, called it “economically unsound and financially impossible of perpetuation.” Industrialist and world-class antisemite Henry Ford derided Roosevelt for making “impossible promises” to workers. The US Chamber of Commerce, while pledging to fight every facet of the New Deal not directly related to economic recovery, labeled the various existing and proposed programs of the New Deal (then only two years old) “bungling,” “futile,” and “extreme.” The liberals who claim Roosevelt’s legacy while deriding the Green New Deal should be aware their arguments have a long, conservative pedigree.

Is the Green New Deal overly ambitious? Maybe so. But given that it’s addressing a crisis in which every year we fall short of the scientific timetable means displacement and death for millions, that is hardly a sin. Prominent liberals who find the resolution distasteful should be honest and admit that — incubated through decades of neoliberal consensus — they simply don’t like the idea of any expansive government action (unless, of course, it’s to destroy a Middle Eastern country). But they should also be honest about the gross human and environmental cost of their meek acceptance of right-wing supremacy and rigid faith in incrementalism.

If the Green New Deal really is “unrealistic,” then it’s a vision fit for its time. What is more unrealistic than the decades we’ve spent treating the natural world on which our lives depend as a bottomless garbage dump? Or the way we’ve siloed the issue of the environment, on which our entire economic system rests, from issues of economy and society? Is it more unrealistic than the idea, widely accepted for years by sober, serious experts, that we can base our entire economic system on digging up and consuming more and more of the Earth’s finite resources forever?

For as long as I, and probably most anyone else reading this, can remember, we’ve been living in a haze of denial, fully aware of the crisis we were heading towards but unwilling to change course. Now, at the eleventh hour, Ocasio-Cortez’s and Markey’s Green New Deal has finally forced us to start confronting it. If your greatest fear at this point is that the Green New Deal is too ambitious, you’re not just on the wrong side of history; you’re on the wrong side of humanity.

How We Answered the Lies

2019-02-20T15:29:04Z

It was only a matter of time: the US right has decided that the best way to attack rising socialist forces is to accuse them of antisemitism. In the space of a week, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was pilloried for exchanging a friendly phone call with the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, then Ilhan Omar faced a […]

Amazon Is Waging Class War

2019-02-20T15:27:06Z

Let's call Amazon's cancellation of its New York City headquarters what it was: a capital strike. It's a demonstration of why we must overcome capitalists' power over investment.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on September 19, 2018 in National Harbor, Maryland. Alex Wong / Getty Images

Amazon’s sudden announcement that it would back out of building a second headquarters in Queens, New York — which was slated to employ at least twenty-five thousand people supposedly set to earn an average of $150,000 per year — made no sense as a business decision. Amazon had undergone a lengthy and elaborate process to pick the optimal location for its new campus. As suspected, Amazon settled on a city (actually two) that had high concentrations of workers with the needed technical skills, a major airport, mass transit, and the sorts of cultural attractions that would entice employees to move to or remain in that city.

New York and Washington met Amazon’s stated criteria. In addition, Washington is the nation’s political capital, and New York is the capital of almost everything else. Neither New York nor Washington offered as lavish financial incentives as the other applicants, which sought to make up for their less educated workforces, lack of a viable center city, and cultural wastelands via huge giveaways.

The opposition to the deal with Amazon, while intense and heartening, was likely to be defeated in the end. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio had the authority to override objections from other elected officials and push through the zoning changes needed for Amazon to build their ideal campus. Governor Cuomo could have blocked the State Senate’s appointment of HQ2 opponent and Queens state senator Michael Gianaris to the Public Authorities Control Board, which had the power to reject projects like Amazon’s. Most of the actual cash subsidies and tax abatements were “as of right,” meaning that they didn’t need approval: they were payments from the city and state governments that are given to any corporation that creates enough new jobs in parts of the city classified as “distressed.”

Mayor De Blasio, in a New York Times op-ed, offered suggestions for how Amazon could have undercut and divided their opponents: “Meet with organized labor. Start hiring public housing residents. Invest in infrastructure and other community needs. Show you care about fairness and creating opportunity for the working people of Long Island City.” De Blasio said he had offered the same advice privately to Amazon days earlier. Why didn’t Amazon listen to the mayor, and to all the lobbyists they hire to the tune of $14 million plus each year and who no doubt offered similar suggestions? Why instead did Amazon pull out of New York so abruptly?

Amazon is staging a capital strike. Just as workers can withhold their labor in return for concessions, so too can capitalists. Capitalists strike to force governments to create a “good investment climate.” By that capitalists mean low taxes on their corporations and on them individually, and cuts in regulations. They also want governments to weaken or ban unions.

Most often when we think about capital strikes we look at cases directed against leftist governments in weak and poor countries of the Global South. Capitalists stopped investing in Venezuela the minute Hugo Chavez became president, as they did in Chile under Salvador Allende. However, capital strikes also are used to extract specific concessions from governments in richer and more stable countries. After the 2008 financial crisis, banks held back on lending to non-financial firms until governments in Europe and the United States agreed to not impose stricter regulations on finance.

Amazon also unleashed a capital strike on its home city of Seattle. In 2018, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a $275 per employee annual tax on business with over $20 million in revenues to fund construction of apartments and shelters for that city’s ever-growing homeless population. Amazon responded by immediately suspending construction on a new office complex in Seattle. Amazon explicitly said it would not resume investment in Seattle until the tax was repealed. Faced with Amazon’s capital strike, the Seattle City Council quickly repealed the tax.

Seattle’s mayor, in a perfect expression of neoliberal thought, reported that Amazon and other companies would find non-monetary ways to address homelessness. “What we’ve heard from company to company as I’m talking to them is, ‘Tap us for our know-how . . . We have some of the most talented people on the globe right here in Seattle [who can provide] data analytics, dashboards, applications and software for the city’” to address homelessness. She likened such promised apps to the ones wealthier people use to book hotel rooms around the world. Of course no app can close the chasm between the tens of thousands of homeless in Seattle and the far fewer housing units available.

The same dynamic occurs in other cities, most notably San Francisco, where growing and wealthy corporations draw in numerous well-paid workers who can outbid poorer people for a stagnant or very slowly expanding pool of housing units. A similar outcome would have been inevitable if Amazon had brought twenty-five thousand highly paid employees to Long Island City, which is one of the few places in New York City where people of low and middle incomes can still afford to rent apartments.

Amazon’s capital strike in New York is unusual in that it wasn’t aimed at repealing a tax, winning a specific concession, or undoing a set of regulations. Instead Amazon just wanted to teach a lesson. Amazon sought to demonstrate that it would never recognize unions, nor would it make unionization or even neutrality to unionization a subject for negotiation with any city, state, or nation that wants to attract Amazon facilities.

We don’t yet know all the details of Amazon’s back-and-forth with New York public officials, let alone its internal deliberations, and thanks to corporate and government secrecy we may never know all. But we do know that Amazon has a long, unbroken record of total hostility toward unions. Amazon’s profits depend on its ability to ship goods at ever-lower cost so that it can undercut brick and mortar stores. Amazon accomplishes this by paying their warehouse workers as close to minimum wage as possible and even more by imposing a pace of work that injures employees who work in dangerously hot or cold buildings.

Unions negotiate and strike for better working conditions as well as higher wages. If Amazon workers were able to unionize, that corporation’s profits would be slashed. So even though the highly paid executives and technicians Amazon employed in New York probably never would have joined a union, the few construction and support workers employed in building and maintaining the new campus would have had reason to unionize. Those workers would have enjoyed the support of New York public officials who were demanding that Amazon facilitate or remain neutral in union drives in the city.

The financial cost of a few hundred unionized workers in New York would have been trivial in relation to Amazon profits. But the precedent and the resulting challenge to Amazon’s no-union business model would have been transformative. That is what Amazon moved to block with its sudden withdrawal from New York.

Most capital strikes are effective. Governments back down and do whatever capitalists demand in return for a resumption of investment. President Obama, despite his campaign promises and widespread public rage against the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis and resulting Great Recession, caved almost entirely in the face of the capital strike. Few regulations were imposed on banks and those that were enacted contained mechanisms allowing financial firms to lobby for revisions further undercutting those rules.

Since Amazon isn’t making a demand in this case but instead is just warning future governments and communities against insisting on the right for Amazon workers to unionize, the consequences will depend on how ordinary people interpret and react to this episode. Already media outlets, public officials and other businesses are denouncing the activists (especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who opposed New York’s deal with Amazon. As long as we leave investment decisions and workers’ rights in the hands of for-profit corporations, then the space for capital strikes will continue to expand.

The only alternative to giving in again and again to capitalists’ demands is to legislate national and eventually global limits on corporations’ freedom to make investment and employment decisions. If the minimum wage is raised to a truly living wage, then corporations will no longer be able to get workers and localities to bid against each other to attract jobs in return for lower wages. We need to strengthen occupational health and safety laws and regulations and beef up the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s enforcement capacity.

Most importantly, we need to move control over investment decisions away from private capitalists and corporations to public entities that respond to mass needs and demands. There are various ways to do that. Elizabeth Warren is proposing an Accountable Capitalism Act that would require corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue to obtain a federal charter (eliminating their ability to play states against each other) and to allocate at least 40 percent of board seats to workers. Such a model has been used for decades in Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. That would be a significant first step. Bernie Sanders takes a different approach, focusing on making it easier for workers to unionize and expanding employee-owned enterprises.

But we should go further. If we were to raise tax rates on the rich and corporations back to the levels of the 1940s and 1950s, as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez propose, and impose a wealth tax, as Warren suggests, enough revenue would be realized so that the government could become the dominant investor. Funds could be used for a Green New Deal, to provide free education from preschool through university for all, and other projects that ordinary people rather than capitalists deem worthwhile. Investments would be made with the goal of enhancing everyone’s quality of life and the future of our planet, not for further enriching the already obscenely rich.

Within the confines of neoliberal politics and economics we have no choice but to surrender to capital strikes. But if we change the rules under which capitalists and the working-class majority live, we can defeat capital strikes and decide for ourselves how the fruits of our work will be invested. First we need to realize we have an actual choice. Then we need to mobilize to make others aware of the possibilities to transcend the grim options and non-negotiable demands that Amazon made last week in New York and that Amazon and other corporations will continue to make in the future.