Partial online archive of Insurgent Notes, a journal founded in 2010 and edited by Loren Goldner and John Garvey.
Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice
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Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto
Editors: J. Garvey, L. Goldner
Associates: A. Barksdale, D. Berchenko, L. Carter, J. Locks, C. Price, R. Scypion, A. Zahedi
Insurgent Notes is a collective-based journal that will publish online several times a year.
Insurgent Notes #1, June 2010
Content from the debut issue of the journal.
Full contents at http://insurgentnotes.com/past-issues/issue-1/
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Editorial: Presenting Insurgent Notes
Introduction from the first issue.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.)
Marx/Engels, The German Ideology
We take our Marx and Engels seriously. Recent history, beginning perhaps (in the US) with the UPS strike of 1997 and the “battle of Seattle” in 1999, now quickened by the abject financial and ideological meltdown (Fall 2008) of the three decades of the stifling “neo-liberal” era, has favored a certain revival of the radical critique of capitalism, by which we understand first and foremost the work of Karl Marx. Conferences of rock concert dimensions, attracting thousands of young people in Europe, the US and East Asia, gatherings that only a few years ago would have featured some (now happily passé) hip literary theorist, are today devoted to the work of Marx . The premature rumors of Marx’s demise–almost a cyclical indicator in their own right–have recurred often enough in the past 120 years, but Marx’s books, in the wake of the fall 2008 world financial meltdown, were cleaned out of the bookstores of the U.K. and Germany.
“Theory must seek its practice,” Marx wrote long ago, but “practice must also seek its theory”, and such theoretical ferment expresses the rising tide, in fits and starts reaching back to the 1990’s, of an accelerating global reaction to the ravages of the “neo-liberal”, “Washington consensus” phase of capitalism, after the rollback of what we might consider he last (l968-1977) offensive of the world working class.
We, less than a dozen intellectuals and militants, limited for now to the U.S. but with networks of association reaching into Europe and Asia, are launching Insurgent Notes as a contribution to this ferment.
Our minimal program of agreement is:
- commitment to social revolution for the abolition of the wage-labor system, i.e. the capitalist mode of production, and an orientation to the wage-labor proletariat (i.e.the working class) and its potential allies as the main force for such an abolition;
- an affirmation of the great experiences in direct democratic management of production and society (soviets, workers’ councils) that came to the fore in the failed revolutions of the 20th century (Russia, Germany, Spain, Hungary) or, closer to U.S. experience, the self-managed Seattle general strike of 1919 as important antecedents, but hardly the last word, in our project;
- a commitment to “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption” (Marx, Grundrisse), and the “development of human powers as its own end” (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations) within the expanded reproduction of humanity as the true content of communism ;
- a deep-seated skepticism about vanguardist notions of revolution; while we at the same time affirm the need for some of kind of organization that emerges practically and concretely from real social struggle–not “sprung full-blown from the head of some world reformer” (Communist Manifesto)–and which conceives of itself not as “seizing power” but as a future tendency or current in a future self-managed society;
- a rejection of nationalism of any kind as an obstacle to such a revolution;
- a rejection of existing Socialist, Communist or Labour (let alone Democratic) parties in the advanced capitalist sector as alien to our project, and as parties whose (well-proven) role is nothing but the management of capitalism in one or another form, as well as rejection of the “extreme left” groupings (Trotskyists, Maoists) who see such parties as “reformist” “workers’ parties”;
- a rejection of the few remaining “real existing socialist states” (Cuba,Vietnam, China, etc.) and their Stalinist predecessors (the defunct Soviet bloc) as any kind of model, degenerated or not, for the kind of society we wish to help build;
- a rejection of the renascent “anti-imperialism” of recent years, associated with the loose alliance of Chavez and his Latin American allies, China, Hezbollah, Hamas, Amadinejad’s Iran, etc., as an anti-working class ideology serving emergent elites in different parts of the developing world;
- a rejection of any strategy of “capturing the unions” for such a project, as practiced since the 1970s by various “boring from within” Trotskyists, etc.;
- a rejection of post-modern “identity politics” as the ideological articulation of the very real problems of race, gender, and alternative sexuality, but which must be relocated in class politics.
These basic points do not particularly distinguish us from a number of existing currents, broadly associated (in the US and Europe) with the “libertarian communist” or “left communist” scenes. We do not feel the need, at this early point in our activity, to noisily affirm any distinguishing trademark, except to say that we are launching Insurgent Notes because we have found no place for ourselves in any existing grouping. We look forward to comradely dialogue with such groups and individuals who may feel some attachment to them and also look forward to larger regroupments forged in the kind of practical struggles that can cut the knot of theoretical and practical disagreement. We well remember Marx and Engels, in their London exile in the early 1850s, turning their backs on the petty wars of the sects in the ebb that followed the 1848 revolutions. While we do not see the contemporary period as one of ebb, but rather as one of a rising curve of struggle, our perspective for now is nonetheless Dante’s “segui il tuo corso elascia dir le genti” (go your own way, and let people talk).
The past 35-40 years since the 1968-1977 working-class offensive, however difficult and trying for would-be revolutionary Marxists, have hardly been without practical import for our perspectives. The collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union and its bloc, and the devolution toward full-blown integration into the capitalist world market by China (and, more recently,Vietnam) have largely cleared away the “Russian question” over which so much polemical ink was (perhaps necessarily) spilled over so many decades. It is clearer today than it was 40 years ago that the Soviet “model,” once its brief internationalist and worker-based phase up to 1921 hardened into Stalinism and then was, as such, exported to rule one-third of the world’s population by the mid-1950s, was about the eradication of pre-capitalist social relations in agriculture, and about the “reinvention of the wheel” of primitive accumulation and the extensive phase of capital accumulation the West had experienced in the 19th century. Its nationalized property, state planning and state monopoly of foreign trade—those features which even today various Trotskyists call features of a “workers’ state”—were developed by closed mercantilist states from Renaissance Italy via 17th century Prussia to Meiji Japan. Well into the 1970s, such states were conceived by most theories on the left as being something “after” private capitalism, whereas in 2010 it is clear as day that they precede a more privatized capitalism. As their own ideologues unwittingly said, they “lay the foundations of socialism,” which is exactly the historical task—developmentof the productive forces—of capitalism. We know today, far better than 40 years ago, that “developing the productive forces” is not the task of socialism or communism. We know that the centralist and statist dimensions of Jacobinism and Bolshevism, not to mention Stalinism and Maoism, arising as they did in overwhelmingly agrarian societies, express the weakness and not the strength of the revolutions that carried them to power.
The legacy of Bolshevism in particular (which we neither embrace nor despise) has among other things greatly obscured the fundamental problem identified by Marx as the alienation of universal from cooperative labor. This problematic has been reified for over a century by variations around the themes of a (mainly intellectual) vanguard “leading” the working class and a libertarian counter-point glorifying workers as the point of production to the exclusion of all else. The much deeper reality of the problem is built into the nature of capitalist society itself, based as it is on the separation of mental and manual labor. Universal labor is science, art, and intellectual work, understood in the broadest sense, which will one day be fused, with aspects of contemporary “hands-on” material labor, into the “all-sided activity” which Marx in the Grundrisse identified as the overcoming of the antagonism of work and leisure by the abolition of commodity production. Capitalism in the past 50 years has increasingly required universal labor quite as much as cooperative labor, first in scientific research in its “ceaseless striving” to develop the productive forces and, in parallel, has enlisted artists and intellectuals to perform its increasingly threadbare ideological unification. Since most of us are, in this embryonic stage of our activity, intellectuals, we align ourselves with the tradition of Marx, as that small minority of intellectuals who refuse their assigned role in the production of ideology and turn their theoretical weapons against the wage-labor system.1 The unification of universal and cooperative labor is another way to express what we mean by “all-sided activity” (again, the Grundrisse).
We do not wish to start our existence by picking up the 1960s/1970s debates about “forms of organization”: party, soviet, workers’ council, union. All such questions are important but they are subordinate to the larger question of content. Content in this case means a program for radical social reconstruction once the world is dominated by “soviet-type” power. But in our view such a revolution will not take place if there is not prepared in advance a substantial stratum of workers with a clear programmatic idea of what we wish to do with the world when we take it away from the capitalist class. That is the true “vanguard of the working class,” not some self-appointed vanguard party intent on “seizing power.” Such an advanced stratum of workers and their allies may very well at some point form a political party, or even several, but our perspective must always be as a current in the future multi-tendency “world soviet.”
Too often in the past, in Russia (1917), Germany (1918) or Spain (1936), workers have established something resembling soviet power as we mean it (in the latter two cases really only as dual power) rooted in workers’ councils, but since such formations were lacking precisely that “programmatic imagination”—what to do next–they quickly handed real control over to the specialists of power in the state or were in short order dispersed and savagely repressed. In our view, the question of revolution is not first of all about forms of organization, but about the social-reproductive programmatic content required to abolish wage labor, commodity production, the capitalist law of value and thereby class society. And that means, for example, having clear ideas of what to do about the environment, energy, the work day, the organization of human living space, education, health care and many other issues that all but dominate the world.
These issues demand attention far beyond the individual workplace. We make this point because many of our political ancestors cut their proverbial teeth in the defense of the practical and political wisdom of workers on the job. We retain a great deal of appreciation for that perspective. But capital has moved on and the point of production is no longer quite what it once was. Profoundly radical actions and demands from the past are no longer sufficient. More jobs and workplaces in the advanced capitalist world will be abolished by the transformation than will be placed under “workers’ control.” We need to define what we want far beyond the limits imposed by what we are faced with.
Let’s take a recent example. The Argentine piqueteros developed in the late 1990s as a resistanceto the drastic attack on workers there through neo-liberal “reform.” As hundreds of factories closed and workers were thrown into unemployment and in some cases ultimately into lumpenization, the piqueteros abandoned the old factory-based strategies of the left and took the struggle to the supermarket, the hospital and the freeway blockage. They fought back against repression by attacking police stations and publicly outing the torturers of the 1976-1983 “dirty war.” In December 2001, the Argentine neo-liberal “miracle,” based on impoverishment of the once-militant working class, collapsed and the state with it. Even the middle classes were fed up with the Peronist state. The piqueteros, mainly recruited from the youth of the downsized and casualized working class, took over the center of Buenos Aires, and power lay in the streets. But no force was prepared to take the crucial next step and reorganize production on a working-class basis, and to thereby nullify the frantic efforts to cobble together a new bourgeois government. The moment was lost; thePeronists regrouped, and the piqueteros were swept aside or even co-opted into the new Peronist patronage machine.
Insurgent Notes might perhaps be distinguished by our emphasis on what Marx in vol. II of Capital called expanded social reproduction. In our future discussions of what a victorious revolution must do about the many social and biosphere problems mentioned above, above all those located outside the “immediate process of production,” we hope to begin a generalized discussion, but one which, in contrast to a sect, we hardly claim to “own.”
In contemporary “advanced capitalism” (advanced mainly in decay—as assessed by the increasing disparity between what could be and what is) an enormous number of people, the great majority of them wage-laborers (including wage-labor professionals) consume surplus-value and do not produce it. Some of what such workers do is all but essential to a human society–they educate the young, care for the sick, and attend to the elderly. However, much else that such individuals do is simply and straightforwardly a waste of their and our time on this earth. A primary focus of Insurgent Notes, in our attempt to spark a discussion of expanded social reproduction, will be the potential of how the expenditure of so much socially-unnecessary labor power, redirected to socially-useful activity and to facilitating “the radical shortening of the working day” which is the sine qua non of the full human self-development for which we fight. And such a redirection requires, it goes without saying, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.
Insurgent Notes addresses itself initially to those sympathetic to our assessment of the overall situation and notions of what to do about it. We recognize that, for the moment, this in all likelihood means those intellectuals like ourselves and possibly some working people with a certain political and theoretical formation, or those looking for itand not finding it in the broader (self-styled) anti-capitalist milieu. We seek collaborators, initially, among those who share our interest in making the critique of political economy, the focus on social reproduction, and a program for social reconstruction central to our activity and initial intervention. We do not intend to build a network of unformed activists around ourselves as a general staff but rather, to the extent possible, within current conditions, a network fusing “universal labor” (critical intellectual work) with “cooperative labor” (practical intervention). That will mean, initially, the work of writing, editing and publicizing this journal. We intend to organize internal and external study groups on Marxian theory and revolutionary history. As our capacity to do so grows, we intend to establish ongoing investigative work on the global political economy, in order to arrive at ever-clearer understanding of what a revolutionary program and global reconstruction can mean. When we have the numbers and resources to do so, we intend to move to more popular and accessible forms of expression.
We intend to follow and, where possible, participate in ongoing struggles, large and small (an immediate example today would be in Greece), developing strategic and tactical, understanding of the necessities and possibilities of the present. We wish to reconnect with and update the Marxian tradition of strategy as developed by such figures as Engels and Trotsky, but also (more broadly) of the Clausewitzes, Makhnos, Villas, Durrutis and Sun Tzus of world history. We want to study and make accessible an understanding of the strategic and tactical strengths and weaknesses of such moments as the Argentine piqueteros (or the remarkable earlier Argentine cordobazo of 1969), the Chilean cordones comunales of 1973, the Bolivian revolt of 2003, the Oaxaca uprising of 2006, or the Kwangju uprising in South Korea in 1980. Closer to home and to our present, we would include the Seattles and Genoas of the past decade .
We wish to make this kind of knowledge available to the “real movement,” and not as the “property” of ourselves as a sect. Our organizational loyalty is precisely to that “real movement,” not to any artificial, abstract and separate self-definition apart from it. We believe that the more theoretically and practically armed the real movement is, the less it will need “leaders” and “vanguards” of any kind. In contrast to the centrality of key leaders (one thinks e.g., of Lenin) in most revolutions of the past, we feel that the deeper and more substantial the revolutionary leadership is, the stronger it will be, and the broader the base of the movement, the less violent its victory will have to be.
Cultural activities and the arts are not our strong suit, but we recognize their importance for our broader project. Consider the centrality of song for the IWW. Consider the dozens of songs created on the spot during the Oaxaca uprising. Consider the broad activities in song, dance, and movement art work of the Korean minjung movement of the 1970s, taken over into the broader Korean workers’ movement to this day. We know there is a long and noble tradition of artistic involvement in revolutionary movements reaching back more than 200 years, and since the early 20th century, avant-garde attempts of various quality to build a bridge between the arts and life. The great majority of those early 20th century efforts (German Expressionism and the Bauhaus, Russian Futurism, the artists produced by the Mexican Revolution), Dada, or surrealism) after the defeats of the 1917-1921 insurrectionary wave, were simply re-appropriated by the bourgeois cultural museum and presented under glass as “art,” stripped of their broader radical intent. After World War II, groups such as the Situationists attempted to use the method of “diversion”(detournement), first developed in poetry from Lautreamont onward, in broader subversion, but after having a certain impact on the May 1968 general strike in France, “Situationism” in turn was made respectable almost to the point of the creation of “Situationist Studies” and “Situationism scholars” in universities. These currents all represented attempts to use methods first developed in the arts to the communication of radical ideas. We recall the Polish workers of Poznan who, in 1956, briefly captured the state radio network to present their own perspectives or, again, in Oaxaca where the movement captured and controlled radio and TVstations for weeks.
Something takes place in revolutionary moments that have been studied and captured in writing—to the extent that it can be captured in retrospect at all–only rarely, where the Marxian concept of the “class-for-itself” steps out of textbook exegesis and “seizes the masses,” something akin to amaterialist version of Hegel’s idea that “the truth is a Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk.” Or again to paraphrase Hegel’s notion that the “real is rational” when the real is understood as exactly such moments, those which occur when the “inverted world” of the everyday is turned upside down, when the isolated individual realizes his/her true reality in a collective surge that few, if any, suspect could slumber under such passive appearances. One suspects that something of this kind took place in Barcelona in July 1936 when the unarmed crowds charged the military and police and won the day or in Budapest in November 1956 when the country was placed under a national system of workers’ councils in a few days. In such moments, we suspect, Marxian theory, strategy, and aesthetic expression all fuse into some ephemeral collective sense of being capable of everything, whatever the odds.
We should not exaggerate their importance, because history has shown quite clearly that they were, in fact, not capable of everything. But we of Insurgent Notes wish to keep clearly in mind that such qualitative moments in history are a fundamental part of what we call reality, and we hope to locate all other aspects of our activity in that future maturing in the present.
If these ideas converge with your own, contact us.
- 1“a portion of bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,” Communist Manifesto, London 1979, p. 91.
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The historical moment that produced us: global revolution or recomposition of capital? - Loren Goldner
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Introductory article to the first issue of Insurgent Notes (June 2010).
The Historical Moment That Produced Us
Global Revolution or Recomposition of Capital?
1789 1848 1871 1905 1917 1968 20??
I. Dispersal and Regroupment in Working-Class History in the Capitalist Era
The years 1917-1921 constituted the first worldwide assault on capitalism by the revolutionary working class, centered in Germany and in Russia. That assault was crushed, and the counter-offensive of the following years took the form of, transitionally, fascism, and more enduringly, Social Democratic welfare statism, Stalinism and Third World development states, which succeeded—almost— in burying the memory of its true content and character.
The years 1968–1977 marked the return of revolution, and at least the partial recovery, in a much deepened development of capital’s hegemony, of the communist project left in abeyance by the earlier defeat. The task of Insurgent Notes is to deepen that recovery and to participate in the theoretical and practical regroupment for the next—and hopefully last—global assault.
Looking back from the vantage point of the latest phase of the world crisis that erupted in 2008 (itself merely the latest twist of the “slow crash landing,” sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that began ca. 1970), and from the working-class response to it that, in fits and starts, is taking shape today, one cannot help being struck by the staggering banality of most social, political and cultural life around the world since the late 1970s. By that we hardly mean that “nothing happened”: one need only recall the dismantling of the Social Democratic welfare state, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and reunification of Germany, the rise of East Asia as the most dynamic economic zone in the world, or the emergence of radical Islam. But for those of us who lived through the mass struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, the three and a half decades of the long slide of the world capitalist system, prior to the meltdown of October 2008, must appear as one of the longest and strangest historical periods since the communist movement first emerged in the 1840s.Those of us too young to have experienced the years of repeated mass movements in the streets, in the heart of advanced capitalism, must make an even greater leap of imagination to grasp the unreality of an era successively characterized by dominant ideology as the “Washington Consensus,” neo-liberalism, globalization, “post-modern” or the “end of history”. From the Paris Commune (1871) to the Russian Revolution of 1905, we might recall a relative ebb of struggle of comparable length, but even then, there was a steady expansion of the organized working-class movement, above all in Europe, both in trade unions and mass-based workers’ parties, on a sufficient scale to even produce, by 1900, the ideological disarray of “revisionism”.
That was then—still the era of the ascendant phase of capitalism on a world scale—and this is now.
By contrast, the period from the mid-1970s onward has been one of almost uninterrupted defeat: brutal dictatorships in the southern cone of Latin America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil); the crushing and cooptation of the Polish worker explosion of 1980–81, containment of the radical currents of the South African workers’ movement in the managed transition from apartheid to austerity, defeat of the workers’ councils of the Iranian Revolution, defeat after defeat of old-style single-industry struggles in the capitalist heartland, from the downsizing of French steel (1979), by way of FIAT in Italy (1980), to the British miners’ strike (1984–85).
The US saw a long string of defeats of traditional union struggles: from PATCO (1981) to Greyhound (1983), Phelps-Dodge Copper (1984) and P-9 (1986) to the Jay, Maine paper strike of 1987–88. By the end of this phase, Wal-Mart had replaced General Motors as the biggest US employer.
Even when workers fought back in forms beyond the traditional, they lost:
- Brazilian workers staged some impressive strikes in the late 1970s but were then channeled into electoral containment by Lula and the Workers’ Party and largely downsized in turn; steel and auto were the most important employers in the late 70s, and Macdonalds and security had replaced them 10 years later.
- Chronically unemployed Algerian youth rioted in 1988 but were co-opted into the Islamic movement and ground up in the subsequent civil war.
- Oil workers and others established workers’ councils during the Iranian revolution (1978–81) whose repression was a major priority of the Islamic Republic that highjacked the overthrow of the shah.
- The South Korean working class exploded in 1987 and made gains into the early 90s, after which it was beaten back by salami tactics and then by the tsunami of the IMF crisis of 1997-98.
- The South African masses forced the dismantling of apartheid, only to be handed over to neo-liberalism by the ANC.
- The Argentine piqueteros’ movement of 2001–2002 brought the government there to its knees, but did no more, and was dispersed and co-opted by the recycling of Peronism.
Add to this picture the succession of local war upon war, from Lebanon (1975–1990) to the 40-odd wars in progress in the early 1990s, culminating (to date) in the 1994-1998 African near continent-wide war (4 million dead), the U.S. debacle in Iraq and potential new debacles in Afghanistan and perhaps Pakistan. The proliferation of murderous nationalisms in ex-Yugoslavia and on the periphery of the ex-Soviet Union made the proletarian internationalism that forced the end of World War I seem very remote indeed.
II. The Global Wage-Labor Work Force as the Sole Practical Universal
As we emerge, hopefully, from this dismal period of rollback, we recall Rosa Luxemburg’s remark, shortly before her murder in 1919: “The revolution says: I was, I am, I shall be!” We assert the ongoing reality of communism, “the real movement developing before our eyes,” as Marx put it in the Manifesto. Like Hegel’s “knights of history,” we locate our identities not in any immediacy but in the emerging new universal that must be the cutting edge of the next global offensive.
What does this “universal” mean? As a first approximation, it means the global program which can unify, as a “class-for-itself”—a class prepared to take over the world and reorganize it in a completely new way—the wage-labor forces currently dispersed in the (somewhat diminished but still central) classic “blue collar” proletariat, the dispersed and casualized sub-proletariat, and those elements of the technical, scientific, intellectual and cultural strata susceptible to allying with such forces. These are, in “inverted” form, the forces actually comprising what Marx called the “total worker” (Gesamtarbeiter). Scattered around the world as it is, above all by the past four decades of debt-driven social retrogression, this “total worker” may seem to be a chimera, but it nonetheless, under the scattered appearances—the very fragments theorized and glorified by “identity politics— of capital accumulation, it does the world’s “use-value” work every day. Subordinated as these forces currently are to the increasingly insane drive of the accumulation of CAPITAL careening toward barbarism and planetary destruction, the programmatic reunification we advocate may seem “utopian,” but it is in fact the survival of this outmoded social system in any remotely humane form which is the real utopia of our time.
It is to the programmatic and practical unification of these forces that we of Insurgent Notes are committed.
III. Working-Class Dispersal and Regroupment as an Historically Ascendant Spiral
As the admittedly dense language in the preceding may be opaque to some, a bit of “unpacking” is in order.
The last concerted proletarian offensive of 1968–1977 might be characterized, on a world scale, as a revolt against the factory assembly line. Although, as indicated, this movement failed to articulate and implement an “alternative social project,” the goals seemed, to some, relatively clear. Reconnecting with the workers’ councils and other forms of mass assembly of the previous great revolutions (Russia 1917, Germany 1918, Spain 1936, Hungary 1956) or less total mass strike phenomena (such as Portugal in 1974–75 or the black-led wildcat movement in Europe and the U.S. from the 1950s to 1973), the goals of the movement were understood to be taking over the existing industrial plant and placing it under “workers’ control.” Given the already skewed character of capitalist “growth” after 1945—we need only think of the net negative social impact of the automobile—such a perspective was already flawed, but it at least had the merit both of seeming palpable to many workers and of providing a focus for the most advanced struggles of that time: the generalized wildcat movement in Europe and North America.
“All power to the international workers’ councils” was the seemingly best “universal” of that era, and there were ephemeral moments when its realization did not seem that far off.
The capitalist counter-offensive involved a direct attack on the “visible” dimension of the movement toward “generalized self-management”: breaking up the big factory into cottage industry and isolated rural “greenfield” sites, further de-urbanizing workers into sprawl and exurbia, the casualization of labor, outsourcing to the Third World, and “high tech” intensification of production. The resulting “de-socialization” of the workers of the 1968–1977 rebellion achieved in these ways was deep and thorough. It was a textbook illustration of the way in which technology—in this case, first of all, new telecommunications and improved transportation—is inseparable from its capitalist uses; not since the mass production of the automobile did an innovation have such an initial impact of isolating and dispersing the universal class which the proletariat IS. That such telecommunications and transportation may tomorrow contribute to the practical unification we advocate is another matter, and remains to be seen.
Our guarded optimism is only strengthened by the long view. Strange as the preceding decades may have been, cycles of defeat and renewal of the movement to abolish bourgeois capitalist society are nothing new. The workers’ movement has repeatedly had to regroup and learn from defeat, and to respond to new forms of capitalist containment. From the Enragés and the Babouvist Conspiracy of Equals of the French Revolution until 1848, the very early movement had to slough off conspiratorial putschism (Blanqui) and various utopian schemes (Owen, Fourier) to emerge in the first concrete, armed expression of communism in the Paris June Days of 1848 and their extensions in other parts of Europe. Out of that 1840s upsurge came the mature self-consciousness of the movement in the work and practical activity of Marx and Engels. The long boom following the defeat of 1848 brought on the 1860s rise of struggles, from U.S. slave emancipation to the European strike wave that produced the multi-tendency First International and culminated in the Paris Commune.
The crushing of the Commune and dispersal of the First International marked the shift of the cutting edge of capitalist development and the maturing workers’ movement to Germany, the long illusion of Social Democratic reformism (trade unions and parliamentary activity), as well as the bowdlerization of Marx’s theory of the real movement into an ideology for the industrial development of backward countries, first in Germany and then, more fatally, in Russia. It inaugurated what might be called the “century of Social Democracy” and Social Democracy’s bastard spinoff, Stalinism (1875-1975), the fatal illusion of statist socialism. Marx and Engels from the earliest opportunity denounced the term “Social Democracy” as an eclectic hodge-podge having nothing to do with communism as they understood it (cf. Critique of the Gotha Program, private correspondence), but the grey eminences of what became the Second International (1889-1914) quietly buried the founders’ critique under the seemingly relentless electoral and trade union advances in western Europe. The illusion that socialism/ communism meant state planning of nationalized property (understood moreover within individual, autarchic nation-states) in fact covered over the reality of a world transition from the formal/extensive to the real/intensive domination of capital (1870s-1940s), a transition perfectly adumbrated in yet another unknown (until 1932) work of Marx, the so-called Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Volume 1 of Capital.
The “real movement that abolishes existing conditions” ripped open the self-contented humdrum world of Social Democracy in the Russian-Polish mass strikes of 1905-1906. As in the Paris Commune with its groping attempt at the abolition in practice of the state (e.g. immediate revocability of delegation), the explosion of 1905 placed on the historical agenda, against the parliamentary gradualism, trade unionism and productivist planism of the Second International, the soviet and the workers’ council as the far more advanced forms of working-class power. And soviets and workers’ councils in turn were at the center of the 1917-1921 world insurrectionary wave, centered in Germany and Russia, that ultimately spread to, and was defeated in, 30 countries. Out of that groundswell from 1905 to 1921 came the next generation of revolutionary theoreticians, including Luxemburg, Bordiga, Gorter and Pannekoek,[1] the self-conscious expressions of the practical discoveries of the working class in motion.
The revolutionary wave of 1917-1921, however, was not deep enough to end the “century of Social Democracy” and productivist top-down planning; quite the contrary, it made the latter more directly palatable to the stabilization of capital. Capitalism recovered its balance, over new mounds of working-class corpses, through previously unknown, or barely adumbrated forms of statism, a decade of depression and a second world war that achieved for the first time (in contrast to the actual reformism of the pre-1914 period) a “recomposition”; this recomposition covered over the reality that in 1914, on a world scale, the global productive forces necessary to abolish commodity production already existed. Part of this recomposition involved intensified accumulation in the semi-colonial and newly independent ex-colonial worlds, as the hegemonic British empire as well as the French empire gave way to American hegemony.
IV. Recomposition and Revolt in the Era of Capitalist Decadence
The long expansion after World War II, under the auspices of various statisms of self-styled progressive veneer, largely seemed to have exorcised the “specter of communism,” particularly since the word as well as the trappings had been taken over by totalitarian states ruling one-third of the world’s population. Workers on the shop floor, however, knew differently, and in both major blocs regrouped and found their way to new forms of struggle, most notably the wildcat strike which from the mid-1950s onward grew in momentum in the US, the UK, France, Spain, and Italy. Polish workers in 1956 forced a shakeup of the Stalinist state and, in Hungary a few months later, without a Leninist vanguard party in sight, proletarians built a national system of workers’ councils in a matter of days and overthrew the regime. In France in 1968, workers staged the longest wildcat general strike in history. This wildcat moment of the workers’ movement after the 1950s had in many places by 1970 wrested de facto control of the shop floor from the capitalists, but it never went beyond that to the practical elaboration of a social project beyond capitalism, and succumbed to the capitalist counter-offensive which began to gather momentum by the mid-1970s. That counter-offensive intensified with the successive triumphs of Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, Mitterand in France, and Teng in China, joined after 1985 by Gorbachev in Russia. Not since the pre-1914 era had ideology spoken so globally with one voice, orchestrating 1) the biggest disparity in wealth since the 1920s, 2) the shredding of most of the social safety nets had been created in the preceding statist era, and 3) using new telecommunications and transportation technologies, a “globalized” dispersion of production that seemed to fragment the previous concentrations of workers which made possible the wildcat era in the West.
All of history since 1914, then, has involved the successive (and to date successful) attempts to stave off the reality of the superannuation of capitalist social relationships, to periodically, through destruction, repression and ideology, to force working people and their struggles back into those relations, whatever the social and human cost.
Since World War I, these capitalist recoveries, in contrast to the 1815–1914 era, have involved recomposition, in the same way that they involve massive destruction of workers and physical plant in a way unknown in the previous century of capital’s dominance. Mere collapse, deflation, depression and “automatic” recovery, as in the decennial crises analyzed by Marx in Capital, no longer sufficed. Recomposition, in contrast to genuine reformism as it was practiced before 1914, means a “reshuffling of the deck,” a lowering of the total social wage bill under the appearances of inclusiveness: trade unions and socialist parties disciplining the working class, worker-management cooperation schemes, or, closer to the present, diversity counselors, NGOs, women CEOs and green capitalism.
What characterizes the new post-1914 period (variously called “decadence,” “the epoch of imperialist decay,” the “real domination of capital”), in contrast to the previous one, is that capital expands, and social reproduction contracts. Recoveries, such as the postwar boom (1945–1970) involved such a recomposition, made possible by the earlier massive destruction, (two world wars, a decade of depression, fascism and Stalinism) the reorganization of the world system (end of the British and French empires, transformation of the world economy—minus the Soviet bloc and China— into a “dollar bloc” under the Marshall Plan, IMF and World Bank, and the imposition of a new “standard of value” based on the new technologies of the 20s and 30s (mainly of consumer durables, e.g. the auto and household appliances) that had been bottled up by the previous, superseded national markets. This recomposition ran out of steam in the mild 1966 recessions (Japan, Germany, US), the 1968 dollar crisis and the final crackup of the Bretton Woods system (1971–73). Not accidentally, that latter period of unraveling saw the sharpest class struggle in decades, before or since.
V. Capital Seeks a New Equilibrium Through Destruction, 1970–present: The Slow Crash Landing
Since that time, capital has been groping for another successful recomposition based on a new “standard of value”,[2] whatever the consequences for social reproduction on a world scale. Those consequences have been destructive enough, and they have hardly run their course.
In these four decades, as indicated, capital expands, social reproduction on a world scale contracts.
Let’s look more closely at the chronology.
1970-73 was the beginning of the “slow crash landing,” announced by the bankruptcy of the Penn Central railroad, a U.S. recession, Nixon’s belated discovery that he was a Keynesian, and his unilateral dissolution of the Bretton Wood system of fixed exchange rates in August 1971. Above all through the pyramiding of debt, capital has mainly kept up the appearances of “normality” in North America, western Europe and East Asia: :”normal” recessions in 73-75, 80-82, 90-91, 2001-2, and the current one beginning in 2007. But looked at from a social reproductive view, the post-1960s history of capitalism has been, on a WORLD scale, little less than a substitute World War III, attempting once again the recomposition achieved in 1914-1945. We merely list the highlights: a 20-30% fall in real living standards in the US, the replacement of the one-paycheck family by the 2-3 paycheck family, whole regions de-industrialized; in western Europe, an average of 8-10% unemployment over most of the period and a general (as yet incomplete) dismantling of the welfare state; in eastern Europe and Russia, wholesale retrogression for workers surrounding enclaves of yuppiedom, built (in Russia) on ground rent from natural resources, not any real production, and in eastern Europe on speculative flows of Western capital into real estate. When we “factor in” Latin America, Africa, the non- oil Middle East, the ex-Soviet Central Asian countries, India and the rest of non-Tiger Asia, we are talking about billions of stunted lives and millions of deaths from disease and general slum existence. Mexico in those decades went from being the “next Korea” (Wall St. Journal, ca. 1990) to the possible next Afghanistan (Financial Times, March 2010).
Only East Asia, now extended to coastal China, stands out as a partial exception, and even there Korea, Thailand and Indonesia underwent the terrible retrogression of the 1997-98 crisis, and China’s post-1978 growth has left about 850 million peasants and its floating unemployed army of 100 million quite out of the boom.
The similarly-touted “India shining” has been exposed by large-scale rural poverty, a suicide epidemic of bankrupted weavers, worker unrest in the industrial suburbs of Delhi, and the resurgence of the Maoist Naxalite guerrilla movement, previously declared all but extinct following large-scale repression in the 1970s.
Asian growth, already a minority phenomenon in the two “emerging giants” China and India,, is more than offset by all the retrogression on a world scale.
But one cannot conceive of a new global assault against capitalism comparable to, and surpassing 1917-1921 or 1968-1977, without a concrete analysis of the changing conditions of the wage-labor proletariat over the past 35 years, conditions as discontinuous with those of assembly-line workers in Detroit or British Leyland or Renault-Billancourt (Paris) in 1968, as the latter were discontinuous with the conditions of German, Russian or Italian workers right after World War I.
VI. Capital’s Assault on Proletarian Concentration
Marx, in the beautiful passages on “Machinery and Modern Industry” in vol. I of Capital, points out that the history of technology can be written in terms of the ceaseless struggle between capital and labor over the length and conditions of the working day, and one must also understand everything capital has done since the late 1970s as a counter-offensive against the worker insurgency of the 60s and 70s. The issue is one of locating a new universal for the unification of the conditions of world wage labor, similar to the practical discovery of the soviet and the workers’ council before and after World War I, and their transient “recovery” in the decade after 1968. The issue is one of locating “immanently,” in today’s world production and reproduction, the “inverted” form pointing to what Marx described in the Grundrisse :
…Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness (Naturbedürfdigkeit) and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself…[3]
Capital, deeply frightened by the inchoate emergence in 1968-1977 of the search for this “full development of activity itself” responded to the breakdown of the old conditions of accumulation with its second great recompostion of the world working class (following that of 1914-1945), achieved through the breakup and dispersion, on a large scale, of the big factory and its high concentration of workers in dense urban areas in the U.S. and in Europe. It intensified production through new technologies and a revolution in communication and transportation. Capital’s struggle was, as it had always been, to increase productivity while eliminating, as much as possible, living labor from production, but given the high level of productivity already achieved in the 1960s, it was a constant, mystified struggle against the reality that, on a world scale, the living labor necessary to materially reproduce the system had already become “superfluous” as a portion of the total population, and yet urgently necessary, in the dominant social relations, to continue the capitalist expansion of value. We need look no further than the 7 million people in the U.S. prison system (awaiting trial, in prison or on parole, 2% of the 300 million total) to see the warehousing of capital’s surplus population, not to mention the two billion people similarly marginalized in various parts of the Third World.
Technology as such, we understand even more clearly today, following the “high-tech” “new economy” hoopla of the 1980s and 1990s, , is not capital, even if existing technology must of necessity be the material embodiment of capitalist social relationships.
VII. Capital’s Struggle Against the Specter of Its Own Abolition Since the Eruption of the Communist Movement in 1848 and Thereafter
The 1848 emergence of communism as a real movement in the European working class forced capitalist ideology to increasingly mystify, in contrast to all previous class formations, what society could do, namely abolish wage labor, commodity production, capital and, with them, social classes, starting with the wage-labor proletariat. To that end it discarded its own classical political economy, its embrace of Enlightenment rationality, and its advocacy of the rights of the “Third Estate,” since it was now confronted with the proletarian Fourth Estate. It abandoned the Promethean social realism of its artists from Shakespeare via Goya to Balzac, and it shrunk back in horror, seeing its own emancipatory weapons turned against itself, from the devolution of its greatest philosophy, that of G.W.F. Hegel, into the radical ferment of the 1840s, leading to Karl Marx. Whereas capital had, from Tudor England via the French Revolution to various countries (e.g. Spain) into the 1840s aggressively closed down monasteries and expropriated vast church lands, its ideologues responded to the “specter of communism” by a growing flirtation with religious revival and a new irrationalism (admittedly mild indeed by comparison with the religious revival and new irrationalism of the past three decades.)
Such mystification, the frenetic ideological inversion of true human possibilities forced back into capitalist relations, had already achieved enormous proportions during the 1945-1970 postwar boom, perhaps best embodied in the aesthetics, theory and practice of “high modernism”. This was, East, West, North and South, the era of the “enlightened planner,” whether in the New York City of Robert Moses, the “science cities” of the former Soviet Union, the white elephant foreign-aid driven construction of huge, little-used steel plants and freeways to nowhere in the Third World development regimes of Nasser and Nehru, or the eerie silence of Oskar Niemeyer’s technocratic dream of Brasilia (like his similarly eerie headquarters of the French Communist Party in the Paris suburbs). Capital recovered from its brush with oblivion right after World War I, and the long decades of crisis up to 1945 necessary to re-establish global accumulation, with the pseudo- rationality of social planning of experts: the grey faceless bureaucrats of the British Labour Party and its welfare state, the arrogant technocrats of France’s “trente glorieuses,” the Stalinist bureaucrats of successive Soviet five-year plans and the promise of “goulash communism,” the “defense intellectuals” and Robert McNamaras of America’s world military sprawl. It was the era of triumphalist pseudo-rationality in ideology, from brain-dead logical positivist philosophy via the onslaught of mathematics in neo-classical “economics” to the spare formalist austerity of modernist literature, art, architecture and music, these latter carefully expunged of the radical social dimension that animated or seemed to animate some currents of modernism in the years after World War I. Only a few, in this celebratory atmosphere, were aware that, since 1848, the only real rationality was that of the self-conscious global praxis of the revolutionary working class, but while the working class began its regroupment in the wildcat strike movement from the 1950s onward, dominant ideology continued to tout the luminous future of productivist technocratic modernism, a brilliant encampment of the hidden potential of “the beach” hidden “under the paving stones,” as one wall poet lyricist in Paris in May 1968 put it.
What, then, is one to say about the task capital faced in mystifying its superannuation after it managed to contain the worker revolt of 1968-1977? Every phase of capitalist ideology since 1848, but especially since 1917, has been forced to adorn itself with fragments borrowed from the defeated revolutionary surge. One recalls Louis Napoleon’s promotion of worker organization and even of a French delegation to the early congresses of the First International. Interwar fascism was adept in borrowing the trappings and mass propaganda methods of the workers’ movement it crushed. One might then characterize the three decades after World War II, whether in welfare statist, Stalinist or Third World development guise, as the “realization” the Social Democratic Gotha Program denounced by Marx in 1875.
The capitalist counter-offensive since the late 1970s is the one closest to us, and thus merits a more detailed accounting. All these social and cultural phenomena, from the breakup of cities into suburbia and exurbia, the proliferation of shopping malls and “edge cities,” the “reconquest” of the inner city, previously abandoned by the middle classes during the postwar boom, in the form of worldwide gentrification and expulsion of the poor to trashy sprawl, by way of the overt corporate takeover of “education,” to the even greater privatization and atomization of people by individual technologies and the vast ocean of trivia they “communicate,” must be understood from the vantage point of the potential human material community whose inversion they are. And it must never be forgotten that these “post-modern” phenomena, in North America, Europe and East Asia, touted as they are as “growth,” coexist on a world scale with the “planet of slums,” in Mike Davis’s phrase.
What is noteworthy about the past three decades is the way capital appropriated for itself much of the ideological froth of the defeated and co-opted movements of the 1960s.[4] It was not the first time that the rebellion of the alienated middle classes helped to pioneer the next phase of accumulation. In the 1930s it was exactly these classes who populated the bureaucracies of the emerging welfare state. After the late 1970s, one might say that the personal computer, for the well-to-do classes of the “advanced” capitalist sector, will stand as a symbol of this phase of accumulation as the automobile did for the earlier period. Yet the computer, like the automobile before it, was much more than a technology, bound up as it was with a whole ideology of freedom. That latter ideology was the “revolution” against “bigness” and “bureaucracy” and “hierarchy,” against the “Organization Man” and the “grey flannel suit,” once among the battle cries of the 60s New Left. Where the earlier movement, both in its political as in its Bohemian/ counter-cultural form, had counterposed hedonistic consumption to the then-dominant “Puritanism,” here was the capitalist class and its minions themselves, headed by its Wall Street and City of London yuppie vanguard, plunging into designer drugs, gourmet restaurants and high fashion S+M. Not much was said about the ever-lengthening work week, both for these “creative classes” touted by hip and vacuous social theorists (e.g. Richard Florida), not to mention for the two- and three-paycheck working class family that was the road kill of the “new economy” and the “information superhighway”. And for the “creative classes” and many others, the PC, cell phone and Blackberry eliminated the antagonism between work and leisure, not in Marx’s “all-sided activity,” but as 24/7…work.
The quasi-totalitarian incorporation of failed rebellion reached into every aspect of life, from chic New York restaurants in some former warehouse district, with photographs of 1930s breadlines as interior decoration, to the obliteration of the offbeat café or independent bookstore by Barnes and Noble. Huge shopping malls appeared with little or no service personnel, let alone people knowledgeable about the merchandise, in cavernous halls of commodities; every business and state agency able to do so replaced receptionists with endless telephone trees of irrelevant options and interminable waits, cutting costs by forcing unpaid labor time on those they ostensibly “served”; all the “oppositional” culture of the past, from blues and jazz to once-subversive books was served up under cellophane at Borders. In the name of the new, ultra-reified hype of “information” (as if books such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind or Marx’s Capital constitute “information” side by side with the latest Tom Peters management manual), libraries shredded millions of books to move into reduced, wired space. Arrogant Silicon Valley CEOs and their publicists who had always hated books and serious thought touted the “paperless” economy of the new millennium. Millions of “middle management” jobs (admittedly of no redeeming social importance) disappeared through high-tech downsizing, and those who lost them disappeared into the recycled suburban oblivion covered over by the chorus of the “new economy”. Universities remade “liberal” education as extended vocational training for their “customers,” handing over the tattered remnants of the old humanities to the “everything is corrupt” mantras of the post-modern deconstructionist Lumpenintelligentsia, expert in projecting its (no argument- very real) corruption onto the very emancipatory universal movements in history—revolutions—from which Insurgent Notes draws inspiration. Such ideological decay helpfully diverted attention from the accelerating decay of American infrastructure—the “old economy” of sewers, subways, street and road pavement, bridges, New Orleans levees, or tenement apartment buildings. Perhaps most astounding in this whole ideological facelift was the emergence of the MBA and computer geek and investment banker, figures widely reviled and ridiculed in the climate of the 1960s, as little less than culture heroes and “revolutionaries”. The forgotten “absent-minded professor” ,still (in some cases) having a whiff of the old (and now passé) humanism, was replaced by the sleek, tanned, cynical “radical” post-modern literary theorist, networking his or her way to tenure and from conference to conference.
Modest houses and neighborhoods built for workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the post-1970s reoccupation of the inner city by the dual income /no kids yuppie class, were refurbished in the general “quotation” of the culture of the past, stripped bare of the vibrant street life that had once made them bearable for their earlier inhabitants. (Adding insult to injury is the little-discussed “fact” that the typical US working-class family spent 15% of its income on housing in 1950, and spends on average 50%—usually one full paycheck—today.) This new dispensation also involved a massive war on memory, from the proposal to turn Auschwitz into a theme park to the malling of the site of the great street battles of San Francisco’s 1934 general strike. Radical longshoremen in the 1950s had mixed with literary Bohemia in San Francisco’s North Beach or at New York’s White Horse Tavern, but today the fully-containerized ports have relocated far away, with one-tenth the number of workers, and one hardly imagines a similar mixing in those old venues of the yuppies and the zoned-out workers from the nearest Macdonalds.
Just as capitalism, through primitive accumulation, had always lived in part off the looting and destruction of pre-capitalist social formations, so had bourgeois culture in its ascendant centuries lived off pre-capitalist cultural strata (e.g. its mimetic relationship to the European aristocracy). As capital turned inward on itself, the self-cannibalization of its social reproductive base since the late 1970s was echoed with eerie concision in the self-cannibalization of its once-emancipatory culture in the ideological Ebola virus spread by the post-modern nihilists and deconstructionists, the Foucaults, the Saids and the Derridas. As Marx said long ago, “the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.”
VIII. Class Regroupment and Its Enemies: Porto Alegre, NGOs and the World Social Forum against the Global Working Class
This cultural offensive has not been without its political counterpart. The non-Marxist left has repeatedly been essential to capitalism in reshaping it for a new phase of accumulation. One need only remember Proudhon and his 150 years of influence on worker-run cooperatives[5] in a capitalist framework, or, closer to our own time, the role of Social Democracy, Stalinism and Labourism (and even fascism, from the ex-leftists such as Mussolini who initially forged it) in laying the foundations for the post-1945 Keynesian welfare state.
But just as in the way that, in the 1950s and 1960s, many leftists shifted their hopes (during an apparent period of working-class ebb in the West) to romanticized guerrilla movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia, only to be bitterly disappointed by their results and above all to be taken aback by the working class explosion in Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, the shift of emphasis in the 1980s and 1990s shift to social movements, in a radically transformed world context, grows from a similar ebb. The world working class, and only secondarily the social movements, holds the key to any positive 21st century future we wish to see. The newly-created working classes that have emerged in parts of the Third World in recent decades naturally mean that the next working class explosion will not look like the last one, any more than the last one looked like those of the interwar period. Without such an explosion, the social movements will only be, as they have seemed so far to be in Latin America, mere adjuncts to a newly reconstituted capitalist state, possibly with Chavez’s Venezuela or even Lula’s Brazil as a paradigm.
If world capitalism manages to reconstitute a viable framework of accumulation out of the current crisis, many of the new social movements—identity politics built around race, ethnicity, gender, alternative sexuality, energy and the environment, hostile to class content—will have played such a role. The polemical fire of the World Social Forum and lesser venues is mainly aimed mainly at neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, not at capitalism and nor the global Keynesians Stiglitz, Sachs, Soros, Krugman et al. who are among the leading candidates to reshape a future capitalist restructuring at the expense of the working class and its potential allies, as their predecessor J.M. Keynes helped do in the 1930s and 1940s. The World Social Forum’s exemplary proponents of “global justice” include the Stalinist Fidel Castro, the petro-Peronist Hugo Chavez, or the former Khmer Rouge admirer Samir Amin.
One proponent of such “progressive forces” wrote recently, and typically:
”…the challenge for progressive forces, as ever, is to establish the difference between ‘reformist reforms’ and reforms that advance a ‘non-reformist’ agenda. The latter would include generous social policies stressing decommodification, and capital controls and more inward-oriented industrial strategies allowing democratic control of finance and ultimately of production itself.”[6]
If such a program is to have “capital controls” and “democratic control of finance” one wonders how serious “decommodification” is to occur, since commodity production is central to the existence of capital and finance.
New social movements are nowhere so prominent or successful as in Latin America, where a new populism has been on the ascendant in recent years. Lula was certainly a pioneer of this trend,[7] from the social-movement orientation of the early years of the Brazilian Workers’ Party to his…disappointing …(if predictable) performance once in control of the state. The Argentine piqueteros overthrew a government in December 2001, and then, after failing to replace it with anything else (pace John Holloway[8]) split into a right and left wing, with the right wing now administering state workfare and welfare programs for the remade (and Peronist) governments on a highly politicized basis. Evo Morales in Bolivia seems similarly to be using the momentum of the social movements that stopped the privatization of natural resources in 2003 (setting aside for a moment the implications of state property) for a new legitimation of the state. And the most elaborate development of this trend culminates, to date, in Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian “socialism of the 21st century,”[9] with the standing professional army at its core, complete with Cuban advisors, using ground rent revenues from oil to finance a new version of the Peruvian (1968-1975) military model which was one of Chavez’s foremost influences. A new form of state paternalism is being reconstituted on the basis of the social movements, replacing the old authoritarian state paternalism (e.g. Peron, Vargas) which is no longer viable.
Yet side by side with this fanfare, new workers’ struggles have emerged in Latin America. In 2006, the Oaxaca uprising, set off by the teachers’ union but quickly transformed into an urban insurrection, brought to the fore a radical “asembleista” element over months, more or less simultaneous with the weeks-long investing of downtown Mexico City after the stolen election of that year, a mass occupation that went well beyond the left-bourgeois party (the PRD) of the aggrieved loser Lopez Obrador. There have been general strikes in Ecuador and Peru. There have been a few exemplary strikes in Venezuela sounding a discordant note in the hoopla over Chavez (a hoopla increasingly more fervent among his foreign cheerleaders than in the Venezuelan masses). In Argentina, in 2001-2, the piqueteros (despite their shortcomings mentioned earlier) and the creative methods of struggle beyond the factory they had developed earlier brought down the Peronist state for a brief moment before demonstrating their own inability to go any farther. Aspects of this Latin American ferment have also percolated into the U.S., as in the May Day mobilizations of Latino immigrants in 2007 and 2010.
Social movement theorists reiterate again and again that “organized labor” can no longer be the unifying force for a much more atomized, casualized and dispersed workforce that it once was.
Insurgent Notes is not preoccupied in the slightest with “organized labor” but with the working class as a whole. It is important never to lose sight of the historical backdrop of this shift of emphasis from the working class to the new social movements. Again and again the pattern has emerged, as in Brazil (1978-83), Poland (1980-81) and Korea (1987-1990) of a sort of culmination of “old style” industrialization (the “mass production worker” as some say today) of an explosion of wildcat strikes, important victories, followed by a capitalist counter-offensive that boils down to the full implementation of the all-too-familiar out-sourcing, casualization, and de-industrialization ad nauseam. In Brazil in 1983, the CUT (the main union federation, including Lula’s metal workers’ union) was riding the prestige of those strikes. By 2000, the CUT was reduced almost to social work, teaching laid-off auto workers how to start fruit stands around the downsized factory gates. Similar the landless movement (os sim-terra as they are called in Portuguese) has combined some important successes in the face of harsh repression with the repeated problem of peasants falling away once they have acquired their piece of land. In South Korea, the late 1980s strike wave gave way to a proliferation of NGO’s, “peace activists” and chatter about “civil society”.
The new social movements emerged in the early 1980s to fill the gap left by this devastating counter-offensive of capital against the world working class. To take only one paradigmatic example, FIAT in Italy spent billions in those years shifting from the big Turin factories to cottage production producing as many or more cars with far fewer workers, spread out in small towns. The wildcat wave of the late 1970s was broken. It could almost be a paradigm for an epoch. Capital is prepared to destroy society to continue as capital.
In recent years, in addition to Latin America, there has been an impressive groundswell of strikes around the Third World (textile strikes in Bangladesh and Egypt, the TEKEL strike in Turkey, general strikes in Vietnam, struggles in Gurgaon (India)[10] the role of the Indonesian working class in the overthrow of Suharto in 1998, 70,000 “incidents” a year in China involving e.g. privatization, looting of pension funds).[11] Outsourcing, casualization and temp work has obviously blurred the boundaries of the classical, relatively stable blue-collar proletariat of the pre-1980 period. Whatever their condition, the blue-collar workers of China, India, Brazil, or Southeast Asia movements, not to mention the workers of the ex-Soviet bloc which have become available to capital accumulation in recent decades, are already part of the emerging next proletarian offensive.
IX. Summary and Program
Faced with this rising tide of an opposition groping for coherence, and fearful of provoking further escalation through five-thumbed immediate confrontation and repression, capital in the recent period has rediscovered the strategy and tactics of the Italian industrialists faced with the factory occupations of 1920: fold their arms and wait. As in Argentina in 2002 or in Oaxaca in 2006, or—on a smaller scale—the 77-day Ssangyong Auto factory occupation in South Korea in 2009, the basic message from the capitalists and the state to the insurgents is: “you’ve taken over the factory, the town, the country? Fine. Are you ready to run it yourselves?” (One recalls a similar meeting in January 1919 between British Prime Minister Lloyd George and the heads of the British Trade Union Council—not that the latter ever had any intention of taking over anything) When the insurgent movement fails to rise to that challenge, tempers fray, patience is exhausted, the professional leftists capture the mikes, people tire of endless meetings, however democratic (all this drift helped along by whatever repression the state can muster politically while awaiting its moment to strike back massively) and the movement collapses. In these recent instances (unlike Italy in 1920), a massive bloodletting has not been necessary after the defeat (which hardly means that selective deadly repression did not follow). The point is rather that, without a “programmatically-armed” militant stratum, one that will not spontaneously converge in the run-up to the final showdown, without a concrete idea of “another social project” (to use a certain language), the movement melts away, often with relatively few shots fired. (This is not to deny the often important and creative role of “spontaneity”[12] in the early, ascendant phase when the movement seems to go from strength to strength.)
This absence of a broad-based alternative to rule by elites—whether by the bourgeoisie or by professional leftists prepared to outlast everyone else in interminable meetings and then vote their agenda at 2 AM—has always been the basis of class society, whether “reactionary” or “progressive”. Passivity, voluntary or induced, is always the handmaiden of “bureaucracy”. And in our view, the best antidote to such a defeat is the widest possible propagation of the concrete programmatic aspects of a different “social project” and practical testing of such knowledge on the way to working-class power. Our aim is to help the working class become the ruling class in the process of dissolving all classes.
To summarize:
- capital since the wildcat rebellion of the 60s/70s (with extensions in such places as Brazil, Poland, Korea) has been engaged in a quasi-conscious counter-strategy to break up the centers of proletarian concentration, creating as much as possible the new atomized, casualized, dispersed wage-labor populations for whom the one paycheck family, long-term job security, benefits, secure housing, education and”aspirations” (however bourgeois) for the nextgeneration are not even a memory.
- This is closely tied to the financialization of capitalism. This is not ‘normal’ capital accumulation. It is destroying the material basis of social reproduction, both in terms of labor power and means of production (including infrastructure and nature).
- This development expresses the fact that value (in Marx’s sense) was already superannuated in the crisis of the 60s/70s, and that capital on a world scale has to perform massive retrogression to reconstitute an adequate rate of profit, not in the debt-for-equity restructurings and mergers and acquisitions, but in real production and reproduction.
- The programmatic question can obviously not be one of rebuilding the old mass production factories as such. No one misses the assembly line, and automobile- centered production and consumption has already ravaged enough “social” space. It has been pointed out often enough that, despite the creativity of the wildcat movements from the 50s to the 70s, most of the left (myself included) theorized the factory worker as worker, and not as the leading force in a striving to break the logic of factory work
to accede to a Grundrisse-like “activity as all- sided in its production as in its consumption,” i.e. communism. Nonetheless, while recognizing that mass production seemed to produce something much closer to class consciousness and class
action than what we have seen since, we can also recognize that breaking the old “social contract” of the post-World War II period also broke the conservatism built into attachment to one job, a mortgage, etc. that must have inhibited as much solidarity as it fostered, in one factory, in one industry. This has led, in some countries such as France and Italy, to movements of working-class youth, who will never have the stability their parents had, using this precarious mobility as a way of building city-wide “flying picket” movements centered on whole cities as opposed to one big factory or industry. - In an “Hegelian Marxist” perspective, i.e. a realistic perspective, the reality of the world working class (Gesamtarbeiter) is the current potential of the world working class
to build a society beyond value production. That is the reality against which capital has been fighting since the 60s/70s, and in fact since the early 20th century. It determines the true framework of struggles today. A Stiglitz- Sachs et al. inspired global Keynesianism, built on the new social movements, would be the exact update of the Keynesian reorganization of capitalism coming out of the transitional crisis of 1914-1945. - Our task must be to articulate the full implications of that positive power which lies beyond the disorientation of today. We must further try to show where that potential surfaces in micro-ways in the struggles of the present. For example, the suburban youth of the Paris region routinely ride free on the trains in and out of the city, and physically confront the train personnel who are obliged to collect fares. A campaign for free public transportation could unite such elements, freeing the train personnel from an important part of their “cop” role. The same could be said for many toll-takers of daily life, to give only one example of where proletarians are set against sub-proletarians.
What follows in conclusion, then, is a program for the “first hundred days” of a successful proletarian revolution in key countries, and hopefully throughout the world in short order. It is intended to illustrate the potential for a rapid dismantling of “value” production in Marx’s sense. It is of course merely a probe, open to discussion and critique:
- implementation of a program of technology export to equalize upward the Third World.
- creation of a minimum threshold of world income.
- dismantling of the oil-auto-steel complex, shifting to mass transport and trains.
- abolish the bloated sector of the military; police; state bureaucracy; corporate bureaucracy; prisons; FIRE; (finance- insurance- real estate); security guards; intelligence services; cashiers and toll takers.
- taking the huge mass of labor power freed by this to radically shortening of the work week
- crash programs around alternative energy: (in the long run, if possible) nuclear fusion power, solar, wind, etc.
- application of the “more is less” principle to as much as possible (examples: satellite phones supersede land-line technology in the Third World, cheap CDs supersede expensive stereo systems, etc.).
- a concerted world agrarian program aimed at using food resources of North America and Europe and developing Third World agriculture.
- integration of industrial and agricultural production, and the breakup of megalopolitan concentration of population. This implies the abolition of suburbia and exurbia, and radical transformation of cities. The implications of this for energy consumption are profound.
- automation of all drudgery that can be automated.
- generalization of access to computers and education for full global and regional planning by the associated producers
- free health and dental care.
- integration of education with production and reproduction.
- the shift of R&D currently connected with the unproductive sector into productive use
- the great increase in productivity of labor will as make as many basic goods free as quickly as possible, thereby freeing all workers involved in collecting money and accounting for it.
- a global shortening of the work week.
- centralization of everything that must be centralized (e.g use of world resources) and decentralization of everything that can be decentralized (e.g control of the labor process within the general framework)
- measures to deal with the atmosphere, most importantly the phasing out of fossil fuel use by 3 and 6
Once again, at this stage, such programmatic points are only suggestive and wide open to debate, focusing not on “forms of organization” but on the content of a world beyond value, in which “the multiplication of human powers is its own end.”[13]
- [1] While we do not locate ourselves in the Bolshevik tradition, of which the contemporary remnants of Trotskyism are –in contrast to Stalinists and Maoists—the serious continuity, we hardly dismiss Lenin and Trotsky out of hand, as many libertarian communists tend to do. Lenin’s intransigeant internationalist stance in 1914 and his 1917 April Theses, like Trotsky’s almost unique application of the theory of permanent revolution to Russia, well before 1917, were revolutionary moments. What we reject in Leninism and Trotskyism would take us far afield, but the fetishization of organization and “leadership” (in the case of Trotsky) are obvious starting points for our critique. ↩
- [2] By “standard of value” we mean the generalized “common denominator” or “unit of value” based on a new, higher productivity of labor achieved through crisis and shakeout for the next phase of accumulation, through the incorporation of new technologies and a higher productivity of labor. The postwar boom of 1945-1975, for example, was based on the previous thirty years of destruction of people and capital plant, but also on new mass production (e.g. in auto) introduced during the pre-1945 period, as well as the greatly expanded world market made possible by the destruction of the British and French empires and the reduction of Europe’s national bourgeoisies (French, German, etc.) to the generalized dollar standard. Each successive “standard of value” represents “apples” to the “oranges” of the previous one, in this case that achieved through the long shakeout (1873-1896) making possible the boom preceding World War I. ↩
- [3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London, 1973, p. 325. ↩
- [4] Tom Frank’s (2000), though flawed by its undercurrent of nostalgia for New Deal statism, is a good portrait about how the “revolutionary” pretensions of the 1980s and 1990s “new economy” took over a huge element of the 1960s New Left/hippie counter-culture. ↩
- [5] The Mondragon cooperative in Spain (which somehow operated without a hitch during the Franco dictatorship) is a favorite reference of some new social movement activists for an egalitarian capitalism (we agree it is capitalism). ↩
- [6] Patrick Bond, paper presented to the Socialism for the 2lst Century conference, Jinju, South Korea, May 2007. We quoted these muddled formulations as merely exemplary, while recognizing Bond’s deep and serious involvement in social struggles in South Africa. ↩
- [7] In its early (1980s) dynamic phase, the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) distinguished itself from the moribund Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) by saying, in effect, that an earlier militant joined the PCB and only then became involved in trade unions, etc. whereas its own militants came to the PT as activists in various social movements. ↩
- [8] Holloway’s book How to Change the World Without Taking Power, and its cheerful, even adamant refusal to say anything about a program for “the next step,” was tested in Argentina in 2001-02 (where it had been wildly popular). It failed the test. ↩
- [9] Cf. Internationalist Perspectives, #51-52 and #53. ↩
- [10] In 2008, an Italian CEO was beaten to death by workers in a New Delhi suburb during an attempted downsizing of the workforce. ↩
- [11] Though they occurred 30 years ago, one should not overlook the workers’ councils established by oil workers in 1980-81 during the Iranian revolution, repressed and shut down when the Islamicists consolidated their hold. ↩
- [12] CLR James, in his discussion of the seemingly overnight takeover of Hungary by a national system of workers’ councils in 1956, points out that, contrary to any spontaneist interpretation, the ability of Hungarian workers to accomplish this was in all likelihood prepared in advance by years of experience of bureaucratic Stalinist regimentation and shopfloor discussions of its consequences and cure. ↩
- [13] Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. ↩
Comments
I welcomed the arrival of 'Insurgent Notes' and Loren Goldner is always worth a read.
This text has much to commend it as a summary of changes in the organisation of capital, working class struggle and the potential for revolutionary change but......
What are we to make of the list dumped at the end of the text as a suggestion for ''....a programme for 'the first hundred days' of a successful proletarian revolution in key countries,...'' ?
I say dumped as it arrives with little in the way of an introduction in the main text and no further explanation or clarification of the reasoning behind the 'programme' as a whole or any of the particular parts. There seems also to have been very little posted on the Insurgent Notes Web site in response to this, apart from some vague support by a variety of trotskyism.
I have to assume that the 'programme' is meant to:
1. consolidate the 'dismantling of value production' in the 'key countries' and
2. assist in the spreading of the proletarian revolution to the 'non key countries'.
Since there is no definition of what the minimum number or names of countries that would comprise a 'key' this is difficult to grasp and is confused further by the trotskyist supporter seeming to consider that such a programme is needed specifically for the USA alone.
Now some of the list might be considered as fairly basic, if rather generalised, practical suggestions for change that are perhaps not too contentious, but we need to carefully consider the references to points 2 - 'Creation of a minimum threshold of world income', 12 - 'Free Health and Dental Care' and 15 - 'The great increase in productivity of labor will make as many basic goods free as quickly as possible, thereby freeing all workers involved in collecting money and accounting for it' (Also relates back to no 4). On the face of it, these together suggest that we are still dealing here with a monetary and commodity based system of production and distribution which is only being dismantled on a piecemeal basis in accordance with some 'plan' previously agreed and centrally implemented?
To start with it would seem frankly impractical to define and agree a 'world' minimum income level especially in the context of only a partially succesful proletarian revolution.
As to 'free health care' - is this really free as in a proletarian revolution which has successfully abolished value production or only free in the same sense as it is free in the British NHS ie free at the point of use but subsidsed through a complex financial arrangement overseen by a state bureacracy? I can't help thinking this particular point is aimed at a specifically USA audiance ie a 'key country'.
Point 15 implies that the commodity/monetry system is being maintained for an indeterminant period together with the workers in the supporting industries.
Then going back to some of the otherwise practical suggestions - how is 'technological export' to 'equalise with the 'third world' , presumably not comprising the 'key countries' (why not?) to practically take place for our assumed purpose above, as between the succesful proletarian revolution in key countries at least 'on the way to abolishing value production' and the third world still in the throws of fully capitalist social and economic relations?
Neither is it clear how this is supposed to relate to current working class struggle - are we not in danger of reverting back to some kind of support for reformist demands potentially compatible with capitalism - 'free' transport comes to mind.
Perhaps I am, in my usual suspicious way, reading too much into some of the imprecise language used by Loren here, but without further clarification questions remain both about the usefulness of any such attempts at a comprehensive programme of this kind and about the underlying assumptions behind this particular list.
The years 1917-1921 constituted the first worldwide assault on capitalism by the revolutionary working class, centered in Germany and in Russia.
Bold opening words from Goldner but are they correct? Was the revolutionary period she writes of really 'centered' on Russia and Germany? These events were mirrored around the globe, in Hungary, in Belgium, in England, in Argentina, in India... In what sense were they centered on Russia or Germany. And was it our first worldwide response?
Looking back from the vantage point of the latest phase of the world crisis that erupted in 2008 (itself merely the latest twist of the “slow crash landing,” sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that began ca. 1970), and from the working-class response to it...
I think 'the latest phase of the world crisis' is capital's response to working-class intransigence and not vice versa.
Insurgent Notes #2, October 2010
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/honda-strike-china-1.jpg?itok=WGodJOHX)
Issue two of the journal of communist theory and practice.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The condition of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto
Comments
Editorial: Shock and Au-sterity
1. Scared to death that all the lights were about to go out after pulling the plug on Lehman Brothers, the bourgeoisie rolled up its sleeves, girded its loins, crossed its fingers, and reached deeper than deep for that thing of all things, that relation of all relations that is the life of all lives for the bourgeoisie—OPM, other people’s money.
Tapping the unrestricted credit lines offered by the banker’s banker—the government—the bourgeoisie helped themselves to what they knew they were entitled to, the public purse.
For the bourgeoisie, it’s always other people’s something or other. For capital to be capital, it must command other people’s labor. For finance to be finance it must command other people’s money. So when the bourgeoisie through those great organizations of inter-governmental cooperation, regulation, and exchange call for austerity, it’s always somebody else’s austerity.
After the billions in direct transfers from public treasuries to private accounts, after further billions in government guaranteed debts, after more billions in government sponsored special investment vehicles, after more than more billions in toxic assets, non-performing loans, bad debts bought and overpaid for—after all that expenditure of other people’s money, the bourgeoisie had come to the shocking conclusion that:
- money changes everything;
- whatever changed, it wasn’t enough;
- a hundred billion dollars here and a hundred billion Euros there and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money;
- somebody has to pay;
- somebody else has to pay;
- there is no such thing as being too rich or too thin.
“We,” say the bourgeoisie “can never be too rich. You [meaning all of us] can never be too thin.”
So first from the hack economists, journalists, commentators, representatives, ministers, senators—those agents and bagmen employed by the bourgeoisie—come the expressions of shock that other hack economists, journalists, commentators, representatives, ministers, senators—other agents and bagmen of the same bourgeoisie—could have acted so irresponsibly, could have acted with such profligacy. This only means that the bourgeoisie needs this other section of hacks to act even more irresponsibly, with even more profligacy. This time, however, the wastefulness requires a specific universality—a wastefulness in the very basis for human existence; a wastefulness determined to deprive human lives of the bare necessities for living a human life. Then even and ever greater misery and poverty must be piled atop that mountain of misery and poverty already piled up as the more than equal but opposite symbols of capitalist wealth.
First comes the shock then comes the austerity.
2. When in April and May of this year the government of Greece stood just a stone’s throw from collapse, suspended between pit of bankruptcy and the pendulum of mass demonstrations and strikes, the European Union hesitated to provide a “rescue” package, transfixed so it seemed, not by the spectacle of the conflict, but by the image of itself it saw in Greece. It wasn’t the cost that paralyzed the governments of the European Union, it was the mirror.
Merkel was reluctant to approve the “rescue” of the government of Greece without assurance that Germany’s interests would be protected, which meant that Germany’s contributions would be considered as senior to, and secured prior to, any other obligations. Merkel, of course, was only reprising the role she thought her mentor and role model would have played in the discussions. Her role model is Margaret Thatcher, but not the Thatcher of 1981, of Attila the Hen fame, but the Thatcher of today whose addled brain and lack of recognition of her current environment make her the once and future champion of everything bourgeois.
After the hemming and hawing, the toing and froing, the after you Alphonse-ing, after you Johann-ing, the half-hearted and half-assessed agreement on a “rescue,” the high command of the European Union received a phone call from US Treasury Secretary Geithner. Geithner’s elevated stature among the titans of finance is due as much to the fact that he sits on a telephone book at his desk and in restaurants as to his previous and ongoing service in Maiden Lane I, Maiden Lane II, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers TALF, TARP, PPIP, ABCPFF campaigns.
“You guys and dolls need to do something big,” said secretary Geithner to his counterparts, counterparties, across the Atlantic. “You need to do something dramatic. You need to impress the markets,” he said getting to the real issue, the only issue.
“Yeah,” he said, gaining confidence if not height with each pregnant pause. “You’ve got to do something completely different. Like create an off-balance sheet funding facility with a really big number and guarantee its initial capital with the revenue of the EU itself, and then you get the IMF to supplement, to partner, in this vehicle, with the IMF vetting the economic program of any government stupid enough—check that—finding it advantageous to request funding by this off-balance sheet special funding facility guaranteed by your own revenues. How does that sound?”
They looked at each other, these ministers, presidents, financiers. “It sounds just like Greece to us,” they said.
“Exactly,” said Tim, sounding less like a munchkin and more like a wizard in Oz. “That’s the point. You’re all Greek to me.”
3. Greece revealed that Europe was the sick man of Europe. The markets translated that as “you’re all Greek to us.” Banks in the sixteen euro zone countries had amassed a euro 1.25 trillion exposure to sovereign and private debt instruments of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. UK banks had amassed euro 270 billion in exposure. French banks accounted for euro 370 billion, and German banks for euro 394 billion, with approximately euro 624 billion of the total in private debt instruments and euro 140 billion in government debt issues [it was this sovereign debt exposure that Deutsche Bank was so reluctant to reveal to EU bank commissioners during the “stress test” evaluation]. The total amount of debt outstanding from these four countries exceeds euro 2 trillion. Outside this group of four, Italy alone has outstanding debt of approximately euro 1.7 trillion.
With so much debt concentrated in such poorly performing economies, the European Union commercial banks and other financial institutions found themselves virtually unable to refinance their own operating requirements in the commercial paper money markets. Banks that did attempt to circulate their short-term instruments in these markets were forced to pay three or four times their previous average interest rates.
The European Central Bank, by the end of 2009 having guaranteed bank debts in the amount of euro 433 billion, increased its direct loans to euro zone commercial banks. At the end of June 2010 the volume of these loans measured euro 879 billion. In addition to finance the operating needs of its member countries, the ECB took to directly purchasing government debt issues.
With the commercial paper markets inaccessible, with cross border lending essentially frozen, the banks themselves decided that the best, if not the only place, to risk their cash was no place at all, depositing over euro 300 billion with the ECB itself.
Meanwhile, the costs of credit default protection on the sovereign debt of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and the UK soared. The credit default swap costs on the debt of EU private financial institutions reached the levels of costs after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Debt auctions failed in Hungary, and in Germany, with issues not being fully subscribed and discounts from face value exceeding discounts planned by the issuers.
The joker in this house of cards is, of course, fiscally righteous, monetarily strict, and financially responsible Germany. Germany’s very own bankers from their lofty position in the EU food chain can turn to the west and survey their mountains of non-performing collateralized, asset backed, structured, real estate debt in the United States.
The bankers can turn to the east and survey more mountains of under-performing sovereign debt, the debt they sought to isolate and conceal from the “stress tests” performed by the European Union.
They can look straight ahead and survey yet more mountains of non-performing commercial real estate debt ranging across Europe.
The one place the German bankers did not want to look was Basel III, where the “improved” requirements for “key capital ratios,” diluted and phased in over nine years, were still too much too soon.
But it wasn’t the height of the mountains of debt that bothered the bankers; it was the fact that as high as those mountains are, they are all underwater.
Surely it’s the mountains of non-performing debt, which makes Germany’s banks technically insolvent, that weighs like an Alp on the brains and pocketbooks of the living.
“Do as I say,” implores Merkel, “Not as my bankers do.” What else could she say?
It was all Greek to the markets, with Greece itself emerging as the leader of a new world economy—a Dubai World economy with the world itself running out of Abu Dhabis.
4. So, enter austerity. Austerity appears to aim at ensuring the repayment of debt, the bourgeoisie’s first and last words being, “pay me.” In essence, in its social reproduction, austerity serves a different purpose.
If debt originates in the lags, delays, the a-synchronicity of capitals’ metamorphoses from money through commodity production and back to even more money as a claim on that expansion of value, debt concludes, realizes, itself on the extinguishing, the annihilation, the devaluation of the accumulated values of society necessary for the reproduction of value but which themselves, can no longer be sustained, be reabsorbed, recirculated, reproduced as value. Primary among that expanse of social accumulation that can no longer be sustained is the reproduction of labor power, and all that makes up labor power, itself.
So to that part of the population who are working, austerity means some will be working harder, longer, some will be working less, and shorter, but all will be reproducing a lesser social basis for reproduction. All that was substantial will become marginal, and the marginal will become substantially greater.
For that part of the population retired and receiving a pension, fewer will retire; fewer will receive pensions, those that do will receive less.
For that part of the population born into poverty, deprived of a basic, necessary education, of proper medical care, even more will be born into greater poverty. Even more will be cheated of and by an even poorer education. Even more will be excluded from already inadequate medical care.
All value must be devalued. “Everything must go!” is the slogan of this bourgeoisie’s staying in business forced liquidation sale.
The call for austerity, the programs of austerity are about destroying the overproduction of accumulated values, even and especially the miserably paltry assets of public health, transportation, education—those things that make up the social basis for expanded reproduction which is inverted into overproduction and becomes a burden to capital.
5. “Everything must go!” proclaim our salesmen of austerity. But not exactly everything will go. Military spending—that’s one thing that doesn’t really have to go, as Greece itself has shown.
Greece, the largest importer of conventional weaponry in Europe; Greece, with military spending as a percentage of its GDP twice that of the European Union; Greece whose deficit revision “scandal” has in fact been driven by military expenditures; Greece who year ago purchased two submarines from Germany neither of which has been delivered; Greece with plans to buy six frigates and 15 military helicopters from France; Greece having purchased 24 F-16 fighters from the US , has managed to exempt those expenditures from its austerity program.
Military spending is the near perfect vehicle for non-reproducible accumulation by the bourgeoisie. It is not-reproductive production, it is finance made real, its values only being realizable in not only their own destruction, but in the destruction of all other values. Military spending acts as a conduit of recuperation for the bourgeoisie, with taxes transferring and restoring a portion of the wage expenditure to capitalism and without any need for enhanced social reproduction to make use of the commodities.
If revolution is one way, the exploited’s way, of resolving the contradiction of use value and exchange value, military spending is the exploiter’s penultimate way of resolving the same contradiction. War, of course, is the bourgeoisie’s ultimate method of resolving that contradiction.
Greece shows the way to, for, and of the brave new Dubai World where submarines that list to one side, helicopters with nowhere to go, circulate among the artificial islands bursting with abandoned homes, vacant condominiums, and empty streets.
When Greece, upon agreeing to the EU rescue package, enacted the terms of its austerity program, a financial analyst remarked, “They were supposed to make these changes ten years ago.” Maybe “they” were, as part of the entry into the European Union, but guess what? Seven years ago, Portugal did make such reforms as part of its adherence to the European Union, and today it finds itself in the same predicament as Greece.
And something else not for the guessing: This is the economic contraction capitalism was supposed to have ten years ago, after the capital spending bubble of the 1994-2000 period.
6. Meanwhile, how much better off than their European cousins are the bourgeoisie in the United States where the market is the austerity program; where stimulus and contraction go hand in hand; where poverty is so established in the fabric of everyday life that increases in poverty, declines in household income, and declining numbers of insured are the recovery?
The US Census Bureau’s Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the US: 2009, released in September 2010, verified the progress the bourgeoisie had made in reversing the little bit of progress made against poverty in the 1990s. After stagnating between 2000 and 2007, the inflation adjusted median income for families plummeted between 2007 and 2009. It took the bourgeoisie almost a decade, and two recessions, but at last poverty was back up where it belonged—embracing one in seven of the general population, but more importantly, almost one in four for those under the age of six. Nothing secures the future of capital like no future.
In 2009, per capita income declined 1.2 percent from 2008 levels. The growth in the overall poverty rate 2007-2009 exceeded the rate of increase in the 1973-1975 recession and the rate of increase measured in the combined double dip recessions of the 1980s.
In 2009, the family poverty rate increased from 2008’s 10.3 percent to 11.1 percent. The poverty rate for single-parent female head of household reached 29.9 percent.
Those without medical insurance increased to 16.7 percent of the population and the absolute numbers with coverage declined for the first decrease since 1987.
Among all workers over the age of 16, the poverty rate and absolute numbers increased in 2009, and the increase is solely the result of the decline in full-time employment. Of the general population between the ages of 25 and 34, 42.8 percent live below the poverty.
The legacy of Ronald Reagan, unlike Reagan himself, lives forever.
Besides collateralized debt obligations and synthetic asset backed securities, the legacy of that administration of Ronald Reagan, the US’s idiot version of the UK’s Thatcher, includes “new federalism.” “New federalism” was designed as the mechanism through which the national government dramatically reduced its participation in, and administration of, social welfare programs. Some forty three social welfare programs were returned to the administration of the individual states, with the national government awarding block grants which the states were to utilize toward defraying some of the costs of these programs.
The “reasoning” behind this policy was painfully clear to the most casual observer. The legislatures of many states were configured to dramatically reduce the political strength of the urban centers, and consequently, the urban poor. State governments were much more permeable to corporate influence, and much less vulnerable to that of organized labor.
Capital thought globally and acted locally well before any leftist made that a slogan.
Lobbying by corporate and large-scale agricultural interests, allied with the small town and rural distrust of big cities could, and did, effectively maintain the burden of regressive financing on the urban and poor populations. The fact that these same corporate interests proceeded to close industries, reduce employment, shatter the wage structure and generally devastate the small town and agricultural areas was the dirty, little not-so-secret tucked within the “revenue sharing” of the “new federalism.”
Sales tax and personal income taxes account for 80 percent of state government revenues in the United States. Since 2008, these flows have declined by 12 percent. So while US corporations have booked over $1 trillion in cash and liquid assets, over the next two years, state governments are facing budget shortfalls amounting to $127 billion. In some states, pension liabilities are underfunded by half.
After imposing furloughs, wage reductions, and cutting support to education and transit, states have responded, as states always respond, by attacking the weakest, the most vulnerable, those most in need of service and support. Home care services to the elderly and disabled have been reduced. Illinois has ended its support for Meals-on-Wheels programs. Alabama has reduced its provisions for housekeeping assistance to elderly people. California is proposing to eliminate adult day care centers and home support for 400,000 disabled or elderly people. Nearly every state has reduced eligibility in and payment for Medicaid services.
As reported in the New York Times of July 21, said the director of senior and disabled service for Rogue Valley, Oregon, “I’ve seen, in a matter of months, thirty years of work go down to drain.”
A decade, the 1990s reversed, a decade 2000 to 2010 lost, but most importantly, 30 years of work gone in 24 months.
“In a matter of months, thirty years of work down the drain.” There in a dozen words is the liquidation of pensions, 401Ks, the attacks on immigrant laborers, the destruction of wages, the rolling back of opportunity and equity for women in the workplace, in the doctor’s office, in the schools. There in a dozen words is the past, present, and future of capitalism, of human beings under capitalism. There in a dozen words is all you need to know about valorisation and devaluation.
7. It is not the task of the working class, or of Marxists, to reverse capitalism, to restore capitalist valorisation in the face of capital’s self-devaluation. It is the task of the working class, of Marxists; it is the task for revolution to oppose this devaluation that capital imposes upon all human relations, not things, not commodities, but actual human relations.
It is the most essential, critical task of the working class to defend the need for better than adequate medical care, better than basic education, better than tolerable public transit; to meet the needs for home care assistance, day care centers; to defend immigrant labor, women’s access to safe healthcare; to defend the social basis for human beings actually reproducing themselves as social human beings.
That defense requires the disavowal, rejection, cancellation, shredding of the debts accumulated by capital in its own attacks on that social basis; of the debts accumulated by our asset-liquidationist bourgeoisie.
That disavowal of debt requires in turn the immediate end to all military spending.
And that’s just the beginning.
Related articles
Why Accept Changes EU Leaders Say Won’t Work? (online.wsj.com)
Can the E.U. Find a Way to Fix the Euro? (time.com)
Waiting for Side Effects of Austerity Medicine (online.wsj.com)
Greek Central Bank Urges Reform (online.wsj.com)
Comments
Elephant on a skateboard - S Artesian
S Artesian writes for Insurgent Notes on how the very mechanism of capital accumulation becomes a barrier to its own accumulation.
1. Love and Infamy
The bourgeoisie, the one we know and don’t love so well, thinks it has the solution to the problems it knows and doesn’t love inherent in the accumulation of capital. The solution for everything and anything that besets capital is of course…. more capital. The solution to the problems of too little return on capital, and too little capital is more capital. The solution to the problem of too much capital, of more capital is even more capital, but relatively.
Capital, for our well-known unloved capitalist, does not mean production. It does not mean creating products, or creating the means for creating products, or creating the means for creating the means. For our capitalist, capital means only the expansion of value.
Our capitalist doesn’t mean production even when he or she says “production.” Our capitalist doesn’t mean product even when he or she says “product.” Our capitalist does not mean productivity even when he or she says “productivity.”
For our well-known unloved capitalist, product means value, production means the process of aggrandizing value, productivity means increasing the rate of aggrandizement.
For our unloved, well-known capitalist, productivity is mis-represented as the productivity of capital, which is just our capitalist’s way of taking over a quality that is alien to him or her, and to his or her property; a quality that is alienated from labor. All and everything the capitalist means is proportionately greater aggrandizement of value output per unit of input, with the input itself being measured by, existing as, value. There’s the pot, the gold, and the rainbow all wrapped into one.
So whenever capital expands, the expansion is the result of the “productivity” of capital; of improved efficiency; of optimized allocations; of rationalized resources.
Whenever capital recovers, the recovery is the result of productivity, of improved efficiency, of optimized allocations, of rationalized resources.
When capital contracts? Here our chest and tub thumping capitalist is brought up short, literally and metaphorically. If expansion and recovery are the result of improvement, optimization, productivity, rationalization—in a word “progress,” in another word “capital”—how could anything as irrational as contraction, as recession, devaluation, and depression, even occur?
When Marx, known and beloved, says reproduction he means the renewal of the circuit, the process by which labor is transformed into value. When he says expanded reproduction he means the reconversion of the surplus value aggrandized by the capitalists into the components for capitalist production for the aggrandizement of more labor. When he says accumulation, he means that the expanded reproduction requires the introduction of relatively greater amounts of machinery as value into the production process.
When Marx analyzes accumulation, he is analyzing a single process, a totality where both expansion and contraction are the result; where the sub-optimal, inefficient, irrational, unproductive moments and structure of capital are the result of the optimal, efficient, rational, magnified “productivity” of capital.
Capital itself, whether in flower or withering on the vine, has no productivity. It assumes, expropriates the productivity of labor through the command of labor time.
2. Materialism and History
Marx initiates his critique, his engagement through opposition, of capital after his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel, in this last published work, becomes the object lesson of his own definition of
liberalism as a philosophy of the abstract that capitulates to the world of the concrete. Hegel’s dialectic of reason, dialectic through negation, had reached its end, and become a veritable negation of reason. The state is an abstraction. The abstraction embodies reason. The real embodies the rational, and becomes the end to rationality. Rather than being the product and producer of history, no longer representing the sojourn of consciousness through history, the real and the rational abandon history.
Marx’s critique recognizes that Hegel’s philosophy relates a history of human beings making themselves “at home” in the world, but that the philosophy is an estranged representation of an estranged history. Hegel gives us a disavowal of reality. The dialectic of negation, conflict, opposition, antagonism becomes the affirmation of things as they are.
Marx identifies the real material by which human beings make themselves at home in the world; retrieves the real content of history, and extracts that rational kernel of the dialectic—the kernel of opposition, conflict, antagonism. That material of human history, that basis for the kernel of the dialectic is the labor process. The labor process is that activity where human beings appropriate nature and make themselves at home in the world of not entirely their own making.
The appropriation of nature through labor is a social process. The appropriation is mediated by the forms of society. Appropriation of nature, then, is simultaneously the appropriation of the labor itself. Labor creates itself and the forms in which the labor is organized, rendered, captured. The forms of capture are the different forms of private ownership, of property. If Hegel is presenting us with an estranged representation of an estranged history, the estrangement is a reflection of the estrangement in the labor process. Labor creates the conditions for its own reproduction, but only in the reproduction of its expropriation, its loss.
So we get from labor, to the labor process, to the conditions of labor, to the organization of labor as property, to labor producing the conditions for the material reproduction of society.
The conditions of production, the loss that labor imposes on itself, is nothing other than dispossession of labor from its own usefulness in directly meeting, creating, expanding, and satisfying need. Needs can only be met through the mediation of exchange, through the quantifying, the measuring of the single element common to all human labor, which is of course also the essence of history— time.
Labor dispossessed from its individual, particular abilities to provide for the laborer; labor stripped of its use; labor as time; time as the measure for exchange. Labor’s loss is time.
If time is the measure, then absent that bigger fool of whom every capitalist dreams, then the formal exchanges of commodities have to be equal, and fair; they have to be exchanges of time for time.
The reduction of labor to time is only possible because of labor’s capacity to create greater quantities than can be directly consumed. The time of labor is a quality; the quality is the ability of labor to convert itself into material products extending forward in time, beyond its own particular, and immediate, needs; to create surplus; to overproduce.
Labor’s ability to overproduce is precisely what is captured, fixed, by capital in the conversion of labor time into value.
Within the fairness, the equality of exchange of labor for wages, the unequal exchange of quality, time, for quantity takes place. Only a portion of the labor time is compensated, that time necessary for the reproduction of the laborers as a value-producing class; only that portion required for the workers to expand the reproduction of capital.
The more this labor power produces, the relatively less the power of labor; the more this labor power produces, the proportionately less is returned to the laborers; the more this labor power produces, the less the need, use, production and reproduction of labor makes up the value of the products; the more this labor power produces, the more the surplus labor, the surplus product, the surplus value, the overproduction is converted into the property of the capitalist; the more this labor power produces, the more the capital displaces, outweighs labor power in the process of reproduction; the more this labor power produces, the more the productivity of labor is consumed by and converted into the overproduction of capital.
Overproduction, inherent in the organization of labor as wage-labor, is the source and the limit to the aggrandizement of surplus-value. Overproduction is the origin and barrier to profitability. Overproduction is always the overproduction of capital, and is capital’s immanent critique.
The extraction of proportionately greater amounts of surplus labor time through reducing the time necessary for the laborers to reproduce, “work up,” values equal to their own wages, does not, and cannot, increase the new value embodied in the individual commodities, or the value of the commodities in total. Time is time.
Exchange is based on the formal equality of capital’s values, of time for time. The valorisation of capital, its expansion, requires a growing inequality in the exchange between the components internal to capitalist production, an exchange of less time for greater time—of objectified, quantified time for the quality of labor power, its surplus labor time.
Valorisation, expanded reproduction, accumulation, all these are simply manifestations of the conflict that is the heart of capitalism. From the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx gets us to that heart—overproduction.
3. Elephant on a Skateboard
Since 2001, the number of production workers has declined by 21.9 percent in U.S. manufacturing industries. Economists, business school professors, union bureaucrats, journalists, politicians, some of the living junk of this junk bond capitalism, have attributed this decline to capital flight, taxes, regulation, union representation, competition, outsourcing—all of which supposedly restrict, and subvert, the natural, exuberant, uninhibited productivity of capital.
Other economists, other journalists, politicians, union bureaucrats, professors–some of that other junk– point to speculation, “financialization,” outsourcing, capital flight, and competition for the decline in the employment of production workers by “productive” capital.
These tweedledums and tweedledees of capitalism with their twiddling explanations are all of a cloth, and of the cloth. They are peddling the gospel of accumulation, more capital, as the path to increased manufacturing employment. It’s the gospel of the productivity of capital.
In the profane world, the one where money is made, the decline in the numbers of production workers is the direct, and sustained, result of the capital’s reconversion of surplus value into the means of production, into capital that amplifies the productivity of labor. Between 1973 and 1995, manufacturing productivity grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent in the United States. Between 1995 and 2007, the average annual rate of growth measured 4.1 percent.
The increase in labor productivity was the result of alterations, adjustment, changes in the production process brought about through the investment in fixed assets —the structures, equipment and software dedicated to production.
Fixed assets, fixed capital refers to those instruments and structure of capitalist production the value of which is transferred to the finished products only incrementally, over extended periods of time, and numerous cycles of production. Marx writes in his volume 2 of Capital:
It is this advance in one sum and the reproduction in natural form by small degrees which distinguishes this capital in the role of fixed from circulating capital.
The essential, distinguishing characteristic, of the investment in fixed capital is that it yields its value only to the degree that its usefulness, its physical capacities are consumed through the labor process. The exchange value of the fixed capital is only preserved through the destruction, depreciation, of its use value, in the labor process, which is the aggrandizement of surplus value, surplus labor time. Value is recuperated only in the slow annihilation, the extinction, of the instrument itself.
The average annual growth in productivity since 1995 is the result of very uneven periods of investment in fixed assets. The increase in manufacturing fixed assets, as measured by historical costs, measured 30 percent in the 1996-2000 period but only 13 percent in the 2000-2008 period. More importantly, the replacement rate, new investment in the stock of fixed assets compared to depreciation [which is the transference of value through the consumption of use value] measured:
167 percent of depreciation in 1996, declining to:
140 percent of depreciation in 2000, before falling in the ensuing recession to:
103 percent of depreciation in 2004, recovering to:
121 percent of depreciation in 2006, never reaching the 2000 rate, much less the 1996 ratio despite increasing to:
125 percent of depreciation in 2007 and 2008.
As profitability was peaking for nonfinancial corporations in the US in 2006, these corporations increased, albeit modestly, their investment in fixed assets.
The asynchronous aspect of the replacement rate investment in fixed assets and profitability is neither ironic nor random. This increase in investment isn’t just bad timing on the part of our bourgeoisie. Rather, the investment in fixed assets brings the hands of the clock, and the profitability of capitalism, down.
It is the essential characteristic of fixed capital that it is advanced, and procured, in a single sum, recuperating its value over repeated cycles of production. While all of the fixed assets are necessary to, and required for the labor process, for reducing the time spent by labor in reproducing the value of its own wages, only portions of the fixed capital participate in the valorisation process, which is the preservation of values through the accretion of more value.
Without a lengthening of the working day, the labor process itself only preserves the value of the fixed capital consumed in production by increasing the physical quantities of finished products, adding nothing more to the total time expended in the conversion of objects into values. Time is time, and 8 or 9 or 10 hours can never be more than itself.
While the extensive application of fixed capital to the production process reduces the time necessary for the reproduction of the value in any individual commodity, including the time necessary for the reproduction of the commodity of labor power, in displacing that labor power, the application of fixed capital lengthens the cycle, the time necessary for the reproduction of the total capital deployed in the production process. This shortening of the particular time needed for reproduction of any commodity extends the space, the volume of commodities, needed to reproduce the value of the commodity of fixed capital; and it extends the time necessary to achieve that reproduction.
Marx writing in the notebooks for his economic manuscripts that are now part of volume 33 of the Collected Works puts it this way:
The fact that the annual returns decline in proportion as the capital advanced, if there is an increase in the part of auxiliary capital consisting of fixed capital, that is if its turnover periods extends over several years—its value only entering into the product annually in the form of depreciation—is not a phenomenon peculiar to agriculture, but a general one.
General it is indeed, to capitalist development. The cycle of reproduction is lengthened by the very means that initially expands profitability, and reduces the time to the realization of profit.
The annual rates of return decline as more capital is accumulated and reintroduced into production. The exchange of fixed capital with wage-labor in the labor process aggrandizes relatively more surplus value, but it is an exchange in the valorisation process which reduces the proportion of capital actually exchanged with wage-labor. The more that capital exchanges of itself with less wage-labor, the relatively less of itself capital exchanges with wage-labor.
Our well-known and unloved capitalist is between the rock and the hard place or in this case…the fixed place. What’s to be done? If our capitalist is first on the block with his new fixed capital, the rock isn’t quite so hard, as the general social time necessary for reproduction will not yet have been altered, and our capitalist can, in essence arbitrage the difference between his or her new, improved reduced cost of production and the general, social, old price of production.
Now it’s in this arbitrage that each and every individual capitalist thinks he or she finds comparative advantage, market superiority. In a word, finds value. This arbitrage allows our unloved capitalist, and more unloved than usual by his competitors, to reroute, channel some of the profit that would flow to his or her unloving competitors into his or her own wallet. The capitalist may think he or she is pocketing the surplus value that has been personally aggrandized, but that’s never the case since, although expropriated privately, value always and only materializes in a social form, as a product of the general, abstract social labor. The arbitrage is always and only the capitalist garnering a portion, a ratio, a rate of that general, social profit.
So what do our other unloved capitalists do, now put between that same rock and the new fixed place? The answer to the problem is the problem itself. More capital. In their social existence as a class, the capitalists do en masse what they try to do individually, which is to apply more capital to production, to the accumulation of capital. In so doing, the arbitrage, the variance between any individual capitalist and the class of capitalists disappears. The arbitrage between any particular cost of production and the general social price of production approaches zero.
Still, in the process of expanded reproduction, it is precisely this moment with capitalists acting as individuals “collectively” that constitutes expansion, growth, development, increased accumulation—those happy days and good times where the future is so bright the bourgeoisie are all wearing sunglasses.
What else can our capitalist do? In reality, the question is not what the capitalist can do, but what the capitalist will/must do to offset this slowing and lengthening of the rates of return. The capitalist can/must/will charge off more to depreciation, but charging off more to depreciation is an accounting trick and has no significance to the actual costs and prices of production.
Moreover, depreciation itself does not account for the loss of accumulated value in the means of production when new mechanisms and methods of greater amplifying the productivity of labor are introduced into the labor process. Then the as yet unrealized, unabsorbed, non-transferred value stored in the old productive apparatus, a value that demanded realization at its purchase, and after purchase exists only in a latent condition to be recuperated, or re-realized, through the transfer to the entire mass of final products, is transformed into a loss. The arbitrage works the other way against our capitalist. It cuts directly across the profitability of current production.
The capitalists can/will/must attempt to function as a cartel to control production and raise, or at least stabilize, prices, thus restoring a bit of arbitrage between production and realization. Yet, raising prices only redirects the total socially available profit to specific sectors and enterprises. It is the opposite identity of the precipitating condition where the variance between the cost of production and the price of production narrowed, where the blades of the capitalist scissors began to close on the throat of accumulation. Now with the attempt at an increase in prices, the capitalists as a class are once again parceling out the socially available profit, and the total rate of accumulation will stagger and slow coincident with the hyper-accumulation realized in one or two particular sectors. Our unloved capitalists call this “stagflation.”
Our capitalist can/will/must attempt to improve the means of communication and the means of transportation in order to measure the market, moved the finished products to the markets more quickly. In short, our capitalist will inject more capital into capitalist production as a whole in order to reduce the time and cost of circulation, circulation being itself the gap, the variance, the arbitrage between production and realization, the domain of price.
Our capitalist can/will/must increase production through either intensification of labor, application of even more capital to the production process. Nothing begets overproduction like the declining returns that are the result of overproduction.
Our capitalist can/will/must push for reductions in wages, and/or the aggrandizement of greater quantities of absolute surplus value, achievable only through a lengthening of the working day.
Surplus value has, upon its, materialization only the most ephemeral of existences. Money is nothing, making more money is everything to our bourgeoisie. The realized surplus value must be moved from money in hand to money out of hand, money seeking its own expansion. That is the diktat of capitalist accumulation.
Our capitalist can/will/must liquidate, sequester, cancel, warehouse, and retire the assets of fixed capital. Liquidation will produce a relative increase in the rate of return through the diminution of the fixed asset base. In addition, forced sales of fixed assets are devaluations which work to reduce the length and number of cycles required to realize the latent value in the assets themselves. There it is! The bourgeoisie have found the perfect solution to the problems of capital that more capital can only reproduce—asset liquidation. The asset liquidation, however, then reproduces that same form of capital with the shortest half-life, cash in hand. Cash in hand is the accumulation of anti-accumulation. It is capital all dressed up with nowhere to go, except right back into contraction.
Ultimately, none of the solutions are; all of them are the manifestations of the conflict between the growth of the social means of production and the private property of the capitalist. Fixed capital is the overproduction at the heart of capital, the conversion of the “overcapacity” of labor power, of the expropriation of surplus time, surplus labor, and surplus value, made solid.
5. Wafer Thin
The nexus of despair and exhilaration, of mania and depression, of fear and greed for our capitalist is that capital lives only in its process of accumulation, in its command of the labor of others. Once accumulated, however, capital has no life, no purpose, nothing to wear, nothing to do, and no place to go, except to dissolve itself back into the process of origination. It is not just that the relationship of capital to the capitalist is as the monster describes his relationship to Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel—“You are my creator, but I am your master. You must obey!”—it is also that wage-labor’s relationship to capital is the complementary opposite, the inverted identity of that relationship: “You are my master, but I am your re-creator. You’re nothing without my obedience.”
The light and life that burn so weakly beneath the mists of value are threatened with extinction in their materialization as more capital.
Our well-known, unloved capitalist undertakes his or her great responsibilities, shoulders these great obligations, carries these great burdens: to buy low and sell high; to seek out, close with, and engage a sucker every minute; to find anew a new and even bigger fool; to conduct a war of all against all; to exploit, expropriate, and otherwise reduce human labor by any and all means. All this weight is endured in the capitalist’s belief that he or she will be able to realize in the markets, will extract from the universe of exchanges, more value than he or she has in fact paid for.
By its very nature, fixed capital precludes the ability of the capitalist to recover the value of the total capital committed to the labor process through the valorisation process in a single cycle of production. If the capitalist could do so, then by definition that investment would no longer be fixed but would part of the circulating capital and the reproduction of capital would require the impossible—replacement of the means of production in their entirety in every single cycle.
Given that all capital cannot be recovered in the immediate cycle of production, but that simultaneously it is possible for the capitalist to bring a portion, a ration, of that fixed capital value to market as part of the cost of production and recover a profit, a price greater than that cost, our capitalist now lives his or her entire life, and life cycle, on the margins —on edge and at the edge over the portions, rations, ratio, rates of return on the total value that is achieved in the differential between the costs of production and the price of production.
All of capitalist economics, of capitalist theorizing, philosophizing, managing, marketing, is about margins. All of these margins are simply the ratios, the relations that capitalism utilizes to keep itself alive; to keep itself half-alive; to keep a half-life.
The margin that means more than most to our capitalist is that of the rate of return on produced assets since that ratio is derived from the ratio of net operating surplus [corporate profits + net interest + income from transfers, royalties etc] to the produced assets [net stock of capital + inventory].
In May, 2009, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published a study of that rate of return for the years from 1997 through 2007 for US nonfinancial corporation.1
. In 1997, that ROR for US manufacturing corporations peaked at 16.4 percent before sliding to 13.7 percent in 2000. The rate then collapsed to 11.2 percent in 2001, marking the onset of the 2001-2003 contraction.
The mass of the operating surplus actually peaked in 1998, and was above the 1997 mark in 1999. However, the growth of the produced assets exceeded the growth in the mass of the operating surplus. Produced assets increased 14.6 percent between 1997 and 2001.
The recovery from the 2001-2003 contraction saw the ROR peak at 15.2 percent in 2006, declining to 15.1 percent in 2007. Despite being delayed and restricted, capital investment between 2003 and 2007 increased produced assets by 19 percent.
Nowhere did, or does, capital produce itself right out of its glory and right into its misery more blatantly than in the information-communication-technology [ICT] sector. This sector’s rate of return peaked in 1997 at 22 percent, declining to -0.7 percent in 2001, as the produced assets increased 38.6 percent. The recovery of 2003-2007 was hardly anything to email home about, as the ROR peaked in 2005 at 11.7 percent, despite the fact that the ICT sector dramatically reduced its accumulation of produced assets, with the increases amounting to only 15 percent.
While the ICT sector lowered its own expansion of produced assets, capitalism as a whole directs more and more of its accumulation into the means of information and communication, and the “motorized” complement of information and communication, the means of transportation. In 2008, 62 percent of the $679 billion US businesses spent on new equipment was directed towards communication and transportation with $233.5 billion was dedicated to means of communication and information and $185.2 billion in accumulating the means of transportation.
The improvement in communication and transportation reduces the circulation time, which itself is the variance, the gap, between production, the labor process, and exchange, the valorisation process. The means of communication assesses, prepares, and secures [as much as possible] the prospects for exchange. The means of transportation deliver the finished products to the markets where they assume the life, that brief half-life, as commodities.
Our capitalist feels something approximating love when the telephones are ringing and he or she needs more lines. Our capitalist knows something approximating love when the trucks are always out making deliveries and he or she needs more trucks.
But it’s a tough love. In his or her every attempt to improve circulation, to offset the lengthening of the cycle of return brought about by fixed capital, our capitalist can do nothing more than increase the investment in fixed assets.
The “motor” of the information-communication sector is semiconductor fabrication. The cycles of semiconductor fabrication are particularly severe given both the costly investment in the instruments and materials of production, and the rapid pace of technological innovation both in the manufacturing equipment and the processing power of the semiconductor. This lovely/deadly-profitable/unprofitable combination initially brings more powerful semiconductor arrays into the markets at prices well above their actual costs of production, but with lower prices relative to the use value, the “productivity,” the processing power of the previous semiconductor configuration.
Then, as the technological innovation in the semiconductor processing power or the method of semiconductor production proliferates throughout the industry and becomes the “normal” social time of reproduction. Market prices begin their steady decline. Production intensifies as declining prices and processing power enhance consumption. The greater processing power becomes the standard. However, as prices decline, production based on the less advanced technologies becomes unprofitable, and the market moves from furious expansion to overproduction, glut, and contraction.
Technical innovation has becomes overproduction in bulk, because overproduction of the finished product can be nothing other than the result of the overproduction of the means of production as capital. The oversupply of the semiconductors in the markets stands in the same relation to the overproduction of the fixed assets of semiconductor production as that of market prices to value.2
Emerging from the 2001-2003 recession, the equipment utilized in semiconductor fabrication embodied three significant technical innovations: 1) replacement of the 200mm size disc by the 300 mm disc, allowing greater surface area for the building of more chips in a single production cycle. This advance was first introduced in the 1997-1999 period.2) use of .09 micron technology increasing processing power and performance. 3) use of higher conductivity copper interconnects.
As the lower production costs boosted profits, and provided greater processing power, the amplified demand for flash-memory and DRAM chips sustained the use of the older 200mm disc fabrication processes. Meanwhile, capital spending programs accelerated
In 2003, only eight semiconductor fabrication companies registered more than one billion dollars in capital expenditures. In 2005, 15 companies had capital spending programs greater than one billion dollars. In 2006, and again in 2007, 16 companies had programs of more than one billion, with these 16 companies accounting for three-quarters of the entire sector’s capital expenditure.
Despite the fact that sales had peaked in 2007, fabrication capacity rose in 2008 and the first part of 2009 as the capital expansion programs were completed, and completed just in time for the implosion in chip sales. By January 2009, chip sales were 33 percent below the year earlier level.
A little too late, and a little too little, in 2009 only three companies announced capital spending budgets greater than one billion dollars. Meanwhile, the industry has fashioned a recovery of sorts, as it always fashions its recovery: shutting production lines, reducing capacity, laying-off production workers. In particular, almost all the older 200mm wafer lines have been closed, allowing the industry to register a capacity utilization rate for the first quarter 2010 of 93 percent versus 2009’s first quarter rate of 57 percent.
Numbers are one thing, but capitalism is about money, real—more or less—money. So, as a money professional said of the semiconductor industry: “This is a horrible, terrible business that no one should be in, the way it’s organized currently…You get some incremental profits for a little while, then everybody moves in and there’s oversupply again."3
The “horrible business” is not, of course, the business of semiconductor fabrication. It is the business of capital accumulation, where the very machinery of accumulation becomes the obstacle to its own valorisation. Our capitalist, unloved and well-known, is at war, now more than less, with the usefulness of his, or her, own property in the means of production. The “solutions” for recovery are reproductions of the fundamental conflict. To offset the delayed return on the accumulated fixed assets, the capitalism will demand, and sooner rather than later, lengthening of the working day in order to garner absolute surplus value; physical destruction of accumulated assets; reduction in wages and consumption not because wages are significant factors in the costs of production—they are not, in the semiconductor industry production worker wages amount to 1 or 2 percent of the total costs of production—but because reducing wages provides additional surplus value. All this and more amounts again to a reproduction of the fundamental conflict between labor organized as wage-labor, and the means of production organized as capital, a conflict to which capitalism has no, and seeks no solution. Rather it is in liquidation, destruction, deprivation, immiseration of capital—fixed, circulating, constant, and variable— that our capitalist places all of his, or her, hopes for the future.
- 1 Returns for Domestic Nonfinancial Business,” Andrew W. Hodge and Robert Corea.
- 2 Shameless self-advertisement: for a highly condensed but more detailed discussion of the anti-economics of semiconductor fabrication see Reprint on Reproduction.
- 3Avi Cohen, managing partner, Avian Securities, as quoted in the New York Times, July 5, 2009, “Despite Turmoil in Chip Industry, Signs of Hope for Micron Technology.
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The Demise of Andy Stern and the Question of Unions in Contemporary Capitalism - Loren Goldner
![Andy Stern at an SEIU rally Andy Stern at an SEIU rally](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/Andy-Stern.jpg?itok=bh0TIGgW)
The rise and recent fall of Andy Stern illustrates, as if through a glass darkly, that in this epoch there is nothing positive for the class as a whole to be achieved through the unions. With the resignation of SEIU leader Andy Stern, Loren Goldner looks at his legacy and analyses the development and function of trade unions over his career.
For decades, since the beginning of the world crisis in the early 1970’s, militants around the world have groped for a way to turn the relentless attack on the global working class from defensive, usually isolated (however valiant) struggles into an offensive one. The rise and recent fall of Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for fifteen years, illustrate some of the issues at hand. They illustrate, as if through a glass darkly, that in this epoch there is nothing positive for the class as a whole to be achieved through the unions. Let’s first look at the specifics in order to arrive at a general perspective.
Andy Stern resigned as president of the SEIU in April of this year in the midst of acrimony and scandal that has hardly abated. As many commentators said at the time, the once “fastest-growing union in the U.S.”, having at its peak added 900,000 new members during Stern’s tenure, had become perhaps the fastest-shrinking union, as the result of massive defections, raids on other unions and untrammeled high-handed bureaucratic politics within the SEIU itself.
Stern left the SEIU to assume a position on the board of SIGA Technologies, Inc[1]. His departure marked the ignominious end of a period of “renewal” in U.S. unionism that began with the accession of John Sweeney to president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, amid hoopla and enthusiasm by much of the left. While the technocratic Stern was never quite the object of similar enthusiasms, the SEIU itself ranked high among “progressive” unions, and Stern’s breakaway (along with six other unions) to form the rival Change to Win (CTW) coalition in 2005, in the wake of Sweeney’s abject failure to reverse union decline, further revealed terminal symptoms of the situation of unions in contemporary capitalism.
While we were neither among the cheerleaders for Sweeney nor Stern, and while we do not see (to put it mildly) trade unions as vehicles for the next emergence of the “class for itself”—the wage-labor proletarian class unified consciously and practically to take over the world in the dissolution of all classes, including (and first of all) of itself—the end of the Stern era presents an opportunity to draw up a “balance sheet” of several decades, going back to the late 1960’s, of left-wing agitation in the U.S. trade unions and more broadly in the working class, and thus to see more clearly the strategic questions of the present and the future. Few will disagree that the forty-plus years of “boring from within” existing unions by currents radicalized in the late 60’s and early 70’s, riding on the wildcat strike wave of that period (even more in Europe than in the U.S.) have overwhelmingly proved to be a dead end. But we also reject the sterile posture of currents in our own broader “libertarian” or “left communist” milieu according to which “rank-and-file” developments in and around the unions in advanced capitalism are nothing but rumblings within the “left wing of capital”.
Before dealing with the developments following the 1995 takeover of the AFL-CIO by Sweeney and his team, some background is necessary to see how the current dismal situation of the working class in the U.S. came to pass. We look for continuities and discontinuities in each phase of struggle.
In all of the class struggles in the West in the 60s and 70s, from the wildcat movement in the US, Britain and France, via the French May 68 and the Italian hot autumn, to the role of the Portuguese and Spanish workers in ending the dictatorships in Iberia in the mid-1970s–in none of these cases was the expansion of unions central to what the workers were doing or demanding.
The formation of the CIO in the US in the 1930’s and 1940’s (with formal legal collective bargaining sanctioned by the state) had already represented a step backward from the openly anti-capitalist “one big union” strategy and tactics of the IWW from 1905 to 1920. But it is undeniable that millions of workers during the Depression and up to the end of World War II were demanding and forming unions, not accidentally in a complex dialectic with the politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal[2]. By contrast, during the wildcat strikes of the 1960’s and 70’s, the 1968 general strike in France, the so-called ‘creeping May’ in Italy and thereafter, in none of these strikes were workers saying “We want more unions”. The existing unions were mainly fighting against the radical workers’ movement. In Italy in the early 1970s, union bureaucrats could not even go into many factories because they would be run off by the workers. All this was in the context of the post -World War II boom, when it was easy for workers to change jobs and when very few imagined the drastically worsened situation of today. And since the end of that period and the beginning of a decades-long world economic crisis and restructuring of capitalism, no major union in the US has ever gone beyond a narrow corporatist viewpoint in dealing with the crisis.[3]
The United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, had 750,000 members in 1973 and today they probably have no more than 100,000 auto workers. During that whole period of decline, when rank-and-file left opposition groups criticized the union’s relentless accommodation to the management of the “Big Three” auto companies (GM, Ford, Chrysler), the union bureaucrats and their shills would say in a chorus ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. Now, it’s broken beyond repair. As in many other unions in decline, the bureaucrats’ main concern seemed be preserving the flow of union dues long enough to secure their own retirement. In the early 1970’s, similarly, 300,000 truck drivers in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) were covered by the nationwide Master Freight Agreement, whereas today that number has fallen to 80,000. The almost mythical United Farm Workers (UFW) had more than 100,000 people under contract in the early 1970’s, and by the death of its founder Cesar Chavez , in 1993, merely a few thousands.
At the bottom of the world recession of 1973-1975, when official unemployment in the U.S. neared 10% (and real unemployment undoubtedly higher), various left groups in the U.S. founded their short-lived unemployed leagues (most of them barely-disguised front groups for recruitment), remembering the role of similar organizations in episodes such as the Toledo Auto- Lite strike of 1934, but nothing came of this and other “class-wide” approaches in the new period of rollback.
In Insurgent Notes No. l we alluded to the almost endless series of defeats that marked the long decline in the new period, not merely of “union membership” but of broader class struggle in the U.S. The bankrolling of the 1975 New York City “bankers’ coup”[4] by New York’s municipal unions began the trend of “sharing the pain’ with management, followed by the UAW in the bailout of Chrysler in 1979, but the crushing of the air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1981, followed by the Greyhound bus drivers in 1983, the Phelps Dodge copper strikers in 1984, the P-9 meatpackers in 1986, and the Jay, Maine paper workers in 1987-1988 were cases where workers fought back and lost in the cascade of concessions, plant closings, outsourcings and relocations that ushered in a new era. This bloodletting continued in the 1990’s with the “Three Strikes” (Caterpillar, Staley, Bridgestone- Firestone) in Decatur, Illinois in 1993-96, the Detroit newspaper strike of 1996, or again in the Safeway strike in southern California in 2003-2004[5]. It was driven home again and again that merely “being more militant”—the main perspective of various left rank-and-file groups in the unions–was, in contrast to the earlier period of wildcats, not enough[6]. World capital accumulation had hit a wall, and that wall was falling on the working class.
In all fairness, some union struggles after the 1970’s did succeed in fighting management to a stalemate, or occasionally even winning. The Pittston (Virginia) miners’ strike of 1989 did prevent the gutting of the United Mine Workers’ (UMW) contract there, and the New York Daily News strike of 1991 prevented a management bloodletting in the print trades. Both the Harvard and much more militant HERE (Hotel and Restaurant Employees) chapter of the Yale campus workers (the latter striking four times) won gains, as did casino and hotel employees in Las Vegas and elsewhere. But it was not insignificant that these more successful struggles, in contrast to most of the defeats, took place at locales where management could not threaten to “move the factory”, or actually do so. Similarly, workers in transport sectors could, on occasion, take advantage of their location at choke points in the new “just in time” reorganization of world production flows, most notably in the 1997 United Parcel (UPS) strike, which more than any specific gains in the contract, briefly illuminated the horizon nationwide by highlighting the proliferation of precarious part-time work and by eliciting broad popular support for a worker struggle rarely seen before or since in the new (post-1970’s) era. (The chief of police in Houston, Texas even arrested scab drivers during the strike.). Two years later, the participation of 50,000 workers in the “battle in Seattle” against the World Trade Organization (WTO), despite some of the dubious ideologies on display (including nationalism and protectionism) further contributed to ripping away the media- imposed blackout on the dark underside of much-trumpeted globalization and the (now defunct) “New Economy”.
Seattle was just one (albeit dramatic) example of an attempt by some unions to project power beyond the workplace, and even there they lost control of their own rank-and-file, which joined in fighting the police. More traditional was organized labor’s unrequited love affair with the Democratic Party (a love affair to which, thankfully, millions of workers are indifferent). In exchange for hundreds of millions in campaign contributions and campaign mobilizations for Democrats[7], American unions got NAFTA and further free trade agreements (e.g. CAFTA)[8] with laughable “labor-environment set-asides”, one failed and one aborted attempt at national health care[9], and no progress whatever in rolling back “replacement worker” (i.e. scab) legal protection. Far more serious than these fruitless electoral antics by the union bureaucrats has been the ever-deepening involvement of unions in pension-fund investments, leading to situations such as the above-mentioned southern California grocery strike in which the striking UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) was sinking the stock market value of its own rank-and-file’s retirement fund.
We have developed elsewhere the concept of the “left wing of devalorization”[10]. “Devalorization” is a term borrowed from Marx meaning the cheapening of costs, including the cheapening of labor costs, often in a crisis situation such as the current one. The “left wing of devalorization” refers to ostensibly “progressive” phenomena where workers and other oppressed groups are offered “organization” and “participation” as the consolation prize for the diminished total social wage of the working class as a whole. A paradigm would be the corporatist self-management and worker participation schemes devised by Social Democrats and sociologists in response to the worker rebellion throughout the West in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, or the work teams first developed by Toyota and then spread around the world. One might summarize their content as mobilization and pseudo-inclusiveness with intensified exploitation and without real power.
In his fifteen years at the head of SEIU, Andy Stern brought the left wing of devalorization to new lows.
When the John Sweeney team (which included many ex-SEIU staffers) took over the AFL-CIO in 1995, American union membership had declined from its peak of 35% of the work force in 1955 to 18%. Fifteen years later, it has further declined to 12%, of which only 8% are in the private sector. It was in this situation of accelerating decline that Andy Stern, claiming to have synthesized the radical tactics of Saul Alinsky with the centralizing business ruthlessness of former General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan[11], emerged into national prominence, taking over the presidency of the SEIU when his predecessor, Sweeney, moved up.
Stern had begun as a social worker[12]. Born in 1950, he had caught the tail end of the New Left, before initially studying business at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, after which he widened his horizons. His experience as a social worker did give him insight into the welfare system that he later used in organizing home care attendants in…novel…ways. His business school background exposed him to management theories such as Sloan’s (the benefits of centralizing dispersed and conflicting local power bases, as Sloan had done at GM) which were in fact a departure from typical union local fiefdoms, mob-controlled or not. Stern took over the SEIU when it was riding on the prestige of the Janitors for Justice campaign in Los Angeles in 1990, when the LAPD had clubbed Latino janitors in front of the TV cameras, after which the ensuing uproar forced management to cave. The janitors’ strike was led by militants with experience in Central American civil wars in e.g. Nicaragua and El Salvador, and hence cut from a rather different cloth than many American workers. (The janitors did get a pay raise from $4 to $4.25 per hour, but the black janitors they had previously replaced had earned $12 an hour.) A paradigm for the Stern era was established early on, in 1995, when one of Sweeney’s last acts as the head of SEIU was to put the LA janitors’ local into trusteeship after it elected officers too militant for his tastes (some of the very same Central American janitors), then replace them with an appointee, from the Washington office of the union, and reorganize the janitors into a huge SEIU local covering most of California in which “rank-and-file rebellion” would be suffocated. The janitor militants staged a hunger strike at their own union headquarters, to no avail. From 1996 onward, Andy Stern took over this method, placing 14% of all SEIU locals under trusteeship over the next decade and a half, , usually sending in an SEIU staffer, fresh off some college campus, to replace the local leadership. In 2002, for example, San Francisco janitors in SEIU local 87 balked at a Stern-engineered merger and were put in trusteeship. The new regional local made significant health care concessions. Pittsburgh local 29, called an “anachronism” by Stern, was merged into a huge tri-state entity. Another SEIU “local” stretched from Trenton, New Jersey to Hartford, Connecticut. And so it went.
This was not exactly the kind of renewal of organized labor that the Sweeney team had promised, but such was in fact exactly the kind of renewal that Andy Stern delivered, adding 900,000 new members (at least on paper) to SEIU over fifteen years.
To understand Stern’s methods, as they developed after the LA janitors’ episode, a bit of context is helpful. In the run-up to the triumph of the new Sweeney team at the AFL-CIO, a rather misplaced debate had taken place in and around the labor movement about prioritizing either the “high road” or the “low road” as the way forward. The “high road” offered a rosy perspective of labor participation in the burgeoning technology sectors of the (now happily forgotten) “New Economy”, with high-wage high-skilled jobs expanding in tandem with high tech and the technology-intensive innovations in core U.S. industries. The “low road” looked instead to organizing the tens of millions of working poor, casuals and temps who had emerged from the 1970’s crisis as the gritty reality of the “great American jobs machine” that won accolades from such various quarters as conservative think tanks and European ideologues looking to break the “stagnation” of high-wage, stodgy Europe with its tougher laws on layoffs, its early retirement and its universal health care[13]. Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton had already contributed a mass of potential new constituents for the “low road” option with the 1994 passage of NAFTA, the US-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which gutted Mexican agriculture by American imports and forced millions off the land and into the precarious migration to El Norte, where minimum-wage (or worse) jobs, fly-by-night employers and the INS (immigration police) awaited them[14]. He added millions more with his 1996 abolition of welfare, presented, along with the other remnants of New Deal big-government liberalism, as an anachronism in the illusory, debt-driven “Great Moderation” of those years. While the majority of those affected by “welfare reform” were…children, Clinton’s “welfare to work” soon had millions of their mothers commuting hours a day to minimum-wage jobs in far suburbia for slightly more than their previous welfare checks. (Presumably anticipating further gate receipts, Sweeney’s “new” AFL-CIO said nothing about Clinton’s effective abolition of welfare.)
High-tech capitalists showed little interest in playing their part in any “high road” strategy for a will-o-the-wisp high-wage labor-management condominium, so the “low road” won hands down. Thus, to get a bit ahead of our story, in 2005, the split between the AFL-CIO and Stern’s Change to Win was precisely between the older CIO unions still standing (however much in retreat) such as the UAW, the USW, the UMW or the IAM, and unions that stood to gain members from the new millions of minimum wage workers: the SEIU, the IBT, the UFCW, UNITE, HERE, and the Laborers (LIUNA)[15].
A Marxist—this Marxist–might say with some accuracy that the split occurred between workers producing primarily relative surplus value and those producing absolute surplus value[16]. Not incidentally, they were also in sectors least affected by the off-shoring of factories in the previous period.
Stern quickly put the ideas of Sloan and the Harvard Business Review to work, on the model of the LA janitors’ campaign and its aftermath. He engineered the cleanout of some Mafia elements in New York, Boston, Detroit and Chicago or the notorious Gus Bevona of New York’s famous Local 32 BJ (from which Sweeney had emerged) with a combination of organizational hardball and some golden parachutes to get people to go quietly. Stern aimed at national unions in hospitals, long-term care, public service, and building services. Stern’s method of “organizing” was unique in that it was more aimed at organizing key politicians such as then-California governor Gray Davis or currently embroiled ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich with large campaign contributions, after which these politicians would approve collective bargaining for categories of workers who had never been mobilized.
As Stern put it in reply to some critics of his top-down, high-handed approach:
“Workers want their lives to be changed. They want strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy. Workers can win when they are united, and leaders who stand in the way of change screaming “democracy” fail to understand how workers exercise the limited power they have in a country where only 8.2% of the private sector are in unions. They just don’t get it!”[17]
In the California case, , in February 1999 SEIU won the right from Gov. Davis to represent 74,000 home care attendants, claiming it was “the biggest organizing victory in the U.S.” since the 1937 Flint sit-downs of the UAW; quite a comedown from the Battle of the Overpass. The attendants got a raise to $8.15 per hour. But as Robert Fitch pointed out, most of the people organized were not really workers, but welfare recipients caring for family and friends. The SEIU made big contributions to the Los Angeles county board of supervisors and mayoral candidates to promote the creation of an entity with which union could “bargain”, which happened in due course. Only one-fourth of the eligible workers voted in the election to establish the union.[18]
The same pattern was repeated in Illinois. Stern gave Rod Blagojevich $800,000 in campaign contributions to obtain his backing for SEIU, which he granted in 2004. SEIU had in fact been collecting dues from the Illinois home care attendants for 20 years, with no agency to bargain with. As in California, the “rank-and-file” were primarily former welfare recipients caring for children, earning $50 a day, having had no raise since 1986, and with no health care benefits, sick days, or retirement[19].
But it got even better. In order to win collective bargaining representation at private nursing homes, the SEIU blocked with their managements in Florida, Texas and particularly California against indigent patients’ rights, getting the California legislature to pass a bill which gave the nursing homes $3 billion over 5 years, guaranteed company profits, and gutted patients’ rights. The SEIU then joined with the nursing homes to crush the Nursing Home Residents Bill of Rights, much to the consternation of activists attempting to curb elder abuse in such homes. The SEIU claimed this was to help workers and improve patient care. In exchange for this help, the nursing homes agreed not to block SEIU organizing. Stern and SEIU also formed an alliance with California health care giant Kaiser Permanente, and in the state of New York, lobbied with employers for legislative funding and a plan to close hospitals.
These tactics by Stern and the SEIU were not without their critics, including internal critics. One example was the widely-touted Boston janitors’ strike of October 2002. 11,000 janitors in the Boston region, including many Latinos, struck for three weeks, and ended the strike with a contract granting 30% salary increases over five years and health insurance for some part-time janitors. But under the contract, only 1,000 part-time workers in the largest buildings won fully-paid health insurance, whereas three-fourths of the strikers were part-timers, and the full-timers already had health insurance. The strike was widely supported by the local media and by the Massachusetts political and business establishment, as well as by clergy and U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Everyone except the striking workers fell all over themselves proclaiming it a victory. As one dissenting SEIU staffer of the striking local said afterward, “My first concern in calling the strike a ‘victory’ is that not a single worker I know believes it to be such.” According to this staffer, the janitors became “deeply angry” seeing the contract in print and called the union “vendidos” (sellouts) because of inadequate pay raises over five years: “…the International placed so much emphasis on winning something (on full-time jobs and health benefits for some part-timers) that they were willing to totally cave on wages”[20].
But these criticisms of Stern’s method at SEIU were nothing compared to the firestorm that developed after July 2005 when he led five million members out of Sweeney’s hapless AFL-CIO into the new federation, Change to Win (CTW), mentioned earlier.
The groundwork had been laid when Stern created the New Unity Partnership (NUP) with Bruce Raynor of UNITE and John Wilhelm of HERE in 2004. In these two figures, the New Left turn to the working class in the late 1960’s again casts a long shadow. Bruce Raynor came out of 1960’s SDS and civil rights activism to work, after 1973, for the then-Textile Workers Union of America, (TWUA) while first graduating from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He came to prominence in the long struggle to organize the Southern textile company J.P. Stevens. Raynor, once apparently known as the “Lenin of the South”, spent 20 years in the TWUA organizing in southern states. John Wilhelm started work with HERE in 1969 after graduating from Yale and led the successful 1984 strike there. He was also involved in some organizing victories among hotel and casino employees in Las Vegas in the late 1980’s.
UNITE was the merger of three earlier textile worker unions, a merger itself reflecting the massive loss of jobs in that sector[21]. Following the merger of the Textile Workers, Amalgamated, and ILGWU (merged in UNITE) the combined membership (estimated at 450,000) was less than ACTWU alone in 1976[22]. Raynor’s UNITE and Wilhelm’s HERE in turn merged to form UNITE HERE.
After 2005, not much changed, but rather intensified, with Change To Win[23]. In April 2007, when the rival AFL-CIO endorsed single-payer (extending Medicare to all) in the brewing health care debate, Stern said that government should play only a secondary role in healthcare; a couple of months before, he had held a press conference with the CEO of the notorious anti-labor Wal-Mart announcing their joint project for “Better Health Care Together Campaign”[24]. The officials of another CTW affiliate, the UFCW, checked in with the highest salaries in organized labor, approximately ten times the average salary of a grocery employee. But criticism without and within intensified as well. In February 2006, two thousand SEIU members at the University of Massachusetts bolted from the union to reject the imposition of another mass local[25]. Stern responded with a crackdown on rank-and-file militants. In typical fashion, in September 2007, the California SEIU merged twenty locals into three and laid off hundreds of union staff based on political criteria. In February 2008, the SEIU sent Dennis Rivera, leader of New York’s health care union 1199 and another fallen angel of the left, to raid the Puerto Rican teachers’ union[26].
In August 2008, sleaze merged with the well-established high-handed organizational methods and warfare with other unions. In Los Angeles, Stern appointee Tyrone Freeman resigned after it was revealed that he had directed $600,000 in contracts to his wife and paid his mother-in-law $8000 a month to take care of his daughter and other staffers’ kids. Annelle Grajeda, the appointed president of Local 721 and Stern’s designated successor to his emerging breakaway rival Sal Rosselli (cf. below) after the latter’s pending ouster, had put her boyfriend on multiple salaries while he was working as county employee.
Probably most serious was the crisis involving California nurses, a battle which still continues at this writing. Unhappy with Stern’s overtures to the management of health provider Kaiser Permanente (again pointing to a deal at the expense of patient rights) and the usual top-down treatment of members, thousands of SEIU nurses rallied in Oakland at a rally in March 2008 demanding their de-certification from the union so they could form another one. This occurred, however, under the leadership of Sal Rosselli, previously a strong Stern supporter who had earlier praised the SEIU contract with Kaiser, but who by 2008 was calling for direct election of union officers instead of by convention delegates. Shortly after the Oakland rally, SEIU thugs attacked a Labor Notes conference in Detroit where a nurse from Rosselli’s faction was scheduled to speak, with one SEIUer dying of a heart attack during the melee. Through all this, Andy Stern was lobbying with employers to close hospitals in New York state, saying that responsible unions should embrace outsourcing, and attacking the California nurses for opposing “jointness” in health care. . In June 2009, anti-Stern reformers took over a Massachusetts SEIU local, and Stern laid off 75 organizers in a “reorganization”. In July 2009, as part of the California nursing battle, the SEIU colluded with Kaiser to remove shop stewards.
With fires burning on so many fronts, open civil war had erupted in March 2009 in UNITE HERE. Bruce Raynor of UNITE was effectively working to take a large part of the fused membership into the SEIU, having made a deal with Stern; he became an SEIU Executive Vice President while still drawing a salary from UNITE. The financial stakes were considerable: UNITE owns the Amalgamated Bank, with $5bn assets, and valuable New York City property. True to form, Stern and Raynor had made secret deals with companies to allow union organizing while waiving workers’ right to strike. In April 2009, the SEIU moved to break up UNITE HERE, and UNITE- controlled regional councils, under Raynor, voted to leave the union. Ultimately about one-fourth of the membership followed Raynor into the SEIU.
With this legacy, Andy Stern resigned as SEIU president in April 2010, and was succeeded by Mary Kay Henry, one of his own intimate circle, who promised a kinder, gentler SEIU and a healing process with rival unions.
At the end of such a dismal tale, it is necessary to step back from mere chronology and try to draw the political lessons. As indicated at the outset, at the tail end of the New Left experience in the U.S. ca. 1970 various vanguard groups made a “turn” to the working class. These groups were inspired in part by the militant wildcat strike wave that peaked in 1973 (the high points of which were the black-led strikes of DRUM and ELRUM in Detroit, the nationwide Teamster wildcat of 1970, the Lordstown (Ohio) wildcat of 1972, and the shutdown of the Dodge Main plant in Detroit by black militants who cut the power in summer 1973) and that was still showing signs of life as late as the UMW rank-and-file’s rejection of Jimmy Carter’s imposition of the Taft-Hartley law during the coalfield strike of 1977-78. At its peak, thousands of Trotskyists, Maoists and assorted Marxist- Leninists, not to mention independents, took blue-collar jobs in this turn, constituting the first left-wing “intervention” in the American working-class since the expulsion of conscious leftists from all but a few small unions by McCarthyism, the Cold War and the general rollback of the 1950’s. One could say a great deal—and a great deal was said at the time—about the artificiality of such an attempt. While many of those participating in this turn did in fact come off of college campuses (such as Stern, Raynor and Wilhelm), many among them were nonetheless of working-class background themselves. Few if any were aware at the time that decades of ebb and rollback were beginning, and given the labor market two decades later, the better-paying blue-collar jobs available in 1970 and still around in 1990 looked pretty good by comparison with many of the alternatives. All in all, in the former U.S. industrial heartland of the Midwest, little came of these efforts[27]. A fair number of these “industrializers” tired of blue-collar jobs and migrated into the middle levels of the trade union bureaucracies, where they became an important base of Sweeney’s attempted makeover of the AFL-CIO in 1995. (One Marxist- Leninist, Bill Fletcher of the Maoist Freedom Road group, was briefly a member of Sweeney’s inner circle.) Their opposition to traditional AFL-CIO involvement in Cold War foreign policy forced a major debate within some major unions over the U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980’s. Many of them were swept up in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. To the extent they maintained their earlier political commitments, they increasingly wore two hats, simon-pure trade union militant by day and radical sect member by night.
For it was precisely ca. 1970 that the postwar boom was ending, and what was beginning was the biggest economic restructuring since the final supersession of craft production by intensified industrial production ca. 1900 and the mass production of consumer durables (1920’s, 1930’s). The “wildcat” perspective was nowhere in the wave of plant closings, downsizings, outsourcings, quality control, technical intensification of the labor process, concession bargaining, the de-industrialization of whole regions, and the flood of German and Japanese goods produced with newer factories and methods abroad[28]. The recessions of 1969-1970 and much more so of 1973-1975 wrong-footed the rank-and-file rebellion, and the management counter-offensive in the U.S. and Europe has generally held the upper hand ever since. In the older industrial countries such as the U.K. and the U.S. (not accidentally the dominant world financial centers), the much-touted shift to a “post-industrial” “service” economy seemingly covered over this rollback of the productive work force, so that today less than 10% of the U.K. work force remains engaged in industry and in the U.S. less than 20%. The U.K. had long ceded world financial pre-eminence to the U.S., but from the Thatcher era onward, it was the net capital flows into the City of London which kept Britain solvent; the U.S. shifted from being the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor ca. 1984. The U.S. balance-of-trade deficit has, since 1971, ceased to be negative only at the bottom of the post-1970 recessions, until the next debt-driven “consumer-led” recovery begins.
The deeper problem, of course, as argued in IN No. l,[29] was that capitalism on a world scale as of 1970 had reached the limits of its recomposition and recovery from the long crisis of 1914-1945 and had again run up against the barrier whereby capitalist accumulation of “value” grew in opposition to the expanded material reproduction of society. Capital was again manifesting its tendency to simultaneously expel living labor from the production process through higher productivity and on the other hand its absolute need of living labor to maintain itself as capital[30]. This expansion of absolute surplus-value production is the true basis, beneath appearances, of the proliferation since 1970 of the low-wage “low road” jobs of the type that Andy Stern’s SEIU set out to organize. This is the true basis of the proliferation of fast-food outlets, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, home care attendants, in short of the “great American jobs machine” that added 30 million jobs after the 1970’s, the majority of which no longer paid enough to support one worker, let alone reproduce a family. The single most important material “fact” of the past fifty years of capitalist accumulation in the U.S. is the disappearance of the single-paycheck working-class family.
Capital’s search for a new foundation for accumulation has hardly run its course. The shakeout that erupted to the surface in the fall of 2008 is only an acceleration of a forty-year process. World accumulation, in order to find a new expansive footing, must be restructured in a way similar to the restructuring whereby the U.S. replaced Britain as the hegemon, with the necessary “reshuffling of the deck” to reflect the new world distribution of cutting-edge production that can no longer accomodate New York as the unquestioned world financial center, the special status of the U.S. dollar, and the other institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) through which U.S. exercised supremacy after 1945. Such a reorganization necessarily passes through geopolitics, starting with NATO and the U.S. military presence in 110 countries. And these institutional considerations in turn come down to the dynamic between classes, just as they did in 1914-1945. Seen in this perspective, capital can carry out this restructuring only through the same violence and destruction through which it survived the previous “Thirty Years’ War” epoch of crisis. War and increasingly authoritarian regimes, ramped up by the “war on terror” and the ever-accelerating e-totalitarianism already in place, are the likely way stations to any new phase of capital accumulation.
We must now locate the class struggle, as sketched out above, in this larger process. Capital, as indicated, finally resolved its previous global impasse in 1945 by the founding of U.S. hegemony and that hegemony’s institutions on the ruins of World War II and by the defeat and containment of the working class everywhere, made possible by the channeling of class struggle by Socialist, Communist and Labour parties, not to mention the trade unions the latter controlled. The world capitalist class “thinks globally and acts globally”, whatever localist outlook mystified left opinion wishes to counterpose to it. The world working class must therefore do the same; if it is defeated, as it was defeated between 1914 and the end of World War II, world history will mark another “1945”, whatever the specific outcome, at the beginning of any new capitalist cycle[31]. Capitalists conducted World War II in full awareness of what had happened in 1917-1918, and are fully intent on preventing, with all the murderous means at their disposal[32], a repetition of that brief moment in which they seemed to lose control.
Seen in this perspective, as stated at the outset, there is nothing positive, for the class as a whole, to be achieved through the unions. We remember the murderous, lynch-mob repression that rained down on the IWW from 1917 to 1920 as an anticipation of what the American capitalists will attempt to do to any serious opposition when the chips are down, and today’s unions are, to put it mildly, nothing like the IWW and obviously not a serious opposition. Mainstream American unions dutifully lined up to serve on government-enforced labor-management boards in both imperialist world wars[33]. Closer to the present, one need only recall the meek, red-white-and-blue, we’re-all-in-this-together reaction of American unions in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the day when ordinary Americans first experienced what peoples around the world have experienced at the hands of U.S. imperialism a thousand times in the era of its hegemony. With such precedents, and with the U.S. increasingly bogged down in its rapidly-failing Middle East and South Asian policy from Turkey to Pakistan, by way of Palestine, Iran and Afghanistan, and provoking China over Korea and in the South China Sea, one can only imagine what American unions will do in the next serious (and/or fabricated) war scare.
But here we are a bit ahead of ourselves. Such an apocalyptic perspective (and in our view the historical juncture, particular when seen in tandem with the environmental crisis, is indeed apocalyptic) in 2010, somewhat resembles Schelling’s “night in which all cows are black”[34], a dumb totality in which all the specific realities (e.g. the rise and fall of Andy Stern and the fallout from it) of the present disappear. The process we point to, which we previously characterized as a “slow crash landing”[35], might drag on for years, perhaps decades, particularly given the absence, for the near to medium future, of any power or power bloc capable of challenging the U.S. for hegemony. The patient is terminally ill, but it would be foolish to pinpoint the date of demise, particularly because the process is fluid and will be determined by what the global working class does or does not do.
IN No. 1 outlined a possible program for an exit from “value production” by a successful world revolution[36]. Such a program, eminently debatable in its specifics, has concrete meaning only insofar as it emerges from the necessities of global reproduction and from the huge gap between such necessities and the worldwide retrogressionist assault on workers now underway. The issue is obviously to connect it meaningfully to the struggles, or their absence, of today.
The recent world panorama is mixed, at best. In the current issue of IN, we run articles on the recent strikes in China, ongoing strikes in Bangladesh, and the impressive TEKEL strike in Turkey of last spring. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks went into the streets in May to oppose the European Union’s super-austerity, and gave Yiannis Panagopoulos,
head of the General Confederation of Workers in Greece, the pelting of eggs and beating he so richly deserved[37]. However relatively quiet the U.S. may be for the moment, this is not the case on a world scale.
The struggles in the U.S. and Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s combined many elements that obviously went beyond the workplace and the shop floor[38], and in fact often eclipsed what was happening on the shop floor. For the U.S. alone, in addition to the mounting wildcat strikes, we recall the different phases of the black movement, the antiwar and GI movements, the (mainly middle-class) youth and student movements, the Latino (Chicano and Puerto Rican) movements, the prison movement, the women’s movement and the gay movement. A situation had been created in which militancy in one sphere encouraged militancy in others, and ultimately broke down the boundaries between spheres altogether in an increasingly visible totality. The bare outlines of a similar totality, since the mid-1990’s, have been taking shape in the contemporary period.
What distinguishes our present from the 1960’s is that the revolts in that earlier period, in the U.S. and Europe[39], were in large part directed against institutions created by the moderate left as they emerged from World War II, whether the Keynesian/Social Democratic welfare state or the trade unions. What characterized the revolts of that period was an ever-greater “outflanking” of bureaucratic “reformist” institutions (political parties, unions) created by the postwar Keynesian settlement in the West. A paradigm might be the uproar in the UAW in 1973 when the union bureaucrats announced with great pomp a new contract inscribing a “four-day week”. Factory militants, already involved in large-scale absenteeism, responded: “The four-day week? We already have the four-day week!”
Today, when “reform” has become the war cry of the capitalists themselves, by which is meant “taking back” the “bloated” “entitlements” of “rent-seekers” (the Wall Street bankers and their bonuses, of course, never figure among the “rent-seekers”) in “painful adjustments” supposedly to make way for a recovery that never comes[40], struggles worldwide have necessarily taken on a new and mainly defensive character.[41] The ruling classes of Europe pursue salami tactics to pare down its welfare state, finding (like their American counterparts) the post-2008 meltdown a most useful wedge for doing so, even as they spent hundreds of billions to rescue their banks.
We cannot will into existence the next conjuncture in which a “contagion of struggle” reappears. A look at the years between the crash of 1929 and the first major U.S. strikes in 1934 shows great quiescence but also battles against foreclosures, rent parties, or the Bonus March on Washington in 1931[42]; in the general desolation, they were perhaps straws in the wind. And the great strikes of 1934 in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toledo and throughout the Southern textile industry, right up to the steel strike and Flint auto sit-downs of 1936-37 did occur on the upswing from the depths of the Depression. (One further cannot discount the political dimension of hopes, misplaced as they may have been, generated by the launching of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)[43] The problem in the U.S. and Europe for nearly forty years is that there has been no upswing in which workers could recapture the high ground they occupied at the peak of the postwar boom.
Capitalism in 1934, not to mention in 2010, had already entered the epoch (ca. 1914) in which its true goal of expanding value runs counter, on a world scale, to the expanded material reproduction of society[44]. Seen on a world scale, the global economic crisis of today will be worse than that of the 1930’s, not to mention the accelerating environmental catastrophe[45] now underway, beyond comparison to anything in the 1930’s.
Let’s put it bluntly: for the class as a whole to advance, to even win back the ground lost over forty years, the apparatus of production must be taken away from the capitalists. “Reform” has been the war cry of the neo-liberal pro-market right for decades, echoing the fact that there is no possible reformism on the left. Much of the left-wing opposition in the U.S. labor movement[46], as it culminated in the Sweeney fiasco, has been involved in trying to interest the capitalists in a game from which they have walked away. Much of this left could think of nothing better to do, in fall 2008, than cheer the election of Barack Obama, who had been backed by more Wall Street money than his “conservative” opponent McCain, and who brought in, to administer the crisis, the likes of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Hilary Clinton, all veterans of multiple crimes against the working class[47].
Taking the apparatus of production away from the capitalists means social revolution, and a revolution moreover international from the beginning. It was argued[48] previously that the “real economy” on a world scale, and nowhere more than in the U.S., has been so distorted by capitalist accumulation over decades that only a program for social reconstruction can make clear how much of contemporary “reality” will have to be swept away to rebuild the world on the basis of “use-values”.
We hardly say this from some absolutist posture dismissive of contemporary struggles, small and large, that do not directly pose the question of “expropriating the expropriators”. As Marx put it in his letter to Ruge in 1843, “we merely tell the world why it struggles, and consciousness is something the world must acquire, even if it does not want to”[49]. We point to examples such as the Buenos Aires subway workers in 2003 who, confronted with a plan from management for 2000 layoffs, struck to demand a 6-hour day for all, and 2000 new hires to make the system work with the shorter shifts. They won.
Not all defensive struggles, probably not even most, can be turned around in this fashion. Most will lose, as most have lost (at least in the U.S.) over the past 35 or 40 years. Centered as we are in the U.S., at least for now, the task is to bring home to workers the kinds of struggles underway everywhere in the world, to internationalize the awareness of the class. But beyond the specifics of those struggles that erupt, win or lose, the main perspective must be to point to the world dynamic of capital and the need for workers on a world scale to either put an end to capital or suffer the (already quite visible) consequences. Capital is a meat grinder we are inside of. The tipping point in this process is as impossible to predict in advance as the bread riot that led to the French Revolution or the women’s day demonstration that led to the overthrow of the Russian tsar or, closer to us, the gesture of Rosa Parks that led to the Montgomery bus boycott.
A meaningful advance of workers’ struggles means bringing into existence class-wide organizations. Where those with such a perspective find themselves, by hook or by crook, in trade unions, the issue is to broaden struggles to include the unemployed wherever possible, on the model of (e.g.) the Buenos Aires subway workers. Such militants participate in unions, where circumstances require it, always with a perspective beyond unions and of their supersession into class-wide organizations[50]. The miserable ghettoization of different parts of the class in (declining) corporatist formations, bound hand and foot by labor law and decades of anti-worker legislation, that cannot even come to each others’ aid in meaningful solidarity, not to mention the abject refusal (with few notable exceptions)[51] to breach legality, has to end. This serene indifference to non-members, including unemployed workers who the day before yesterday were members, has to end. Many of these corporatist formations themselves, it seems all but forgotten, were built decades ago by workers willing to break the law.
In the U.S. in particular, where 88% of the work force is not in unions, where 20% of the work force is unemployed or underemployed and more become homeless every day, where there are almost as many proletarians or sub-proletarians in the prison system as in unions (and where, finally, a not insignificant number of union members are police and prison personnel[52]) the idea of “basing a revolutionary strategy on the unions”, of “capturing the unions” for revolution, ideas still propagated today by various and sundry Trotskyists, is a joke.
IN’s role is to bring into existence, in collaboration with like-minded others, the worldwide programmatically-armed current that can help turn the current defensive rollback into an offensive one, and help push that offensive past the point of no return.
Notes
[1] SIGA is a company specializing in the development of pharmaceutical agents to combat bio-warfare pathogens.
[2] On important holdovers from the IWW, battling top-down CIO methods from the start, see the essays in Staughton Lynd, ed. “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930’s. (1996).
[3] Following 3000 strikes in the year 1987 alone, with a further strike wave continuing until 1990 in many cases in fact demanding and forming unions, South Korea is something of an exception to this trend. By the early 1990’s, however, under the cover of still-fiery rhetoric, South Korea’s unions as well had settled (and had been beaten) into the more familiar acceptance of a capitalist framework. See home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/korea.html for a brief account of this containment.
[4] With New York City on the verge of bankruptcy, its banker creditors seized control and total oversight of the city budget through an entity called “Big MAC” (Municipal Assistance Corporation). The city’s municipal unions sank tens of millions of their pension funds into Big MAC bonds while the bankers pushed through civil service 40,000 layoffs and slashed city services.
[5] See my article on this defeat at http://home.earth link.net/~lrgoldner/supermarket.htm
[6] It should be pointed out that in addition to these better-known episodes of defeat was the year-in, year-out grinding down of working people, without a battle, without even an awareness that a war was in progress (Cf. Wallace Peterson The Silent Depression, 1994, for the basic statistics, albeit within a Keynesian framework.) Some of this has been compensated, until recently, by low-level state and local programs, now on the chopping block in the general crisis of state and urban finane.
[7] Stern’s SEIU, for example, contributed $85 million to the electoral campaign of Barack Obama.
[8] NAFTA was the North American Free Trade Agreement; CAFTA was the Central American Free Trade Agreement. On NAFTA, cf. below.
[9] According to some estimates, 80% of strikes in the past two decades have had health care as a main, if not the main issue.
[10] See L. Goldner, The Remaking of the American Working Class, http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/remaking
[11] Stern also cited as influences the futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler as well as the Republican Congressman and right-wing ideologue Newt Gingrich. In his book, A Country That Works, Stern even criticized the “class-struggle mentality” of the U.S. labor movement.
[12] The material in the following section draws on the informative chapter on Stern in Robert Fitch’s otherwise deeply flawed Solidarity for Sale (2006), Steve Early’s Embedded in the Labor Movement (2009) and articles in the Detroit-based Labor Notes.
Fitch points out that Stern’s most important ideas on organization came from the Harvard Business Review.
[13] This of course was prior to the 2010 crisis of the very foundations of the European Union, which offered many new openings to introduce the “Anglo-American” model, or worse.
[14] Cf. the journalistic but fact-packed account of the sleaze surrounding the passage of NAFTA in John R. MacArthur, The Selling of “Free Trade”: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy (1995). Contemporary, historically-blind media hand-wringing about the murderous drug wars in Mexico (28,000 dead in the past three years) never mention NAFTA’s decimation of Mexican agriculture as “background.
[15] Change to Win (CTW) unions were, as indicated, the SEIU, the IBT (Teamsters) the UFCW (organizing grocery employees), UNITE (the result of the fusion of several textile worker unions), HERE (hotel and restaurant workers) and LIUNA, organizing laborers. Robert Fitch points out (op. cit.) that of the main CTW unions, three (SEIU, the IBT and LIUNA) had recent or ongoing histories of Mafia influence.
[16] Relative surplus value is Marx’s term for that extracted by intensification of the labor process through new technology; absolute surplus value comes from the lengthening of the working day. Relative surplus value had been preponderant in the post-World War II boom in the West; as that accumulation reached its limits, more and more absolute surplus value compensated for stagnating profits in the technology-intensive industries.
[17] Quoted in Steve Early, Embedded with Organized Labor (2009), p. 221.
[18] Fitch op. cit
[19] Ibid
[20] Early, op. cit. pp. 226-227.
[21] This merger was a swan song of an earlier period of American unions. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was led by “labor statesman” Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, and helped found the CIO. Amalgamated merged with the Textile Workers Union of America in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union This merger then merged with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (of David Dubinsky fame) in 1995 to create the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).
[22] Cf. Robert Fitch, op. cit. Ch. 9 “UNITE’s Garment Gulag”. UNITE was involved in a number of scandals involved in non-enforcement of New York sweatshop contracts that on paper provided for decent wages and benefits, but actually often had worse conditions than many “unorganized” sweatshops. According to Fitch, a sweatshop thus became (for example, for the campus-based anti-sweatshop movement) a sweatshop not organized by UNITE.
[23] The material in the following paragraphs draws heavily on Steve Early, op. cit.
[24] Actually in some ways this was a departure, as the typical SEIU overture was for union recognition in exchange for no health plan.
[25] The material in the following section is from Labor Notes, different issues from 2005 to 2010.
[26] This union had been stripped of its bargaining rights for striking against the government over privatization and other issues.
[27] The great exception was the short-lived success of the International Socialists (IS) in helping to elect Ron Carey president of the Teamsters in 1991, helped in turn by the U.S. Department of Justice’s takeover of the union with the stated aim of eliminating Mafia influence. This complex tale should be told in another article, but a good start is Fitch’s material on Carey in Solidarity for Sale.
[28] For a portrait of this wrenching period for millions of American workers, using the example of Chicago, cf. David Ranney, Global Decisions, Local Collisions. Urban Life in the New World Order (2003), describing job loss, divorce, wife-beating, mortgage forclosures, homelessness, suicide and anomie in the wake of factory closings there.
[29] Cf. IN No. 1, “The Historical Moment Which Produced US”.
[30] K. Marx, Grundrisse, (English translation, 1973), p. 706. “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, (in) that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.”
[31] The only sure prediction is a formalization of the recognition of relative U.S. decline.
[32] The Allies bombed German and Italian working-class neighborhoods instead of factories in order to paralyze Axis war production. Cf. the writings of the historian Tim Mason, especially Nazism, fascism and the working class (1995) on the fear of working-class revolt in the Nazi regime.
[33] It should be pointed out that, during World War II, this class collaboration did not go unopposed, particularly after the AFL, the CIO and the CPUSA signed on to the wartime “no strike” pledge. Cf. Marty Glaberman, Wartime Strikes, Detroit, 1980.
[34] GFW Hegel criticized his contemporary Schelling for conceiving of reality as a totality—all to the good—but as a totality in which the developmental specificity of it different “moments” disappeared into an indeterminate (one might say, today, New Age) whole.
[35] IN No. 1 ….
[36] IN No. 1, “Historical Moment”.
[37] Panagopoulos had attempted to calm an angry crowd in front the the Greek Parliament, the latter surrounded by riot police. The shower of eggs began immediately, after which Panagopoulos was roughed up by the crowd and had to flee for protection behind police lines.
[38] The focus of vol. I of Marx’s Capital, “the immediate process of production”.
[39] We are not forgetting the struggles and revolts of that period in the Third World, but they in their great majority lacked a clear-cut proletarian character. That is, in many countries, no longer the case, as our coverage of some of those strikes shows.
[40] The paradigm for such vile propaganda, diverting attention from the huge U.S. disparities in wealth, beyond anything achieved in the 1920’s, is the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, which for decades has banged away about the need to reduce Social Security and Medicare to solve the U.S. crisis. The Petersen Institute is a good example of the update of the “Goebbels principle” according to which if an outrageous lie is repeated often enough, it sinks into general consciousness.
[41] Cf. Lance Carter’s short article in IN No. 1 and the longer article in the current issue on the recent strikes in China. It is true that these strikes in China were offensive, but they must be seen in tandem with the many struggles, going back years, in the northeastern “rust bowl” against factory closings, managerial asset stripping and looting of pension funds in the older “state-owned enterprises” (SOEs). In China as well, after three decades of 10+% growth, wages have declined as a portion of GDP.
[42] Tens of thousands of World War I vets converged on Washington DC demanding Federal money owed them, and encamped for months; they were finally dispersed by army units under the command of Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
[43] One can take the measure of the difference between even the 1930’ s and today by comparing the mass struggles of FDR’s first years in power with the relative silence of most left opposition during Obama’s first two years. Similarly, the electoral triumphs of the Popular Front in Spain and in France in 1936 set off, in the Spanish case, a revolutionary crisis and ,in the French, mass factory occupations. Forty-five years later, the respective elections of Felipe Gonzalez (Spanish Prime Minister 1982-1996) and Francois Mitterand (French President, 1981-1995) were followed in both countries by fifteen years of quiescence, punctuated by a few defensive, stopgap struggles. Between the two periods is a vast deflation, from hard experience, of the illusions of “the left in power”.
[44] Cf. “The Historical Moment Which Produced Us” in IN No l for an unpacking of this theoretical framework.
[45] Cf. John Garvey’s article on the BP oil spill in this issue. In addition to the incalculable damage to the Gulf of Mexico, 2010 has so far witnessed the hottest summer on record in many parts of the world, a huge ice island breaking off of Greenland’s glaciers, the Russian wheat crop seriously reduced by drought, and large-scale flooding in Pakistan and China.
[46] An opposition perhaps best articulated by the Detroit-based monthly Labor Notes.
[47] Geithner came straight from experience at the New York Fed and the IMF; Summers, as Bill Clinton’s Undersecretary of the Treasury, had read the riot act to the Asian powers during the 1997-98 Asian meltdown to force them to accept the IMF’s draconian bailout (in fact, a leveraged buyout by U.S. capital of Asian assets) and Hilary Clinton had been involved in such notable achievements of the 1990’s as the 1993 health care fiasco (keeping single payer off the radar), NAFTA and the abolition of welfare.
[48] See Insurgent Notes No. 1, “Historical Moment”.
[49] The full context of Marx’s remark is: “Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”
[50] For an excellent example of how this has been done in the post-1970’s crisis period, cf. the interview with Scott McGuire “Class Struggle Beyond Unions” http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/scott.html
[51] We note here the three-day strike of the New York City transit workers (TWU) in December 2005 in defiance of New York State’s infamous Taylor Law forbidding strikes by public employees.
[52] Cf. John Garvey, “Workers’ Progress? From Iron Mines to Iron Bars” in Insurgent Notes No. l. In Pennsylvania, the state AFL-CIO was prevented from issuing a statement of support for death row prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal by police and prison personnel organized in AFSCME; in California, AFSCME similarly opposed any punishment of its prison guard members who had forced prisoners into gladiator battles in the super-max for their own amusement. Most recently, California unions did not lift a finger when the subway cop who killed Oscar Grant in cold blood was convicted of “involuntary manslaughter”.
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Not another disaster movie - John Garvey
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/burning-oil-rig-explosion-fire-photo11.jpg?itok=Suh_E96P)
John Garvey looks at the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the oil industry in general.
While the oil “spill” at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico (fifty miles off the Louisiana coast) that began with an explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon on April 20th has received a great deal of attention in the regular news media (some of it, by the way, quite serious and critical), it’s necessary to place the explosion and its aftermath in some larger contexts.
In early September of 2010, British Petroleum (BP) issued a report summarizing the results of its internal investigation. Not surprisingly, it focused attention on a series of small technical problems and human errors made just before and after the initial leak. In addition, it also attempted, in very subdued fashion (as befitting an objective investigation), to deflect responsibility for virtually all of those technical and human errors onto the shoulders of its corporate partners, Transocean and Halliburton, proving once again that there’s no honor among thieves.1
As many media commentators have already pointed out, the report should best be seen as BP’s initial test-run of its defense against allegations of “gross” negligence as compared to just ordinary regular negligence. Apparently, the cost difference of a legal finding in such a matter is a mere $15 billion. For the moment, I’ll leave it to the courts to sort out the legal issues—without implying that the courts will supply either justice or wisdom. I just have other fish to fry. I do, however, want to suggest that a preoccupation with degrees of negligence amongst the various parties or with the narrowly legal dimensions of the disaster is likely to divert attention from what are, ultimately, much more serious matters.
Disasters certainly have their attractions. Who hasn’t wanted to watch a fire down the street? But we usually prefer that they don’t last as long as this one. The best ones last only as long as a feature movie. You know the script–the day starts out as usual (coffee and a kiss good-bye); something odd happens; no one really notices; the odd things keep coming; all hell breaks loose; an odd couple, thrown together through even odder coincidences, realizes what’s happening; they know something that no one else knows; they frantically try to notify the authorities; the authorities are in denial or campaigning for re-election; the wife or child of one of the authorities gets caught in some of the bad stuff; the authorities eventually take notice; they recognize the odd-ball wisdom of the oddly associated couple; they agree to do what seems impossible; the first try doesn’t work; the even odder scientist recommends an adjustment; it’s done and the town/city/nation/world is saved. Whew! All in just less than two hours! (Let me confess—I like those movies as much as anyone. I also like a lot of other bad movies and some good movies). But this is no movie.
The prolonged flood of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, over the better part of four months, and the yet to be properly accounted for, long-term impact on the natural environment and the well-being of residents in the coastal communities suggest that we need to lengthen our attention spans a bit. The disaster should attract the deep attention of Americans, and especially American workers, to the devastation that is the result of oil (and by extension, gas and coal) production across the globe. What’s at stake is something much bigger than the possibility of our next vacation on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf disaster is a window into seeing how oil and other forms of energy production have devastated all too many natural environments and ruined the lives of all too many people across the planet.
For descriptions of the social and natural degradation associated with oil production in places as varied as Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan and Russia, see Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass. For a close-up examination of the devastation in the Niger Delta, see Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta by Michael Watts, with photographs by Ed Kashi. (According to that book, an equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil leak has been drowning Nigeria for each of the last fifty years). For a compelling fictional view of the ways in which oil is the pain and suffering that keep on oozing out in that area, see Helon Habila’s new Oil and Water. And for visual images of what long-term degradation looks like in Nigeria and Ecuador, see the following videos:
- Ecuador
Crude: Official Trailer
Amazon Crude - Niger Delta
“Sweet Crude”, Oil in the Niger Delta-1/2
“Sweet Crude”, Oil in the Niger Delta-2/2
If we concentrate too much on surface appearances or are relieved by a too-soon happy ending, we become susceptible to: 1) the false assurances of advertising (which BP, with its cute yellow and green logo, has been exceedingly generous in funding—so much so that it may be responsible for the New York Times showing a profit this year); 2) news reports paid indirectly through advertising, and 3) somewhat paradoxically, the lures of a variety of conspiracy-oriented explanations of what lies beneath the surface. It is essential that we acquire sufficient understandings of scientific/technical issues in order to adequately assess what has happened and what its consequences might be. This essay is the product of an effort in self-education on some of those matters. I welcome all corrections of facts and flawed interpretations.
Simultaneously, we need to imagine ways in which the remarkable scientific/technical expertise that is primarily deployed for the purpose of production for production’s sake (in this case of oil, but, more generally, of just about everything that’s bought and sold) might be re-appropriated for the long-term reduction of unnecessary labor and the comprehensive production, preservation and thoughtful use of non-human resources. This imagination would, I think, be greatly enhanced by a new appreciation for the ways in which Karl Marx’s critique of political economy was informed by a delicate and sophisticated interpretation of the relationship between humans and nature as well as his prescient understanding of the terrible costs of the squandering of human lives, the products of human labor and nature’s treasures in societies dominated by capital.
Eleven Men Dead
Eleven men died on the Deepwater Horizon. They appear to have come from a rich cross-section of the population of the states bordering the Gulf.2 Even now, their names are probably not well known outside their families and the communities they lived in. In this miserable year of 2010, they joined the 29 coal miners killed in the Upper Big Branch disaster in Montcoal, West Virginia and the seven Chinese coal miners who are reported to die every day of the year and still others elsewhere in the count of victims sacrificed in the energy industry and the many thousands unnecessarily lost in the Haitian earthquake at the beginning of the year and the recent floods in Pakistan as a result of the inadequacy of the physical infra-structures in those lands.
This essay will not likely be read by any of the family members or friends of the eleven who died and it can hardly claim to serve as much of a memorial to their too short lives. But their deaths must not be forgotten. We are long overdue for a renewed commitment to the elemental affirmation of solidarity that “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Solidarity, however, cannot end at a workplace, a company, an industry or a border. When we embrace those who died in the Gulf, we must embrace all those many un-named others who have died and are dying, slowly or suddenly, all over the world. Furthermore, solidarity should not be seen as its own ultimate self-justification. Solidarity in the face of a social system that continues to produce maimed and dead workers cannot be content with shared anger at the pain and suffering. It needs to be complemented by a vision that points to a world where such casualties are not assumed to be all but inevitable. We need a solidarity that is deeply influenced by and respectful of the traditions of the last two centuries of workers’ struggles but, at the same time, is inspired by the practical need to abolish the conditions that gave rise to such solidarity in the first place. Ultimately, we need solidarity for what we want and not just solidarity against what we are damaged by.
The Gulf of Mexico
Most Americans who took geography in middle school and social studies in high school know that the Gulf of Mexico is the third great shoreline of the United States—along with the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (let’s leave out Alaska for now). The US coast that stretches from the Florida Keys north to the Florida Panhandle, then west along Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and finally south along Texas (until it meets the Mexican border) totals almost 1700 miles. The Mexican coast, which curves like a semi-circle towards Cuba, adds almost 1400 miles. The Gulf’s southern boundary is formed by the island of Cuba.
Thirty four American rivers (including the Mississippi and Rio Grande) eventually drain into the Gulf; a number of Mexican rivers (including the Grijalva and Usumacinta) do as well. Water flows back and forth from the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean through two relatively narrow bodies of water—the Florida Straits and the Yucatan Channel. All told, the Gulf includes approximately 615,000 square miles and 660 quadrillion gallons of water, although the water is shallow along the coast lines–leading to a large number of barrier islands and marshes—as in the Mississippi Delta. (As we’ll see below, that’s a lot of water to use to hide some oil. But hiding is not disappearing).
The Mississippi Delta is one of a handful of similar environs in the world—along with the Niger, Mekong, Nile and others not as well known. Deltas are complex mixes of land and water that seem to have something of the character and shape of tangled knitting yarn or the apparently haphazard structure of an uncut forest. It’s easy to imagine that, in an unspoiled delta, someone unfamiliar with the local territory would be lost in no time at all. That complex environment serves the purpose of holding the deltas together so that they can, in turn, serve as the productive breeding grounds of a remarkably diverse array of plants and fishes. They are simultaneously fragile and strong.
The Gulf is one of the world’s warmest bodies of water. Its distinctive ecology makes it extraordinarily bountiful—Gulf fisheries yield more fish, shrimp and shellfish each year than the south and mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake Bay and New England areas combined. And, obviously enough, a great deal of oil and gas is trapped below its floor. As a result, the two major economic activities conducted in the Gulf waters are oil drilling and fishing. For the better part of sixty years, most of the local people hoped and prayed they could have: “Both, thank you.”
What Have They Done to the Gulf?
Long before the devastation wrecked by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the Gulf was under siege—from river drainage, from dumping of all sorts and from the ongoing and sometimes long-forgotten after-effects of oil exploration. Anne McClintock has eloquently captured the state of the Gulf:
The Gulf also bears the brunt of agricultural pollution from the heartland: runoff and waste from Midwest cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses, factories, nitrogen from fertilizer drain down the Mississippi into the Gulf every year. And through those damaged and vanishing marshes, massive watery superhighways have been cut, canals and passageways for the barges and huge ships on their way to the Gulf. Every straight line in the marshes is man made and a road to destruction. Every straight line has been forcibly dredged for flood control and shipping, the river and marshes forcibly reengineered by levees and canals to stop flooding, thereby fatally closing off the silt and fresh water that the marshes need to sustain themselves, and rendering them vulnerable to the yearly slow violence of the hurricanes.3
As a result of the drainage from the Midwest heartland, it’s reported that 1.5 million tons of nitrogen are dumped into the Gulf every year. The nitrogen dumping results in the accelerated growth of phytoplankton (microscopic single-celled plants which live near the surface of the water because they need sunlight). They, like all of us, die and fall to the bottom. Then they are digested by bacteria (maybe the same ones that are digesting the dispersed oil) which consume lots of oxygen. When there is less oxygen, there is less support for marine life. As a result of this on-going deluge, a dead zone (technically, a hypoxic zone) has spread across the Gulf from Galveston in Texas to Venice in Louisiana. The dead zone now consumes 8,000 square miles—a sea area as big as Lake Ontario—one of the Great Lakes. It’s the second biggest dead zone in the world’s waters; the biggest one is in the Baltic Sea in northern Europe.
Let’s take a detour to what has been and is being promoted as an alternative energy strategy—the conversion of corn to ethanol. Ethanol now composes 10% of gasoline at many pumps. Sounds good—grow corn under God’s sunlight and turn it into fuel. God would be pleased—if he was given a proper briefing about the matter. Unfortunately, things are not as simple as God would like. Any increase in corn production results in an increase in the increased use of fertilizers. An increase in the use of fertilizers produces an increase in nitrogen drainage—which increases the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
But that’s not all. One report I read said that there were 10,000 miles of oil canals through the marshes of the Mississippi Delta. It’s bad enough that the construction of the canals destroyed marsh land but the resulting straight-line channels allow saltwater from the Gulf to flow into the marshes thereby allowing the saltwater to poison the plant life in the marshes.
It may be that some of what’s now wrong is the result of what appeared to be right. The Mississippi River used to flood every few years. People who lived along the river understandably enough wanted to figure out a way to avoid being flooded–so they built a massive system of levees to keep the river at bay. And, in spite of the massive failure of the levees in New Orleans five years ago, the system mostly prevents flooding. But, at the same time, it prevents the deposit of soil sediment carried down the river which leads to the disintegration of the marshes. The soil which would have sustained the marshes is, instead, dumped directly into the Gulf. Since 1932, Louisiana has lost approximately 1,900 square miles of land mass–almost equal to the state of Delaware.
And what’s left after oil exploration and production? There are more than 27,000 abandoned oil wells (out of about 50,000 that were ever drilled) and more than 1,000 unused production platforms in the Gulf. Approximately 3,500 of the abandoned wells have been considered temporary cases and have never been permanently sealed. But some of the temporarily abandoned wells have been abandoned since the 1950s. (Just recently, the US Interior Department ordered that those temporarily abandoned wells be permanently sealed).
The result of all this is an industrial netherworld—eerily reminiscent of the abandoned factories littering once productive cities and towns in the Midwest and Northeast parts of the country. But it’s scarier:
….since the 1950s, decades of greed and deregulation have turned the Gulf into the United States’ largest industrial wasteland. The Gulf is an immense, watery mausoleum to the hedonistic high times of the military-industrial petro-era. If a gigantic hand emptied the Gulf like a basin of water, we would see a drowned version of industrial New Jersey: seeping oil-rigs, dumped military ordinance, unexploded bombs, thousands of miles of pipelines, a giant watery wrecking-yard, cluttered with the debris of a century of industrial waste. Miles from anywhere, the spires of an oil rig rise from the marshes, like a church to a demonic god.
Perhaps the only good thing that can be said about the recent spill is that it has brought to the surface some of the long-term degradation that has occurred in the Gulf.
Global Oil Production
“It is almost impossible for someone who is not in the industry to begin to understand the magnitude of the industry and what we do.4 ”
One of the reasons why it might be so hard to understand the magnitude of the petroleum industry is that an awful lot of the oil industry is rather invisible to those of us who don’t live near where it’s produced or refined (and where its ravages are most evident). Peter Maass, in Crude World, comments that: “In a technological sleight of hand, oil can be extracted from the deserts of Arabia, processed to eliminate water and natural gas, sent through pipelines to a terminal on the gulf, loaded onto a supertanker and shipped to a port thousands of miles away, then run through a refinery and poured into a tanker truck that delivers it to a suburban gas station, where it is pumped into an SUV—all without anyone actually glimpsing the stuff” (p. 14-15).
Oil production is profoundly dependent on a combination of complex machines and sophisticated technology. It is not nearly as dependent on actual workers. By way of illustration, in Saudi Arabia (the country with the largest proven reserves and the current leader in oil output), out of a population of 20 million, only 50,000 work in the oil industry and there are typically only 500 new hires per year. The oil workforce includes many foreigners and they, along with their Saudi counterparts, live in separate compounds that look more like American suburbs than the Arabian desert—in recognition of this somewhat bizarre reality, they call themselves Aramcons.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the off shore oil industry employs about 150,000 people although most of them are not out on the water—in large part, because drilling and production don’t really require much human labor. At the time of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, there were only 126 people on the rig, most of whom worked for Transocean.
According to petroleum industry reports from Market Research, in the United States, there are about 5,000 exploration and production companies with annual revenues of approximately $250 billion; 150 refineries operated by about 90 companies with annual revenues of $700 billion, and 5,700 wholesale distribution companies with annual revenues of $750 billion. But the wealth and power of the US-based industry is not reflected in its control of the raw resource. North American oil companies only control approximately 3.5% of producible oil equivalent (oil and natural gas) reserves.
Offshore Oil Production
In April 2010, world production of all liquid fuels was 86.62 million barrels a day but, perhaps surprisingly, offshore deepwater production was only just over 5 million barrels a day—about 6% of global oil production. However, offshore production is expected to be 40% of world production by the end of this decade—as they drill deeper and farther off shore.
Off shore drilling is now underway in countries across the globe (including Brazil, Great Britain, Norway, Tunisia, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Vietnam). In the US, offshore drilling is concentrated in the western and central Gulf (it is prohibited off the Florida coast) and, in a very limited way, off California; 90% of the production comes from the Gulf. In 2009, Gulf oil production was 1.6 million barrels per day—or 31% of all domestic oil production; natural gas production was 11% of all domestic gas production.
Off shore drilling takes place in two quite different marine environments—shallow and deep water. Immediately offshore, the water is relatively shallow (less than 700 feet); however, it eventually drops off fairly dramatically to a depth of as much as three miles—so the deepwater wells are also the ones farthest from land. For thirty years, the drilling took place in shallow waters but the development of new drilling technologies launched the era of deep water drilling in 1979. Deepwater oil production surpassed shallow water production in 2001. In 2009, 80% of offshore oil production and 45% of natural gas production came from deepwater.
States have jurisdiction over oil drilling that takes place within three and a half miles of their shorelines but, for curious reasons (having to do in part with the fact that Texas was admitted to the Union as an independent nation), Texas and Florida control access for more than ten miles from their shores. The United States claims the right to all resources within 200 miles of its coast and the federal government controls oil exploration by selling leases through a bidding process. (There’s a finely worded agreement that splits the difference in the Gulf in those areas that could be claimed by both Mexico and the US). In 2009, the federal government earned at least $6 billion (and maybe as much as $10 billion) from offshore oil leases; since 1953, the government has collected $200 billion in various kinds of payments.
Over the past 45 years, 17.5 billion barrels of oil have been produced from off shore wells across the globe, but only just over a half million barrels have been spilled—30.3 barrels per 1 million barrels produced. And all but two of the largest marine spills of petroleum occurred at the ocean surface—as the result of war sabotage and tanker accidents. Only one serious spill previously took place in the Gulf—the Ixtoc I spill in June of 1979 on a well being drilled for Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) by Transocean. (This summary of spills is based on the expert testimony of Ted Patzek, Professor and Chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas in Austin before the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives on June 9th. So far as I can tell, Patzek is quite critical of many of the industry’s practices and I don’t think he was trying to make things look good. Perhaps I am wrong). Lest I be misunderstood, these facts, regarding the relatively small number of “spills,” obscure something of terrible importance—the most significant devastation of the seas and lands where oil drilling occurs is not from the infrequent spectacular disaster but rather from the routine, day in/day out operations of the industry.
The small number of “spills” is in spite of the fact that drilling has been fairly intense. More than 50,000 wells have been drilled in federal waters since 1947. A total of 331 wells were drilled in federal waters of the Gulf in 2009. The Gulf has 7,000 active leases; 64% are in deepwater (greater than 1,000 feet). But, in March of this year, there were only 25 wells in deep water, as compared to over 3500 in depths less than 1,000 feet. Nearly 4,000 wells have been drilled in depths greater than 1,000 feet and 700 in depths greater than 5,000 feet. This suggests a very low rate of finding oil. One source suggested that two-thirds of all drilled wells were never put into production because of a finding that there was not enough oil to make it profitable. (See Caesar below).
Exploration, production and transportation are conducted with an extraordinarily complex array of equipment and machinery. One of the hallmarks of the industry’s leaders is a more or less endless race to build bigger, drill deeper and claim world records along the way. It’s not yet clear if BP will claim the record for the biggest spill. Some of the nature of this strange state of affairs is reflected in the names given to the projects and drill sites in the Gulf—including Atlantis, Mad Dog, Thunder Horse (previously Crazy Horse), and Blind Faith.
In 1996, Royal Dutch Shell installed Bullwinkle, all 1,736 feet of it, standing in 1,350 feet of water, in the Gulf.[5] Bullwinkle was taller than what was then the world’s tallest building, Chicago’s Sears Tower, but only 262 feet was above the water. The newest drills, even newer than the Deepwater Horizon, are being designed to operate in 12,000 feet of water and to drill 40,000 feet below the sea floor. Their size matches their reach. By way of example, Transocean’s new Discoverer Clear Leader is classified as a 6th generation deepwater rig—part of what the company calls its ultra-deepwater fleet. It was built in Okpo, South Korea in 2009. It has a length of 835 feet and a breadth of 125 feet. Its derrick is 225 feet tall with an 80 foot base. It can house up to 200 workers.
Another rig, named Perdido, is operated by Shell. It was put into service in 2008. It’s not a ship; it floats in the water and is anchored to the sea floor by giant cables. It is 550 feet long and 118 feet wide. According to one gushing report, it’s nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and weighs as much as 10,000 cars. It was built in Finland (at a cost of $3 billion) and towed to Texas. You can see what it looks like and how it was put into place in this video clip:
Perdido is designed to pump oil from 35 wells stretched across 30 miles. The rig is lighter than others because the process that separates the oil from water, grease and various heavy metals takes place on the sea floor, instead of on the rig, and the oil is pumped directly into a pipeline system that leads to an on-shore refinery. Another example of the invisibility of oil production!
In case you were wondering, all of the equipment in deep water is installed, maintained and repaired by remote controlled submersibles—controlled by people at computer terminals on the rig or on land. Human beings cannot work at the depths of the wells.
In most cases, oil rigs are not owned by the exploration companies; instead they’re leased from companies like Transocean. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, the rig was leased to a BP-led consortium that also included Texas-based Anadarko and a wholly owned US subsidiary of Mitsui in Japan. A tangled web indeed!
I haven’t mentioned it yet but there is something else that almost everyone knows about the Gulf of Mexico—it has hurricanes. Not surprisingly, hurricanes pose a serious threat to the drilling structures. In 2005, hundreds of platforms and pipelines were destroyed by hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
In spite of the advanced technological wizardry and the incredible power of the machines involved, control over work remains the same as in the sweat shop—the boss orders you to do what he wants. And, not surprisingly, that results in injuries and death, even without a disaster:
- A 2008 CDC (Center for Disease Control) report said that the overall fatality rate for workers in the oil and gas extraction industry was “approximately seven times the rate for all workers” between 2003 and 2006, with many deaths caused by accidents involving machinery and pipes.
- The Minerals Management Service reported that there had been 1,298 accidents on rigs and platforms between 2006 and 2009—as well as 30 deaths.
Before we leave the Gulf oil scene, let’s note three important realities. First, according to one insider report, oil companies stopped investing in staff and in oil drilling technologies during various down periods in oil process. As a result, they rely on multiple contractors (such as Transocean and Halliburton) to provide the technical expertise that they lack. This, according to many reports in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, results in a situation where no one is in charge and no one is responsible (more about that topic below). Second, the increasing computerization of the oil exploration and production processes in the deepwater environment has shifted the responsibility for decisions away from people on the ground (I meant to say water) who might have genuine knowledge about local conditions to people reading data produced by software, written by still other people with little knowledge of the actual geology or physics of the sea floor. Third, the expansion of offshore oil production was prompted, not surprisingly, by high oil prices. But the construction of the offshore rigs and the exploratory work takes time and money and, once again not so surprisingly, the timing is not always right—just when the well is ready to start producing, the price of oil could drop. What’s a poor oil company to do? Most of the time, it will keep on producing. Since time is money, when you want to make more money, you want to spend less time–which is what BP wanted to do in April of 2010!
The Spill, The Cleanup and The Aftermath
The Spill
I won’t rehearse the well-reported details of the events leading up to the explosion.5
Suffice it to say that it was apparently clear to more than a few of those on board the rig that things were not being done the way they should have been and that behind all of the bad decisions was–MONEY. The Deepwater Horizon was an expensive piece of equipment and it was taking a long time to get the drilling of the well completed. The well was more than forty days behind schedule by April and each day that went by apparently cost BP between $800,000 and $1 million. There was a good deal of pressure to get things done and numerous warnings were ignored. The most illuminating account of what led up to the explosion and what the explosion was like has been authored by Ed Caesar in a special report for The Sunday Times in London on September 12th. Let me mention a few of what I thought were important revelations in his article:
- BP apparently finances the companies, like Transocean, that then do the drilling work—meaning that those drilling companies are beholden to the big oil companies for their ability to build and operate the rigs.
- BP was not planning to start production from the Macondo well any time soon. It had apparently confirmed that there was lots of oil and was going to cap the well and hold it in reserve for connection to its pipeline system sometime in the future. The rush to complete was, therefore, not exactly a rush to produce. (We should not, however, assume that it will never return to the source).
- The blowout occurred “because those responsible for this well failed to control pressure. At three miles beneath the seabed, where the Deepwater Horizon was drilling, the pressure from the surrounding rocks is so great you could crush a double-decker bus to the size of a shoebox. ….If you fail to control these extreme forces, you can start producing oil and gas in unsafe conditions. And, if you start producing oil and gas, and all the safety barriers between the reservoir and the rig fail, you have a blowout.”
- Gas from the blowout was sucked into the rig’s diesel engines, which caused at least two explosions and a horrifying fire, which was visible from 145 miles away.
Although I believe that this has been reported previously and many readers may know about it, the surviving workers were kept on a nearby service boat and were forbidden to use phones or radios. They didn’t arrive on land until twenty-eight hours after they were pulled out of the water. Then they were “strongly encouraged” to sign a document which reads: “I was not a witness to the incident requiring the evacuation and have no first-hand or personal knowledge regarding the incident. I was not injured as a result of the incident or evacuation (quoted in Caesar).” Apparently even those individuals who were in the hospital were encouraged to sign. It appears clear that BP was not prepared for the technical consequences of a blowout, the human consequences of an explosion or the environmental consequences of a massive spill (see below) but it was very well prepared for the financial, legal and public relations consequences of all of the above.
Caesar focused attention on the story of Jason Anderson, one of the eleven dead. Anderson had the second highest Transocean position on the well and he had become increasingly worried about what might happen. He had confided in his father (a veteran oil worker) and his wife. Just before he returned to the rig for the last time, he and his wife re-wrote their wills and talked about decisions regarding their children’s future. He told his father, “If they keep this up, they will kill every one of us.”
This heart-breaking story invites a question—a big one: Why did workers who knew that so much was wrong and that they were in great danger keep going back to work? I’ll return to that in the last section.
The Cleanup
The cleanup consisted of five principal activities—
1.Skimming (or scooping up) and burning of oil, especially near the spill site;
2.Spraying of dispersants to break up the oil—meaning that smaller particles would drop to the sea floor where ever-ready microbes were invited to an imaginary feast;
3. Spreading of containment booms along the shorelines to capture oil coming in with the tides;
cleaning up the beaches, and
4.Covering up as much as possible.
The least objectionable of the cleanup activities were the skimming and burning. In those cases, the oil being collected or burned off was no longer in the water. On the other hand, the use of dispersants could very well turn out to the making of a prolonged assault against the environment and all its inhabitants. BP sprayed enormous quantities (at least 1.8 million gallons) of what many consider to be poisonous dispersants (Corexit 9500 and 9527). Initially, the spraying was done fairly far off shore by plane but there are now reports from Mississippi that in August, BP furtively deployed private contractors in small boats, specifically contractors from out-of-state that were not involved in the very public containment boom effort, named the Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) program, to spray close to the land. Indeed, it appears that local residents working on the cleanup were being used to find oil that was then sprayed, rather than to skim that oil.6 This suggests that BP, with the close cooperation and support of the Coast Guard, was doing everything possible to make things look far better than they really were.
But the price of this sinister magic act is going to be steep. Corexit, manufactured by Nalco (a company that provides high technology chemicals and services for the oil industry), is nasty stuff—so much so that, in the days immediately after the explosion, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) ruled that it should only be used in “extremely rare” situations. But the Coast Guard routinely approved BP’s requests to spray. Anne McClintock summarized what Corexit does:
The main ingredient in Corexit is 2-Butoxyethenol, which is toxic to blood, kidneys, liver and the central nervous system. Corexit is mutagenic for bacteria, huge amounts of which live in the Gulf of Mexico. Corexit ruptures red blood cells and accumulates as it moves up the food chain. The EPA, reluctant at first to release data, eventually conceded that Corexit is lethal for 50% of any group of test animals that comes in contact with it. Even the Department of Transportation classifies Corexit as “Class 6.1: Poisonous Material” for transportation purposes. The risks of Corexit to humans, the fragile marsh ecosystems and marine life are potentially staggering. Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and tireless community activist, has testified meeting people all over the Gulf who are showing symptoms: “headaches, dizziness, sore throats, burning eyes, rashes and blisters that go so deep, they are leaving scars.” Dispersants have never been used in such quantities before, or at such depths in the ocean, or on open marshland. Dispersants are so dangerous because they accumulate up the food chain. Fiddler crabs absorb the toxins in their muscles and are then eaten by birds. Coyotes and feral pigs eat the bird corpses. Pelicans absorb the toxins from fish and even lightly oiled pelicans ingest the oil through their constant preening. Larger marine life like tuna, dolphins and whales carry the greatest lethal loads. Stories have been told by fishermen finding vast, floating graveyards of birds, dolphins and whale corpses near the Macondo well site, which, they say, are secretly disposed of at night.7
BP did employ a small army of cleaners—including some prison labor in Alabama (for which it received federal subsidies for providing work-release opportunities). However, the beach cleanup has been described as a Keystone Kops routine. In late June, Julia Reed wrote:
Last week was supposed to be the week the president finally got out in front of the oil spill. It was supposed to be the week when he stopped trying to figure out whose ass to kick and just get on with it. But here we are on Day 64 of the oil spill and still there is no sense that someone—anyone—is in charge. That has been the case on the ground from day one. The shore cleanup that BP contracted and subcontracted out is a tragic joke. Teams of untrained, barely employable (sic) folks are bused into Grand Isle from nearby parishes to “patrol” the beach for tar balls. They put a handful of tar balls into enormous clear plastic bags and mostly take breaks beneath the docks and in the air-conditioned food tents, since it is stultifyingly hot. They are not trained to tell the difference between a tar ball and a jellyfish; worse, they are inadvertently trampling sensitive bird breeding grounds. After they leave, another crew comes and rounds up the bags and trucks them off (again over sensitive marshland and breeding grounds); last week came word that the majority of these bags containing hazardous oil waste were being dumped next to a Houma Indian reservation. These workers are not allowed to speak to reporters, which brings us to one of the countless appalling aspects of the spill response. BP has been effectively banning press coverage with our own government’s collusion. A photographer from the New Orleans Times-Picayune was banned by the FAA from flying over the spill to take pictures.8
An NBC reporter, cited in the same account, suggested that the cleanup was the “equivalent of trying to clean the Superdome with a toothbrush.”
It seems clear that cleaning up the spill was never quite the goal. That goal might better be described as clearing up the spill—in other words, making it go away, even if it didn’t really go away–for both short-term publicity purposes and long-term legal ones.
The Aftermath
In the weeks and months after the explosion and especially after the drill was plugged, there was a great deal of conflicting testimony about the extent of damage to the waters and to the living creatures who inhabit the water or depend on its products for food. A very confident report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on August 4th proclaimed that the majority of the oil had been burned, skimmed, dispersed, recovered or evaporated. That rosy picture has been challenged by a number of independent scientists, including oceanographer and veteran Gulf researcher, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia. In the middle of August, based on work tracking oil plumes below the surface, Joye and a colleague published a memo which asserted that three-fourths of the oil (or at least three million gallons) was still in the ecosystem. In mid-September, Joye reported on her more recent research in areas of up to 80 miles from the well. She found evidence of oil in both shallow and deep waters.9
According to a New York Times editorial on September 20th, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration appeared ready to concede that its earlier estimate might have been premature and announced that it would conduct a new systematic study to measure the oil and to assess its impact. It would, of course, be better by far if the damage turns out to be less rather than more but such a result should not provide any reassurance that this spill was not one more very serious assault against the Gulf. Indeed, even as I finished this essay, I came across a TV report from Louisiana that many thousands of dead fish had been found in Bayou Chaland in Plaquemines Parish. In all likelihood, the oil spill will slowly disappear from the news reports but its left-overs will not disappear from the Gulf.
Truth and Consequences
Although Ed Caesar’s article from the Sunday Times that I referred to above is very informative, at the end it comes up short on at least one important matter. He argues that the oil spill was “completely avoidable.” By that he means that it is evident that careless maintenance of equipment, cutting corners on various recommended steps to ensure the integrity of the well and ignoring the advice of people who knew what was going on—in a volatile marine and geological environment–all came together to result in a disaster. At one level, of course, he’s right–this disaster could have been avoided. But, and this is a big but, the accumulation of disasters is part and parcel of the contemporary world scene. One or another accident might be avoided but the logic that produces disasters is inescapable.
In an essay intended to introduce the writings of Amadeo Bordiga, an Italian communist, on the disastrous consequences of capitalist production, on the Antagonism web site, the authors commented that, “Capitalism produces disasters almost as fast as it produces commodities.” They suggested that it’s useful to think about disasters as “massacres that take place without deliberate planning.” And then they go on:
The massacres here are unplanned only in the sense that no date was set in advance, or orders given to shoot. In this sense disasters are different from wars. Yet the possibility of catastrophe is planned for whenever unnecessary risks are taken in the planning of new buildings, industrial processes or machines, or when environmental or biological processes are left to take their course without intervention that could prevent them or minimize their impact. Disasters come in different forms. There are slow-motion disasters, an accumulation of deaths in ones and twos that add up to mass carnage. …. Then there are sudden accidents resulting in mass casualties caused by technical failures of machines or buildings, such as train or plane crashes. Finally there are natural disasters featuring environmental factors such as floods and droughts, but often with social causes.
Although the emphasis in the lines above was on disasters resulting in human deaths, I believe the analysis is easily enough re-worked to make sense of the oil spill. It was a sudden accident that took place in the context of a slow motion disaster that resulted in human deaths and a likely environmental disaster. To the extent that the oil spill in the Gulf is followed, more or less rapidly, by a return to production as usual, it is all but certain that the slow death of the Gulf will proceed on schedule—unless and until there’s another accident which becomes a disaster.
Bordiga points to essential characteristics of capitalist production that result in a tendency towards disaster; they are the embrace of supposed expertise linked to the specialization of labor and the capitalization of science. Both seem relevant to the Gulf spill. Bordiga, who had been trained as an engineer, acknowledged that some design problems could be solved through modeling in the laboratory. But not all! Thus:
The geological problem is not one for the smoking saloon or the test tank. It is one of lengthy human experience based on the proofs of historical building. Human and social experience. For all modern engineering, in so far as it makes things which are not pocket-sized or cars, constructing things fixed to the Earth’s crust, the key problem is the land/building relationship (for a simple house, the foundations). There are no perennially valid formulae but instead many skillful applications to choose from after gaining hard-learnt experience. Taking a big salary and smoking in front of the computer is not sufficient. This experience ripens over the centuries: whoever believes in progress and in the jest that last season’s latest discovery contains the wisdom of all time, may get a big salary, but causes disasters, statistics for which, and they alone, show progress. … At the bottom of these reckless projects [he was talking about dams in Italy], dictated and imposed by the hunger for profit, by an economic law to which all the navies, the surveyor and chief engineer must all bow, for which reason it is foolish remedy to uncover the guilty party at an inquest, lies the most idiotic of modern cults, the cult of specialization. Not only is it inhuman to hunt down the scapegoat, but also vain, since one has allowed this stupid productive society to arise, made of separate sections. No one is guilty because, if someone takes off the blindfold for a moment, he can say that he gave advice requested by the next section, that he was the expert, the specialist, the competent person.10 Marx Once Again
On a number of occasions in Capital, Marx described various interactions among humans and between humans and nature as having the character of a metabolism. In this instance, he is discussing the labor process:
The labor process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live (Volume I, 290).
At the same time, Marx makes clear that the labor process is not the same in all situations. Specifically, when the labor process becomes a process by which a capitalist consumes labor power, the “worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labor belongs” and the product is the property of the capitalist:
… the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s worth of labour-power; then the right to use that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity, such as a horse he had hired for a day. The use of a commodity belongs to its purchaser, and the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality than part with the use-value he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation, into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belongs to him. From his point of view, the labour process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i.e. of labour-power; but he can consume this labour-power only by adding the means of production to it. The labour process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him. Thus the product of this process belongs to him just as much as the wine which is the product of fermentation going on in his cellar (291-292).
Marx had previously explained that the means of production included the instruments of labor (tools and machines) and the objects of labor (materials either spontaneously provided by nature or natural materials processed through previous labor). He wrote: “An instrument of labour is a thing, or complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes” (285).
A page before, in a famous passage, Marx had celebrated the uniqueness of human labor:
A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials.
But then he changes his tone:
And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be (284).
In a few sentences, we have gone from the wonder of an architect’s imagination to the need to pay close attention to something you hate to do. The move is from the possibilities of free creation to the realities of wage slavery.
Human labor, subordinated to capital, is alienated—as is the science used by capital in its relentless pursuit of surplus value through production. In a footnote in Volume III, Marx observed:
Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means prevents him from exploiting it. ‘Alien’ science is incorporated by capital just as ‘alien’ labour is. But ‘capitalist’ appropriation and ‘personal’ appropriation, whether of science or material wealth, are totally different things. Dr. Ure himself deplores the gross ignorance of mechanical science which exists among his beloved machinery-exploiting manufacturers, and Liebig can tell us about the astounding ignorance of chemistry displayed by English chemical manufacturers (508-509).11
Ignorance aside, commodity production promotes and is sustained by a dramatic increase in circulation which, in turn, transforms the ways in which human beings stand in relation to each other and to nature. “…the circuit made by one commodity in the course of its metamorphoses is inextricably entwined with the circuit of other commodities (Volume I, 207). Marx further comments:
… the exchange of commodities breaks through all of the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, and develops the metabolic process of human labour. On the other hand, there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents (207).
In Volume III, Marx approvingly cites the findings of von Liebig, who described a “rift” in that metabolism:
…large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country (949).
Many years earlier, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx had written:
Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.
But Marx had a complex understanding of nature:
With the exception of the extractive industries, such as mining, hunting, fishing (and agriculture, but only in so far as it starts by breaking up virgin soil), where the material for labour is provided directly by nature, all branches of industry deal with raw material, i.e., an object of labour which has already been filtered through labour, which is itself already a product of labour. An example is seed in agriculture. Animals and plants which are accustomed to consider as products of nature, may be, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour but the result of a gradual transformation continued through many generations under human control, and through the agency of human labour (Volume I, 287-288).
Thus, while society is in nature, nature is also in society.
Finally, Marx was, among other things, genuinely attentive to the need to preserve what had been passed down:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household] (Volume III, 911).
The advances made possible through the application of science and technology have brought us to the brink. As was first suggested more than a hundred years ago, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. The Gulf disaster, and the on-going disasters elsewhere, hint at how the barbaric alternative will announce itself. We remain in need of some new examples for how the socialist alternative might be advanced instead. And we need them sooner rather than later.
Although capitalism is obviously characterized by the accumulation of extraordinary wealth by a relative handful, that is not the essence of the beast. The fact of the matter is that the majority of shares in BP might very well be held on behalf of the pensions of millions of English workers—who wouldn’t want to hurt a feather on the wing of a pelican in the Gulf, let alone make life miserable for the people who live around the Gulf. But capitalism goes on just the same—no matter if the owner is a Rockefeller with a top hat (or more currently, a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet with their humanitarian commitments) or many un-named millions of workers, turned into unwitting accomplices in the reproduction of their own misery.
What people are willing to put up with depends on circumstances. In the US, almost forty years of a slow wearing down of wages, benefits and working conditions have increasingly resulted in workers being willing to put up with almost anything—even the possibility or likelihood of death. When Jason Anderson and his wife re-wrote their wills, they weren’t doing something very different from what many millions of people in this country do every day—they hope for the best while they prepare for the worst. I don’t think that we’re going to convince very many workers, even those who are going out to rigs as dangerous as the Deepwater Horizon, that they should change their minds. In general, we don’t change our minds because someone convinces us that we’re wrong. The fact of the matter is that most of us are never wrong! Instead, we change our minds when the worlds we live in change. But it doesn’t happen automatically. The world of the people who live around the Gulf of Mexico has changed (probably for a long time). What they make of those changes remains to be seen.
Ultimately, it’s not a problem of the mind; it’s a problem of the will. Whose will is it that keeps us going the way we are? The will of capital, albeit a capital that’s been refurbished for our modern times. That will cloaks itself in the garb of progress, science and technology. At the same time, it justifies itself by the invocation, in the developed countries and those (like China) on the fast track to development, of an apparently all but incontrovertible need to maintain “our way of life.” That way of life threatens to fairly quickly become a threat to the possibility of life in any form that we would want to be part of.
But this is no argument that the real cause of environmental degradation lies with the individuals who drive cars or chill their homes. There is a great deal of what we have become accustomed to that will have to be reconsidered and there is a great deal to be gained by individuals and various communities experimenting with new ways of living now that could serve as potentially valuable models for what we might decide to do. But the root cause of the degradation lies with the on-going transformation of human labor power into a hostile power that increasingly dominates all aspects of human life.
- 1 BP is not alone in its efforts to double-cross. Mitsui (a Japan-based multi-national company), which owned a stake in the well, has refused to pay BP $480 million for its share of the costs incurred in the effort to stop the spill and clean up the Gulf.
- 2 The eleven men were Jason Anderson (Midfield, Texas), Dale Burkeen (Philadelphia, Mississippi), Donald Clark (Newellton, Louisiana), Stephen Curtis (Georgetown, Louisiana), Gordon James (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), Wyatt Kemp (Jonesville, Louisiana), Karl Kleppinger, Jr. ( Natchez, Mississipp), Blair Manuel (Gonzales, Louisiana), Dewey Revette (State Line, Mississippi), Shane Roshto (Liberty, Mississippi), Adam Weise (Yorktown, Texas). A video gallery of their photos and brief biographies is available at CNN
- 3See Slow Violence and the BP Coverups.
- 4 Lee Raymond, Chairman and CEO, ExxonMobil, February 2003, quoted in Crude World, p. 119.
- 5Much has been made of the lack of powerful oversight by the government as a result of the cozy relationship between the oil companies and the leadership and staff of the Minerals Management Service, especially in the Gulf. That is undoubtedly true.
- 6See Evidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants for details.
- 7See Slow Violence and the BP Coverups.
- 8 See The BP Oil Spill: Keystone Kop Kleanup?
- 9See Joye’s blog at Focusing in on oil.
- 10Murdering the dead: Amadeo Bordiga on capitalism and other disasters – Antagonism.
- 11 Andrew Ure was a doctor, a chemist, an author and an apologist for large-scale industry. Marx frequently made use of his work but was very critical of his views. Justus von Liebig, was a chemist, from whom Marx apparently borrowed the concept of metabolism.
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Auto industry strikes in China - Lance Carter
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Lance Carter gives an account and analysis of the hugely successful wildcat strike wave at mostly Japanese-owned auto factories in China, 2010. From Insurgent Notes #2.
Between May and July of this year a series of high-profile strikes in foreign-owned auto parts plants spread throughout China’s coastal regions. Strikes in China are nothing new, but the recent strike wave was remarkable in at least three respects: the amount of concessions granted to workers; the degree of publicity it initially received in the Chinese media; and the prospects for showcase union reform that it has helped push onto the agenda. Although the strikes were directed primarily at unfair wages, there were some attempts to address the more political question of union representation. Workers that I spoke with who had participated in strikes at Honda factories had clearly been politicized by the events and were well aware of strikes occurring throughout China’s auto industry.
The first and only strike to make headlines in the Chinese press began on May 17th and lasted until June 4th. It took place at Honda’s Nanhai factory in Foshan, Guangdong. The strike was kicked off by two workers from the factory’s assembly division. Well aware of their central position within the production line, these two young workers were quickly joined by the rest of the assembly division and were able to suspend production throughout almost the entire factory.1 Their actions sparked over two weeks of protest which at its height gained the support of some 1,900 workers. The strike eventually stopped production at four Honda assembly plants and went on to inspire at least eleven large-scale strikes in other foreign-owned auto factories.2 Was this strike wave the result of mere spontaneity? Why were the strikes so ubiquitous in the auto industry? And why did they take place in mostly Japanese-owned (or Japanese-invested) factories?
Although the Nanhai Honda strike was uniformly presented as the spark that ignited the fire, according to a report from the Hong Kong Liaison Office of the ITUC/GUF,3 the Nanhai strike was actually a culmination of industrial unrest in related enterprises which began a year earlier in June of 2009.4 Such information is important in showing that much about the Nanhai strike was only slightly unique to the auto industry and was more than just a reaction to the spontaneous decision of two young workers. The strike wave should first be understood within the context of increasing social unrest nationwide since the early 1990s. Between 1993 and the years 2004 and 2005, the Ministry of Public Security recorded an increase from 8,700 incidents of social unrest nationwide to 74,000 and 87,000 incidents respectively.5 Because of the negative implications of such statistics, the Ministry of Public Security stopped publishing them after 2006. In addition, the recent strike wave was concentrated within the Pearl River Delta (the heart of Chinese industry) which has seen a peak of labor unrest since 2003. Although the Pearl River Delta is known for its high percentage of labor disputes handled through legal means, the region is certainly not without its share of protests and strikes. In Shenzhen city alone there were sixty cases of strikes recorded as early as 1993, and 110 cases of specifically large-scale strikes for the year 1999.6 In the larger Guangdong region, one report documented 182 cases of strikes involving over 400 people between 1994 and 1995.7
While the recent strikes are clearly not without precedent, the amount of attention and support from the media went well beyond established protocol. The Nanhai strike began receiving coverage in the Chinese press within the first week of its appearance. Because Nanhai is a transmissions plant, the strike caused production to come to a halt at three assembly plants in Guangzhou on the 25th and one in Wuhan on the 27th. Following the suspension of production at these other Honda factories the Western media began to take notice. The Ministry of Propaganda then issued instructions to pull coverage of the strike on May 28th.8 In spite of this, the local Guangdong media continued to cover the strike up until its conclusion. On May 31st, after 200 thugs affiliated with the local trade union physically assaulted a group of workers, the Nanhai strike turned into a national incident. Letters from the trade union, sympathetic academics, and the striking workers themselves were all published in the mainland press. Meanwhile, all this was transpiring within a climate of outrage over the treatment of workers at Foxconn Technology (a Taiwanese-owned electronics manufacturer with operations in Shenzhen). The Chinese media thus played a key role in presenting the Nanhai strike as not only erupting without precedent but more importantly as a heroic struggle by migrant workers for just compensation and respect. The fact that this was allowed to take place at all reflects a tacit approval by the Central Government in favor of the worker’s demands. In short, it was not so much the Nanhai Honda strike itself but the degree of publicity and support the strike received in the Chinese media that made it truly remarkable.
This is important to note because it was precisely this publicity that lent confidence to other workers in the auto industry and throughout the country at large. Honda’s decision to raise the wages of Nanhai employees by ¥500 per month (around a 33% increase) and the publication of this information in various Guangdong newspapers established a standard by which other Honda workers could measure their own grievances. The proximity of auto parts factories in the Pearl River Delta allows for word of mouth to function as a rudimentary form of communication between enterprises. As a result, copycat strikes erupted throughout the industry. Although the Chinese press was ordered to stop reporting subsequent strikes, Hong Kong and Western media were able to provide information on these strikes for the various Chinese internet forums which sprang up in response to the struggle. In this way, labor unrest was able to spread to at least eleven other factories in the auto industry.
I went down to the Pearl River Delta toward the end of July, after the last reported strike had ended. In addition to meeting with workers and various labor NGOs, I was able to spend a day walking around the industrial district of Xiaolan. Xiaolan is the manufacturing town in Zhongshan where the Honda Lock workers went on strike. Gated factory complexes, many employing over 10,000 workers, ran endlessly along the industrial district’s main strip. About a third of the vehicles I saw on the road were shipping trucks. And I was told that workers who are not native to Xiaolan—and therefore have no residence permit—make up sixty percent of the population.
From June 9th to June 18th, Honda Lock workers in Xiaolan went on strike in defiance of management. Like Nanhai Honda, Honda Lock was one of the few strikes where workers demanded the reelection of union officials. Unlike the Nanhai strike however, management decided to take a hard-line stance and workers were forced to retreat from many of their original demands. After six days of struggle and three days of waiting,9 workers at Honda Lock finally settled for a meager ¥200 pay increase and an ¥80 housing subsidy per month. This puts Honda Lock on a par with only the Toyota Gosei strike in Tianjin in the minimal amount of concessions won. The strike was described to me rather candidly by one worker as “a failure.” Demands for union reelections were never seriously addressed, as they were at Nanhai. Instead, workers were told that “the company has no authority over such matters.” This seems incredibly two-faced being that Honda Lock is a joint venture with thirty percent ownership held by the Xiaolan government! On the other hand, that is precisely why the strike had so much difficulty succeeding.
Such attempts to voice more overt political demands are in need of some clarification. As far as we know, calls to restructure enterprise-level unions were put forth at Nanhai Honda, Honda Lock, and Denso. However, this was misinterpreted by many foreign journalists as calls for fully independent unions. There is an important distinction here. The only legal union in China is the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Though nominally an independent union, in reality the ACFTU acts as a quasi-governmental organization. Enterprise-level unions are very often chaired by CCP cadre and (or) management. However, the right of workers to reelect enterprise union officials is protected under Chinese labor law. As Anita Chan pointed out in her article on the strikes, there is a significant difference between demanding a restructuring of the factory union and the right to establish a union independent of the ACFTU.10 Workers who expressed this demand therefore were acting within the purview of their legal rights. Unfortunately, such demands constitute much less of a political challenge than what was presented in the foreign press.
Another area in need of clarification is the question of why the strike wave was largely confined to Japanese-owned enterprises. Though some commentators speculated that this was related to some lingering resentment toward the Japanese,11 in actuality the strikes had nothing to do with nationalism. A better explanation is that auto industry workers simply became more aware of their bargaining power as a result of the victory at Nanhai. This then emboldened workers affiliated with Honda to push for similar demands.
A second possible explanation is that strikes occurring in Japanese factories received unbalanced coverage in the media and, in reality, were proportionally somewhat less than they appeared to be. Journalists have better access to information from Japanese firms than they do from either Chinese firms or the local Communist Party. In addition, many newspapers would be more interested in Chinese labor unrest within the formidable Japanese auto industry than within some other sector. It is thus possible that the strike wave was much bigger than what was reported. This point is supported by the findings of the ITUC/GUF report as well as the numerous hints of unrest taking place outside the auto industry that were scattered throughout Western newspapers. Though it seems safe to say that the majority of disputes did occur in Japanese-owned auto parts plants, the strike wave was by no means exclusive to this grouping.
Finally, Japanese lean production techniques certainly played a role in the ability of workers to force demands on management.12 Lean production is a cost-cutting strategy based primarily on just-in-time delivery of parts and the subcontracting of low-tiered workers. An assembly worker I spoke with from the Nanhai Honda factory was very conscious of not only the importance of factory interns in saving labor costs to the company but also the pivotal role of his assembly division within production. “The whole factory looked to us for leadership; cause when we stop, they stop,” he recalled. Though workers seemed unaware that lean production techniques are a trade mark of the Japanese auto industry, some obviously understand that certain ways of organizing production are more vulnerable to disruption than others. This knowledge no doubt strengthened workers’ confidence in their own bargaining power and may be another reason why so many Japanese auto parts factories were targeted.
On the whole, the strike wave of May, June, and July was an overwhelming success. Despite minimal concessions awarded to Honda Lock and Toyota Gosei, all other factories for which there is information won considerable pay increases. Not only that but pay increases increasingly rose from the ¥500 won at Nanhai Honda, to the ¥800-¥900 won at Denso, to the high of ¥980-¥1420 awarded to Atsumitec workers. Although demands to restructure factory unions largely fell on deaf ears, workers from Nanhai Honda went ahead with reelections of their union chairman on September 1st.13 In addition, the strikes seem to have given those in favor of union reform the upper hand in Guangdong province.14 While the latter may mean little to rank-and-file workers, it is a testament to the threat autonomous worker’s struggles—particularly those within the auto industry—present to the stability of the “communist” regime.
Honda and the Auto Industry in China
Honda moved production to China in 1992. It began as a joint venture in cooperation with the state-owned enterprise Dongfeng Motor. Though initially involved in making motorcycle parts, Honda eventually turned its focus to auto parts production and assembly. As part of China’s attempt to protect domestic industries, the government requires foreign firms investing in the auto assembly sector to establish 50-50 joint ventures with Chinese firms. This however does not apply to firms involved in component parts production.15 Over time, this led to a situation where Honda shifted a huge percentage of its auto parts production to China and to Guangdong province in particular. Though now promoted as a profit maximizing strategy, Honda today has the highest percentage of core parts coming from locally sourced suppliers—many of them Honda subsidiaries—of any foreign automobile enterprise operating in China.16 Having so many factories concentrated in one region needless to say makes Honda more vulnerable to large-scale industrial unrest. This may be another reason why strikes in Honda factories were so pervasive.
A second area of vulnerability which workers were able to take advantage of is the technical division of labor between factories. As witnessed at Nanhai Honda, Fengfu Honda, Denso, and NHK Spring (all component parts factories) the downing of tools brought production to a halt at affiliated assembly plants. Because of the way the Japanese auto industry is structured, component parts are supplied directly to assembly factories on a regular, if not daily, basis. There are no storage warehouses for parts to sit in and lay idle. Such techniques are known as “just-in-time” delivery systems (JIT). They were pioneered by Toyota in the 1980s. Though saving on production costs, they are also highly vulnerable to disruption at the point of supply and shipping. During the strike wave, Chinese workers learned quickly how disruptions of this kind attract media attention and enhance their bargaining power.
Both the local sourcing of component parts and JIT delivery systems are integral to the Japanese auto industry’s strategy of increasing output while keeping down labor costs. These are known as “lean production techniques.” As mentioned earlier, an important aspect of lean production is the subcontracting of workers from lower tiers of production. This means separating the workforce into essentially two groups—skilled and well paid core workers on the one hand and unskilled, underpaid, and temporary base laborers on the other. In China, this strategy was broadly adopted within the auto industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s.17 Although designed to improve flexibility without laying off elderly workers, this subcontracting system creates a hierarchy of labor which is incredibly effective at undermining worker’s solidarity. During the Nanhai strike, Honda management made repeated attempts to divide interns from formal workers by appealing to the acute grievances of the interns. At one point students from the interns’ schools were even sent to the factory to convince interns, who constituted one third of the workforce, to settle for management’s offer.18 Fortunately, at Nanhai such attempts were unsuccessful.
According to some analysts, a tiered labor system within the Japanese auto industry in China is becoming increasingly harder to maintain.19 In order to sustain current rates of productivity, firms are being forced to cut into the relative security of core workers, pushing them into the lower tiers and deskilling them in the process. While this obviously lessens the bargaining power of labor within the market, it also helps to dismantle workforce hierarchies and therefore should increase worker solidarity. This trend may have been in evidence at Honda Lock where workers were primarily unskilled. On the one hand, Honda Lock was very effective in taking a hard-line position against employees seen as replaceable. On the other hand, workers showed a fair degree of solidarity and were infuriated by management’s repeated attempts to hire strike breakers and force workers to chose between a pitiful ¥100 wage increase or being fired.
Although the central concern of the strikes was to secure higher wages and bonuses, Chinese autoworkers—and assembly workers in particular—are generally paid a reasonable wage. Working conditions in auto assembly plants are also decent, though this is less true of component parts factories. In recent years however autoworker salaries have slightly decreased while wages in other manufacturing sectors have increased.20 This seems to suggest that the strike wave had more to do with maintaining respectable wages relative to other industries than to material want in an absolute sense. With that being said, it is important to note that only one of the factories that went on strike was an assembly plant,21 all other factories were component parts suppliers and affiliates. This would suggest that grievances among workers from auto parts factories—where work is likely to be less skilled, less well paid, and conditions less satisfactory—are generally greater than those of workers from assembly plants.
While Honda and Toyota suffered tremendous profit losses thanks to the strikes, in this instance Chinese autoworker demands for increased wages inadvertently converged with the aims of the central government. The CCP’s 12th Fifth Year Plan (2011-2015), scheduled to be passed this fall, recognizes the importance of raising wages as a share of GDP. If China’s economy continues to grow at current levels of investment, her production capacity will eventually outstrip global demand. Thus, it is necessary for China to move from an export driven economy to a more balanced model based on greater domestic consumption. Wages will play a key role in helping to increase this consumption. Following the resolution of the Nanhai strike, both the Shenzhen government and the Beijing Municipal Government announced they were raising local minimum wage by ten percent and twenty percent respectively.22 Since January of this year, over half of China’s provinces have declared similar increases in the minimum wage. Thus, while workers were in no way manipulated by the CCP to go on strike, their calls for partaking in a greater share of the wealth were no doubt met with sympathy by certain factions within the government.
The Chinese economy is fueled by the sweat of cheap migrant labor. These laborers are generally born and raised in the countryside where income from agriculture can barely support a family. As a result, they move to the cities to look for work. However, as formal residents of the countryside they cannot enjoy the social welfare benefits awarded to urban residents. They are thus effectively an underclass and are often treated as such by people from the city. Migrant workers in China currently number over 210 million.23 Statistics from 2005 indicate that migrant labor comprised 57.5 percent of the Chinese industrial sector and 37 percent of the service sector for that year.24 In the Pearl River Delta however this percentage is much higher.
Migrants in the Pearl River Delta divide into roughly three categories. Around ten percent are actually urban workers, often former employees of the State Owned Enterprises. These migrants tend to be older, skilled workers and have usually received a decent education. The other ninety percent of migrant workers are from the countryside—thirty percent being farmers and sixty percent being former students. It is often suggested that because migrant workers from the countryside own farmland and plan to return to it in the future they are less likely to get involved in serious and protracted labor disputes in the cities. While this generalization may be true of older migrant workers who know how to farm, it is certainly not the case with former students from the countryside. Young workers, fresh out of high school and vocational college, form the majority of migrants in the Pearl River Delta. These workers not only lack the skills to engage in agriculture, but are often unable to be supported by the family farm. In addition, they see a farmer’s life as a considerable step backward in light of the education they have received. Former student workers thus form a peculiar group whose long-term interests are bound to the city yet who are unable to obtain the social benefits of urban residents.25 It was precisely this group of workers that showed its teeth so ferociously during the strike wave.
During my visit to the Pearl River Delta I had the chance to sit down with a migrant worker who had participated in negotiations at Honda Lock. Originally working in the paint division, the man had resigned from his position at Honda on the second day of negotiations out of fear for the safety of his family. As his kids ran around just a few feet away, he told me the story of how the strike proceeded and the brief role he played in negotiations.
In many ways Mr. Chen26 is not typical of the majority of workers at Honda Lock. Though he grew up in the Hunan countryside, Mr. Chen had been working in the Pearl River Delta since 1992. He was older than most of his coworkers, having already married and had kids. Prior to quitting his job, he had been employed in the paint division at Honda Lock. As a skilled worker, Mr. Chen enjoyed considerable respect within the factory. He received decent pay and was well treated. Because of the respect shown him, when the strike broke out he was chosen to represent his division in negotiations. This however caused problems for him almost immediately, as he now became identified as a “leader.” His phone was tapped and management tried on several occasions to either intimidate him or buy him off. Fed up with negotiations and fearing for his safety, Mr. Chen resigned from of his position at Honda and moved his wife and kids to a different town.
A few days after quitting his job, Mr. Chen was contacted by a stranger pretending to be an old childhood friend. Speaking in Hunanese dialect, the stranger insisted on meeting up for a beer. Although Mr. Chen refused, the man later approached him on the street and forced him to a restaurant where a lawyer representing Honda Lock was waiting. As Mr. Chen related the story, over dinner he was offered five years pay and a promotion if he would return to Honda and convince workers to settle for a ¥100 pay increase. He refused.
Mr. Chen’s involvement with the strike was fairly short-lived. He told me he had originally struck because he thought wages were unfair. However, he became frustrated during negotiations when management refused to budge from their low offer and many workers were demanding wages higher than what he thought the company could reasonably afford. Mr. Chen mentioned that after receiving word of the strike at Nanhai, he got together with others to calculate worker’s wages as a percentage of company income. The Honda Lock workers were later able to use this information as a reference when they began negotiations with management.
My conversation with Mr. Chen also shed some light on the structure of “workers representative councils” and their role within negotiations. Because all strikes in China are essentially wildcat strikes, firms operating in China have developed certain procedures to take when confronted with the need to bargain collectively with workers. At Honda Lock, management requested each of the eleven divisions to write down their demands and elect a representative to present them. Mr. Chen had been a worker in the paint division and was chosen as one such representative. Prior to the first round of negotiations, the eleven representatives were told they had thirty minutes to discuss worker’s demands, narrow them down to a short list, and present the list back to each division for approval. After all demands were approved, the eleven-member “workers representative council” was invited to begin talks with management.
One thing that stands out immediately is the degree to which management was directing the process of negotiations. Although the structure of the “workers council” was fairly democratic and seems to have adequately represented worker’s demands, neither the organization nor the procedure was the result of workers’ self-initiative. Much of Mr. Chen’s description was verified by a different worker I spoke with as being true of the situation at Nanhai Honda as well. This would suggest that it might take some time before Chinese workers grasp the liberating potential of a radical labor movement self-organized from below.27
A Workers Movement in China?
The right to strike was removed from the Chinese constitution in 1982 in response to the example set by the Solidarity movement in Poland. Today, eight-teen years later, the same fear still resonates within the government. Though the recent strike wave may have received the sympathy of some circles within the CCP, this is almost certainly because political demands were kept within the established legal framework. The desire to prevent a radical workers movement from developing in China is one of the main concerns behind keeping GDP growth above the eight percent per year mark. It is also behind the growing drive towards union reform.
Over the past few years, the ACFTU has begun shifting its focus from enterprise-level negotiation and arbitration to industry-wide negotiations.28 The recent strike wave has only helped this process further along and it is pushing other changes onto the agenda as well. Proposals to make enterprise unions less financially dependent on employers have been heard coming from several quarters. In addition, there has been discussion of strengthening democratic management of enterprises and in Guangdong even reinstating legal protections for striking workers.29 While this may represent an important break through in reforming the ACFTU, in the long run it will lead only to co-optation and the further stabilization of capital. A true labor movement will be built on the trial and error of the worker’s themselves or it will not be built at all. Let us hope that the recent strikes have served as a process of politicization that will help sow the seeds of a future workers movement.
Timeline
Nanhai Honda
Nanhai transmissions factory in Foshan, Guangdong.
strike from May 17th to June 4th.
stopped production at four Honda assembly plants:
1 at Zengcheng (Guangzhou), 2 at Huangpu (Guangzhou) on May 25th, 1 at Wuhan on May 27th.30
total of 2,000 workers employed; peak of 1,900 on strike;31
665 workers (1/3rd) are interns.32
strike caused by two Hunanese workers who walked off the job.33
demanded salaries be raised by ¥800 (about 75%), additional year-end bonuses, an agreement that workers would not be punished and would be compensated financially for the strike, plus a restructuring of the factory union.34
received ¥500 (about 33%), plus regular cash bonuses and other demands.35
Fengfu Honda
Fengfu exhaust systems factory in Foshan, Guangdong.
strike from June 7th to evening of June 9th.
stopped production at two Honda assembly plants:
1 at Zengcheng (Guangzhou), 1 at Huangpu (Guangzhou) on June 9th.36
total of around 500 workers employed;37
between 250-300 on strike.38
Honda Lock
Xiaolan lock factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong.
strike from June 9th to June 18th.
total of around 1,500 workers employed;39
peak of 1,700 on strike (discrepancy in statistics);40
unskilled, low education, 1/2 women, no dormitories.
strike caused by security guards assaulting workers either for planning industrial unrest41
or for wearing name tag improperly.42
demanded salaries be raised from ¥930 to ¥1600 (¥900 to ¥1700 or 89%43
), this was lowered on May 15th to ¥1200 and housing subsidy of ¥400-500;44
double pay for overtime; punishment for security guards who had assaulted workers; restructuring of the factory union; and agreement that workers would not be punished.45
received ¥200 pay increase and ¥80 housing subsidies.46
Honda IV
Wuhan Auto Parts Alliance in Wuhan, Hubei
strike from June 17th to June47
240 workers on strike.48
demanded pay increase of ¥800.49
Nihon Plast
partially owned by Honda and Nissan (supplies steering wheels and airbags)
strike from June 17th to June
500 workers on strike50
Toyota Gosei I
Toyota Gosei Starlight Rubber and Plastic Co. (compact car door components and other parts) factory in the Xiqing Economic Development Zone, Tianjin
strike from June 15th to evening of June 15th.51
total of around 800 or 82752
workers employed53
(discrepancy in statistics); 1,000 workers on strike (discrepancy in statistics).54
did not stop production at other plants
demanded salaries be restored to 2009 levels after dropping 50% in early 2010.55
Toyota Gosei II
Toyota Gosei in Dongli Development Zone, Tianjin
strike from June 17th to June 19th.56
total of 1,300 workers employed;57
1,700 workers on strike (discrepancy in statistics).58
demanded salaries be raised from an average of ¥1500 to ¥1800 (about 20%).59
received ¥200 pay increase (about 13%).60
Japan’s Denso
Denso Corporation in Nansha Guangzhou, Guangdong (supplies fuel injection equipment to Toyota and Honda)61
strike from June 21st to June 24th.62
total of 1,100 workers employees;63
300-600 workers on strike;64
stopped production at a GAC Toyota factory in Nansha on June 22nd65
demanded salaries be raised from ¥1,100-¥1,300 to ¥1,800-¥1,900;66
a restructuring of the factory union; dormitory air conditioners; and an agreement that workers would not be punished for the strike.67
received ¥800-¥900 pay increase68
Japan’s NHK Spring
NHK-UNI Spring Co. in Huangpu Guangzhou, Guangdong (supplies suspension springs and stabilizers for Honda, Toyota, Nissan)69
strike from June 22nd to evening of June 24th.70
stopped production at two Guangqi Honda factories and one Nissan factory:
1 at Zengcheng (Guangzhou), 1 at Huangpu (Guangzhou)71
; 1 Nissan at Guangzhou (half production)72
demanded salaries be increased from ¥1200 to ¥1700; and year-end bonuses be increased ¥1200 to ¥6800.73
Honda V
Honda Assembly plant
strike from June 30th to July 1st.74
Atsumitec Auto Parts
Atsumitec Auto Parts in Nanhai Foshan, Guangdong (supplies gear sticks to Dongfeng Honda and Guangqi Honda)
strike from July 12th to 21st75
total of 200 workers employed;76
170-180 workers on strike77
demanded salaries be raised from ¥1070 to ¥1570;78
an apology from management for its conduct during a confrontation with workers; and an agreement not to lay-off workers for two years.79
caused by management’s firing of 90 workers80
or by managements announcement of changes in worker’s shifts, cutting overtime hours and increasing the work load.81
received a pay increase from ¥980 to ¥1420 (45%), plus two month bonus if plant runs at a profit, and ¥250 monthly living allowance.82
(switches and ignitions keys for Honda, Ford, BMW)
strike from July 21st to evening of July 21st83
total of 700-800 workers employed, 400-500 workers on strike84
demanded salaries be raised from ¥1270 to ¥1770 (40%)85
From www.insurgentnotes.com
- 1 “Nanhai bentian fugong, gongren qude jubuxing shengli” (Nanhai Honda Returns to Work, Workers Win a Partial Victory), Chinanews. June 2, 2010.
- 2 At least a dozen strikes were reported to have taken place within the auto industry between May and July, though it is highly likely that many more occurred—both inside and outside the auto industry—than were reported. See the timeline below.
- 3 International Trade Union Confederation/Global Union Federation.
- 4 IHLO, “A Political Economic Analysis of the Strike in Honda and the Auto Parts Industry in China.” at IHLO.org. July, 2010, pp. 19-20.
- 5 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press, 2007, p. 5.
- 6 Ibid., p. 163.
- 7 Report of Chinese Labor Science Studies, 1997-1999Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University Of California Press, 2007, P. 174.
- 8Fiona Tam, Mimi Lau, “Shutters Slammed on Reporting of Strikes,” South China Morning Post. June 12, 2010.
- 9 Many workers agreed to return to work on June 15th while negotiations dragged on until the evening of June 18th.
- 10 Anita Chan, “Labor Unrest and the Role of Unions,” China Daily. June 18, 2010.
- 11 Keith Bradsher, “A Labor Movement Stirs in China,” New York Times
- 12 For a discussion of lean production techniques see: Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 66-74.
- 13 This information was verified by a worker from Nanhai Honda.
- 14 Luisa Tam, “Guangdong Blazes Path on Collective Bargaining,” South China Morning Post, July 27, 2010.
- 15 IHLO, “A Political Economic Analysis of the Strike in Honda and the Auto Parts Industry in China.” at IHLO.org. July, 2010, p. 4. In addition, China requires that forty percent of auto parts used by assembly factories (which are necessarily joint ventures) be produced locally, by either foreign or domestic firms.
Ibid., p. 3. - 16 Ibid., p. 4.
- 17 Zhang Lu, “Lean Production and Labor Controls in the Chinese Automobile Industry in the Age of Globalization,” ILWCH,
- 18 Wei Le, “Nanhai bentian tichu di san ge tixin fang’an” (Nanhai Honda Presents a Third Wage Adjustment Offer), Caixin Online
- 19 Zhang Lu, “Lean Production and Labor Controls in the Chinese Automobile Industry in the Age of Globalization,” ILWCH,
- 20 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
- 21 See the timeline below for the fifth Honda strike.
- 22 David Barboza, “More Honda Labor Trouble in China,” New York Times. June 9, 2010.
- 23 Xinhua News Agency, “China’s ‘Floating Population’ Exceeds 210m,” China Daily, June 27, 2010.
- 24 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press, 2007, p. 6.
- 25 This information comes from a discussion the author had with the Shenzhen labor NGO Honghuacao.
- 26 Although the interviewee no longer works for Honda Lock and was not overly concerned with protecting his anonymity, I have nevertheless chosen to refer to him by the pseudonym Mr. Chen.
- 27 This is of course true throughout much of the world and is by no means peculiar to China.
- 28 Ronald C. Brown, Understanding Labor and Employment Law in China. Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 48
- 29 “ACFTU Pushes Forward on Collective Bargaining and Democratic Management,” International Law Office, September 8, 2010.
- 30 Wang Duan, “Bentian zai zhongguo si jia zuzhuangchang tingchan” (Four Honda Assembly Plants in China Stop Production), at Caixin Online. May 28, 2010.
- 31 David Barboza, “Workers in China Accept Deal, Honda says,” New York Times. June 4, 2010.
- 32 “Nanhai bentian fugong, gongren qude jubuxing shengli” (Nanhai Honda Returns to Work, Workers Win a Partial Victory), Chinanews. June 2, 2010.
- 33Ibid.
- 34 “Bentian ti di san fen tiaoxin fang’an, gongren jixu tinggong” (Honda Presents a Third Wage Adjustment Offer, Workers Continue to Strike), Southern Weekly. May 31, 2010.
- 35 David Barboza, “Workers in China Accept Deal, Honda Says,” New York Times. June, 4 2010.
- 36 Will Clem, Mimi Lau, Choi Chi-yuk, “Hundreds Clash as Labour Strife Widens: Worker Unrest Spreads to Yangtze River Delta,” South China Morning Post. June 9, 2010.
- 37 Tom Mitchell, Justine Lau, Robin Kwong, “Protests Pose Challenge for Beijing,” Financial Times. June 9, 2010.
- 38 Will Clem, Mimi Lau, Choi Chi-yuk, “Hundreds Clash as Labour Strife Widens: Worker Unrest Spreads to Yangtze River Delta,” South China Morning Post. June 9, 2010.
- 39 Mimi Lau, “Honda Hit by Strike at Third Factory, More Industrial Action as Earlier Dispute Ends,” South China Morning Post. June 10, 2010.
- 40 Keith Bradsher, “Workers at Chinese Honda Plant March in Protest,” New York Times. June 10, 2010.
- 41 Mimi Lau, “Honda Hit by Strike at Third Factory, More Industrial Action as Earlier Dispute Ends,” South China Morning Post. June 10, 2010.
- 42 Keith Bradsher, “Workers at Chinese Honda Plant March in Protest,” New York Times. June 10, 2010.
- 43Ibid.
- 44Choi Chi-yuk, “Hundreds Hold Out for Better Pay at Honda, Some Staff Make Concessions and Return to Work,” South China Morning Post. June 15, 2010.
- 45 Mimi Lau, “Honda Hit by Strike at Third Factory, More Industrial Action as Earlier Dispute Ends,” South China Morning Post. June 10, 2010.
- 46 Ng Tze-wei, Choi Chi-yuk, Verna Yu, “Toyota Hit Again As Pay Claims Escalate, Strikes a Release of Pent-up Demand,” South China Morning Post. June 19, 2010.
- 47Ibid.
- 48Ibid.
- 49Ibid.
- 50 John Chan, “More Strikes Erupt in China’s Auto Industry,” World Socialist Website. June 21, 2010.
- 51 Reuters, “Second Strike Hits Toyota Supplier,” South China Morning Post. June 18, 2010; Associated Press, “Toyota is Latest Car Maker Hit by Strike in China,” New York Times. June 17, 2010; “Strikers Seal Deal at Toyota to Resume Work After Pay Hike,” China Daily. June 21, 2010.
- 52 Li Fangfang, “Strike at Toyota Parts Supplier Ends Quickly,” at China Daily. June 18, 2010.
- 53 Associated Press, “Toyota is Latest Car Maker Hit by Strike in China,” New York Times. June 17, 2010.
- 54 “Strikers Seal Deal at Toyota to Resume Work After Pay Hike,” China Daily. June 21, 2010.
- 55Ibid.
- 56Ibid.
- 57Ibid.
- 58Hiroko Tabuchi, “Walkout Closes Another Toyota Supplier in China,” New York Times. June 18, 2010.
- 59 “Strikers Seal Deal at Toyota to Resume Work After Pay Hike,” China Daily. June 21, 2010.
- 60 Ibid.
- 61 Reuters, “New Strike at Supplier to Toyota, Honda,” South China Morning Post. June 22, 2010.
- 62 Peter Symonds, “More Strikes Hit Auto Plants in China,” World Socialist Website. June 26, 2010.
- 63 Reuters, “New Strike at Supplier to Toyota, Honda,” South China Morning Post. June 22, 2010.
- 64 Mimi Lau, “Toyota Production Hit by Supplier’s Strike, Workers Down Tools at Plant that Makes Fuel Injection Equipment and Demand Pay Rise,” South China Morning Post. June 23, 2010; Mimi Lau, “More Car Parts Workers Walk Off the Job, A Japanese-owned Component Plant in Guangzhou is the Latest to be Hit by Strike Action,” South China Morning Post. June 24, 2010.
- 65 Hiroko Tabuchi, “With Strike, Toyota Idles Auto Plant in China,” New York Times. June 22, 2010; Mimi Lau, “Toyota Production Hit by Supplier’s Strike, Workers Down Tools at Plant that Makes Fuel Injection Equipment and Demand Pay Rise,” South China Morning Post. June 23, 2010; Mimi Lau, “More Car Parts Workers Walk Off the Job, A Japanese-owned Component Plant in Guangzhou is the Latest to be Hit by Strike Action,” South China Morning Post. June 24, 2010.
- 66 Reuters, “Labour Strife Halts Toyota, Honda Plants,” South China Morning Post. June 23, 2010.
- 67 Mimi Lau, “More Car Parts Workers Walk Off the Job, A Japanese-owned Component Plant in Guangzhou is the Latest to be Hit by Strike Action,” South China Morning Post. June 24, 2010.
- 68 Peter Symonds, “More Strikes Hit Auto Plants in China,” World Socialist Website. June 26, 2010.
- 69 Reuters, “Labour Strife Halts Toyota, Honda Plants,” South China Morning Post. June 23, 2010.
- 70 Agencies, “End in Sight for Toyota Strike, Unrest at Nissan,” South China Morning Post. June 25, 2010.
- 71 Reuters, “Labour Strife Halts Toyota, Honda Plants,” South China Morning Post. June 23, 2010; Mimi Lau, “More Car Parts Workers Walk Off the Job, A Japanese-owned Component Plant in Guangzhou is the Latest to be Hit by pager Strike Action,” South China Morning Post. June 24, 2010.
- 72 Agencies, “End in Sight for Toyota Strike, Unrest at Nissan,” South China Morning Post. June 25, 2010.
- 73 Mimi Lau, “More Car Parts Workers Walk Off the Job, A Japanese-owned Component Plant in Guangzhou is the Latest to be Hit by Strike Action,” South China Morning Post. June 24, 2010.
- 74 Reuters, “Honda Plant Halted Over Labour Strife,” South China Morning Post. July 09, 2010; “Honda Assembly Plant Resumes Production After Two-day Strike,” South China Morning Post. July 10, 2010.
- 75 Reuters, “Honda Strike Ends After 45pc Pay Rise,” South China Morning Post. July 22, 2010.
- 76 Reuters, “Striking Foshan Workers Demand Apology,” South China Morning Post. July 16, 2010.
- 77Reuters, “New Strike Hits Honda Parts Supplier,” South China Morning Post. July 15, 2010; Mimi Lau, “Foshan Factory Strike Enters Fourth Day,” South China Morning Post. July 16, 2010.
- 78Mimi Lau, “Foshan Factory Strike Enters Fourth Day,” South China Morning Post. July 16, 2010.
- 79Reuters, “Striking Foshan Workers Demand Apology,” South China Morning Post. July 16, 2010.
- 80 Ibid.
- 81Mimi Lau, “Foshan Factory Strike Enters Fourth Day,” South China Morning Post. July 16, 2010.
- 82Reuters, “Honda Strike Ends After 45pc Pay Rise,” South China Morning Post. July 22, 2010.
- 83Reuters, “Omron Workers Down Tools for Better Pay,” South China Morning Post. July 22, 2010.
- 84Reuters, “New Strike Hits Guangdong Factory,” South China Morning Post. July 21, 2010.
- 85 Ibid.
Comments
Tailoring to needs - garment worker struggles in Bangladesh
![Garment workers protest - May 2010 Garment workers protest - May 2010](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/3-2010-May-12-RMG-women_protest.jpg?itok=0eIDi1nw)
A general overview and analysis of developments in the garment worker struggles we have been covering for the past few years.
The class struggle in Bangladesh is fought at a consistently high level and concentrated in the ready made garment (RMG) sector, the country's dominant industry(1). Mainly unmediated by trade unions, struggles frequently assume an explosive character. In Part 1 we give some idea of the content and extent of these struggles - followed in Part 2 by some historical background.
Part 1
Chronology of some high points of class struggle since 2006
The events listed below are only a small selection from incidents occurring on a regular basis in the garment sector. For a large selection of articles covering disturbances over the past four years, see; http://libcom.org/tags/bangladeshi-garment-workers . See also a 15 min. video; http://libcom.org/history/video-machinists-against-machine-bangladeshi-garment-workers-struggles
Strikes are generally sparked by either middle-management/supervisor brutality or non-payment of wage arrears. Workers walk out and march to picket out neighbouring factories. Roads are often blocked and barricaded. Cops and paramilitary forces are used against workers and things often turn violent; security forces are indiscriminate in their methods and as they invade workers' slum areas adjacent to industrial zones this can draw in the wider community; strikers' demonstrations often become mass riots attacking factories and vehicles. So workers' protests have a tendency and potential to overspill into a larger class confrontation.
Women do participate in street protests. But despite a predominantly female workforce, evidence of the remaining deeply patriarchical traditions of Bangladesh and their divisions of labour can be seen in news footage of garment worker riots; violence has been the almost exclusive act of males. (A few recent examples suggest this may, however, now be beginning to change.)
May-June 2006; the Dhaka explosion
At certain times the generally high level of struggle reaches a peak. In late May and through June of 2006, there was an explosion of fierce class conflict in the Bangladesh garment industry. To illustrate the scale of events: around 4000 factories in Dhaka went on wildcat strike, 16 factories were burnt down by strikers and hundreds more ransacked and looted, pitched battles were fought with cops and private security forces in workplaces and workers' neighbourhoods, main roads were blocked. Casualties include 3 workers shot dead, thousands injured, several thousand jailed. The Government eventually felt compelled to bring in the Army to restore 'order'. With hundreds of thousands participating, it was a working class revolt that spread beyond the workplace and generalised to involve the wider working class community.
The revolt began on Saturday 20th May in Sripur in the Gazipour district of Dhaka. 1,000 garment workers gathered at FS Sweater Factory, refusing to work until 3 arrested fellow workers were released from custody. The factory bosses locked the striking workers in the factory, cutting the power and water supplies. Eventually, the sweltering heat proved too much and by 11 am the workers fought their way out, then gathered on the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway. Now joined by locals, they barricaded the highway for 6 hours and fought pitched battles with the cops. One person was killed and 70 others, including cops and journalists, were injured. The revolt then rapidly
"spread to more factories as more workers were picketed out and the industrial areas of Dhaka were shut down by a generalised strike. Workers took the revolt from the industrial suburbs, where factories were now being looted, into the capital city itself, destroying cars and attacking commercial buildings. Mass demonstrations demanded an end to repression, release of arrested workers, higher minimum wages, weekly time off, overtime pay for extra work, public holidays, payment of wages due etc."
Years of accumulating resentments boiled over into a month of mass unrest with repeated clashes and attacks on bosses' property.
Although trade unionism is legal, garment bosses have consistently refused to recognise or tolerate trade unions. But in the absence of normal union mechanisms, previously marginal union-type groups (with little or no real influence on workers' struggles) were quickly drafted in as negotiators on behalf of workers. A new minimum wage was agreed (along with other improvements), but it was inadequate, soon made irrelevant by inflation and only patchily implemented.
For a detailed article on the events see; http://libcom.org/news/article.php/bangladesh-garment-revolt-140706The fire next time
The recurring use of arson by workers must be put in context;
"Health & Safety regulation are routinely ignored by management and are hardly enforced by government (many politicians have business interests in the industry); factory fires break out on a bi-monthly basis. Most are smaller incidents with regular injuries but fewer deaths, but over 240 workers have died in major fires since 1990. [...]
Many garment workers will have experience of fires in the workplace, many will have sustained injuries, lost friends and workmates to them - and all know that this is due purely to bosses' greed and negligence. The fairly regular use of fire by garment workers in their struggles against their employers must be understood within this context. Garment workers have often burned down factories in retaliation for non-payment of wages, lockouts or management brutality.(1) Many garment workers are malnutritious due to low income, living hand to mouth. Arson is a readily available means of hurting the bosses and depriving them of something when they refuse to pay; and there is certainly a poetic justice in the fact that those forced to live with a constant fear of fire at work can also utilise it as a weapon against their exploiters." http://libcom.org/news/death-traps-work-home-fire-poor-bangladesh-10032010
Jan 2007; A state in a "State of Emergency"
After months of conflict between the two main parties - the Bangladesh National Party (NBP) and the Awami League (AL) - as they squabbled over the details of rules and procedures for the General Election, a military-led caretaker government was put in place in January 2007. It's likely this move was encouraged or even proposed by foreign diplomatic pressure;
"Events leading up to the emergency are widely seen as having been orchestrated by the military, which acted after the UN threatened it with the loss of its lucrative and prestigious peacekeeping duties if flawed elections went ahead.
The day after the emergency was declared, former central bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed was installed as head of a new caretaker government." (Bangladeshinfo.com, May 6 2007)
Over 100,000 were arrested in mass arrests during "anti-corruption purges" targetting the business and political communities. Strikes and demonstrations were banned, but by May garment and other workers had ignored the ban and again begun to assert themselves against the bosses with wildcat strikes, street protests and clashes with police. (See; http://libcom.org/news/jute-workers-attack-union-leaders-bangladesh-amid-wider-unrest-17092007 and http://libcom.org/news/garment-workers-struggles-escalate-again-bangladesh-23092007)Sept 2008; the "Ghost Panic"
The calorific intake of ready made garment(RMG) workers is deficient, causing stunted physical development. With income reduced by static wages and rising costs of basic foods, malnutrition has become so widespread that in 2008 some workers were reported to be hallucinating in a delirious state during long shifts. A wave of mass hysteria is said to have spread through RMG factories where workers reported ghost attacks - hallucinatory experiences based on the symbolism of the prevailing religious and cultural beliefs and superstitions. Psychologists labelled the 'ghost panic' as 'collective obsessive behaviour' or 'mass sociogenic illness' and attributed it to stress, overwork and malnutrition.
The so-called 'ghost panic' in factories first surfaced after a section of workers vandalised Diganto Sweater's factory in Gazipur, following rumours of the deaths of a few workers as a result of 'ghost attack' in a toilet of the factory. Production in the factory remained suspended for four days as workers went on a rampage, damaged factory property and blocked the roads for hours.
In May this year, vandalism triggered by ghost phobia forced a factory in the Chittagong Export Processing Zone to suspend production for two days. At least 10 other garment factories have come under attack in the last two months in Gazipur alone after the spread of almost identical news or rumours that workers fainted in factory toilets and some of them even died.
The latest incident occurred at Pandora Sweater Factory on the Joydevpur road intersection on September 5, three days after workers vandalised Diganta Sweater and clashed with law enforcers in the same area.
Five workers of Diganta Sweater claimed that they saw 'witches' before they fainted inside factory's toilet. They were taken to a nearby clinic where physicians found that none of them had sustained any injury.
'They fainted because of weakness. I found that their blood pressure and heart beat was too low,' said Abdur Rahman, chairman of Sheba Diagnostic Hospital. He said that all the patients were cured after initial medical treatment. The hospital and some 80 other clinics have become used to get patients with such symptoms in Gazipur which has a concentration of apparel factories.
He said his hospital treated, on an average, 100 garment factory workers suffering from anxiety-related illness every month. 'Poor garment workers suffer mainly from malnutrition and anxiety, which make them weak and vulnerable to nervous breakdown,' said Rahman.
He said the stories of ghosts were either fabricated or hallucinatory. (New Age, Sep 13 08)
In at least one factory a religious exorcism rite has been performed.
One explanation of the 'ghost panic' may lie in the fact that so many reports place the 'sighting' of the apparition in the factory toilets. In the present climate of intense class conflict a worker is surrounded by openly hostile forces in the factory - and only protected by the solidarity and presence of fellow workers. Exhausted and malnutritious, they feel the threatening presence around them even when alone in the toilet - leading to paranoid hallucinations. Also, the toilet is where many actual attacks on workers by factory management and security staff have occurred, so the feelings of vulnerability and paranoia are not without reason.
While RMG workers' working and living conditions are undoubtedly bad enough to destroy workers' health, it is hard to gauge the wider truth of these strange events - what may have been true in some factories may have then spread as a running joke among workers (and been swallowed whole by gullible media and doctors always on the lookout for a new phenomena to categorise); an ironic excuse from striking workers smashing up bosses' workplaces - 'It's not our fault - you've driven us mad!'.
For further information; http://libcom.org/news/bangladesh-militarized-factory-visions-devouring-demons-capital-15092008 (Surprisingly, considering its positive discussion of the class struggles of garment workers, this article - containing phrases such as "...half starving wage slaves worked to exhaustion - yet still bravely maintaining a high level of autonomous class struggle outside of any union control..." was taken from libcom website and, to the surprise of the author, quickly published in a national Bangladeshi newspaper (The Bangladesh Today) and on the front page of its website.)Jun 2009; 50,000 on the streets and 50 factories burning
In late June a dispute over pay and sackings in the suburb of Ashulia led to police shooting dead a garment worker. Trouble quickly spread to other Dhaka factories;
"On the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital city, in the industrial zone; workers' rioting and demonstrations yesterday escalated to new heights. As thousands of workers gathered in the morning, at 10am a group set off towards the nearby Dhaka Export Processing Zone where many garment factories are located. Police blocked their way and fierce fighting began - in the pitched battle police use of teargas and rubber bullets left 100 workers injured.
Other workers soon joined the protesters and informed them that work was continuing as normal at the Hamim Group factory complex. Twenty thousand workers began to march towards the complex. As the numbers of protesters in the area swelled to 50,000 the security forces were simply overwhelmed; the Dhaka District Superintendent of Police said; "An additional 400 policemen stood guard in front of the major factories. We tried our best to disperse the crowd, but they were too many and too fierce.”
[...] The workers split into smaller groups and stormed the complex at around 10.15am. They sprinkled the buildings with petrol; a sweater factory, three garment factories, two washing factories, two fabric storehouses ... over 8,000 machines, a huge quantity of readymade garments, fabrics, three buses, two pickup vans, two microbuses and one motorbike were all reduced to ashes.
The crowd was thinking strategically. Once the buildings were ablaze some workers returned to the highway and blockaded the road; consequently, the fire services were unable to reach the blaze for several hours until 3.30pm - by which time the buildings were burnt to the ground.
Meanwhile, groups drawn from some of the other 50,000 workers and participants (undoubtably other sympathetic non-garment workers and slum dwellers would have been drawn in) roamed the area and attacked and vandalised another 50 factories and 20 vehicles. Thick black smoke could be seen across the city."
http://libcom.org/news/short-fuse-50000-workers-streets-50-factories-burning-bangladesh-30062009
July 2010; Rage over the wage
At the time of writing, a new minimum wage has finally been set after long tripartite negotiations of government, bosses and (largely self-appointed) labour leaders;
"Dhaka, capital city - last Friday morning (30th July), the day after the wage announcement ; in the Gulshan, Banani, Kakali, Mahakhali and Tejgaon areas of the city thousands of workers streamed onto the streets and began blockading the main highways with burning tyres. Police responded with teargas, truncheon charges and water cannon (the water is mixed with an indelible dye to aid catching demonstrators). But, heavily outnumbered, the cops could not contain the workers and the protests spread outwards. Making the link between their class status and the contrasting concentrations of wealth in the city landscape, workers were quite specific in their targets; as well as attacking garment factories, 200 businesses were targetted. In an unusual development that shocked many, the wealthy Gulshan Avenue neighbourhood - close to the diplomatic zone and embassy area of Baridhara - was invaded by 5,000 workers who smashed up offices, banks and shops. Media and TV offices were also attacked. "Gulshan police chief said the protesters had targetted the area's high-end shops." http://libcom.org/news/rage-over-wage-04082010
In the following days clashes continued; thousands of workers fought police, blocked roads, attacked and looted factories and forced hundreds of others to suspend operations, attacked hundreds of businesses, shopping centres and banks. Police arrested workers and raided offices and homes of those union leaders who refused to accept the deal. (The majority of labour leaders accepted the deal; see further comments on trade unions in Part 2.)
"The continued labour unrest and disruption in the garment industry - alongside infrastructural problems of energy supply shortages that regularly interrupt maximum productivity - are worrying both foreign buyers and local suppliers. [It has rarely been mentioned that the new wage structure only applies to the 'woven' sector - but not to the RMG knitwear sector.] The narrow national economic dependency on a single export industry's ability to deliver competitive rock-bottom prices and reliable fast delivery times means garment workers still have considerable weaknesses to exploit in the class struggle. The government and employers may finally - after years of hinting at it whenever labour unrest reaches a certain peak - begin to allow full trade union representation in the sector. But the majority of labour leaders, having now been courted to play the role of giving legitimacy to the miserable settlement, may have lost more than they've gained. The state and bosses could easily again break their promises on union recognition - and, as they continue their struggles, the most militant workers will not look kindly on the unions' class collaboration and meek acceptance of the poor wage offer." (Op. cit.)
After several days of disturbances, a massive deployment of security forces in the industrial belts along with sweeping raids and arrests have, for the moment, quietened the unrest. But, with little resolved, the antagonism is set to continue.
* * *
Part 2
Some historical background of Bangladesh and the garment industry
The region of Bengal is known to have been a trading centre with active trade routes and shipping ports for over 2000 years. It produced both high quality raw cotton, cloth and clothing for hundreds of years; from the 16th century on, the European aristocracy came to prize Dhaka muslin as the finest textile in the world. With the decline of the Mughal empire British imperialism beat off its rivals and the East India Company established its rule in the 1750s. Policies were imposed that favoured the emerging British textile industry; by a protectionist system of tariffs Bengal was forced to only supply cheap raw materials and leave finished articles to be produced in the "dark satanic mills" of early British capitalism. This economic restructuring, being imposed upon communities of relatively prosperous artisan producers, brought impoverishment and forced relocation from agriculturally desirable areas to previously uninhabited flood-prone areas.
In 1947 India won independence from the British Empire. In response to religious and ethnic tensions Muslims were given a separate nation-state homeland of Pakistan. This was comprised of two distinct territories, West and East Pakistan, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory.
The two regions had quite different cultures, languages and traditions and these were reproduced within the new state boundaries. West Pakistan's political and economic structures were dominated by merchant and bureaucratic classes developed under British rule to service, supply and administrate the colonial regime. The West therefore became the political and economic centre of Pakistan, while the East remained a predominantly agricultural producing area. The Islamic cultures of the the two regions were also quite different; in the East the older pre-Islamic Bengali culture - though still strictly patriarchal - cushioned against the harsher interpretations of Islamic code.
"In many ways, the impetus for an independent Bangladesh was a logical byproduct of the 'decade of development' inaugurated under the regime of Ayub Khan and cited as a model of capitalist success by the international planning community. Development policy in the Pakistan era identified economic growth with the creation of an industrial base. To finance this, the government followed a deliberate policy of fostering economic disparity, by diverting the surplus generated in the agricultural sector into the hands of a small class of entrepeneurs based in West Pakistan. The rationale for this strategy was summed up in a succint fashion by one of the US advisors to the Pakistan Planning Commission: 'Great inequalities were necessary to create industry and industrialists ... the concentration of income in industry facilitates the savings which finance development.'"(2)
These imbalances created growing resentment in the East, which eventually led to the very bloody War of Independence in 1971. Led by a leftist faction in the Eastern section of the Army, a decisive intervention by Indian troops secured victory for the East and led to the establishing of the nation-state of Bangladesh.
From the very beginning, the "pro-Islam" segments of Bangladeshi society and of the army had sympathies for Pakistan and opposed the independence of Bangladesh in the name of Islamic unity. The Jamaat-e-Islami (the main Islamicist party) leadership was at the forefront of mass atrocities on behalf of the Pakistan army on the eve of Bangladeshi independence. (It is only now, almost 40 years later, that war-crime trials are beginning.(3))
Identities
Assumed identities can be varied and complex in Bangladesh - and most stem from one's defined relationship to the 1971 Independence War. The lines drawn through Bangladeshi society by that war are still deep divisions today. For some, the national victory is seen as a victory for the Bengali culture embracing diversity and tolerance - in the face of the continued threat from Muslim fundamentalists who resent the split from their fellow Pakistani Muslims. Depending on emphasis, there are various ethnic, national and religious identities composed of different measures of cultural Bengali, national Bangladeshi and/or religious Muslim combinations or oppositions. (The other smaller religious and pre-national indigenous/tribal self-identities do not concern us here.) These oppositions embody contending views as to what kind of society Bangladesh should be and are contested at various levels, both politically and culturally.The internal exile of the left and ideological proxy wars
During the War of Independence there was a left wing element within the army and politics. After the coups of the mid 70s and the resulting repression, the Bangladeshi left was forced to disperse - of those remaining active, many went into NGOs or cultural propaganda work. A few tiny Trotskyist and Stalinist groups now remain, mainly student-based with little connection to the working class. Some parties also have their allied 'union' groups - but these 'unions', despite aspirations, rarely, if ever, function as workplace representatives.
The NGOs promote micro-credit loan schemes for small business activities, partly as a means of encouraging independence from large landowners in rural areas and for greater economic and social independence for women. Funding is provided to teach and implement small-scale improved farming techniques, co-operative or individual household workshops and subsequent distribution networks etc. They also sometimes act as a type of proxy trade union by offering legal and welfare advice in cities. They have often used traditional cultural drama and folksong forms in village meetings to spread their liberal ideology of cultural tolerance and entrepeneurial micro-capitalist activity.
On the other side of the ideological battleground are the Saudi Arabian-financed Muslim NGO groups who campaign for fundamentalist values and a traditional submissive role for the poor and women in particular (some have also been linked to terrorist activities).
The more than three million Bangladeshi urban female garment workers with a relative economic independence are, for the fundamentalists, particularly unacceptable evidence of the corrupting influence of modern society. For these reasons they have sometimes physically attacked NGOs, unions and the projects they sponsor.
This ideological divide manifests across various political and cultural issues. The most recent election winners, the Awami League (AL), are considered a more liberal and secular party (by Bangladeshi standards, though historically just as involved in corruption) than their Bangladeshi National Party (BNP) opposition, who have a recent history of electoral alliances with fundamentalist groups (though the AL have themselves on occasion flirted with religious alliances).Enclosures
After Independence, various Aid and Planning agencies appeared in Bangladesh; from the West, via the IMF, came subsidies for landowners to move into mono-culture and cash crops for Western markets. This took land away from tenant farmers who farmed for subsistence or for local markets only. With more modern imported farming techniques applied - which were also ecologically destructive and created dependency on Western-supplied fertilisers, non-reproducing seeds etc(4) - rural unemployment grew. This was a new form of enclosures against the peasantry, similar to those European countries had suffered in earlier centuries.
* * *
Emergence of the RMG industry and the female worker
At the same time as these changes in the rural agricultural economy and its gender relations were occurring, the Western economies were also influencing urban industrial development. The Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA) was introduced in 1974 as a means of controlling the increasing imports to the West from developing countries in Asia and South America. Quotas were allotted to various countries, but the poorest countries - including Bangladesh - were excluded from quota limits. This led to "quota hopping" whereby quota-free countries became attractive to entrepeneurs from quota-restricted nations. The combination of low start-up costs and a quota-free environment - as well as government incentives - encouraged local and foreign investment in the Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry.
The industry grew rapidly from the 1970s as exports expanded across the global market; the RMG sector now contributes around 80% of the country's $18 billion export earnings and employs about 40 per cent of the country's industrial workforce; around 3.5 million people, 85% of them women. Most are young, officially from 14 years upwards (but younger children often work as unofficial 'helpers' for minimal wages). The majority are young women, with a working lifespan of perhaps 20 years, after which their productivity is said to decline - for reasons such as failing eyesight and other physical degenerations, often linked to the malnutrition widespread among garment workers.
Thousands of young women heading for the garment factories were a new and, for some, shocking sight on the city streets. In the early days of the industry the clerics preached sermons outside the factories against this new female 'transgression' and distributed cassette tapes of the sermons. Wild rumours spread of the consequences of allowing men and women to occupy the same workplace. In fact the factories were ideally suited to utilising female labour under existing gender relations; secluded from public view and with behaviour strictly monitored (and often segregated) to maximise productivity and allay fears, the concerns of male relatives of female workers were largely overcome (helped by the added income) and the industry quickly expanded. For married couples this also often changed work roles in the home; men were obliged to, for the first time, take a share of domestic chores to keep the home functioning.
Yet even as capitalist development changes gender relations in this way it does so partly by utilising the existing gender divisions. In the early days of the industry men were employed, many recruited from among the traditional tailoring artisans. But their general indiscipline and consequent low productivity meant that garment bosses began to employ increasing numbers of women; factory bosses explain this preference as due to Bangladeshi women being more docile in temperament than men(5). This is only a reflection of the gender roles and cultural conditioning of the wider society, and in the fact that women have few other economic choices, so are more likely to stick at the job. As a female garment worker explained;
'You see, as women, one of our wings is broken. We don't have the nerve that a man has, because we know we have a broken wing. A man can sleep anywhere, he can just lie down on the street and go to sleep. A woman cannot do that. She has to think about her body, about her security. So the garment factory owner prefers to hire women because men are smarter about their opportunities, you train them and they move on. Even when he compares a small boy and an older girl, he will think, "She's only a girl, she can't wander too far away."' (6)
Challenging purdah tradition
As inheritance traditionally passes through the male line, women's reproductive powers have been jealously guarded as a protection of family assets. Under Islamic rules of purdah (literally 'curtain' or 'veil') women in town and country were expected to stay in the home unless accompanied by a male guardian in public (as is still common in countries such as Saudi Arabia). Traditional village morality determined that women were rarely allowed to work outside the home, so they were limited to gardening and handicrafts such as making fishing nets, spinning and basket making. As unemployment grew and agricultural wages entered a long term decline after Independence, women began - out of both economic necessity and desire for greater independence - to challenge these restrictions. (The country's series of 1970s post-independence disasters - floods, famine and bloody political coups - also considereably dislocated traditional gender roles and forced more self-reliance on many women due to their loss of male protection and support.) Some began working outside, initially quite discretely where possible; others were encouraged to set up village craft or agricultural co-operatives by Aid agencies; some moved away to the towns seeking work - many into factory work in the garment industry and a life in the teeming city slums.
The fact that women make up at least 85% of the garment workforce reflects some dramatic recent social changes. From the 1960s the dowry system shifted its balance of power - whereas the groom's family had traditionally paid a dowry, among wealthy families it now became an obligation for the bride's family to do so. This shift gradually filtered down to become the norm among all classes. For poor families this meant female children became an added burden - not only were their earning capacities limited, now each required a dowry and marriage became a net drain on family wealth. (These are added reasons for the migration of many young women from village to city garment factory; by sending money home, they can transform their economic role from a burden to a family asset.)
The practice of a woman giving a "dowry" or gift to a man at marriage is said to have had its origins in the system of streedhan (woman's share of parental wealth given to her at the time of her marriage). As a woman had no right to inherit a share of the ancestral property, streedhan was seen as a way by which the family ensured that she had access to some of its wealth. There is no clear proof as to when this practice was first started in India.
What began as gifts of land to a woman as her inheritance in an essentially agricultural economy today has degenerated into gifts of gold, clothes, consumer durables, and large sums of cash, which has sometimes entailed the impoverishment and heavy indebtedness of poor families. The dowry is often used by the receiving family for business purposes, family members' education, or the dowry to be given for the husband's sisters. The transaction of dowry often does not end with the actual wedding ceremony, as the family is expected to continue to give gifts. http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Dowry/id/464788
Women can be easily divorced and abandoned in Bangladesh, left destitute with their children. The garment factories became a lifeline both for abandoned women and those young females who sought to avoid being at the mercy of male dependency and many of the patriarchal limitations that go with it. They were also an opportunity for poor families to add to their income.
* * *
Trade Unions admit "no control" ... but desperately seek it
The struggles against the extremes of exploitation in the RMG industry have a long history and their combativity and violent nature are unsurprising, considering that the Bangladeshi garment workers are estimated to earn the lowest industrial wages in the world. The class struggle and the forms it takes has developed largely autonomously in the industry, with little institutional mediation. This has contributed to the intensity and explosive character of garment workers' struggles; as a possible solution to the unrest there have been repeated calls to institute full trade unionism in the factories. When disturbances reach a certain peak new promises are made to allow trade union activity, but as unrest subsides most factory bosses maintain their refusal to concede to allowing union representation.
"The trade unions have always been denied any effective role in the garment sector and so have little influence over the workforce or abilities as mediators of labour relations;
Dozens of trade unions in the readymade garment (RMG) sector are hardly in any position to resolve recurrent labour unrests, as they have no control over workers at factory level due to inactivity of most workers' unions, observed trade union leaders.
According to some leaders, at present there are more than 28 registered trade unions and more than 13 unregistered trade unions in the RMG sector.
Of the 200 registered workers' union units at factory level, only 15 or so are active, the trade union leaders claimed.
As a result, the central trade union leaders do not have any proper means of intervention in the wake of any labour unrest, although the leaders are meant to play a major role in resolving labour unrest.
During the recent incidents of unrest, garment workers attacked many factories, but the trade union leaders could not communicate with the workers due to the absence of active workers' union units.
[...]
"We know we have a lot of responsibilities in the wake of any unrest in the industrial sector. But, sometimes we feel helpless as we have no control over the workers," said Amirul Haque Amin, secretary general of the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF). (Daily Star, Sep 14 08)" http://libcom.org/news/bangladesh-militarized-factory-visions-devouring-demons-capital-15092008
The stubborness of employers to deny for so long trade union rights seems an overall strategic weakness; the granting of basic employment rights and an acceptable minimum wage would presumably give greater stability to the sector and the increased costs be offset by a reduction in stoppages. Introduction of official trade union negotiating procedures would also be likely - as it is designed to do - to some degree at least, take initiative away from self-organising workers and their often spontaneous wildcat actions and put it in the hands of union bureaucrats who would tend to dissipate and fragment the present high level of class struggle by channeling it into long drawn out official procedures.
The outsourcing of particular tasks by larger factories to smaller ones is common, such as button holing and other finishing. (Textiles are a flexible 'limp' material, so mechanisation possibilities of many productive aspects have been limited.) The various supply lines of the industry that make up the diverse parts of the division of labour in RMG production range from fly-by-night operations quickly set up with a few machines and a small workforce to hi-tech factories employing thousands. Therefore, at the lower levels of the supply chain - where low operating costs, casual employment and fast delivery of orders are crucial to turning a profit - conforming to health & safety regulations and other legal and financial obligations that trade union recognition would bring appears unattractive to garment bosses. Yet the granting of the recently refused Taka 5,000 (£48/€58/$71) minimum wage increase would add relatively little to production costs, which could easily be absorbed by larger producers, buyers, retailers and consumers;
"Media reports on the garment situation analysis indicate that minimum wage rate for garment workers will hardly hinder the profit margin for the apparel export. The pay rise means 1.0-3.0% increase in garments products. The pay increase constitutes highest 9.2% of total garment export during 2009-10 financial year, when average profit margin was 8.0-10% of export value. According to World Bank economic report, RMG exports nearly doubled in last five years from $6.4bn. to $12.5bn. in financial year 2010." (thefinancialexpress-bd.com - Aug 10 2010)
Yet international buyers for global retail chains exert continual pressure for low prices and in recent statements have expressed no willingness to absorb the cost of wage rises, but only to help factories 'increase productivity'.
Another reason for the long reluctance of successive governments to encourage trade unions and to enforce workplace regulations is that many politicians are investors in the garment trade. In recent statements by the Labour Minister the government now appears to believe - despite continued reluctance of employers - that trade unions are a desirable mechanism for mediating and controlling labour unrest. The issue is whether unions can tame the prevailing mode of struggle of workers and replace its intensity and spontaneity with the formalities of long drawn out bureaucratic and legal procedures. The working class must be dispossessed of its present direct control of its own struggles and domesticated into accepting the alienation of its class power, its passing to a union bureacracy - otherwise unions will be an irrelevancy for capitalism.
"If the union reform is implemented, will it work? Certainly the institutionalising of certain health and safety measures (deaths in factory fires are common, as are many occupational illnesses) as well as legal powers to enforce a living wage that is actually regularly paid would be popular among workers. But this depends on the garment bosses and the state showing a willingness to both grant reforms and then actually enforce them - which has never been the case so far. Promises have repeatedly been broken on these issues - and if there are no concessions on offer to win through union negotiation on behalf of workers, then unions will remain as largely irrelevant as they are today. (Another factor is that unions have often been as corrupt as most other political institutions in Bangladesh and have often been merely instruments of the political goals of one of the main political parties.) The unions have to try to establish credibility and take representative control of a workforce that has, over the past 25 years, shown itself consistently capable of a high level of self-organisation and solidarity. It is possible that the well-established current forms of mass struggle - regular wildcat strikes that then picket out neighbouring factories, roadblocks, riots and attacks on bosses' property - will prove hard to overcome." http://libcom.org/news/3-dead-garment-workers-clashes-unions-promised-new-role-04112009
The labour leaders who accepted the recent minimum wage deal have quickly begun to show their true colours;
"the majority appear to not even be garment workers themselves. They are reported as having been cherry-picked by the government for the negotiations. But some workers' reps were happy to give the settlement the appearance of legitimacy and to accept the offer on the workers' behalf;
Nazma Akter, president of Sammilito Garment Sramik Federation, a platform of 40,000 garment workers, welcomed the announced minimum wage at Tk 3,000 for the entry-level workers. (Daily Star, Aug 1st 2010)
Akter, a former garment worker who has gained a foothold on the career ladder of NGOs and international lobbying has previously been happy to collaborate with garment bosses and publicly lie to deny any workplace abuse of garment workers(1). The National Garment Workers Federation(2) also accepted the offer. Both Federations have condemned violent protests by garment workers and the NGWF have, absurdly, denied worker involvement. http://libcom.org/news/rage-over-wage-04082010
Yet it is reported that, as thousands of garment workers rejected the minimum wage, fought the police and state repression - and in the midst of raids on union offices and arrests of union leaders who refused to condone the miserable wage offer - the NGWF leader is happy to publicly accept the wage deal, to condemn workers' violence and (like a good union bureaucrat) to call for the arrest of workers who actively oppose the deal. The stupid claim that workers aren't involved is a lie, as proved by numerous daily media and police reports of worker unrest and arrests;
Emerging from a tripartite meeting, held at Bangladesh Garments Manufacturing and Exporters’ Association building late in the evening, National Garments Workers’ Federation convenor Amirul Huq Amin said they did not differ with the new wage structure. [...]
‘The workers are not involved in the on-going violence in the apparel industry,’ Amirul Huq told reporters after the meeting He called for identifying and punishing those involved in the recent incidents of violence. http://www.newagebd.com/2010/aug/02/front.html#3."
The NGWF has had past contact with Western anarcho-syndicalists and, more recently, the US Industrial Workers of the World. It has also worked closely with Western NGOs and charities (eg, War On Want). Despite its reputation as a more grass-roots garment workers group it is now clearly jockeying for position with rival bodies to try to 'own' the role of representation of garment labour by impressing the state with what a good cop it can be. Attempting to give validity to a starvation wage settlement and calling for state repression against militant workers and rival unions is a sign of the strength of their ambition.Charities for liberal and regulated forms of exploitation
NGOs lobby for factories to conform to "compliance" guidelines setting minimum standards for pay and conditions and seek co-operation with Western retailers on these issues. Western multinationals are keen to protect their corporate image by trying to avoid public association with '3rd World sweatshops'. But much compliance is a fiction, aided by employers keeping model compliant workplace areas - that don't represent typical working conditions - solely for compliance officer inspections; two sets of books are often kept showing wage payments higher than really paid; workers are forewarned of inspections and told how to behave, health & safety equipment is temporarily improved etc.
Western NGO's and charities highlight the terrible wages, working conditions and slum housing of garment workers. But they primarily portray them in emotive humanitarian terms as passive victims who only acquire some agency to act in their own interests through the intervention of Western NGO schemes and their lobbying for legal reforms. So the militant class struggles of garment workers are rarely mentioned for what they are - class conflict - but only as tragic and regrettable consequences of an insufficiently regulated industry and 'unethical' consumerism. This ignores the double-edged character of garment workers; while they suffer from extreme exploitation as wage slaves, they are are far from simply passive victims.
The neo-Dickensian "dark, satanic mills" - its relevance for us?
The emergence of such class conflict is a symptom of shifting relations and functions in the global marketplace. The restructuring of Western economies - partly in response to the high levels of class struggle in the 1960s and 70s - moved much manufacturing to the '3rd World' to take advantage of its cheaper labour costs. As the ruling class used unemployment, outsourcing and relocation to change and outmaneouvre the traditional industrial proletariat of the West it created a new industrial proletariat in the East. The Bangladeshi working class is both archaic and modern. Archaic in the sense that its conditions of life often resemble those described by such as Engels in his "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844" - terrible insanitary overcrowded slum housing, malnutrition and adulterated food, brutality and extreme overwork in the factory, strong resistance by bosses to trade unions and factory legislation, the state using military repression against strikes and demonstrations etc. But modern insofar as it functions as the recently proletarianised labour power of an export-orientated outsourcing economy (of finished goods, rather than the colonial-era export economy of raw materials) that has been used as a replacement for much Western manufacturing.
"This generation of garment workers is much more literate and politically aware than their predecessors," said Alam [a political scientist]. "They have grown up in the slums not the villages and know that they need to be united and to demonstrate in the streets to realise their aims." (Guardian - 30 June 2010)
The garment workers were combative since the early days of the industry - but the younger generation of today is more assertive. Unlike their parents, who were mostly migrants from rural villages, many of today's young city-bred workers are more literate and more aware of the contradiction between their supposed legal rights within bourgeois democracy and the reality of their situation; this emergent working class has progressively formed a culture of solidarity within itself, as a mode of existence, that counterposes its own class power to its exploiters. It is entirely normal for whole factories to quickly stop work and picket out neighbouring workplaces when conflicts arise. The conflicts sometimes generalise beyond the workplace when the nearby residential slum areas - home to many garment workers and dependents - are also drawn into the conflicts.
Information is lacking in how RMG workers organise their strikes and agitations; perhaps partly because the workers must deal with repression and blacklisting by organising some things secretly - but also presumably because the high-pressure intensity of exploitation in factory conditions mean it takes little for resentments to ignite and spread. So this description (in a business magazine representing the major multinationals operating in Asia), of a wave of strikes during 2005 in Japanese-owned factories in China's Dalian Special Economic Zone, seems to be just as applicable to events in Bangladesh:
"Although the workers apparently do not have leaders, they develop an organizing strategy without a head. Because the workers have widely shared interests and a sense of shared suffering, they react to subtle signs. Workers explained that, when they are dissatisfied, it just takes a handful standing up and shouting 'Strike!' for all the workers on the line to rise up as if in ovation and stop working."
Is there any great revolutionary potential within these struggles? The more 'classic' traditional conditions of the newly emerged industrial proletarians in the export economies of Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere - with often weak mediating institutions and traditions (unions, workplace rights legislation etc) - suggests that the workng class will continue to fight fiercely against the extremes of exploitation they face there. If one had to say where the conditions for development of such a radical potential seemed most favourable, it would seem to be in this region. But such developments would take the form of expanding local and international organisational solidarity - not of leftist groups seeking to dominate by assuming leadership of workers' struggles, but as a development of the existing self-organisation of workers themselves.
Leftist and unionist attempts at recuperation and control through their bureaucratic representation of struggles will be one obstacle workers everywhere must confront. But while the state resistance to radicalisation will be in the form of blunt repression when necessary, wage pressure and workers struggles in the East will presumably also continue to bring some level of concessions we've known in the West under social democracy (factory legislation, minimum wage, union recognition, social security benefits etc). Even with the decline in that 'social wage' in the West, it will probably be a long time (if ever) before any socio-economic equilibrium meeting point would be reached. So the 'global nature of the working class' is more wishful than actual right now - the often neo-Dickensian Eastern conditions don't generate struggles readily applicable or inspiring to Western conditions.(7)
But, for some Asian countries, this function within the global economy has possibly its economic limits; for Bangladesh to develop further economically it would need to develop a substantial internal consumer economy - but this requires paying considerably higher wages, which then may threaten its competitive edge in the global clothing market. (China appears better placed to overcome this contradiction, given the massive size of its potential internal market and its global investment strategy(8).) The continued divisions within the Bangladeshi ruling class - originating in the conflicting loyalties taken in the 1971 War of Independence - mean that the political elite remain, so far, too fractured to easily implement any long-term economic development strategies beyond the stand-alone RMG industry.
The consequences of restructuring industry to the East has left the Western working class still largely searching for new cohesive forms of struggle suitable to confront this restructuring. But after 25 years of, largely, retreats in the West, these struggles of the East do remind us that today the class struggle can still be made an undisguised central focus in society; and that the 'social question' of relative class power can still be contested by a militant self-organised class struggle.
NOTES
1) We don't have space here to discuss other non-RMG struggles occurring among, eg, jute, mining and transport workers (see; http://libcom.org/news/river-transport-strike-paralyses-bangladesh-14052010) - nor the Phulbari August 2006 anti-mining movement, significant for it's sheer scale and combativity, almost a local insurrection where 30,000 protesters seized control of a town against a proposed open-cast mine project (see; http://libcom.org/news/bangladesh-unrest-bhulpari-mining-garment-industry-310806 and http://libcom.org/news/bangladesh-phulbari-mining-garment-industry-010906).
2) Naila Kabeer - Subordination and Struggle: Women in Bangladesh; New Left Review 168, 1988.
US advisor's quote cited in Richard Nations, 'Pakistan: Class and Colony, NLR 68, pp. 3-26.
3)
The geopolitical dimension of internal feuds within the Bangladesh army is related to the India-Pakistan rivalry in South Asia. From the very beginning, the "pro-Islam" segments of Bangladeshi society and the army had sympathies for Pakistan and opposed the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. The JI [Jamaat-e-Islami Islamicist party] leadership was at the forefront of mass atrocities on behalf of the Pakistan army on the eve of Bangladeshi independence. When the secular Hasina returned to power in January, she implemented a bold initiative to seek war crimes prosecutions with UN assistance of the JI figures who spearheaded the killings in 1971.
(Asia Times, 3 Mar 09)
4) See article here; http://libcom.org/news/a-world-food-crisis-empty-rice-bowls-fat-rats-16042008
5) An RMG boss explains;
"Why women? Because men smoke, drink, talk a lot, disturb everybody ... they are very vociferous, demand holidays, they have tough friends ... We want as little talk as possible on the machines ... That is something women are prepared to do.
Men in groups will immediately start agitating for more pay ... Women listen better and they don't talk back. Men won't take instructions or accept authority easily. Women are cheaper because they have fewer choices - in terms of physical location of work and in terms of their physical ability to do different kinds of work." (Naila Kabeer - The Power to Choose - Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka; Verso, London, 2000.)
6) Naila Kabeer - The Power to Choose ... op. cit.
7) But bear in mind that migrant workers are Bangladesh's second largest export (mainly across Asia and the Gulf states) and foreign currency earner after RMG products. So knowledge and forms of struggles at home will to some extent be spread by these channels; see, for example - http://libcom.org/news/bangladesh-migrants-export-class-struggle-07082008 .
8) Some observers are claiming that rising labour costs due to strikes in China are an opportunity for smaller RMG-producing countries in Asia to increase their market share (the same observers also sometime lament that foreign buyers are wary of the Bangladeshi industry's reliability due to continual labour unrest). But China is rapidly expanding its economic empire, which may eventually move it away from RMG exports, or at least lead it to outsource to where labour is even cheaper;
"Why would the Chinese government push some of its labor- and energy-intensive industries to move to special economic zones in Africa, even as the U.S. Congress bans the U.S. Agency for International Development from financing any activities that could relocate the jobs of Americans overseas? Because Chinese planners want industrialists at home to move up the value chain. Polluting industries such as leather tanneries and metal smelters are no longer tolerated in many Chinese cities. And as the world economy recovers from the recent economic recession, wages and benefits will resume rising in China's coastal belt, as they had been before the crisis. Some factories will move further inland, but others will go offshore, closer to both the sources of and the markets for raw materials.
The early stages of industrialization might bring pollution, low wages, and long workdays, especially if the Chinese zones are successful. But like China's resource-backed loans, the planned economic zones promise to provide African countries with some things they very much want: employment opportunities, new technologies, and badly needed infrastructure. This is an opportunity for African states to ride into the global economy on China's shirttails rather than remain natural-resource suppliers to the world." (D. Brautigam - Jan 2010; http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65916/deborah-brautigam/africa%E2%80%99s-eastern-promise )
Source; originally written for & published by Insurgent Notes no. 2, October 2010 - http://insurgentnotes.com/
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Comments
Thanks Ret. You thought about distributing this around Whitechapel/Bethnal Green/Mile End as a flyer or small news letter? Its just that there is about 160,000 Bengalis(including descendents) or more around there who might find this particularly interesting.
I have thought about it, and have spoken to some London Bengalis about these struggles but few expressed any knowledge or interest. Maybe cos 90% of London Bengalis are descended/from Sylhet - a tea region in far north-eastern Bangladesh - and very few if any garment workers come from that region. But I did hear (too late to attend) of a meeting in August in Tower Hamlets called by the 'Workers Interest Group' about garment struggles in Bangladesh.
Red Marriott
I have thought about it, and have spoken to some London Bengalis about these struggles but few expressed any knowledge or interest. Maybe cos 90% of London Bengalis are descended/from Sylhet - a tea region in far north-eastern Bangladesh - and very few if any garment workers come from that region. But I did hear (too late to attend) of a meeting in August in Tower Hamlets called by the 'Workers Interest Group' about garment struggles in Bangladesh.
Ah ok, yeah most in the Uk are from there.
Lessons from the Tekel strikes: class solidarity and ethnic (in)difference
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/Tekel.jpg?itok=no-VGZCH)
Kadir Ateş and Toros Korkmaz analyse the Tekel tobacco plant strikes in Turkey between 2009 and 2010.
Our aim here is to analyze in brief the recent Tekel worker struggles in Turkey at the level of national economy. The Tekel strikes which began on 15 December 2009 and ended on 26 May 2010 was the result of an ongoing privatization process which had been in effect since 1980.1
In 1999, through “an IMF restructuring program, privatization continued at a more accelerated pace and came to a peak through the application of Article 4/C, of Law No. 657 enacted by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).”2
What started out as demands by the Tekel workers grew into strikes as the AKP government rejected any concessions. In taking such a firm stance as the government had, the strikes multiplied in their participation as well as intensity, which culminated into forming a brief tent commune in the middle of Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Police and other security forces were eventually dispatched to quell the striking workers, whose violent confrontation led a few of the workers to question the nature of the police in a class society.3
These strikes were important in the sense that contrary to the prevailing Huntingtonian paradigm, which asserts that the dominant conflict in contemporary society is based upon cultural and religious divisions, such a paradigm is inefficient in explaining one of the largest strikes in modern Turkish labor history. In Turkey, where the working class is deeply divided4
along such lines, the Tekel workers managed to overcome these internal divisions when confronted with unfavorable changes in the existing material conditions.
Tekel, which translates to “monopoly” in Turkish, has its origins as a Franco-German company specializing in tobacco production.5
After the 1923 Izmir Economic Congress, which established corporatism as the newly-formed economic policy of the Republic of Turkey, the new Republican ruling class nationalized many private foreign companies. In February of 1925,6
Tekel along with other companies, passed under state-control. The factories are scattered throughout the country, particularly along the Black Sea cities of Samsun and Tokat, which are majority Sunni Turk and in the southeastern cities of Bitlis, Malatya, and Adıyaman, where both Sunni and Alevi Turks as well as Sunni and Alevi Kurds are present. In 1999, under orders from the IMF, the Turkish agricultural industry was to be subjected to deregulation.7
With the rise of the neoliberal AK Party in November 2002, the pace of globalization increased dramatically in Turkey, and by December of 2003, “[s]everal Tekel plants were sold to MEY, a national consortium for $292 million.8
In the following years since, the company was resold to several other international holding companies such as the Texas Pacific Group ($900 million)9
and as of February 2008, British American Tobacco ($1.72 billion).”10
BAT managed to acquire “six factories, which employed 15,313 workers. Only one out of the five factories was to remain operational, the rest were closed down, displacing some 12,000 workers.”11
On 14 December 2009, the Tekel workers struck in reaction to Article 4/C of Law No. 657, a labor law which was previously applied to professionals who worked in the public sector on a contractual basis, was extended to public employees whose workplaces were being privatized. This offer was proposed as an alternative to the Tekel workers who had otherwise quit or found work elsewhere. However, 4/C included included several conditions, which the workers had to accept, such as:
Ceding the right to organize.
Accepting a sharp decline in wages
The elimination of severance pay and health benefits.
Workers would be allowed to work for 10 months without any guarantee of job security and alotted two sick days within this time period.
Workers would be forbidden to work a second job during these 10 months.
Employers would have the power to dimiss their employees at any time.12
The results of BAT’s purchase of Tekel in combination with the newly-enforced 4/C resulted in confrontation between the workers and a government they once firmly supported. For many of Tekel workers, the dismissive response from the current Prime Minister Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan was met with greater hostility and to an extent disappointment. As Fuat Karlıkaya, a worker from a Tekel plantation in Tokat explained, “the majority of my work friends voted for AKP. Now they are very regretful. Remember, many of my friends who wear the headscarf are participating in the strike.”13
AKP, many of whose members were formerly part of the now-defunct Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), which was the ruling party in 1996-97 until the military had threatened to oust them from power, attracts many working class votes through its use of religious rhetoric and promotion of conservative values. As the protests escalated in January of 2010, it became apparent that AKP was not interested in brokering any favorable terms to the workers. As Erdoğan notoriously said in response to the growing unrest: “[The workers] just sit there doing nothing.”14
Following orders from the ruling government, the police used a variety of brutal methods to break the mounting resistance of workers, such as tear gas, pepper spray, water cannons, clubs and mass arrests. In one instance, “workers escaping tear gas were forced into a nearby lake, where the police subjected them to water cannons in the middle of winter.”15
This however, did not deter the workers from responding in kind. Part of what made the Tekel strike particularly notable was strength and extent of the resistance. News reports of workers conducting hunger strikes or what they called “death fasts” were widespread and the establishment of a tent commune on Sakarya Street where the workers gathered lasted for about 40 days.16
Free of the “meddlesome trade union bureaucrats, workers were able to discuss amongst themselves and sympathizers began to rethink their initial perceptions about socialism.”17
In one instance, the Tekel workers living in the commune were “joined by an additional 30,000 workers who spontaneously showed up to express their solidarity.”18
Yet after more deliberations by the government, one of the last radical acts which occured during the strike was the occupation of the Istanbul branch office of Türk-İş, the largest labor union confederation. In May, approximately 200 workers stormed the union’s office and hung slogans outside of the building Istanbul office of Türk-İş, the largest labor union confederation, and “hung slogans outside of the building in support of the 40 hunger-striking workers.”19
The results of the strikes resulted in little material gains however, as the work period was extended from 10 to 11 months and their salaries increased by about 80 Lira.20
The most significant victory by the workers was the application of Article 4/C to the Constitutional Court, the highest judicial authority in Turkey. Today, the struggles have formally ended, yet the outcome of this court trial could trigger further protests if the demands of the workers are not satisfied.
In our estimation however these gains were greatly outweighed by the overcoming of pronvincialism, racism and religious bigotry which had been (and still is) present among the working class in Turkey. Ramazan Ercan, one such worker who had taken part in the protest, remarked that differences between easterners and westerners in Turkey diminished. “A worker from Samsun said that ‘I had a different opinion of Easterners. And I said that I also had a different opinion about those from Samsun. The state does such a thing that everybody becomes an enemy of each other. When you get to know each other, you understand that our fate is the same.”21
Or, as Mustafa Alacalıoğlu, another worker put it: “There are no differences between Kurds, Alevis, Sunnis and Turks. We have no party.”22
- 1On 12 September 1980, a CIA-backed right-wing military coup led by General Kenan Evren overthrew the existing government and began the process of privatization of state-owned manufacturing facilities in Turkey.
- 2 Erinç Yeldan, “Awakening of the Proletariat in Turkey,” Sendika.org 30 January 2010. 16 August 2010.
- 3In one revealing part of a group interview conducted by Express magazine, two of the workers said the following: Fadıl Elçi: “The police attacked us with [tear] gas, but the blame should be put on those who gave the order. Except the police officer is also part of the people. If he were to disobey [orders] they would fire him.” Ramazan Ercan: “Fadıl, besides the rich man’s son would never be part of the police. But the police who had come forgot their class.” “Sömürgelerdeki köleler gibiyiz,” Express 01-15 January 2010, Issue No. 1: 19.
- 4 Turkey is divided along two broad ethnic and confessional lines, which are Turks v. Kurds and Sunni Islam v. Alevism.
- 5 Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Volume II, Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 506; 233.
- 6 Ibid., 506.
- 7 Erinç Yeldan, “Awakening of the Proletariat in Turkey.”
- 8 Ibid. Yeldan notes that the produced stocks of the plants which had been sold were valued at $126 million.
- 9Ibid.
- 10 Ali Berat Meric and Thomas Mulier, “BAT bids $1.72 billion to Win Turkey’s Tekel Auction,” Turkishjournal.com, 22 February 2008. 16 August 2010.
- 11 İzgi Güngör, “Turkish experts divided over Tekel privatization dispute,” Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review, 1 February 2010. 16 August 2010.
- 12 Tolga Korut, “Tekel Workers Have Final Say for End of Resistance,” Bağımsız İletişim Ağı (BIAnet.org), 24 January 2010, 16 August 2010.
- 13 “Ağaç bile kaderine hükmetmeye çalışır,” Express 01-15 January 2010, Issue No. 1: 17.
- 14 “Boş boş oturuyorlar” in Turkish.
- 15 “Polis tekel işçilerini göle doktu,” Taraf, 18 December 2010, 24 August 2010.
- 16 Sungur Savran, “The Tekel Strike in Turkey,” Center for Research on Globalization (Globalresearch.ca), 17 March 2010, 22 August 2010.
- 17Ibid.
- 18Ibid.
- 19“Tekel işçileri Türk-İş’i işgal etti,” CNNTürk, 25 May 2010, 6 August 2010.
- 20 Labor activist Yunus Öztürk, telephone interview regarding on Article 4/C of Law No. 657. 16 August 2010.
- 21 “Sömürgelerdeki köleler gibiyiz,” Express, 19.
- 22 Ibid., Express.
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Book review: Kevin Anderson, Marx at the margins - John Garvey
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John Garvey's review of Anderson's 2010 book, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies
Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins is a very good and very important book. I hope to do it at least partial justice. But the book needs to be read; reading a review will not suffice to appreciate or understand its depth and breadth. The book is finely written and Anderson goes to considerable lengths to provide readers with background information to be able to make sense of what might be otherwise obscure matters.
Anderson’s argument is based on a careful and comprehensive reading of the writings of Marx (and, to the extent necessary, Engels) on:
1. The history, economics and politics of societies and nations outside Western Europe (but including Ireland),
2. Movements of national liberation, as in Ireland, Poland and India, and
3. The relationship between ‘race’ and class in countries such as England and the United States.
Anderson draws upon his extensive knowledge of the full body of Marx’s writings, including those that have still not been published in any language. (In an Appendix, he provides an especially illuminating account of the publishing history of Marx’s works, including the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the just over twenty year old international effort to collect, edit and publish all of Marx’s writings in a manner undistorted by narrow political interests. The total number of planned volumes for MEGA is 114; just over fifty had been published as of the date of this book’s publication).
Anderson convincingly demonstrates that few of the commonplace observations about the limitations of Marx’s ideas when it comes to matters other than the exploitation of labor by capital or the accusations that Marx was guilty of Euro-centrism (as articulated by critics such as Edward Said) can withstand careful scrutiny. His core argument about the eventual subtlety, sophistication and universality of Marx’s work, involving numerous historical periods and political situations, is built upon a fairly straightforward claim—that Marx changed his mind over the course of almost forty years of committed intellectual and practical work. He acknowledges that, in their early writings (including The Communist Manifesto), Marx and Engels emphasized the ways in which capitalist development battered down all ancient customs that stood in the way of progress—while, at the same time, they denounced the pain and suffering that such development inflicted on all who came in its way. Furthermore, and worse, they subscribed too easily to the common prejudices of their time when it came to matters such as the nature of the Slavic, Indian and Jewish peoples.
While Anderson always provides contexts within which to judge what the two revolutionaries wrote (such as the profoundly reactionary character of the Russian state and its domination of the Slavic peoples), he makes no attempt to obscure matters. He includes the following examples:
- In 1849, writing about Eastern Europe, Engels said that, “except for the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars (Hungarians), ‘all the other large and small nationalities] are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary’ (49). He went on to predict, ‘the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that too is a step forward’ (49). In the same article, Engels suggested that the Slavs had never really had a history of their own.
- On a number of occasions, Marx made especially derogatory comments about the Jews—in both published and unpublished documents. In the 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx criticized Feuerbach for having a notion of praxis that was ‘defined only in its dirty-Jewish [schmutzige-judischen] form of appearance’ (51). Anderson also comments that, while “On the Jewish Question” provides valuable insights, it is marred by “extremely problematic comments on Jews” (52).
- In 1853, in an article published in the New York Tribune, Marx suggested that India had been more or less frozen in time. The traditional village system had ‘transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature …’ (52).
At the conclusion of the Tribune article, Marx managed to do something that would attract the ire of Edward Said a hundred and twenty-five years later; he quoted Goethe—specifically, a stanza from West-Eastern Divan, a poem about Timur, who conquered Delhi in 1398. The stanza reads:
Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?
Said seized upon Marx’s quoting of Goethe as proof positive that Marx shared all of the traditional condescending views of the Orient and that, ‘in article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution’ (17). Anderson methodically takes apart Said’s claim by pointing out that the literary critic had failed to notice the ways in which Marx had used the same Goethe stanza to sarcastically highlight the self-satisfaction of various ruling classes in the crimes they perpetuated against the European working classes—including an 1855 newspaper article on the economic crisis in England, his 1861-63 economic manuscripts, and in volume I of Capital (17-20). In addition, Anderson argues that Said simply had either not read or not understood Marx’s later writings on India (even as early as later that same summer of 1853) where he increasingly emphasized his disgust with British rule, his sympathies for Indian independence and his support for Indian revolts.
As Marx studied varied societies more intensively, he came to reconsider some of his earlier views on countries such as India, Russia and China.1 Four aspects of his evolving views are especially important—
1. The survival of communal forms in late 19th Century societies (societies as varied as the Indian, the Russian and the Native American) suggested that it might not be necessary for all countries to be dragged through the squandering of human life that capitalist development required in order to arrive at a higher stage of social organization 2 ;
2. there was no single path that the various countries of the world had been on prior to capitalist development—there were, of course, similarities but it was essential to appreciate the differences;
3. There is no single path that countries will follow even after their encounter with capitalist realities;
4. There is a complex, and reciprocal, relationship between the development of revolutionary possibilities in the advanced and “backward” countries.
Marx was increasingly interested in understanding the ways in which movements of opposition to colonialism might make a direct contribution to the renewal of revolutionary movements in the capitalist metropolises and the ways in which the workers’ movements might advance the cause of freedom from national oppression.
Anderson eventually concludes that, in spite of the continued survival of indigenous communal forms in Africa, Asia and Latin America today, these survivals can probably no longer represent an alternative way forward:
… none of these are on the scale of the scale of Russian or Indian communal forms during Marx’s day. Nonetheless, vestiges of these communal forms sometimes follow peasants into the cities and in any case, important anticapitalist movements have developed recently in places like Mexico and Bolivia, based upon these indigenous communal forms. On the whole, however, even these areas have been penetrated by capital to a far greater degree than was true of the Russian or Indian village of the 1880s. Marx’s multilinear approach toward Russia, India, and other noncapitalist lands is more relevant today at a general theoretical or methodological level, however. (245)
At the heart of this methodology is an insistence on specific concrete analyses. In 1890, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, wrote about his memories of Marx. He commented directly on his manner of thinking and working:
He saw not only the surface, but what lay beneath it. He examined all the constituent parts in their mutual action and reaction; he isolated each of these parts and traced the history of its development. Then he went o n from the thing to its surroundings and observed the reaction of one upon the other. He traced the origin of the object, the changes, evolutions and revolutions it went through, and proceeded finally to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings; he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion.3
Much of the writing Anderson examines was produced during the very years when Marx was formulating the most theoretically abstract elements of his critique of political economy (reflected in the Grundrisse and the three volumes of Capital), when he was also an active journalist (Anderson notes that Marx’s journalism accounts for five full volumes in the Collected Works, MECW) and when he was a leading political thinker/activist, on issues such as Polish rebellions against foreign domination and the American Civil War, within the emerging First International.4
Anderson provides what I thought were fascinating glimpses into Marx’s daily life; he was not the only agitator in the family. Perhaps my favorite passage in the entire book is the following account of the Marx family’s participation in a London demonstration on October 24, 1869 demanding amnesty for Irish prisoners, written by Marx’s daughter Jenny:
In London the event of the week has been a Fenian demonstration got up for the purpose of praying the government for the release of the Irish prisoners. As Tussy [Eleanor/another daughter] has returned from Ireland a stauncher Irishman than ever, she did not rest until she had persuaded Moor [Marx], Mama and me to go with her to Hyde Park, the place appointed for the meeting. This Park, the biggest one in London, was one mass of men, women and children, even the trees up to their highest branches had their inhabitants. The number of persons present were by the papers estimated at somewhere about 70 thousand, but as these papers are English, this figure is no doubt too low. There were processionists carrying red, green, and white banners with all sorts of devices, such as “Keep your powder dry!,” “Disobedience to tyrants is a duty to God!” And hoisted higher than the flags were a profusion of red Jacobin caps, the bearers of which sang the Marseillaise—sights and sounds that must have greatly interfered with the enjoyment of the portwine at the clubs. (134-135)
If, one day, some film maker finally gets around to making a biopic about Marx, I sure hope that he or she finds a way to picture Marx and the family amidst those demonstrators—maybe even capturing Marx’s unrecorded complaints about how bad the speakers were (even though he probably couldn’t hear them). It appears that Marx was glad that he had gone and that he had, characteristically, noticed something important. Two days later, he spoke to the General Council about the demonstration and said, “The main feature of the demonstration had been ignored, it was that at least part of the English working class had lost their prejudice against the Irish” (135).
Each dimension of Marx’s life and work penetrated the others. In November of 1864, Marx had written about the origins of the International:
In September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland. On that occasion, an International Workers’ Committee was formed. The matter is not without importance because … in London the same people are at the head who organized the gigantic reception for [Italian revolutionary Giuseppe] Garibaldi and, by their monster meeting with [British Liberal leader John] Bright in St. James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. (67)
The English working class had been forthright in opposing any English intervention on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War—even though the Northern blockade of shipping of cotton from the South was leading to a collapse in the English textile industry, thereby resulting in the losses of many jobs—a solidarity that Marx celebrated. Hard as it is to imagine these days, those English workers were prepared to support the cause of abolition even though such support resulted in their own immiseration. A far cry from the sad spectacle of the 1980s when American anti-apartheid organizers insisted that their efforts to disinvest from the South African economy would not adversely affect the pensions of American workers—indeed, they insisted that they would be opposed to any disinvestment that adversely affected those pensions. It was a long climb down from the heights of the 19th Century.
In his “Inaugural Address” to the International, Marx argued that the callous hypocrisy and complicity of the ruling classes in the suppression of the Chechens (yes, they were being oppressed by Russia then too) and the Poles and their all but open support for the Confederate States in the Civil War ‘have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics. … The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes’ (67).
At times, the International, under Marx’s clear influence, functioned as if it was the foreign affairs ministry of the global proletariat. In December of 1864, the General Council of the International wrote to Abraham Lincoln to congratulate him on his re-election. The address was delivered to Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain. Anderson quotes the following extended excerpt:
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the Titanic-American strife the working men of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. … The working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slave-holders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed on them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastic ally the pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their betters—and, political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier has been swept off by the red sea of civil war. The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes. (110)
While the American minster declined to meet with a delegation from the International, he did transmit the letter to Lincoln. And Lincoln responded:
Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slave-maintaining insurgents as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies [emphasis added]. (111)
In the letter to Lincoln, Marx had highlighted the debasement of white American workers by their support for slavery and white supremacy and the key role that abolition would play in opening up the landscape for broader struggles. When it came to the relation of the English workers to Ireland and the Irish workers among them, he had the same approach:
I have become more and more convinced—and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class—that they will never do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801, and substituting a free federal relationship for it. … Every movement in England itself is crippled by the dissension with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England itself. Letter to Kugelmann, 1869. (145)
But approval and support did not require the abandonment of enlightenment. Two years earlier, Marx had been sharply critical of a bombing outside a London jail holding Irish prisoners. The bomb had exploded in the wrong place and killed a dozen residents in a nearby neighborhood. Marx immediately wrote to Engels:
The latest Fenian exploit in Clerkenwell is a great folly. The London masses, which have shown much sympathy for Ireland, will be enraged by it, and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to let themselves be blown up for the sake of Fenian emissaries. Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general, more or less doomed to failure. (130)
Marx had indeed figured many things out and far too much of what he thought and wrote was never available soon enough to revolutionaries in the years since his death—whether we’re talking about the early philosophic manuscripts, the break-through notes of the Grundrisse, the multiple editions of Capital, or the ethnological notebooks of his last years. Much of what we had not seen is now recovered and Anderson has provided an indispensable re-introduction to the great revolutionary. There is much more to write about and think through but my hope is that this review provokes many to read the book and to become part of conversations about its relevance to pressing issues of this day, such as the form, content and meaning of political Islam (in all its various shades) and the continued inability of far too many leftists to understand that simple defiance of the United States (in the manner of Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) does not have anything to do with the establishment of an emancipated society anywhere.5 Marx’s vision and his dreams were, over the course of his life, increasingly universal ones. They need to be brought to life once again.
- 1It is beyond the scope of this review to summarize Anderson’s accounts of Marx’s extensive studies, in the last years of his life, of places as varied as Russia, Indonesia, Algeria, and Latin America. What is worth mentioning is that Marx thought they were important enough that he neglected the editorial work on the revisions of Capital in their favor.
- 2For a wonderful appreciation of Marx’s late understandings of Native American societies and their political implications, see Franklin Rosemont’s “Karl Marx and the Iroquois.”
- 3http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1890/xx/marx.htm
- 4A good selection of Marx’s newspaper writings is available in Dispatches from the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter. New York. Penguin: 2007
- 5 Recently, an especially deplorable scene took place in New York when representatives of various “progressive” or even “revolutionary” groups met with Ahmadinejad after his appearance at the UN to denounce American imperialism. It is of no use to suggest that those who attended should be ashamed of themselves—they have made it clear that they are no longer able to have such sentiments. For a celebration of the meeting, see U.S. progressives meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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Insurgent Notes #3, March 2011
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Issue three of the journal of communist theory and practice.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The condition of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto
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Thanks for posting this Django, read a couple of articles already, this is a great issue of a very good publication!
Together with 'Aufheben', 'Endnotes' and 'Internationalist Perspectice' one of the best communist publications I know.
Introduction
In This Issue
Insurgent Notes No. 3 appears (in mid-March 2011) in the midst of a social ferment that portends the regroupment necessary to confront, at last, the ongoing attack on the world working class of the past four decades. The creation of extra-union “interprofessional committees” in the French movement of last fall, the riots in London in December against massive budget cuts in the U.K., the revolt sweeping the Arab world from Algeria to Bahrein, and the recent Bolivian general strike against Morales are so many signs that the “bad old days” are ending. It was high time.
Centered as we are in the U.S., we take special note of the month- long mobilization in Wisconsin in response to the all-out attack on public unions and collective bargaining rights there. Hence our first two articles, by Loren Goldner and S. Artesian, deal with the Madison movement and the historical backdrop to it, both in Wisconsin history and in the empire of the billionaire Koch brothers, who are prominent among the forces financing the charge against U.S. public employees.
On a similar theme but offering a more general overview, John Garvey takes up the question of the crisis of education in the U.S.—the crisis of the reproduction of labor power—and the way in which teachers’ unions have generally stood in the way of attempts to deal with it. Dealing yet again with the public sector, Henri Simon offers an analysis of the crisis of the pension system in France as a backdrop to the important movement against pension reform there last fall.
Finally, as part of our ongoing polemic against the ideologies of the complacent left, we present two articles of a more historical and theoretical nature. S. Artesian begins his planned series offering a critical examination of Marx’s theory of ground rent, and Loren Goldner analyzes the authoritarian and fascist origins of “anti-imperialist” ideology in the interwar period, using the example of the Bolivian MNR.
–The Editors
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From Cairo to Madison, The Old Mole Comes Up For An Early Spring - Loren Goldner
Loren Goldner examines the Wisconsin protests against the background of the capitalist assault against workers since the 1970s.
(Editor’s Note: The following article generated sharp debate in the IN editorial board because of its discussion of the race/class dynamic in the Wisconsin movement. We welcome responses from readers on this and any other controversial points.)
Insurgent Notes takes heart from the fact that, nine months after our first issue, governments in two countries (Tunisia, Egypt) have fallen, a third (Libya) is teetering on the brink, and masses have gone into the streets in Algeria, Yemen, and Bahrein. A February general strike in Bolivia, in response to further austerity, put paid to the myth of the “socialism of the 21st century” of Morales. Last fall, extra-union inter-professional committees appeared in the mass movement in France against Sarkozy’s public sector pension “reform”, and in December in Britain, working-class youth led the rioting against David Cameron’s massive budget cuts there. When we used the subheading (in Insurgent Notes No. 1, for “The Historical Moment That Produced Us”) “1789-1848-1870-1905-1917-1968-20??” even our guarded historical optimism did not allow us to foresee that 2011 could well be the next in the sequence. We are hardly so brash as to claim influence on these developments; we merely felt the early winds of the emerging tempest, and aspired, and continue to aspire, to be part of it.
Now, as we prepare IN No. 3 for publication, this seemingly global contagion has been extended in the biggest U.S. working-class mobilization in forty years in the American heartland of capitalism, in Madison, Wisconsin.
Whatever else may happen in the near to medium future, events have shown that the past four decades of class warfare (in the U.S. above all) in which only one side—the capitalist class–was fighting—have come to an end.
This hardly means that the institutions which safeguard and reproduce the system have been overthrown, however much they must stretch themselves to keep up with the daily-unfolding reality. In Tunisia and Egypt, “caretaker governments”, politicians, parties and trade unions are working overtime to put an acceptable face on a revamped social arrangement to channel the popular movement, and above all the working class, into calmer waters.
Let us look, then, at the balance of forces as they are shaping up in Wisconsin. Forty years of unrelenting propaganda, chipping away at the post-1945 Keynesian dispensation in the U.S., have prepared this moment, when capital aims at turning its long war of attrition into a rout.
There can be little doubt that powerful forces have designated 2011 as the year for a showdown with public sector unions—state and local– in the U.S., and these forces clearly see Wisconsin as a national test case to be repeated elsewhere, as soon as possible. These forces, propelled and financed by the likes of the infamous Koch brothers, want to use the momentum of the past year’s hard right advance (Tea Party, etc.) against Obama’s “socialist” policies (most notably the health care “reform”, written by the insurance companies) to deliver a knockout blow to what they see as the last standing obstacles to their unrestrained “free market” feeding frenzy. They see their plan to abolish public sector collective bargaining, even after the anointed spokespersons (Democrats, union officials) of the opposing side have already whimpered their assent to “shared pain” in various budget cuts, as a 1-2 punch that will simultaneously allow them a free hand in ridding the state of whatever remains of public services, and also deprive the Democratic Party of a major source of its funding, the public sector unions.
For forty years, during which income disparities in the U.S. reached and then surpassed those of the pre-1929 period, the ideologists of the “free market” (promoting of course their agenda for the proper use of state power to get their snouts deeper into the public trough) , the wealthiest people in the U.S., who control the system at every level, have quite succeeded in demonizing “elitist” “special interests” highjacking the common good. “Special interests” have included at different times black people, Latinos, women, or gays, but no “special interest” has drawn right-wing venom like what remains of the organized labor movement. (Recall, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s apoplectic response to the mildly successful 1996 UPS strike.) Meanwhile, that labor movement has declined from 35% of the work force at its 1955 peak to 12% today, with only 8% in the private sector. Such a decline, expressing first of all a hemorrhaging of decently-paid and stable unionized jobs through a combination of outsourcing, casualization and capital-intensive development, is one important factor in creating the gap between working conditions in the public and private sectors. Contemporary propaganda aimed at whipping up support for right-wing populist rage never mentions that public employees as a whole appear “privileged” today only because millions of other workers have been so beaten down for so long. (That the unions in both the private and public sectors, trapped in their ostrich-like parochialism, have never lifted a finger over the past 40 years to address this reality, nor do they do so today, is a problem to which we will return.)
Linked to this unending hurty-gurty about “special interests” has been a similar, droning one-note song about the stagnant, slothful state and “big government”, as if these benighted souls did not know that it was “big government” that saved capitalism from the precipice in the 1930’s depression. While we at Insurgent Notes have no use for the capitalist state, from an entirely different point of view, we note the same distortion of reality in right-wing propaganda, ignoring such statist phenomena as the Manhattan project or the Tennessee Valley Authority, not to mention the role of the state in the economic rise of Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and now China) since the 1960’s, or finally the statist-protectionist (Hamiltonian) origins of U.S. capitalism itself (from which the Asians got the idea, via Germany). But of course the real targets of such muddying of the waters are such “entitlements” as widely-popular Social Security and Medicare. The “free-market” ideologists never mention the parasitical HMOs as a significant reason for spiraling health care costs and hence further state deficits, nor debt service (to fully-protected investors) on those deficits, nor the trillions spent (more recently) on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks after 2008 and the resulting ongoing bonuses of the hedge fund and securitization crowd. The beneficiaries of such largesse are of course not “rent-seekers”, but the state civil servant retiring on $19,000 a year or the destitute people in the slums left behind by de-industrialization, surviving on disability or Social Security and Medicare are, for the right, precisely that. Hundreds of pinhead PhDs in grey suits spend their days at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute or the Peter Peterson Institute putting the proper spin on statistics and propaganda to perpetuate this distortion of reality. All of this, moreover, is supposedly argued on behalf of the beleaguered “taxpayer” (and all this funded by the class in society that pays a smaller percentage of its income in taxes than any other), as if most “taxpayers” are not precisely the ordinary working people who benefit (mostly) from public education, transportation, health care, housing and various other services.
Finally, the mainstream “free market” propaganda is silent about the fact that, without “big government” and its massive deficits since ca. 1970, (financed to a significant extent by foreign holders of Treasury bills) their system would have collapsed long ago. A real implementation of a program of “small government” and balanced budgets as advocated by Milton Friedman and his ilk (who, for example, will pay for U.S. military and intelligence operations in 110 countries?) would promptly replace the 1970-2008 “hidden depression” with something qualitatively surpassing the post-1929 depression in scale and scope.
Enough said, for now, about the 40-year propaganda war by which the right has set the stage for the escalation of class war in Wisconsin, after having seemingly won the ideological high ground in significant sectors of American society, and the buzzwords (big government, the beleaguered taxpayer, “elitist” special interests, entitlements, rent-seekers, spiraling health care costs) that have passed for many into almost unchallenged self-evident truths as a result. To anyone likely to be reading Insurgent Notes, most of the preceding is quite well known. The propaganda war of the right, as part of the real one, has been powerfully abetted by the ideological disarmament of the “left”, for the most part hypnotized by its Keynesian/ Social Democratic assumptions and thereby blinded to the real crisis in production and reproduction which began long ago, and thus incapable of effectively countering the fog of lies set down by the ideological carpet-bombing of the right.
We are of course much less concerned with charging through an open door in a fairly well-known critique of the right and hard right than with assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the left as they have been taking shape in the ongoing confrontation at Madison, and first of all because some of those weaknesses mirror the ideological fog of the right.
We naturally begin by expressing our delight at the return of class struggle in the American heartland on a scale not seen since the early 1970’s, and with a mobilization far surpassing such notable but isolated and losing struggles as the Hormel (P-9) strike in the same area (Austin, Minnesota) in 1985-1986, or the even longer “three strikes” (in both senses of the term) in Decatur Illinois in 1993-1996. The scale of what has been transpiring in Wisconsin since mid-February reflects the scale of the crisis of U.S. and world capitalism today, far graver than either in the 1970’s or the 1990’s (even though it is an extension and deepening of the selfsame crisis, a point we cannot elaborate here).
A brief rehearsal of the (again, broadly known) “facts” is also in order. Riding the wave of the brain-dead right-wing populist backlash (“Big Government Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!” went one particularly eloquent slogan) in the November 2010 elections, Scott Walker and the Republican Party took over the governorship and both houses of the Wisconsin state legislature on a program built around “creating jobs”. No sooner were they ensconced in power than, borrowing a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, they gave major tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations, and then, invoking a state deficit greatly exacerbated by those very same tax breaks, attempted to ram through legislation, not merely imposing slash- and- burn cuts in social services of all types, but also enabling the state government to privatize at whim without the slightest public oversight, and, adding insult to injury, effectively abolishing collective bargaining rights for public employees. (The bill was not rushed through only because 14 Democrats in Wisconsin’s upper chamber left the state to prevent the quorum necessary for certain passage of the bill by the Republican majority. The bill was ultimately passed on March 10 in the absence of the Democrats, by further legal maneuvers. Walker and his minions intended to achieve their pillage by stealth and shock, but they were shocked in turn by the unleashing of a statewide, regional and ultimately national mobilization that (as of this writing) led to an ongoing occupation of the state’s Capitol Building and repeated mass demonstrations, in freezing weather, of between 70,000 and 100,000 people (culminating—to date—on March 12), and support demonstrations in fifty states. (The movement had been launched almost immediately in response to the legislative launch of the bill in a rolling strike wave that that shut down schools throughout Wisconsin.) Demonstrations on this scale had not been seen in Madison since the Vietnam War, 40 years ago. And we can measure the distance from that era by noting the far greater presence, in the current mobilization, of a broad swath of the organized labor movement, which was cool or downright hostile to the movement of the late 60’s/early 70’s. This time it’s for keeps.
Everyone on both sides understands that this is for keeps. We cannot know if the Koch brothers and the national Republican command central which is closely monitoring events (with an eye to trying the same tactics elsewhere, most immediately in Ohio and Indiana) specifically chose Wisconsin as their preferred test run. On our side, there is a palpable whiff of “Tahrir Square” in the obdurate persistence of masses who come, day after day, to demonstrate and occupy with the idea of outlasting Walker and his cohorts. But Wisconsin and America are not Tunisia or Egypt, because here, unlike those doddering gerontocratic dictatorships with no popular base when the crunch came, the U.S. is still in the midst of a surging right-wing populism that positively admires what Walker is attempting, and wishes to emulate it at the first opportunity. This permits the right to reach out demagogically to the very same private sector workers it has steamrollered in the past, referring to the supposedly privileged lifetime jobs of public employees, not subject to “competition” and “market forces”, with their benefits, health plans and supposedly Rolls Royce pension plans, which have become “unsustainable” by (among other things) the very erosion of the tax base that has resulted from downsizing nearly everyone else and from one of the most regressive tax structures in the “advanced” capitalist world, (advanced mainly in senescence). In other states, these same attacks are carried out by Democrats such as Jerry Brown (California) and Andrew Cuomo (New York), abetted by the very unions that financed their 2010 elections. (Mainstream propaganda rarely mentions that many state and local pension funds are in trouble because of massive losses in “AAA”-rated junk in the 2008 meltdown; “toxic assets” from Wall Street were reimbursed at 100% in the U.S. government bailout, the toxicity was dumped on the states and municipalities, and the famous “taxpayer”—ordinary working people—winds up paying in higher taxes and with lower or even disappearing pensions.)
Having expressed our unequivocal enthusiasm for the mobilization in Wisconsin, we sense that this movement, as the first confrontation in what certainly will be a national issue in coming months, is in its very early stages. Madison, the state capital where the movement is focused, is also a liberal university town where, like Cambridge (Mass), or Ann Arbor (Michigan), or Berkeley (California), some palpable afterglow (albeit diminished) of the Sixties still lingers. (A fair number of those who lived through the Sixties there are still there, and have been in the streets.) It is the capital of a northern Midwestern state where, as in Minnesota or North Dakota, a northern European (Scandinavian and German) Social Democratic and a native-born prairie populism deeply marked the political culture, most notably associated with the name of Robert La Follette, however attenuated those currents may be today. Some in the crowds at the massive weekend demonstrations waved a number of American flags and even sang the national anthem or “God Bless America”; not our style, but we know well that the IWW on occasion (as in the great Lowell Massachusetts Strike of 1912) did the same, attempting to take that symbolism away from the capitalists and their state. We surmise that many, perhaps most of the demonstrators were disillusioned Obama supporters, some of whom may still hope (God help them) that he will come out in clear support of their movement. The Wisconsin Police Assocation (11,000 members) has, like prison guards (who are members of AFSCME), indeed supported the movement, and the laid-back, even jovial relations between the demonstrators and the police strikes us as another manifestation of a movement in its early stages. We cannot imagine the NYPD or the LAPD, dealing with the occupation of public buildings by young blacks and Latinos in similar circumstances, being so relaxed when similar cuts hit home elsewhere, as they will. Widespread talk of defending the “middle-class” way of life also strikes us as an American ideological muddle that must be overcome.
(Many of the cops and prison guards are former blue-collar workers or potential workers who never made it to the working class. Jay Gould famously remarked long ago that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half, and American capitalism in recent decades has amended that to hiring part of the working class to incarcerate another part.)
We also note the apparent overwhelmingly white (judging from on-line photos and videos) composition of the movement, at least in Madison itself. We doubt the significant black population of nearby Milwaukee, not to mention of nearby Chicago, would be so sanguine about the presence of police and prison guards in any movement it chose to join. (Wisconsin has routinely ranked at or near the top of states for the rate at which it locks up blacks compared with whites. In Dane County, where Madison is, nearly half of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 residing in the county are either incarcerated or under court-ordered supervision. Black men there are 21 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.) The Wisconsin movement has to date toed a fuzzy line between legality and illegality (it occupied the Capitol building, and finally evacuated it when asked to do so by the police, and a teacher sick-in has amounted to a wildcat strike, strongly supported by student walkouts). But when this movement, or similar movements elsewhere, have to cross the line of illegality and shut things down, law enforcement personnel will either have to break with their roles as police and prison guards or else will turn on the movement, under orders.
We mentioned at the outset the crucial role of institutions that must sustain and refurbish the status quo. Here we speak of course of the unions and of the Democratic Party, both of which desperately want to sign on to some version of Walker’s budget cuts, if only he will stop short of abolishing collective bargaining. Jesse Jackson and Rich Trumka—to how many losing causes have they given the kiss of death over the decades?—flew in to work the crowds with their demagogy. Michael Moore flew in on March 5th to give a rousing populist speech that never once mentioned capitalism and invoked the U.S. constitution. The Democratic politicians in hiding in Illinois were apparently in daily touch with “reasonable” Republicans in the state senate, hoping thereby to get Walker to throw them the bone that will allow them to return and proclaim victory. Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) flew in for the day and advised the movement to cede to all the proposed cuts, then flew out again.
This whole show by the duly-appointed left-wing guardians of the status quo hardly means that the masses of the mobilized rank-and-file, who started this movement by walking out (led by high school students) almost as soon as the bill became known, share these craven, threadbare illusions. It does seem that a majority is willing to give in on wages and benefits, but not on the indispensable right to collective bargaining, which if nothing else means some modicum of protection on the job from harassing supervisors, and the right to tell such supervisors to shove it without being unceremoniously fired on the spot. Giving so much ground from the get-go is in our view not the best strategy, but we certainly support whatever minimal protection union membership provides day to day on the job.
We sincerely hoped that the movement in Wisconsin would succeed in stopping Walker’s bill. But win or lose, the national movement it has unleashed must understand that this is still, on a greater scale, the kind of defensive struggle that the American working class has for the most part lost, going back to the early 1970’s. At some point, these defensive struggles have to go on the offensive. People involved in them, and those who will be joining them, have to realize that the situation we are in provides no room for any stopgap solutions. The world crisis of capitalism is not about greedy, reckless Wall Street bankers or the machinations of the Koch brothers or tax breaks for the rich or two-bit local politicians trying to balance budgets; these are, in different ways, deepening symptoms of a crisis in capital accumulation that started 40 years ago. From here on out (and for a long time already) there can only be stopgap victories on the way to taking economic and political power away from the capitalists: in short, a social revolution. The movement in Wisconsin might like to recall Scott Walker and restore the status quo ante, but that status quo ante was already one of long-term grinding down of working people that finally has come for its pound of flesh from the previously (somewhat) sheltered public sector. There is no going back.
Individual sectors, even as large as public employees in the U.S., have to reach out to all those who have been ground down over the past forty years. Any working-class movement worthy of the name embraces the interests of the most oppressed, and that today includes the 15-20% of the U.S. population currently unemployed and increasingly foreclosed into homelessness, the casuals and temps, the harassed immigrant workers both legal and illegal, the millions of marginalized youth, white black and Latino, and the three million people in prison. We know very well that not every struggle that erupts can immediately enlist all such people, but a “climate” must be created in which that universal outreach—what we might call a “class for itself” orientation– is understood as a necessity, much as such a climate existed, for a few years, in a less extreme situation, in the 1960’s. No reformism is possible today, and those who do not yet recognize that nothing can change for the better without changing everything–a social revolution–will have to do so. That means, for starters, running off the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucrats, the Jesse Jacksons and Rich Trumkas and Michael Moores, whose job is to refurbish empty populist rhetoric about the “rich”. That means understanding that such figures will talk as far to the left as the situation requires because they understand, as much of the Wisconsin movement may not, that in a rapidly polarizing situation the ultimate issue is power and control. (We do well to remember that, in the midst of the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, the local Democratic Party Congressman proclaimed himself a revolutionary socialist.)
The coming months, from the Middle East to Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, will undoubtedly be decisive.
Attachments
Comments
Goldner
We also note the apparent overwhelmingly white (judging from on-line photos and videos) composition of the movement, at least in Madison itself.
You were there, weren't you? What did you see?
Goldner
We doubt the significant black population of nearby Milwaukee, not to mention of nearby Chicago, would be so sanguine about the presence of police and prison guards in any movement it chose to join. (Wisconsin has routinely ranked at or near the top of states for the rate at which it locks up blacks compared with whites. In Dane County, where Madison is, nearly half of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 residing in the county are either incarcerated or under court-ordered supervision. Black men there are 21 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.)
The author's informant, based on another libcom post, was a member of the Working Families Party whose left-liberal position seems to have influenced this account of the racial dynamics in Wisconsin. Why didn't the author ask more than one protester about their opinion on the racial divide in the Wisconsin working class?
Goldner
The Wisconsin movement has to date toed a fuzzy line between legality and illegality (it occupied the Capitol building, and finally evacuated it when asked to do so by the police, and a teacher sick-in has amounted to a wildcat strike, strongly supported by student walkouts). But when this movement, or similar movements elsewhere, have to cross the line of illegality and shut things down, law enforcement personnel will either have to break with their roles as police and prison guards or else will turn on the movement, under orders.
Didn't the author even bother to read first-hand libcom posts about the actions at the capitol in Madison? Obviously not. He confuses the legality/illegality situation. Progressive-era laws, overturned with the recently passed labor bill, allowed citizens access to state buildings in Wisconsin at anytime relevant events were occurring. So sympathetic officials scheduled meetings 24 hours a day.
And without a single substantial first-hand account of the attitude of protesters about the cop and prison guard presence, these assertions are mere speculation. It's crucial to know the level of tolerance of the pigs, but if the authors had read libcom threads they'd see Oliver Twister's account of skirmishes with the pigs to stay inside the capitol. The involvement of the pigs and prison guards in the protests needs a critical analysis, as well as uncovering the role of AFSCME and other unions representing them, but the above account seems to be forwarding an anti-racist ideological agenda from the outside -- with little basis in fact.
Actually the material of the rate of incarceration and court supervision in Wisconsin is easily available on-line.
As for an "anti-racist ideological agenda", I never use the term "racist" (or other buzzwords such as "whiteness") to characterize the Wisconsin movement. I would not presume to use such moralizing language. I merely note the overwhelmingly white participation in the March 12 mobilization in which I participated, and in previous ones I had seen in videos. The movement only needs to be color-blind to show its limitations, both historically and in the US of today. The Knights of Labor in the 1870's and the IWW from 1905 to 1920 systematically attempted to overcome the "caste" hierarchy within the U.S. working class that was the legacy of white supremacy; the contemporary movement must do the same. For evidence that an important legacy of centuries of white supremacy still persists in the U.S., one need look no farther than the scores of young blacks and Latinos shot down with impunity by the police every year or making up large majority of the 7 million people in the prison system or on parole. The movement will indeed, as the commenter suggests, need a "critical analysis" of the role of the police and prison guards in the movement, to put it mildly.
I also wrote in the article:
"Any working-class movement worthy of the name embraces the interests of the most oppressed, and that today includes the 15-20% of the U.S. population currently unemployed and increasingly foreclosed into homelessness, the casuals and temps, the harassed immigrant workers both legal and illegal, the millions of marginalized youth, white black and Latino, and the three million people in prison. We know very well that not every struggle that erupts can immediately enlist all such people, but a “climate” must be created in which that universal outreach—what we might call a “class for itself” orientation-- is understood as a necessity, much as such a climate existed, for a few years, in a less extreme situation, in the 1960’s. "
If the commenter disagrees with that, well, I don't know what to say. That's the kind of "color-blind" Marxism which, in the U.S., has historically been blind Marxism.
First, it's necessary to put the Wisconsin incarceration rate into a national context. While not having the highest rate of African Americans imprisonment in the U.S. (South Dakota has that inglorious distinction with 4.71%), Wisconsin is second with 4.42%. But the rate of disparity also has to be put in context because states like Wisconsin and Vermont have high rates of black incarceration, but average rates of white incarceration. Other states, such as New Jersey and Connecticut, have average rates of black incarceration and below-average rates of white incarceration. So raw numbers or ratios can be misleading. The national statistics are more telling because while African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, their national rate of incarceration is 38.9% -- and states exhibit substantial variation in the ratio of black-to-white incarceration, ranging from a high of 13.6-to-1 in Iowa to a low of 1.9-to-1 in Hawaii (statistics from the Sentencing Project). Wisconsin ranks 5th, at 10.6-to-1 (or it's 6th if Washington D.C., at 19.0-to-1, is included and would be #1).
While Wisconsin is on the high end of racial bias in rates of incarceration, it pales considerably when compared to the breakneck velocity of California's massive prison building boom. California went from 76,000 prisoners in 1988 to 170,588 today (this does not include federal prisons, county jails, or California Division of Juvenile Justice facilities located in California, or any of the private correctional facilities in Arizona, Mississippi, and Tennessee under contract housing California inmates to relieve prison overcrowding). From 1852 to 1964 the state built only 12 prisons, but since 1984 it has built 23 new prisons -- at a cost of $280,000,000 to $350,000,000 each. Yet the 33 state prisons have beds for only 83,000. So nearly all prisons are not only at 200% capacity, but due to bloody decades-long gang warfare, most are segregated powder kegs of violence. One of the most significant trends nationally, particularly noticeable in California, is the Hispanic rate of incarceration that has risen 43% in the last 2 decades. And due to the 3-strikes law passed in California in 1994, 1-in-6 prisoners have life sentences. But in the greatest indicator of California's brutal prison regime (in the country with the world's highest rate of incarceration), it leads the nation in the number of death row inmates, currently numbering 697 (#2 Florida=398; #3 Texas=337; #4 Pennsylvania=222; #5 Alabama=201; #6 Ohio=168). Wisconsin has none; the overall incarceration rate in Wisconsin is 17% below the national average.
(California has 170,588 prisoners, which is 4.75% of the overall population; Wisconsin has 21,110 which is 3.70%; overall Louisiana has the highest rate, at 8.66% and is 48% above the national average)
To really understand what has happened in Wisconsin one must go back to the 1960s and 1970s and look at the role of unions and their institutionally racist hiring practices. Systematic barriers were raised to blacks in securing union jobs; when they got them, they were the shittiest, i.e., the worst paying, most dangerous (when danger was involved), and the least likely to offer opportunities for better work. White union workers entering the workforce in this period supported this type of policy. The crucial question is whether workers remain openly racist because from on-the-ground reports on forums like libcom, the protesters at the capitol in Madison are not harboring tacit racist sentiments as expressed practically, in daily speech or in behavior vis-à-vis fellow workers. If Juan Conatz, Oliver Twister, Will Barnes or others present in Wisconsin could confirm -- or refute -- this, we could discuss this on a more factual basis.
The working class in Wisconsin is dealing with the burden of the institutional past, which first found full expression when Scott Walker became Milwaukee County Executive (2002-2010) and proceeded to fire 20% of the public sector workforce during his term in office -- this affected African Americans most heavily as the last hired, first fired. Secondly, and directly related to this, the unemployment rate in the inner city of Milwaukee among black males of all ages, 47%, while it is 16% county wide. This condition is a nationwide trend (with unemployment of black youth at 46.5%, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics), with similar conditions in Gary Indiana, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, East Oakland, South Central Los Angeles, and other deindustrialized inner-cities. Statistical analysis alone (especially decontextualized incarceration rates) cannot show the historical causation of the current attacks on public sector workers; we need a deeper analysis of past class formation that gave rise to the current situation in Wisconsin. To fill out this picture, we must include an understanding of the near-complete deindustrialization resulting in the mass disappearance of unionized private sector jobs (see the section "Basic Industry and its Collapse in Wisconsin" in Will Barnes' Report from Madison: Fascists and Unions in the U.S. North), and hence the lack of any significant presence of private sector workers at the Madison protests.
Likewise, these class and race relations are specific to historic developments in Wisconsin. Hypothesizing how police/protesters interactions would play out in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or Oakland is disingenuous. Also, understanding how a mass of 100,000+ workers relate to unionized cops and prison guards can't be generalized from internet images or knowledgeable activists. Yet common sense would tell anyone who's ever attempted illegal direct action that sympathetic cops are preferable to ones swinging riot batons, spraying mace or unholstering their Taser (think Oscar Grant here). It would be great for anyone on the ground in Wisconsin to post their first-hand observations on this.
Lastly, I've been to Wisconsin twice in my life. I spent 2 weeks in Madison one summer over a decade ago, and to be honest I didn't see anyone non-white the whole time. Granted, I stayed a week in a student co-op on Lake Mendota and another in an apartment in the shadow of the capitol. I spent another week traveling west, staying in a small town near the Minnesota border. During that week, I didn't meet a single person who wasn't of Scandinavian descent. Later, I traveled to the Twin Cities and it was more of the same in rural Minnesota. Expecting diversity in such a non-diverse region is pretty unrealistic. Both states are around 90% white and this was confirmed by my experience.
I’d like to respond to comments that have been made in response to two different posts by Loren Goldner about the same topic—the recent mass demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m going to do so by posting the same response in both threads and ask readers’ indulgence about reading something that might not quite make sense in light of what’s been written before in one or the other of the threads.
Let me begin by acknowledging that I am not an innocent bystander. I am one of the co-editors of Insurgent Notes with Loren Goldner and have had numerous conversations with him about the events in Madison; I also know Hieronymous and have had some limited correspondence with him about the issues at hand.
Let me begin again by saying something trite: we need to reserve our spite and contempt for our enemies and we need to be very careful when we express our disagreements with our friends and comrades or with the larger groups of workers that we’d like to engage. As regular readers of this web site and others well know, comments on a blog are often not the most conducive contexts for careful delineation of differences. This is not an iron rule. By way of example, in the earlier discussion prompted by Will Barnes’s post on the fascist aspect of the Republican agenda, I thought that Will’s follow-up comment on the significance of electoral shifts prior to the Nazi seizure of power was quite illuminating.
So, what is the debate all about? One important issue apparently is the significance of Loren’s meeting with a University of Wisconsin academic who is a key figure in the Working Families Party. I have no doubt that this guy’s politics are bad—about as bad as just almost all of those who think that they are on the left. That tells me as much about us as it does about them—we have not even registered on the landscape of what counts as opinion. The other guys--the ones with insider connections with the Obama administration (God save their souls) and those beseeching the Obama administration to be something it can’t (I saw a great Spartacist poster this past weekend: “The ISO dilemma: kneel on one knee or two before the Obama agenda”)--effectively constitute the world of left opposition. (Please note—this is not an endorsement of the Sparts). However, the flaws of their politics do not mean that they know nothing or have nothing to say of value.
I have read Loren’s report several times and there is nothing to suggest that Loren has adopted any of the political views his interviewee holds nor is it clear what, if any, parts of Loren’s report were specifically informed by his conversations with that academic figure. Perhaps naively, I suggest that Loren used what he learned in that conversation (because it’s possible to learn something from a soft-left academic, just as it’s possible to learn something from a right-wing web site about Van Jones) to complement what he was learning by being part of the mass rally and talking to the various people he met. So far as I can tell, none of the individuals who have contributed their observations to this web page have raised any fundamental objections to what Loren described about the rally, but there are clearly differences of interpretation about their significance.
Which leads us to the second and more substantial issue involved—the significance of race in the Wisconsin events. As Loren has already noted, none of his observations and comments were about the “racist” attitudes of the Madison protesters. Instead, they were an attempt to understand the significance of what might be considered the racial structuring of everyday life and class conflict in Wisconsin and the extent to which the protesters both reflected that structuring and appeared to be unaware of it. The issue of the relationship of the protesters to the participation of police and prison guards is important because policing and imprisonment (along with failed schools and effective exclusion from large chunks of the primary labor market) are the defining experiences of the lives of black people in places like Milwaukee. So what is plain as day to them is as obscure as night to others. That is a large problem and a challenge to all of us who would like to contribute to a resurgence of sustained working class struggle in the United States. I hope it is not too late for that discussion to take place on libcom.
John
John Garvey
...the second and more substantial issue involved—the significance of race in the Wisconsin events. As Loren has already noted, none of his observations and comments were about the “racist” attitudes of the Madison protesters. Instead, they were an attempt to understand the significance of what might be considered the racial structuring of everyday life and class conflict in Wisconsin and the extent to which the protesters both reflected that structuring and appeared to be unaware of it. The issue of the relationship of the protesters to the participation of police and prison guards is important because policing and imprisonment (along with failed schools and effective exclusion from large chunks of the primary labor market) are the defining experiences of the lives of black people in places like Milwaukee.
and
Loren Goldner
...the biggest U.S. working-class mobilization in forty years
Am I missing something? I mean all this talk about "race," the size of the protests, and the need to look to Milwaukee, makes we wonder if we're discussing the same thing.
Also, I forgot to mention that I find it admirable that Goldner went to Madison in the first place, since many chose to watch the events from afar even though they had the time and resources to go there. He should be applauded for his act of solidarity.
That all said, I'm feeling this strange generation gap. Not that Goldner and Garvey are anything like the institutional economists of the Wisconsin School of Labor History, because they're not and have done excellent theoretical work challenging white supremacy and racism. They're clearly not ol' John R. Commons, the dean of the Wisconsin School, who wrote the 4-volume History of Labor in the United States (1918-35), or his disciples like Selig Perlman, Philip Taft or Ira Cross. But the latter's own student, Alexander Saxton did break new ground to be taken up by the New Labor historians, who Goldner and Garvey are closer to, with his account of how anti-Chinese racism was used to unify the white working class in his monumental Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971). The anti-immigrant movement was whipped up in San Francisco behind racist demagogue Denis Kearney during rallies in support of the the Great Upheaval Railroad Strike in 1877.
The Workingmen's Party of California rallied workers behind the platform of white supremacy and lobbied for the successful passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The Big Four robber barons of the railroads (Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington, and Stanford) needed Chinese coolie labor, but the ruling class reveled in this huge wedge dividing the working class. And they cheered again as workers rallied for in support of the "Yellow Peril" campaign against Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century. This anti-Asian racism carried on when 120,000 people of Japanese descent were imprisoned in the U.S. during World War II.
So why all the talk about immigrants, when the topic seems to be public sector workers protesting and ignoring the 1-out-of-2 black workers unemployed in Milwaukee? I guess because I wasn't expecting an incomplete, contemporary version of Wisconsin School Labor History. I was expecting Goldner or Garvey to have gone beyond even the New Labor historians of the Brody, Dubofsky, Gutman, and Montgomery variety. I was expecting a more complete, more thoroughly synthesized account of the working class, including race, ethnicity, gender, and immigrants. And an indication as to why this new form of fascism was being born in Wisconsin, birthplace of "Fighting Bob" La Follette and the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century. But also the state where McCarthyism was born with the Cold War anti-communist witchhunts of Senator Joe McCarthy.
Scott Walker's fascist predecessor, and heir to Joe McCarthy, is Jim Sensenbrenner -- who serves as congressional representative for Wisconsin in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing district 5 that includes suburban Milwaukee. He was the main author of the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437, also called the Sensenbrenner Bill) which would have have not only militarized the border, but would have made all illegal aliens felons, in addition to mandating: "humanitarian workers, public schoolteachers, church workers, and others whose only object is to provide relief and aid to five-year mandatory minimum prison sentences."
Beginning in February, 2006, mass mobilizations against H.R. 4437 began throughout the U.S., including as many as 1,500,000 protesters in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006 -- in the city's largest protest ever. The main day of action was May Day, where strikes and walk-outs occurred in at least 200 locations, involving as many as 4 to 5,000,000 protesters. The U.S. Senate never passed the bill, so the resistance was successful.
Infoshop News
Effects of the general strike hit well beyond the visible numbers of protestors in the street and absent from school. Thousands of stores, companies, offices, small businesses, service agencies, and branches of corporate industries closed down either in solidarity or were forced into closure by loss of workers. Port truckers in Los Angeles shut down 90% of transport at the Port of L.A. [& Long Beach, the busiest container port complex in the western hemisphere--Hieronymous] In many of central California's agricultural counties: Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito, San Joaquin-- tens of thousands of workers were absent. Gallo wines suspended their production. In the South and elsewhere, industries including construction, domestic work, and meatpacking suffered huge absences and many plants closed—including a dozen Tyson factories, the world’s largest meat producer. Tyson, Swift, Perdue and Cargill closed plants in the Midwest and the west employing more than 20,000 people. Chain restaurants including McDonalds’ and Chipotle shut stores and slashed shifts. Human chains blocked Wal-Marts and Home Depots in Arizona, as student protestors blocked Wal-Mart in Mexico City.
In conjunction with Mexico-wide demonstrations for a “Day Without Gringos,” border crossings were blocked by 400 protestors at the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing (northbound shut down intermittently for 3 hours); Hidalgo International Bridge (into McAllen, Texas) blocked for 14 hours by hundreds of protestors with their bodies and rope in Reynosa, on the Mexican side of the border; the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo bridge was blocked for hours.
The following cities and towns participated in the 2006 May Day General Strike:
Accomack County, VA: several hundred
Alamosa, CO: 200
Albuquerque, NM: 2-5,000
Allentown, PA: 300
Anchorage, Alaska: hundreds
Athens, GA: 1200
Atlanta, GA: 1-5,000
Aurora, IL: 9,000
Austin, TX: 8,000
Bakersfield, CA: 15,000 march/ 4,000 students walk out
Beaufort County, SC: 80-90% of Latina/os boycott work
Berkeley: 1,000 college & high school students
Boise, ID: 75
Boston: 2-5,000
Boulder, CO: 2,000+
Burlington, VT: 300
Carbondale, CO: 1,200
Camden, NJ: 1,000 join Philadelphia rally, most independent grocers in county closed
Caldwell, ID: several hundred for silent vigil
Cannon Beach, OR: 175
Ceres, CA (N. San Joaquin Valley): 2,000
Chapel Hill, NC: 40
Charlotte, NC: 10,000 rally, 684 students absent, Spanish-language radio goes ad-free to support boycott
Chattanooga, TN: 300
Chicago: 600,000 (fire department estimate), some school districts up to 80% absent
Cincinnati, OH: several thousand rally at National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Cleveland OH: 200-400
Colorado Springs, CO: 3,000
Columbus, OH: 40 at Ohio State University
Concord, CA: 3,000
Dallas, TX: 1,500
The Dalles, OR: 700
Dayton, OH: 550
Denver CO: 75,000
Des Moines, Iowa: 40+ businesses close
Detroit, MI: many businesses in southwest closed
Dothan, AL: hundreds
Durango, CO: 100
Eugene, OR: 400
Kansas City, MO: 2,000
Knoxville, TN: 300
El Paso, TX
Eugene, OR 1,000-1,500
Eureka, CA: hundreds march to Arcata
Florida: state totals 30,000 in Pensacola, Homestead, Ft. Meyers, other cities
Forks, WA: 700
Fresno, CA: 15,000+ and earlier rally of 3-4,000 students at CSUF
Grand Island, NE: 3,000
Grand Junction, CO: 3,500
Hickory, NC: hundreds
Hood River, OR: 1,500
Houston, TX: 15,000
Huntsville, AL: several hundred
Ithaca, NY: 400
Jackson Heights (Queens), NYC: 1000+ make chain measuring 10 blocks
Joliet IL: 600
Laramie, WY: 200
Las Vegas, NV: 2,000
Laurel, MS: 200
Little Rock, AK: hundreds
Los Angeles: 500,000 (about 72,000 --27% of students absent)
Louisville, KY: 1,000
Lumberton, NC: 4,000*
Madras, OR: 250
McAllen, TX: thousands rally, 700 students absent
Medford, OR: 500
Merrifield, VA: some day labor crews reduced by over 90%
Miami: 10,000 (65,000 walk out)
Madison, WI 7-9,000
Milwaukee: 70,000
Minneapolis, MN: 3,000
Modesto, CA: 15,000 & student march of 250 from Modesto High
Morehead, KY: 60
Nashville, TN: many workers strike, immigrants shut off lights from 8-9 p.m.
New York City: 50-500,000
New Orleans: 2-10,000
Oak Cliff TX: 500
Oakland, CA: 40-50,000
Odessa, TX: rally
Ogden, UT: 1,000
Olympia, WA: 400
Ottumwa, MI: hundreds rally, 440 students absent
Oxnard, CA: 4,000
Omaha, NE: 3-6,000
Ontario, CA: 1,000
Orlando, FL: 20-30,000
Paso Robles, CA: 200 rally, 24% students absent
Philadelphia: 7,000 (incl. 1,000 coming from Camden)
Pittsburgh, PA: 150+
Port Chester, NY: 2,000 march, blocks of stores closed
Porterville, CA (Tulare County): 4,000
Portland, OR- 10,000
Poughkeepsie, NY: 800-2,000
Pueblo, CO: 500
Raleigh NC: 3,000
Rapid City, SD: several hudred
Russelville, AL (town with large KKK presence): more than 20% of Latino/a students absent (30% county-wide)
Salem, OR: 8-10,000
Salinas, CA: 13-20,000 (biggest at least since 70s)
San Antonio, TX: thousands
San Bernadino, CA: 1,000
San Diego: 10,000+ at multiple events
San Francisco, CA: 75-125,000
San Juan, TX
San Rafael, CA: 5-7,000
Santa Ana, CA: 2-5,000 (police start confrontation with protestors)
Santa Cruz, CA: 4-6,000 when two marches merge
Santa Maria, CA: 5-30,000
Santa Rosa, CA: 8-10,000
Santa Barbara, CA: 15,000
Sacramento, CA: 18-40,000
Salt Lake City, UT: 7,500 (10,000 statewide participate in events)
San Jose, CA: 50,000 at least—up to 100,000
San Ysidro, CA: 1-2,500 march to border
Seaside, CA: 1-2,000
Seattle, WA: 30,000
Siler City, NC: effectively shut down through boycott
Sioux Falls, SD: hundreds
Somerville, MA: hundreds
Stockton,CA
Sussex County, DE: poultry plants shut down who refused to close Feb. 14th for the regional Day Without an Immigrant
Tennessee: 10,000+ strike/boycott
Tiffin, OH: 200, organized by Toledo’s Farm Labor Organizing Committee
Tulare, CA: 3,000
Tuscaloosa, AL: silent march on Univ. of Alabama campus, 200+
Union City, CA: 1,000
Ventura, CA: 200+ march, some school districts almost 40% absent
Virginia Beach, VA: hundreds
Vista, CA: 8-12,000
Washington D.C.: Malcolm X Park, 2-3,000 and Capitol: 5,000
Watsonville: 12,000
Wendover, UT: 500
White Plains, NY: 500 highschoolers walk out, march to courthouse
Worcester, MA: 2,500 rally (largest since Vietnam War), 67+ businesses close, 800-900 students absent. Feeder marches organized for: students, Africans, Colombians, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Latinos, Pleasant St Neighbors, and Christians
Yakima, WA: 8-15,000
(source: Infoshop News)
In the initial build-up to oppose the Sensenbrenner Bill, 30,000 protested in Milwaukee on March 23, 2006.
On April 10, 2006, for the National Day of Action as many as 25,000 protesters marched in Madison.
For the May Day General Strike, between 7-9,000 marched in Madison and 70,000 in Milwaukee.
So this history is of "significance" to "what might be considered the racial structuring of everyday life and class conflict in Wisconsin."
I agree completely that it's part of the structuring that I was talking about.
There is in the pieces that Loren Goldner has written on the events in Madison a subtle subtext, one which he has refused to publicly defend, that goes something like this (and it is explicit in his off-list, off-website correspondence): There is something very wrong with the working class upsurge in Wisconsin. It is a profoundly disturbing racial imbalance in these events, the almost complete absence of blacks among those rallying against or fighting the effort to legislatively gut collective bargaining.
Viewing the situation in Madison Goldner states, “I could not imagine such cordial relations between police and prison guards and a similar movement if it erupted in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles.” He would like to deduce rates of black incarceration in Madison (and Wisconsin) relative to those whites from the response of white workers to cops and prisons guards at a rally and demonstration, and on this basis conclude to that profoundly disturbing racial imbalance among workers. Perhaps through a complex series of mediations this is possible, but perhaps then the statistics that Goldner has invoked are skewed, skewed simply because methodologically statistical analysis offers no social and historical account of those conditions that create that the social relations that are frozen in a statistical summation. Let’s set aside what is just below the surface here… a provincial chauvinism that typifies the left communist (and not just left communist) milieu in NYC, for what, in part, bothers Goldner is that a similar movement did not erupt in New York (Chicago or Los Angeles)… Instead, if Goldner had said this would not have happened in Honolulu[1], where the incarceration rates of blacks to whites is 1.88 black for every white (1.88:1) per 100,000 population, well, then, he might have been more believable; for as it stands there is little in the way of race relations that New York can illuminate us on.
Since in an extensive personal correspondence, Goldner, together with John Garvey, have been fond of citing incarceration statistics to us, and since it is these statistics that underpin (and a specific “informant” that confirms) his assessment of the situation in regard to race and class in Madison, let’s look more carefully at this information.
Rates of incarceration of blacks relative to whites are highest in those states that are most lily white, in the Northeast in Vermont (12.45:1), Connecticut (12.00:1) Rhode Island (9.6:1), and the Midwest in states such as Wisconsin (10.64:1), Iowa (10.27:1) and North Dakota (10.05:1); and lowest in those states that admit the greatest racial admixtures of blacks and whites (which having lived in the mid-South for 17 years comes as no surprise) for it is in the old South, in Georgia (3.32:1), Mississippi (3.46:1) and Alabama (3.56:1), that the rates of incarceration of blacks relative to whites are regionally the lowest in the continental United States. As liberals have long known[2], integration homogenizes and grounds down, more than merely marginally, the differences between class and race; which is another way of saying that, for capital, labor power is, well, labor power, a capacity to be exploited in the creation of value…
Going back to Reconstruction, planter-merchants engaged in exploiting a hidden proletarian in black sharecroppers, and today industrial capitalists (there is a good deal more capital intensive industry relative to population density in this region of the South than in the Northeast inclusive of NYC), know from long experience how to mystify and divide by drawing a fault line down a color line among the exploited, because they know the difference between class and race so that when it comes to disciplining labor whites are two to three times more likely to be subject to formal regimentation (i.e., incarceration) there than say in… New York City…[3]
The national average is 5.56 blacks incarcerated for every white (5.56:1) per 100,000 population, while the vaunted example that Goldner invokes, New York, has an incarceration rate of 9.35:1, which, statistically, is not all that difference from Wisconsin… unless, of course, you are black, but which certainly leads to the conclusion that the relation of cops to workers, whether cordial or not, has little to do with incarcerations of blacks. In the United States the injustice of black incarceration is ubiquitous: It is surely not confined to Wisconsin.
There are several other features of Goldner’s subtext over race and class that are suspect.
First, there is the question that we can only hint at here, the abuse in the use of statistics (not to mention the absence of social and historical causation that decidedly shapes statistical analyses in the first place). Do the statistics that Goldner cites say anything about the conditions that obtain in prisons in different parts of the country? It is really, really stunningly myopic, hopelessly abstract and piously liberal (i.e., moralistic) to assert the situations in Madison and those in New York or Los Angeles are in any sense comparable when the actual numbers of human beings, blacks, incarcerated in the former are contrasted with the latter. (Statistically, in Madison, about 2,200 blacks were arrested in 2009, more than 136,000 incarcerated in NYC and 122,000 in Los Angeles)[4]. In California, overcrowding is endemic with not a single prison below 140% of capacity, and with most near 200% of capacity (with 170,588 prisoners for only 83,000 beds)[5]. This situation does not exist in Wisconsin to our knowledge. New York and California long ago legislated the death penalty, and while New York has not executed anyone since 1979, in Wisconsin there has never been a death penalty. We mention this because it is Goldner himself who cites the situation of Mumia abu Jamal on death row in Pennsylvania.
Second, there were three phases to the development of events in Wisconsin. The first was the rolling wave of strikes (teacher sick-outs and student walk-outs) that closed down 38% of the schools (by population) in the state beginning 16 February and ending on Friday, 18 February, and the massive demonstrative upsurge centered in Madison that accompanied the strikes ending Monday, 21 February; the following week through Sunday, 27 February in which "pressure" in the capital was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely nonproletarian or at least not actively so (i.e., municipal workers, teachers and university teaching assistants had nearly all returned to work); and the following 8 days that, ending with passage of Walker’s bill, was more or less a vigil maintained by the hardcore of a couple to three thousand (and dwindling) who thought they might "bring down" Walker by sheer force of will, i.e., by their unrelentingly presence, and which was renewed on Saturday, 12 March in a massive reformist display of support for union bureaucrats and the Democratic Party. By his own admission, Goldner’s assessment of events do not refer to the first, purely proletarian phase but were made on the basis of crowds that formed in Madison on 26-27 February and again on 12 March.
Third, there is the question of black participation in these events. It was minimal. Why?
In this regard Goldner refers to the city of Milwaukee, where some 230,000 blacks in a population of 600,000 live. He has indicated they had a lot a stake in this enactment… The situation there involves Walker’s role before he began governor. He was elected to the position of Milwaukee County Executive in 2002 (and was reelected several times serving into 2010) as a rightwing reformer. In this capacity, he balanced the county budget on the backs of public sector workers. He's enormously proud that property taxes in the county did not rise for eight (8) years under his regime. He did this by cutting public sector jobs in excess of twenty percent (20%) and by dramatically lowering contributions to the county employees' pension plan. There were not Milwaukee blacks at the Madison rallies and demonstrations because they were savaged in the cuts in Milwaukee County. In fact with the exceptions of UW-M academicians and a handful of black teachers, there have been few public employees from Milwaukee period... in large measure because of the demoralization inflicted as a consequence of the defeats there. More to the point, the program that is incarnate in Walker's bill had its trial run in Milwaukee, where it was not fully realized (i.e., unions were not effectively decertified) due to the calculation that, with AFSCME at the state level arrayed against him, he couldn't pursue and realize his full program without occupancy of the state of Wisconsin's executive office, i.e., the governorship.
Goldner appears to think that large layers of the proletariat in Milwaukee are black, while they are not; that the bulk of the black proletariat where it exists is there, in Milwaukee, organized; it is not. You are as likely to find blacks there employed in administering social services and as social workers as anywhere else. Like the question of the prison guards (not to mention the cops), we are not ecumenical in our conception of the working class; these elements strike us as dubiously proletarian, and though public employees we think the attitude and orientation of the administrative levels is quite different with a view to Walker’s bill.
Fourth, there’s the question of whether these events would have occurred in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles in the manner in which they did in Madison. Goldner is begging the question here, since what he refers to (in private correspondence he state “the Bronx, the south side of Chicago or southcentral in LA”) are non-Anglo, overwhelming black residences. We too couldn’t imagine the same scenario, in these areas or in south (not north) Milwaukee (and here it should be noted the polarization was historically between blacks and Polish workers, not German-Scandinavian ones). The scenario he is imagining is one where racial relations have been highly polarized and overlaid and overshadowed class relations. The proper comparison is between Madison and San Bernardino, or Chicago, north of the point where I-90 bisects the city, or, again, in western Milwaukee where the outcome of the imagined scenario would be far different. And, posed this, the proper way, Madison (in its proletarian phase) did quite well in this comparison. So, in contradistinction to Goldner (and Garvey), we reiterate our earlier assessment: In the proletarian phase of these events, the strike wave and the mass demonstrations that accompanied it, exhibited the presence of blacks, especially teachers, in proportion to their presence in the general public sector proletarian population statewide.
As we have pointed out to Goldner, the problem in Wisconsin exemplifies the problem of labor reformism and contract legalistic awareness among organized workers. And this was the real problem in Madison and Wisconsin, and not just here but among unionized workers in the United States generally. The situation in Milwaukee… where the unemployment rate in the inner city among black males of all ages is 47%, countywide it is 16%… is the historical legacy of whole racist set up that has structured union activity since the emergence of the CIO... going back to 1886, the AFL has been more often the less openly racist... and, accordingly, the failure to integrate blacks into labor... where they have been integrated they have on the basis of a much greater demographic density than exists in Wisconsin and they have done so through their own actions… is a product of this institutional legacy which, without doubt, earlier generations of white workers actively supported. That legacy can be summarized in the statement, “last hired, first fired,” and, in Milwaukee, this entire situation was exacerbated by Walker’s countywide cuts during the course of the last decade.
Finally, there is the question of Goldner’s other sources. One of us (Will) was with him in Madison for part of the day on Saturday, 12 March. He was there Saturday and Sunday. His sources are, politely speaking, limited and burdened with an ideological, i.e., Democratic Party, agenda. In the 3+ hours Will spent with him in and around the capitol grounds, he spoke to no one besides Will, Vicki (his wife), and S., his driving companion. Now you may want to write this down to travel fatigue. (He and S. made the long drive in from NYC the previous day). Though, we would add, S. informed Will he had spoke to roughly 25 people Saturday. (Perhaps, you can write this down to his youth, since Goldner, Will and Vicki are all in excess of thirty years old than him.) Outside of a retired steelworker he states he spoke with, his main source of information on Madison and the events there derived from discussions with Joel Rogers, a professor of law, political science and sociology at UW-Madison, and a longtime adviser to the Democrats who heads up the Working Families Party, a left of center Democratic Party pressure group (despite being, as told by Goldner to G.H., a “Situationist in the 70s" Rogers serves as the exception to Goldner’s rule that “Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers”). Such an “informant” does not, in our view, embody or even “represent” the views of workers, especially those workers who in the early days of the unfolding events in Wisconsin engaged in class action.
G.H. (Hieronymous)
Will Barnes
References
[1] Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity,” Publication of The Sentencing Project, July 2007: 6 (chart). Raw statistics are available at the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics and can be accessed online at www.albany.edu/sourcebook.
[2] If we were to make a liberal argument, you know, the bleeding heart type that Goldner makes, we would point that since our figures date from 2007, and Goldner’s from 2005 (at which time the combined rate of Iowa and Wisconsin according to his source was 11.60:1), Wisconsin (and Iowa) appear to be making progress. This, however, it not the type of argument we are making. For Goldner’s and Garvey’s source, see Bruce Dixon, “Ten Worst Places to be Black,” 14 July 2005, accessible at www.blackcommentator.com.
[3] Goldner might also recall that NYC has the dubious distinction of being home to the worst, most brutal race riot in U.S. history in mid-July 1863, an event that exploded in not just a race riot but a week long general strike in which the city's working classes, particularly dock laborers and the early industrial proletariat, opposed Republican party war policy set forth anew in the first conscription in U.S. history. The draft riots embodied the single, definite statement of the position of the working classes on the war - namely, resounding, violently anti-black based opposition.
[4] Mauer and King, “Ibid.”
The population for New York used in this calculation is 8.392,000, for Los Angeles 4,095,000 and for Madison 233,200.
[5] California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website: http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Prisons/index.html; “California’s Overcrowded Prisons,” by Fred Dungan, see graphic map.
Hieronymous - trying to get my head round what's happening over there, as there seems to be very little information in France, and even less discussion.
So a couple of questions which are probably not really central to your polemic with LG & JG.
You state:
the following week through Sunday, 27 February in which "pressure" in the capital was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely nonproletarian or at least not actively so (i.e., municipal workers, teachers and university teaching assistants had nearly all returned to work)...Goldner’s assessment of events do not refer to the first, purely proletarian phase...Goldner appears to think that large layers of the proletariat in Milwaukee are black, while they are not; that the bulk of the black proletariat where it exists is there, in Milwaukee, organized; it is not. You are as likely to find blacks there employed in administering social services and as social workers as anywhere else. Like the question of the prison guards (not to mention the cops), we are not ecumenical in our conception of the working class; these elements strike us as dubiously proletarian
I'm a little confused about your use of the word "proletarian". Do you mean actively contesting their proletarian condition (as opposed to "working class" as a term to describe one's condition within this society, whether you struggle against it or not)? In which case, what does it mean to say "the following week through Sunday, 27 February in which "pressure" in the capital was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely nonproletarian or at least not actively so "? People were demonstrating after work? Or it wasn't directly workers who were involved? Or just that they weren't contesting anything? As for the statement "Goldner appears to think that large layers of the proletariat in Milwaukee are black, while they are not; that the bulk of the black proletariat where it exists is there, in Milwaukee, organized; it is not". Are you using "proletariat " and "working class" interchangeably? And that there are no large amounts of black proletarians/workers (working or not) in Milwaukee? It's not clear - but maybe that's me.
Also, do you know if there have been any attempts by the student (and others) movement in Milwaukee to go beyond the University ghetto and connect to the blacks (or other proletarians) in the area?
I thank Hieronymous and Will Barnes for all the empirical work they have brought to bear in this debate.
First, a simple clarification of fact: in my shorter piece (also posted on libcom)
"A Brief Report On A Brief Visit to Madison" I wrote:
"In recent decades, only the national Latino demonstrations in May 2006 can be considered a larger working-class mobilization, but they not related to a specific issue such as the union-busting austerity now underway in Wisconsin." I omitted that from the longer article. My bad.
Hieronymous and Will Barnes write:
"There is in the pieces that Loren Goldner has written on the events in Madison a subtle subtext, one which he has refused to publicly defend, that goes something like this (and it is explicit in his off-list, off-website correspondence): There is something very wrong with the working class upsurge in Wisconsin. It is a profoundly disturbing racial imbalance in these events, the almost complete absence of blacks among those rallying against or fighting the effort to legislatively gut collective bargaining."
Well, I wouldn't (and didn't) put it so strongly, either on or off-line, and I'll thank comrades for focusing on what I say, not what they think I am saying. (I'm glad they didn't tar me with the brush of saying the workers in Wisconsin are "racist", as one of them attempted to do his HIS "off-line comments".) My purpose in going to Madison and writing about it was in response to one of the biggest signs since four decades that in the U.S. (where the incidence of strikes in the U.S. tapered off to almost nothing in the past decade) that workers in America were at last mobilizing to take on the crisis underway, (sometimes slower, sometimes faster, and now definitely accelerating) since the 1970's in confrontation with the state.
One might think from the intensity of the response of Hieronymous and Will Barnes that I had indicated some "unspoken" sympathy for the Democratic politicians or union blowhards leading the crowd in the chants I cited, or for the recall campaigns about which everyone I talked to (from people in the crowd to Joel Rogers) were totally into, or ended the two articles I wrote with the usually Trotskyists rosary paragraph about "only by building a revolutionary vanguard party..."
No. What I wrote about Madison was a probe, based largely on material and videos available before I went there, and what I saw there on a brief weekend. Will Barnes is from Wisconsin and has an intimate knowledge of the working class in the upper Midwest which I totally lack. Neither he nor Hieronymous are "color blind" (i.e. blind) Marxists. The probe was aimed at inciting debate about the significance of the Wisconsin movement, and more importantly, about its generalizability to other parts of the country (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) when this same super-austerity juggernaut arrives there (and it has arrived point-black in Ohio and Indiana), probably promoted by the same miserable Democrats who were being cheered in Wisconsin. At the heart of my probe, and the questioning which prompted my trip to Madison, was the following: how can a movement that seemed (in Madison) to be 98% white, that seems largely in thrall to the Democrats and the unions, that to date has mobilized neither the 200,000 largely marginalized blacks in the north Milwaukee Bantustan nor the significant Latino population scattered around the state, how can such a movement became a "class for itself"?
Neither Hieronymous nor Will Barnes have addressed that question, nor commented on the various widespread chants I quoted ("The people united will never be defeated", "Recall recall recall", "Thank You Thank You" interrupting the speeches of the Democratic politicians) or the singing of "God Bless America" as indicating something about the consciousness of the movement, however many people anyone talked to.
In late spring 2003, I participated in the mass mobilization in France around a (successful) attempt by the Chirac government to raise the retirement age of public employees to the same level as workers in the private sector. I was in more mass demonstations, week-in week out, than at any time since the late 60's/early 70's. Red flags, the sound trucks blaring the "Internationale" and calls for a general strike were everywhere. It meant little or nothing. The unions and CP and SP led the series of parades in Paris and other big cities until everyone was tired out and went home; the measure passed. And once again, the movement was 99% white, and was not supported by either the private sector workers nor the Arab and African immigrant population, (the youth of the latter rioting in the Paris suburbs two years later). There was the same indifference or even hostility from the rest of the class about the relatively privileged (after three decades of rollback aimed at them) to the situation of the public employees. Total disconnect.
To quote my longer article again: "Any working-class movement worthy of the name embraces the interests of the most oppressed, and that today includes the 15-20% of the U.S. population currently unemployed and increasingly foreclosed into homelessness, the casuals and temps, the harassed immigrant workers both legal and illegal, the millions of marginalized youth, white black and Latino, and the three million people in prison. We know very well that not every struggle that erupts can immediately enlist all such people, but a “climate” must be created in which that universal outreach—what we might call a “class for itself” orientation-- is understood as a necessity, much as such a climate existed, for a few years, in a less extreme situation, in the 1960’s. "
Do Hieronymous and Will Barnes disagree with this? I doubt it. Have they seen signs in the Wisconsin movement of development in this direction? They don't mention them. How do THEY feel about the presence of cops and prison guards--the very people enforcing the incarceration and state supervision of the very high percentage of blacks and Latinos there, including in Dane County, where Madison is--simultaneous with the virtual absence of blacks and Latinos in the mass mobilizations? Not important?
They should say so.
Thus their insinuation--supported by nothing in either of my texts--that I think something is "very wrong" with the Wisconsin movement is a lot of clap-trap. Now that the movement has thrown itself into the "recall" campaigns to replace the Republican pols with Democratic pols, what do THEY think about that? I said that the Wisconsin movement is a "very young" movement and I welcomed and still welcome it. It has nonetheless in its political and trade-union expression still shot through with illusions.
As constituted and projected into the future in the recall campaigns, it will lose, perhaps by electing some Democrats who will, like Jerry Brown in California or Andrew Cuomo in New York, push through a similar austerity package, tarted up by the unions who massively funded their campaigns.
So I throw the question back at them: how will this movement, led for the moment by the two institutions, Democrats and unions, which have been the "soft cop" to the "tough cop" of the Republicans in the U.S. since the late 19th century, break out to become a "class for itself"? Failing to deal with this, everything else they say, valid or not, is so much hot air.
Loren
Samotnaf
Hieronymous - trying to get my head round what's happening over there, as there seems to be very little information in France, and even less discussion.
So a couple of questions which are probably not really central to your polemic with LG & JG.
You state:
the following week through Sunday, 27 February in which "pressure" in the capital was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely nonproletarian or at least not actively so (i.e., municipal workers, teachers and university teaching assistants had nearly all returned to work)...Goldner’s assessment of events do not refer to the first, purely proletarian phase...Goldner appears to think that large layers of the proletariat in Milwaukee are black, while they are not; that the bulk of the black proletariat where it exists is there, in Milwaukee, organized; it is not. You are as likely to find blacks there employed in administering social services and as social workers as anywhere else. Like the question of the prison guards (not to mention the cops), we are not ecumenical in our conception of the working class; these elements strike us as dubiously proletarian
I'm a little confused about your use of the word "proletarian". Do you mean actively contesting their proletarian condition (as opposed to "working class" as a term to describe one's condition within this society, whether you struggle against it or not)? In which case, what does it mean to say "the following week through Sunday, 27 February in which "pressure" in the capital was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely nonproletarian or at least not actively so "? People were demonstrating after work? Or it wasn't directly workers who were involved? Or just that they weren't contesting anything? As for the statement "Goldner appears to think that large layers of the proletariat in Milwaukee are black, while they are not; that the bulk of the black proletariat where it exists is there, in Milwaukee, organized; it is not". Are you using "proletariat " and "working class" interchangeably? And that there are no large amounts of black proletarians/workers (working or not) in Milwaukee? It's not clear - but maybe that's me.
Also, do you know if there have been any attempts by the student (and others) movement in Milwaukee to go beyond the University ghetto and connect to the blacks (or other proletarians) in the area?
Response to Questions (forwarded from Will Barnes)
We assign no special meaning or sense (sens) that entails a contrast or a distinction between the terms “proletarian” and “worker.”
So that what is meant here that the first phase… evinced in the strike wave carried out first and foremost by teachers (and high school students) at the elementary and secondary schools, by teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin, and by municipal city and county workers in and around Madison… was defined by defensive struggle, in which strictly worker or solely proletarian demands where raised, i.e., it was a fight to preserve the mass organizations of public sector workers.
From another written account:
Will Barnes
In response to Walker’s programmatic assault on worker organizations, on Wednesday, 16 February, teachers and students in Madison and some of the outlaying towns inaugurated a wildcat, closing down these schools and rallying at the capitol grounds; on Thursday, 17 February, teachers from Milwaukee and more towns around Madison joined so that now the two largest school districts in the state were shut down; on Friday, 18 February, still more schools now reaching toward the center of the state (north of that point where I-90/1-94 split) wildcatted and headed for Madison. By then, 3/8, a full 37% of the schools in the state were shut down, and other school districts in the state (in and around Fond du Lac and Green Bay for example), while managing to keep their doors open, reported absences between 25% and 40% of personnel and students. On each day, teachers and students were joined by growing numbers of city and county municipal workers from Madison and the surrounding area, and teacher assistants at UW-Madison (who had initiated the whole movement with the first day of the capitol occupation on Tuesday, 15 February). The numbers were astounding, and they grew each day. On Wednesday, 20-25,000, on Thursday (the first time I was there), 30,000; Friday, 40,000. Then, as the weekend rolled around, and the more cautious workers joined in the size of the movement skyrocketed, 70,000 on Saturday and a 100,000 on Sunday.
The statement, “the following week through Sunday, 27 February, in which ‘pressure’ in the capitol was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely non-proletarian,” meant the core public sector workers (enumerated above) were no longer present, that they had gone back to work, that those who were present were now the “activists,” those with leisure and time to engage in a sustained, narrow action aimed at getting Walker and the legislature to reverse course. In point of fact, some these people may have been workers, or retired workers, but quite a few were university students (who, in Madison at least, may have a working class formation…as many students work part- and some even full-time… but others do not work at all, and whose existence is not immediately determined by the wage relation).
In the statement concerning blacks and Milwaukee, yes we used the terms “proletariat” and “working class” interchangeably. And, yes, the black proletariat in Milwaukee is exceedingly small. To hint at this, a couple statistics: The current unemployment rate for black males of all ages in the Milwaukee’s inner city, here known alternatively as a “ghetto” or “slum,” is 47%; countywide, it is 16%. Though exacerbated by the ongoing contraction, this is not a temporary situation. The spatial dimensions of Milwaukee’s black “community” have, not incorrectly, been characterized as a Bantustan. Black workers, male and female, are largely casualized, we think you might say precarious; and while there is a very thin layer of black Milwaukeeans who are employed in administering social services and as social workers (and who we do not consider proletarian), there are very large numbers who are lumpenized, finding a life and home in gangs, engaged in the “illegal” economy (mostly drugs).
While we have a sense of what is the case with regard to your last question (relations between UW-Milwaukee and the black community), we are not well enough informed to make a reasonably evidenced judgment in this regard. This is obviously inadequate, but it is honest and exhibits our limitations, for, though one of us was in Madison on two occasions during the events in question and one of us lived twenty-seven years in Wisconsin (including time in Milwaukee), that was years ago. Neither of us lives there now.
Shoulda Stayed Home and Watched it on Video
Loren Goldner
"In recent decades, only the national Latino demonstrations in May 2006 can be considered a larger working-class mobilization, but they not related to a specific issue such as the union-busting austerity now underway in Wisconsin." I omitted that from the longer article. My bad.
Come on, get the facts straight! The May Day General Strike was in response to the Sensenbrenner Bill, H.R. 4437, a very specific issue to not only undocumented workers but to those (like myself), who work (i.e. humanitarian workers, public schoolteachers, church workers, etc.) in a capacity giving them aid or support. It made all of the former felons and all of the latter violators of a misdemeanor, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years in prison.
Loren Goldner
One might think from the intensity of the response of Hieronymous and Will Barnes that I had indicated some "unspoken" sympathy for the Democratic politicians or union blowhards leading the crowd in the chants I cited, or for the recall campaigns about which everyone I talked to (from people in the crowd to Joel Rogers) were totally into, or ended the two articles I wrote with the usually Trotskyists rosary paragraph about "only by building a revolutionary vanguard party..."
This still begs this question: there were plenty of first-hand accounts here on libcom, some of which were written by left communists and other libertarian communist-sympathizing comrades. Why didn't you read their libcom acounts and why didn't you seek these comrades out? Instead you talked to hardly any workers, but instead sought out Democratic Party apparatchiks, or read and watched...
Loren Goldner
...material and videos available before I went there...
And you based your account on that, as well as what you "saw there on a brief weekend." Fair enough. But why did you even bother going? I mean, you could've just stayed home and watched it on video. The wildcat strike phase was clearly over,
Loren Goldner
Neither Hieronymous nor Will Barnes have addressed... commented on the various widespread chants I quoted ("The people united will never be defeated", "Recall recall recall", "Thank You Thank You" interrupting the speeches of the Democratic politicians) or the singing of "God Bless America" as indicating something about the consciousness of the movement, however many people anyone talked to.
Just one, among many accounts here on libcom:
Oliver Twister
... There was a "people's mic" in the center and I got to it pretty early, imagine how happy I was when the speaker two spots before me called very eloquently for a general strike and had the crowd chanting. I did this, and several other speakers throughout the night did.
...they didn't come for us until after 11. MSNBC (I believe) interviewed one of the blockaders (who wasn't a part of any political group) and asked her what people would do if this bill passed and everything failed, to which she answered (with the support of the rest of us) "General Strike!" Eventually, though we were doing our best to link arms and go limp they were able to drag us out with no arrests (I think - there was a rumor of one arrest in the antechamber). Right after I was led out people were chanting "General Strike".
This isn't to make a critical appraisal of whether a general strike was still feasible, given the momentum of the class and the forces on the ground, at that point. But the sentiment for militancy was still there when Oliver made this report on March 11.
Loren Goldner
... but a “climate” must be created in which that universal outreach—what we might call a “class for itself” orientation-- is understood as a necessity, much as such a climate existed, for a few years, in a less extreme situation, in the 1960’s."j
That "climate" does exist, but almost exclusively for the Spanish-speaking proletariat, as made clear in the spring of 2006 and culminating in the May Day General Strike that forced congress to back down of the fascist Sensenbrenner Bill. But that climate didn't spring out of nowhere, but could be seen as part of the historical trajectory that goes as far back as the 8-hour-day movement and the tragedy of Haymarket in Chicago in 1886. It goes like this:
Hieronymous
The U.S. the government intentionally put Labor Day in September to try to erase the memory of the Haymarket martyrs who inspired the celebration of May Day as International Workers’ Day, starting in 1889. Events have come full circle; in 1886 during the eight-hour day movement in Chicago immigrant workers were fighting against capital accumulation in the phase in its extensive form, as it extracted surplus value under formal domination. The Haymarket prosecution was the “trial of the century” as radical workers around the world followed the court case through their labor press. In places like Spain the execution of the Chicago radicals was integrated into their commemoration of May Day.
Since the 19th century many Spanish radicals have immigrated to Latin America to escape government repression, bringing their version of May Day with them. Workers throughout South America and Mexico celebrate May Day under the influence of these Spanish émigrés. With American-backed repression throughout Latin America, in addition to the destruction of tradition work sectors with the passage of NAFTA, many Latino immigrants escaped to the U.S. – bringing their version of May Day with them. They have reconnected the American working class with the traditions of self-activity of the working class and the insurrectionary potential at its birth, embodied in Chicago anarchists of the 1880s. Today’s immigrants are part of the new global proletariat, recomposed within international division of labor at this higher level accumulation, yet connected to historical continuities as they point us to the future.
My comrades and I participated in the events on May Day 2006, joining a march along International Blvd (a.k.a. East 14th Street), that began around 98th Avenue at the Oakland/San Leandro city border with around 15,000. It doubled through the Spanish-speaking Fruitvale District and when it arrived in downtown Oakland there were over 50,000, having marched over 100 blocks. It was the largest demonstration in downtown Oakland since the 1946 General Strike.
And I saw some serious cleavages. About a dozen black nationalists started attacking the protest right in front of City Hall, spewing xenophobic hatred. It was calculated to be divisive, attracting over a dozen police cars. Some protesters with saner heads defused the situation and nothing came of this provocation. At the time, I was teaching laid off Chinese garment workers, all of whom had either a green card or citizenship. Just prior to May Day, they introduced the topic of the planned strike and marches and asked my opinion. I grew excited and suggested we participate together. They grew glum and denounced the "Mexicans" with "no papers," who hadn't paid the tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to be legal residents or citizens as they had. My heart sank, but I realized that the racial tensions in the U.S. go well beyond simple white/black binaries, especially on the West Coast where Spanish-speakers and Asian are the the fastest growing groups.
When the ILWU invoked a contractual clause to hold a "work-stop" meeting on May Day 2008, I went to every planning meeting in the Bay Area. The ILWU was able to use this technicality to shut down 29 ports on the West Coast on May Day, with the unrealistic, but admirable, demands of ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, solidarity with and legalization for all undocumented workers, and as a celebration of international workers' day. But the longshore activists were short-sighted in many ways. They hadn't thought of sending the message to the tens of thousands of troqueros (16,500 at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex alone) who do the short-haul moving of the cargo containers around the port. These drivers had been mostly unionized workers, until Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, deregulating the trucking industry and making most non-long-haul drivers into precarious independent contractors.
So for about 2 weeks at the end of April, ten of us would get to the Port of Oakland at the crack of dawn and flier the troqueros with bilingual announcements of the May Day action, inviting them to join the protest -- since with the longshore workers taking a day off, meant no work for them. We also gave them bilingual fliers about the national wildcat of long-haul truckers that had been spreading sporadically that spring, hoping that they would find common class interests and perhaps strike themselves -- as they had done in a wildcat action that blocked the one of the main gates at the Port of Oakland for 8 days in the spring of 2004.
Additionally, some of us linked up with the Bay Area I.W.W. and spread the word of the 2008 May Day port closure to other ethnic based organizations of workers. From an attempted fare strike in San Francisco's transit system, we had worked closely with the San Francisco Day Laborers Program, so we scheduled a formal meeting with that group to announce the port shut down and the May Day rally in order to invite their participation. They voted right then and there and decided to not work on May Day and to help spread the action in the Spanish-speaking community.
We also tried to reach Chinese worker groups, like San Francisco's Chinese Progressive Association, to no avail (although we had worked with them on the 2005 transit strike). All this is to say that it's impossible to bridge the racial divides that weaken the class without reaching out to everyone in organized groups and trying to get them to listen. If a general strike had begun across Wisconsin when all the teachers were wildcatting, it would have been up to working class militants like us to try to spread it to other ethnic working class communities, but also to attempt to break down sectoral walls, as well as to spread it regionally beyond Wisconsin. That's where the contact my comrades and I have made in California could be called upon to try to spread it here. That would be keeping alive the militant working class "climate" that Goldner mentions, mostly dormant now but we hope to keep it alive by continuously fanning the flames.
Loren Goldner
Do Hieronymous and Will Barnes disagree with this? I doubt it. Have they seen signs in the Wisconsin movement of development in this direction? They don't mention them. How do THEY feel about the presence of cops and prison guards...[?]
What's there to say? Yeah, we find no common cause with pigs and prison pigs because we consider them class enemies. Some of us in the Bay Area participated in the movement around Oscar Grant, the African American young man shot in the back by a transit cop in Oakland on New Year's Day 2009. It fizzled with typical leftist infighting, but if there hadn't been a handful of riots in downtown Oakland, the killer cop probably would've gotten off. But even this type of anti-cop activism lacks class politics and can be extremely limited and reformist.
Loren Goldner
--the very people enforcing the incarceration and state supervision of the very high percentage of blacks and Latinos there, including in Dane County, where Madison is--simultaneous with the virtual absence of blacks and Latinos in the mass mobilizations? Not important?
They should say so.
Here again, when you say: "virtual absence of blacks and Latinos in the mass mobilizations," virtual is the operative word because you are simply mistaken.
naima1917
Watch this video, posted on March 14th:
[youtube]2AbHfez__54[/youtube]
[/quote]
Or click and watch this "Mutiny in Milwaukee" video from Fox News about the wildcat strike by 600 public school teachers in Milwaukee during the first week.
Public schools are one of the biggest battlegrounds in the current phase of the class war. Just watch the lame anti-teacher, anti-worker, anti-union hit-piece Waiting for Superman to see the pro-market ideology for education. Michelle Rhee was appointed by Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, when he was elected in 2007, as chancellor of schools where she was given autocratic discretion and began her hatchet job of attacking teachers' working conditions with merit pay, in addition to firing 241 teachers and attempting to close 24 schools. In the backlash, Fenty was voted out and Rhee had to step down too -- but even in failure, her campaign to privatize, charterize schools and attack teacher pay and working conditions has gained momentum.
A recently retired Oakland high school teacher, who was instrumental in helping organize the K-12 walk-outs in Oakland on March 4th last year, is heading to Milwaukee this weekend to talk with organized groups of black parents who are coming together to fight against Mayor Tom Barrett's plans, à la Fenty & Rhee, to give dictatorial powers to the mayor to run the schools -- by almost anyone's standards Milwaukee Public Schools are one of the worst districts in the U.S. He's read this debate, is sympathetic to the position of Will Barnes and myself, and has promised to write an account of the conditions in Milwaukee when he returns. I hope to post it here.
How race divides the class has been an important concern to our solidarity activities here in the Bay Area and we have been attempting to intervene with bringing class unity across race, ethnic and gender divisions, in a coordinated fashion, since at least 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began. We made the banner below, with "NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR" written in English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. During the demo, we had conversations with other protesters speaking all of those languages, we handed out around 5000 of two version of our anti-capitalist, anti-war flier, and we invited like-minded people we met at demos to come meet with us.Loren Goldner
Thus their insinuation--supported by nothing in either of my texts--that I think something is "very wrong" with the Wisconsin movement is a lot of clap-trap. Now that the movement has thrown itself into the "recall" campaigns to replace the Republican pols with Democratic pols, what do THEY think about that? I said that the Wisconsin movement is a "very young" movement and I welcomed and still welcome it. It has nonetheless in its political and trade-union expression still shot through with illusions.
As constituted and projected into the future in the recall campaigns, it will lose, perhaps by electing some Democrats who will, like Jerry Brown in California or Andrew Cuomo in New York, push through a similar austerity package, tarted up by the unions who massively funded their campaigns.
I believe not a few, but most of your account regarding working class conditions in the U.S. come from sources clearly clueless about the lived reality of the proletariat today. Some are disreputable Trots, others are classless angels in the academy. Still others are fellow travelers with the Democratic Party and some are even class enemies from the bourgeoisie (or functioning to serve their interests).
I recently came across a fairly mainstream book I'd recommend to Goldner. It's from 1996, so it's dated; it's William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Wilson was a social democrat and was weak on so many things. But he was excellent in comparing the difference between ghettos that are simply poor with those that are poor and are plagued with long-term unemployment. Not that I want to glorify wage labor, but in the latter a sense of hopelessness and despair sets in that's corrosive and much more demoralizing than poverty from low wages. Wilson claims that we need to see this less with the lens of race and more with the lens of class. And to update his tale, just watch films like Winter's Bone or read Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus to see that if left to the communist practice of coastal dilettante Marxists, sipping their latte, reading the New York Times, and whipping out their iPad to plan their next trip to Paris, we're fucked. The ghettos will explode like Watt/Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992 again and cosmopolitan left communists will be sitting on their hands. And trailer trash working class whites will keep smoking crystal meth and goose stepping with fascist Christian fundamentalists. That is, if we don't start rolling up our sleeves and engaging all the members of our class, warts and all. Goldner, you clearly don't.
Loren Goldner
So I throw the question back at them: how will this movement, led for the moment by the two institutions, Democrats and unions, which have been the "soft cop" to the "tough cop" of the Republicans in the U.S. since the late 19th century, break out to become a "class for itself"? Failing to deal with this, everything else they say, valid or not, is so much hot air.
Loren
Less hot air than your grand pronouncements written from afar (New York City) and from far outside the class. Goldner, you obviously arrived in Madison well-after the proletarian phase (but couldn't tell the difference, anyway), that had been marked by wildcat strikes of teachers and walk outs of students that shut down 18 school districts throughout Wisconsin. The detailed accounts of Will Barnes and Paul Taylor made that explicitly clear. So you saw the potential "post-peak," but your sweeping account of the events were judgments "from on-line photos and videos" you watched "before" you "went there." It begs this same question again: why did you even bother going? You gained no further insights once there (except, perhaps, Democratic Party strategy from your informant), so why didn't you just stay home and watch it on video?
The statement, “the following week through Sunday, 27 February, in which ‘pressure’ in the capitol was kept up largely by Madisonians, largely non-proletarian,” meant the core public sector workers (enumerated above) were no longer present, that they had gone back to work, that those who were present were now the “activists,” those with leisure and time to engage in a sustained, narrow action aimed at getting Walker and the legislature to reverse course. In point of fact, some these people may have been workers, or retired workers, but quite a few were university students (who, in Madison at least, may have a working class formation…as many students work part- and some even full-time… but others do not work at all, and whose existence is not immediately determined by the wage relation).
This is not true at all. After the teachers went back to work, the demonstrations just started really happening later. There might have been a core of these "non-proletarian" people during the hours of 12-3pm, but 3-5pm, the composition of the crowd would change until people left around 9-10pm. Even inside the capitol, where people were staying it was a mix. With some public sector workers apparently staying there on their day off or staying and going to work in the morning.
WTF is it with H. and his New York bashing? You got a problem with NYC, H? Not proletarian enough for you? Too many bankers?
And this crap about lattes, iPads, and the rest of that neanderthal anti-urban, anti-intellectual but oh so perfectly American tub-thumping, this channeling of
Spiro T. Agnew?
Sounds to me, H., that you've got a personal problem with Goldner, and you should keep it a personal problem.
Like for example, if I personally think you happen to be a sanctimonious, stuck-up, poseur with your head up your ass, waving your pseudo-proletarian credentials around like a bloody shirt, that wouldn't stop me from agreeing with what's right in what you say, nor make me any more vehement in my disagreement with what's wrong.
Nor would I ever even think of attempting to besmirch your analysis with reference to geographical locations, computer preferences, or favorite beverages. I mean I might hate your guts, but it would be your guts I hate, and for reasons regarding you, and not your zipcode.
S. Artesian
...you happen to be a sanctimonious, stuck-up, poseur with your head up your ass, waving your pseudo-proletarian credentials around like a bloody shirt,
That's not something anyone will ever say about you, not in this lifetime (having seen your CV and your business profile on the 'net). But since libcom is not composed of Leninists, how is your approach not coming to class struggle from the outside?
By the way S. Artesian, your critique of the Leninist theory of imperialism is the best one I ever read (and thanks for the tip on David A. Wells' Recent Economic Changes, it was excellent).
S. Artesian
WTF is it with H. and his New York bashing? You got a problem with NYC, H? Not proletarian enough for you? Too many bankers?
[...]
Nor would I ever even think of attempting to besmirch your analysis with reference to geographical locations, computer preferences, or favorite beverages. I mean I might hate your guts, but it would be your guts I hate, and for reasons regarding you, and not your zipcode.
But I didn't say "New York," or "NYC." I said:
Hieronymous
... left to the communist practice of coastal dilettante Marxists, sipping their latte, reading the New York Times, and whipping out their iPad to plan their next trip to Paris, we're fucked.
Your defensive municipal chauvinism sounds like this is your worldview:
As though west of the Hudson we start fires with flint, drink water out of wells, use an outhouse, and communicate by telegraph.
You know, there is another coast (where people sip latte, read the New York Times on their Kindle, design not only iPads, but many of the apps, and actually travel by plane -- if they can afford to).
EDIT: my mistake. I mentioned where Goldner lives to point out that it's not Milwaukee. If conditions are so bad there, which is an important point, he should have gone to Milwaukee to investigate. But it's disingenuous to go to Madison, then write a report that attributes the weakness of the movement converging on the the Wisconsin capitol to race and class relations in Milwaukee (or by hypothesizing what reactions would be in Chicago).
If I understood correctly, the problem with New York City is that it does not present a clear view of the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. I imagine that had Goldner lived in LA that would have been cited, instead.
You know, there is another coast (where people sip latte, read the New York Times on their Kindle, design not only iPads, but many of the apps, and actually travel by plane -- if they can afford to).
Sure. That's what you said. Combined with this:
Less hot air than your grand pronouncements written from afar (New York City)
and in the previous post:
Let’s set aside what is just below the surface here… a provincial chauvinism that typifies the left communist (and not just left communist) milieu in NYC, for what, in part, bothers Goldner is that a similar movement did not erupt in New York (Chicago or Los Angeles)… Instead, if Goldner had said this would not have happened in Honolulu[1], where the incarceration rates of blacks to whites is 1.88 black for every white (1.88:1) per 100,000 population, well, then, he might have been more believable; for as it stands there is little in the way of race relations that New York can illuminate us on.
Now strip my gears and call my shiftless, but pardon me for detecting a bit of good ole American anti-New Yorkism in your quotes, and maybe I'm just paranoid, but I bet I'm not alone in my dementia.
I have never read anything by Loren that would indicate NYC is any sort of paradigm for anything, other than shorter trip times to Europe.
And BTW, I think Loren has it wrong in his analysis of Madison, no BTW about it, unlike little, old, modest me who never gets it wrong.
Nope, not self-righteous, sanctimonious, or stuck-up that's for sure. Arrogant? No doubt. Blunt? Painfully so. Abrasive? Like shark's skin. But... with a real good sense of humor. And that's what truly bothers me in your criticism of Loren's .. there's isn't a shred of humor, not an ounce, a gram.
re business profile: Something I am only too proud to claim as mine. Yeah, I did all that.
Thanks for the kind words on the anti Lenin's Imperialism-- the whole point being that whatever exists as "superprofits" exists only as a moment in capitalism [if it exists at all], which in its very existence creates its own abolition.
Value isn't theft, which is where Proudhon, Gunder Frank, Sweezy, Wallerstein ad infinitum ad nauseum go and come wrong, regarding property as something distinct from the mode of production, property as NOT a reproduction of the mode of production. Value is reproduction of the social relation of its production. That's what makes it self-mediating. That's what makes "imperialism" such a sham ideology... there's capitalism, uneven and combined development to be sure.. but it's all capitalism, interlocked, intertwined, international.
Anyway, enough about that. Like I said, I agree with much of the Barnes/H. analysis of Madison, including that "pre-fascism" fascist content of the Walker, the Doublemint Fitzgerald twins, etc. attacks.
I just think you're expressing a bit of personal bitterness in your critique of Loren.
Now as for that Leninist stuff: Honestly, I try not to think about that. Next to the stuff about imperialism, I can't think of anything that has weighed like a nightmare on the brain of the living class struggle than this constant, tedious, and quite detached and therefore worthless debate about "the role of the party," the "role of the intellectuals," "the bringing of 'class consciousness'" like it's one of those gifts that magi brought to the baby Jesus. I say Hallelujah!
I have no idea where that puts me in the spectrum of "authentic" working class militancy.
What I do know is that for Madison to succeed, from the getgo the organizations have to be outside the boundaries of the unions, outside the fractionalization of the workers as public sector/private sector, unionized/non-unionized, employed/unemployed. And those organizations have to, also from the getgo, articulate a bit more than just "no concessions, no give-backs" but speak to the privation and misery imposed on just those sections of the class segregated, herded into the margins by the "privatization" the asset-stripping of our liquidationist bourgeoisie.
And I say that knowing full well I live in NYC and think NYC is more messed up than other places, but with better restaurants.
Bleeding Wisconsin - S. Artesian
S Artesian on the Wisconsin protests and the governor's attack on workers.
1. In 1854, the US Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The act, advertised as a compromise, was in fact a capitulation. The law proclaimed not equality, but the power of slave labor over free labor, and the power of slaveholders over the old order of the republic. The law embraced the spread of slavery into the territory purchased from France in 1803, thus annulling the Missouri Compromise, and allowing for the admission of new slave states to the Union.
For 35 years, the old parties of the North, whose vision and existence never extended beyond that of a merchants’ republic, had been accommodating to the slaveholders’ autarchy, presenting itself, and to itself, every capitulation as a compromise. In 1854 the capitulation to the slaveholders could no longer be disguised. The old parties represented only those interests opposed to capital’s free access to “free labor.”
In that same year, thirty people met in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin for the purpose of creating a new political party. This party was organized around a simple principle—that political compromise with a system that enslaved human labor was intolerable.
One hundred and fifty seven years later, that same party founded in that same state is still attempting to make amends for the wild idealism of its youth when it dared to oppose the emancipation of the laborers to the plantation class’ claim to ownership, to property in the laborers themselves.
2. In 2011, having selected the incompetent former county executive of Milwaukee County to be the new governor of Wisconsin, our recidivist/arsonist/deconstructionist/liquidationist bourgeoisie submitted their shopping list of bills to the governor, Scott Walker, for introduction into the legislature.
Walker, as county executive of Milwaukee County, had proven himself a loyal, obedient, belligerent, and oblivious errand boy for the liquidationist bourgeoisie. He had not, however, shown himself to be a competent county executive. Indeed, competence is not now, nor has it ever been a requirement for those handling the public money in government. Ideology is ever so much more effective when it comes to getting done, or not done, the things the bourgeoisie pay to have done and not done.
As county executive, Walker had been a master of incompetence; the apotheosis of ineptitude; the ideologist of decay, collapse, and pettiness that is currently called “privatization” and “outsourcing,” “balanced budgets,” and “entrepreneurship.
From public transit to mental health, from prisoner transport to courthouse to security, from medical assistance to custodial services, Walker uniformly proposed reducing the county’s fiscal and operating responsibility. Raising prices while reducing service was his basic approach when and where he could not accomplish the same thing by outsourcing and privatizing the work. Under the guise of balancing the budget and restraining taxes, Walker shirked the local responsibilities for providing social services, either awarding the tasks to private contractors, advocating the state government assume responsibility, and/or simply neglecting the need for improvements. This is the business acumen that the bourgeoisie requires at the highest levels of its government; that the bourgeoisie makes others pay for, secure in the knowledge that the return on this anti-investment is greater than any its class could obtain by actually satisfying a human need.
The truth of the obsolescence of modern capital accumulation is made painfully clear in the deliberate and instinctual incompetence of its selected government officials. Value admits no other need save the accumulation of value. Value denies, opposes, and attacks need. Value isn’t about squeezing blood from a stone; it’s about turning flesh into dust through malign neglect.
3. The bills introduced into the Wisconsin legislature in 2011 read like love letters exchanged among a ménage a trois of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, and Milton Friedman. These sonnets to the higher organic rate of capital decomposition included:
–advancing the date of certain tax refunds to employers
–increasing the number of enterprise zones where employers may claim additional tax credits
–increasing tax benefits to employers hiring additional employees
–increasing the income tax exclusion on capital gains
–awarding grants to manufacturing associations for marketing and advertising
–more tax credits for business
–additional enterprise zones
–repealing the requirement that police motor vehicle motor stops be audited for racial profiling
–more tax credits for business
–prohibiting the state’s Department of Natural Resources from requiring cities to provide continuous disinfection of drinking water
–increasing investors’ tax credits
–eliminating the right of a school district resident to challenge the use of a race-based nickname, logo, mascot, or name for a school team
–more tax breaks
–expanding the arena for, and easing the requirements on, the establishment of charter schools, the costs of which will be funded by reducing the general appropriation for public education
And of course these bills are just probes, raids, tests, and diversions to the real attack, to the deep battle envisioned in Assembly Bill 11 “an act introduced….at the request of Governor Scott Walker.” The [unamended] bill:
… limits the right to collectively bargain for all employees who are not public safety employees (general employees) to the subject of base wages. In addition, unless a referendum authorizes a greater increase, any general employee who is part of a collective bargaining unit is limited to bargaining over a percentage of total base wages increase that is no greater than the percentage change in the consumer price index. This bill also prohibits municipal employers from collectively bargaining with municipal general employees in matters that are not permitted under MERA [Municipal Employment Relations Act].
… requires an annual certification election of the labor organization that represents each collective bargaining unit containing general employees. If, at the election, less than 51 percent of the actual employees in the collective bargaining unit vote for a representative, then, at the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement, the current representative is decertified and the members of the collective bargaining unit are nonrepresented and may not be represented for one year.
… also allows a general employee to refrain from paying dues and remain a member of a collective bargaining unit.
… provides that the employee required contribution rate for general participating employees and for elected and executive participating employees must equal one−half of all actuarially required contributions, as determined by the Employee Trust Funds Board. For protective occupation employees, the bill provides that the employee required contribution rate must equal the percentage of earnings paid by general participating employees.
…provides that an employer may not pay any of the employee required contributions under the WRS [Wisconsin Retirement System] or under an employee retirement system of a first class city or a county having a population of 500,000 or more.
… provides that the employer may not pay more than 88 percent of the average premium cost of plans offered in the tier with the lowest employee premium cost.
[provides]…For the remainder of 2011, however, beginning in April 2011, the bill provides that state employees, as well as employees of public authorities created by the state, who work more than 1,565 hours a year shall pay $84 a month for individual coverage and $208 a month for family coverage for health care coverage under any plan offered in the tier with the lowest employee premium cost; $122 a month for individual coverage and $307 a month for family coverage for health care coverage under any plan offered in the tier with the next lowest employee premium cost; and $226 a month for individual coverage and $567 a month for family coverage for health care coverage under any plan offered in the tier with the highest employee premium cost.
UW System graduate assistants and teaching assistants must pay half of these amounts. Employees who work less than 1,566 hours a year are required to pay the same amount for health care coverage during 2011 that they were required to pay before the bill’s effective date. The bill further provides that a local government employer who participates in the local government health insurance plan offered by GIB may not participate in the plan if it intends to pay more than 88 percent of the average premium cost of plans offered in any tier with the lowest employee premium cost.
… requires GIB to design health care coverage plans for the 2012 calendar year that, after adjusting for any inflationary increase in health benefit costs, reduces the average premium cost of plans offered in the tier with the lowest employee premium cost by at least 5 percent from the cost of such plans offered during the 2011 calendar year. GIB must include copayments in the health care coverage plans for the 2012 calendar year and may require health risk assessments for state employees and participation in wellness or disease management programs
… requires the secretary of employee trust funds to allocate $28,000,000, from reserve accounts established in the public employee [emphasis added] trust fund for group health and pharmacy benefits for state employees, to reduce employer costs for providing group health insurance for state employees for the period beginning on July 1, 2011, and ending on December 31, 2011
[provides] the governor may declare a state of emergency if he or she determines that an emergency exists resulting from a disaster or the imminent threat of a disaster. This bill authorizes a state agency to discharge any state employee who fails to report to work as scheduled for any three unexcused working days during a state of emergency or who participates in a strike, work stoppage, sit−down, stay−in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the of operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls. Under the bill, engaging in any of these actions constitutes
just cause for discharge. [Note: former employees may be discharged for resigning.]
If the other legislation proposed for enactment comprises the love letters of Greenspan, Rand, and Friedman, then this act, this omnibus deconstruction and unreconciliation act, represents the pre-nuptial, the post-nuptial, and the last will and testament of that cluster fuck called capitalism.
4. So the party born in Wisconsin, that found slavery an intolerable burden to the advancement of human welfare had come full circle, finding human welfare an intolerable burden to the advancement of slavery.
Education, medical care, mental health, security for young and the elderly—any and every facet of what are most properly called the conditions of social reproduction [human beings being human precisely to the degree that they are social, do provide for the welfare of all]—is to be abolished by these new anti-abolitionists.
“I’ve seen future,” said the state’s chief incompetent executive, “and it’s right here,” he said pointing with his left hand to his right hand that was under the table, performing the secret libertarian handshake with the brothers Koch, the brothers of Koch Industries, those entrepreneurs extraordinaire, who made their money the old fashioned way, by inheriting it.
And so begins the fifth decade of the bourgeoisie’s assault on the living standards of the working class. The assault has gone on for so long that many have no memory of there ever being a time when the bourgeoisie were not engaged in such attacks; had not made Hobbes Leviathan their Gideon bible, placed in every hotel room, every abattoir, every MBA program, every prospectus offering securities that may or may not perform as anticipated; had not counted [literally] on the spread of misery and privation through cruise missiles, structured investment vehicles, capital flight, and that old time religion—driving the price of labor below its cost of reproduction.
It is an offensive that has gone on for so long that the offenders grow ever more nostalgic for their salad days of the second decade of the offensive, the decade of that pomaded but empty-headed empty suit, Ronald Reagan.
Walker, his stocking nailed above the fireplace, eagerly awaited Santa David and Santa Charles sliding down the chimney, helping themselves to the Wisconsin milk and Nabisco ‘Nilla wafers he had so thoughtfully spent the public money contracting a private caterer to supply, and delivering their goody bags of personal political contributions to the Scott Walker is the new Ronald Reagan Cosmetic Surgeons/Spin Doctors Stem Cell Recombinant DNA Makeover Fund [“Piece of cake,” said the head doctor, “We’ve been cloning sheep for years.”].
Walker imagined himself a Reagan, that is to say he imagined himself a man without imagination, he thought himself a man without thoughts. He pretended to be a man who was already a pretender.
The Wisconsin Democrats elected to the state senate proved that their greatest and only contribution to class struggle is their disappearance from the scene. Hiding out in the deep forests around Rockford, Illinois, the Democrats, who were not opposed, mind you to the attack on the workers’ living standards, just opposed to the attack on the right of workers to maintain membership in unions while under attack, the Democrats prevented the gathering of a quorum in the state senate, thus preventing the Republicans from conducting the important business of transferring wealth from the pockets of the workers, and from the public treasury, to the private accounts of their bankers and bankrollers.
The message from Wisconsin was broadcast far and wide: Class struggle begins where the Democrats leave off and just plain leave.
Meanwhile on the southern edge of these United States in the state of Alabama, hundreds of white people, good Republican church-going white people, wearing their favorite uniform in their favorite color, Confederate and in battle grey, gathered to wave the flag of the slaveholders’ rebellion and celebrate the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of the single greatest traitor in US history, Jefferson Davis.
History holds something for everyone, but it seems it holds the most for the cynic and the fool, each acting in a play written by the other for the amusement of both. The party of Lincoln, a party born embodying the inseparability of the cause of union from the cause of emancipation had come to worship at the feet of slaveholders, secessionists, the anti-Unionists who were now the inspiration for its own anti-unionism.
After years of living the lie of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the bourgeoisie had stepped boldly out of its closet, dressed in the white sheet and wearing the white camellia of the nightrider, the terrorist.
It was almost a most perfect world. Ignorance was its strength, slavery was its freedom, and treason was its patriotism.
Here in Wisconsin and Alabama, just two of fifty states, representing less than four percent of the US population, on public display were two-thirds of the makeup of American democracy: dolts and terrorists. Missing only were the looters. But they were there, they were everywhere, and in more than spirit.
5. The brothers Koch worked their way up the ladder of corporate America by climbing on their father’s knees as young boys. Upon the father’s death, they took over the control of an enterprise based on energy [oil refining was the source of their father’s triumph], and built it into a conglomerate with operations in minerals, ranching, fibers and polymer, forest products, process and pollution control equipment, polymers, fibers, chemicals, commodity trading, and finance.
It hasn’t all been a bed of roses for Koch Industries, as the conglomerate and its units seem to display a certain inability to abide by the laws of the country in which it is incorporated, the United States of America. While the American Enterprise Institute, that busy beehive of ideological advocacy endorsing the mythology of “invisible hand” laissez-faire capitalism refers to CEO Charles Koch as “The Principled Entrepreneur,” it is apparent that the principles themselves are not quite that ingrained in the business activities of Koch’s corporations—or if they are so ingrained, the principles themselves are not exactly principled.
In March 2000, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced:
Koch Petroleum Group (Koch), which operates a refinery in Rosemount, Minn., was sentenced on March 1 to pay a $6 million criminal fine and pay an additional $2 million in remediation costs to the Dakota County Park System in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis. This is the largest federal environmental fine ever paid in Minnesota. The defendant was also ordered to serve three years probation. Koch previously pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act (CWA). Koch admitted that it negligently discharged aviation fuel into a wetland and an adjoining waterway. Even though Koch was aware of the problem, it did not develop a comprehensive plan to recover between 200,000 – 600,000 gallons of released fuel until June 1997. In addition, the establishment of the system to recover the fuel destroyed a portion of the surrounding ecosystem and wildlife habitat. In a separate offense, Koch dumped a million gallons of wastewater with high ammonia content on the ground between November 1996 and March 1997 and also increased its flow of wastewater into the Mississippi River on weekends when Koch did not monitor its discharges. These actions allowed Koch to circumvent the weekly monitoring and reporting requirements of its wastewater discharge permit. The case was investigated by EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division, the FBI and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and was prosecuted by the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota.
In November of 2000, CBS News reported:
… that [Bill Koch, brother of Charles and David stated] Koch Industries engaged in “(o)rganized crime…”
“It was – was my family company. I was out of it,” he says. “But that’s what appalled me so much… I did not want my family, my legacy, my father’s legacy to be based upon organized crime.”
Bill Koch says that his brother Charles made a fortune stealing oil. Much of it from beneath Indian reservations and federal lands – places like national forests. Oil under federal lands belongs to the public. Koch Industries was the middleman – buying oil from the government at the well – then selling it to refineries. Bill Koch says that the company took more oil than it paid for by cheating on measurements.
A gauger measures the volume and the quality of the oil that his company is buying. The buyer leaves his measurements behind on what’s called a “run ticket.” It’s an IOU to the well owner.
“What Koch was doing was taking all these measurements and then falsifying them on the run sheets,” says Bill Koch. “If the dipstick measured five feet 10 inches and one half inch, they would write down five feet nine and one half inches.”
That may not sound like much, but Bill Koch says that it added up. “Well, that was the beauty of the scheme. Because if they’re buying oil from 50,000 different people, and they’re stealing two barrels from each person. What does that add up to? One year, their data showed they stole a million and a half barrels of oil.”
In a written statement, Koch blames its problems on Bill Koch – calling him a “disgruntled family member” who has waged a “personal vendetta through lawsuits and the media against his brothers’ company.”
But in December 1999, the jury found that Koch Industries did steal oil from the public and lied about its purchases – 24 thousand times. The oil theft conviction was a heavy blow, but the troubles of Koch Industries don’t stop there. If the company was fattening its bottom line through theft – there is also evidence Koch was pinching pennies on safety and environmental protection – cutting costs with disastrous results.
But wait, that’s not all:
Former EPA administrator Carol Browner announced in 2000 that she was hitting Koch Industries with the largest civil penalty in the history of the federal Clean Water Act: a $30 million fine.
She said, Koch Industries spilled over 3 million gallons of crude oil in six states
Koch pipelines make up the largest oil and gas network in the nation. The EPA complaint targeted more than 300 oil spills, some poisoning fisheries and drinking water.
In a statement, Koch Industries claims that it has spent a billion dollars on environmental improvements and reduced leaks by 96 percent. The company urged us to look at its record at the federal Office of Pipeline Safety. We did and discovered that Koch’s records at OPS look good. But we also found that OPS doesn’t cover more than half of Koch’s lines – including the lines that leaked.
And there’s still more:
“They don’t care for any loss of human life. Like I said, it was the buck that counted for them,” says Danny Smalley. He had the extreme misfortune of living near a Koch Industries underground pipeline that ran through Texas. In August, 1996, Smalley was home with his daughter Danielle and her friend Jason Stone. Danielle was packing to leave for school the next day – the first person in her family to go to college.
She and Jason started smelling gas. It was butane, pouring from a corroded Koch Industries high pressure pipeline, 200 yards from their home. Jason and Danielle set out in a pickup truck to find help. But their truck set off the butane, and caused an explosion.
Danny Smalley filed suit against Koch Industries. His attorney, Ted Lyon, says the investigation exposed a pattern of negligence and coverup involving the pipeline known as Sterling One. Lyon describes the pipeline as like “Swiss Cheese.”
Koch is require by law to ensure that its vast pipeline system is protected from corrosion in two ways. The pipe must be wrapped in a protective coating. And, once in the ground, an electrical current is applied all along the pipeline – a technique that inhibits corrosion.
“If you don’t have the current and you don’t have coating, you have a big problem. And that’s what happened in this case. And the sad thing about it is, they knew it,” says Lyon.
Federal investigators blamed the explosion on Koch’s failure to adequately protect the line. Koch industries told us the fatal explosion is the only incident of its kind in the company’s history. Still, in 1999, a jury found Koch Industries guilty of negligence and malice.
“They admitted to me if they had done things the way they should have, my child and Jason would still be alive,” says Danny Smalley.
“They said, ‘We’re sorry Mr. Smalley, that your child lost her life and Jason lost his life.’ Sorry doesn’t get it. They’re not sorry. The only thing they looked at was the bottom dollar. How much money would they lose if they shut the pipeline down. They didn’t care, all they wanted was the money.”
“Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else,” says Bill Koch.
And still more:
August 2001 Update
In May, 2001, Bill Koch and Koch Industries announced a legal settlement of all their disputes, effectively putting an end to the two-decade family feud. The settlement calls for Koch Industries to pay $25 million in penalties to the U.S. government for improperly taking more oil than it paid for from federal and Indian lands. About a third of it goes to Bill Koch or bringing the lawsuit.
Koch industries has faced other troubles with the government since the original broadcast in November. In April, Koch’s Petroleum Group was fined 20 million dollars after it released huge amounts of cancer-causing benzene from a Texas refinery and then tried to cover it up.
In July, 2001, thestatesman.com of Austin, Texas reported:
CHARLOTTE — Oil made many Texans rich. It’s also killing grass and polluting creeks at the Hindes Ranch.
The beef and dairy operation 35 miles south of San Antonio is crisscrossed by gathering lines — pipelines no more than 8 inches wide that carry crude oil and natural gas from production fields to larger lines feeding refineries and other collection points. The decades-old gathering lines at the Hindes Ranch have sprung hundreds of leaks during the past 15 years, said Bob Hindes, who owns and operates the ranch.
Hindes has photographs to back up his claim. You can also tell by the dozens of brown patches, some of them 60 feet long, amid the grasses and wildflowers.
“It makes a mess,” Hindes said. “The ground’s real soaked with salt water and oil. The grass won’t grow for years. We’ve had spills that would run half a mile down the creeks.”
The ranch’s oil rights were sold off before Hindes bought the land, and the out-of-state oil producer is not required by any law, regulation or government agency to meet safety or environmental standards on rural gathering lines.
The federal Office of Pipeline Safety does not regulate such lines. Nor do many state pipeline agencies, including the Texas Railroad Commission. Gathering lines in urban areas, by contrast, are subject to regulation by the federal and state pipeline agencies.
Federal officials estimate that there are more than 200,000 miles of rural gathering lines. That would be enough to reach three-fourths of the way to the moon. Texas alone has 43,000 miles of such lines.
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned lawmakers 23 years ago that incidents involving rural gathering lines were on the rise and that regulation was warranted. Lawmakers and regulators have declined to act despite mounting evidence of the hazard.
For example, Koch Industries Inc. had more than 300 spills into water supplies in six states from 1990 to 1997, mostly from unregulated gathering lines, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“We discovered that 80 percent of the spills were caused by corrosion,” said Michael Goodstein, a senior attorney for the Justice Department, which with the State of Texas prosecuted Koch under the Clean Water Act.
The company had a better record with its larger-diameter, regulated lines, Goodstein said.
A 1998 Railroad Commission investigation of Koch’s pipeline system in Texas reached a similar conclusion. It found that gathering lines accounted for a third of Koch’s Texas mileage but nearly two-thirds of what would have been considered safety violations if the lines were regulated.
The problems the commission found included testing and documentation deficiencies, as well as shortcomings in corrosion protection, line marking, protection of valves against vandalism and other matters.
The staff of Texas’ Sunset Advisory Commission, a legislative panel that reviews state agencies, recommended last year that the Railroad Commission regulate rural gathering lines.
A report by the sunset commission staff reached an unusually blunt conclusion: “State regulation of pipelines does not adequately protect the public.”
The Railroad Commission opposed the recommendation, and the Legislature declined to compel the agency to regulate rural gathering lines.
The environmental and safety risks posed by the lines, which operate at low pressure in generally isolated areas, do not warrant the dramatic increase in funding that would be needed to regulate them, said Michael Williams, chairman of the Railroad Commission.
“We don’t have a real history of gathering lines breaking, exploding or posing a danger to ground water,” Williams said. “That doesn’t mean it’s never occurred.”
Hindes isn’t the only rancher with problems. The Texas Land & Mineral Owners Association says more and more landowners are discovering leaks as gathering lines age.
“There’s no pressure-testing of these lines,” said Doug Beveridge, secretary of the association and vice president of minerals for the King Ranch, which covers an area in South Texas larger than Rhode Island. “There’s no requirement for the type of steel they put into these lines. No one even knows where they are. We’ve wondered forever for our ranch — where are all the lines?”
In June, 2003, the US Department of Commerce announced:
Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Lisa A. Prager announced today that a $200,000 civil penalty has been imposed on Flint Hill Resources L.P. – formerly known as Koch Petroleum Group, L.P. – of Wichita, Kansas to settle allegations that the company exported crude petroleum from the United States to Canada without the required U.S. Government authorization. The Commerce Department controls the export of crude petroleum to any foreign destination to protect the domestic supply.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) alleged that between July 1997 and March 1999, Koch Petroleum committed 40 violations of the Export Administration Regulations by exporting crude petroleum to Canada on 20 occasions without the required export licenses and Shipper’s Export Declarations. Acting Assistant Secretary Prager noted that in determining the amount of the penalty, BIS gave consideration to the facts that Koch Petroleum voluntarily self-disclosed the violations, stopped exports of oil once the violations were discovered, and enhanced its export compliance program.
BIS administers and enforces export controls for reasons of national security, foreign policy, nonproliferation, anti-terrorism, and short supply. Criminal penalties and administrative sanctions can be imposed for violations of the Export Administration Regulations.
In December 2006, the EPA announced the following resolution of violations by a subsidiary of Koch Industries:
Anchorage, Alaska. – December 12, 2006) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that Flint Hills Resources Alaska, LLC (Flint Hills) has agreed to pay $15,867 for alleged federal Clean Air Act (CAA) emergency planning violations. Flint Hills operates a refinery near the City of North Pole, Alaska.
EPA alleged ten separate violations of the CAA including: failure to establish procedures for reviewing and updating the Company’s emergency response plan, and failure to establish procedures for informing the public and local emergency response agencies about accidental releases of flammable substances.
As part of the settlement with the EPA, Flint Hills has agreed to correct all alleged violations, pay the penalty and spend at least $60,000 on a Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP) involving the purchase of two hazardous substance spill response trailers and one incident command post trailer for the Fairbanks/North Star Borough.
“Flint Hills needed a better management system to ensure that their emergency procedures were continually updated and also needed a way to inform the public about accidental releases,” said Kelly Huynh, EPA’s Risk Management Plan (RMP) Coordinator. “The program is designed to protect public health and the environment in the event there is an accidental release of hazardous or flammable substances.”
The federal Clean Air Act, Section 112(r), requires the development of a Risk Management Program and submittal of Risk Management Plans for all public and private facilities that manufacture, process, use, store, or otherwise handle greater than a threshold amount of a regulated substance(s). Flammable gases and toxic chemicals, such as ammonia and chlorine, are covered by the program.
The Risk Management Program requires the development of an emergency response strategy, evaluation of a worst case and more probable case chemical release, operator training, review of the hazards associated with using toxic or flammable substances, operating procedures and equipment maintenance. These requirements are in place to protect the public from the accidental release of flammable gases and toxic chemicals.[/i]
In April 2009, the US Department of Justice reported after self-auditing and voluntary reporting of violations by Koch subsidiary Invista:
WASHINGTON— Invista will pay a $1.7 million civil penalty and spend up to an estimated $500 million to correct self-reported environmental violations discovered at facilities in seven states, the Justice Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today. The company disclosed more than 680 violations of water, air, hazardous waste, emergency planning and preparedness, and pesticide regulations to EPA after auditing 12 facilities it acquired from DuPont in 2004.
“This settlement is a significant achievement, as it will reduce air pollution in numerous communities, and demonstrates the United States’ commitment to ensuring that all facility owners come into compliance with environmental requirements,” said John C. Cruden, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “This settlement reflects an effective use of EPA’s audit policy and the value of companies performing audits and working with the United States to correct violations found at their facilities.”…
The settlement resolves violations disclosed under Invista’s corporate audit agreement with EPA. Invista conducted 45 separate audits of environmental practices and compliance at facilities located in Seaford, Del.; Athens, Calhoun, and Dalton, Ga.; Kinston, N.C.; Camden, S.C.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; LaPorte, Orange, and Victoria, Texas; and Martinsville and Waynesboro, Va.
As part of its corrective action requirements agreed to in the settlement, Invista will install pollution control equipment to treat air pollutants at its Seaford, Del.; Camden, S.C.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Victoria, Texas facilities. The company has also applied for applicable air and water permits, has installed adequate secondary containment for oil storage areas, and has notified state and local emergency planning and response organizations of the presence of hazardous substances.
To ensure continued compliance and minimization of the benzene wastes generated at the Victoria and Orange, Texas facilities, Invista is required under the settlement to either upgrade control equipment or make major changes to its processes used to handle these wastes. EPA estimates that these actions will reduce air emissions of benzene by more than nine tons annually and eliminate 25 to 750 tons per year of benzene from wastewater.
The emission reductions resulting from correcting these violations will result in estimated annual human health benefits valued at over $325 million, including 30 fewer premature deaths per year, 2,000 fewer days/year when people would miss school or work, and over 9,000 fewer cases of upper and lower respiratory symptoms.
Invista is a multi-national manufacturer of a wide range of polymer-based fibers, including Lycra, Stainmaster, and Coolmax…
The states of Delaware, South Carolina and the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Board in Tennessee have also joined in today’s consent decree and will share portions of the civil penalty with EPA.
The consent decree, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, is subject to a 30-day public comment period and approval by the federal court. A copy of the consent decree is available on the Justice Department Web site at http://www.usdoj.gov/enrd/Consent_Decrees.htm
Certainly, the bourgeoisie can find no person more capable of articulating the principles of enlightened entrepreneurship, the practical benefits to all of society of private enterprise, the negative consequences of government regulation, the impending loss of creativity, independence, freedom, productivity embodied in the socialization of the means of production thanthat this CEO of an industry group that has been such a leader in the social responsibility of that most perfect of nature’s creations, the corporation.
Politically, of course, the brothers Koch have been active spreading the gospel by way of spreading the money, funding the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, where the banner headline on the website reads “Stand With Scott Walker.”
Koch Industries, when it isn’t paying out millions to settle environmental health and safety violations, has a Political Action Committee that certainly has stood with Walker. The PAC provided $43,000 to Walker’s gubernatorial campaign and a token amount of $1 million to the Republican Party Governors Association.
David Koch, co-owner and executive vice-president of Koch industries is a former Libertarian Party candidate for US Vice-President. Like his brother, he is a strong backer of the teabagger party.
A well-known philanthropist, David Koch is the guiding spirit behind the American Museum of Natural History’s so perfectly named David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.
History does hold something for everyone.
6. The British, who have more experience than most in suppressing rebellion and revolt, in pre-empting, canalizing, and throttling class struggle with the garrote of electioneering, legislation, and trade union accommodation, compromise, capitulation, are very proud of their parliament. “It’s our substitute for civil war,” the parliamentarians will tell you.
Sooner or later history accepts no substitutes. The threatening and dangerous fact is that in the United States, the bourgeoisie realized this before, and has prepared itself for the combat of class struggle better than the workers, including those demonstrating in Madison.
The vanguard dinosaurs of the bourgeoisie, these once-crackpot-now-prophets of Jack-the-Ripper’s “invisible hand” capitalism have no allegiance to their prior forms of political organization.
“Parliaments? Bi-cameral legislatures? Representative government? Popular votes?” laughs our ruling dolts, thugs, thieves. “Who needs them? They cost too much. They are so inefficient.”
“Independent judiciary? Equal justice under the law? You thought we were serious about that?”
The arsonist/monetarist bourgeoisie don’t know Hegel, but they do know that form is mutable; the form is evanescent. It’s the content that counts. It’s the substance that matters. It’s necessity that rules.
That content is private property; the ownership of the means, conditions, and products of labor. That substance is the substance of accumulation. The necessity is precisely the destruction of the very forms once essential to accumulation, profit, expanded reproduction of capital. That necessity is the necessity of capital to drive the price of labor below the cost of its social reproduction.
The workers engaged in this struggle will need to move beyond, outside, and against their old forms of organization. To the extent that the clash in Wisconsin remains a struggle for unions, for collective bargaining, for “rights;” to the extent that the clash does not become a movement for new, open, class wide organizations beyond unions; organizations linking employed, unemployed, pensioners, students, migrants, private sector, public sector, temporary, permanent, insured, uninsured in bodies of collective power with the ability, desire, need to confiscate the revenues and income of the state, and seize the property of those financing the attacks on living standards —to precisely that extent the Kochs, the Walkers, the ideologues of decrepit capitalism will impose their necessity.
S.Artesian
February 27, 2011
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Rethinking Educational Failure and Reimagining an Educational Future - John Garvey
John Garvey critically examines the contemporary American education system.
At the moment, there are bitter struggles going on over continuing school failures, testing policies, budget cuts to schools and colleges, layoffs, school closings, class sizes, and the establishment of charter schools. There is also an increasingly sharp debate emerging between proponents of what I will refer to as the “new education reform” and a growing multitude of opponents. In those contexts, I’ve been worried that it would be way out of synch to be publishing an article that is primarily concerned with long-term trends and their manifestations in the everyday realities of educational institutions (and vice versa—the production of long-term trends by everyday practices)—especially to the extent that some of what I believe reflects rather badly on the routine practices of teachers, schools and unions. I am not interested in providing any ammunition to those forces that obscure every assault against the well-being of teachers with claims to be acting on behalf of the children.
But I decided to continue down the road I had been travelling on—in the hope that what I have to say might alert some of those involved in various struggles (teachers, parents, community activists) about the profound dangers associated with defending what we might consider to be education as usual. I am aware that an already quite bad situation could be made much worse if forces on the right emerge victorious but, at the same time, I’d like to insist that the bad that we have must be seen by all as indefensible. And furthermore a defense of the existing state of affairs will not get us anywhere that we should want to go.
A recent court case in Los Angeles illuminates the situation. In January, a judge ruled that the seniority rights of teachers employed in the Los Angeles Unified School District would not be fully honored in the case of layoffs—in spite of those rights being enshrined in both the local collective bargaining agreement and state law. Judge William Highberger ruled against the suit brought by the United Teachers of Los Angeles and approved an agreement between the ACLU of Southern California, the state of California and the school district which would shield 45 of the district’s lowest performing schools from layoffs. The ACLU had based its argument on the situation that had resulted from the last round of layoffs at three poorly performing middle schools which have had high rates of teacher turnover and, therefore, few teachers with the years of seniority that would protect them from layoffs. As a result of layoffs in the past two years, more than half of the teachers at the three schools had lost their jobs; in one school, the percent of teachers laid off was over 70% and, in another, almost the entire English department and all eighth grade teachers were laid off. As a result of those layoffs, many of the classes have been taught by a succession of substitute teachers with little connection or commitment to the schools. At the same time, more successful schools in wealthier parts of the city lost far fewer teachers. The ACLU had argued that this disproportionate impact represented a denial of the constitutional right of students enrolled in the three schools to a quality education. Not surprisingly, the union had argued for the sanctity of the seniority principle and pointed out the need to address the real causes of failure at the affected schools. It has promised to appeal the decision. Perhaps needless to say, one thing that the union apparently did not consider was that the actions of its members, protected by the union, had very much to do with failure in those schools. In general, the forces of the organized left, mostly but not all Trotskyist-minded, have rushed to the defense of the union’s position. I’d suggest that if we begin and end where the United Teachers of Los Angeles begins and ends, we will remain trapped in a vicious circle.
Canary in a Coal Mine
Let me begin with the big picture. In an illuminating book, Global Decisions, Local Collisions, Dave Ranney has examined the fairly devastating impacts of the collapse of manufacturing in Chicago starting at the end of the 1970s:
In the late 1970s, I lived and worked in Southeast Chicago.
At the time, the neighborhood was a vibrant, mixed-race, working
class community of solid single-family homes and manicured lawns.
Its economic anchor was the steel industry. U.S. Steel Southworks,
Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel and Acme Steel employed over 25,000
workers. Southeast Chicago was also teeming with businesses that
used steel or that sold products to the steel mills: steel
fabrication shops, industrial machinery factories, plants that made
farm equipment, and railroad cars. There were also firms that sold
the mills industrial gloves, shoes, tools, nuts and bolts and
welding equipment. The commercial strip had retail stores, bars and
restaurants. Many of these, like the steel mills, were open
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
……
During the 1980s, the Chicago steel industry collapsed and
took down with it much of the related industrial and service economy
that depended on it. Both Wisconsin Steel and U.S. Southworks
eventually closed. Republic Steel was bought out by a conglomerate
and was greatly downsized. Steel jobs in Southeast Chicago declined
from about 25,000 workers to less than 5,000 in a decade. And the
decline in manufacturing extended far beyond steel. The Chicago
metropolitan area suffered a net loss of 150,000 manufacturing jobs
during the 1980s. People’s lives were torn asunder in the wake of
massive layoffs. Divorces, alcoholism, even suicides were on the
rise. Industrial unions were decimated and union membership
declined throughout the United States. The new jobs created in the
wake of this decline paid far less than the jobs that had been lost.
Many were temporary or part-time and usually lacked benefits like
health care. Workers taking these jobs no longer made enough to
live on. So they worked two or sometimes three jobs to make what
they had previously made at one. Many of the dislocated workers
never worked again. The struggle over civil rights in the workplace
and within the union was over because the workplace itself no longer
existed.
Although Ranney modulates his nostalgia for Chicago’s lost world by acknowledging the historical significance of racial discrimination (that resulted in constricted job opportunities and lower wages for Hispanics and African-Americans) and the struggles against those discriminatory practices in workplaces and unions, he suggests that something very important had been lost:
Not only were the community and its economy vibrant, there
was a system in place that looked to future generations. The mills
and many of the related firms had strong unions. Through the union
you could get your children into the steel mills to learn a trade or
get a well-paying job that would allow them to save and go on to
college.
In passing, I’d suggest that this notion of a link to the future is a very important one and that its frequent absence in contemporary life, as a result of the devastation visited upon the productive workforce and the long painful decline in working class living standards, has a good deal to do with what I interpret as a withdrawal from both intellectual and political engagement on the part of many. At the same time, as evidenced by the recent events in Northern Africa and the Middle East, the return of people who thought that they had no future to the stage of history should not be discounted.
Fast forward to the middle of the 1990s and listen to the words of Ms. Sparks, a sixth-grade teacher who had grown up in Chicago, in all likelihood in the same neighborhood that Ranney described, and had returned to teach in the elementary school she had attended:
I am from streets with buildings
that used to look pretty.
From safe walking trips to
Mr. Ivan’s family grocery store,
where now stands a criminal sanctuary.
I am from a home and a garage
Illustrated with crowns, diamonds,
upside-down pitchforks, squiggly
names and death threats.
I am from a once busy, prosperous
and productive community;
where the fathers and mothers
earned a living at the steel mills,
And the children played
Kick the Can and Hide and Go Seek
Until they could play no more.
I am from here.
[reprinted in Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from
Chicago]
The destruction of the world that Ranney and Ms. Sparks remember and its consequences have not received the attention they deserved. Indeed, it seems like we have simultaneously managed to lose the past and the future.
The wave of Chicago factory closings was a canary in the coal mine moment. It signaled the emergence of a new era in American (and world-wide) social and economic life–an era characterized by:
- factory closures and plant transfers to lower-waged
locations; - outsourcing;
- the development of finance as a major source of profits (even
for industrial firms); - the elimination of millions of jobs;
- a rise in part-time or temporary jobs as primary employment;
the depopulation and physical destruction of cities (such as
Detroit and Baltimore); - gentrification in many urban neighborhoods and the rise in
political importance of the social groups formed by that
gentrification; - severe decreases in unionization rates in the private sector;
- lowered wages and benefits in the private sector;
- extensive technical innovation in communication,
- transportation and production–resulting in still more job losses;
the increasing commodification of the satisfaction of all
sorts of human needs (such as care for the elderly and the very
young and the maintenance of households) and an accompanying
proliferation of low-waged, on or off-the-books, service jobs; and - the establishment of credit (at either normal or usury
rates) as an indispensable way of life for many members of the
middle and working classes.
And perhaps, as a result of it all, it was characterized by the
sucking out of the life blood of the collective spirit of the
American working class.
The Solution of All Solutions?
It also resulted in an enhanced focus on educational failure as the cause of a wide array of social maladies–such as poverty, discrimination, unemployment, low wages and social despair. The Alliance for Excellent Education, a not untypical advocacy organization, pointed out the negative impacts it associated with what it believed was an education “crisis”:
… high school dropouts face long odds of landing a
good-paying job in the ultra-competitive job market of the
twenty-first century. In addition, they are generally less healthy,
die earlier, more likely to become parents when very young, more at
risk of tangling with the criminal justice system, and are more
likely to need social welfare assistance (see
http://www.all4ed.org/node/13/print).
Conversely, educational achievement was portrayed as the solution of all solutions—especially to what was seen as the worsening position of the United States in the world economy. In most policy accounts, this new emphasis on education was seen as all but inevitable, and indeed cause for celebration, since the country had shifted to a knowledge-based economy and it was no longer possible for individuals to earn a living by the sweat of their brows. They now needed skills and credentials—at least a high school diploma but, increasingly, a credential beyond high school and they were advised that the reason why people could not find and keep good jobs is that they lacked the skills they needed—there was a “skills mismatch.” Therefore, education was more important than ever—it was up to individuals to acquire the “human capital” that would make them qualified for employment in what is routinely characterized as a global competitive economy.
Efforts are continually made to help people understand the dollar value of a diploma or a degree—usually claiming that bachelor degree holders would earn a million dollars more over a lifetime than someone with a high school diploma. This differential was, of course, seldom placed in the context of the massive shift of wealth that has taken place in the larger society and is, for all practical purposes, simply urging individuals to compare themselves to other members of the broad working classes and to pursue an individual strategy for relative improvement. As I observed in an article in the first issue of Insurgent Notes, the enormous increase in enrollment in higher education over the past four decades provides convincing evidence that workers have, at least on the surface, become convinced of the usefulness of education as an individual strategy in replacement of even modest collective efforts through trade unions.
Recently, in an interesting turn, President Obama has asked every young American to “commit” to at least one year of education after high school so that America can win in the global sweepstakes. So, where individuals were previously advised to get better educated so that they could advance themselves and their families, the president wants them to do it for the country. This rhetoric has become all but completely dominant in educational policy circles. It is long overdue for a serious challenge.
Let’s be real. The reason why there are so few well-paying jobs and jobs with secure benefits is that employers made every effort to eliminate those kinds of jobs and have mostly succeeded—with the partial exception, now being directly challenged, of jobs in the public sector. While there may have been a good deal of personal malice and greed involved in those employer calculations, there was no need for such motives. The logic of profit was more than sufficient. At the bottom of the desperate drive for profit is the still hard to believe transformation of production from what was already a quite advanced stage in the 1960s and early 1970s. A current example from automobile production illuminates the current state of affairs. Hyundai, the Korea-based auto manufacturer, has built an assembly plant in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s not unionized but it pays good wages by Montgomery standards—about $20/hour and a good deal of overtime. The plant employs 3,000 assembly workers and produces 300,000 cars a year. At that rate, it would only take about 150,000 assembly workers to produce cars at the highest annual level ever recorded in the US. What’s true for Hyundai and the automobile industry is true for many other firms and many other industries—the ongoing and increasing application of scientific/technical knowledge to production has made human labor less and less necessary. What it also means is that companies engaged in production have too much capacity—those with capital to invest are in a bind—if they invest more in production, they might very well profit less. Therefore, they look elsewhere.
Let’s look more closely at skills and credentials. Almost all of what are imagined to be unskilled or low-skilled jobs (such as those in factories) actually require a good deal of skills (see Kusterer, Know How on the Job and Rose, The Mind at Work). But, in the dominant narratives, the skills of individuals who do all sorts of manual labor are belittled and denied (as retrospectively have been the skills of the industrial workers who made American manufacturing the envy of the world). Ranney tells a revealing story:
During a television debate in the early 1990s, that I had
with an economist in the employ of Citicorp she talked about the
tragedy of her family—mother, father, brothers and sisters—who
had all been autoworkers in Detroit. We were debating the merits of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a simultaneous
proposal then before Congress to raise the minimum wage. She was
for NAFTA and against raising the minimum wage. The tragedy of her
family, in her view, was not that they had lost their jobs as
General Motors and Ford shifted production to
low-wage/high-productivity plants in Mexico or that they were forced
to take low-wage jobs that didn’t pay enough to live on. The
tragedy was that the high pay that they had received as autoworkers
in the past had destroyed their jobs and undermined their incentive
to get more education, which would have made them more competitive
in today’s world.
There’s another, somewhat contrary, narrative which suggests that the era of American prosperity and global domination was the result of American success in educating its people and that the decline in educational achievement (as compared to other countries) is the reason why American dominance is at risk. And indeed, high school completion rates grew from about 10% of the population at the turn of the 20th Century to about 50% in the early 1940s and then up to almost 80% by the late 1960s—although those national averages obscure regional and racial/ethnic variations. Large
increases in postsecondary enrollment and completion did not occur until after World War II. It seems more likely that increases in educational achievement accompanied, but did not necessarily cause, American prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s.
The achievements of industrial production had a great deal to do with the power of workers’ collective labor on the assembly line and the application of scientific/technical knowledge related to the technologies of the time that was produced by relative handfuls of engineers and other technical staff. The workers’ skill and knowledge mattered a great deal but the skills and knowledge they used were not acquired in schools. Often enough, workers had other
intellectual and cultural interests, even ones that could be applied to production, but those who ran the factories were not interested in hearing about them (see Watson, “Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor”).
What about credentials? Hiring practices in what might be considered the primary labor markets effectively exclude large
numbers of people from consideration for better-paying jobs because they lack credentials—adversely affecting those who have been least successful in schools. This is in spite of the fact that there is frequently little evidence that what’s been learned during the acquisition of the credential has much to do with successful job performance or even with the more effective acquisition of technical skills (see Collins, Credential Society ). By way of example, individuals were once able to become nurses by completing a one-year program at a nursing program sponsored by a hospital; then they were
required to complete an associate’s degree and now, there is considerable pressure on nurses to have a bachelor’s degree. (To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single non-degree nurse preparation program in New York City).
Let’s put two and two together. The civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s initiated a process, uneven to be sure, to end legally sanctioned race discrimination. But, the election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, it is evident that black, and many Hispanic, individuals and communities live in deeply oppressive circumstances rooted in high rates of unemployment and low incomes. There has been a lot of handwringing as well as lots of vicious drivel about why this is so. But it should be clear that the combination of credential inflation, massive educational failure, especially in
black and Hispanic communities, and the elimination of millions of industrial jobs, has all but guaranteed the reproduction of a racially stratified society.
Credential inflation and the parallel effort to insist upon meritocracy as the proof in the pudding of a color-blind society also had effects beyond the black and Hispanic communities. In the last forty years, a wide divide has opened up between the elite colleges and universities and the rest of higher education. That divide is manifest, for example, in the different experiences of the relatively small number of kids who are competing for slots in the relative handful of elite institutions—where the defining experiences are demanding high school coursework, lots of college visits, high quality SAT prep, lots of AP classes, a dozen applications, stretch schools and safety schools, and early admission and early decision, frequently challenging college courses, high rates of degree completion and prospects of admission to prestigious graduate programs or professional schools. For the great majority of kids who are headed for the non-selective institutions (both public and private, and four-year and two-year), the typical experiences include uneven high school coursework, frequently ineffective SAT prep, applications to a handful of colleges unguided by a good sense of
what might be a good match, bewildering placement processes upon admission, high rates of remediation, courses narrowly focused on employment goals, low rates of graduation and increasingly uncertain employment prospects for those who do graduate. Perhaps needless to say, the two different roads are clearly marked with signs—the first for the children of the wealthy and the professional classes and the second for just about everyone else.
Failure and Its Discontents
Although they are familiar enough, let me cite a few of the basic indicators of educational failure in America:
About 70% of students entering ninth grade are reading below
expected proficiency, according to the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP).
In 1969, 77% of high school students graduated but by 1997,
the graduation rate had fallen to 65.7%. By 2004, it had gone back
to about 70% but then started dropping a bit. In other words,
almost one third of high school students drop out.
About 70% of high school graduates continue on to enroll in
college; about 25% of those who enroll in four-year colleges need at
least one remedial course; and about 60% of those who enroll in
community colleges need at least one; but only about 30% of those
required to take remedial courses successfully complete all of them.
Only about half of students enrolled in public four-year
colleges earn a degree and only about 30% of those enrolled in
community colleges do so—within six years of entry.
In virtually every case, black and Hispanic students do even worse. According to NAEP results, more than 85% of black and Hispanic eighth graders read below grade level; only 55% of Hispanic students and 51% of black students graduate from high school in four years; only 20% of Hispanic graduates and 23% of black graduates are considered ready for college; and many fewer blacks and Hispanics attend or graduate from college.
These failures, or other versions of them, are continuously cited and, interpreted within the contexts of global competition and US decline, they have been driving the last couple of decades of education reform—pushed forward by policy organizations and a host of foundations. At the same time, they have also featured prominently in what is frequently characterized as social entrepreneurialism, a movement of sorts that is grounded in elite colleges and universities, and manifested in such projects as Teach for America and an array of charter school organizations, such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Virtually all of the projects associated with this movement emphasize the notion that the leading ideas should primarily come from those who are unburdened with the beliefs and customs of those with many years of experience in schools. The trend has also been accompanied by the increased involvement of all sorts of financial industry folks in bankrolling school reform projects, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone. In spite of all the talk and much of the effort, it increasingly appears that the new reforms have not yielded consistent gains. Higher test scores are increasingly found to be based on student performance on predictable tests with cut points set far below what had been expected; high school graduation rates have increased but the majority of graduates are not deemed ready for college.
There is one other not so small thing—many millions of American students were, and still are, effectively disengaged from the institutions that are trying, with more or less intelligence and more or less integrity, to educate them—that might have a lot to do with the ineffectiveness of the reforms. How and why they become so disengaged is an important matter. There is a good deal of give and take in everyday schooling. Students often enough perceive their classes as really boring and, for sure, a lot of them probably are. But there are classes where the nature of the material requires both prior learning and sustained attention. If students have not more or less mastered what they previously should have and find themselves unable to do much of the work at hand, a claim that it is boring is a lot easier for them to handle than an admission that they can’t do it. And if it’s perceived to be boring, then there’s not much reason to try to struggle with the material to see if it can be understood; once again, failing because you didn’t try is a lot easier to handle than failing in spite of trying. This way of thinking about student failure has sometimes been called “learned helplessness.”
But there’s another part of the story related to student disengagement that is more directly connected to the bigger picture painted above and it’s of special relevance to kids in middle school (typically, grades six to eight) and high school. It is generally taken to be the case that middle schools are far less successful than elementary or high schools–student performance on various assessments frequently decline during middle school but students do somewhat better in high school. Middle schools appear to be an educational black hole. One of the most frequently cited explanations for the shortcomings of middle school is the significance of raging hormones among younger adolescents. Although I am no expert on hormones, I find that explanation a bit simplistic since, if hormones make some kids act out, they probably should be making all kids act out and thereby interfere with effective schooling all over the place. But that’s not the case. By way of counter-evidence, middle schools in good suburban school districts routinely do quite well, as do handfuls of somewhat selective middle schools in large cities. So far as I know, they are not administering anti-hormonal medications.
I think that a more useful explanation is the recognition that children of middle school age (12-14) are increasingly able to recognize and interpret what is going on around them and to develop a more or less realistic assessment of what their life prospects are and they begin to act on the basis of those assessments. A realistic assessment is one that’s going to be grounded in children’s perceptions of what’s going on in their immediate and extended families, their neighborhoods and, of course, the schools they have attended and are attending and, very importantly, where they think
they stand in terms of what they have learned and what they need to learn. What kids know and understand is almost always limited by the simple fact that they’re kids—they have limited experiences. It’s hard enough for most kids to figure out what’s going on within their families, let alone about the ways in which events beyond their family or neighborhood are shaping their lives. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t notice things—their mom or dad, who finished high school but can’t get a regular job; their older brother or sister who started community college but dropped
out; their cousin who’s spent time on Rikers Island (a New York City jail) who got his GED while he was waiting for trial. And the kids put things together! And when you put things together from the bad end of the American educational dream, it starts to look like a bad dream. So, maybe you don’t believe in the dream so much!
Once again, this perception is not limited to black and Hispanic kids. The handwriting is visible on the wall for lots of white kids who attend ordinary high schools and colleges that produce failure more often than success. The dream is not doing so well in their lives either.
A good deal of what has gone on and is going on in lots of schools, especially in schools in cities with large numbers of black and Hispanic students, is terribly disheartening—a lot of kids haven’t learned very much (specifically, they haven’t learned to read and write very well and they have not really learned arithmetic or elementary algebra); they find themselves increasingly frustrated as they progress through the grades, whether or not they have been left back; way too many of them (mostly boys) have been referred to special education, through the more or less routine functioning of
evaluation processes that are all but pre-set to result in certification of students being in need of special services (and
being excluded from regular classes); and lots of them have been subject to suspensions for violations of school rules—some serious, some not, and many ambiguous—where the most appropriate response should have been an effort to simply figure out what was going on in a child’s life.
Let me emphasize that last point—children are being judged according to criteria that should not be applied to children.
Children make mistakes: they act inappropriately; they sometimes act quite badly. It is the responsibility of adults in schools to stop them from acting inappropriately or badly; to explain why they should not have done what they did; to describe what the consequences might be if they act inappropriately or badly again; to insure that parents and guardians are fully informed, and never to hold a grudge against children for what they have done. However, that’s not what happens—far too often, kids who misbehave are portrayed as demons and monsters. Lest readers think I exaggerate, I took this
from a recent teacher’s post on the web page of the Independent Community of Educators (ICE), a leftish rank and file opposition group within the UFT, the teachers union in New York City, which I first came across on a Chicago-based teachers’ web page:
The Logical Truth: Through no fault of his own, if Dr. Martin Luther
King taught in a “rough” school and was given up to 150
students, many highly disruptive, disrespectful and emotionally
disturbed that told him to “Shut the F… up or I’ll kill your
mother,” and these students refused to do any work and
subsequently failed Standardized Tests, Dr. King would be branded
publicly as a Bad Teacher, Bum, Dead Beat and the like by the DOE
and newspapers.
( http://iceuftblogspot.com/2011/02/overwgelming-controversies-defame-nyc.html )
I don’t think that guy should be anywhere near kids. But what I think is an even bigger problem is that an opposition caucus in the UFT or an oppositional educational group in Chicago thinks it’s all right to post his rants. One friend, upon reading an earlier version of this article, was puzzled that I felt that it reflected so badly on the teacher in question. Perhaps I let too much of my own experiences in schools get in the way of clarity. Look back upon the quote—the teacher says that many of the 150 students were “highly disruptive, disrespected and emotionally disturbed,” that they
cursed and threatened and that they “refused to do any work.” He did not say those things about a child or a few children; he said it about many of them. It seems evident to me that he simply cannot escape from his convictions that black kids are mostly hopeless—and let’s be clear about this, the “rough school” is a school with black kids, in light of the sarcastic invocation of Martin Luther King. It is hard to imagine that he could ever be an effective (let alone thoughtful or considerate) teacher in a classroom with black youngsters—especially youngsters who have not done well in school.
I am not suggesting that such a character is representative of all teachers in struggling schools. Indeed, there are many
extraordinarily dedicated and very hard-working teachers who are thwarted in their efforts by patterns of unproductive student behavior, especially in schools where the leadership does not take an active role in developing policies and practices that lead to children behaving in ways that are appropriate for learning environments.
If we think about what goes on in classrooms as consisting of a complex interaction between what teachers ask children to do, what children do, how they are responded to, how they interpret the response, and how they subsequently act, I think we can relatively easily imagine a situation where kids start acting in ways that are probably really quite opposed to their own best interests as learners—meaning that they get to school late, they skip school entirely, they don’t do the work they’re asked to do, they create disturbances in their classrooms, they challenge and disrespect their teachers and their classmates, they do little homework. Often enough, the kids don’t seem able to distinguish between the
teachers who disrespect them and the ones who are exhausting themselves in trying to do the right thing. Not exactly a recipe for academic success! But, at the same time, the students remain ambivalent—if you ask them, they will usually insist on how important a good education is and how they want to be successful in school—there are very few student opponents of education at the level of articulations. But there are more than a few at the level of everyday actions. As in many other situations, actions can come before articulations and can even be at odds with those articulations.
What Should Educators Do?
Teachers and other educators should be prepared to act beyond the simple defense of their interests as workers. On the outside, it demands an unequivocal commitment to stand in solidarity with the people who live in the communities where they teach when community residents take steps to address issues of concern (such as police abuse or violence) and not just when those issues coincide with the interests of workers in the schools—as in the case of school closings.
And on the inside, teachers must take collective responsibility for two things: 1) documenting and challenging the ways in which school policies and practices adversely affect some students (such as those being referred to special education and those being subjected to disciplinary proceedings), and 2) enhancing the quality of teaching that’s provided to children. The real problem with teaching in schools (and colleges, for that matter) is not that there are lots of really bad teachers; the overwhelming majority of teachers are not lousy. But, at the risk of over-simplifying matters, let me suggest that far too much teaching (including some of the teaching that I’ve done) is probably not good enough. I would
characterize it as teaching guided by common sense and over-relying on telling students what they should know; but as Eleanor Duckworth memorably wrote, “Telling is not teaching and remembering is not learning.” Much of what even young children have to learn is the result of a remarkable set of human inventions—such as the alphabet; a place-value based number system; written texts in multiple genres. Unlike what is commonly assumed, what is basic
(such as the alphabet) is often times not easy. Teachers need to be sophisticated interpreters of the achievements that provide the essentials of a powerful education and astute observers of human development, not people blinkered by a whole set of commonsensical prejudices.1
Their work is made much more difficult because of the failures that have come before. Teachers in the upper elementary grades, middle schools, high school and even colleges are faced with a daunting challenge to find effective ways of engaging students in learning grade-appropriate material and, at the same time, to enable them to acquire skills that they should have already learned. Very few teachers are able to figure it out on their own—they need access to
sophisticated learning theories, to numerous examples of effective practices and to more skillful practitioners. There are, I believe, more than enough raw materials for the assembly of effective educational institutions but they are not as consistently well used as they need to be. The current assaults on teachers make the possibility of effective
and equitable education less likely—even though they’re being conducted in the name of excellence and equity. There’s a cruel irony to the fact that a president who cannot recognize tyrants in the Middle East nonetheless feels completely qualified to recognize the failures of teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island and to endorse their mass dismissal.
I’d suggest that there has not been an adequate articulation of a genuinely radical alternative to the prevailing ideas. There have been a number of more or less unhelpful approaches—including diversity training and multi-cultural education, a focus in schools of education on matters of democracy and social justice, an insistence that the behaviors associated with poverty are the key contributors to educational failure, and (in spite of its popularity with many on the left) a Paolo Freire-inspired liberatory education. My reasons for describing these approaches as unhelpful are multiple
and I should emphasize that they are not all of a piece.2
However, most of what might be considered left voices are inadequately attentive to the specificities of the ways in which
failure is produced and reproduced in schools and all but completely inattentive to the large scale realities that I’ve described above. And finally, the unions and the various grass roots and oppositional groups active within them have failed to embrace a politics of solidarity with the children they teach and the communities they teach in. The activists may rail against the betrayals of the union leaders when those leaders maneuver to come to an accommodation with
school superintendents, mayors and governors while maintaining their own power, but effective opposition will require a more fundamental break with the common sense of trade union activity and educational practice.
The inability of those perspectives to generate effective solutions has a great deal to do with why many dedicated educators and community advocates have been led to make common cause with an assortment of external actors (including powerful foundations and influential policy groups) in order to address the most pressing issues of educational inequality and failure. As a result, they have found themselves being pulled along in support of the “new education reform” including its reliance on policies and practices that they do not necessarily support—such as test-based
accountability, test-based teacher evaluation, merit pay, and an excessive reliance on school closings. Those approaches are now the currency of the education policy realm and the common sense of the Obama administration’s education policies.
A Different Approach
In the article thus far, I have relied upon fairly traditional ways of assessing educational achievement or its absence. Those measures are revealing only up to a point. What they effectively leave out is any sense of how impoverished the goals and accomplishments of American education are in light of what they should be. In all likelihood, the great majority of American students are being provided with an education that will leave them ill-equipped to understand, interpret or act to change the world they and their children will be living in. At the end of their formal schooling, even for those who are apparently most successful, they will know precious little of history, literature, science, philosophy or politics. While I would not overstate the point, it may very well be that one reason why students invest so little in their learning is that so little of genuine substance is being presented to them.
The recent renewal of mass political activity around the world and just now making an appearance in the United States might provide new reasons for disengaged and disaffected adolescents to become re-engaged with serious study so that they might acquire the skills nd knowledge they need to become full-fledged participants in those events. It would be an especially welcome side effect of the return of politics.
I began this essay by reviewing some of the devastating consequences of the widespread deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that the United States still has the greatest manufacturing capacity in the world—even after all those jobs were shipped overseas. But the manufacturing process is now increasingly organized by the application of scientific knowledge and, as I noted about the Hyundai plant in Alabama, less and less reliant on human labor. The potential implications of this development were foreseen by Karl
Marx:
Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the
production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as
watchman and regulator to the production process itself. …. No
longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [i.e. a
tool—my insert] between the object and himself; rather, he inserts
the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a
means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps
to the side of the production process instead of being its chief
actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human
labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but
rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his
understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his
presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the
social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of
production and of wealth.
The “social individual” is the very well educated individual. Marx anticipated that the kind of advanced education that had been and, to a great extent, remains available only to a minority would become something available to all individuals–once people had access to the free time which would be made possible by automated production. The German critical theorist, Iring Fetscher, attempted to articulate, in very broad terms, what might be the essential dimensions of the kind of knowledge individuals would need:
As many members of society as possible must become familiar with science; and An end must be put to the isolation of individuals from the creative collective subject which alone is capable of coming to dominate the material conditions of human existence, rather than being dominated by them in the form of a totality subsumed by capital.
It is evident that we remain dominated by our circumstances. But the goal of the whittling away of the distinction between manual and intellectual labor that Marx anticipated can and should become the starting point of our thinking about the kind of education we want to provide for our children. If we start not from the goal of acculturating most children to the demands of an economy which promises only to make things worse, but from the goal of preparing all children to live in a world worthy of human beings, we will find a very different kind of education reform to advocate for. It will have some things in common with some parts of current reform efforts but it will go beyond and transform them.
References
Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart
Luppescu, and John Q. Easton. Organizing Schools for Improvement:
Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Randall Collins. The Credential Society. New York: Academic
Press, 1979.
Eleanor Duckworth, “The having of wonderful ideas” and
other essays on teaching and learning. New York: Teachers College
Press, 2006.
Iring Fetscher. “Emancipated individuals in an emancipated
society: Marx’s sketch of post-capitalist society in the
Grundrisse,” in M. Musto, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations
of the critique of political economy. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Ken Kusterer. Know-How on the Job: The Important Working
Knowledge of “Unskilled” Workers. Boulder: Westview Press.
1978.
Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
David Ranney. Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in
the New World Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2003.
Mike Rose. The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the
American Worker. New York: Viking Penguin. 2004.
Bill Watson, “Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor,” in Radical
America. Vol. 16, No. 3. Somerville: May-June 1982. Available at
- 1Although it is far beyond the scope of this essay, the work of the
Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, is one of the best places to start thinking about these matters. - 2I hope to write a follow-up to this article, tentatively titled “The
Politics of Pedagogy and the Pedagogy of Politics,” in a future issue of Insurgent Notes that will explore these matters.
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How the French pension system works - Henri Simon
Henri Simon looks behind the pension reform demonstrations and sees discontent with politics and politicians, and with the capitalist system itself.
In France for more than fifty years, everyone, whether they worked or not, had the right up until now to a minimum old age benefit at 65 years old. This right, independent of income earned elsewhere, is matched with add-ons depending on health, number of children, etc. Additionally, if someone’s income didn’t reach a minimum level, this basic pension can be supplemented with housing aid, transportation, etc. and if needed, at the local level with other financial benefits.
Everyone working a large part of his or her adult life reaches retirement with a pension set higher than this minimum. All social classes have the right to a basic pension, including the non-wage earner, because setting up a retirement fund is legally mandated (sometimes contractual, becoming legal). This general situation however conceals widely varying differences in circumstances. If non-wage earners relying on legislative guarantees are excluded along with the administrative agencies collecting and managing benefits independent of the State for them, the retirement system for the working becomes extremely complex.
Depending on their occupation, all wage earners come under the control of:
- The general system: most private sector wage-earners draw from the Caisse Nationale d’ Assurance Viellesse de la Securitie Sociale, whose benefits are matched by compulsory supplements specific to each economic sector. Right now, for a worker having worked from 20-60 years these two retirement funds together add up to around 70% of salaries.
- State workers (which includes most teachers) whose retirement is specifically paid directly by the State.
- “Special programs” whose conditions are by and large more favorable than the general retirement system for certain classes of workers like local government officials and workers in essential economic sectors nationalized in the past like mining, energy and railroads or specialized sectors like the national theatres or notary clerks.
The legal and financial administrators of the general system are State appointed but the system’s management is independent and jointly run by the bosses’ and labor unions (in the beginning the latter were elected but became bureaucratized with the introduction of union stipends). For the complementary or special retirement funds, the management rules depend on the sectoral agreements. They are managed according to rules, whether elective or bureaucratic, made part of these union benefits too. In principle the management of most retirement funds, whether general, special or supplementary, is done by distribution, that is to say that receipts of 50-50% contributions from both employers and employee are prioritized to pay current pensions. Nevertheless, all these funds must invest their surplus into financial markets, making them subject to capitalization. For accounting and financial reasons (often because of privatizations), the special sectors which functioned like those of state workers as a direct service by the employer, have been forced to create separate funds acting like other retirement funds.
The General Reduction in Labor Costs
This point has been part of a wider longstanding attack on these special sector retirement plans that in past years – and now – are at the center of conflicts over retirement plans. It is an important issue in the current struggle because the beneficiaries of the special retirement plans (notably in energy and transportation) work in key economic sectors and, by taking action, can paralyze economic activity across the country. There were memorable strikes in 1953 and 1995 that forced the government to back down from changing these special plans.
It is true that these particular pension schemes offer benefits superior to those of the general plan. Successive governments have tried to use this fact in trying, in the name of ‘equality’, to align these special sector plans (and those for government workers too), with the general pension plan. In fact, these attempts had nothing to do with any improvement but acted only as a smokescreen for the general tendency of capital tied to social insurance to complete making cuts in legal benefits, lowering all incidental wage related costs and financing of all the pension plans. This is an especially complicated situation not only because of the reactions of workers affected, but also because of the multiple interests involved:
[List]
What is usually called “the attack on retirement” is nothing but an expression on the French level of the world-wide tendency to ward off the global fall in the rate of profit by both increasing productivity and cutting labor costs. This systematic and global attack develops under intensified capitalist competition between the multinationals and states that still make up the framework for financial activity.
In the European Union (EU), for a long time this pressure has been displayed by the transfer of production to European countries with lower labor costs and sometimes semi-non-existent social expenses, which has led on one hand to changing working conditions (lower wages and social guarantees, rising insecurity) and restructuring production and distribution.
For the past two years, the crisis has accentuated these tendencies. On the other hand, helping these businesses stay competitive in various ways by exempting them from social or fiscal expenses have helped lower their production costs in France. Together, these factors, imposed directly or indirectly by the crisis of capital, have produced growing shortages in the many organizations providing social benefits because their income has shrunk while their expenses increase. This was especially obvious in all the pension organizations, whose shortfalls worsened more because of increased life spans.
Besides, for the special plans affecting specifically defined groups from national industries, political and economic changes like sub-contracting cut back the number of active workers while increasing the number of retired. This imbalance was especially obvious, for instance in the case of mines since hardly any mines are open in France because global competition forced them to shut down while numbers of ex-miners continue to collect pensions paid with ‘special case’ funds. Another example is the national railroad company, SNCF, which severely downsized its workforce through subcontracting and by using many outside workers not covered by statutes. SNCF’s pension funds see the number of retirees increase with receipts based on lower salaries.
All these pension funds, whether general or special case, have no other alternative but to appeal to the State or to borrow to finance the deficits, which increases total State debt. To the economic pressure of competition aggravated by the crisis is added the pressure from the European Union which, to stabilize the Euro, requires reducing State debt in the community. Thus, in France, as in other member states, this obligation to cut back State expenses especially those concerning public debt, which the pension system is an important part. To that is added another indirect strategy–that of capital as a whole, looking to expand into the public sector to find both sources for financing as well as for profit.
A Systematic Attack On Deferred Income
Certainly, the extension of lifespan is a basic factor in the pension problem (life expectancy in France has risen from 66 years in 1950 to 80 years in 2010) while for different reasons, working life has been lessened by 8 years. In 2010, 1.5 active workers could be counted for every retiree. This situation is imposed regardless of financial arrangements for pensions because the whole system relies on the same basic methods. The main problem is above all financial and comes up whatever the system used: who is going to pay for pension services? Labor or capital, on which side does the surplus value go? This is not an insolvable problem especially considering the surplus value extracted from the large growth in workers’ productivity.
Recent surveys carried out with workers have shown that most are so dissatisfied with work that they prefer to be able to keep the present time-frame for exiting the workforce, even if it means increasing their own costs or leaving with a reduced pension. But such solutions, which would also involve a contribution from employers, doesn’t fit in with the general tendency to reduce the part of surplus value going to wages for the benefit of capital. Both employers and government strongly oppose them and these alternatives aren’t addressed by the unions.
The core of the present debate over pension reform thus unfolds almost exclusively over technical details. This is the terrain chosen by capital: discussions on liabilities and demands from the union federations that don’t see the whole picture but only these tangled procedural details which spread great confusion. Excluding the individual calculations for those approaching retirement, no one can say for sure what his or her future will be, except the certainty of having to work longer to get a reduced pension compared with former expectations. It isn’t possible in this article to describe in detail all the manipulating these technical facts are subjected to; we list here only a few:
[List]
These reforms, being discussed now before parliament, not only affect the general system, but will eventually adjust civil servant pensions and the special plans, which will be aligned to the outcome of the general system.
What should be remembered from all the pronouncements is that capital and the government habitually manipulate the complexity of the retirement system, avoiding the mistake of frontal attacks that have unleashed strong movements of struggle and forced reversals on specific points. A united struggle over this issue though seems hard to realize because of the variations in individual situations.
Who opposes the present retirement reforms?
Before answering, a few words have to be said about the French union federations. These federations can be characterized by:
- Important legal protections safeguarding union activity inside companies, mandatory participation in many internal committees often elected (enterprise committees, personal delegates) and many joint committees managing most social benefits, sick leave, retirement, training, and work-related disputes or in national consulting bodies (Economic Council). Besides what is considered legal income, the unions can also receive many types of grants from the State or local government.
- A very small membership, altogether fewer than 10% of active workers, almost non-existent in certain sectors like retail or small businesses, which makes union functioning dependent on legal protection.
- Union pluralism, with no less than seven “recognized” national federations (that is to say, beneficiaries of various degrees of legal protections), which on the one hand leads to administrative complications which capital wants very much to get rid of and, on the other hand, to competition which doesn’t make forming unified movements easy.
Reform and any changes to it now run through this specifically French union situation which is also an unspoken part in the confrontations around retirement.
If you pay attention to the government – union negotiations and to movements against pension reform, there aren’t any independent resistance movements now. The union federations remain the only mediators along with the government and the demonstrations with the “days of action” and even the one day general strikes against pension reforms are entirely organized by the union federations either separately or together.
The demonstrations against pension reform hide growing resistance against the global capitalist offensive
In France, there is a cult or routine around demonstrations, which are more acts of political pressure than a direct expression of class action. The demonstration is a weapon in the hands of the unions because they are almost the one ones able to organize significantly across the whole country.
Government and the unions clash over how many demonstrators it takes to act as a de facto thermometer of social tension, shifting the balance to union leaders in negotiating with the state. But there should be no delusions about this number. Generally, such demonstrations are coupled with a “day of action” which doesn’t really represent a strike but gives leeway to workplace union branches in organizing protest in the workplace. The numbers don’t necessarily come from large numbers of workers actively taking part. It’s well known the union federations can, if they judge it necessary to apply political pressure, “mobilize” everyone on-the-job having a legal right to “non-productive” paid time off. If necessary, others can be added for whom the trip or tweaking of the 35 hours law let them demonstrate without loss of pay1
The demonstration is a substitute for the strike but it only has political character without socially affirming class struggle.
Despite this, the issue of demonstrations should be considered from another angle. If the union federations are a way to channel a movement and eventually exhaust it by repetition, which leads to disaffection and the movement’s death, this can also have the opposite effect: a wider participation than was predicted. The nature of these actions can even reveal a much broader current which itself goes past the apparent objective of union demands.
This was the outcome at the time of the last demonstrations of September 7, 2010, which were meant to be similar to the prior ones against pension reform. Not only did Paris bring out more participants than the previous actions (hard to estimate, probably several hundreds of thousands) but parallel actions held in provincial cities regrouped more participants than the actual number of employed workers in the city. This characteristic shows the protests against pension reform contained a more general: they conveyed wider social discontent which couldn’t be expressed because of the official demands but which took advantage of the opportunity to surface.
The unity of the union federations in the call to demonstrate further testifies to the extent of this hidden current of social discontent. The federations’ discomfort about what follow-up to give to this Sept. 7 demonstration shows well that they are afraid of a growing movement that could escape their control. Union leaders openly expressed such fears and they planned, even though the question of reform was being discussed in parliament, of scattered actions and a new day of September 27th identical in spirit to the preceding national demonstrations. This showed the unions had no intent of promoting large-scale actions, knowing well the reform will be adapted in the end and that their political games with the government will only let them demand adjustments in details. Their actual role now, objectively or not, is well within the line of the union function: to be effective agents when capital has need to resolve its ongoing problems and, eventually, the guard dogs of the proletariat. No one can say, on the actual state of affairs in France, how the class struggle will compel them to reveal their true character.
- 1 What is called “the RTT strikes” resulted from applying the thirty-five hour per week law which let workers collect off days which they can take throughout the day notably to take part in demonstrations during working hours without losing pay.
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Of Forests and Trees Pt. 1 - S. Artesian
S Artesian on Marx's theories on land and ground rent.
1. I could start off by saying “Marx has some problems in his analysis of ground-rent.” However, it’s not exactly the case that Marx is wrong in his analysis of the derivation of ground-rent or in his calculations of the comparative rates of ground-rent. It’s more that Marx misses a few things, a few important things; he misses the transformation of British agriculture that underlies the fluctuations in ground-rent and the fluctuations in agricultural commodity prices. It’s more that he takes Ricardo’s and others’ assertions about the availability of land, the “insatiability” of demand, about the “natural” fertility of land as not just accurate, but eternal. Does Marx do this as a matter of regard for Ricardo? Of faith? Of expediency so he can get to what he really wants to discuss, which is not really ground-rent at all? Beats the hell out of me, almost literally, which upon reflection means I need to change what I want to start off saying.
So… so after thinking about it for a little bit, I want to start off by saying that I have some problems with Marx’s analysis of ground-rent. He misses a few things, a few important things, like the transformation of English agriculture; like the transformation of English landlords; like the transformation of the social relations of production which rent does not cause, but which rent serves. Some things, some really important things, he doesn’t miss.
And more than that, I think various mis-apprehensions of Marxism, and mis-analyses of advanced capitalism stem from the ambiguity in Marx’s analysis of ground-rent. Normally, I could start that off by identifying Lenin’s theory of imperialism as an example; Lenin’s and others’ theories of rentier capitalism as another example; the various theories according to which monopoly has transcended the law of value for capitalism as an example; the theories that have US capital as a monopoly capital, and/or a financial hegemon extracting tribute, extracting rent, from
a) Other developed capitalisms
b) Other less developed capitalisms or
c) Both;
Through either
a) Artificial inflation of prices for its highly processed (large value-added) goods or
b) currency manipulation or
c) Both,
as an example. And all those examples, I would identify as so wrong, so transparently “left” recapitulations of the capitalists’ own mythology of “having finally, seriously, this time we’re sure, once and for all we have conquered the business cycle” mantras that it makes me laugh. I could start off by saying that. But only later.
2. We know how Marx engages with these categories of rent, capital, wage-labor, value. He engages through opposition and the opposition is elaborated through critique. Marx begins his critique of ground-rent when he begins his critique of capitalism. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx launches his initial probe into the complexities of ground-rent. We see Marx establishing the characteristics, the determinants in and of rent that will occupy him for the next 25 years. We get fertility, the relation of rent to population, the ever-present and always unrealizable demand for food, and the landlord and rent as obstacles to both the industrial capitalist and the development of industrial capitalism.
In the first manuscript, we have Marx telling us:
(5) While, thus, the landlord’s interest, far from being identical with the interest of society, stands inimically opposed to the interest of tenant farmers, farm laborers, factory workers and capitalists, on the other hand, the interest of one landlord is not even identical with that of another, on account of the competition which we will now consider.
I’m not about to disagree with the accuracy of Marx’s characterization of the landlord as all that is petty, venal, and vicious in human history, however much I think those attributes are better applied to the nuclear family. If the landlord isn’t the sum total of cynicism, avarice, pettiness, dishonesty and brutality in all of human history, then he or she still comes close. And close does count.
However, Marx’s claim that the landlord stands inimically opposed to the interest of the industrial capitalist is indicative of the ambiguity that persists throughout his analysis of rent.
Marx regards rent as the way in which:
…property in land realizes itself economically, that is produces value. [Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 37 “Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent]
Rent is the means by which land produces value. Except it isn’t because the land doesn’t produce value. Ground-rent is the mechanism by which labor in agriculture manifests its transformation from the supplier of surplus-product and into the source of surplus value. Marx says, but does not pursue as much in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2:
…the very existence of rent is feasible because the average wage of the agricultural laborer is below that of the industrial worker. Since, to start with, by tradition (as the farmer turns capitalist before the capitalists turn farmers) the capitalist passed on part of his gain to the landlord, he compensated himself by forcing wages down below their level…Surplus-value can be increased, without the extension of labour-time or the development of productive power of labour, by forcing wages below their traditional level. And indeed this is the care wherever agricultural production is carried on by capitalist methods…Here then we already have a potential basis of rent since, in fact, the agricultural labourer’s wage does not equal the average wage. This rent would be feasible quite independent of the price of the product, which is equal to its value.
Ground-rent is the capitalization of land; its organization as a means of production for exchange rather than a means of consumption.
Still, this transformation, this capitalization of land is stymied, incomplete, and necessarily so. Capital does not encounter land, at least not in Europe, in either its “natural” state, or in its “commodity” condition. Capital encounters landed property as encumbered by the pre-existing relations of production. Capital encounters land as constrained by a form of private ownership that is at once archaic and powerful.
Ground-rent then is a bit more than just the capitalization of land. It is capital adapting, and adapting itself to, feudal property that is refracted through the lens of market exchange and market value.
Even in, especially in, the most advanced capitalist country in Europe, capital is confronted with the obstacle of its own uneven and combined development.
Marx’s target is not this uneven and combined development. His target is not ground-rent as the preservation, extension, and dissolution of the archaic relations of production. His target is not the part ground-rent, and landed property play in the reproduction of capital. His target is not the part ground-rent plays in driving the social differentiation, the class relations, which accompany and signify the transition to capitalism.
Marx’s target, more than anything else, more than anyone else is David Ricardo.
3. For Marx, Ricardo is the best bourgeois political economy can produce; a figure of profound analytic capabilities and severe shortcomings, like capital itself. Ultimately Ricardo is constrained by the power of his own analysis. Ricardo’s examination of the economic categories of capitalist production begins with, requires, and reproduces the excision of those economic categories from the social relations of production that give the categories life. At its end, Ricardo’s analysis substitutes ideology for history.
Next to bayonets, cruise missiles, and beehive rounds, ideology is the bourgeoisie’s sharpest tool. Ideology tells the bourgeoisie exactly what they want to hear: There was a history. History has come to its end. The circumstances surrounding the birth of capital, the origin of the bourgeoisie, are not immortal, but rather completely natural. Capitalist markets are nature’s way of organizing humanity. There was creation. Capital is the crown of creation.
Landed property, as capital confronts it, is not so natural, but the political economist regards economic categories of landed property, and rent as excised from their social relations. To the political economist ground-rent is a-historical. For the English political economist, the origin, function, movement, and result of ground-rents in the period 1794-1815 versus the period 1500-1550 are immaterial. Ground-rent by any other name is ground-rent, and is an obstacle to the accumulation of industrial capital.
Marx is in hot pursuit of Ricardo, and in this hot pursuit he is inclined to allow, repeat, and even accept Ricardo’s less-than-historical critique of landed property and ground-rent. Marx is not doing this for the purpose of exposing the inadequacy of Ricardo’s critique. Before Marx begins his own critique of Ricardo’s theory of ground-rent, it’s as if Marx feels he needs to defend Ricardo’s “natural/unnatural” a-historical conceptualization of ground-rent in order to achieve his real objective. That objective is the rescue and recovery of the labor theory of value from the equivocation, the qualification and disqualification it suffers in Ricardo’s analysis of rent.
So we have Marx repeating Ricardo’s “materialist basis” for ground-rent: The supply of fertile land is limited. The supply is limited by “natural” conditions as the “more fertile” land is the land occupied; as “less fertile” land is always brought into cultivation as the population grows. The supply is limited by the social relations in that landlords monopolize the land.
Ricardo maintains, and Marx accepts, that not only is land of inferior quality brought into cultivation as the population expands, but also that proportionately less productivity gains are realized with successive applications of additional capital to the same plots of land. In Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 37 Marx writes:
That Mr. Lavergne is not only familiar with the economic achievements of English agriculture, but also subscribes to the prejudices of the English tenants and landlords, is shown on page 48:
“One great drawback attends cereals generally … they exhaust the soil which bears them.”
Not only does Mr. Lavergne believe that other plants do not do so, but also believes that fodder crops and root crops enrich the soil:
“Forage plants derive from the atmosphere the principal elements of their growth, while they give to the soil more than they take from it; thus both directly and by their conversion into animal manure contributing in two ways to repair the mischief done by cereals and exhausting crops generally; one principle, therefore, is that they should at least alternate with these crops; in this consists the Norfolk rotation” (pp. 50, 51).
No wonder that Mr. Lavergne, who believes these English rustic fairy-tales, also believes that the wages of English farm labourers have lost their former abnormality since the duties on corn have been lifted.
The Norfolk four-course rotation was no fairy tale, and the ability of clover, legumes, etc. to fix nitrogen in the soil is no myth. As Mark Overton writes:
The effects of the rotation were to increase yields of grain and to allow much higher stocking densities. These effects are modeled in Table 3.19 which demonstrates convincingly that the Norfolk four-course could indeed have been responsible for unprecedented changes in both crop and livestock productivity and output…
Partly because the integrated mixed-farming systems comprised so many mutually dependent components their evolution took time. Hence the long lag between the appearance in England of clover, turnips and other components of the Norfolk four-course system and the perfection of the system itself, whose widespread diffusion must be dated to the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless there can be no doubt of the superiority of the new system at whose root quite literally lay the improved management of soil nitrogen. This of course was not the farmer’s intention, since the chemistry was unknown to them. Their concern was with fodder. Sowing grass leys focused attention on the range and suitability of grasses that could be grown and so clover was selected…; turnips were an alternate source of fodder. Once grown, and integrated into arable rotations, their probably unintended outcome was an increase in overall output. Although systems such as the Norfolk four-course rotation increased output of both stock and crops their major contribution maybe have been that optimum output occurred with a larger proportion of arable crops than under a system of permanent grass and permanent arable. The much increased amounts of manure from more efficient fodder crops, and the rotational use of crop residues, allowed this substantial increase in grain area, while still maintaining, or even boosting, yields. [Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, p. 117, 120-121, Cambridge University Press, 1996]
So here’s my point, what I would have said first, if I didn’t have to provide the background: Marx, in his pursuit of Ricardo, fails to comprehend exactly what Ricardo failed to apprehend: the revolution in English agriculture, the revolutionary increase in output and yield between 1750 and 1850. This failure is not so much a case of Marx failing to see the forest because of the trees as it is the case of Marx failing to see the deforestation because of the tree farms.
4. For Marx, the transformation of agricultural, the capitalist transformation of agricultural that actually operates through rent just isn’t the issue, and that’s a shame. This is the only instance in Marx’s writings, that I know of, where Marx actually adopts the position, the attitude, and the analysis of an economist, in essence abstracting the economic categories from the historical relations, and the historical development, that produce the economic category.
Ground-rent, for Marx, is the grand exception that is the proof of the rule of the law of value. Ground-rent will be the vector by which Marx, accepting the elements of ground-rent as Ricardo describes them, will prove how the apparent anomaly in the prices of agricultural commodities—where the less efficient producer, and the dearer product, set the market –actually validates the labor theory of value.
For Marx, following Ricardo, ground-rent exists as a transfer of value from industrial capital to the landlord. Rent is a deduction from profit, but not just from the profit of the tenant capitalist-farmer. Value moves, through the mechanism of price, from the superior productivity of industrial capital, and lower cost of industrial commodities, to the inferior productivity of agricultural capital and the higher cost of agricultural commodities.
Says Marx:
Incidentally, however the phenomenon of rent may be explained, the significant difference between agriculture and industry remains in that in the latter, excess surplus value is created by the cheaper production, in the former by dearer production. [Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, Chapter 8]
So… ground-rent does not cause the higher prices, or the increase in price of agricultural commodities. The possibility for rent exists in those higher prices. The values of agricultural commodities are, like the values for all commodities, determined by the labor-time embodied therein as mediated by the time necessary for their reproduction. In agriculture, however, increased production necessarily entails, creates, an increase in the time necessary for the reproduction of any individual commodity. In agriculture, unlike industry, the expansion of production does not mean the relatively greater production of use-values with the same or proportionally less expansion of exchange-value.
In agriculture, the increased production does not reduce the socially average time necessary for reproduction and all of this occurs because demand is not satisfied.
Says Marx:
If the area of fertile land were enlarged or the fertility of the poorer soil so improved that I could satisfy demand, then this game would end. [TSV, Part 2, Chapter 8].
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx gives us the outline of Ricardo’s argument that he will use, and maintain, for his own examination of rent throughout his economic manuscripts, including volume 3 of Capital:
We have seen that, according to the Ricardian doctrine, the price of all objects is determined ultimately by the cost of production, including the industrial profit; in other words, by the labour time employed. In manufacturing industry, the price of the product obtained by the minimum of labour regulates the price of all other commodities of the same kind, seeing that the cheapest and most productive instruments of production can be multiplied to infinity and that competition necessarily gives rise to a market price – that is, a common price for all products of the same kind.
In agricultural industry, on the contrary, it is the price of the product obtained by the greatest amount of labour which regulates the price of all products of the same kind. In the first place, one cannot, as in manufacturing industry, multiply at will the instruments of production possessing the same degree of productivity, that is, plots of land with the same degree of fertility. Then, as population increases, land of an inferior quality begins to be exploited, or new outlays of capital, proportionately less productive than before, are made upon the same plot of land. In both cases a greater amount of labour is expended to obtain a proportionately smaller product. The needs of the population having rendered necessary this increase of labour, the product of the land whose exploitation is the more costly has as certain a sale as that of a piece of land whose exploitation is cheaper. As competition levels the market price, the product of the better soil will be paid for as dearly as that of the inferior. It is the excess of the price of the products of the better soil over the cost of their production that constitutes rent. [Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 4, “Property of Ground Rent”]
Marx concludes the paragraph with what he regards as near insurmountable obstacles to the “parity” of industrial and agricultural production:
If one could always have at one’s disposal plots of land of the same degree of fertility; if one could, as in manufacturing industry, have recourse continually to cheaper and more productive machines, or if the subsequent outlays of capital produced as much as the first, then the price of agricultural products would be determined by the price of commodities produced by the best instruments of production, as we have seen with the price of manufactured products. But, from this moment rent would have disappeared also.
Yet, here is exactly the transformation imposed upon agriculture by capitalism, a transformation that finds its agents, in part, through the receivers of rent, the rent-seeking, profit-seeking landlords.
5. Marx certainly achieves his objective. He pursues Ricardo and brings him to ground [-rent]. The critique of Ricardo that Marx produces using ground-rent as a vector absolutely restores the integrity and viability of the labor theory of value.
The analysis of cost-price and the differentiation of cost-price from value establish the mediation through which the law of value must operate given the private ownership of the means of production. Marx demonstrates not only why prices deviate from values, but more importantly how the deviation of specific, individual, numerous prices from specific, individual, numerous values is the mechanism through which the law of value enforces itself. The analysis by Marx at one and the same time answers the “transformation question” before it is asked; embeds the labor theory of value as the center around which all of capital spins and morphs; proves that profit is derived from exchanging commodities at their values, but the profit so derived for any commodity is a distribution of, a proportion, a relation to the totality of value of all commodities.
Marx has climbed the ladder of Ricardo’s labor theory of value, and having done so, has no more need for ladders. The labor theory of value is firmly established at ground [-rent] level.
Here are the determining conditions of Ricardo’s theory of ground-rent, and Marx reproduces in and as his own in the critique of Ricardo: increased and increasing population; increased demand for agricultural commodities; inability of cultivated land to satisfy the demand for agricultural commodities; cultivation of less fertile lands; inability of new areas of cultivation and/or successive applications of capital to old areas to maintain or improve yields.
Marx certainly recognizes the weaknesses in Ricardo’s theory of the persistent, if not eternal, scarcity of agricultural output. We have Marx’s recognition of the feasibility of rent in the lower wage paid the agricultural laborer. We have Marx explaining how the new land brought into production is not necessarily less fertile, naturally, but that successive applications of capital are required to this new land to establish productivity equal to that of the already cultivated property. We don’t see Marx recognizing that his very recognition of this quality contradicts the assertion that successive application of capital produce declining returns.
We hear Marx telling us that if, in agricultural production, the machinery and constant capital inputs stood in the same ratio to the labor, variable capital as the ratio is industry, then rent would disappear:
If the mode of production changed in such a way that the ratio of variable to constant capital became the same as the average ratio in industry, then the excess of value over the average price of wheat would disappear and with it rent—excess profit. [Marx, TSV Part 2 “Herr Rodbertus. New Theory of Rent (Digression) {9} Differential Rent and Absolute Rent in Their Reciprocal Relationship. Rent as an Historical Category. Smith’s and Ricardo’s Method of Research”]
We don’t hear Marx analyzing exactly this trend in the development of capitalist agriculture, even though he writes:
In our view rent arises from an historical difference in the organic component parts of capital which may be partially ironed out and indeed disappear completely, with the development of agriculture.
But this is exactly the point where the historical analysis of rent, of its function in expanding the capitalist relations of production in agriculture, the capitalist organization of labor in agriculture should begin.
6. Ricardo’s study of ground-rent and price formation in agriculture is heavily informed by the dramatic price inflation in agricultural commodities in the period 1794-1815, the period of the anti-Jacobin and then Napoleonic Wars. In part, it was the military’s demand for agricultural commodities, and not just agricultural commodities, that drove the price inflation of these years.
This period is also the initialization period of the industrial revolution, when steam power was harnessed to the production of textiles; to the production of coal; and to the processing of grain.
The military’s requirements in the midst of this dramatic transition in the technical basis of production worked to the benefit of some, but not to the benefit of all. There was little or no benefit to the cottagers living in and around the villages and manors, who depended on rights of common for pasture, for maintaining production and productivity of their smaller, rented plots. There was no benefit to the commoners who rented almost no land for their direct production and relied almost completely on the common rights. There was certainly no benefit to the agricultural laborers. Between 1780 and 1810, real wages for agricultural workers declined by twenty percent.
For the most part, the dramatic price inflation and the subsequent climb in rents were driven by the number of poor harvest years, and the number of successive poor harvest years. Bad harvests were recorded in 1794, 1795, 1799, 1800, 1809, 1810, 1811, and 1812.
During this period of bad harvests, the population of England continued to grow, nearly doubling in the 1780 to 1806 period.
All the elements for the basis of rent are in place: population growth, inability of agriculture to meet demand, declining wages, apparent failure of successive applications of capital to maintain yield, cultivation of less fertile lands. Marx writes:
But apart from absolute rent, the following question remains for Ricardo:
The population grows and with it the demand for agricultural products. Therewith their price rises, as happens in similar cases in industry. But in industry, this rise in price ceases as soon as demand has become effective and brought about an increased supply of commodities. The product now falls to the old, or rather below the old, level of value. But in agriculture this additional product is thrown on to the market neither at the same price nor at a 1ower price. It costs more and effects a constant rise in market-prices and along with that, a raising of rent. How is this to be explained if not by the fact that ever less fertile types of land are being used, that ever more labour is required in order to produce the same product, that agriculture becomes progressively more sterile? Why, apart from the influence of the depreciation [of money], did agricultural products rise in England from 1797 to 1815 with the rapid development of the population? That they fell again later proves nothing. That supplies from foreign markets were cut off proves nothing. On the contrary. This in fact created the right conditions for demonstrating the effect of the law of rent as such. For it was the very cutting off of foreign supplies which forced the country to have recourse to ever less fertile land. This cannot be explained by an absolute increase in rent, because not only did the rental rise but also the rate of rent. The quarter of wheat, etc. rose in price.
It cannot be explained by depreciation because although this might well explain why, with greater productivity in industry, industrial products fell, hence why the relative price of agricultural products rose, it would not explain why in addition to this relative rise, the prices of agricultural products were continuously rising absolutely. Similarly, it cannot be explained as a consequence of the fall in the rate of profit. This would never explain a change in prices, but only a change in the distribution of value or of price between landlord, manufacturer and worker. [Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, (Chapter IX) History of the Ricardian Law of Rent [6] Ricardo’s Thesis on the Constant Rise in Corn Prices. Table of Annual Average Prices of Corn from 1641 to 1859].
Marx is a bit over-zealous, but he is writing in his notebooks. If the price increases tell us something about the mechanisms of accumulation and apportionment, then the price declines also tell us something about accumulation and apportionment. In fact, it is Marx’s contention, at least for industrial capital and industrial commodities, that it is only in the totality of those changes in those prices, in that inflation and devaluation that the truth of accumulation and apportionment is manifested.
The correlation between population growth and price increase is a strong correlation, but it is not an absolute correlation. Again, Mark Overton in his Agricultural Revolution in England points out that there is a positive correlation between the rate of growth of the population in England and the rate of growth in prices:
It indicates a strong positive relationship from the 1540s to 1780s: the rate at which prices were growing followed the rate of population growth. But after the 25 year period starting 1781 the relationship changes: population growth rates rise to unprecedented levels [over 1 per cent per annum], but the rate of growth in prices starts to fall, from a peak of over 2 per cent per annum…Although population was growing, the agricultural sector of the economy was able to expand output to meet the additional demand, so that prices failed to rise so rapidly as they had done under pressure of demand in previous centuries. [emphasis added] …at the start of the eighteenth century English agriculture seemed unable to expand output significantly, but by the end of the century such expansion was well under way. [Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, p.69-70]
As a matter of fact, after 1800 the correlation between population growth and rate of growth of prices turns negative, with the steady population growth rate of about 1.4 percent per annum coincident with a negative rate of growth of prices. This negative trend is reversed only when the rate of population growth declines after about 1825.
It’s not Ricardo’s fault that the poor state of English record-keeping regarding its agricultural revolution prevented him from recognizing that such a transformation had occurred. It’s not Marx’s fault that the English record-keeping and analysis of the record that did exist was still in a poor state at the time he undertook his critique. However, it is Marx’s “fault” that in his defense of the law of value, he abstracts, in his discussion of rent, that law from the social relations that it embodies and reproduces.
The law of value is not some deus ex machine, nor is it some divinitus machine. It is a law derived from the social relations of production. It is derived from and reproduces the relations of classes. It is a law containing and expressing the way society organizes its own reproduction. That organization is of time itself as the means of exchange. It is the conversion of time into labor-time; the conversion of labor-time into the production of values; it is the exchange of labor-time for value. The law of value is nothing but the reproduction of the conflict between labor and the conditions of labor. The core to that reproduction, to that law, is the dispossession of the immediate, direct, producers.
So if the law of value is not compromised by ground-rent but rather confirmed and expressed through ground-rent, and Marx most definitely proves exactly this, then ground-rent must be vehicle, a vector, a mechanism, a mediation for the realization of that core to the reproduction of value. Through ground-rent, the class renting out the ground, must be reproducing the social relation of value even to, especially to, the point of transforming itself as a class in the process, and in the relation, itself.
This transformation is exactly what ground-rent accomplishes. This transformation is exactly what ground-rent accomplishes painfully, acutely, chaotically in the inflationary period of failed harvests during the anti-Jacobin and then Napoleonic Wars.
7. So what is this revolution? What is transformation of English agriculture? And what about the period 1794-1815, what processes are quickened by and during this period of inflation? What is the legacy of this period?
First and foremost, the effects of the price inflation, the changes in land use, land tenure, rights of common are very different for different regions, and for different villages within the same region in England. Still there are trends, and the trend is our friend.
During this English “revolution,” the growth in agricultural yield outpaced the increase in new lands brought into cultivation. Jonathan Theobold in his paper “Agricultural Productivity in Woodland High Suffolk 1600-1850,” [from the Agricultural History Review available on the website of the British Agricultural Historical Society: www.bahs.org.uk volume 50, part 1, 2002. See note at end on how to access paper from this site] writes:
For example, figures show that although the area under grain grew by approximately 160 percent between 1670 and 1850, the total grain yield in this period increased by over 500 percent implying that land productivity was noticeably improving.
…in the 170 years after 1700 the agrarian economy of England was utterly transformed, and agricultural practice and productivity significantly improved. Overton noted in 1996 that ‘the magnitude of changes that occurred [in Norfolk between 1750 and 1850] were out of all proportion to those which had occurred during the preceding 500 years, and changes of similar magnitude were happening elsewhere’ in England.
Output exceeded, and by far, increases in arable acreage. Yields improved, but yield is a very “soft” measure of agricultural improvement, as one of the factors determining yield is the amount of land devoted to the cultivation of crops.
Liam Brunt in his paper “Estimating English Wheat Production in the Industrial Revolution,” [available at: http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/paper29/29bruntweb.pdf] writes:
By 1771 the effect of crop rotation reached a peak because the average crop rotation featured a large proportion of turnips and a relatively small proportion of grain crops- so the wheat yield was correspondingly high. But as the price of wheat rose dramatically through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793 onwards) farmers grew a higher proportion of wheat and accepted a lower wheat yield per acre. In the post-war depression the proportion of wheat in the rotation shrank dramatically (thus improving yields) but thereafter increased in response to rising prices. Two aspects of this process need to be stressed.
First, the change in crop rotation was a rational response to temporarily high prices. The soil is effectively a ‘nutrient bank’ where the farmer can either make a deposit or a withdrawal. When wheat prices were temporarily high during the Napoleonic Wars it was optimal for the farmer to make a withdrawal (i.e. grow more wheat in the rotation) and run down the quality of the soil.
We see there is a moment that corresponds to Ricardo’s claim, and Marx’s endorsement of the claim, that successive applications of capital to the same land provide a declining rate of return in agriculture. But this moment is not a “natural event” but a market decision to apply capital in order to deplete the land of its potential, improved yield and output in favor of a compressed, reduced but more valuable immediate yield and output.
We see a possible moment that corresponds to Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of increased agricultural prices due to the incorporation of marginal, less fertile land. There follows increased effort for increased production, theoretically, but at a higher price, practically. The marginal lands require more capital, more labor, more time to provide the yield and output of the land already in cultivation. The increased cost of this expanded production to meet the moment of insufficient supply or increased demand raises the average social cost of reproducing the total agricultural product. Again, however, this is a moment, a market decision, and not the permanent characteristic of agricultural production.
Says Brunt:
The point to note is that variations in total wheat output are much more sensitive to changes in crop rotation than changes in arable acreage. There are two methods of raising wheat output by 25 percent. Once option is to keep the same crop rotation and increase the arable acreage by 25 percent. This is clearly very costly because it involves a high fixed cost for bringing new land into production (even if the farmer simply ploughs up pasture land). Moreover since the new land is likely to be of lower quality it will require an acreage increase in excess of 25 percent… The second option is to keep the same arable acreage and grow 25 percent wheat instead of 20 percent wheat.
Marx’s claim that agricultural producers cannot multiply and reproduce their critical instrument, the land, at will and with the same level of productivity as the bourgeoisie can multiply their machines ignores the ability to bring fallow land into production, and to alter rotations.
Certainly the price inflation of 1790-1813 brought new lands, formerly marginal lands into production but neither massively nor quickly enough to determine the price of wheat. The weather conditions that limited the harvest by exacerbating the underlying low level of technology, in particular the poor drainage, of most English agriculture did act that massively and that quickly.
J.A Perkins, in his paper “The Prosperity of Farming on the Lindsey Uplands: 1813-1837,” [available on the BAHS website, volume 24.2, 1976] writes:
The high prices of cereal prevailing during the majority of the war years offered the prospects of a return to farmers for bringing the light soils of the Lindsey uplands permanently under the plough, to be cultivated with cereal and fodder crop rotations designed to raise the fertility of the soil and the profitability of farming in the longer term. To bring the land to a peak of fertility required a considerable investment of capital, which was largely borne by a tenantry occupying their farms without the security of leases, and which—although inflation during the war years reduced the time-span between investment and return—was not completely returned before a number of years had elapsed. The landlords provided the framework [emphasis added] for progress by financing the enclosure of the land and the relocation of farmsteads…Thereafter, the landlords mainly assisted their tenants by permitting a lag to exist between the level of farm rents and the productivity and profitability of farm. But the initiators of the agricultural revolution on the Lindsey uplands were the tenant farmers, and the overwhelming bulk of investment in the land from the turn of the 19th century consisted of tenant outlays.
In converting the land from pasture to permanent tillage the tenants had to expend a total of £ 8 to £ 9 per acre, of the equivalent of fifteen to twenty times the unimproved annual value of the land in the late 1790s…. the land had first to “pared and burnt,” by gangs of men….Next the land war “marled” or dressed with chalk at the rate of 80 cubic feet per acre to…counteract…the tendency of turnips grown on light soils to run to a taproot. Finally the process of reclaiming the land for tillage was completed by a dressing of 60 bushels of bones per acre on the initiating turnip crop in the rotation…..
…There were, however, important differences of emphasis between the farming of the wartime and that of the postwar years. Where previously the farmers had striven to raise output without according much consideration to costs, whose increase was retarded in the instances of rent and wages by custom and tradition, and whose general significance was eroded by inflations, after 1813 they were motivated to increase the productivity of labor and capital as well as the productiveness of land. After 1813, the prosperity of farming came to depend not only upon the farmer’s ability to increase the gross output of their farms, to maintain the level of their farm by means of a larger volume of produce, but also upon a lowering of costs per unit of output to maintain profit margins. Both of these objectives were achieved by the continued development of the farming system.
What we have here is half the story of the revolution in English agriculture, the story of increasing applications of capital providing increased output and demanding the modern measure of value, profitability.
No revolution is so benign as to simply be the product and the record of hardy, hard working entrepreneurs, conquering nature with drill and plow, overturning the soil inspired by their innate acquisitiveness. Revolutions, even those that don’t overthrow kings, tyrants, and classes; even those that don’t establish kings, tyrants, classes; even revolutions in the prosaic practice of agriculture involve more than just “improvement.” Within, and under, those indexes of output, yields, productivity—those measures of the change in the forces of production—are the measures changing the relations of production.
Within those measures that record, between 1700 and 1850, the 100 percent increase in sown arable acreage; that productivity of land doubled; of the 100 percent growth in labor productivity [Mark Overton, “Re-establishing the English Agricultural Revolution,” BAHS website, volume 44.1, 1996]; is the coded record of the transformation of the land and its products into capital, and the changes in the proportions of that capital to the labor it commanded. That code, when deciphered into its measures of capital and labor, tells us that improvement was a by-product of acquisition and accumulation.
The level of technology circumscribed by capital sets for the farmer an optimum scale of operations—an expanded area to be cultivated where the relationship between costs and benefits is optimized. This expanded area, this “new” land brought into cultivation is not “virgin” land of unknown fertility, existing at the edges of established agriculture, but the land cultivated by the cottagers, and small farmers who cannot afford the cost of enclosure and must sell or abandon the land. The expanded area is the “wastes,” the fens and moors and marshes utilized as resources for subsistence by cottagers, commoners, small farmers, hunters, artisans, day laborers, seasonal laborers. The “improvement” of agriculture is the attack on the right of common to tillage and pasture, to gleanings, to the folding of livestock. The expansion is the expansion of private property.
“The landlords provide the framework by financing the enclosure of land,” the major result of which was the increase in average farm size. J.A. Perkins writing again about Lindsey in “Tenure, Tenant Right, and Agricultural Progress in Lindsey 1780-1850” [BAHS website, volume 23.1, 1975 ] states:
In 1787, to take one example, the 2200 acres of land in the parish of Beelsby on the Wolds were divided between four farms of over 300 acres each, four small farms of between 10 and 40 acres each, and eight small holdings of from 3 to 9 acres each, which shared with two other cottages without land in the exploitation of the 70 acres of “Cottagers Pasture.” Thirty years later, the whole parish was divided into two large farms of 1,086 and 1,080 acres respectively.
The loss of rights to common, of access to the wastes, fens, marshes, all these made the market dependency of producers, big and small, more acute… and more desperate. The high prices of the Napoleonic War years seemed to provide relief, and prosperity, to the small farmers and the cottagers, as prices for their surplus product brought higher prices. However, the rising prices of inputs to production, of the means of subsistence, and the rising rents that the small farmers and cottagers had to absorb made them that much more market dependent, and that much less capable of withstanding any economic adversity such as reduced harvest due to poor weather. Subsistence required income. Income meant production for exchange, for the market.
And when income was not enough to provide for subsistence and rent? Then the direct producer, the smaller tenant, the commoners, the cottagers were dispossessed, and were left with only one thing of value to exchange in the markets, their labor-power.
And here we can see the social function of the price inflation of agriculture products, and the resulting high rents. Inflation is accumulation by almost, but not quite, primitive means. Landlords are the personification of that almost, but not quite, primitive means.
8. Enclosure effectively concentrated capital—land, buildings, implements, livestock, seed—into fewer hands, operating expanded acreage. Certainly the process was uneven, but the trend was the trend to larger farms cultivated “in severality”—without obligation to the community of producers, large, small, poor, and even landless.
The trend to larger farms was not confined to enclosed acreage but was the trend in both open and enclosed field farming. Enclosure, however, was the dominant response to increased market dependency. The effects of enclosure on the social relations of agricultural production were the “other half” of the agricultural revolution in England, transforming class relations from those of common right, common obligation, common allocation, and common service to those of private accumulation. With the transformation of the relations of land to labor there comes, necessarily, the “disappearance” of those who depended upon the common appropriation, on the reproduction of the common right. The disappearance is, of course, the transformation through dispossession of that class reproducing itself as private producers engaged in agricultural production through the common management, supervision, regulation of the source of surplus– landed labor.
J. M. Neeson writing in Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700-1820 [Cambridge University Press, 1993] concludes in his study of twenty-three parishes in Northamptonshire between 1780 and 1815:
We can summarize the findings on disappearance of landholders and decline of survivors’ holdings as follows: First: half of all landholders sold all their lands in enclosing parishes during the enclosure period, compared to only one quarter of those in open parishes. Occupiers sold as frequently as owners who let their lands; and tenants left the land at the same rate. The smaller the holding, the more likely was the sale of land….One exception to this rule seems to have occurred in forest parishes, where smallholders stayed on the land in greater numbers than elsewhere, perhaps encourage by continued enjoyment of common right.
Second: surviving landholders sold some of their land too, and tenants worked smaller holdings. One third of the remaining original landholders lost a significantly larger amount of their lands than would have gone to the tithe-owner for tithe compensation. In contrast only one eighth of open parish landholders lost land on this scale…. [p.239-240].
Thus, with the possible exception of parishes where pat of the old common-right economy survived, many smallholders sold all their land at enclosure and most sold some of it. Although there was no common parish experience, there was a common shareholder experience…
…it becomes that enclosure dealt small peasants a double blow, for not only did they lose common right, they lost land too. No argument about the rise and fall of classes can do justice to this effect of enclosure. Whether the English peasantry disappeared or not, the effect of enclosure on the last generation of open field peasants was profound. [p.242-243]
Open-field agricultural communities were no utopias for small proprietors, for small tenants, for cottagers, and commoners, but they were less market-dependent, less exchange-driven. The organization of production, the use of land and labor, was fundamentally opposed to the capitalization of agriculture.
Open-field agricultural practices were not less “efficient,” less “productive” than enclosed field agricultural practices. Much of the advance in crop rotation, land “conditioning,” and convertible husbandry had been developed on and incorporated into open-field cultivation without reductions in common rights.
Enclosure was first and foremost the reconfiguration of the relation of land to labor, of landed labor, institutionalizing profit and accumulation as the determinants of production. The reconfiguration of labor was not limited to the small holder of land but extended to the village. Destroying the common rights excluded the landless, the small-holding artisan, the craftsman from supplementing his or her income; from maintaining himself or herself as a small private producer insulated from the expanding market dependency. Destroying the common right also prevented the artisan, the landless, from presenting himself or herself as a casual wage-laborer, seeking wages only at various times and only as individual circumstances dictated.
Enclosure was not simply dispossession from land, from property, but the dispossession of labor from any direct attachment to the products of its own creation. It is the extended moment in English history that transforms production into production for exchange; where the market becomes the mechanism for subordinating labor to property by transforming land into capital.
In this historical transformation of the social relations of production, we can determine why it was that while modern capitalism begins its existence in the transformation of agriculture, the accumulation of capital proceeds more slowly in agriculture than in industry. We can even account for the different rates of capitalist accumulation and development among countries.
Those different rates have little to do with the “strength” of the landlords, the level of rents, the “diversion” of profits from the industrial capitalists and to the landlords through rents. That difference indeed has its origin, as Marx noted, in the fact that capital does not confront landed property in a “pristine” state, but in its pre-existing social organization. However, that condition is not the “one-sided” domination of the feudal lords. The social organization of agriculture in England was also the prevalence of the small-scale, “subsistence plus surplus” cultivators of open-field, common right land.
The more that small scale “subsistence plus surplus” mode reproduces itself, actually “fractalizes” itself, the more difficult is it for capital, and the capitalists, to establish the commercial relations of land to production, of labor to product, that can create and sustain the market. The more difficult it is to create those relations that can transform production into production for exchange, and exchange into accumulation.
Rent is no integument to that market relationship. On the contrary, rent is its hand-maiden. The rent-seeking, profit-seeking landlord, in the very process of rent-seeking, is transforming land into capital and, at the same time, doing away with class of landlords. After the wave of enclosures during and after the Napoleonic Wars, the number of landlords in some parishes of the English countryside was reduced by one-third, as landlords too sold out, and cashed in.
In the end, the revolution in English agriculture sets the stage for eclipse of those old tenets of ground-rent theories, where less productive land is always brought into cultivation, where demand can never be satisfied, where successive applications of capital provide reduced yields, and where excess surplus value accrues to the higher priced product, to the least efficient producer. In the end, the revolution in English agriculture sets the stage transforms agricultural production into the reproduction of capital and thus sets the stage for overproduction.
In his paper “Adjustments in Arable Farming after the Napoleonic Wars” [BAHS site, volume 28.2, 1980], A.R. Wilkes writes:
For twenty years after the Napoleonic War the response of England’s farmers to low wheat prices was to produce more. While some of the increase was obtained from higher yields, the major part came from vastly expanded acreages. This development seems to have taken place throughout the country. Although on some farms, it was a positive economic response…on many it represented the only possible response by farmers already growing wheat as their main crop. Such people were unable or unwilling to adjust to other types of farming, and they were forced increasingly to pin their hopes on the traditional rent-payer, often at the expense of good farming. This pattern did not change until the mid-1830s.
9. Capital accumulates so much faster in industry than in agriculture for the very reason, in part, that Marx identifies as being the basis for rent—the lower average wage paid to agricultural labor in comparison to the wage paid to industrial labor.
Accelerated accumulation in industry is precipitated by the higher wages paid to urban workers who cannot supplement their own subsistence through access to common rights in agriculture. Consequently, the source of industrial capital, the wage, and the wage alone as the source of reproduction of the laborer consistently pushes against the capitalists’ need to restrain costs.
Capital attempts to resolve this tension by aggrandizing greater wage labor through proportional expulsion—by reducing the amount of time of the working day required for the reproduction of the workers’ wages. The expulsion requires the substitution of the inanimate, insensate, machine—the application of increasing amounts of fixed capital to the production process.
The fixed component only transfers its value, its cost to the capitalist, piecemeal, incrementally in the value of the individual product. The ability of fixed capital to amplify accumulation exists solely in its ability to reduce the time of production of the commodity, which also reduces the amount of value transferred from the machinery to commodity. The capitalist has no choice save to operate the fixed capital on the largest scale, running continuously, ceaselessly.
No such continuity of production is possible in agriculture practiced on the small scale, limited by subsistence, circumscribed not only in space by area, but in time, by its very seasonality, disrupting the continuing of production, extending the lag between production and product.
Only through expansion of the area for cultivation, through dispossession of the small producer, can capital in agriculture begin that process leading to accumulation. In this, the trajectory of capital, rent is not the barrier, it is the facilitator. Rent launches capital.
S. Artesian
December 29, 2010
Part 2 will examine rent and “natural resources”- and the suitability of rent as an explanation for price fluctuations in a representative natural resource like… oil.
Note: How to access papers from the BAHS website.
1. go to www.bahs.org.uk
2. in the left margin, click on Agricultural History Review
3. on the new screen click on “search and read past articles from the Review…”
4. on the new screen click on “to search an index to articles with links…”
5. Scroll to volume in which the paper appears and click.
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"Only through expansion of the area for cultivation, through dispossession of the small producer, can capital in agriculture begin that process leading to accumulation. In this, the trajectory of capital, rent is not the barrier, it is the facilitator. Rent launches capital."
Yes, this is excellent. S Artesian provides a detailed exposition of how capital transforms the rent based social relations of the English countryside, a job Marx does not do.
Anti-capitalism or anti-imperialism? Interwar authoritarian and fascist sources of a reactionary ideology: The case of the Bolivian MNR
![Police joined the popular uprising of April 9, 1952](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/history/Bolivian-revolution.jpg?itok=02QJx7Fa)
Loren Goldner's detailed account and analysis of the Bolivian Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) which was the key player in the 1952 national revolution, and which was supported by the left despite its pro-fascist, corporatist tendencies.
Abstract
The following recounts the evolution of the core pre-MNR intelligentsia and future leadership of the movement and its post-1952 government from anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, pro-Axis ideologues in the mid-1930′s to bourgeois nationalists receiving considerable US aid after 1952. The MNR leadership, basically after Stalingrad, began to “reinvent itself” in response to the impending Allied victory, not to mention huge pressure from the U.S. in various forms starting ca. 1942.
However much the MNR purged itself of its “out-of-date” philofascism by the time it came to power, I wish to show it in the larger context of the top-down, state-driven corporatism that developed in key Latin American countries in this period, specifically Argentina, Brazil and (in a different way) Mexico through the Cardenas period.
The following is a demonstration that, contrary to what contemporary complacent leftist opinion in the West thinks, there is a largely forgotten history of reactionary populist and “anti-imperialist” movements in the underdeveloped world that do not shrink from mobilizing the working class to achieve their goals.
This little-remembered background is all the more important for understanding the dynamics of the left-populist governments which have emerged in Latin America since the 1990’s.
Introduction
The following text is a history and analysis of the fascist and proto-fascist ideologies which shaped the pre-history and early history of the Bolivian MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario) from 1936 to its seizure of power in 1952.
Friends and comrades who know of my brief (two week) visit to Bolivia in fall 2010 have generally been expecting the text to be a critique of the contemporary government of Evo Morales and the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo). That was in fact part of my intention in going there, but the enormity of the task, the brevity of my visit and my experiences there began to alter that plan after I returned to the U.S. My momentum in writing about the present was also undercut by the discovery of the excellent articles of Jeffery Webber on Morales’s neo-liberal economic policies since coming to power, based on much more in-depth research and a much longer involvement in Bolivia itself than mine, saying more or less exactly what I intended to say, and more1 . Finally, in past writing about different countries (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Korea) an indispensable aid has always been finding “my crowd” in such places, and while I met many excellent people who gave freely of their time and knowledge, this did not occur in Bolivia.
But the impulse behind the direction the article finally took lies deeper. Long ago I was deeply influenced by the book of Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (published in France in 1972, and still outrageously not translated into English) which describes the “oscillation” between the elements of the far left and the far right in Germany between 1890 and 1933 (personified in the figure of Karl Radek), the “red-brown” crossover between nationalism and socialism that ultimately produced …National Socialism and its more radical spinoff, the National Bolsheviks. These various “Trotskyists of Nazism” (such as those most famously associated with the “red” wing of the Nazi Party led by the likes of Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser) were massacred by Hitler’s SS along with hundreds of others on the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. (Faye hints briefly in an afterward at a “National Bolshevik” moment in Bolivia, though in the 1970’s, not in the period leading up to the MNR revolution of 1952.) There was the further enticing hint of the very same Ernst Roehm’s two-year presence in the Bolivian Army High Command in the late 1920’s, which in fact turned out to confirm my early working hypothesis in spades. Finally, I noticed that even the best treatments of the early MNR founders gave short shrift to their fascist moment.
Lacking access to “my crowd” in Bolivia (if it in fact exists), I had to fall back on books and whatever discussions came up. Almost immediately I encountered what would be a main, and troubling, theme of the trip: the apparently widespread belief that Marxism, class, capitalism and socialism were “Eurocentric” concepts, to which the “plurinational”, “pachakuti”2 higher synthesis of “European” and “Andean-Amazonian” cultures—essentially the ideology of the regime– was the real alternative. It seemed on further inquiry to be a local variant of the identity politics that had overwhelmed much of the Western left after the defeat of the upsurge of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
While this is indeed the ideology of the Morales regime and is articulated by staffers, foreign and local, of the swarm of NGOs from which the regime seems to have drawn many of its personnel, I first heard it from the intellectually-inclined manager of a La Paz bookstore, where I was buying volumes of the Trotskyist Guillermo Lora’s highly useful (if politically not fully reliable) history of the Bolivian working class. What was particularly troubling about this “discourse” (to use a loathsome word from contemporary faddish jargon) was the utter caricature of the West to which the indigenous side of the synthesis was counterposed. It was as if, in these people’s experience, 1950’s Soviet-type Zhdanovian “Marxism” was all they had ever encountered. Marxism was “linear” “developmentalist” and hardly different epistemologically from Newton and Descartes3 .
Octavio Paz once described Latin America as the “suburbs of history”, trapped for geopolitical reasons in something of a backwater. I would not want to exaggerate this, particularly since, in the law of combined and uneven development, today’s apparent backwater can be tomorrow’s cutting edge. But in conversations with militants in Bolivia and then Peru ( where I also spent a week in fall 2010) it emerged that almost no one had ever heard of Marx’s Ethnographic Notebooks, Rosa Luxemburg’s extensive writings on pre-capitalist societies (in her Introduction to Political Economy4 ), the Grundrisse (though it was translated into Spanish in 1972), Ernst Bloch, Korsch, Lukacs, the Hegel Renaissance in Marxism generally, I.I. Rubin, Bordiga, German- Dutch council communism, the Socialism or Barbarism group, Guy Debord, Camatte, Dauvé , CLR James or many other figures one could mention from the ferment in the West since the 1950’s. Rosa Luxemburg seemed little known, and even Trotskyism (the major current of the Bolivian working class from the 1940’s to the 1980’s) seemed to have been largely eclipsed by the perspective of “social movements” and pluri-nationality. (In Peru, the left is dominated by Stalinism and Maoism, with Trotskyism a poor third; the Shining Path movement is making a comeback with guerrilla action in the countryside and a significant urban base of supporters.)
Much could be said about this, and since I was little more (where Andean South America is concerned) than a better-informed-than- average tourist, I hesitate to press very far. In addition to the Aymara and Quechua majority, there are approximately 35 identified “ethnicities” in Bolivia, such as the Guarani in the Amazonian region. One Aymara woman in Cochabamba told me “yes, I was an anarcho-Marxist militant for a number of years, but then I realized that these were Eurocentric ideas”. When I countered, hoping to draw her out, that a large number of the Trotskyist miner militants from the 1940’s to the 1980’s had been Quechua or Aymara, she replied that, “yes, that was true, but up until recently the left never talked about it. For the left, they were just workers.”
Clearly the turning point in modern Bolivian history and the backdrop to this ideological turn was the gutting of the mines under the mid-1980’s neo-liberal regime, in which 80% of Bolivia’s miners were laid off and dispersed around the country5 . It was a rollback as great as Thatcher’s defeat of the British miners’ strike, at exactly the same time. Many of these miners did manage to re-establish themselves somewhat, particularly in the huge hard-scrabble exurb of El Alto, just above La Paz, where the 2005 gas war was centered and which was definitely strengthened by their earlier militant experience of mass struggle6 .
One sad reality of the trip, however, was the absence from Bolivia, while I was there, of Oscar Oliveira, by all accounts a central self-effacing rank-and-file leader of both (2000 and 2003) water wars. Prior to 2000, he had been a militant in a shoe factory. His book, Cochabamba!7 , contains his riveting account of the uprisings, which amounted to the constitution of a virtual soviet taking over the city and stopping the privatization of the local water works, a “social movement” that pulled in what seemed at times like almost the whole population. The savagery of the privatization law was such that, in addition to price increases sometimes amounting to 20% of family incomes, people with wells on their property were required to cap them, and it was illegal to trap rain water in a barrel.
Oscar Oliveira also made a scathing critique of the Morales government in August 20108 , having been declared an “enemy” by Morales two years earlier. In summer 2010, he decided to withdraw from political activity, apparently deeply demoralized. At the time, he was the head of the Federación de Trabajadores Fabriles de Cochabamba, an association of one hundred workplaces in the city. When he submitted his resignation for personal reasons, it was overwhelmingly rejected by the membership. At that point, Morales intervened, trying to get the MAS supporters in the organization to oust him. They refused, and instead the membership put Oliveira on a kind of leave of absence, welcome to return at any time. (He was apparently taking a personal trip to Europe.) Oliveira had refused Morales’s offer of a ministerial position and all other perquisites, preferring (unlike many key figures of the 2000-2005 struggles) to stay with the base.
Though I missed the chance to meet Oliveira, Cochabamba was nonetheless where I had one of the outstanding encounters of the trip. I was in a local bookstore with a cultural anthropologist I had met, and she pointed to a big book: “You should read this. It’s by a guy who broke with Morales even before he came to power”. This turned out to be the above-cited book of Filemon Escobar, who from the 1950’s onward was, with Guillermo Lora, the leading Trotskyist miner militant in Bolivia, where, as indicated, and unlike in all but a handful of other countries (Vietnam in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) up to the 1960’s) Trotskyism was the dominant current of the mass workers’ movement and Stalinism a miserable sect on the margins9 . (Stalinism in Vietnam, of course, was unfortunately not a marginal sect.)
I was fortunate enough to meet Escobar shortly thereafter. I had read a good deal of his book, and my aim was above all to hear from someone with such a rich experience as a Marxist militant in the Bolivian workers’ movement, over decades, how he had come to reject “Eurocentric” Marxism and embrace the “pachakuti”. Escobar did me the great favor of showing me all the “underground” books on the indigenous question written over the past century, to which the radical left had been deaf and indifferent, and a fair number of which I read upon returning to New York. There is in fact a lineage of indigenous writers going back 200 years to Pazos Kanki, an Aymara who translated Thomas Paine ca. 1810. Another key figure is Pablo Zarate Willka, who led an indigenous insurrection of considerable proportions in 1899, in the middle of a civil war between two factions of the white elite, which ended in defeat for the indigenous forces and Zarate’s execution (Willka is an Incan word meaning a kind of chief). Given my bent for uncovering German romantic populists and folklorists at the origins of authoritarian movements in developing countries10 , Escobar did me the further favor of putting me on to the foremost Bolivian ideologue of such a sensibility, Franz Tamayo (1878-1956), an unabashed admirer of Fichte with years of experience in Wilhelmine Germany. The discovery of Tamayo, and from such a source, was the true beginning of the text that follows.
One key part of the pachakuti ideology, in Escobar’s book and in the general movement, is the idea of “reciprocity”, apparently the key to the Aymara and Quechua communities. Explained in simple language, it seems to mean (as Escobar put it) that you eat before I eat, and in reciprocity you make sure that I eat. Somehow, it didn’t sound so different from the ethos of the primitive Christian communities. Similarly, shortly before his execution, Zarate Willka, (in a quote highlighted at the beginning of Escobar’s book) had said: “With great feeling I order all Indians to respect the whites (…) and in the same way the whites must respect the Indians”. Hard to disagree with, but a sentiment that one could have heard in any speech in the early civil rights movement in the U.S.
Closely tied to reciprocity in the indigenist ideology is the centrality of the ayllu, the pre-Columbian community that some have even elevated to assert that Incan society prior to the arrival of the Spanish was “communist”. Decades of debate raged in the past over this question, which seems to have ebbed away in the grudging recognition that the Incan empire, which barely established itself one century before the arrival of Pizarro, had in fact been expansionist, and had crushed and enslaved populations of previous dominant groups in the Andean region from what is now Ecuador to Chile.
The cultural anthropologist who put me onto Escobar had this to say about the survival of the ayllu:
“The structure of the ayllu with its traditional authorities still persists, but within a much smaller territorial space than it was the case in pre-Columbian times, in some areas of the highland regions of Bolivia, mostly in the altiplano, northern and southern Potosi, the western highlands of Cochabamba and a few places in Chuquisaca. In some cases, the ayllu has been reconstituted in areas where it had ceased to exist after the law of popular participation of 1994.
The main problem with Filemon´s (and others) idea of using the ayllu as the building block to develop an Andean version of socialism is that it highly romanticizes social relations within the ayllu and/or community as if these were horizontal and equal, denying the social differentiation that exists within them since pre-Columbian times. This differentiation may be minimal within very poor regions.”
In short, I found myself somewhere among the identity politics against which I had polemicized for some time, some Bolivian variant of the Russian peasant commune which fascinated Marx and Bordiga, and the “new Marx” emerging from previously unpublished (or unread) writings on cultures and movements on the margins of capitalism.11
My problematic, however, was populism as an anti-working class ideology and political reality. From the era (1930’s to 1950’s) of Peron in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil, or Cardenas in Mexico, nationalist populism as a statist, top-down movement, backed by the military, has turned a page. (The Bolivian MNR, in less developed circumstances where the military temporarily collapsed, presents a somewhat different dynamic.) The contemporary Latin American populism of Lula, Chavez or Morales is a “social movement” populism, much as, in Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s, “worker self-management” replaced the older hierarchical unions as a form of working-class containment12 .
One thread in the following text is the German ideological influence in Bolivia, from the Fichtean Tamayo, who first posed the “indigenous question” in 1910, to the Spenglerian Carlos Montenegro, the foremost theoretician of the MNR’s “national revolution’ against “foreign” influences, including Marxism. The shift from Latin America’s authoritarian populism and corporatism, as it existed into the 1950’s, to the more supple “social movement” populism of today, calls to mind a parallel shift before and after 1945 in two German theorists of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” with complicated relations to Nazism, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. Jünger’s soldier-worker, the “storms of steel” on the Western front in the First World War, and technicist “total mobilization” of reality gave way after to 1945 to mythical musings about astrology as expessing “the need for metaphysical standards” and about “a revolt of the earth with the help of man”. The hardened 1920’s “decisionism” of Heidegger which led him into his involvement with the Nazi Party was replaced after World War II with poetic “Gelassenheit”, or “letting Being be”13 and studies in the “history of Being”.
This text, then, limits itself to the earlier, “Conservative Revolution” phase of Bolivian populist ideology, as it evolved from Franz Tamayo to Carlos Montenegro, and must necessarily leave the flowering the “Pacha Mama” (Mother Earth)/indigenist cover for the Morales-MAS neo-liberalism to others.
New York, February 2011
Few people on the U. S. and European left today remember the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Fewer still are aware of its history, and above all of the early (1930’s, 1940’s) fascist origins of the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario14 ) which it brought to power. The radical phase of the revolution was short enough, and its memory has faded, having been eclipsed for contemporaries by more recent developments in such countries as Cuba, Chile or Nicaragua. The rise and decline of the MNR, nonetheless, ranks with developments in Mexico (1910-1940) and Cuba (1958- ) as one of the most important Latin American revolutions of the 20th century.
Of all of these Latin American revolutionary movements, however, the Bolivian MNR stands out as a prime example of the recycling of proto-fascist and fascist ideologies of the interwar period in “progressive” “anti-imperialist” form after 194515 .
1. The Setting
Bolivia was and is, in the Americas, second only to Haiti in poverty. But much more than Haiti, it has been weighed down by the contrast between its rich endowment in raw materials (tin, oil, natural gas and, most recently, lithium) and the overall impoverishment of the country by foreign investment in those materials. Along with Peru, Bolivia inherits the complex and ongoing legacy of the pre-colonial Andean civilizations, present in its large Quechua and Aymara-speaking populations, as well as the thirty-odd smaller ethnicities in the Amazonian east of the country.
Remote, poor and landlocked as modern Bolivia may have been, its political and social evolution nonetheless fits the global pattern of the impact of German romantic populist nationalism in the process whereby conservative and fascist ideologies, initially spawned in Europe between 1870 and 1945, migrated to the semi-colonial and colonial world and were then re-imported by the Western left in suitably “anti- imperialist” guise.
Bolivia’s history, in the eighty years preceding the MNR revolution, was a rude awakening to the world market dominated by Anglo-American imperialism. Its political system, like most political systems in Latin America between the 1870’s and the 1929 world depression, was a restricted affair of two political currents, Republican and Liberal, both representing factions of the small elite which had wrested independence from Spain in 1825, and which was periodically elected, after 1880, by the narrow enfranchised sliver (2%) of the population. This elite in turn dominated the much larger mestizo and above all indigenous, overwhelmingly rural population which periodically expressed itself in local and occasionally national revolts, the fear of which shaped the elite’s unabashed racism16 .
One such failed nationwide indigenous revolt, associated with the name of Pablo Zarate (El Temible) (The Dreaded) Willka, took place in 1899, in the midst of a civil war (1898-99) in which the Liberals ended two decades of Republican domination and won control of the political system until 1920.
Republican or Liberal, the Bolivian elite hardly excelled in protecting national interests. Between 1879 and 1935, Bolivia lost a significant part of its national territory and its entire coastline in successive wars and conflicts with Chile (1879), Brazil (1903)17 and finally with Paraguay in the infamous Chaco War (1932-1935), the bloodiest engagement ever fought in Latin America in modern times and the real beginning of the ferment leading to the MNR revolution in 1952.
2. German Romantic Populism Comes to Bolivia
It is little appreciated today to what extent Germany, from the Kaiserreich to Nazism, influenced developments throughout the semi-colonial and colonial world, including Bolivia, prior to 1945. After its long-delayed national unification in 1870, and its stunning defeat of France (previously considered the dominant continental army) in the Franco-Prussian war of the same year, Germany began the long process of contesting Anglo-French and later American dominance in the world economy. Being itself, as a latecomer, largely excluded from the imperialist land grab of the 1870’s and 1880’s, and having been compelled, in its own struggle to unify, to shake up the European balance of power built on the fragmentation of the Germanic lands since 1648, Germany up to 1945 could plausibly present itself in many parts of the world, to nations and nationalist movements under the heel of the dominant imperialist powers, as a supporter of “national liberation”. Germany was, in that very real sense, the first successful “developing country”; its (initially) highly successful economic and military emergence made it a “model” for would-be developing countries everywhere, much in the same way that Japan (itself a star pupil of Germany) became such a model for Asia a bit later, and above all after World War II. But along with economic and military prowess, Germany increasingly attracted the attention of the semi-colonial and colonial elites with its stellar culture, a culture developed precisely in opposition to the dominant Anglo-French liberal paradigm from the Enlightenment onward. From Japan, Korea and China to the African Negritude movement, via the origins of Turkish and Arab nationalism, to the German immigrants and military advisors in Latin America, there is scarcely a part of the pre-1945 developing world that was untouched by attempts to imitate the “German model” in all its various dimensions.
In Bolivia, the 1880’s saw the founding of the first commercial houses for German immigrants. German-Bolivian trade took off in that period with the sale of German heavy machinery and locomotives in exchange for Bolivian rubber. While British finance capital, funding above all railway construction, was still dominant over Germany in Bolivia, the Krupp and Mauser arms producers were already selling weaponry to most Latin American armies, including Bolivia’s. Overall, from 1880 to 1920, Bolivia’s foreign trade was expanding greatly. German trade there surpassed France’s by 190018 . By the 1890’s, tin had replaced silver as Bolivia’s main export, and by the 1930’s the three largest “tin barons”, known popularly as “La Rosca” and quite detached from the real life of the Bolivian masses, were the core of the dominant oligarchy19 . In 1910, Bolivia was the world’s second producer of tin.
By 1900, German (mainly Prussian) military officers were training armies throughout Latin America, and with the well-known role of military elites in nation-building in the developing world, were often, along with trade and immigrants20 , the conduit through which broader German influence entered a specific country. Between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I, these officers repeatedly displaced French officers in training new armies, from Japan to the Ottoman Empire to Argentina, Chile and finally (after 1911) Bolivia. Some German-trained officers of the latter countries in turn trained armies in Peru and Ecuador. 1908 also saw the German-Bolivian Treaty of Friendship and Commerce.
Undoubtedly the most notorious German military adviser to the Bolivian Army, over a twenty-five-year period, was Gen. Hans Kundt , the commander of a number of German officers with colonial experience in such settings as Cameroon or the suppression of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. In 1914, Kundt returned to Germany to play an undistinguished role in the First World War, after which he participated in the proto-fascist Freikorps and then in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch against the newly-founded Weimar Republic, whereupon he had to leave Germany and returned to Bolivia.
Despite these German ties, Bolivia sided with the Western allies in the war, breaking relations with Germany in 1917, under the pressure of the U.S. and Britain, the major investors in Bolivian tin and also the major market for it. Kundt returned to La Paz in 1920 and became Minister of War, and would continue to deeply influence the Bolivian army until the debacle of the Chaco War. During his tenure there, Bolivia’s Revista Militar, the leading journal of strategy for the officer corps, was not accidentally dominated by Germanophiles.
3. A Bolivian Fichte: Franz Tamayo and the pre-MNR Tradition of Paternalistic Indigenism
German influence, in Bolivia as elsewhere, was hardly limited to the economic and military spheres. The first intellectual of the “cosmopolitan”, i.e. Anglo-French oriented Bolivian elite to pose the question of the indigenous majority, as least as a cultural program imbued with German romanticism, was Franz Tamayo. He was undoubtedly the foremost Bolivian intellectual and cultural figure of the pre-MNR generation. In his 1910 book, Creacion de una Pedagogia Nacional (first serialized in fifty-five articles in a newspaper) one of the most arresting formulations was: “What does the state do for the Indian? Nothing. What does the state take from the Indian? Everything.”21 Tamayo asserted that 90% of the energy of the Bolivian nation came from the indigenous majority and that instead of slavishly copying European models, Bolivia should put the Indian at the center of its culture and education.
Franz Tamayo (1878-1956), played in Bolivia a role somewhat similar to that, somewhat later, of Jose Carlos Mariategui in Peru (cf. below), although, in contrast to Mariategui, totally outside of any Marxist or leftist problematic. Tamayo was born into the latifundia class; his father, Isaac Tamayo, had published a sociological novel in 1914, Habla Melgarejo, which by some estimations contains all of his son’s later affirmations about the centrality of the Indian in Bolivian history and culture, and the elder Tamayo is considered by some to be the “true father of indigenismo in Bolivia”.
Franz Tamayo was a major literary, intellectual and occasionally political figure in Bolivia from from the early 20th century until his death. Like many men from the Latin American elite, he had spent years prior to World War I in England, France and above all Germany on the mandatory tour of the continent. (Unlike most such Bolivian men, however, his mother was Aymara, and Tamayo grew up bilingual in both Spanish and Aymara.) In Paris, he married a Parisian beauty of la belle époque and brought her back to live, incongruously, on his remote Bolivian estate. His major intellectual influences were Goethe, Nietzsche, the geopolitician Rätzel and above all Fichte. Like many similar figures from underdeveloped countries, he (like his father) pointed repeatedly to Japan as a model for such countries to follow, because it had (in his estimation) totally internalized what the West had to offer, while preserving its own culture.
Tamayo’s work consists more of poetry and other literary forms rather than political writings. The work Creacion de la Pedagogia Nacional22 , his main venture into social analysis, is a call for Bolivia to emerge as an indigenous nation, and was profoundly influenced by Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation. From Fichte, Tamayo took the idea of “national will”; he denounced the Europe-addled “Bovaryism”23 of the Bolivian elite, with its pale imitations of Europe, saying rather that Bolivian education needed to prepare the youth for struggle, because “life is struggle, the struggle of interests, struggle on every terrain and of every kind”. Bolivia, in Tamayo’s view “had to eliminate the European and mestizo elements and make itself into a single indigenous nation.”24 The work is shot through with 19th-century Teutonic terms such as “life”, “force” and “race”. “National energy” required “fighters, not literati”. Tamayo saw Nietzsche as the philosophical negation of, in his words, “the poisonous books” of Rousseau. Fascinated as well by Schopenhauer, Tamayo similarly had no use for the world historical progress informing the outlook of Hegel.
Tamayo, for all his desire to escape from “Europe”, was totally a prisoner of late 19th century European race theory, in which biology was destiny; a race for him was
“a group from people possessing the same biological inheritance, identifiable by external physical characteristics, which have a definite relation in types of behaviour and which give rise to cultural differences.”25
Tamayo had no more use for any universalist outlook than today’s theorists of identity politics, who might at least blush at the biologist foundation of such a predecessor:
“The ideal of humanity! That is an unreality which never existed, except as a false and artificial product of French romanticism which nations have never practiced!”
and
“The human ideal, if it exists, is a preparation for the forces of the nation, not for an impossible Saturnalia of peace and universal concord, but in a recognition that everything is a struggle without truce, a struggle of interests, a struggle on every terrain and of every kind, in markets as on the battlefield.”26
In Tamayo’s paternalistic view, of course, the indigenous masses of Bolivia are not to be the protagonists of any struggle to throw off the weight of European culture:
“Who is to carry out this movement (for the overthrow of Spanish culture)…? It is not the Indian directly, but rather us, the thinkers, the leaders, the rulers, who are beginning to become conscious of our integral life and our real history.”27
Given his central role and his controversial views, there were obviously many reactions to Tamayo. In the view of one critic, Juan Albarracin Millan28 “Tamayo’s irrationalism, basically racist, posits ‘Bolivian man’ as the ‘new man’…With its insistence on the mystique of blood, race and soil”, in Albarracin’s view, “Tamayo’s orientation was not called irrationalism, voluntarism, vitalism or mysticism, but, quite the contrary, ‘indianista’. Tamayo was, in this view, ”anti-liberal, anti-democrat, anti-socialist and anti-masses.” Eduardo Diez de Medina, a writer and diplomat, cursed Tamayo for “his puerile adoration of Fichte, Nietzsche, Max Stirner, the Kaiser and Hitler.” and said that “only Adler, Jung, Scheler…or Freud could have understood Tamayo’s writings.”29 . For Augusto Cespedes, a major MNR intellectual and generally an apologist for the MNR’s early anti-Semitism and proto-fascism30 , said of Tamayo that “his mind admitted only an abstract national pedagogy suitable for an empty utopia…his condition (was that of) a latifundist, landowner and master of serfs.”31 . Guillermo Lora, the leading Trotskyist in Bolivia over decades, contrasted Tamayo to another figure of the elite, Bautista Saavedra (Bolivian president 1920-1925), saying that if the latter had not left his study and gone to seek the masses in the outlying neighborhoods, “he would have remained in the same position as Franz Tamayo, the poet, essayist and owner of haciendas and houses, forgotten in the midst of a flood of intellectual memories and dusty books.”32
Tamayo does not fare better in the critique of a major theoretician of indianismo33 , Fausto Reinaga34 . In Reinaga’s view, Tamayo soared in thought, “but always had his feet planted on the side of feudal exploitation”. After the 1952 MNR revolution, according to Reinaga, the “youth turned to Tamayo”, and the latter responded: “No revolution”. With his “black class hatred”, Tamayo opposed agrarian reform. He joined the “Rosca”, the oligarchy deposed in 1952, in calling the MNR “communist”. His work had been hailed in the publications of the Falange Socialista Boliviano (FSB), the authentically fascist current after World War II. After 1952, Tamayo had written “I had always considered communism to be the most terrible retrogression…”35 He had been, in Reinaga’s view, “the greatest enemy and detractor of the working class in Bolivia”; the working class for him was “la canalla”. In a speech to parliament in 1931, Tamayo had already said “We know that communism is an immoral doctrine, destructive of all principles, it is a human pestilence.”36 In the estimate of his most serious intellectual biographer37 , Tamayo’s reactionary outlook was closest to those of Burke and Maistre. Charles W. Arnade, whose book Historiografia Colonial y Moderna de Bolivia surveys the gradual discovery of indigenous reality in Bolivia’s long tradition of Eurocentric historiography, considered that Tamayo had pushed the “the racial themes to absurd extremes”.38
The assessment of Marcos Dumich39 , albeit theoretician of the Bolivian Communist Party, is no less harsh. He sees Tamayo as a healthy reaction to the early 20th century reactionary and cultural pessimist Alcides Arguedes, author of the 1909 book Pueblo Enfermo (A Sick People) but who then falls into talk of the “indigenous race”. In Dumich’s view, Tamayo opposed humanism, liberalism, scientism, and intellectualism, for which he substituted voluntarism and authoritarianism40 . Politically, Tamayo’s contempt for bourgeois democracy and his “heroic authoritarianism and grandiloquent nationalism” puts him on the ideological terrain of pre-fascism. In a 1934 speech, Tamayo denounced the Russian Revolution and called for a “strong hand against its Turano-Mongol nihilism”. “Tamayo”, for Dumich, “contributed to creating that emotional tone so hard and so necessary for the fascist currents.”
Tamayo, in fact, did not limit himself to theory and literary works. He intermittently intervened in politics throughout the period under consideration here. He founded the Radical Party in 1912, falling on the Liberal side of the intra-elite battle between Liberals and Republicans. Tamayo played a leadership role, becoming chancellor, in the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932-1935), and was then elected president in 1934 but prevented from taking office by the coup of 1935, while both his house in La Paz and his rural estate were burned to the ground. He had run at the urging of the proto-fascist, later pro-Axis secret military lodge Razon de Patria (RADEPA), and then had become the president of the Constituent Assembly in 1943 in the government of Villaroel, also a RADEPA member. Tamayo (who left political office in 1945) remained notably silent during the mini- civil war of August 1949, preparatory for the MNR revolution three years later, as a well as on the 1950 massacre of workers in the Villa Victoria district of La Paz. The MNR seriously considered him for their presidential candidate in the decisive 1951 elections, which began the immediate crisis prior to the 1952 revolution, but he was passed over for Victor Paz Estenssoro.
Tamayo’s Fichtean nationalism, then, based as it was on a racial affirmation of the “true” Bolivia rooted in the indio, was the kernel of what would become, in a more cultural but still highly Germanic form, the ideology of the “national revolution” against the “foreign” elite elaborated by Carlos Montenegro.
Charles Andrade’s study, reputed to be the first which brushed aside the white elite-centered historiography and unearthed the indigenous tradition, also places Franz Tamayo in perspective, while revealing the racism of much of the treatment of the indigenous question, for and against. Rene Moreno, the most important Bolivian historian of the 19th century, was a declared racist. Nineteenth-century historians generally were “a mixture of narrow provincialism and French intellectualism…they failed to understand the great social problems of their nation.41 The above-mentioned Alcydes Arguedes (1879-1946), another Francophile historian of the period, was influenced by reactionaries such as Le Bon, Gobineau, and Vacher de Lapouge, but was nonetheless “one of the fathers of Bolivian indigenism”.42 (He also was funded by the Patiño tin empire to write a tendentious multi-volume history of Bolivia.) Jaime Mendoza (1874-1939) was, for Andrade, “the first aristocrat who, without vacillation, demagogic intensions or pat phrases, proclaimed the potential equality of the Indians…he opposed changing the mode of life of the Indians, in the sense of subjecting them to Europeanization”43 . Mendoza’s book Factor geografico (1925) emphasized the Indians’ “love of the land” and thus, in Andrade’s view, “the cult of Pachamama was born”http://insurgentnotes.com/2011/03/anti-capitalism-or-anti-imperialism/ - footnote_anchor-44.44
Such, then, were some of the contending currents with which the Bolivian elite entered the global crisis ushered in by World War I and its aftermath, prior to the appearance, after 1928, of the future MNR generation.
4. Prelude to the Crisis of the Chaco War, 1918-1932
The period 1914-1945 was a period of violent reorganization of world capitalism, of the demise of the British world hegemon and the struggle for succession to world hegemony between the emerging contenders, Germany and the United States, a struggle which played itself out quite explicitly in Bolivia. It was also a period of transition, on a world scale, (to use Marx’s language) from the phase of “formal”/extensive to the “real”/intensive domination of capital45 .
After the First World War, Bolivia’s economy was hard hit by the 1920-21 world depression. With the end of war demand, the world tin price, and hence Bolivia’s tin exports, collapsed. It was at the same time a period of heavy foreign investment in the country’s public utilities and government securities. In 1920-21, Standard Oil of Bolivia was created, and Spruille Braden, a dominant figure in U.S. business and diplomacy in Latin America over the subsequent decades46 , negotiated the very advantageous sale of four million hectares of Bolivian soil to Standard Oil, a sale which would later inflame Bolivian nationalism before and during the Chaco War. With recovery after 1921, something of a new educated middle class emerged. German investment returned, carving out a spot behind U.S. and British interests in transportation and communication. In 1923, Wall Street banks floated the so-called Nicolas loan of $33 million, which refunded Bolivia’s state debt, taking 45% of government income for repayment47 . This was followed in 1927 with a $14 million loan from Dillon, Read. In the same year, Walter Kemmerer, a Princeton economist, spent three months in Bolivia as a consultant, ultimately outlining the “Kemmerer reform”, which proposed the U.S. Federal Reserve System as a model for the Bolivian Central Bank. Kemmerer also recommended tax reforms and a return to the gold standard. Kemmerer’s intervention was followed in 1928 by a new Dillon, Reed loan of $23 million. In 1929, Bolivian tin production peaked at an all-time record, a level never attained again and, given the country’s then-total dependence on tin exports, a serious problem over subsequent decades, as Bolivia was eclipsed by tin production in Malaya, Indonesia and Nigeria. On the eve of the world collapse in 1929, foreign debt was still taking 37% of the state budget, and government finance remained in deep crisis over the following decade.
Bolivia was, in short, a classic semi-colonial country, totally beholden to competing imperialist powers for finance and technology, and whose immense natural resources benefited primarily those foreign investors.
The Bolivian working class emerged in its modern form amidst all this economic turmoil, after an earlier period of the Proudhon-inspired mutualism widespread throughout Latin America prior to 1914. As happened in so many countries immediately after the war, a strike wave swept Bolivia in 1920, led by the railway workers, who called a general strike in January 1921. Tin miners had struck at the Catavi mines in August 1920, but their strike was crushed. Another general strike in La Paz in 1922 forced the government to concede, but the Uncia mining massacre of 1923 marked a pause in labor unrest.
Along with strike activity, as well as peasant ferment, a flurry of new left-wing organizations emerged. A (non-Marxist) Socialist Workers’ Party was founded in the fall of 1920, and a Socialist Party, with ties to the more developed Chilean workers’ movement, was founded in 1921. Later in the decade, the newly-created Third International began activity in Bolivia, from its continental headquarters in Buenos Aires48
In June 1929, the Comintern organized the Conference of Latin American Communist Parties in Buenos Aires under a Moscow flunky named Vitterio Codavilla. As this was the “Third Period” of “class against class”, the conference issued a call for the Stalinist version of a “worker-peasant govt.”(cf Lora, vol. XX pp. 230-231) Jose A. Arce, later the leader of the ill-fated pro-Moscow PIR (Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria) was among the among Bolivian representatives. . In 1927, Tristan Marof49 (1898-1979), an important left-wing figure over subsequent decades, helped found a Labor Party (Partido Laborista), the first self-identified Marxist party in the country. (For his troubles, Marof was exiled from the country for a decade.) In the same year, an indigenous revolt of 100,000 peasants in the Bolivian south was crushed, a revolt caused by rise in the price of land due to railroad construction and land seizures by landholders. Agitation spread for the eight-hour day, which was adopted in some sectors.
All this economic turmoil, worker and peasant ferment, and the proliferation of socialist and labor organizations (many ill-defined) had to have ideological repercussions, and by the late 1920’s a tumultuous mix including Marxism, nationalism and indigenism all reached the educated middle class, a ferment which would bear its ambiguous fruits after the Chaco War. In August 1928, the first convention of the Bolivian University Federation (FUB) took place50
The 1928 convention followed up on a 1921 international congress of students in Mexico City, where first-hand acquaintance with the Mexican Revolution was to be had. (Ferran Gallego, Los origenes del reformismo militar en America Latina: La Gestion de David Toro in Bolivia (1991). , where particularly the Cochabamba intelligentsia was swept up in discussions of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, as well as the ideas of Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui51 . This agitation was also significant in that virtually all the major figures of post-Chaco radical politics came of age politically in these years. The deepening world depression after 1929 and looming Chaco War would provide the context for their emergence. The late 1920’s, in short, was the period in which Marxism of different varieties swept educated strata in Bolivia.
5. Mariategui and Marof Pose the Indigenous Question for the Left
Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930), was the first Latin American Marxist to underscore the problematic of the Andean indigenous population for socialism, and had a major impact in Bolivia as well as early as the late 1920’s Mariategui, in a short life, wrote hundreds of journalistic articles. His major work is a collection entitled Seven Essays for the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Mariategui was denounced by the Comintern in the Third Period as a “populist”, and denounced by the populists (of Haya de la Torre’s APRA party) as a Marxist.
Mariategui was initially formed by the leading Peruvian anarchist of the preceding (pre-World War I) generation, Manuel Gonzalez Prado, whose prominence was based on the early mutualist (Proudhon-inspired) phase of the Peruvian and Latin American workers’ movement ( which was more or less superseded by the global impact of the Russian Revolution). Mariategui traveled to Europe after the war and was in Italy during the factory occupations of 1920. It was in Italy that he most directly experienced the realities of the European workers’ movement. He is a tangle of influences, including Georges Sorel52 and surrealism. He founded the highly original journal Amauta (1926-1930), which propagated his theses at a time when the Peruvian elite was totally Europe-oriented, and both disdainful and fearful of the seemingly mute indigenous majority. He helped to found the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928, so named precisely to demarcate it from Third International Communism as well as Haya De la Torre’s APRA.
In addition to Mariategui, a second figure on the Andean left who raised the indigenous question to prominence was the (above mentioned) Bolivian Tristan Marof53 , the nom de guerre of Gustavo Adolfo Navarro. Marof was an aristocrat who served as a diplomat in Europe from 1920 to 1926. He was expelled from Bolivia, as indicated, for pacifism during the Chaco War, and upon his return attempted to found a real Marxist party there. Marof, in Andrade’s view, wrote an unprecedented history of Bolivia, albeit with an “exaggerated interest in the Inca empire”, which Marof saw as superior to the present. For Marof as for Tamayo, the “Bolivian people were the Indians, and they were not sick but merely sad at the loss of their ‘great past’”54 . Marof figured prominently in a debate within Andean Marxism about the possible “communist” character of Incan society, a viewpoint that has faded away.
6. Bolivia and the South American Revolutions of 1930
In 1930, under the impact of the world depression, revolts and revolutions overturned the governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile55 . These developments were the South American moment of the worldwide collapse of classical 19th-century liberalism in the depression decade, and in Bolivia, as in the other Latin American countries, this meant the impending defeat of the old oligarchic elite parties based on restricted suffrage, and the entry of the masses into politics56 . In the Bolivian case, with the return to power of the Liberals, this collapse and reshaping of the political, social and economic system stretched over more than two decades, as the Bolivian moment of the world transition to forms of social organization appropriate to the new “intensive” form of accumulation.
During these developments, the German military presence had continued apace.
Over the course of the 1920’s, General Kundt had imposed more and more discipline on the military. Faced with instability and revolt, the Republican Hernan Silas government (1926-1930) became more and more dependent on the army, and hence on Kundt. In 1926, Ernst Roehm, the founder of Hitler’s stormtroopers, was invited to Bolivia as a military adviser and arrived there in 1928, along with a number of other far-right military personnel from Danzig, who had been demobilized by the Treaty of Versailles. The Liberal overthrow of the Bolivian government in June 1930 was a revolt from the right, placing in power Daniel Salamanca, after which Roehm briefly joined the Bolivian General Staff, though Hitler recalled him to Germany months later. In the upheaval, Kundt’s house was attacked by a mob because of his association with Silas. Other German officers supported the rebels.
In January 1931, the Liberals consolidated their mandate in a landslide electoral victory (once again within the restricted suffrage). In the same year, Bolivia became the first Latin American country to suspend payments on its foreign debt during the depression decade. In March 1931, Salamanca took office as president. The Trotskyist57 militant and intellectual Lora commented on this development: “Our greatest liberals may have had a few democratic ideas in their heads, but their very existence was based on the servile labor of the peasants.’58 Almost immediately, in April 1931, Salamanca was confronted with a general strike, centered in the postal and telephone workers, and managed to suppress it.
7. The Chaco War and the End of the “Old Regime” of Elite Politics
For years, Bolivia and Paraguay had fought minor skirmishes on their vague shared border in the Chaco, a huge and very sparsely populated area of jungle, desert and shrub land in Bolivia’s east. Disputes have continued ever since the Chaco War about the ultimate reasons for the conflict, which cannot be settled here. During and after the war, the great majority of Bolivians believed it was provoked by Standard Oil, backed by Argentina and/or Brazil, for reasons such as the desire for an outlet to the sea. Serious historians such as Herbert Klein dispute this59 . Whatever the case, Chaco War fever initially helped Salamanca to divert domestic passions away from his abysmal failure to deal with the economic crisis. In May 1931, he pushed for military penetration of the Chaco just as he was unleashing massive repression of May Day demonstrations around the country. In early 1932, the Bolivian Parliament debated a “Law of Social Defense” allowing it to exercise “legal dictatorship”, also denying the right to unionize and to demonstrate. A government roundup of leftist intellectuals ensued. Nonetheless, at the same time, there was growing anti-war sentiment in the labor movement, culminating perhaps in a major demonstration in Cochabamba on May 19th, but, according to Lora, many leftists also capitulated to war hysteria.60
Salamanca pushed for war in the Chaco, confident of victory. Bolivia had twice Paraguay’s population61 , and superior armed forces. What the Bolivian elite did not reckon with was the huge incompetence revealed by the general staff, the extremely hostile terrain (many more troops died of thirst and disease than from combat) and the rapid demoralization of the front line troops, who were in their overwhelming majority indigenous draftees pulled from remote villages without the slightest idea of what the war was about.
In 1932, General Kundt, having fled after the overthrow of the Silas government in 1930, returned to Bolivia with full powers as commander-in-chief in the Chaco War, after Bolivia’s initial defeat at Boqueron provoked a clamor for his reinstatement. Kundt’s popularity was heightened by a growing fascist influence on middle-class youth, a number of whom had studied in Germany during the rise of Nazism. In addition to economic ties to Germany, cultural clubs and colegios (high schools) spread the growing appeal of authoritarianism and fascism in Europe62 . Be this as it may, Kundt, who was seemingly committed to a cumbersome strategy of position, was definitively ousted after another defeat at Campo Via.
All in all, Bolivia lost 60,000 men in the Chaco War, and Paraguay lost 40,000, by the time Bolivia agreed to an armistice in 193563
Foreign officers and technicians were present on both sides; White Russian veterans were commanders on the Paraguayan side, Chileans and Germans were advisers on the Bolivian side. . Deserters had been shot in droves, and leftists protesting the war were intentionally sent to the front lines to be killed there. Thousands of Bolivian troops perished from thirst when logistic lines were interrupted by incompetence and neglect. The peace negotiations, overseen by representatives from the U.S., Argentina, Chile and Brazil, dragged on until 1938, and ultimately awarded Paraguay territory that doubled its size. The economy was reeling under accelerating inflation.64 By 1935, the traditional Bolivian Liberal and Republican parties of the tin barons had been totally discredited, never to recover in their old form. The social ferment unleashed by the Chaco debacle turned Bolivian society upside down. In that ferment, fascist, corporatist and socialist ideologies battled for dominance in a chaotic and highly fluid postwar situation.
8. Intermezzo on Corporatism in Latin America
The collapse of elite liberal and republican parties in southern South America, under the impact of the post-1929 world depression, as well as the rise of increasingly radicalized workers’ movements, as often more anarchist than socialist, required the ruling classes of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile to fundamentally remake their political systems if they were to retain power. This transformation was the Latin American moment of the worldwide proliferation of statist regimes of different types in the global restructuring of capitalism then underway. Earlier immigration to southern South America from Spain, Italy and Germany made crisis responses in Europe significantly present, to different degrees, in the debates over how to accomplish this. The Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain (1923-1930) with its definite corporatist overtones, fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, and, a few years later, Nazism in Germany all came into play as references for the new era of mass politics. These forces were received somewhat differently in the less urban, less industrial countries of the Andes such as Bolivia and Peru, with their large indigenous populations. Yet, in Bolivia, perhaps in the long run the model most studied was the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940), particularly its left-corporatist phase under Cardenas after 1934. But this came later, after the Bolivian “movimientistas” were compelled, by the Allied defeat of the Axis in World War II, to shed their infatuation with the Italian and German examples.
Let us look, then, at some of the 1930’s developments in neighboring countries, confronting the dilemma, for the capitalist class, of organizing top-down statist forms of working-class containment, or of facing the prospect of a bottom-up working-class revolt that could not be contained:
“…In the Brazil of 1930, for instance, it was clear that the ‘social question’ could no longer be left entirely to the police to deal with…the proletariat was a significant presence in the cities. Not only was it a proletariat; it was in a very disturbing sense an a organized proletariat with an impressive history of protest, strikes, demonstrations…one of the possible ‘courses of action’ of the new regime in relation to the urban proletariat was to give them some crumbs, so as to get their souls in exchange. The ‘welfare state’ was about to be born in Brazil: its midwife was the Ministry of Labor, which was set up in 1930.”65
And:
“…the basic finding of such an analysis (is): the fundamental effect of the labor laws has been…to make it extremely difficult for the working class to organize effectively and autonomously for political action…The very fact that the government changed its approach toward the working class (from repression to inducements plus repression) contributed to partially annihilate the ability of the working class to answer the renewed waves of repression with corresponding countermeasures such as strikes and public demonstrations.”66
In his section on “Corporatist Control of the Working Class” the author sums up:
“The legal framework of labor relations established by Vargas, and left practically intact up to present-day Brazil, is based on three structures: the syndicates, the labor courts, and the social insurance system.”67
A few years later, a similar dynamic brought forth the same responses in Mexico, in the culminating (Cardenist) phase of its revolution:
“What was decisive in this change in the conception of revolutionary politics was not merely recognizing the working masses as its central element, but especially being disposed to convert them once again into an active element in the service of the revolution, of course, in the best imaginable way: by organizing them, and organizing them for something close to their hearts: their demands.”… “There is no doubt that the revolutionaries (here the author refers to the Cardenistas-LG) had rediscovered the master key to mass politics: organization.” .68
Finally, in Argentina from 1943 to 1950, the same drama was played out again, in the emergence of Peronism:
“…At the very moment in which the masses were mobilized politically…they were being co-opted into a corporatist project led by a nationalist sector of the armed forces…Peron’s overall labor strategy was now becoming clearer, as were his words in 1944 when trying to reassure Argentina’s employers:
‘…It is a grave error to think that workers’ unions are detrimental to the boss…On the contrary, it is the best way to avoid the boss having to fight with his worker…It is the means to reach an agreement, not a struggle. Thus strikes and stoppages are suppressed, though, undoubtedly, the working masses obtain the right to discuss their own interests at the same level as the employers’ organizations…That is why we are promoting trade unions, but a truly professional trade unionism. We do not want unions which are divided in political fractions, because the dangerous thing is, incidentally, a political trade unionism.’
Peron never deviated from this essentially corporatist vision of social affairs and his ‘revolutionary’ image in a later period…was never reflected in practice.”69
9. The Post-Chaco Crisis in Bolivia: Corporatism, Fascism and Socialism in Contention
With this general framework as it developed in other parts of Latin America, we now turn to the complex process of ferment unfolding in Bolivia, in reaction to the Chaco debacle.
As early as 1933, the Legion of National Socialist Veterans (LEC) was founded, though it defined itself as a political party only in 1936. Its program called for “national socialist action”.70 Some German immigrants had organized a National Socialist party after Hitler’s triumph in Germany in 1933. Elections in 1934 put an end to Salamanca’s bankrupt presidency, but a coup led by Jose Luis Tejado Sorzano prevented Franz Tamayo from taking office and set the stage for military government.
On the left, 1934 saw the formation of the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), the Trotskyist group which would play a highly influential role from the late 1940’s onward71 . Also formed immediately after the war was the Confederacion Sindical de Trabajo Boliviano (CSTB). One intellectual influenced by Trotskyism, but more accurately described as a centrist for his career of overtures to bourgeois parties72 , was (the above-mentioned) Tristan Marof, whose book La Tragedia del Altiplano had made the case that the Chaco War had been fought to obtain an oil port for Standard Oil and to defend Standard Oil’s four million hectares against Dutch Royal. Throughout the country, innumerable “socialist” clubs were formed. War-weary youth were reading the post-World War I antiwar classics of Remarque and Barbusse. A Partido Republicano Socialista identified with “evolutionary socialism” and flirted with the Italian fascist idea of corporatism73 . In 1935, the South American Bureau of the Comintern established the Provisional Secretariat for the Communist Groups in Bolivia, with the aim of unifying disparate groups into a Communist Party. The Bureau denounced the peace negotiations then underway in Buenos Aires and called for a peace without annexations and without conquest, and for the abolition of Bolivia’s external debt. It further called for the formation of Quechua and Aymara republics, and, in keeping with the Comintern’s new global line, for a Popular Front.
Other veterans were sympathetic to the nationalism of Carlos Montenegro, one of the core future pro-fascist founders of the MNR. Perhaps most important of all for the subsequent decade, a group of Chaco junior officers, many of whom had been trained in Germany and in Mussolini’s Italy, and who had then spent serious time in Paraguayan POW camps, founded the secret military “lodge” called Razon de Patria (RADEPA), centered in the Escuela Superior de Guerra in Cochabamba74 , clearly committed to fascist ideas. Its subsequent influence, up to 1946, would be second only to that of the MNR which, in 1936, existed only in embryonic potential in the overall ferment.
10. “Military Socialism”, 1936-1940: The First Dress Rehearsal for the MNR Revolution
On May 17 1936, Tejada Sorzano, who had ousted Salamanca two years earlier, was himself overthrown in a coup by two Chaco war heroes, Colonels David Toro and German Busch, initiating the ten-year period (1936-1946) in which European, and above all Italian and German fascist influence in Bolivia would contest hegemony with the “sellout’ democracy” (democracia entreguista, selling the country out to foreigners) oriented to the U.S., Britain and, of course, the Bolivian oligarchy itself.75 (During the war, Busch had risen to prominence by leading the “great defense of the Camiri oil fields”.) The Toro-Busch coup began a four-year experiment they called “military socialism” which, along with the further military government of Gualberto Villaroel (1943-1946) would have an important impact on the development of the MNR (itself founded in 1942). Because of its secret character, it is not always possible to identify the influence of the RADEPA junior officers in the successive regimes, but there is no question that they were a serious presence.
Adolf Hitler had assumed power in Germany in January 1933, to the general enthusiasm of most of the German-speaking immigrants in Bolivia. Throughout the ensuing twelve years, until the defeat of the Third Reich, Germany’s main thrust into Latin America would be economic and, secondarily, through espionage, although the propaganda wars on both sides often exaggerated the real German presence. Hitler’s Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht in August 1934 imposed strict barter on Germany’s foreign trade, on a bilateral basis76 , and a German trade delegation went to South America later that year. While the delegation did not go to Bolivia, it was definitely interested in Bolivia’s extraordinary mineral wealth. The Reich’s Foreign Ministry, on the other hand, wanted “no political ties” to Bolivia.
The Toro-Busch period was the first real political expression of the post-Chaco attempt to remake the bankrupt Bolivian political and social system, in general revulsion at the traditional parties controlled by the tin magnates, echoing the parallel regime crises in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina mentioned above. As Herbert Klein put it77 : “Thus after fifty years of struggle, the civilian party system was overturned by a reawakened military establishment.”. In this development, the ideology of “anti-imperialism” was at its peak. Neither Toro nor especially Busch were sophisticated political figures, and the whole period evidenced serious eclecticism, generally of a corporatist kind. Mussolini’s Italy was, for purposes of reorganization, more of a model than Nazi Germany, if only because it was older and more formed. (Toro’s ambassador to Germany did express admiration for German National Socialism, and Oscar Moscoso, the Defense Minister, was also a Nazi sympathizer.) Toro announced his regime as “state socialism”, and for the first time, in keeping with world trends, a “right of the State”, (in contrast to the old liberal constitutionalism theoretically founded on the individual) was articulated. On other occasions, the Toro regime called itself a “syndicalist state”.78 Carlos Montenegro, whose later book Nacion y coloniaje (1953) would be the quintessential statement of MNR nationalism (cf. below), had been a co-conspirator in the coup79 . The government was also supported by labor and by the Legion of Chaco War Veterans (LEC). The LEC formed the Frente Unico Socialista and called for “authoritarian nationalism”. Toro created state-controlled “functional syndicates”; these had the official support of the Socialist Party, which wanted them to be anti-communist80 . When the syndicates proved a failure, Toro tried to fashion a “state socialist party”. The new regime saw the meteoric rise of young officers, among them members of RADEPA. This “military socialism” never took up questions of latifundismo or of the indigenous masses, and its main base of support was the urban middle class. From Italian fascism, “military socialism” took over mandatory unionization, a corporate type of regime in parliament, mandatory worker savings plans, a social security system, and state-subsidized food stores. It established the first Ministry of Labor with the first worker minister, as well as the first Ministry of Indian Affairs in Bolivian history. The Ministry of Labor in particular was attacked for “creeping radicalism”; it became notorious for hiring (self-designated) Marxists. The ministers of Foreign Affairs and of Hacienda were from the Socialist Party and were pro-corporatist81 . On May 25 1936, the Toro government announced its “fifty-two points of action”, including compulsory unionization. The Toro and Busch regimes, with all their pro-worker rhetoric, were confronted with a number of general strikes in the 1936-1939 period, led by the miners and railroad workers.
11. The MNR in Embryo
The true nucleus of the future MNR was the daily newspaper La Calle, founded in 1936 by a group around Victor Paz Estenssoro (1907-2001), who dominated MNR politics into the 1980’s, and all the major “movimientista” intellectuals such as Augusto Cespedes (1904-1997), Carlos Montenegro (1903-1953), and Jose Cuadros Quiroga (1908-1975)82 . La Calle became an organ for German fascist propaganda and virulent anti-Semitism83 , and as of 1938, used only German news services; Augusto Cespedes himself called it the “megaphone” of the MNR, and decades later said La Calle was “almost fascist” in the years after the Chaco War. Jose Cuadros Quiroga, the most outspoken anti-Semite in the group, excelled in writing catchy, sarcastic headlines that made La Calle a popular broadsheet, in contrast to the staid press controlled by the tin barons. According to Guillermo Bedregal Gutierrez, (Quiroga’s) “philofascist and anti-Semitic streak was a ‘fashion’ of the time. There was great German influence in Bolivia and Quiroga felt that ‘it was important to be anti- Semitic as an element of popular agitation’.”84 (This takes on particular significance because it was Quiroga who, in 1942, wrote the founding program of the MNR, in which these fascist echoes were still present). La Calle was pro-Republic in the Spanish Civil War which erupted in July 1936, but the La Calle team was “awed” by early German and Italian successes in World War II85 . Quiroga apparently wrote most of the anti-Semitic articles86 . For the group around La Calle, German Busch loomed as a saviour of Bolivia. Paz Estenssoro, who proved to be the greatest political survivor of all the founders, never wrote for La Calle, but did write for the weekly named (appropriately) Busch, edited by Montenegro, which was founded during a brief period when La Calle was suppressed.87 It was an elite group, condensing the ferment of the period. The fourteen founders included three future presidents, and ranged ideologically from socialism and Marxism to totalitarian tendencies such as those of Cuadros and Roberto Prudencio88
La Calle was eloquent about its political options, on the subject of early Trotskyist influence in Bolivia, with headlines such as “Trotzkyite (sic) Loud-Mouths Bring Anarchy to the FOT”, “Will We Be Governed by Deserters?”; Another article “called for an ‘iron fist’ to ‘purge the country’ of the ‘red extremism’ of ‘adherents of the Third and Fourth Internationals’”.89
Echoing the developments in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico described earlier, La Calle supported “the renovation of union structures”. But this renovation could not be limited to such structures but must rather “make concrete the institutionalization of the regime in a Corporative State” and give special significance to the “disciplinary function of syndicalism extended as a factor of social cohesion more than as an instrument for the defense of class objectives.” 90
12. Crossover of Fascist Rhetoric and Left-Corporatist Policy Measures in “Military Socialism”
The 1936-1940 period of “military socialism” was a maelstrom of ideological, foreign policy and organizational ferment which might be considered the first blush of the future MNR forces’ attempt to position themselves, in response to a whirlwind of both domestic and international pressures, not the least of them German Nazism. It is necessary to follow them in some detail, to navigate the flood of ideologically-motivated propaganda coming from all sides.
In January-February 1936, Montenegro (who was very close to Busch) and Augusto Cespedes had founded the Partido Socialista, which in Herbert Klein’s view best articulated the “national socialist” perspective91 . The “national socialists” in 1936 had been influential enough, as indicated, to get Toro to propose the corporate model and forced unionization under state control. For Klein92 , Toro articulated “in essence and in its most articulated form” the “philosophy which the small group of politically conscious and advanced young officers proposed for the regeneration of national life…some of whom had received some type of training in Italy in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.” Toro in fact issued a harsh anti-communist decree to appease the oligarchy, but it was stopped by Waldo Alvarez, the Minister of Labor. The radicals at the Labor Ministry were adamantly against the corporatist proposals and demanded worker independence. Their opposition in fact ultimately ended these plans.
In late June 1936, Toro and Busch created an all-military regime. Elias Belmonte Pabon, a founder of RADEPA and (whose Nazi sympathies were, in Guillermo Lora’s view, “beyond question”93 ), was Minister of the Interior in the new cabinet. Belmonte had worked with Ernst Roehm during the latter’s stay in Bolivia, and Busch sent him to Germany as a diplomat94 . Other RADEPA members were send to Italy. Militants from another far-right group, the Estrella de Hierro (Star of Steel) were also in the Busch government.95
El nacionalismo en Bolivia de la pre y posguerra del Chaco (1910-1945 (2006), Pedro Silveti Arce in his Bajo el signo de la Barbarie (1946) argued that the Mariscal Santa Cruz had ties to the Chilean GOS (Grupo de Oficiales Selectos), the Argentine GOU (generally known as the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos), and the Paraguayan Ferente de Hierro, in a general mouvance of the South American extreme-right of the period.
The broader social context was increasingly tense. A strike wave began in early 1936 and by May it has evolved into “greatest strike movement that Bolivia had ever experienced.” There was intense discussion of the proposed mandatory syndicalization in the labor movement. Some parts of the left saw Toro’s labor policy as more fascist than socialist96 . In early July , the radicals in the Ministry of Labor formed the ANPOS (Asemblea Nacional Permanente de Organizaciones Sindicales)97 . In Guillermo Lora’s estimate, the ANPOS “one of the most important creations of the leftists connected to the Ministry of Labor” (who) “wanted to transform society from above”; it ultimately had an ephemeral existence. This conception, in which “worker associations recognized by the Ministry sent their delegates to the meetings”, with the authority of the state “recognizing” different organizations of society, reflects the essence of corporatism.
The Busch-Toro regime in its first weeks pushed ahead with its plans for “military socialism”. On July 6, it issued a decree on mandatory work by all. Chaco veterans were to be reincorporated into their previous jobs within twenty days. Henceforth, anyone without employment papers (carnet de trabajo) would be declared “unemployed” and liable to be enrolled in state labor brigades. Companies were called upon to make their labor needs known to the state. Lora98 saw this as forced labor expressing a “totalitarian, i.e. fascist-oriented” mentality, apparently inspired by Mussolini . Mass demonstrations took place in support of the Ministry of Labor and compulsory unionization. Toro in a speech in late July declared himself “in favor of a corporative state” and for a “regime of trade-union association identified with the organs of power and political representation.”99 As in Brazil, or Mexico, or later Argentina,
“…the National State, as the definitive successor to the oligarchic State prior to the Chaco War, would replace class conflicts by a division of productive functions, in which contradictions would give way to integration within a development project directed by the State.”100
On the day after the mandatory labor decree, Toro issued a Ley Organica de Petroleos to curb speculation and concessions to the foreign exploitation of Bolivia’s oil. Two weeks later, on July 24, this was followed by a decree creating the Banco Minero. On August the decree on mandatory unionization was issued.101 According to the decree, unions would henceforth “will be under the ‘permanent protection and control’ of the socialist government and were ‘incorporated into the state mechanism’. Employers and workers, following the Italian syndicalist model, would be in the same union. According to Lora, “In practice…it fell to the Ministry of Labor to organize the unions and to administer them in all times and circumstances”.102 This fit into a broader plan of the government “to mobilize the entire active population for an intensive program of production”.103
In November 1936, the First National Congress of Workers took place, and debated the creation of a Confederacion Sindical de Trabajadores de Bolivia (CSTB) oriented to the left parties. By this time, however, Toro had moved to the right and appointed a leading lawyer for the Hochschild mining interests104 to the Ministry of Labor, while the radicals were removed from the Ministry. As Klein put it105 “A mixed syndicalist-corporatist state grafted on to the old political party system was contemplated”.
Further steps along such lines followed on Dec 21 1936, with the creation of the Yacimientos Petrofileros Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB- Bolivian State Oil Deposits), a prelimary step to Toro’s historic nationalization of Standard Oil in May 1937. This expropriation of a major U.S. firm was unprecedented in Latin America, a full year prior to the better-known nationalization of oil by the Cardenas regime in Mexico. Further, the government regulation of the tin industry, initially a temporary measure during the Chaco War, was made permanent106 . In the wake of this rapid flurry of decrees and state takeovers, the Toro- Busch government came under fire from the right by the tin interests and from the left by various Marxists. Bolivia’s statist measures were followed by similar steps in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In “military socialism”, of course, the Bolivian Army continued to account for 37% of the government budget.
On July 13 1937, German Busch unseated Toro as sole military ruler. Busch viewed himself as champion of the May 1936 general strike. Toro had never lost labor support or persecuted the radical left, but he had lost the support of fascist107 and reformist-minded junior officers around Busch. In some of his immediate measures,
Busch closed state-subsidized food stores and rolled back some other controls of the previous year. (He also allowed Tristan Marof to return to Bolivia after ten years in exile.)
Once consolidated in sole power, Busch in November 1937 recommended an expansion of the earlier Labor Code (Codigo de Trabajo), itself (by some estimates), influenced by the Italian Carta di Lavoro and the Nazi Arbeitsfront108 . In reality, however, mandatory syndicalization never took hold. Klein summarized the period as follows109 : “In the four years of military socialism the basis of the old parties had definitely rotted away…in the end, the left emerged as the dominant factor in political life.” In March 1939, in recognition of this shifting ground, a Concordancia of the three traditional political parties was formed110 , in which the pre-1930 parties were forced to recognize the end of old system and become (in Klein’s estimate) “class-conscious representatives of oligarchy”.)
13. Influence of the Mexican Revolution
A further important development during the period of Busch rule was the March 1938 constitutional convention. The proceedings reflected the impact, among others, of the Mexican Revolution111 , just then reaching its left-wing limits under Cardenas. The new constitution demarcated itself from its liberal predecessors, with their orientation to the individual and to private property, by a corporatist emphasis on state-recognized professional or occupational organizations, and anticipated further elaboration after 1952. It was accompanied by a new property law pushing social ownership. It proposed agrarian reform, legalization of the ayallu (the pre-Hispanic rural commune, still in existence in some regions), and the nationalization of the mines (though this was ultimately rejected). It forced a regroupment of traditional parties from the pre-Chaco period. The regime decreed (in principle) free universal education and the creation of rural education centers for the highland indigenous population112 .
March 1938 also saw the complete triumph of the Frente Unico Socialista in elections. Carried along on this momentum, the (in Klein’s view) “extremely radical” constitutional convention of 1938 amounted to “a vital turning point in Bolivian history”113 . It repealed the 1880 liberal constitution, and developed “social constitutionalism” (a concept first elaborated for Latin American purposes by the Mexican Revolution). Property, previously conceived in individual terms, was redefined in function of the state. (This recentering of constitutionality on the state, and its legal recognition–and enforcement by compulsion of such recognition–of different bodies, from property owners to professional associations to labor unions, is the essence of corporatism.) The convention was also influenced by European radicalism and socialism as well as by 20th century indigenism, articulated by figures like Mariategui and Tamayo. It approved worker participation in profits, and proclaimed the function of the state as the provision of social welfare.
A few months later, again showing the continental projection of the Cardenas phase of the Mexican Revolution, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL) was founded in Mexico City. According to Lora114 , “it had a huge influence on the Bolivian trade union movement” and had a practical influence in shaping the character and of the (Stalinist) Confederacion Sindical del Trabajo Boliviano (CSTB). Later, during World War II, the CTAL was controlled by the Stalinists, headed by the notorious Mexican Stalinist and trade union bureaucrat Lombardo Toledano115 .
14. Attempted Implementation of a Schachtian System of Currency Controls and Managed Trade; Labor Regimentation
The intensifying geopolitical struggle between Germany and the U.S. was hardly absent from Bolivian developments in the late 1930’s, as this social radicalization was deepening. By 1938, Germany accounted for 17% of Bolivia’s foreign trade.
The German foreign trade boards, for their part, wanted to exchange railroad equipment for Bolivian raw materials under Schacht’s new system of managed trade. Standard Oil was waging a major campaign for compensation for the Toro nationalization of its Bolivian assets, and Busch told the Germans he “didn’t want much to do with Americans” given this standoff. The United States was making efforts through the Pan-American Union (which it dominated) to counter German influence.
In April 1939, German Busch proclaimed himself dictator. While the Bolivian ambassador in Washington declared that that the Bolivian government and Bolivian people felt no sympathy for Nazi or Fascist ideology, Busch moved closer to the Third Reich116 .
One anomaly in the last two years of “military socialism” (1938-1940) was Bolivia’s unique policy, for the world at that time, of open admission of European Jewish refugees. The result was the arrival of between five and ten thousand Jews, mainly from Germany and the German-speaking areas of Central Europe. The purpose of the policy was to promote agricultural development of Bolivia’s remote and nearly-empty eastern hinterlands, for which the largely middle-class professional population of Jewish immigrants were exceptionally unsuited. By the end of World War II, most of these immigrants moved on to other countries, but their presence, and difficulties of assimilation in a country where they could neither speak Spanish well nor use their professional skills, also fed the anti- Semitism of La Calle, which found its way into the first program of the MNR in 1942 (cf. below Section 16).117
In May 1939, however, the Busch regime issued a new Labor Code providing for greatly improved working conditions, effectively the most lasting change of his years in power118 . The Code’s first article excluded agricultural laborers, i.e. the masses of peasants. It was protectionist, setting a maximum of 15% of foreign workers in any given workplace. It provided for worker-employer unions, and granted the right to strike under government control, and also the employers’ right to lock-out and imposed mandatory arbitration.
Guillermo Lora elaborates further119 :
“(the decree) …in reality was a document worked out during the presidency of Col. Toro, when Waldo Alvarez was Minister of Labor and organized discussions in commissions created for that purpose. Organized workers participated in those discussions. This reality deflates the legend that Busch imposed the Labor Code from one day to the next on a working class that had done nothing to deserve it. There is a visible international, and particularly Mexican, influence on the Bolivian law…The approval of the Labor Code had enormous political repercussions. It confirmed the workerist (obrerista) character of the new government and Busch was automatically transformed into the knight errant of the popular movements. This enthusiastic support allowed the regime to acquire an unexpected political stability. The Chaco hero, even though he had issued no equivalent measure for the nationalization of oil, was identified by friend and foe as a caudillo of the left. The Labor Law and other measures adopted by the government even propelled a considerable number of Marxists to join the ranks of the unconditional supporters of Busch…the bulk of the masses and not a few Marxists considered this body of laws to be synonymous with socialism…Many authors of treatises and other exegetes wrote about the Busch Code and almost all of them are convinced that, especially in a backward country such as Bolivia, the exploited can be liberated by social legislation…(the philo-Trotskyist university professor Alberto Cornejo) finds a presumed identity between the labor code and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International…Cornejo fancies that the struggle for serious social legislation is nothing less than the Gordian knot of revolutionary activity.”
As Lora said: “State socialism, far from abolishing the principle of private property, would limit itself to modernizing it, giving it the content of a social function.”120
Along with all this labor ferment and legislation, Busch imposed a great increase in the taxation of mines. When the tin mine owners from Comite Permanente de Mineros forced the government to abolish special taxes and foreign currency requirements, Busch responded in June 1939 with a Schacht-type system of currency controls. The decree required the mandatory handover of all foreign currency from mineral exports to the central bank, citing Germany, Russia, Spain, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Chile as antecedents. This measure increased state revenues by 25%.
The Bolivian representative in Berlin announced Bolivia’s intention to withdraw from the International Tin Pool and put the Banco Minero in charge of tin exports, creating a state monopoly. The Germans saw this as an opening through which the Reich could acquire all Bolivian mineral production in exchange for mining equipment121 . In July 1939, the Reich representatives in Bolivia, Walter Becker and Horst Koppelmann, were asked to reorganize German-Bolivian trade through the centralization of the ASKI marks122 in the Central Bank, thereby obtaining all Bolivian mineral products (above all tin) in exchange for ASKI marks, and to sign a treaty, a “Convenio Comerical de Pagos” on all credit transactions between the two states123 . Bolivia, like other countries which entered into these barter agreements with Nazi Germany, was flooded with cameras, Bayer aspirin and ASKI marks124 .
Busch then nationalized the Central Bank, and Alberto Ostria Gutierrez, a pro-Anglo- American diplomat, resigned from the government in protest at the drift of economic policy. On the same day German emissaries signed a preliminary protocol with the Ministry of Foreign Relations ; in it, Germany and Bolivia agreed to give Reich-Credit-Gesellschaft and the German Bank of South America the regulation of trade in ASKI-marks. The protocol also anticipated a five-year treaty under which Bolivia would sell all products to Germany for ASKI marks (with some exceptions for tin). The last part of agreement proposed oversight of Bolivia’s Central Bank by a mixed commission of Bolivians and the “German Minister in Bolivia”. It also established the role of the Reichsmark and it reserved for Germany the right to use 50% of its “creencias de compensacion” (i.e. ASKI marks) in the purchase of Bolivian tin. The U.S., Britain and Japan attempted to exert counter-pressures, but six days later the two German banks signed an agreement with the YPFB, the state oil company, agreeing to help Bolivia in oil industry development. Walter Mehring, “the special plenipotentiary of the YPFB “ and a German citizen, was ordered to sign an agreement with the two German banks. Four million marks were slated for equipment in exchange for oil and raw materials.
This flurry of activity marked the high point of German-Bolivian commercial relations in the 1936-46125 period, but the anticipated exchanges never materialized and served more to focus U.S. attention on these developments; up to this point, the U.S. had been more interested in the Bolivian-Paraguayan negotiations in the wake of the Chaco War, which dragged on until 1938, and which had taken precedence over concerns about Bolivian “military socialism”. The German envoys ultimately left Bolivia empty-handed.
15. The Tin Barons Return to Direct Control of the State, 1940-1943
“Military socialism” in Bolivia came to an abrupt end on August 23, 1939, with the (apparent) suicide of German Busch. There were widespread popular doubts that his death was indeed a suicide and many suspected that Busch had been assassinated by the tin barons and their “superstate”.126 . Indeed, Busch was not replaced by Baldivian, his vice president, but instead a special commission convened to install General Carlos Quintanella as provisional president until April 1940. Quintanella promptly overturned the Busch decree on foreign currency and in late 1939, issued a modified decree suited to the wartime situation127 .
Bolivian politics following the death of Busch entered a new period of the restoration of the oligarchy’s power, in suitably modified form with an open orientation toward the emerging Allied side in the Second World War and a simultaneous right-wing shift on the domestic front. As early as September 1939, a rapid falloff in Bolivian-German trade took place as Bolivian trade with the U.S. eclipsed it. The German presence in Lloyd Aereo Boliviano was eliminated128 .
The new period represented by the 1940-1943 presidency of Enrique Peñaranda, following the Toro-Busch period of “military socialism”, marks a shift of the pendulum away from previous pro-fascist foreign policy and left-corporatist appeals to the working class, and toward a pro-Allied international stance combined with a hardening of the regime’s relationship with workers and peasants. The pendulum would swing again after Peñaranda’s ouster by the coup of December 1943, ushering in the 1943-1946 return to the previous Toro-Busch dynamic, naturally modified for wartime conditions, under Villaroel. Following Villaroel’s overthrow and lynching in July 1946, the pendulum swung back again, and hard, in the repressive “sexenio rosquero129 ”, the six-year period leading up to the MNR revolution, in which the tin baron “superstate” returned to power with a vengeance, before being definitively overthrown in 1952. Hence it is necessary, as heretofore, to follow this crossover between international pressures and domestic developments in detail130 . From 1940 onward, when the U.S. turned its attention to Bolivia as the sole tin producer in the world not under Axis control, the U.S. and Britain engaged in a propaganda barrage depicting the emerging MNR as “Nazi-fascist”, and increasingly intervened in domestic Bolivian politics. After the war, during the “sexenio rosquero”, it was pointed out with some irony that under Bolivian “fascism”, workers were urged to unionize and peasant questions were at least theoretically addressed, whereas in “democratic” (read: pro-Allied) phases, workers and peasants were repressed and massacred. In the decade before the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, “Nazi- fascist” was the epithet of choice reserved for anyone who opposed American interests, thereafter being replaced by “communist”.
Beginning with its founding in 1940, the PIR (Partida de la Izquierda Revolucionaria- Party of the Revolutionary Left) emerged as the most influential self-designated Marxist party in Bolivia, with a pro- Soviet and an indigenous faction. The main personality of the PIR, Jose Antonio Arze131 , was not, however, (at least in Lora’s view), a “sectarian Stalinist”. In the absence of any established Communist Party in Bolivia, the PIR functioned effectively as the local pro-Stalinist party, and followed the Soviet line as faithfully as any CP elsewhere. From the time of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 to the outbreak of the Cold War, the PIR so aggressively depicted critics of the Allies, whether from the MNR or the Trotskyists, as “Nazis”, that it wound up in a close alliance with the tin baron superstate, ultimately even involving itself (in 1947) in bloody repression of workers. This abject pro-Allied, pro-“democratic” stance of the PIR so totally discredited it in the eyes of the Bolivian masses, especially the working class, that the party’s mass support of 1940 simply evaporated by 1950, when it shrank to a miserable sect. This self- destruction of the PIR (hardly unique among pro-Soviet political parties in the 1940’s) was an important factor in the emergence of Trotskyism as the dominant current in the Bolivian working class in the late 1940’s and beyond132 . During the war, the MNR was pro-Axis, at least until U.S. pressures (and the imminence of German defeat) forced it to moderate its tone; the marginal Falange was pro-Axis throughout133 .
Thus on Apr. 12,1940, Enrique Peñaranda was elected president, ending the provisional rule of Quintanilla and re-establishing the tin baron superstate’s direct influence in the government. The 10,000 votes (out of 56,000 total) for Jose Antonio Arze, the PIR leader, were the real shock of the elections, particularly given the elite character of the enfranchised 2%. Peñaranda’s priority of reorienting Bolivian foreign policy to the U.S. ran into the obstacle of Standard Oil’s ongoing clamor for compensation for the 1937 nationalization of its assets.
Alberto Ostria Gutierrez, who had resigned under protest from the Busch regime, was back in charge of diplomacy. He claimed to have forced Washington to back down on the oil issue in exchange for full cooperation in the war effort134 .
In this new period, moderate left, middle-class intellectuals were anti-U.S. and influenced by fascist ideology135 . The pro-German and pro-Italian “national socialists” were in favor of the nationalization of basic industries, above all the tin mines. In Klein’s view, it was in their interest to foster a radical mine labor movement”136 and the time was indeed propitious; in October 1940 there were wildcats in the mines and a major railroad strike.
16. The “Nazi Putsch”; Peñaranda Fights to Retain Social Control; the U.S. Begins to Eclipse Germany in Bolivian Domestic Politics
The new dispensation under Peñaranda was accelerated by the so-called “Nazi putsch”. A letter was published in Bolivian newspapers on July 20, 1941, ostensibly naming Bolivian attaché Elias Belmonte in Berlin and the German ambassador in La Paz in a plot for a Nazi takeover in Bolivia. Though the letter was actually a caper of British intelligence services137 , it gave the Peñaranda government all the pretext it needed for harsh repression of those associated with the Toro-Busch years. The German ambassador was expelled from the country, German and Bolivian Nazis as well as MNR activists were jailed, the Italian contractors in Cochabamba were expelled, La Calle was shut down, and Carlos Montenegro was also jailed for four months.. Up to that time, the MNR had been the loudest critic of compensation to Standard Oil. The “Nazi putsch” also solidified the working alliance between the PIR, now (after the German invasion of the Soviet Union the previous month) in its anti-fascist “Democratic Front” with the Rosca oligarchy. The military, however, never completely eliminated the nationalist younger officers who oriented to Toro-Busch military socialism, which would be important in the subsequent (1943-1946) Villaroel period.
Not all went smoothly for the new right-wing course; in September and October 1941, Siglo XX miners and railway workers struck and won a 20% pay increase, and Ostria Gutierrez was forced out in controversies over the sales of minerals and the compensation questions. Nonetheless, by late 1941 the U.S., seriously in need of tin, enrolled Bolivia in its Lend-Lease program. After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) the Peñaranda government issued a pro-U.S. statement, froze German and Japanese assets, and agreed to $1.5 million in compensation for Standard Oil138 . In late January 1942,
Bolivia broke diplomatic relations with Germany and expelled more German citizens.
The left parties did make big gains in the spring 1942 elections, in which the MNR also participated for the first time. But the Peñaranda government issued its infamous State Security Decree (Decreto de Seguridad de Estado), banning organizations with “international ties”, no doubt aimed at sympathizers of Germany and Italy. In June, Bolivia joined the Allied forces in the world war, and under this pressure the MNR began to take its distances from Germany. One early spur to this realignment was the Economic Cooperation Agreement with the United States, which had resulted from the Inter-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro139 and the report of the U.S. government’s Bohan mission. The agreement provided $15 million for oil prospecting, highway construction and funding for the Bolivian Development Corporation (Corporacion de Fomento Boliviano-CFB), which would play a major role after the 1952 revolution. (Critics pointed out that the sum provided hardly made up for Bolivia’s sales of tin and wolfram to the U.S. at below world market prices.140 )
17. Fascist Overtones in the Founding of the MNR
The MNR was founded on January 25, 1941 (and more formally on June 2, 1942), with the La Calle intellectuals such as Montenegro, Cespedes, Paz Estenssoro and Cuadros Quiroga providing the main inspiration. One historian141 called it a “uniquely Bolivian blend of nationalism and socialism, but never outright fascism”. Augusto Cespedes, much later, agreed with Ostria Gutierrez that there was more than a whiff of Nazi influence in the founding program, but went on to say that it was the “fashion” (sic) of the time142 . Another author143 later asked Cuadros Quiroga, who drafted the program, about the anti-Semitism in the original document of the MNR; the latter replied that it was due to (the Jewish tin baron) Hochschild. Cuadros Quiroga referred to the “sinister figure of the Jew Mauricio Hochschild…the pontiff of palace machinations.” In Cuadros Quiroga’s view, anti-Semitic sentiment was widespread in Bolivia at the time, but he claims that after the Holocaust he himself gave it up. For him, Hitler was seen in Bolivia as an “alternative formula to bourgeois and oligarchic democracy.”
In Cuadros Quiroga’s “Principles and Action of the National Revolutionary Movement”, the 1942 founding document of the MNR, the following points are enumerated144 : 1) against false “entreguista”, or sell-out (to foreigners), democracy; 2) against the pseudo-socialism of a new exploitation. On the latter point, the document continues: “we denounce as anti-national any possible relationship of the international political parties and the maneuvers of Judaism.” It concludes with a call for the “absolute prohibition of Jewish immigration, as well as any other immigration not having productive efficacy”. And finally, 3) a call for “solidarity of Bolivians to defend the collective interest and the common good before the individual interest”, possibly a direct translation of the Nazis’ “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz”145
It is enlightening to read some attempts to contextualize the collective views of the early MNR leaders, written decades later by MNR sympathizers. Walter Guevara Arze, in his 1988 book calling for a renewal of the movement, and commenting on the torrent of pro-Allied propaganda calling the MNR “Nazi”, wrote: “…unfortunately some texts of the party which confused the struggle against imperialism with support for Nazi-fascism appeared to justify, at a certain moment, this absurd accusation…to this we have to add the declarations of some officers who believed, more or less sincerely, that this was the position most beneficial for the country…”146
Guillermo Bedregal, in a massive study of Victor Paz Estenssoro, the most visible political face of the MNR over decades, writes that in 1939, World War II
“…gave rise to great expectations and obvious sympathy for the impressive military victories of Germany. Some people therefore believed that the matter was summed up in a twofold idea: the history of humanity, after capitalism and communism, was entering into a national-proletarian, national-peasant phase, whose paradoxical emergent form was then represented by European “fascisms” (sic), and some were convinced that the advent of the new era had as its precondition the triumph of the Axis in the world war…Many young Bolivians believed in the European victory of the Axis and in a peace that might be favorable for the Indo-American peoples…Latin America had never had any problems with German hegemonism or attempts at domination…To this we have to add the important influence of political developments in Brazil and in Argentina…(such as) an anti-U.S. politics enriched by the emergence of the syndicalized workers’ movement of the “descamisados” of Eva and Juan Peron…the founding opposition of the MNR was driven by great passions and also great disinformation. No one, until the final defeat of Nazi Germany, knew about the existence of the famous concentration camps…Sympathy, there was; disinformation, I repeat, there was in spades.”147
(Presumably the crushing of all organizations—parties, unions–of the German workers’ movement as well as all other parties of the center and the right, concentration for enemies of the regime, 200,000 political refugees before the outbreak of the war, the Nuremberg Laws on racial purity, the expulsion of Jews from public life and the Kristallnacht had been insufficient reasons for skepticism.)
Guevara Arze and Bedregal are at least willing to face up—to some extent–to these currents for what they were. Consider, then, the attempt of Eduardo Arze Cuadros, in his 2002 book148 (dedicated to…Jose Cuadros Quiroga) to finesse the same questions in a far more laudatory view of the early MNR. For Arze, the critics (presumably Marxists) who see the key struggle as “class against class”, in opposition to the MNR’s insistence on the “nation against imperialism”, are “Eurocentric”. He makes virtually no mention of the existence of RADEPA. In his chapter on La Calle, he invokes only its support for the Spanish Republic, and makes no mention of its pervasive anti-Semitism. After this whitewash of La Calle, Arze goes on to say that Bolivian anti-Semitism in this period has been “decontextualized”. Sinking further into quicksand, he continues with a priceless passage:
“…other objective elements of analysis of the period, such as the observable fact of the demographic and political gravitation of “semitism” (sic) to the city of New York, the neuralgic point of the grave world crisis of 1929 and the principal headquarters of capitalist finance, (…) can underscore the objectivity of an association of big international finance capital with semitism (sic) in a nation which had just emerged from a serious defeat in a regional war and which was then involved, almost without wanting it, in a new conflict…”149 .
With apologists such as these, the early MNR hardly needs critics.
18. The Catavi Mine Massacre Opens the Door to U.S. Domestic Intervention
While the MNR was making its entry into Bolivian politics, the labor situation under Peñaranda was spinning out of control. In late September 1942, the unions issued demands at the Catavi mine owned by Patiño; two weeks later railroad strikes erupted.
The strike wave intensified through November and December, until on December 21/22 hundreds of assembled workers and their families were machine-gunned by the Bolivian military at the Catavi mine150 . The massacre became an international issue; the U.S. ambassador had called the strikers “Nazi saboteurs”, and Peñaranda later visited the U.S., where he was warmly received in the Roosevelt White House. The two major U.S. union federations, the AF of L and the CIO151 , as well as the U.S. State Department, sent the Macgruder Commission to investigate, including Robert J. Watt of the AF of L and Martin Kyne of the CIO, culminating in a devastating portrait of labor conditions in Bolivia, published by the ILO. In Guillermo Lora’s view152 , the commission was mainly a probe to set the stage for U.S. aid. Such a bloodbath, in the most important source of tin for the U.S. war effort, had to be a major concern, and with forthcoming aid the U.S. began its serious intervention into Bolivian domestic politics. Indeed, in April 1943, then-U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visited Bolivia, and in August 1943, the U.S. Congress held hearings on the massacre. (Wallace was quickly marginalized in dealings with Bolivia by the more conservative Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, who had directed ties to the Rosca. The Patiño mines also established their corporate headquarters in Delaware to acquire the status of an American company.) In addition to tin, the U.S. wanted Bolivian quinine, tungsten, zinc, lead and rubber. From 1942 to 1945, Bolivia’s tin production and the tin price did rise, but Mariano Baptista Gomucio argued that the fixed price during the war cost Bolivia $670 million, more than all U.S. aid to Bolivia into the 1960’s153 .
19. The Villaroel Regime, 1943-1946: Second Dress Rehearsal for the MNR Revolution
The Catavi massacre also made possible something of a national political debut for MNR leader Victor Paz Estenssoro, who denounced it and strongly supported the strike, even though the MNR at that point was an urban middle-class party with no particular link to workers. Six months later, in July 1943, Paz went to Buenos Aires, where a pro-Axis group of military officers, including Col. Juan Peron, had just come to power in a coup; Paz announced that he wanted a similar revolution in Bolivia.
The regime, though rapidly losing its grip on power, declared war on the Axis on December 4, 1943. It was of little avail for Peñaranda, who was overthrown in a coup led by RADEPA and the MNR on December 20, marking another swing of the pendulum back in the direction of the pro-Axis, corporatist “military socialism” of three years earlier154 . The new head of state was Major Gualberto Villaroel, a member of RADEPA. His was the first Bolivian government to rule without at least one faction of the tin barons. Villaroel’s Minister of Public Works and Communication was Col. Antonio Ponce Montan, who had undergone German military training and was a great admirer of the Third Reich155 . The new government was immediately recognized by Argentina, which itself would only declare war on Germany in March 1945156 . One adviser of the chancellery was Dr. German Quiroga Galdo, a former professor of International Law at the heavily fascist-influenced Escuela de Guerra in Cochabamba, who in January 1944 made a speech calling for Bolivian support to the Axis. The cabinet included four officers from RADEPA and three leaders of the MNR, Augusto Cespedes, Carlos Montenegro and Victor Paz Estenssoro. According to Klein157 , the “MNR backed Paz Estenssoro rather than the extreme fascist wing represented by Carlos Montenegro158 and Augusto Cespedes.” Cespedes, however, did become the General Secretary of the Junta del Gobierno, while Paz Estenssoro became Minister of Economics. Paz Estenssoro had apparently met with Peron the night before the coup in Buenos Aires159 , where he had spent the previous months160 . Paz placed “all the most rabidly anti-Semitic and fascist MNR members in the government.”161 The MNR broadsheet La Calle became the official newspaper of the regime. German residents of Bolivia worked with the new government, Bolivian students went to study in Germany, and Germans were incorporated into the Bolivian police force.162
The international situation, however, was quite different from the Toro-Busch years, and within weeks of taking power, the Villaroel government had been forced to recognize the inevitability of an Allied victory in the war and to seek a new relationship with the United States. The U.S. and eighteen other western hemisphere countries refused to recognize the Bolivian regime. In May 1944, Bolivia, then, formally declared war on the Axis, and expelled Germans and Japanese citizens from the country. The United States sent its ambassador, Avra Warren, to La Paz, where the Bolivian government handed over to him 81 Germans and Japanese considered to be “dangerous”. The U.S. also agreed to buy tin at above the world price to assure price stability163 .
The Stalinist PIR demanded an explanation for the presence of Nazi elements in the Villaroel government; the U.S. refusal to recognize the junta forced it to drop the more extreme MNR leaders and by July 1944 to completely remove MNR members altogether. Montenegro and Cespedes had left under this US pressure, with Montenegro becoming Bolivian ambassador to Mexico. Despite this departure of the main pro-Axis figures from the government, the RADEPA-MNR alliance lasted throughout the Villaroel period. In part in frustration at its ouster, the MNR intensified its turn to the labor movement.
Power was also taking its toll on RADEPA. Although Villaroel, increasingly in need of U.S. aid, had made efforts to purge his government of the ostentatiously pro-Axis members of the MNR, RADEPA (of which Villaroel was, it will be recalled, a member) was in the course of increasingly acting (apparently) on its own. It kidnapped Jewish tin baron Mauricio Hochschild and held him for several weeks; once released, Hochschild left the country, never to return. In July 1944, RADEPA was involved in the failed attempt on the life of PIR leader and vocal Villaroel opponent Jose Antonio Arze. Most serious, however, were the executions of ten anti-Villaroel politicians and military officers in Chuspipata in November 1944164 . These executions, attributed to RADEPA, set off a political crisis that brought the MNR back into the government.
Argentina, for its part, had maintained relations with Germany until January 1944, and many Argentina nationalists remained strongly opposed to the break when it came. The United States sent a warship to Montevideo as a warning against any Argentine attempt to aid Bolivia; Argentina at this time was trying to form a pro-Axis bloc in the Pan-American Union. To counter this trend, the U.S. in December 1944 sent Nelson Rockefeller, newly-appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, to negotiate with Juan Peron. In these negotiations, Peron agreed to crack down on Axis spies, property, and propaganda in Argentina; for its part, the US agreed to drop all economic sanctions and to sell Argentina military equipment.
20. Further Left-Corporatist Measures Under Villaroel
All these international realignments and reshufflings of the Bolivian government, however, hardly prevented ongoing ferment on the domestic social front. Strikes were rocking the countryside. Villaroel, to the extent possible, tried to relink with the “military socialism” of the Toro-Busch years. In keeping with those corporatist precedents, the Villaroel government accepted the organization of the a national miners’ union, the Federacion Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros (FSTMB), and decreed the abolition of the “ponguage”, the unpaid domestic labor for landowners that peasants were forced to perform. (This decree however remained a dead letter.) It announced plans for rural schools and began work on a rural labor code. In May 1945, it organized a national conference of indigenous peoples, attended by 1,500 delegates. The conference drew up 27 demands, most of which were ignored. The landlords paid no attention to Villaroel’s decrees, unleashing severe repression in the countryside, including attacks on schools and teachers.
The FSTMB became the biggest union in the country, under its leader Juan Lechin, who would be in the MNR government after 1952 and who was the key link, as shall be seen, between the MNR and the Bolivian Trotskyists165 . The founding congress took place in June 1944 and was backed by the MNR and Villaroel to counter the influence of the PIR in the labor movement166 .
In April 1945, Villaroel and his Economics Minister Paz Estenssoro ostensibly restored the Busch decree of 1939 on foreign exchange controls167 but its requirements on submitting income from foreign trade were not as extensive as the earlier decree. A month earlier, at the Chapultapec Conference in Mexico City, Paz had confronted the U.S. about its unfairly low payments for Bolivian tin.
The end of World War II did not ease the pressure on the Villaroel government168 . On Feb 24, 1946 Juan Peron was elected president of Argentina and took office in June. Peron’s honeymoon with the Argentine working class from 1945 to 1950 undoubtedly had an influence on the evolution of the MNR, whose top leaders (along with many refugees from RADEPA) would spend the 1946-1952 “sexenio rosquero” in exile in Buenos Aires. An MNR delegation did attend Peron’s inauguration. The significance of these links, such as they were169 was Peron’s attempt, well after the war, to organize a Latin American “third way” against both the U.S. and Soviet blocs, beginning with the major countries of southern South America. Nonetheless, along with the clear impact of the Mexican Revolution and its institutions on the MNR, Peronist corporatism was definitely another influence.
Some solution to the ferment of the working class was clearly needed; the March 1946 3rd congress of the FSTMB marked a “fundamental turn of the miners to the left.”170 The press of the Stalinist PIR press spoke darkly of the “fascistization” of the miners, and other critics talked of a possible “anarcho-syndicalist” deviation.
On July 14, 1946, however, Villaroel was overthrown in a popular revolt and lynched along with some of his aides in the Plaza Murillo in front of the parliament building in La Paz. The PIR had played a major role in the mobilization that preceded it, as well as the forces of the tin baron (Rosca) “superstate”. In subsequent revolutionary mythology, the murder of Villaroel would be converted into a major reactionary act and he would join the Bolivian revolutionary pantheon. Carlos Montenegro (in Mexico City at the time) in a posthumous work blamed the coup on “occult maneuvers” by the Rosca and lawyers for Standard Oil. The top leaders of the MNR and RAPEDA fled to Buenos Aires, and hundreds more members of both organizations were imprisoned. Thus the 1936-1946 period of alternating pro-Axis populist and pro-Anglo-American anti-worker regimes ended in six years of harsh repression and the swan song of the tin baron superstate, in which the MNR, from exile, would evolve into its mature form for the revolution of 1952.
21. Carlos Montenegro
Before entering into a discussion of the dark repression of the “sexenio rosquero”, the MNR in exile and finally of the 1952 revolution, it is important to analyze “the” book which defined MNR nationalism, by one of the key founders we have followed through this narrative, Carlos Montenegro (1903-1953). The book, published in 1953 as Montenegro was dying in exile, too sick with cancer to participate in the revolution, was Nacionalismo y coloniaje (Nationalism and the Colonial Period). In it, we can see the continuities and discontinuities of the MNR generation, relative to such earlier figures as Franz Tamayo.
We recall Montenegro’s key role in the post-Chaco nationalism of his generation, his collaboration on the important MNR broadsheet La Calle, his conspiratorial role in the coups of Toro (1936) and Villaroel (1943), his close relationship with German Busch, his imprisonment after the “Nazi coup”, his ministerial portfolio (Agriculture) in the first Villaroel cabinet, his reassignment as ambassador to Mexico under U.S. pressure, and finally his Argentine exile during the “sexenio rosquero”.
Nacionalismo y Coloniaje is one long polemic against the “anti-Bolivianist element of our historical culture”, a counterposition of the “foreign” elite and the “true” Bolivian masses, above all the mestizos. Quoting Oswald Spengler, Montenegro refers to the elite as “literate people who learned to read but not comprehend”171 . Montenegro argues that Bolivian history has been written by those imbued with a “complete lack of intelligence about the past…condemning it with the ideas, prejudices and customs of the present…(in this optic) the historical panoramic of Bolivia appears as nothing but a vision of horror.”172 Bolivian journalism as well, from its 19th-century origins, showed a “sudden and absorbing fever for foreign culture…an impassioned surrender to modern spiritual foreign colonization.”173 After 1879 and the loss of Bolivia’s entire Pacific coastline to Chile, “Bolivia was dispossessed of the very sense of itself”. Hilarion Daza, a military figure associated with the debacle, represented “blood foreign to the nation”; he fled to Parisian exile and became a symbol of “the spiritually foreign”, the personification of “the anti-Bolivian…the child of the colonialist spirit which the domination of the learned and the rich draws its inspiration.”174 By contrast, the most powerful personalities of our history…Jose Ballivian and de Linares, belong by their origins to the lower classes.”175
In his last writings in exile, Montenegro made an extended attempt to delineate the MNR from any taint of Marxism. He argued that Bolivia had had neither feudalism nor capitalism, but rather a comprador class in the service of world empire. Bolivia was therefore colonialism and the servitude of the indio. The Bolivian Revolution was thus “anti-colonial”, in the interests of all classes. The MNR was a mass party, expressing the alliance between classes. For the left parties, the contradiction was between bourgeoisie and proletariat, whereas for Montenegro it was between colony and nation.
Montenegro, like Tamayo before him, attracted comment and hostility from many quarters. The Trotskyist Guillermo Lora pointed to the xenophobic rhetoric of La Calle and its “indisputable Nazi derivation”176 ; for Lora, Montenegro denounced “all internationalism” with his “messianic nationalism” and “adulation of the lower classes”177 . Montenegro “tells us that ‘Bolivianidad’, as the force which modeled the independent state, resided and resides in the vast social stratum of mestizos…”. In 1952, for Lora, “the masses destroyed the feudal-bourgeois state apparatus which the MNR, proclaiming the general interests of the non-existent national bourgeoisie, hurried to reconstitute, as a state totally submissive to the imperialist metropole…It is this which exposes the conservative and not merely Spenglerian178 , subjective and reactionary criticisms of Montenegro’s perspective…(for Montenegro) “…’Bolivianidad’, ‘nationality’ and the anti-foreign are synonymous with nativism.”179
Juan Albarracin Millan, in his book Geopolitica Populismo (1982), argues that “Montenegro transposes this Spenglerism to the field of Bolivian history, through the dualism of nation- coloniaje, orienting that history in the direction of Indoamericanist populism, posing as the axis the Bolivian mestizo…Montenegro, a populist ideologue, underscores the untameable masses as the historical root of the nation, counterposed to the “chola” oligarchy.” In Albarracin’s view, “going from the racial to the social analysis was not easy; it was the hardest task of Bolivian sociology. The actions of people were seen by racism in accordance with color, bone structure, language, etc. Social analysis demanded an explanation of the place occupied by people within the social structure.” For Albarracin, the main characteristic of Nacionalismo y Coloniaje is “its undifferentiated use of race and class in the concept of the people. The mestizo and the Indian class move hand in hand into populism.”180 . “Montenegro calls his theory ‘Indoamericanism’, following Haya de la Torre and, moreover, Spengler. In the concept of the ‘people’ Montenegro telescopes his national thesis on race with the populist theory of the alliance of workers, peasants and the middle classes. This particularity of coupling race and people is the weak thread that Montenegro follows, at times toward racism and at other times toward populism…Montenegro is…the key figure of Bolivian sociological irrationalism…Montenegro’s key concepts are “Bolivianidad”, counterposed to all other types of nationality; the “antipatria”, or everything opposed to the untameable vision of the National Revolution; “genetic history”, or history as a concept of biological maturation through which a new culture emerges against the decadent West…”181
Coming from another angle, a later critic says of Nacionalismo y coloniaje: “In this rewriting of history, the actual anti-colonial content of Indian struggles was erased and replaced by a nationalist narrative…By the early 1940’s, indigenous struggle was treated as one more current leading to national independence… In the early 20th c. there was an uncanny silence about…the great insurrection and civil war that consumed the Andean highland in the late colonial period.”182
The ultimate political message of Montenegro’s work, then, is this alliance of all “national” classes against the “foreign” elite, ultimately the Rosca of the tin barons. In an essay published posthumously in 1954, he reiterates: “Thirty years of the diffusion of communist theories and fifteen years of similar activity by fascism-Falangism never aroused the slightest interest by the national majorities, whose pronouncement in favor of the MNR…underscores their conscious difference from the sham revolutionary ideals of European origin…Let us proclaim the struggle against oppression and foreign conquest and against its favorite instruments, the international finance companies, the secret groups, the venal middlemen and the armed mercenaries…”183
In short, the “advance” of Montenegro over Tamayo is the half-step out of the latter’s early 20th century German romantic race theory to a conflation of race and nation in a populist-nationalist multi-class ideology more suited to the modernization of the Bolivian state, which the MNR would undertake after 1952. The rhetorical excesses of La Calle or the frankly fascist echoes of Cuadros Quiroga’s 1942 MNR program are trimmed away, but the core, irreducible, anti-universalist “Bolivianess”, counterposed to everything “foreign”, (a counterposition which could have been borrowed wholesale from Fichte), remained to drown the Bolivian masses in the corporatist-statist project of the MNR in power.
21. The “Sexenio Rosquero”
In the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Villaroel, the new right-wing government hunted down members of RADEPA and the MNR. Hundreds of members of both organizations were jailed and sometimes killed; thousands more were forced underground. The United States granted recognition to the new regime within weeks, and U.S. allies in the Americas followed suit. The MNR leaders—Paz Estenssoro, Cespedes, Montenegro—fled, as indicated, to exile in Peronist Argentina. (During those years of exile, Cespedes and Montenegro managed to work as journalists for La Prensa, a pro-Peronist newspaper.) They arrived in the midst of the “Blue Book” campaign of the U.S. embassy, led by the notorious (aforementioned) Spruille Braden, depicting Peron, Villaroel and the MNR as “Nazi”. Peron was in the midst of his honeymoon with the Argentine working class, and also conducting a vigorous foreign policy aimed at creating an anti-American bloc in southern South America. Events forced the MNR, both in exile and underground in Bolivia, more and more into an orientation toward labor.
It was a propitious time for such a turn since, despite intense repression, the 1946-1952 period saw no falloff of worker and peasant ferment in Bolivia, starting with a number of general strikes. Villaroel’s end had turned him into a martyr of the left, and workers went into the streets chanting his name184 , which they associated with the gains they had made under his government.
More important still was the Extraordinary Congress of the FSTMB in Pulacayo in November 1946, called in response to this rising ferment. The congress adopted the famous “Theses of Pulacayo”, henceforth (in Lora’s words) “the Bible” of the Bolivian workers’ movement. The Pulacayo Congress marked the clear ascendancy of Trotskyist influence in the movement, given the abject capitulation of the (Stalinist) PIR to the Rosca during the war and after. The FSTMB and the Trotskyist POR formed the “Proletarian United Front”, which subsequently managed to score electoral successes in the repressive atmosphere.
Because the Theses of Pulacayo became so influential in subsequent Bolivian working- class history, it is imperative to present them in some detail185 . They were partly drawn from the Trotskyist Transitional Program, calling for a sliding scale of wages and hours, workers’ control of the mines, armed pickets and armed worker cadres. “We must not,” the Theses continued, “make any bloc or compromise with the bourgeoisie” and then called for “a proletarian united front” in contrast to “the fronts which petty-bourgeois reformists are constantly proposing.” After calling for a “Miners’ Parliamentary Bloc” to transform the bourgeois parliament into a “revolutionary tribune”, to “unmask the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie from within the chambers themselves”, the Theses spelled out their perspective:
“’Worker’ ministers do not change the structure of bourgeois governments. So long as the state defends capitalist society, ‘worker’ ministers become pimps for the bourgeoisie. The worker who exchanges his post of struggle in the revolutionary ranks for a bourgeois cabinet portfolio goes over to the ranks of traitors. The bourgeoisie invents ‘worker’ ministers the better to deceive the workers…
The FSTMB will never join bourgeois governments, because that would mean the most open betrayal of the exploited masses, forgetting that our line is the revolutionary line of the class struggle.”
S. Sandor John writes: “Then, however, the Theses veer away from orthodox Trotskyism, pointing to the time, six years later, when the FSTMB would in fact support “worker ministers” in the first MNR government in 1952. While calling the working class “the revolutionary class par excellence”, it went on to say that the coming revolution as “bourgeois-democratic”, though led by the working class rather than “progressive” sectors of the bourgeoisie:
“…those who claim we propose an immediate socialist revolution in Bolivia are liars…since we know quite well that objective conditions for this do not exist.” For an international perspective, “the Theses declared solidarity with North American workers…the U.S. is a powder keg which a single spark can set off.”186
As Sandor John put it, concerning the confusion spread about a bourgeois revolution made by the working class, pointed to the “fateful contradiction, played out in the ensuing years” of “the role its authors played in entangling this combativity with illusions in the nationalist party.”187
The “sexenio rosquero” was, in spite of ongoing repression, hardly a time of social peace. It was, on the contrary, a period in which the now-clandestine MNR steadily gained ground as the voice of workers and peasants. Rural uprisings persisted throughout the year. In late January 1947, steel workers were massacred in Potosi by troops under the orders of a PIR Minister of Labor188 . Still embedded in their “anti-Nazi” alliance with the Rosca tin barons, PIR militants participated in the killing,; although the PIR claimed it was merely fighting against the MNR and the Trotskyist POR, the party’s reputation never recovered. By 1950, younger PIR cadre were leaving to found an actual Bolivian Communist Party, of negligeable importance in the ensuing years189 . This PIR-Rosca alliance, dating back to the beginning of World War II, was one major factor in Bolivian Trotskyism’s ability to win hegemony in the working class. During the same period, Juan Lechin, leader of the FSTMB (although himself having never been a worker) and like Tristan Marof a centrist capable of using Trotskyist language when necessary, emerged as a broker between the MNR and the POR, a reality which would take on great significance in enlisting workers and other militants behind the MNR after 1952.
Despite its determination to use repression and outright terror to maintain control, the Rosca government of Enrique Hertzog was nominally committed to democratic forms and had to stage regular elections. The POR-backed Frente Unico Proletario had some success in the 1947 elections, a harbinger of things to come. Repression followed in May 1948 at the XX Siglo Mine, and in June, at the 5th Congress of FSTMB in Telamayu, Lechin, who had made a secret deal with the government, showed truer colors and led the charge against the POR. In the radicalizing climate, even the Falange (FSB) had to adopt workerist language. In the May 1949 elections, the MNR elected eleven deputies. Mass demonstrations and mass repression followed. Large numbers of MNR supporters were again in prison. But under the pressure of increasing instability, Hertzog resigned the presidency, and was replaced by the aristocrat Mamerto Urriolagoitia. He had hardly assumed power when in August-September 1949 a mini-civil war of 20 days erupted between MNR supporters attempting a coup and the forces of the government, with the government gaining the upper hand by the aerial bombardment of some cities190 and afterward putting hundreds of MNR militants in a concentration camp on the Isla Conti in Lake Titicaca. Again in May 1950, the government responded to a general strike with the bombing and shelling of the La Paz working-class neighborhood of Villa Victoria.
The last act of the Rosca, however, was at hand. As a snapshot of the social reality underlying this chronic instability, it should be kept in mind that as of 1950, 0.7% of property owners in Bolivia had 49.6% of the land while people owning less than 1000 hectares were 93.7% of the population, with 8.1% of the land191 . 0.1% of the population controlled 68% of mining, 100% of the railroads, and 26% of finance capital.
The February 1951 elections opened the end game for the Rosca with a landslide victory for Paz Estenssoro (still in exile after five years192 ) and the MNR. There was of course no question of accepting these results, and three months later, in May, a military junta took over. A deadlock ensued that would only end with the April 1952 revolution. “Abandoning traditional fascism and economic orthodoxy,” wrote Klein, “the MNR moved to a totally revolutionary position”193 , meaning a no-holds barred commitment to the overthrow of the Rosca regime (though hardly revolutionary in the socialist sense)194 .
22. The 1952 Revolution and After
“…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.”
- Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
Thus did Marx describe the way in which fulsome ideological excess serves to midwife an ultimately banal result. One could say of the Bolivian MNR that by the time it succeeded in overthrowing the Rosca and pushing through its corporatist nationalizations and half-baked agrarian reform, massive U.S. aid drove out its earlier infatuations with Mussolini, Hitler and, on a different register, Peron.
The Bolivian Revolution of April 1952 began initially as another coup attempt by the MNR, similar to the failure of 1949. The coup had the tentative support of General Seleme of the Carabineros and of the Falange, but the latter backed out at the last moment. Even the much-reduced Bolivian Communist Party (attempting to demarcate itself from the debacle of the PIR) supported the MNR by 1951. Fighting lasted three days in La Paz; at first the government seemed to have the upper hand but the intervention of armed workers turned things around. The Bolivian army simply collapsed, and suddenly the MNR found itself in power on the basis of the armed Bolivian working class, which had hardly been its intention. Fortunately for the MNR, the ideology of the “national revolution” whose emergence we have followed throughout, as best articulated by Carlos Montenegro, dominated worker consciousness long enough to permit the re-establishment of a state apparatus and the requisite “special body of armed men”.195 In this endeavor, the MNR had no small help from the both the FSTMB and especially from the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) and its leader Juan Lechin. Lechin had created this broader confederation in the heady first week of the revolution, and in its first years the COB was not merely a union grouping but in fact the organization of a broad swath of social groups, of which the miners of the FSTMB were the backbone196 . Coming up behind these mass organizations, but weighing significantly in the overall balance of forces despite its smaller numbers, was the Trotskyist POR of Guillermo Lora and Edwin Moller, which ended up providing a far-left cover for the establishment of the new state.
Paz Estenssoro and other top MNR leaders returned in triumph from their Buenos Aires exile, met by rejoicing throngs. These throngs had not caught up with the MNR’s refurbished rhetoric, however, and were chanting “Down with the Jews” at Paz’s first public appearance197 . Before leaving Argentina, Paz had also affirmed that the MNR was “completely anti-Communist”198 .
The four main reforms introduced on the momentum of the MNR’s early mass support were 1) nationalization of the mines of the three tin barons, but with full compensation amounting to $22 million 2) universal suffrage, decreed in July 1952 3) land reform and 4) abolition of the hated ponguaje and other quasi-feudal practices in the countryside. All this occurred within the framework of the revamping of the Bolivian state, with important corporatist overtones. It should be kept in mind that Peronism had just achieved its second electoral triumph in Argentina in November 1951, and that a Peronist- style government under Ibañez would be elected in Chile in November 1952199 . In this regional context, Peron’s ongoing attempt to create a South American “third way” would exert its pull on Bolivia under the MNR during the latter’s brief glory days200 . The MNR Revolutionary Committee in fact included Col. Sergio Sanchez, who became Minister of Labor and who was known as “Peroncito” or the “Bolivian Peron”. According to Beatriz Figoll201 , Argentina provided arms for the MNR uprising, though Paz Estenssoro was alienated by Peron’s tendency to use him to advance Argentina’s interests. (Peron also backed Ibanez, who had been a dictatorial president of Chile from 1927 to 1931, who had been close to Chile’s Nazi movement in the 1930’s, and who was supported by the small vestige of the Chilean Nazi party in the 1951 election.
To this end of rebuilding the state, the regime’s first move toward nationalization required tin exports to be processed by the state-controlled Banco Minero, with all foreign exchange earnings having to be converted by the Banco Central202 ; this was effectively the reinstatement of German Busch’s attempts at controls in 1939. The U.S., for its part, had controlled tin prices from 1945 to 1949, and stymied the International Tin Committee. The outbreak of the Korean War and insurgencies in then-British Malaysia and in Indonesia had run the tin price up to $2 per pound, strengthening the posture of the MNR. At the time of the revolution, tin miners were 3.2% of the work force, producing 25% of GNP, which in turn accounted for 95% of Bolivia’s foreign exchange income.
A larger context conditioning the new Bolivian regime’s relations with the hemispheric hegemon, the U.S., was the international atmosphere of crisis in the early years of the Cold War. In 1952, the U.S. was bogged down in the Korean War, the regime of Mossadegh in Iran was preparing to nationalize British oil assets there, and the Arbenz government in Guatemala was moving on U.S.-owned United Fruit. (The Arbenz regime was the first country to grant recognition to the MNR government.) With many fires to put out, the U.S. could ill afford another open counter-insurgency in the developing world. Instead, building on the ties established with Bolivia going back to 1942203 and the orchestrated outcry over the Catavi massacre, followed by commissions of enquiry, aid, and agreements on the tin price, the U.S. opted for entrapping Bolivia and its immense natural resources204 with aid aimed, not surprisingly, at strengthening the most pliable elements in the MNR. The MNR, for its part, jumped into this trap with both feet and by the late 1950’s Bolivia was receiving more U.S. aid per capita than any other country in the world. After Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 election as president, his brother Milton Eisenhower visited Bolivia on a fact-finding mission, and in Washington, the Bolivian ambassador Victor Andrade (who had served earlier under Villaroel) convinced the Eisenhowers that the Bolivian nationalizations had nothing to do with communism (as was in fact the case).
There was of course great pressure in the working class for nationalization (without compensation) and after five months of deliberations by a commission devoted to the issue, this took place in October 1952, with compensation of $22 million. It affected only the large mines, and left small and medium-size mines in private hands. The nationalization also involved a corporatist type of “workers’ control”, but (in contrast to e.g. the workers’ councils and soviets of the German and Russian revolutions after 1917) in collaboration with the managers of the COMIBOL (Corporacion Minera de Bolivia). As Dunkerley put it, “a key component of the revolution was in the process of being managerialized.”205 The COMIBOL was effectively a holding company; it had 30,000 employees with ownership of most mineral production, as well as medical centers and railroads. Decrees in April and June 1952 required the COMIBOL to rehire workers laid off during the “sexenio rosquero”.
As Labor Action commented at the time:
“The nationalization of the mines has been decreed, but not according to the program and wishes of the majority of the workers. The nationalization bill provides for indemnity to the proprietors if they pay all taxes and back debts to the government. Of course, the question is purely theoretical, since the government has no money, and hence will not pay The Central Obrera had demanded workers’ administration, administration of the mines by workers’ committees elected by general meetings of all workers, and a national committee to be elected by all mine committees. But the government, while accepting the principle of workers’ control formally, has passed a bill which creates a Corporation Minera Boliviana as a great state mining trust in the place of the three private capitalist corporations. In the new trust the representatives of the workers are in a minority, and are to be nominated by the government.
In this bureaucratic form, workers’ control has been transformed into control over the workers.”206
The tin barons of the Rosca were down but not out, and from exile they conducted a massive propaganda campaign designed to present the MNR and its nationalizations as “communist”. Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo, who had long been shifting assets abroad, hired the New York public relations firm Nathanson Brothers to convince the U.S. government, Congress and the “public” of this, ultimately in vain. The Rosca’s propaganda machine put out disinformation on the danger to foreign technicians and their families, and quoted such technicians to the effect that nationalization would ruin the mines207 . The Rosca hired U.S. Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland to trumpet their cause in Congress; Tydings threatened to stop the U.S. purchase of Bolivian tin, but he died shortly thereafter. The U.S. State Department issued calls for full compensation. The Rosca campaign was countered by the services of Gardner Jackson, a politically moderate worker-intellectual whose activities in the U.S. labor movement dated from the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign of 1927. (In fact, most sympathy in the U.S. for the MNR came initially from the labor movement.)
Further complicating matters for the MNR was the fall of world tin prices from $1.21 to $0.70 per pound as the Korean War wound down in 1953, costing Bolivian $20 million in income in that year, and bringing the Bolivian state to the verge of bankruptcy; nationalization had in effect saved the mines from such a fate. In the same year direct U.S. aid to the regime began, and the Chinese Revolution was causing the world price of tungsten and wolfram to rise.
The nationalized mines faced multiple problems quite apart from the international campaign of the Rosca and the fall of tin prices. Friction arose between engineers and workers in the management of the mines, and labor leaders and military officers filled the vacuum. The COMIBOL in fact became a refuge for retired military officers and retired second-rate politicians. In addition to these managerial and porkbarrel complications, the long-term trends in production worked against tin; in 1927, just before total tin exports had peaked in 1929, tin made up 74.2% of Bolivia’s exports, whereas by 1956 that percentage had fallen to 56.5%. The slack was taken up to some extent by increases in exports of lead, tungsten, zinc and oil.208 But the tin barons had responded to the depression and to the threats of the “military socialism” of Toro and Busch, and later to Villaroel, with a general policy of disinvestment, so that the mining equipment nationalized in 1952 was quite out of date. (During the Busch years, the tin barons had lowered production to 19,000 tons annually on the pretext that reserves were being exhausted.) In light of this, the MNR’s nationalization parallels e.g. Britain’s nationalization in the same period of mines, steel, and railroads that were no longer profitable. Decrees in April and June 1952 required the COMIBOL to rehire workers laid off during the “sexenio rosquero”. The industries controlled by the COMIBOL had had 24,000 employees in 1951, and by 1956 had 36,000. Further ties to Western imperialism, in addition to U.S. aid, U.S. trade unions, and the various reports and commissions of inquiry were developed when in 1953 the COMIBOL signed a contract with the British tin smelter William Harvey Company. The working population as a whole paid for the losing proposition of the COMIBOL through taxation, and U.S. aid pressured the COMIBOL to return to orthodox management.
The agrarian reform undertaken by the MNR had some of the same ambiguities as the nationalization of the large mines. It was undertaken sixteen months after the revolution in response to land takeovers by armed peasants. It included, as indicated, the abolition of the quasi-feudal pongueaje. The leadership of the popular umbrella organization, the COB, for its part vacillated (SJ p. 143) between protesting the repression of the peasants and peasants and denouncing “provocation” by peasants influenced by the POR209 . According to Sandor John, the POR was actually lukewarm toward peasant mobilizations, arguing that peasants only wanted individual plots of lands for themselves. As Sandor John put it, the POR policy “resembled what Stalin told Chinese Communists in 1925-27: curb peasants’ land seizures because they threaten the party’s bloc with the nationalist Guomingtang.” The reference to China is apt, since the Chinese Communist Party’s “bloc of four classes” in the 1949-1953 period (workers, peasants, industrial capitalists and the progressive middle class) was a frequent reference of the MNR leaders. Shortly after the revolution, Paz Estenssoro had appointed MNR leader Hernan Siles Zuazo to head a commission on agrarian reform. The commission reflected a general lack of expertise on such matters. Further, it was dominated by members of the reduced (Stalinist) PIR wedded to their stagist idea of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, (above all PIR agrarian expert Arturo Urquidi Morales) , even further to the right and more cautious than the MNR’s own perspective of a “national revolution”. In keeping with the corporatist reality already manifest in nationalized industry, in agriculture as well the revolution had created a “new national and organic image of the State as a basic structure for transformation, representation, integration and development.”210 . Paz Estenssoro had carefully studied the Mexican agrarian reform under Cardenas but, the PIR influence on the commission was oriented to maintaining “an important nuclei of traditional latifundist power through the euphemism “small and medium-size properties”211 which were to be preserved. Peasants themselves mobilized in western Bolivia from January to August 1953, placing increasing pressure on the commission, but the latter continued to support the “microfundia”, tying peasants to those plots. The decree on agrarian reform came at the beginning of August 1953. In the view of Bedregal, the commission supported a “semi-democratic agrarian reform of the landowners” and of the “progressive hacendados”, leaving the latifundias with some power. The agrarian reform had to accept a modus vivendi “leaving an ample sector of growers and cattle owners to define what the law meant: ‘land to those who work it’212 . Urquidi, for his part, saw the reform transforming the latifundists into “progressive agriculturists”, better equipped than the indigenous population to advance the rural economy. The reform “did not resolve the key question of the historical survival of latifundist and microfundist factors which, over the long term, would become the most serious problem of Bolivian backwardness, by which the agrarian counter-reform could put down roots and derail the capitalist development which was the immediate objective of the national revolution.”213 Protected by this thrust of the reform were the latifundias of the Beni and Pando provinces (in the latter there were 3000 properties of 2000 hectares or more).
23. The Role of the Trotskyist POR
Following these brief sketches of the MNR nationalizations and agrarian reform, it is imperative to analyze, in conclusion, the dynamic of class forces in which these changes acquired their concrete meaning. In contrast to the other cases of Latin American corporatism in more developed economies, as discussed earlier, the “national revolution” of the MNR could not base itself, at least initially, on a modernizing military and state already in place, since the army, the “special body of armed men” quite simply disintegrated in April 1952, leaving the MNR precariously atop the armed militias of the Bolivian working class which it had to contain and, initially, to appease. Coming right behind the working class were the indigenous rural masses, largely trapped in pre-capitalist immiseration with quasi-feudal overtones, who went into motion at the beginning of 1953. Confronting these forces and trying to ride them, the MNR was drawn from “intellectual sectors of the Bolivian elite and upwardly mobile members of the middle class”214 . Out of this array of forces, the MNR leadership had set itself the task of revamping the Bolivian state it had taken away from the Rosca to “complete the bourgeois revolution”, using Bolivia’s rich endowment of resources and a reformed agriculture to build a viable capitalist nation-state that could hopefully at last escape from the “colonial” status which MNR nationalist theoreticians such as Carlos Montenegro ascribed to it.
The MNR that seized power in 1952 had evolved from its origins around the anti-Semitic broadsheet La Calle, via the Toro-Busch “military socialism” mixing clear German and Italian fascist influences with corporatist elements drawn from the Mexican Revolution, by way of the Nazi imprint on its founding program of 1942, to the force recognized by the U.S. State Department in 1950 as the sole real alternative to “communism” in Bolivia.
The MNR did not have to deal with “communism” in the form of a mass pro-Soviet party, because that party, the PIR, had totally discredited itself by its services rendered since 1940 to the Rosca’s “democracy”. Thus the sole ideological and practical force of any consequence to its left was the Trotskyist POR. Bolivia was, along with Vietnam and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) one of the few countries in the world in which Trotskyism, and not Stalinism or Social Democracy, became for a time the mass current in the working class.
Undoubtedly the key figure in all but wedding the POR to the “left wing” of the MNR was Juan Lechin, the presumed “Lenin” to Paz Estenssoro’s “Kerensky”. As Dunkerley put it, “a disparity between words and deeds that was to be a consistent feature of the COB leader’s erratic career.”215 Lechin, a member of the MNR, had been politically educated by Guillermo Lora. Lechin was the restraining link to the Bolivian working class that the MNR desperately needed in 1952. Sandor John is succinct:
“While presenting their own viewpoint in articles and manifestos, Bolivian Trotskyists216 were becoming a radical appendage to lechinismo in the labor movement, while Lechin guarded the MNR’s left flank…” (quoting Lora): ‘Everything (the POR did in this period) led objectively to the numerical, but not political (sic) strengthening of the MNR’.217 Paz Estenssoro made constant attacks on Trotskyism, while he set about co-opting leaders and bureaucratizing structures. Ultimately more a pressure group than an independent party, the POR, in flat contradiction to the Theses of Pulacayo, supported not only Lechin but also other “worker ministers”. In May 1952, Guillermo Lora declared these “worker ministers” a conquest of the labor movement as “textile workers decided to impose their conditions on the right wing of the MNR”.218
Here is how the Latin American correspondent of U.S.-based Labor Action analyzed the role of the POR at the end of 1952:
“On the other hand, the government ushered the Trotskyist ‘leaders’ into very profitable positions in the official machinery, such as the Agrarian Commission, the Stabilization Office, the Workers’ Security Administration, etc. The PORista theoretician, Alaya Mercada, is a member of the Agrarian Commission with a salary of 70,000 pesos, which is 100 per cent higher than a minister’s salary. Another “theoretician” of the POR, Lora, a collaborator of Lechin’s, is now a member of the President’s Stabilization Office. The Secretary of the POR, Moller, is director of the Workers’ Savings Bank [Caja de Seguro y Ahorro Obrera].
Many other POR militants have also gotten good posts in the official government machine. In this way the Nationalist government has liquidated the ‘Communist’ and ‘Trotskyist’ danger in Bolivia, and now the whole Bolivian ‘left’ is collaborating with the regime, with the claim that it is thus ‘saving the revolution’ from capitalist restoration.
Parallel to all this, the government party is absorbing leading elements from the left, especially from the POR. Two former general secretaries of the POR, Edwin Moller and Jorge Salazar, and the POR theoretician Ernesto Ayala Mercada, as well as Lechin’s ex-secretary Josa Zogada, have entered the MNR officially. Thus a part of the POR staff has capitulated to the MNR, as we predicted long ago. Ideological capitulation preceded the personal and organizational capitulation. The right turn of the MNR is complemented by the capitulation and disintegration of the ‘Left.’”219
Along the same lines, Sandor John writes: “Complete control of the state by the left wing of the MNR” became a leitmotiv of the (POR’s) propaganda.”220 The 9th Congress of the POR in Sept 52 supported the MNR’s “progressive measures” and the left wing of the MNR. In early 1953, the party sent a message to the MNR’s national convention saying that “to fulfill its historic mission…” the convention “should be the scene of reaction’s defeat”. If the left wing wins and the MNR acquires a “proletarian physiognomy”, the Congress declared the POR would even consider fusion. At times of crisis, such as the attempted (and failed) coups by the Falange and the Rosca in June 1953, the POR called on left-wing ministers to take control. When Paz Estenssoro responded to the coup attempts with anti-business rhetoric, the POR newspaper Lucha Obrera headlined “Radicalization of Paz Estenssoro”. ‘THE PRESIDENT, REVISING ALL OF HIS PAST POLITICAL STANCE, POINTED OUT ANTI-CAPITALIST OBJECTIVES FOR THE REVOLUTION, NOT JUST ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND ANTI-FEUDAL ONES.” “All this struggle must center on the slogan ‘Total control of the state by the left wing of the MNR.’” “The people who join ministries as workers’ representatives will not be doing so simply as personal collaboration by particular leaders…(but on the basis of the) “program especially approved by the COB”.221 In early 1954, the POR supported a member of the MNR Left during the MNR’s internal elections to its La Paz Departmental Command.
For all the POR’s efforts on its behalf, the Paz government in 1954 increased repression against the Trotskyists, including large-scale arrests of POR workers and peasants, blacklists, and a crackdown on Lucha Obrera222 .
In sum, the Bolivian POR was by rough analogy rather like the Spanish POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, which was widely denounced as “Trotskyist”, but which was in fact a centrist political formation supporting (and participating in) the bourgeois Republican government. In Spain, the real Trotskyists were expelled from the POUM and with a handful of others formed the “Bolshevik Leninist” group.223
During these first years after the revolution, the U.S. was more and more successfully pulling Bolivia into the fold. Aside from the crucial question of access to Bolivia’s natural resources, U.S. aid was also prompted by the propaganda value of appearing to support a non-Communist version of reform. Paz Estenssoro on May 1953 had proclaimed his intention to open diplomatic relations with newly-Communist Czechoslovakia, but under the impact of U.S. aid in the following months, the initiative was dropped. By fall 1953 the U.S. was providing millions of dollars worth of surplus food, as well as funds for technical assistance and road construction. Because they were no longer profitable, the nationalization of the mines had ultimately revealed Bolivia’s dependency on outside help. By 1954, the Bolivian government was backing the U.S.’s anti-communist measures at the Inter-American Conference in Caracas. Accelerating inflation, which reached 179% in 1956, and other economic disruptions brought a stabilization team headed by U.S. corporate executive George Eder, which proposed more opening to market forces and a dismantling of the public sector. The Eder stabilization plan was adopted in December 1956, with the scrapping of the multiple exchange rates left over from the earlier currency controls; the Bolivian currency was allowed to fluctuate with international supply and demand just as tin prices were contracting in the 1957 world recession224 . The momentum of the revolution of 1952 was long since broken, and the Bolivian working class and peasantry were left to endure ensuing decades of coups, counter-coups, hyperinflation, and a quasi narco-state, much of it under a refurbished military and the U.S. “national security” doctrine worked up, once again, from interwar fascist sources.
Conclusion: The Inability of the Left to Distinguish Between Corporatism and Socialism
The MNR revolution in Bolivia and the little-remembered ideological sources from which it developed provide an unusually clear example of the myopia of much of the self-styled left, both on the scene and internationally. Taking the example of the currents of Trotskyism, particularly the Mandel-Pablo variety dominant in the Fourth International at the time, we see evolving a methodology repeated again and again whereby different variants of the far-left set themselves up as the cheering section and often minor adjuncts to “progressive” movements and governments in fact quite alien to their ostensible goal of socialist revolution, movements and governments strictly committed to a restructuring (or creation) of a nation-state adequate to the present realities of world capitalism. This methodology involves imagining (as has been shown in the relationship of the POR with the MNR) a healthy “left” wing of a bourgeois or nationalist or “progressive” or Third World “anti-imperialist” movement that can be “pushed to the left” by “critical support”, opening the way for socialist revolution (there is nothing specifically “Trotskyist” about this; cf. appendix below). This methodology has been employed again and again, from Bolivia under the MNR to Algeria under the FLN to Mitterand’s France to the Iranian mullahs after 1979. The far-left groups in question see themselves in the role of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Kerensky’s Provisional Government, when in fact their role is to enlist some of the more radical elements in supporting or tolerating an alien project which sooner or later co-opts or, even worst, represses and sometimes annihilates them.
In the case of Bolivia, the multi-class nationalism epitomized by MNR intellectual Carlos Montenegro, with its problematic of the “nation” versus the “foreign”, combined in practice with the corporatist models attempted by 1936- 1940 “military socialism” and the 1943-1946 Villaroel regime, and influenced to different degrees by Mussolini’s Italy, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain, Nazi Germany, Vargas’s Brazil, Peron’s Argentina and the Mexico of Cardenas. Though the standing bourgeois army in Bolivia (in contrast to these other experiences) simply dissolved and had to be rebuilt (as it quickly was), theoretical disarmament set the stage for the practical disarmament of the worker militias. The statist backing of the FSTMB and later of the COB, the creation of the COMIBOL to administer the nationalized mines, and state-sponsored agrarian reform gave Bolivia its variant of the 20th-century adaptation to the post-1929 world conjuncture, in which the old liberal ideologies and party organizations no longer sufficed.
Appendix: Trotskyism, Permanent Revolution and the Case of Bolivia
I felt the preceding text was complex and tortuous enough so I did not wish to burden it with excessive theoretical baggage. I have used the term “Trotskyist” throughout in a neutral way to refer to those who designated themselves as such. The blur of unfamiliar names and events is difficult enough for the unapprised reader, and indeed for some more apprised, without adding on what might seem like a detour into the labyrinth of mutually hostile self-proclaimed Trotskyist currents that existed even before the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, not to mention after. Yet in this case, the question of Trotskyism cannot be avoided because, as indicated, Bolivia was one of the few countries in the world where Trotskyism became the mass movement, as opposed to a small group (or sect) on the fringes of the mass movement. Hence its actions, particularly as they involved the POR and prominent POR leaders such as Guillermo Lora, are highly relevant to our story. In fact, as the comments of Sandor John and of the correspondent of Labor Action have already indicated, the Bolivian POR, at the high point of its influence from 1946 into the early 1950’s, had a rather tenuous relationship (at best) to “orthodox Trotskyism”.
My own distance from Trotskyism, orthodox or otherwise, is not the issue here225 . So many people have been exposed to Trotskyism as a blur of warring sects of no apparent historical weight that the attempt to distill a “true Trotskyism” might seem as futile as an attempt to distill a “true Christianity”.
In the case of Bolivia, however, the self-styled Trotskyists of the POR were not a “warring sect” but a significant party with a mass working-class base. What is most relevant for purposes of the Bolivian Revolution and the relationship of the POR to the MNR is Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, and the related theory of combined and uneven development.
That theory, stated most bluntly, held that any bourgeois revolution in a semi-developed or underdeveloped country must necessarily unleash forces beyond itself (most notably the working class) and “cross over” into a proletarian revolution, which can be successful in the medium to long term only if it successfully links up with a proletarian revolution in the capitalist heartland. Such was the strategy of the Bolshevik Revolution in its early (1917-1921) phase, predicated as it was on the urgent necessity of revolution in Germany at the very least.
The Trotsky-Parvus recovery of the mootings of permanent revolution in the pre- and post-1848 writings of Marx and Engels, and their use of that theory to understand, through the explosion of 1904-1905, that the coming revolution in Russia would be a working-class and not a bourgeois revolution, was a fundamental contribution to revolutionary theory in the 20th century. One does not have to be a “Trotskyist” to recognize this. (At the time of this formulation, it should be recalled, Trotsky was highly skeptical of Lenin’s Bolshevik conception of the vanguard party.226 )
The theory of permanent revolution is adumbrated by Marx and Engels in some of their writings of the 1840’s and on the revolution of 1848. From their earliest period, by way of their assessments of the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels portrayed the German bourgeoisie, in contrast to the English or the French, as having come historically “too late”:
“If one were to proceed from the status quo itself in Germany, even in the only appropriate way, that is, negatively, the result would still be an anachronism. Even the negation of our political present is already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. If I negate powered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs. If I negate German conditions of 1843, I am hardly, according to French chronology, in the year 1789 and still less in the focus of the present. …We have in fact shared in the restoration of modern nations without sharing in their revolutions. We have been restored, first because other nations dared to make revolutions, and secondly because other nations suffered counter-revolutions…Led by our shepherds, we found ourselves in the company of freedom only once, on the day of its burial.”227
Engels, in his 1851 book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, diagnosing the timidity and impotence of the German liberal bourgeoisie in 1848, made this more concrete:
“The Revolution of February upset, in France, the very same sort of Government which the Prussian bourgeoisie were going to set up in their own country. The Revolution of February announced itself as a revolution of the working classes against the middle classes; it proclaimed the downfall of middle-class government and the emancipation of the workingman. Now the Prussian bourgeoisie had, of late, had quite enough of working-class agitation in their own country. After the first terror of the Silesian riots had passed away, they had even tried to give this agitation a turn in their own favor; but they always had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary Socialism and Communism; and, therefore, when they saw men at the head of the Government in Paris whom they considered as the most dangerous enemies of property, order, religion, family, and of the other Penates of the modern bourgeois, they at once experienced a considerable cooling down of their own revolutionary ardor. They knew that the moment must be seized, and that, without the aid of the working masses, they would be defeated; and yet their courage failed them. Thus they sided with the Government in the first partial and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the people quiet in Berlin, who, during five days, met in crowds before the royal palace to discuss the news and ask for changes in the Government; and when at last, after the news of the downfall of Metternich, the King made some slight concessions, the bourgeoisie considered the Revolution as completed, and went to thank His Majesty for having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then followed the attack of the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle, and the defeat of royalty. Then everything was changed: the very working classes, which it had been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to keep in the background, had been pushed forward, had fought and conquered, and all at once were conscious of their strength. Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the right to sit on juries, of the right of meeting-restrictions that would have been very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched upon such classes only as were beneath them—now were no longer possible. The danger of a repetition of the Parisian scenes of “anarchy” was imminent. Before this danger all former differences disappeared. Against the victorious workingman, although he had not yet uttered any specific demands for himself, the friends and the foes of many years united, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the supporters of the over-turned system was concluded upon the very barricades of Berlin. The necessary concessions, but no more than was unavoidable, were to be made, a ministry of the opposition leaders of the United Diet was to be formed, and in return for its services in saving the Crown, it was to have the support of all the props of the old Government, the feudal aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the army.”228
Thus Marx and Engels, before, during and after the “springtime of peoples” of 1848, already saw the dynamic by which the struggle for the bourgeois revolution necessarily opened the way for the independent emergence of the working class, “even before (the working man) had uttered any specific demands for himself”. This “crossover” process between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions was the kernel of what was later elaborated by Trotsky and his collaborator Parvus in 1904-1905 in the mature theory of “permanent revolution”.
Permanent revolution was intimately linked, for Trotsky, with the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory was a direct rejection of the linear- “stageist” view of history widely held in the parties of the Second International, in which every country had to pass through, first, the bourgeois revolution and then arriving at the socialist revolution. It was based on the perfectly reasonable insight, strengthened by the history of capitalism, that each individual country does not (indeed cannot) recapitulate all the “stages” undergone by other countries. Trotsky saw his theory confirmed already in 1905 with the vacillations of the timid liberal bourgeoisie in its feeble battles with Tsarism, all too aware of the workers, in contrast to Germany, already articulating demands of their own. Even at the beginning of 1917, Lenin still shared this stageist view. Trotsky and Parvus, on the other hand, linked up with the Marx-Engels germ of the theory of the “crossover” between the two revolutions, based on seeing individual capitalist countries as part of one single international system, in which developing countries tapping into the cutting edge of world technological innovation not only could but were compelled to “leap” over stages passed through by others. Thus on the eve of its 1905 and 1917 revolutions, Russia had some of the largest and most modern factories in the world, surrounded by a much larger sea of backward agriculture.
“The law of combined development reveals itself most indubitably, however, in the history and character of Russian industry. Arising late, Russian industry did not repeat the development of advanced countries, but inserted itself into this development, adapting their latest achievements to their own backwardness. Just as the economic evolution of Russia as a whole skipped over the epoch of craft guilds and manufacture, so also the separate branches of industry made a series of special leaps over technical productive stages that had been measured in the West by decades…The social character of the Russian bourgeoisie and its political physiognomy were determined by the condition of origin and structure of Russian industry. The extreme concentration of this industry alone meant that between the capitalist leaders and the popular masses there was no hierarchy of transitional layers…Such are the elementary and irremovable causes of the political isolation of the Russian bourgeoisie. Whereas in the dawn of its history it was too unripe to accomplish a Reformation, when the time came for leading a revolution it was overripe.”229
The triumph of Stalinism by 1924 was, among other things, a full restoration of the linear, Second International stage theory, having among its first fruits in the catastrophic Comintern policy of allying with Chiang kai-shek’s Nationalist movement in China in the years 1925-1927.
Whatever the problems of Trotsky himself, Trotskyism after his assassination was mainly an affair of mediocrities, of the Barneses and Cannons and Pablos and Mandels. Trotsky had predicted that the coming Second World War would be followed by world revolution similar to the aftermath of World War I; he also believed that the Stalinist regime in Russia would be swept away in the process. Instead, his followers in 1945 and thereafter found themselves confronted with a giant step forward in Stalinist power in Eastern Europe, China, Korea and Indochina, a giant step in which the working class had played no role. Western Trotskyists such as Mandel were egging on the “reformist” Stalinists in such places as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, while the NKVD and their local counterparts were tracking down and assassinating their own Trotskyist comrades.
Probably the worst case was that of Michel Pablo, who by 1950 had concluded that the world was entering centuries of Stalinist hegemony, and called on Trotskyists to engage in “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties, like Christians in the catacombs. Pablo’s adaptation to current events was blown sky high only a few years later with the 1953 uprising of workers in East Berlin and in 1956 with workers’ movements that shook Stalinism to its foundations in the Polish Autumn and the Hungarian Revolution. But the damage maturing since 1940 had been done, and a methodology of adaptation to Stalinist expansionism as well as various Third World “national liberation fronts” and progressive regimes had been set down for decades. The list is long, from the adaptation of most230 Trotskyists (with their “revolutionary opposition” buried in fine print in footnotes) to such sundry movements and regimes as the Algerian FLN, the Vietnamese NLF231 , Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, the Iranian mullahs, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and Polish Solidarnosc.
And to the Bolivian MNR.
At the time of the April 1952 revolution, the most significant Bolivian Trotskyist, Guillermo Lora, was in Paris conferring with the leaders of the Fourth International, who were by then firmly in the camp of Pablo and who apparently did not impress him. Lora did not join the Pablo faction, and those in Bolivia who did so did not join the MNR government. Nevertheless the relationship between the POR and the MNR we have documented in the main text speaks for itself.
The theory of permanent revolution dictated for Bolivia, as for all other underdeveloped countries, the impossibility of a stable bourgeois democratic regime and the necessary “crossover” of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution. Bolivia was of course not Russia in 1917, and, in contrast to Russia, did not possess some of the largest and most modern factories in the world. It certainly shared with Russia a vast majority of the population working in backward, mainly pre-capitalist agriculture. Fundamental agrarian reform was and is the sine qua non for any true bourgeois revolution. Instead, as we have seen, the Bolivia land reform of 1953 was compromised by preservation of the holdings of the “progressive hacendados” and sizeable micro- and latifundia lands which later became the base of a conservative peasantry.
Similarly, the “nationalization of decline” by the COMIBOL, with full compensation to the three tin barons, burdened the revolution from the beginning with the dead weight of the past.
Between these two halfway measures, and the accommodation with the United States, the runaway inflation of 1955-1956 was hardly a surprise.
Let us then pose the question point-blank: would a different, “truly Trotskyist” policy of the POR in 1951-1953 have resulted in a proletarian revolution in Bolivia? When one considers that in April 1952 the “nationalist revolution” of the MNR had the overwhelming support of the armed working class, the peasantry and the urban middle class; that 85% of the members of the POR ultimately entered the MNR in those years; and when a figure of the stature of Guillermo Lora decided not to enter only at the last moment, the question seems moot. The real question is why the national revolutionary ideology and organization was so popular, to the point that it was even attractive to the great majority of POR members. The Trotskyist view, with its belief that the “crisis of leadership” is paramount in such situations, makes the question of the presence or absence of the revolutionary party the deux ex machina of such crises, when the real historical question is what conditions make possible or mitigate against the existence of such a party in the first place.
In 1952, the Cold War was at its peak and a resulting World War III seemed a real possibility. Developments in Guatemala, Iran, China, Korea and the struggle of the two blocs to influence de-colonization in Asia and Africa were so many flashpoints. In such a conjuncture, surely a proletarian revolution in Bolivia could have had ripples far beyond a poor, remote, landlocked country of three million people. (We bracket for a moment the question of the possibility of a working-class revolution in the capitalist heartland, a necessary counterpart to the theory of permanent revolution, when in fact the working class everywhere in Europe and the U.S. had been contained or defeated by 1952; recall, to the credit of the POR, the declaration of solidarity (cited earlier) with North American workers.”232 ) Bolivia’s ability to command the attention of the United States, for reasons we have described in detail, when there were so many other, seemingly larger fires to put out, already attests to its explosive potential. Nevertheless, such calculations surely weighed on the thoughts of Bolivia’s workers as well, and they made their decisions accordingly. To “blame” the POR for “betraying” the Bolivian Revolution is to fall into the idealist trap of saying “they had the wrong ideas” instead of explaining why they had the ideas they did.
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- 1These articles appear in three parts in Historical Materialism, beginning with No. 16, 2008. They are followed by more recent updates on the situation in Bolivia, available on line above all http://www.isreview.org/issues/73/feat-bolivia.shtml As good as these articles are on Morales’ and the MAS’s domestic agenda since 2005, I of course reject Webber’s situating of the Morales government in a “counter-hegemonic bloc” led by Cuba and Venezuela, with the implication that such a bloc is “progressive” and “anti-imperialist”.
- 2“Pachakuti” is a term taken from the Quechua “pacha”, meaning time and space or the world, and “kuti”, meaning upheaval or revolution.
- 3One strange sub-text of the anti-Eurocentric posture, which I encountered two or three times in person and also in books, is the recourse to quantum physics to buttress this perspective. Bell’s Theorem posits the possibility of one atomic particle being in two places at the same time, across galaxies, and nonetheless in communication. This is supposed to be a scientific grounding of the parakuti synthesis, as elaborated for example in the ex-Trotskyist Filemon Escobar’s 2008 book De la revolucion al Pachakuti: El aprendrizaje del Respeto Reciproco entre blancos y indios. Escobar at least comes to his “revolution of the coca leaf” from more than 40 years of worker militancy, but an even more elaborate counterposition of this indigenist synthesis to a vulgar Marxist straw man is by an academic, Blithz Lozada, Cosmovision, historia y politica en los Andes (2nd ed. 2008). Escobar and Lozada both see Marx as expressing a world view not qualitatively different from that of Newton and Descartes.
- 4 Long unavailable in English, except for a translation published in Ceylon in the late 1950’s, there is an excerpt from Luxemburg’s 1912 Einführung in die politische Ökonomie in P. Hudis/K. Anderson eds. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004).
- 5 An account of Jeffrey Sachs’s 1985 “shock therapy” in Bolivia, under the very same Victor Paz Estenssoro who figures in the following narrative of the 1940’s and 1950’s, is in Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine (2007), Ch. 7.
- 6 This continuity with the past, following the dispersion of the Trotskyist-oriented Bolivian miners after 1985, is recounted in S. Sandor John’s Bolivia’s Radical Tradition. Permanent Revolution in the Andes (2009).
- 7 Published by the problematic South End Press, 2004.
- 8 See Olivera’s statement at http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/08/oscar-olivera-opposition-in-times-of.html
- 9 For a good overview of this Bolivian exception, cf. S. Sandor John, op. cit. A hilarious episode took place when a Soviet delegation came to Bolivia in the 1960’s to deliver some technology to one of the big state mines. The staid and suited bureaucrats were greeting by a mass of workers holding up pictures of Lenin and Trotsky, and at the end of the ceremonial speeches held up four fingers (the Fourth International) and the bureaucrats responded with three fingers, for the Third. Things were capped off by a reporter from Life magazine writing that the Bolivian workers were so backward they didn’t even know that Trotsky had fallen from power 40 years earlier, thereby revealing his own profound ignorance.
- 10Cf. the role of Ziya Gökalp (1875-1924), who imbibed the Prussian nationalist Treitschke through Emile Durkheim and who was effectively the ideologue of Kemalist Turkey, influential long after his death, in my “’Socialism in One Country’ Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary ‘Anti-Imperialism’: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925, available at http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html
- 11Cf. on identity politics, the essays in Vanguard of Retrogression: Post-Modern Fictions in the Era of Fictitious Capital (200l), also available on the Break Their Haughty Power web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner; on Bordiga and the Russian commune, the article “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today” on the same site; and finally the 2010 book of Kevin Anderson Marx at the Margins, reviewed in issue no. 2 of Insurgent Notes at http://insurgentnotes.com; cf. also Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois” at http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-iroquois-franklin-rosemont
- 12Cf. James Petras/Henry Veltmeyer. Social Movements and State Power. Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador (2005).
- 13On Jünger’s and Heidegger’s post-1945 transformation of the elitist, “hard” Conservative Revolution of the 1920’s into preoccupation with myth (Jünger) and “poetizing thought” (Heidegger), still replete with distance from and condescension toward concrete social reality and the masses of ordinary people, cf. Daniel Morat. Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit. Konservatives Denken bei Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger and F.J. Jünger 1920-1960 (2007). This shift involved a “turn to a proto-ecological thought critical of technology…Ecological thought, since the 1970’s, found its political home on the left, even if in this political repositioning many of the traditional anti-modern aspects drawn from Kulturkritik were hidden from the ecology movement…In this philosophically exaggerated avoidance of guilt motivated by collective peer group biography, the intellectual contributions of Heidegger and the Jünger brothers amounted to the quiet rehabilitation of the German “Tätergesellschaft” (in effect, the legacy of the 1920’s Conservative Revolution-LG).
- 14The abbreviation ‘MNR’ will be used throughout.
- 15The reactionary anti-imperialist and populist movements in interwar (1919-1939) Latin America had their parallel in the “Third World” status of parts of central and eastern Europe in the same period. The first theoretician to use the concepts of “core” and “periphery” was the complex but ultimately proto-fascist German sociologist Werner Sombart. For a remarkable account of the migration of these concepts, first to Rumanian corporatism and its theoretician Mihail Manoilescu, and from there to Latin America in the 1950’s and 1960’s work of Fernando Enrique Cardoso and Celso Furtado, see Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: theorizing underdevelopment in Rumenia and Brazil (1996). Love’s book lacks only an account of the further migration of these ideas to the Western left through the “dependency school” and such outlets as Monthly Review Press and its international resonance.
- 16James Dunkerley, Origines del poder miltar. Bolivia 1879-1935 (3rd ed. 2006) p. 102.
- 17Unlike in the Pacific War with Chile and the Chaco War with Paraguay, Bolivia ceded territory to Brazil not from military defeat but simply because it lacked the resources to develop it.
- 18Cf. Leon Bieber. Las relaciones economicas de Bolivia en Alemania, 1880-1920. (1987) on these general trends.
- 19By the time of the systemic crisis of the 1930’s, tin baron Simon Patiño was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Cf. L. Peñaloza Cordero. Nueva Historia Economia de Bolivia. Vol. 7. 1987. Cf. pp. 129-155 for the holdings of the Patiño empire alone.
- 20Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Bolivia all experienced significant German immigration by 1914.
- 21Cf. the reprint of Creacion… in Franz Tamayo, Obra escogida (Caracas, 1979) When Spanish-language sources are cited, all English translations are mine.
- 22Tamayo is celebrated in the pamphlet of Nestor Taboada Terán, Franz Tamayo: Profeta de la Rebelion, a work which makes virtually no mention of Tamayo’s sometimes reactionary politics.
- 23Bovaryism was a late 19th century concept taken from Flaubert’s novel, referring to a dreamy, ultimately impotent relation to reality.
- 24Charles Andrade, Historiografia colonial y moderna de Bolivia (2008), p. 81.
- 25From Creacion, quoted in the extended commentary in Abraham Valdez, La Nacion Boliviana y Franz Tamayo (1996), p. 45.
- 26Ibid. pp. 47-48. The identity theorists might also bridle at seeing their anti-universalism expressed in such an unabashed association of Prussian militarism and Social Darwinism.
- 27Ibid. p. 73. The racism of Bolivian society was such that, until the eve of the MNR revolution in 1952, the indigenous population was expected to stay off of main streets and out of sight. Kenneth Lehman, Bolivia and the United States (1999), p. 101.
- 28El pensamiento filosofica de Tamayo y el irrationalismo aleman. pp. 78-85.
- 29Andrade, op. cit. p. 92.
- 30In the view of V. Abecia Lopez, Montenegro (1997), p. 57 “Cespedes, as a writer, journalist and politician, was the most representative intellectual of the National Revolution by his literary, political and historical works.” For more on Montenegro, cf. below.
- 31V. Abecia Lopez, Montenegro, 1997, p. 63.
- 32Guillermo Lora, Obras completas, vol. XIX, 1997, p. 66.
- 33In Bolivia, “indigenismo” refers to attempts to deal socially, economically and practically with the situation of the indigenous majority; “indianismo” is more of a literary “appreciation” of the indigenous, written from the “outside”.
- 34F. Reinaga. Franz Tamayo y la Revolucion boliviana. 1970.
- 35Reinaga, p. 111.
- 36Ibid. p. 162.
- 37M. Baptisa Gumocio, Yo fui el orgullo: Vida y pensamiento de Franz Tamayo (La Paz, 1978). Pp. 328-329.
- 38Charles W. Andrade, Historiografia Colonial y Moderna de Bolivia (2nd ed. La Paz 2008). P. 3.
- 39Marcos Dumich. Ideologia y Mito. Los Origines del Fascismo Boliviano. 1979.
- 40Ibid. p. 38.
- 41Ibid. p. 61.
- 42Arguedes later pronounced eulogies for the German regime and received the Rome Prize from Mussolini.
- 43Ibid. pp. 69
- 44ibid. “Pachamama”, or Mother Earth, became one of the by-words of the current Morales regime in Bolivia.
- 45A full elaboration of this transition cannot concern us here. Cf. my “Remaking of the American Working Class: Restructuring of Global Capital, Recomposition of Class Terrain, available at http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/remaking.html. The title notwithstanding, the text offers a world perspective on the transition.
- 46Braden tells his story of business deals and bullying diplomacy in a memoir, Diplomats and Demagogues (1971). Whereas he seemed like an earlier version of John Bolton of the Bush (Jr.) era, the U.S. was attempting in the interwar period, with its “Good Neighbor Policy”, to overcome some of the excesses of the earlier gunboat diplomacy with which Braden seemed more comfortable.
- 47Not only did Bolivia pledge its customs receipts as income for the loan, but accepted surveillance by a three-member fiscal commission, two members of which were chosen b U.S. banks. Cf. Kenneth D. Lehman, op. cit. , p. 66.
- 48A detailed chronology of the Bolivian workers’ movement throughout this period is in Guillermo Lora, Obras completas, vols. XIX, XX and XXI (La Paz, 1994). Lora (1922-2009) was perhaps the dominant figure on the Bolivian radical left over subsequent decades, being a miner, a leader of the Bolivian Trotskyist movement, and a prolific writers (his complete works come to 67 volumes).
- 49A full portrait of Marof (the pseudonym of Gustavo Navarro) is in Lora, XX, pp. 277-301. His 1934 book La tragedia del altiplano launched what became a key slogan over the next two decades: “Mines to the state, land to the Indian”.
- 50Eduardo Arze Cuadros, in Bolivia. El Programa del MNR y la Revolucion Nacional (2002) dates the ideological origins of the MNR from the program adopted at this 1928 congress. It highlighted “selective immigration”, the emancipation of the Indian, the “moralization of the lower mestizo”, progressive socialization, nationalization of the mines and oil, and land to the Indians. It went on to call for a “complete regulation of labor and credit”, the latter aimed at avoiding exploitation by bank capital, progressive statification, a reduction of the military budget, the separation of church and state, lay education, the abolition of the monasteries, and finally “war on war”. We shall see below how important elements of this program later mixed with fascist elements during “military socialism” (1936-1940) and the Villaroel period (1943-1946).
- 51In the view of James Dunkerley, op. cit. p. 175, this radical ferment was unprecedented in Bolivian history.
- 52One thorough study of Mariategui’s ambiguous involvement with Sorel (and Mussolini) is Hugo Garcia Salvattecci, George Sorel y J.C. Mariátegui (1979).
- 53From yet another viewpoint, Roberto Prudencio, who began as a nationalist and indigenist and wound up as a founder of the Bolivian Falange and had been an early admirer of German fascism, said that “Mariategui and Tamayo were the fathers of the new America.” (Andrade, p. 119) The Stalinist intellectual and leader Jose Antonio Arce accused Tamayo of being a traitor to his own writings because, since 1917, he had typified “one of the most reactionary hatreds of feudal ideology.” (ibid. pp. 138-139). Ultimately, according to Andrade, “many writers who followed Tamayo were passionate leftists or fanatic nationalists’ (ibid. p. 155).
- 54ibid. p. 77. In M. Grindle pp. 130-131 “The Andrean socialist tradition of Marof…was the overriding tendency that could imagine a past and a future at least partially in terms of Indian community struggle and political autonomy. Yet this was a marginal tradition on the left by mid-century, and the national revolution, with the peasantizing project and corporatist unionism, would make it difficult for any such tendency to grow.
- 55Dunkerley (op. cit. p. 193) points out that the 1930 turnover in Bolivia cannot be compared to the simultaneous developments in the more modern and developed countries of Latin American, above all Argentina and Chile; be that as it may, it was part of the regional collapse of 19th-century elite arrangements in differing contexts.
- 56 At the time of the 1930 revolution, only 2% of Bolivia’s population of two million were eligible to vote.
- 57In this text the term “Trotskyist” will be used throughout for those who designated themselves as such; cf. the brief appendix attempting to explain what Trotskyism means.
- 58Lora, Obras Completas, 1994, vol. XX, p. 255.
- 59Herbert Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (2003 ed.), Ch. 7. In 1932, Standard Oil of New Jersey had purchased a new petroleum concession in southeastern Bolivia, , but oil could not be exported because Argentina and Paraguay refused transit rights. It was widely believed in Bolivia that US and British corporations were supporting Paraguay through Argentina, and that both Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell were behind Chaco War. The Bolivian mining elite was definitely pro-war. Wealthy Argentine and foreign investors had lucrative stakes in the dispute. The US, Brazil and Argentina all opposed intervention by the League of Nations, and the Argentine press was the first to suggest that Standard Oil was to blame. The Wall Street representative Spruille Braden, who had previously negotiated highly favorable deals for Standard Oil, strongly opposed Bolivian interests at the Chaco peace conference. On the other hand, Dunkerley (op. cit. p. 216 footnotes) thinks that neither Standard Oil and nor Royal Dutch Shell were backing either side in the conflict. The Louisiana populist Huey Long, on the other hand, denounced their role in the U.S. Senate. In October 1935, the Bolivian government did take action against Standard Oil over an illegal pipeline to Argentina.
- 60Lora, op. cit. p. 257. Perhaps just as important as this ferment in the cities, the Tupac Amaru group was formed, expressing the “20th c. indigenista agrarian radical ideology of Indo-American left….Considered in 1932 “the ravings of an extremist and ineffectual minority of embittered and exiled intellectuals (it) would have profound impact on the postwar world.” (Herbert Klein, Political Parties, p. 144. )
- 61In 1935, the estimated population of Bolivia was made up of 1.6 million indios, 850,000 mestizos, 400,000 whites, 6000 blacks, and 300,000 unidentified. In Latin America, there were one million German speakers, of whom 180,000 were Reichsdeutsche.
- 62Nazi Germany apparently built about 1,400 schools throughout Latin America. According to Mariano Baptista Gumucio, (in his book Jose Cuadros Quiroga, 2000, p. 10). the German colegios in La Paz and Oruro were “active focos for the diffusion of Nazi ideology. Luis Ramiro Beltham remembers as a child in Oruro being in military parades with Hitler portraits.” A Bolivian, Federico Nielsen Reyes, was the Spanish translator of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and the far-right militant Roberto Hinojosa, who would be the Chief of Information in the Villaroel government after 1943, wrote the sole Spanish-language biography of Hitler.
- 63For an overview of the war, cf. http://worldatwar.net/chandelle/v1/v1n3/chaco.html
- 64Ferran Gallego, op. cit. p 82. There had been 80 million bolivianos in circulation at the end of 1932, and there were 388 million in circulation at the end of 1935.
- 65 Gustavo Maia Gomes, The Roots of State Intervention in the Brazilian Economy (1986), p. 155, pp. 152-153.
- 66Ibid. 154, 160.
- 67Ibid. p. 161.
- 68Arnaldo Cordova, La Politica de Masas del cardenismo (1974), pp. 48-49.
- 69 Ronaldo Munck, with Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli. Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism. Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855-1985, p. 129, p. 132.
- 70In January 1938, under the German Busch government, Humberto Vasquez Rodrigues called for the organization of the legions “in a totalitarian form”. The reader will hopefully indulge the proliferation of party names and initials, and above all note their slight relationship to the real politics of various ephemeral groups.
- 71 Hereafter referred to as the POR. One key founder of the party, the brilliant revolutionary intellectual Jose Aguirre Gainsborg, in October 1938 died in an absurd self-inflicted accident, falling off a ferris wheel after undoing the safety bar in act of bravado. An extensive portrait of Aguirre Gainsborg, “one of the great revolutionary figures of the postwar period”, is in Lora, XXI, pp. 103-124. (Here “postwar” means post-Chaco war.)
- 72 And then some: by 1950, at the height of anti-MNR terror shortly before the revolution, Marof was the personal secretary of the reactionary, repressive President Urriologoitia.
- 73 Klein, Political Parties, p. 205. Klein describes a “fascination with corporatism” at the time.
- 74 Through the late 1930’s and into the war years, the Italian OVRA (secret police) had a military mission in Bolivia, at the Escuela de Guerra in Cochabamba.
- 75 This was of course a South American phenomenon, hardly restricted to Bolivia. In 1935, there were one million German speakers on the continent, and 180,000 Reichsdeutsche. This ten-year battle for influence between pro-fascist and pro-Anglo-American (later Allied) forces is told in detail in Leon E. Bieber, Pugna por influencia y Hegemonia. La rivalidad-estadounidense en Bolivia 1936-1946. Frankfurt am Main, 2004.
- 76 In the context of world depression, and a vast state management of the domestic economy, Schacht created a multi-tiered system of different types of Reichsmarks for international purposes. These different types of marks were paid to trading partners and could only be used in purchasing German goods, and only certain specified goods; moreover, their value could be administratively manipulated, to the detriment of Germany’s trading partners. In December 1934, Schacht created the so-called ASKI accounts (Spezial-Ausländer Sonderkonto fuer Inlandszahlungen, ASKI) as a commercial clearing mechanism. There were high hopes for using ASKI-marks for purchases from Bolivia, but in reality very little trade was financed in this way.
- 77 Klein, Parties, p. 227.
- 78 For a portrait of the Italian original, cf. David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (1979). In the classic of Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (1936), corporatism under Mussolini was characterized as little more than a sham and spectacle thinly covering iron regimentation of workers.
- 79 According to H. Klein (Parties, p. 188) Montenegro and Augusto Cespedes, both future MNR ideologues, most clearly articulated the “national socialist” ideology. During the years of “military socialism”, German business also expanded in commerce and commercial aviation, and German instructors in the army made programmatic headway with the fascist-inclined junior officers.
- 80“The SP was more worried about the presence of ‘demagogues’ in the worker federations than by the latter’s depoliticization.” Ferran Gallego, p. 117.
- 81Bieber, op. cit. p. 49: “Toro wanted to implement state socialism using the left-wing parties.”
- 82Cf. Herbert Klein, Concise History, p. 188.
- 83Augusto Hochschild (1881-1965), one of the three major tin barons and a Jew, was the prime target of La Calle anti-Semitism and of Bolivian popular anti-Semitism generally during the rise of the MNR. Bieber (op. cit. p. 154) finds some evidence of German funding of La Calle.
- 84M. Baptista Gumucio, José Cuadros Quiroga : inventor del Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario 1. ed. La Paz , 2002 p. 119.
- 85Jerry Knudson, Bolivia. Press and Revolution. 1986 p. 81. According to Knudson, (p. 130), Quiroga wrote most of the anti-Semitic articles.
- 86Op. cit. p. 130.
- 87Such a rabble-rousing paper was bound to invite strong reactions. Zavaleto Mercado called the MNR “a whole gamut of poor relatives of the oligarchy who no longer believed in the oligarchy” (quoted in Abecia Lopez, p. 199) The Marxist Liborio Justo said the founding of the MNR was the “desperate expression of the national petty bourgeoisie”. “Paz in particular was known as an admirer of Nazism and an assiduous vistor to the German legation”. L. Zanatta/M. Aguas. “Auge y declinacion de la tercera positcion. Bolivia, Peron y la Guerra Fria, 1943-1954” in Desarrollo Economico, Vol. 45, No. 177. Apr-June 2005.
- 88Abecia Lopez, p. 201.
- 89 S. Sandor John, op. cit. 2009. P. 59.
- 90Ferran Gallego, p. 117.
- 91Klein, Concise, p. 188.
- 92Klein, Parties, p. 245-246
- 93Lora, Obras Completas, vol. XXI, p. 357. Also Ferran Gallego, p. 116.
- 94Belmonte, according to Bieber (op. cit. p. 126) actually stayed in Germany until 1951, studying “geopolitics” there after the war. By his own account, he had graduated from the Colegio Miltar in 1923 and was a pilot during the Chaco War. From 1938 to 1945 he served as the Bolivian military attaché to Germany. After his return to Bolivia, he was a Professor of Geopolitics under the Ballavian government. Belmonte Pabon tells his story in the book RADEPA. Sombras y Refulgiencias del Pasado (1994).
- 95Another authoritarian nationalist group active in Bolivia in the late 1930’s was the Associacion Mariscal Santa Cruz. According to Irma Lorini,
- 96 Ferran Gallego, op. cit. p. 115.
- 97G. Lora, op. cit. vol XXI, pp. 52-53. Lora writes: “The ANPOS…had some influence in the worker organizations. Its stated goal was to coordinate and orient the actions of the worker minister, but in reality it tended to set itself up as the supreme command over the unions and even of the left-wing forces. Some Marxists were sure they could convert the Ministry of Labor into their own citadel, from which they would be able to mold the masses and decide the fate of the government’s policies. (in addition to well-known leaders) second and third-tier leftists practically invaded the Ministry of Labor, which at the time was operating in the National Senate. Leftist leaders fell into complacency from being able to meet weekly in the hall of the high chamber…At the beginning, they were all united in the hope of being able to transform society from above, almost painlessly, thanks to the backing which the military had handed over to men so capable of theorizing about the advantages of socialism.”
- 98Ibid. p. 55-56.
- 99Ferran Gallego, op. cit. p. 115.
- 100Ibid. p. 119.
- 101 Lora, op. cit. . p. 50.
- 102 Ibid. p. 51.
- 103 Ibid. p. 54.
- 104 Mauricio Hochschild, once again, was the Jewish tin baron in the “big three” of “La Rosca” and a major target of the populist anti-Semitism promoted by La Calle and the far right. His holdings are detailed in Peñaloza Cordero, Ch. VII.
- 105 Klein, Parties, p. 259.
- 106 By the 1950’s, state corporations in Bolivia would account for half of GDP.
- 107 In further developments on the far right, the Bolivian Socialist Falange (Falange Socialista Boliviana, or FSB) was founded, on the model of its Spanish counterpart, among student exiles in Chile. Pro-Catholic and nationalist, it was based on conservative and privileged high school students, especially from Cochabamba and the eastern part of the country, it remained a fringe group throughout. In 1952, it considered participating in the MNR revolt, but backed out at the last moment. After the MNR revolution, the tin barons turned to the FSB as the only viable party capable of advancing their interests. The Falange later evolved in a more Christian Democratic direction.
- 108 Agustino Barcelli, in a 1955 book (Medio siglo de lucha sindical revolucionaria), argued for the influence of the Carta di Lavoro and German Arbeitsfront on the Toro government. (Quoted in Bieber op. cit. p. 57-58) However, Nazi experts in the German embassy in La Paz apparently did not think the Toro-Busch government was very different from the previous one.
- 109 Klein, Parties, p. 276.
- 110 Op. cit. p. 305.
- 111 Op. cit. p. 191. Lehman (op. cit. p. 72) sees the 1938 constitution as specifically based on the 1917 Mexican charter.
- 112 The indigenous educational experiment in Warisata became known through the hemisphere.
- 113 Klein, Parties, p. 278.
- 114 Lora, op. cit. vol. XXI, p. 250. John L. Lewis of the American United Mine Workers was present at the 1938 conference. By 1946, the CTAL was following U.S. State Department politics.
- 115 In November 1942, Lombardo Toledano actually visited La Paz, sponsored by the Stalinists of the PIR and and by the CSTB. The CTALwas seen as serving imperialism and La Rosca because of the Stalinist line.
- 116 Bieber, op. cit. p. 72.
- 117 The full story is told in Leon E. Bieber, Presencia judia en Bolivia (2010).
- 118 Guillermo Lora (vol. XX, p. 357) elaborates: “The Busch Labor Code of 1939, originally promulgated in the form of a decree and turned into law in December 1942, was a synthesis of most of the measures taken earlier, plus some new additions. The Code required firms employing more than 500 or more people (i.e. the most important mining companies and a few other firms) to provide hospitalization and free medical care, and to maintain hospitals. It similarly reiterated the requirements already established, specifying the construction of free housing in all mining camps employing more than 200 workers and located more than six miles from the nearest village. It established, in a general way, an 8-hour day and a 48-hour week; exceptional cases aside, it limited the working day for women and for minors under 18 years of age to 7-hour days and a 40-hour week, and established a maximum of five hours for uninterrupted work.
- 119 Lora, vol. XXI, pp. 69ff.
- 120 Lora, XXI, p. 101.
- 121 Bieber, op. cit. pp. 70-71.
- 122 ASKI-Marks [Ausländer-Sonderkonten für Inlandszahlung]) were special non-convertible marks which Nazi Germany paid for foreign goods, and which could only be redeemed by purchasing certain German goods, often unavailable. Their value could further be manipulated administratively and retroactively, leaving the foreign holder to take the loss.
- 123 Op. cit. p. 71.
- 124 The standard joke in the late 1930’s, in countries having a trade surplus with Germany and finding themselves holding large stocks of aspirin and these special classes of non-convertible marks was that Germany created the headache and then provided the remedy.
- 125 The German delegation to Bolivia at this point had 70 personnel, of whom only thirteen were declared.
- 126 Lora, XXI, p. 97.
- 127 Lora, XXI, p. 89. “The provisional government of Gen. Carlos Quintanella, following the mysterious death of President Busch, had the task of dismantling the Decree of June 7 and the suspension of its effects, pending another decree at the end of 1939….The considerations of the Decree of Pres. Quintanilla, which dissolved the bold measure of Busch with right-wing reaction, were that the European war required the dictation of “emergency dispositions” which would permit the country to receive “the maximum benefit as a producer of raw materials”. In addition to changing the amount of foreign exchange that the mining companies were required to hand over to the Central Bank, the law watered down other aspects of the Busch decree to their advantage.
- 128 Germany had invested in airlines throughout Latin America. In April 1941, the U.S. helped Peru to expropriate the Lufthansa line operating there, and in the course of the war the US took over most Latin American air routes.
- 129 The “Rosca”, once again, was the popular term for the tin baron superstate.
- 130 Author’s note: I feel that the detailed exposition of the developments of 1936-1946 is imperative because the Anglo-American propaganda machine during these years repeatedly issued a flood of material portraying the MNR as “Nazi”, and were joined in this by the (Stalinist) PIR and the tin baron press in Bolivia itself. In this period, prior to Cold War anti-communism, any Latin American opposition to Anglo-American interests was “Nazi”, confirming George Orwell’s remark that “a fascist is someone I don’t like.” Since, at the same time, I do feel that the RADEPA and La Calle groups were in fact deeply marked by European fascism, while recognizing the “left corporatist” character of some social measures of the Toro-Busch, Villaroel and early MNR years, I feel it essential to sort out the differing strands which were crudely lumped together by the MNR’s imperialist and domestic enemies.
- 131 A full portrait of Arze is in Lora, XXI, pp. 125-133.
- 132 Indeed, along with Vietnam and Ceylon in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Bolivia was the sole country in the world where the Trotskyists and not the Stalinists dominated the working class in that period
- 133Lora (XX, pp. 300-301) has this to say about these configurations: “There are no real reasons to doubt that the caudillos of “nationalism” had had contacts with the German embassy…but their campaign against the government of Peñaranda expressed a popular sentiment and channeled the radicalization of the masses. The errors of the presumed Marxists (both of the PIR and of Marof) directly contributed to the strengthening of the MNR and they were the ones who practically paved its way to power.”
- 134 Ostria Gutierrez went into exile in Chile after the ouster of Peñaranda in 1943, and wrote a polemical (and somewhat tendentious) book, Una revolucion tras las Andes (1944), giving his version of events. Ostria Gutierrez pointed to (pp. 120-121), in his view, striking parallels between the founding program of the MNR and the program of the German Nazis (cf. below).
- 135 Klein, Concise History, p. 197.
- 136 Again, in parallel to the kind of organization from above associated with Cardenas, as described previously.
- 137 In 1972, the American political scientist Cole Blasier proved the letter was a British forgery; cf. Bieber op. cit. p. 126.
- 138 In January 1942, Peñaranda admitted that secret compensation payments to Standard Oil had begun in 1937.
- 139 At the Rio conference, after Bolivia had reached a formal settlement with the U.S. for the Standard Oil expropriation, loans from the U.S. Export-Import (ExIm) Bank quickly followed. Lehman, op. cit. p. 78.
- 140 G. Bedregal, Victor Paz Estenssoro, el Politico (1999). p. 134.
- 141 W.Q. Morales, Brief History of Bolivia, 2003, p. 117.
- 142 Abecia Lopez, p. 195-196. Abecia Lopez refers to the “fascism” of Cuadros Quiroga, p. 197
- 143 M. Baptista Gumucio, p. 8. His book provides further details on the author of the founding document of the MNR. “Hochschild claimed to be to the ‘socialist’ government what (tin baron) Patiño had been to the traditional parties: the master.” (p. 180) “We all saw how the Jewish parvenus contributed to the affirmation of the democratic faith’ (p. 191). Ours was the “struggle against socialism, the instrument of international finance” (p. 193). Liberal ideas penetrated Bolivia through the Masonic international, a dissolving internationalism “with a dose of the Judaism which was cropping up everywhere” (p. 195). “We can’t construct our identity as a Nation while tied to the universalist ideology which is just being born in our country (p. 196).
- 144 Printed in full in G. Bedregal, op. cit. p. 99.
- 145 In 1983, Walter Guevara Arze, an MNR intellectual and later author of a book Bases para replantear la revolucion nacional (1988), on Bolivian national television called the 1942 document a “creole version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf”.
- 146 Op. cit. p. 105.
- 147 Bedregal, op. cit. p. 72.
- 148 Eduardo Arze Cuadros, op. cit.
- 149 ibid. p. 78.
- 150 On the Catavi massacre, cf. Lora, XXI, Ch. V; also S. Sandor John, op. cit. , pp. 80-83.
- 151 They would not merge into the AFL-CIO until 1955. According to M. Grindle, p. 101, the US labor movement in the years leading up to the 1952 MNR revolution played a major role in explaining Bolivian politics in the U.S. (The AFL and CIO ultimately sent $5000 to the families of those killed.)
- 152 Lora, XXI, p. 284. Not only aid was mooted; Watt called for a “mandate of 25 years” to revamp the Bolivian economy. Lehman, op. cit. p. 79.
- 153 Lehman, op. cit. p. 79.
- 154 L. Rout and J. Bratzel, in their book The Shadow War (1986), p. 380, claim that “the U.S. was able to…verify that SD agents and Argentine army officers had conspired with Bolivian nationalists in the overthrow of Peñaranda.” Lora (XXI, pp. 349-354) also argues that the coup leaders were pro-Axis. Lora’s portrait of Villaroel is on XXI, pp. 355-357. For his part. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January 1944 described the MNR as “Nazi” and attempted to link the MNR to Peron.
- 155 After the MNR revolution in 1952, he joined the Bolivian Falange. The Falange had participated in the coup, at least in Cochabamba. Elias Belmonte, a founder of RADEPA and a tenacious opponent of the MNR, was a Falange deputy in Parliament.
- 156 The populist APRA of Haya de la Torre in Peru split on the question of Nazis in the Bolivian government
- 157 Klein, Parties, p. 201.
- 158 Montenegro, who became Minister of Agriculture, was deeply involved in the coup. According to Abecia Lopez (op. cit. p. 215) he had told the U.S. embassy that he was being paid by Germany, but would change sides if paid enough.
- 159 Joseph Page, Peron (1983), p. 58.
- 160 On Paz Estenssoro’s relations with the Argentine regime in this period. cf. Beatriz Figallo, “Bolivia y la Argentina: los conflictos regionales durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial” in Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, vol. 7/1. Paz was honored in Buenos Aires in July 1943. Figallo claims that prior to 1943, Paz Estenssoro was distinguished by his cult of Nazism and his frequent visits to the German legation in La Paz. According to Lora (XXI, p. 251) the Confedacion de Trabajo de America (CTLA), under the influence of the Stalinists and Lombardo Toledano, saw a conspiratorial link between Argentine coup of June 1943 and the Villaroel coup of December.
- 161 Klein, Parties, p. 372.
- 162 Other fascist organizations, in addition to the Falange, that were active in Bolivia in these years were the Accion Nacionalista Boliviana, Estrella de Hierro and the CEHGA (Centro de Estudios Historicos Geograficos Andinos).
- 163 A series of negotiations between the Villaroel government and the U.S. ensued over the prices of raw materials, and especially of tin. According to Villaroel’s ambassador to the U.S. Victor Andrade, Bolivia asked for an increase in the tin price specifically for workers’ wages, following the scandalous conditions in the mines revealed to international opinion after the Catavi massacre. Cf. V. Andrade, My Mission for Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1962 (1976), p. 31. The U.S. did agree to raise the tin price from $0.62 per pound to $0.635. Throughout the war, Bolivia sold rubber to the U.S. for $2 per pound, when Argentina was offering $5.
- 164 V. Andrade op. cit. (p. 49) wrote: “For the Welles, the Bradens and other U.S. officials of their ilk, the shooting of ten civilians shook the foundations of civilization” (in contrast to their tolerance of the Catavi massacre of late 1942). Andrade was, for his part, a member of the far-right group Estrella de Hierro. Abecia Lopez (op. cit. p. 241) argues that the totalitarian cell of RADEPA extended to national and departmental police chiefs.
- 165 Cf. Sandor John, op. cit. pp. 87-90.
- 166 Lora (XXI, p. 363) considered the congress to be “one of the most transcendent events in Bolivian social history.”
- 167 Lora XXI, p. 92.
- 168 From 1945 to 1949, U.S. policy, backed by large reserves of tin accumulated during the war, kept the lid on the tin price. With the onset of the Korean War in 1950, as well as insurgencies in British Malaya and Indonesia, the price rose to $2 per pound, or almost 300%. The US posture strengthened the appeal of the MNR. The mines employed only 3.2% of the Bolivian work force, produced 25% of GNP, and 95% of Bolivia’s foreign exchange. (Lehman, op. cit. p. 97.)
- 169 According to Knudson, op. cit. p. 128, Augusto Cespedes in a 1973 interview had denied any special link to Peron. But cf. the articles of Zanata and Figallo listed below.
- 170 Lora, XXI, pp. 368ff.
- 171 C. Montenegro, Nacionalismo y coloniaje, 1953, p. 28.
- 172 Ibid. p. 53.
- 173 Ibid. p. 77.
- 174 Ibid. p. 158.
- 175 Ibid. p. 161. Jose Ballivian (1805-1852) was a military figure in the war of independence and later president of Bolivia; Jose Maria Linares (1808-1861) was another military figure and caudillo; president of Bolivia 1857-1861.
- 176 Guillermo Lora, Fue revolucionario Carlos Montenegro? (1965), p. 49.
- 177 Ibid. pp. 53-54, 56.
- 178 Oswald Spengler’s 1918 work Decline of the West was based on a biological metaphor of cultures rising and falling from youth to maturity to senescence; the biological interpretation of race seems to have been Spengler’s legacy to Montenegro.
- 179 Ibid. pp. 64, 68.
- 180 Quoted in Abecia Lopez, op. cit. p. 280.
- 181 Ibid.
- 182 In Grindle, M. ed. op. cit. pp. 125-26, 129. Montenegro and Paz Estenssoro, as fellow exiles in Buenos Aires, daily discussed Montenegro’s book as he was writing it: “…the essential was the discovery and the lived reality of the social contradictions of the parties based on the separation between the people (the nation) and the aristocrats of blood…and money (the anti-nation). (G. Bedregal, op. cit. p. 251)
- 183 ibid. p. 382.
- 184 G. Lora, XXI, 415.
- 185 The following overview of the Theses of Pulacayo is drawn from S. Sandor John, op. cit. pp. 92-94.
- 186 Ibid. 94-95.
- 187 Ibid. p. 95.
- 188 G. Lora, XXI, p. 373. Sandor John, op. cit. p. 98.
- 189 With the abject capitulation of the PIR to Rosca dominance, the influence of the international CTAL of Lombardo Toledano disappeared along with it. By June 1950 and the Sixth Congress of FSTMB the rival Stalinist union federation, the CSTB, had virtually disappeared.
- 190 Through all this, nonetheless, such august American newspapers as the Washington Post were still referring to the MNR as “Nazi”.
- 191 Klein, Parties, p. 395. Also by 1950 a study by the U.S. embassy had concluded that the MNR and the army were the main bulwark against communism, and the MNR’s fascist past and nationalism were no longer liabilities. (Lehman op. cit. p. 95). 1950 also saw the visit of the United Nations’ Keenleyside Commission, which attempted to draw a profile of the Bolivian economy in view of future aid, again reflecting U.S. concerns about access to Bolivian raw materials. (ibid.) Released in 1951, the commission’s report was critical of the Urriolagoitia government, as informed opinion in the West increasingly realized the non-viability of the status quo, and the potential of the MNR as the only solution, once the U.S. government had concluded that there was no communist or Peronist influence. Grasping for analogies, the Keenleyside report likened the MNR to Kerensky and saw the centrist Lechin as Lenin (ibid.).
- 192 According to Paz’s main biographer, the MNR leaders in exile were studying the Mexican Revolution and even the Russian Revolution. (G. Bedregal, op. cit. p. 249). They were also hardly immune to the influence of Peron’s “justicialismo” in the surrounding ambience. According to Labor Action, the weekly paper of the U.S.-based Independent Socialist League led by Max Schactman, (4/7/52), the POR backed the Peronist Congress of Workers’ Unions, organized by Peron’s agents in Asuncion.
- 193 Ibid. p. 401.
- 194 To keep the regional perspective in mind, it should be noted that in November 1951, Juan Peron was re-elected president of Argentina with 62.4% of the vote. Peron, however, had not backed the MNR in the February 1951 elections.
- 195 Only seven weeks after the revolution, Paz Estenssoro authorized the opening of a new air force college in Santa Cruz to rebuild the shattered military. The Colegio Militar reopened in 1953 to form a new generation of “nationalist officers”. Showing the continuity of the pre-World War II German influence, Marcos Domich (in Militares en la revolucion y la contrarevolucion p. 50 (1993) writes; “The high commands of the Allied armies absorbed from fascist sources a whole series of justifications, theory and models of conduct and…acquired the ‘values’ of the dead. Domich (p. 55) sees the origins of the post-1945 doctrine of “national security” in the work of German theoreticians such as Ritter, Raetzel, Haushofer, Kjellen and Mackinder, i.e. the notorious Anglo-German geopolitical school.
- 196 Other groups “relied on the COB to resolve problems that would, elsewhere, have been the province of government functionaries”. Sandor John op. cit. p. 120. Lechin was also named Minister of Mines and Petroleum.
- 197 Dunkerley, op. cit. p. 42. This was not a unique outburst. According to Labor Action (August 18, 1952): The “Trotskyist” POR also speaks in empty revolutionary phrases about the “workers’ revolution” of April 9th, about the fight between the “left” and “right” wings of the Nationalist party, and about the “revolutionary maturity of the Bolivian proletariat” – while trade union elements protest against the “Jewish oppressors’ class” and demand “freedom of pogroms.” And this is against a few Jewish small industrialists, owners of little factories – this is the “maturity” of the Bolivian proletariat, which entirely backs the Nationalist party while the Trotskyist POR backs not only the “left wing” of the MNR led by Lechin, but also the government of Paz Estenssoro.
- 198 As early as 1950, a U.S. embassy study found the MNR and the Bolivian army to be a reliable bulwark against communism and the MNR’s nationalism and fascist past to be no longer “liabilities”. Lehman, op. cit. p. 95. In fact, the U.S. was coming to consider the MNR to be the only solution. Such was the rapidity of ideological remake at the onset of the Cold War. Similarly, the Keenleyside Report of the United Nations in 1951 had underscored Bolivia’s structural problems and seriously criticized the Rosca government. It likened the MNR to Kerensky (!) and gave it a clean bill of health, free of Communist or Peronist influence.
- 199“A political phenomenon which could not be alien to Paz Estenssoro was that of Gen. Juan Domingo Peron. Argentine “justicialism” was a peculiar military-worker symbiosis expressed a new reality for Paz and his party. Peron was the vanguard of a front-line struggle against …the agrarian oligarchy…and the manipulative presence of U.S. interests..,justicialism combinec political categories from Marxism and other aspects of British trade unionism and the social reformism of the Mexican PRI” G. Bedregal, op. cit. p. 251.
- 200 On the overall Peronist strategy of a anti-communist “third position” independent of Washington and Moscow in the Southern Cone, cf.L. Zanata/M. Aguas, “Auge y declinacion de la tercera posicion. Bolivia, Peron y la Guerra fria, 1943-1954.” In Desarrollo Economico, vol. 45, No. 177, (Apr-June 2005). Beatriz Figallo. “Bolivia y Argentina: los conflictos regionales durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. In Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latiny el Caribe. 1996. Vol. 7/1.
- 201 Cf. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe. Beatriz Figallo. “Bolivia y Argentina: los conflictos regionales durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. In Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latiny el Caribe. 1996. Vol. 7/1.
- 202 Ibid. p. 54.
- 203 After visiting Bolivia on the commission investigating Catavi, which had disclosed the abysmal situation of the wage-labor workforce there, the AF of L’s Worth had called for a “mandate of 25 years” to recoup the Bolivian economy (Lehman, op. cit. p. 81.). Bolivians resented the “scores of North American experts and diplomatic attachés who descended on their country during the war.” (ibid. p. 89).
- 204 In addition to tin, oil and natural gas, these included lead, zinc, copper, wolfram and bismuth.
- 205 Dunkerley, op. cit. p. 57.
- 206 Labor Action, 12/8/52. Most subsequent quotes from Labor Action are from the pamphlet of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) “Bolivia: The Revolution the Fourth International Betrayed”, available on-line at http://www.lrp-cofi.org/pamphlets/bolivia1letter.html
- 207 The propaganda battle between the well-funded public relations campaign of the Rosca and the Bolivian government is recounted in Victor Andrade, op. cit. pp. 135-146.
- 208 G. Bedregal, op. cit. p. 350.
- 209 Sandor John, op. cit. pp. 143, 146.
- 210 Begregal, op. cit. p. 448.
- 211 Ibid. p. 451.
- 212 Ibid. p. 455.
- 213Ibid. p. 458.
- 214Sandor John, op. cit. p. 123.
- 215Dunkerley, op. cit. p. 57.
- 216I have left a theoretical discussion of Trotsky and the vicissitudes of post-Trotsky Trotskyism to the Appendix, in order not to excessively burden the main text.
- 217Sandor John, op. cit. p. 89.
- 218Ibid. p. 135.
- 219Labor Action, 12/22/52.
- 220Ibid. p. 136. Most of the material on the POR’s role beginning in 1952 is from this source.
- 221Ibid. p. 137.
- 222The POR, following these developments, entered an internal crisis in 1954-55. The crisis was related to the 1951-53 split in the (Trotskyist) Fourth International pitting Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel against the American Trotksyist James Cannon. Guillermo Lora attempted to avoid aligning with either faction. The pro-Pablo faction did not enter the MNR. The great majority of Lora’s faction opted for “entrism” into the MNR though Lora broke over the question of entrism at the last moment.
- 223A rough analogy, indeed. The POR never formally entered the MNR government, though its members occupied posts therein; the POUM vehemently denied it was Trotskyist, whereas the POR claimed that it was. Cf. Burnett Bolleton, The Spanish Revolution (1979), pp. 381-383. “In its polemic with the Trotskyists the POUM argued that its presence in the Catalan government was a transitional step toward complete working-class power…(for the Trotskyists this)…was inconsistent with the POUM’s participation in a government that…decreed the dissolution of the workers’ committees…”
- 224The information in this paragraph is based on Lehman, op. cit. pp. 109-124.
- 225Cf. my articles on the Break Their Haughty Power web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner :Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Background to “Facing Reality” (2004); Facing Reality 45 Years Later: Critical Dialogue With CLR James/Grace Lee/Pierre Chaulieu (2002); Max Eastman : One American Radical’s View of the “Bolshevization” of the American Revolutionary Movement and a Forgotten, and Unforgettable, Portrait of Trotsky (2006) and The Situation of Left Communism Today: An Interview with the Korean SaNoShin Group (2008)
- 226“In the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation “substituting” itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee…” This quote is from Trotsky’s Our Political Tasks (1904), a text rarely referred to by Trotskyists. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/ch03.htm
- 227“Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction” in L. Easton/ K. Guddat Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, (1967), p. 251.
- 228From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/germany/ch06.htm
- 229Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution. London 1967 pp. 26-28.
- 230The varieties proliferated with the passing decades.
- 231Cf. the remarkable books of Ngo Van, Vietnam 1920-1945 (in French; a review on the Break Their Haughty Power web site summarizes the book in English: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/vietnam.html ) See also the English translation of his autobiography (In the Crossfire: Memoirs of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, AK Press 2010), in which he details the massacres of the Trotskyists by Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinists in 1945 and thereafter.
- 232Sandor John, op. cit. 94-95
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Insurgent Notes #4, August 2011
Issue 4 of Insurgent Notes journal. Articles on the middle east and other topics.
Contents
- In This Issue
- Anti-Imperialism and the Iranian Revolution – Arya Zahedi
- Taksim Is Not Tahrir- Yet – Kadir Ate
- On Egypt – Mouvement communiste and KpK
- On Tunisia – Mouvement communiste and KpK
- The Arab Revolts and the Cage of Political Economy – Benoit Challand
- The Murder of the Mon Valley – R. S.
- Of Forest and Trees Part Two – S. Artesian
- Report from Spain: On the May 15th Movement – C. V.
- Theses for Discussion – Loren Goldner
- Letter: More on Madison
- Letter From Paris
In This Issue
Insurgent Notes No. 4 continues to ride the rising tide of struggle that, happily, has coincided with our first year of publication.
Focus on the Middle East
Since our last issue in March, the ferment in the Middle East has intensified. Following Tunisia and Egypt in the spring, governments have been shaken in Bahrein, Syria and Yemen, and none of these situations, at this writing (late July 2011) have been resolved; quite the contrary.
Hence IN No. 4 has a series of articles on the Middle East, including the Arab world as well as Iran and Turkey. Arya Zahedi, in his article on anti-imperialism in Iran since 1953, by way of 1979, to the present, writes the obituary for that ideology. Kadir Ates covers some new developments in working class struggle in Turkey. Benoit Challand analyzes not only the revolt in Tunisia and Egypt, but some of the geopolitical influences at work in the region as a whole.
Rounding this out, our comrades in the Mouvement Communiste current in Europe have very kindly allowed us to publish English-language adaptations of two lengthy articles, one on Egypt and the other on Tunisia, providing an overview of the political economies of the two countries, historical background, a chronology of events and a chronology of specifically working-class struggles. These articles were written in a collective effort of MC comrades in several countries; we thank them for their permission to publish them in IN.
And also…
This extensive coverage of the Middle East is complemented by several further articles. These include a portrait, by our comrade Rico, of the devastation of the Mon Valley (western Pennsylania- northern West Virginia- northeastern Ohio) by deindustrialization. S. Artesian concludes the second part of his in-depth critical dialogue with Marx’s theory of ground rent (see IN No. 3 for Part One). C.V. from Barcelona gives us a pithy analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the May 15 movement in that city (which took place simultaneously in 50 other Spanish cities).
Loren Goldner offers “theses for discussion”, both within the IN group as well as by interested readers. These theses, with replies and other comments from IN comrades, will be discussed at a July 31 mini-conference and the entirety of the debate will be published in a special issue in early August.
Finally, we print two letters, one from Madison Wisconsin and the other from Paris, by readers of IN.
The Editors
Attachments
Comments
Anti-imperialism and the Iranian revolution
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Arya Zahedi looks at the problems associated with anti-imperialist ideology during the Iranian revolution to cast light on struggles against the Islamic regime today.
The question of anti-imperialism has been much debated on the revolutionary left–particularly during most of the twentieth century. More recently, the question of imperialism has emerged once again—in regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but more particularly in how the left should approach a popular struggle within a nation whose state perceives itself as a bastion against imperialism, or more precisely against US domination.
As students demonstrated in the streets in cities in Iran after the June 2009 elections, some of the left, particularly in the Unites States, was split, or at least confused, about how it should relate to this uprising. Should it support a movement challenging a regime that has been considered a bastion of anti-imperialist resistance?
The left in Iran already faced this question, with serious consequences, in the events around the revolution of 1979. In order to better assess our situation today, we should perhaps go back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to better understand the limitations set at that time. This question is not only pertinent to the left in Iran, but to the US left as well, in its relations to both the movement within Iran as well as to the uprisings sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
Going back to the revolution of 1979 is important for many reasons. The revolution presents many questions and lessons in strategy and tactics for a revolutionary left, as well as many questions for theory. The presentation given here will in no way pretend to exhaust all the reasons for the left’s inability to maintain a foothold politically after the revolution, or to mount a significant resistance to the new regime. Indeed, many did resist and any claim to the contrary is a great affront to the memory of those who perished under the regime’s repression, as well as those who lingered and continue to linger in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. When discussing a revolution, avoiding an analysis implying “I told you so” is difficult, suggesting that if the correct line had been followed, history would perhaps have been different. Perhaps it would have, perhaps not. An equal mistake, on the other hand, is thinking that there is nothing to be learned from history. Understanding may best be gained in the tension between the two poles.
In the dialectical irony so characteristic of history, one of the results of the ideology of the Islamic Republic is the exhaustion of the former analysis of imperialism. This hardly means that an analysis should take no account of imperialism, or take the position that imperialism no longer exists, nor does it mean that there could not be a resurgence of the old outlook. Some sort of military attack, for example, could strengthen nationalistic feelings. Every bit of external pressure helps to better support this type of world-view, putting ruling classes and those who wish to overthrow them in the same camp.
This article attempts to discuss how, in the years leading up to the Iranian Revolution, objective and subjective factors contributed to the development of an ideology that was an amalgam of socialism, nationalism, and religious imagery which can broadly be described as a form of third-world populism. The contention here is that the struggle against imperialism so dominated political discourse in the two decades leading up to the revolution that it, in many ways, became a fetter on the struggle for socialism. The struggle against imperialism became so much the dominant hegemonic discourse in the years before the revolution that, when the revolution did come, the left found itself faced with new problems in the face of which it was impotent. The intent here is not to give the impression that this is the whole story; it was merely one, albeit a very significant, part of the story. To quote Val Moghadam, “…it became clear that two strategic mistakes had been committed: namely, neglect of the question of democracy, and underestimation of the power of the Islamic clergy. It is now widely accepted that this blind spot was due to an inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle and an almost mechanical application of the dependency paradigm.”1 This is the starting point.
A number of significant factors can be identified in the demise of the left during the revolution; the extreme repression unleashed by the new regime almost immediately after it gained some foothold was certainly one of them. But repression alone doesn’t explain much. And the establishment of the Islamic Republic was not a unitary affair that happened over night, but a process, one which included the incorporation as well as the repression of elements of the left opposition to the shah’s dictatorship.
The ideology of anti-imperialism, and the particular variant of Third Worldist populism as developed in Iran, is part of what can generally be referred to as the anti-imperialist paradigm. This developed into the dominant hegemonic discourse in the years preceding and during the Iranian Revolution. Regardless of its place on the political spectrum, almost every political group participating in the struggle against the dictatorship saw that struggle primarily through this lens. Thus, however they interpreted the struggle, by making anti-imperialism the primary contradiction to be resolved, the political groups provided a unifying factor, a true hegemonic ideology that could bring all the forces of opposition under an umbrella and revolt against the shah’s dictatorship. Thus the anti-imperialist paradigm was at once a great strength and a weakness of the revolution. Taking this into account helps to provide a better understanding of the course of the revolution; instead of seeing it as a revolutionary push, followed by a counter-revolutionary repression, as two successive moments, we can instead see it as a more mixed dialectical process. In other words, elements of the counter-revolution were contained within the revolution itself.
The debate over the understanding of imperialism and the struggle against it is nothing new, and indeed it found its clearest classical expression in the debates between Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin over the so-called “National Question.” These debates are still with us, and in many ways the current confusion in relating to contemporary struggles in many countries reflects this. A return to the classical theoretical debates is not our purpose here, but they should be mentioned. In the early 20th century, an ideology of anti-imperialism had not yet developed It is important to distinguish between anti-imperialism, meaning just any conception of imperialism and the expression of the struggle against it, and what has developed into an ideology. By ideology, I mean its classical negative conception; a theoretical understanding, which blurs or masks the real conflicts lying beneath the world we live in (particularly the conflict between classes). Like any ideology, it mystifies the world and obscures the “hidden” reality. The ideology of anti-imperialism, as it developed for the greater part of the 20th century and found its expression in what has been called “Third World populism,” plays exactly this role and serves this function. The clearest definition of this ideology is perhaps best explained by Asef Bayat:
By “Third Worldist populism”, here, I mean an analytical and ideological framework which represents a blend of nationalism, radicalism, anti-”dependencia”, anti-industrialism, and somehow anti-capitalism. This perspective blames the general “underdevelopment” of the Third World nations wholly on the fact of their (economic, political and especially cultural) dependence on the Western countries. The radical intellectuals of the Third World in the post-war period seemed to cling to this ideological perspective, although they perhaps differed from each other in terms of the degree of their adherence to the defining elements, i.e. anti-industrialism, anti-capitalism, etc.2
He goes on to say:
The implication of this paradigm for the struggle against domination of the center is a strategy of national unity, i.e., the unity of all classes in a given Third World country including the workers, the peasants, the poor, the students, the old and new middle classes and the “national bourgeoisie”. This strategy implies that the “national” classes, with different and often contradictory interests, should be united to form a national alliance against imperialism. However, within such an alliance, the political and economic interests of the subordinated classes are often compromised and sacrificed to the benefit of the dominant ones (e.g. workers are not to go on strike against their capitalist “allies”, or intellectuals are not to criticize their national ruling parties, etc.). The influential dependency paradigm is partly responsible for the nationalism and Third Worldist populism of the radical intellectuals and the political leaders of the developing countries.3
If, in the middle of the last century, anti-imperialism had some reality and some validity as a step towards socialism (and I say this only hypothetically) today it most fully serves an ideological function. This ideology has been shown to have reactionary consequences. The experience of the Iranian Revolution proves to be the greatest historical example of this. In our contemporary situation, we see this in the support that some factions of the Left have shown towards petit-bourgeois dictators and authoritarian regimes purely on the basis of the latter’s stance against the imperialist west.4 This has become clearest in the support of some elements, not only for the Islamic Republic, or Hugo Chavez, but also for Muammar Qaddafi! Marx once said that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.” If the experience of the Iranian Revolution is a tragedy, as indeed it is, the current support for populist regimes under the banner of anti-imperialism is a great farce.
We digress for a moment to briefly explain why the Iranian Revolution is such an important case for understanding Third World populism and the ideology of anti-imperialism in general. The Iranian Revolution is exemplary because it reflects many of the great paradoxes of capitalist modernity. Its very occurrence posed a challenge to many paradigms held at the time about revolution in general. Many of these challenges were not the ones people imagined or expected, and this is often still the case.
Fred Halliday, in a talk in February 2009, described the Iranian revolution as “the first truly modern revolution.”5 Now this formulation may indeed raise some eyebrows, but there is some truth to it. For many, various 20th century revolutions had presented a challenge to Marx’s theories of revolution. And for those who choose to take this view, the Iranian Revolution is often the case they invoke. Most revolutions of the 20th century were not spearheaded or carried out by the industrial proletariat, but had their social base in the peasantry. Quite the contrary, in the Iranian Revolution what remained of the peasantry played almost no role.6 The death knell of the dictatorship was sung by the general strike of 1978, particularly the involvement of oil workers that bought the regime to its knees.
This presents us with a paradox. A revolution, very modern in one respect, brings into power a theocracy. It is this paradox, which I believe is what perplexes analysts and which obscures both the real nature of the revolution and the nature of the state it produced. It poses a much-debated question about social revolutions, namely: why do revolutions produce authoritarian regimes? I believe, however, that the question is more complicated than that and the question itself obscures the picture. The Orientalist veil still affects us when looking at this revolution. The “Islamic” character continues to veil (no pun intended) and obscure the character of events. The ideology that developed was not powerful because of its particularly religious character so much as for its militant, populist, and anti-imperialist character.7
The nature of the situation before the revolution and of the balance of forces, as well as the theoretical imperatives of the oppositional forces, contributed to the development of an ideology that gained hegemony in the Iranian Revolution. This ideology was picked up and run with by the founders of the Islamic Republic. The point is not that the development of this ideology was purely the conscious decision of certain actors, but that the historical conditions on the one hand, and the theoretical explanations of this situation on the other, worked together in a dialectical relationship to produce an ideology that served as both the great mobilizing strength of the revolution as well as a great fetter upon its development in a more emancipatory direction.
This ideological hegemony did not develop out of thin air; it grew out of a real situation. A history of imperialist domination contributed to this development. The most dramatic event that affected the consciousness of most Iranians was the 1953 coup against nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Something of a myth developed around Mossadegh that partially obscured the real nature of that time. But suffice it to say that he was a nationalist liberal who supported parliamentary democracy. The struggle at that time was over the nationalization of oil. Mossadegh himself was no great friend of the working class. And tension between him, the trade unions, and the Tudeh party, which dominated the trade unions, grew. Strikes were banned, and anti-union legislation was enacted. The coup set the tone for the popular imaginary. Mossadegh became a symbol in more ways than one. Most importantly, Mossadegh symbolized the overthrow of a popular leader perceived as struggling for Iran’s independence and replaced by the establishment of the shah. The “coup government”, as it was called, carried out a wave of repression against the opposition in general, but against the workers movement and above all the Tudeh Party.
This traumatic event really was imprinted into the popular consciousness. It shaped the political discourse of a whole generation. As Hamid Dabashi writes, “28-Mordadism is the central traumatic trope of modern Iranian historiography.”8
On the political stage, not just everything that occurred after 28 Mordad but even things that have happened before it suddenly came together to posit the phenomenon of 28-Mordadism: foreign intervention, colonial domination, imperial arrogance, domestic tyranny, an ‘enemy’ always lurking behind a corner to come and rob us of our liberties, of the mere possibility of democratic institutions.9
The three political and thus ideological forces, if we are to abstract for the sake of clarity, were socialism, nationalism, and political Islam; all contributed to the development of this ideological hegemony, which found its clearest and most resonating expression in an Iranian form of what can best be described as Third World populism. This Third World populism, in turn, found its strongest voice in that developed by the partisans of the Islamic Republican Party. The clerical militants, for a number of reasons, won the battle for hegemony over the course of the revolution. “The traumatic memory of the 1953 coup was very much rekindled and put to effective political use in the most crucial episodes of the nascent Islamic Republic in order to consolidate its fragile foundations.”10
The Shah’s White Revolution, a series of reforms begun in the early 1960s, had dramatically altered traditional social relationships, particularly in the countryside.
The Shah’s reforms in many ways set the stage for the revolution. “The Pahlavi White Revolution essentially advanced the simultaneous goals of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation proper.”11 The most dramatic policy was that of land reform. Indeed, this was a form of bourgeois revolution from above, intended to prepare Iran for capitalist development. It opened the way for modern agribusiness, mostly US, to move in, thus further incorporating Iran into the imperialist fold. The great landowning estates were divided and distributed among the peasants with little or no technical assistance. This turned the countryside into mainly “small-scale and petty-bourgeois”12 rural production. The state then worked to promote large-scale capitalist agricultural production. Many of the former peasants sold their lands and moved to the cities. Masses of former peasants flooded the cities looking for work in the state’s many construction and industrial projects, while those that stayed worked for agribusinesses as wage earners, making them agricultural proletarians. It is important to keep in mind that all of this took place in essentially a decade. The ranks of the working class swelled.
Other reforms had their effects as well. New education initiatives, while authoritarian, helped create a modern bureaucracy. The expansion of scholarships and opportunities to study abroad helped in the creation of a modern educated middle class, many of whom, as a result, had become politicized. The enfranchisement of women, including further employment and educational opportunities, also helped in this modernizing development. The regime did not understand, or underestimated the fact that all these policies were creating the material basis for a social revolution. Like all development under capitalism, the results were uneven. As the country as a whole became more developed, the class differences also became greater. Most of the new proletarians that flooded the cities lived a world away from the image of modern Tehran promoted by the state in its tourism brochures.
Simultaneously the regime used the tremendous oil revenues at its disposal to finance industrialization, and a policy of import-substitution resulted in rapid expansion of the manufacturing sector and the growth of and urban industrial labour. State policy came to favor large-scale, capital-intensive industry, at the same time that its urban bias and neglect of the countryside were displacing large numbers of peasants. Both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors—as well as a veritable population explosion—thus contributed to the massive rural-urban migration of the 1960s and 1970s, and to the creation of a pool of immiserated semi-proletarians in major cities, notably Tehran.13
Capitalist development was indeed state-centered. And, alongside the development of this entire modern infrastructure, went the development of the repressive apparatus of the state. The military, but more importantly the domestic security apparatus, became more developed technically and in its ability to gather intelligence. A society was developing with modern class forces coming to the fore in an environment that was becoming more repressive.
Most important to keep in mind is that the main modes of the revolution were what are generally attributed to modern forms of mass political struggle. Street demonstrations, some of the largest in history, strikes and factory occupations were the main modes of struggle during the course of the revolution. The players in the Iranian Revolution, then, were from what are considered modern classes: students, industrial workers, civil servants, writers/journalists, etc. Elements of the traditional society participated, but their role at first glance can be quite deceptive at first glance. These elements included the clergy and the bazaaris, or traditional merchant class. They may, on a more superficial level, be seen as a residue of the past, but they were very early on incorporated into the capitalist fold. This is evident by their modes of political struggle, which took a very modern form. A proper discussion of the role of the bazaar in the economic and political life of modern Iran is too lengthy to be taken up here, but it nonetheless needs to be touched upon. The bazaaris resemble what may be called the national bourgeois class. They, like the clergy, historically enjoy some autonomy vis-à-vis the state, and have risen to political action when this autonomy has been threatened. But this class is by no means homogeneous economically or politically. This is the case both before and after the Revolution.14
The Pahlavi state’s growth and increasing strength saw it begin to exert its control over this sector, as well as that of the clergy. The state began to impose regulations on the bazaar such as foreign exchange regulations. It also provided competition to the bazaar commercially by building modern retail stores and shopping centers. Like all other dominant social classes, including landowners and clergy (these three elements often overlap) the state had a policy of attempting to incorporate as well as dominate. Those that it could get to go along with the project were included and often benefited from this relationship, but the state was always keen to show its greater hand. In the mid-1970s, growing inflation, largely a result of the pumping of petro-dollars into the economy, was blamed on the bazaar. These were just some factors that helped develop the opposition of the bazaar. This added to the dissent, where the state was seen as benefiting ‘western’ business interests at the expense of the national marketplace. The opposition of the national bourgeoisie only added to the anti-imperialist dimension of the opposition.
The clergy had a somewhat similar relationship with the new state. It is by no means a homogeneous element. Some of the clergy benefited from a relationship with the Pahlavi state. These benefits included financial and political influence. But this was not the case for all, and much of the clergy began to resent their receding autonomy as well as what was seen as the “anti-national” aspect of the regime.
The cries of opposition from various elements of Iranian society developed more and more a similar ‘national’ or ‘popular’ voice, one that stood for national independence against the ‘west.’ Although the state was becoming more alienated from any social base and the opposition was finding more and more unity, it was not always understood that the interests of these various forces were not identical. The anti-imperialist nature of the opposition obscured this reality.
In terms of an individual, the common enemy was Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In terms of class, the enemy was the “comprador bourgeoisie,” that is, a bourgeoisie reliant on capital and power emanating from the centers of world capitalism, and serving as their extension in the peripheral country.15
The left was essentially disarmed theoretically by the fact that it confronted a new state formation that was both anti-imperialist and reactionary. It was placed in a position of forcing the issue by attempting to prove that the Islamic Republic was indeed still tied to imperialism, and not truly revolutionary. On the other side of the coin, the left was stuck either fully supporting the regime, as in the case of the Tudeh party, or offering “critical support” pending socialist revolution, as some of the Trotskyist organizations did. I do not mean to insinuate that there were absolutely no left organizations that offered a different analysis, as there indeed were. But the more significant point is what had the influence on the street. The ideology of anti-imperialism was indeed the hegemonic discourse on the street, and this is much more significant in the final analysis than a proper analysis by a small number of left sects. The majority of left organizations were stuck banging their fist against a wall, attempting (if they were critical), to prove that the Islamic regime was still a puppet of imperialism; the uncritical supporters were attempting to prove that the regime was revolutionary and progressive because of its anti-imperialist credentials. This specter of 1953, or the flag of its anti-imperialist credentials, emerged most spectacularly in the taking of the American embassy in 1979. This was a great propaganda victory for the new regime.
Let us fast forward to our current period. The latest outburst of resistance since the June 2009 elections is a manifestation of many developments since the revolution. After the war with Iraq ended in 1988, a period of post-war reconstruction began. This centered on a policy of economic liberalization. The radical-populist rhetoric was momentarily toned down for a more pragmatic approach that favored privatization as a development strategy. This again created a social base that would later develop into an antagonistic force within the republic. There was an economic boom that created many millionaires, but also a generation of educated youth that were coming of age and becoming politicized once again. This also meant not only a whole generation of young workers entering the industrial workforce, whose job prospects were becoming more uncertain, but also a new modern and technical workforce. During the period of the liberal-reformist president Muhammad Khatami, the three social movements that have shown to be a force came on the scene; the student movement, the women’s movement, and the labor movement.16
The period of (very) relative political liberalization offered an opportunity for greater open organizing. The limits of the new liberalization were tested, and the state showed its hand during the student riots of 1999. Labor as an organized force has emerged since 2004, when striking copper workers in Khatoonabad were attacked by the local gendarmerie.17 Since then, there have been a series of militant strike actions as well as coordination and organization among different sectors of workers coming together as a class. The most publicized of these was perhaps the struggle of city transit workers, in particular bus drivers, whose strike actions and organizing efforts were met with severe repression.18 But militant activity has also taken place, and still continues, among automobile workers at the Iran Khodro plant, the largest automobile plant in the region. Another important sector has been public school teachers. They succeeded in shutting down a large number of schools during a strike over lack of pay in 2004.19
Industrial proletarians make up about 7.520 out of about 70 million people in Iran. This does not include much of the technical and service, or “white collar” forms of employment that make up a large part of the Iranian workforce. This needs to be factored with a 20% unemployment rate (the conservative estimate.) Taking into account a changing proletariat, we can see that there is a force much greater than 10% of the populace. We are faced, much like here in the US, with a young, highly skilled, technically advanced workforce. But when this force leaves the university and enters the ranks of the proletariat, there is no prospect waiting. There are more workers than positions. This is true not just of the “white collar” sector, but also for industrial workers, but for different reasons. Regardless, a precarious position awaits much of the population. The situation affecting a nineteen year old in Tehran is quite similar in many ways to that of her contemporary in Athens, Cairo or Paris. And we see the explosions taking place. The alienation, so commonplace, is not one that can be quelled by the emotional rhetoric of national independence.
One of the dramatic outcomes is that the paradigm of anti-imperialism, particularly what Dabashi calls the paradigm of “28-mordadism”, has indeed exhausted itself. An entire generation born during or after the 1979 Revolution has developed within an Islamic Republic preaching self-sufficiency, independence, and an “anti-west” discourse from every channel. The issue of national independence, which plagued their parents’ or even more so their grandparents’ generation, seems like a relic of the past, and its only ideological function today is to cover up the real contradictions affecting people’s lives on a daily basis. This is true not only for young educated students and intellectual workers, but also for the industrial working class, which is vital to any social revolution. The experience, especially of those who were active worker-militants during the revolution, has taught them valuable lessons. Their inability to accept what is farcical today and which proved tragic to them yesterday does not only undermine the populism of Ahmadinejad. It is also a vaccine against the appeals by the liberal reform candidates of the opposition. The working class in Iran today, especially since 2004, has been increasingly active and militant, with strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and occupations a regular occurrence.21
But some worker-militants still keep a certain distance from the liberal-reform elements of the opposition. Is this because they are leaning towards the populism of Ahmadinejad? Not in the least. As we have seen in many of the communiqués from the militant worker syndicates before and after the election, they don’t support any candidate, but at the same time do support the struggle for democracy. This is an important distinction.
If the working class is not rushing into either camp, this is not in spite of their class-consciousness, but exactly because of their class-consciousness. The working class, in particular those workers that were active during the revolution, have learned the lessons of the past. They lived through the tragedy of the revolution, as well as the reformists’ attempts to appeal to the people. “The June 2009 presidential election marks an epistemic exhaustion of 28-Mordadism, when the paradigm has finally conjugated ad nauseam.”22 As was mentioned early in this essay, it is important to distinguish between an analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it, and the ideology of anti-imperialism, which is a particular historical manifestation. This critique should not imply that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that it is of a bygone era of capitalism. Nor is it out of the question that this ideology could be resurrected. But it does influence our understanding of imperialism, or more precisely global capitalism (a redundant term because capital has always been global, yet it is important always to emphasize its global character) as well as of the character of the struggle against it. So what is the outcome of the death of this ideology? The most important outcome of the negation of the ideological fetter of anti-imperialism is its positive supersession. But, as usual, this supersession is only a potential. The end of anti-imperialist ideology, in this particular case the “end of 28-mordadism”, offers a potential space, an opening, through a new understanding of the situation, as well as a new understanding of revolutionary subjectivity becomes possible. The recent uprisings are the clearest historical example of the potential overcoming of the binary between east and west, us and our other (whether this “other” is the Islamic world, or Iran, or Cuba, or whether it is the “west,” however we may interpret the term). It is this negative space through which a new positive may be created but not finished, always in a process of formation and creation. In this space, new conceptions of revolutionary subjectivity offer us something new, through which a new universal can be created–one which is the product of collective human struggle, the antithesis to the universalism of capitalist modernity. “The end of 28-mordadism does not of course mean the end of imperial interventions in the historical destiny of nations. It simply means that now there is a renewed and level playing field on which to think and act in postcolonial terms.”23
The Iranian Revolution, and the anti-imperialist ideology that corresponded to its rise and demise, was indeed a tragedy from the perspective of proletarian revolution; to hold such an ideology today is indeed farcical. It no longer revolutionary, as we have tried to show (and it is doubtful that it ever was); it today serves nothing but reaction. It does nothing but bring workers, students, and women’s organizations into an illusory harmony with those who maintain their oppression and exploitation. If this ideological position once served an emancipatory potential, it is today nothing less than utopian and reactionary.
- 1Val Moghadam, “Socialism or Anti-imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran” New Left Review (1987)
- 2Assef Bayat, “Shariati and Marx: A Critique of an ‘Islamic’ Critique of Marxism” Alif. Issue 10 , Pg. 16 (1990)
- 3Ibid., Pg. 17
- 4The clearest expression of this farce lately was the last time President Ahmadinejad came to New York to attend the United Nations he met with a number of “leftists” so they could express their solidarity. See “US Progressives Meet with Ahmadinejad.” http://www.fightbacknews.org/2010/9/23/us-progressives-meet-iranian-president-mahmoud-ahmadinejad. Since then there have been other expressions of this farce such as their support for the Qaddafi regime.
- 5See “The Islamic Republic of Iran After 30 Years”, a lecture at the London School of Economics, February 23, 2009.
- 6The great exception to this was the land occupation and formation of a peasant council in the Turkoman Sahra region, which was swiftly dismantled during the establishment of the Islamic Republic. This was indeed was one of the early important conflicts between the left and the new regime, as well as within the left itself. See Maziar Behrooz, Rebels With a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. I.B. Tauris, 2000. Pg. 109
- 7For the best analysis of the ideological dimension of the Islamic Republic see Ervand Abrahamian Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic.
- 8Hamid Dabashi, Iran, the Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox, Pg. 92
- 9Ibid., Pg. 93
- 10Ibid., Pg. 94
- 11Moghadam, Pg. 10
- 12Ibid., Pg. 11
- 13Ibid., Pg. 11
- 14“If the assembly line, or the coal mine, is the historically ideal space for the fostering of proletarian class consciousness – workers being densely packed together, in perpetual communication with each other and forced by material necessity to develop a dense of fellowship – then the bazaar is the equivalent for the petty bourgeoisie…But the bazaar stretches beyond the confines of this class category.” Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers & Threats of War. 2007, Pluto Press. Pg. 28
- 15Ibid., Pg. 26
- 16It should be stated that these three movements overlap and are not so easily abstracted from each other, particularly in the post-June 2009 election period.
- 17Iran in the Brink, Pg. 71
- 18Their union leader, Mansoor Ossanlou, is currently in Evin prison.
- 19A third of all teachers participated in the strike. See Esmailian, Malm, Pg. 74-77. The Iran Khodro actions began in 2004 as well and have continued. This plant has been referred to as the “Detroit of the Middle East,” and its workers are known for their militancy and class-consciousness but this is counteracted by tactics such as temporary contracts and threat of sack as well as blatant repression. During the protests of June 2009 the workers staged a work slowdown in protest of the repression and in solidarity with the popular movement. http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/iran-khodro-auto-workers-begin-work-slowdown-protest-regime
- 20International Labour Organization. Statistic from 2008 http://amar.sci.org.ir/Detail.aspx?Ln=E&no=98515&S=TP
- 21For the most comprehensive report of worker activity in Iran under the Islamic Republic, in particular since post-war reconstruction see Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers & Threats of War. 2007, Pluto Press. Since its publication much has happened, including the June 2009 elections, but this does not invalidate the book as a good source of information on the labor movement.
- 22Dabashi., Pg. 94
- 23Ibid., Pg. 98
Attachments
Comments
A recent look at 'anti-imperialists' and Iran, with reference to Angry Arab and Zizek:
Very interesting article, the Iranian Revolution and its popular perception is very confusing as is often the case when most sides put a lot of time and money into presenting their versions of events. I've made a PDF, anyone who wants it can grab it here http://www.mediafire.com/view/?du682f1413u45me thanks again for the article.
At the time i recall Freedom were regularly carrying articles by a on the spot participant, i think , associated with the oil workers who had formed workers councils of some sort. Anyone with back copies of the period should search through them check out what he was saying.
I vaguely recall the Communist Party was more in evidence and more a threat to the workers where he was situated. Perhaps, my memory has dimmed somewhat though.
I always wondered what became of this Iranian anarchist correspondent (I presumed he was an anarchist) since his contributions to Freedom simply stopped.
Taksim is not Tahrir—yet - Kadir Ateş
![Taksim during a May Day rally two years ago.](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/taksim.jpg?itok=EMFW4YaK)
Following the seismic upheavals in the Arab world, Kadir Ateş assesses the situation in Turkey.
There is a photograph of a young man standing in the middle of an embattled Cairo with a sign which reads: “Egypt supports Wisconsin workers one world one pain.” In Madrid, where masses of the unemployed youth currently occupy the Puerta del Sol, homages to Tahrir Square can be seen next to banners which announce the Spanish Revolution. Underscoring this collective sentiment was the recognition of the limits to the trade unions and political parties, whose appearance on the scene arrived post festum. This resurgent brand of internationalism is nothing short of inspirational, and has clearly shown that the so-called Arab Spring is a much more global in content than its baptismal name would otherwise suggest. Turkey, a country with historic and religious links with the Arab world has not, however, experienced this same seismic upsurge. This almost unnerving quiet in the wake of such upheavals has (per usual) reinforced the tired narrative of Turkey as the stalwart secular republic, whose democratic tendencies and relative economic stability present itself as a model to which its restless southern neighbors can aspire.
Regardless of the fact that Taksim Square1 did not transform itself into Tahrir Square, there has been a major upswing in labor militancy in the past few years which seems to have no clear end in sight. Reports of yet another strike or demonstration in the past several months have managed to drown out even the more stentorian accolades to Turkey’s successful weathering of the current crisis. This relative success of the Turkish bourgeoisie in maintaining growth was accompanied by a number of legal measures implemented to make labor more “flexible”, suppress the minimum wage, and continue the fire sale of state-owned enterprises. The Tekel strike of 2009-2010 provided the first substantial challenge to the continuous assault against the working class in Turkey, as explained in Issue No. 22 Why the Tekel strike was so remarkable, beyond its militancy—which included hunger strikes, occupations, the formation of a tent commune in the middle of the capital city of Ankara—was the background of the workers themselves. Most closely aligned themselves to the Islamist AK Party (AKP) or the fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP), and had otherwise been staunch anti-leftists. For the first time, many considered alternative ideas beyond what any of these parties had offered, and the lack of trade unionist support cast doubt over that form of organized labor as well. Yet in the months following the defeat of the Tekel workers, signified in the passing of Article 4/C, new anti-labor laws have been enacted which have in turn provoked the working class to continue its fight.
The willful refusal of the trade unions to support the Tekel workers was a lesson which they feel needs no repeating. Since the strike, they have begun to reassert themselves on the scene, with aggressive calls for strikes and demonstrations. Apart from those Tekel workers who continue to denounce trade union bureaucracy and its meddlesome character in the class struggle, others have answered the call to participate in union-led protests and demonstrations. In the latest of a series of laws pushed through the Turkish Grand National Assembly by the ruling AK Party was the “Bag Law”, which takes aim at the power of trade unions in addition to the working class. The Bag Law, named as such because of the plethora of legal measures, some related to labor, some not, aims at continuing the process of cutting costs and providing narrower job opportunities. Here are some of its more distinctive features:
1. The creation of a flexible labor regime.
2. Providing less waged internship positions for the youth upon entering the labor market.
3. A sizeable reduction in corporate taxes for both foreign and domestic corporations.
Other aspects of the law include a reduction of the minimum wage. There appears to be more to come, as one journalist put it, that most of these laws are just the “tip of the iceberg”;3 what comes next will perhaps be further structural adjustments in order to accommodate the Turkish bourgeoisie’s growing dependence on FDIs.
Reactions against these laws in February were met with blunt force: tear gas, arrests and beatings, similar to how the previous Tekel strike was handled by the state. Students, workers and trade unionists all seemed to have joined in blockading streets in Ankara, as the protests began to spread to other cities such as Istanbul, Diyarbakir and Trabzon. The inclusion of students is important, particularly as a report from the ILO last August reported that youth unemployment is at an all-time high. According to the Turkish Statistics Institute, unemployment for those “15-24 years of age is approximately 25%.”4 Life for the youth in Turkey in general looks precarious at best, as public debt begins to spiral out of control and fears of inflation deepen as job prospects decrease.
And the election…
The upcoming election on June 12th may nevertheless signal a victory for AKP, though with not quite the margin it had in 2007.5 Mounting protests against the increasingly authoritarian AKP have been met with scores dead and injured. In one such protest on May 31st in the Black Sea city of Hopa, a retired school teacher died in a tear gas attack, causing further outrage against AKP. Having stuck its finger in the air to test the political change of wind, CHP has managed to purge some of its more orthodox Kemalist members for the sake of gaining more votes. One may recall a similar transformation of the CHP in the 1970s under the first government of Bülent Ecevit. Even the unions are beginning to take advantage of the situation and encouraging the rank and file to elect their own personal picks. The real danger which then presents itself to the working class in Turkey no longer seems to come from the call to (political) prayer of AKP or even MHP, but from the social democrats, garden-variety leftists and even the Stalinist Communist Party Turkey.
Much of the talk of “neoliberalism” coming from such leftist organizations is often a call for a return to state-administered enterprises under “workers’ control”, which is nothing more than bureaucratic state capitalism. It should be remembered that even under the most intense periods of nationalization in Turkey, often glorified among the social democrats and the like, was fought against by the working class. To therefore conclude that what is occurring in Turkey can be reduced to a neoliberal agenda only recycles the endeavors of past struggles, at a time and place where neither such a term nor entity existed. The effort for the working class to reject fascist and Islamist politicians is admirable, and should not be downplayed in any sense. Yet failure to consider how in the most trying of times, the trade unions or leftist parties have not always come to the defense of the working class—or come at a time when only they have been threatened—should be a point of departure, rather than an alternative to, the so-called neoliberal right-wing.
- 1Taksim Square has traditionally been a rally point for activists and protesters on the European side of Istanbul.
- 2See Toros Korkmaz and Kadir Ateş, “Lessons from the Tekel strikes: class solidarity and ethnic (in)difference” in Issue No. 2.
- 3Zafer Adyin, “Torba yasa, torbadaki sendika , December 12, 2010.
- 4Bianet.org, Youth Unemployment in Turkey Twice as High as World Average , August 13, 2010.
- 5AKP won with almost 50% of the vote.
Comments
Interesting article. It would be helpful for the author to explain what the political parties are, in addition to just their acronyms.
The three parties mentioned in the article are the three main political parties in Turkey.
AKP, an Islamic centre right party, is the Current governing party having won 49.83% of the vote in this years election increasing its vote. It has been in power since 2002.
CHP is the main opposition party and took about 25% of the vote in the last elections. It was established by Atatürk in 1919. It is a member of the Socialist International. It is 'Kemalist' and defines itself by the 'six arrows'; republicanism, nationalism, statism, populism, laïcité, and revolutionism.
MHP is the smallest of the three main parties. It's roots are in Turkish 'ultra-nationalism'. It is probably most infamous in the West for its youth-wing the 'Grey Wolves. In 1981 they were formally charged with 694 murders.
The results of the last elections can be seen on this map:
Although it looks all yellow, unlike the UK Turkish electoral have more than one representative. In Ankara for example there are two electoral districts, which elect a total of 31 members of parliament, of which AKP took 17, CHP 10, and MHP 4.
Independents essentially means BDP (Peace and democracy party). To win seats in The Turkish parliament as a party, you need to pass a barrier of 10% of the national vote.
Devrim
I previously criticized this article on RevLeft. My comments can be found on this thread if anyone is interested. Essentially I think it completely overestimates the level of class struggle in Turkey at the moment.
Devrim
Theses for discussion - Loren Goldner
Loren Goldner sketches the basic points of departure for political discussion today
1) CONTRACTING SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
(Editor’s Note: The following theses were circulated within the Insurgent Notes collective for discussion. They attempt to expand on the programmatic points sketched in brief in the editorial of IN No. 1 a year ago. They are the opinions of the author and not of the IN collective as a whole.)
The current crisis, on a world scale, began ca. 1970, as the postwar boom—reconstruction from the destruction of the 1914- 1945 period—exhausted itself, first in the US, and then shortly thereafter in Europe and Japan. Since that time, capitalism has struggled to “recompose” itself, through a grinding down of social reproduction, most importantly of the total working class wage bill (“V”) and aspects of constant capital (“C”),both fixed capital and infrastructure. It has done this by debt pyramiding, outsourcing of production around the world, technological innovation (in telecommunications, transportation and technology-intensive production), all having the same goal of transferring “V” and “C” to “S” (surplus value), while enforcing an overall NON-REPRODUCTION of labor power.
Capital has attempted to achieve the same result as it did in the 1914-1945 period—re-establishment of an adequate rate of profit for a new expansion—without, as yet, resorting to large-scale war. Capital has tapped cheap labor power in the collapsed former Eastern bloc, in Asia (Korea, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India) while at the same time dismantling or whittling down the old “worker fortresses” of the West: the American Midwest, the British Midlands, the Paris suburbs and Alsace, and the Ruhr. It long ago abolished the one-paycheck blue-collar family. Capital has expelled or is expelling the working class from “financial centers” such as New York, London and more recently Paris, greatly increasing commuting time, making housing an expense approaching 50% of a typical working-class income, and turning the major cities into theme parks for the unproductive FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) population.
2) CONJUNCTURE
The 2008 crash, the biggest since 1929, seemed on one hand to discredit the “neo-liberal” “financialization” model (apparently) propelling capitalism since ca. 1980 (Reagan, Thatcher) but in fact was followed by a second wind in which governments attempted to revive the status quo ante with ever-greater infusions of debt. This has had the effect of intensifying the previous, 1970-2008 trend of “capital expanding, social reproduction contracting”. Stock markets recovered, banks cut their losses and consolidated, the top 1% of the population continued to take an ever-greater percentage of “income growth”, while in the U.S., the “real economy” stagnated or declined, with probably 15-20% of the work force unemployed or underemployed, and hundreds of thousands losing homes to foreclosure and apartments to eviction. Japan has been mired in stagnation for 20 years; in Europe, Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and the southern periphery (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece) have been the hardest hit.
3) OBSOLESCENCE OF VALUE
Underneath all appearances, the reality of the situation is the obsolescence of capitalist value—the necessary social time of the reproduction of commodities, above all the commodity labor power — as a framework for the continued expanded material reproduction of humanity. Capital in crisis spirals backwards, pulling society with it. It must either devalue existing commodities, whether labor power or capital plant or consumer goods, until a new general rate of profit can coincide with some real expansion, or else the working class must destroy value.
4) COLLAPSE OF STATIST ALTERNATIVES
The crisis since 1970 has had the positive effect of more widely discrediting the former, apparent alternatives, namely Social Democracy and above all Stalinism. In their diminution or disappearance, the crisis revealed them for what they always were: the completion of one aspect of the minimum program of the bourgeois revolution, (in the countries where they achieved state power or real influence) the elimination of pre-capitalist forms in agriculture and land to the peasants. Where some semblance of their former selves remains (such as in western Europe) they can only compete with the “right” in administering the crisis.
5) PARTIES, UNIONS AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS
Well before the 1970 turning point, however, these old organizations of the left and the unions linked to them were fighting against the working class and the latter’s “shop floor rebellion” beginning in the 1950’s and culminating in the early to mid-1970’s. Since that time, far from challenging any prerogatives of capital, they have only embraced them.
6) LEFT COMMUNISM
We identify ourselves broadly as left communists. Left communism first appeared as a self-conscious tendency in the revolutionary surge after World War I, above all (but not only) in German-Dutch council communism and in the Italian Communist Left (“Bordigists”). Despite their differences, which were real enough, these two currents were briefly able, in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, to demarcate themselves in different ways from Bolshevism, and its “dual revolution” alliance with the peasantry, with their rejection of the Russian Revolution as a universal model, insisting that in the developed capitalist West, the proletariat stood alone. The solution of the agrarian question, the main lasting achievement of the Russian Revolution, and the related development of the productive forces, are tasks of the bourgeois revolution, and the “grand illusion” of the 20th century was the confusion of numerous substitute bourgeois revolutions (beginning with Russia, once the failure of the world revolution had isolated it and when internal degeneration had eliminated its proletarian content, the soviets and workers’ councils) with socialism/communism. The recovery of genuine communist theory and practice can point to many sources, with the Hegel renaissance after World War II, the wide availability of many previously unknown works of Marx (1844 Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, the Unpublished Sixth Chapter of vol. I of Capital, his writings on non-Western societies, the ongoing publication of the MEGA). In addition to elements of the German-Dutch left and the Italian Communist Left, we can cite Rosa Luxemburg’s mass strike conception, Socialism or Barbarism, CLR James, the Situationists, Italian operaismo, the early Camatte, the post-1968 French neo-Bordigists as sources (the list not being exhaustive or exclusive). This recovery, it goes without saying, would never have occurred without the historical developments of the 1960’s and 1970’s, in the culmination and end of the post-World War II expansion.
7) CLASSWIDE ORGANIZING VS. ‘REVOLUTIONARY TRADE UNIONISM’
We argue that the period ushered in by World War I marks a qualitative change in the history of capitalism, characterized alternately, by different currents, as the epoch of the “obsolescence of capital”, “decadence”, or the “real domination of capital”. We see this post-1914 period as one in which reform (trade unionism and parliamentarism), as practiced by the First and and above all Second Internationals and muddled in the Third and Fourth Internationals, is no longer viable as a step forward for the working class as a whole. By this we do not mean that partial struggles, defensive or offensive, outside periods of revolutionary upsurge are meaningless. We disagree with those left communist currents which reject work within and around trade unions as solely the terrain of the “left wing of capital”. Where possible, we favor work within trade unions while always maintaining an extra-union perspective, looking to transform isolated “class-in-itself” struggles into class-wide movements involving other workers and the unemployed, on the model of the e.g. 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike or the 2004 Buenos Aires subway strike. We at the same time reject the perspective of “capturing the unions” for revolution, as advocated by (some) Trotskyists. We aim to supercede unions by class-wide organizations.
8) GEOPOLITICS
The developing geopolitical situation is closely related to the world economic crisis, first of all because it is there that a future major war, as part of capital’s “solution” to the crisis, will emerge. The current world situation is characterized by the (relative) decline of the United States as the undisputed capitalist hegemon it was until the 1970’s. While there is currently no national power or bloc capable of challenging U.S. hegemony, the global situation is characterized by a “multi-polarity” which did not exist in 1970. The U.S. accounted for 50% of world production in 1945, and accounts for 20% today. Part of this is due to the “normal” reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II, part of it due to U.S. overseas investment (similar to Britain’s increased overseas investments in the era of its decline), and part of it is due to the emergence of new zones of development. East Asia accounted for 5% of world production in 1960, and accounts for 35% today. While the much-touted “rise of China” is overblown (one need merely think of its inability to resolve the situation of 750 million people still on the land and another 100 million in the floating, casualized migrant population) , the total post- 1945 industrialization of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, taken together, as a power center and moreover a greater potential power center, is not. Germany, East Asia, Brazil, and India are, in different ways, other established or potential poles of independence from U.S. domination in a way unthinkable 40 or 50 years ago.
One aspect of the economic and geopolitical crisis is the problematic global status of the U.S. dollar as the dominant reserve currency, a status giving the U.S. the unique ability to print money to pay its own external debts—a privilege no other indebted nation enjoys– and to periodically devalue foreign holdings of dollars (Germany and Japan in the early 1970’s, Japan in 1985) which are external debts of the United States. That status further allows the U.S. to fund its perennial state deficits with the recycling of dollars held abroad, which now amount to ca. $15 trillion. In contrast to 1945, the international weight of the reserve currency status of the dollar is out of all proportion to the weight of the U.S. in total world production. As with the British pound over the 1914-1945 period, this disproportionality will not be resolved at some international conference table but by crisis, shakeout and (possibly) a major war.
9) NEW INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASSES
The increasing multi-polarity of the world economy reflects the geographical shifts in the concentration of wage-labor proletarians around the world. According to some estimates, 60% of all workers today are in Asia. This translates into sharpening of class struggle there; China alone experienced over 100,000 “incidents” (local uprisings and confrontations, not all of them involving blue-collar workers) in 2010; Vietnam has experienced 336 strikes in the past year, many of them wildcats; worker ferment has also erupted in Bangladesh (mainly textile workers, as reported in IN No. 2) and India (in the industrial zone around Delhi). In North Africa and the Middle East, workers have played central roles in the insurgencies in Tunisia and Egypt, and important strikes have occurred in Turkey.
These working-class struggles in countries previously associated with the mirage of “Third Worldism” (peasant-bureaucratic movements and revolutions) is a shift of inestimable importance in the “geography” of class struggle.
10) PERMANENT REVOLUTION
While we recognize and welcome the growing importance of the new industrial working classes created by the spread of capitalist investment in recent decades, we continue to see the wage-labor work force in the “old” centers of accumulation—Europe, the US and Canada, Japan—as central to any successful world revolution. The long arc of the history of communism has seen two international revolutionary waves, those of 1848 and 1917-1921, as well as the international wave associated with “1968”. In 1848 and 1917, particularly, the truth of Marx’s theory of permanent revolution (as later developed further by Trotsky) was demonstrated, whereby working-class upsurge in the “center” was complemented by the emergence of an independent working-class upsurge in the emerging “weak link” of accumulation. In the first instance, the “center” was the apex of the English Chartist movement in January 1848 and, above all, the communist uprising in Paris six months later in June, and the “weak link” was Germany; in the second, more protracted case, the “center” was western Europe (Germany above all) and the “weak link” was Russia. In both cases, the “crossover” necessary to the triumph of the revolutions failed, but we consider such a “crossover” as essential, so that a successful revolution in the “center” spares the working class and peasantry in the “weak link” the rigors of “socialist accumulation” in bureaucratic autarchy. The overcoming of the capitalist “law of value”, as transmitted to the developing world, first of all through the world market, must be the task of workers in both the old “center” and in the emerging “weak links”. The history of successive Stalinist and Third Worldist revolutions in the semi-developed and underdeveloped world has demonstrated time and again the impossibility of “socialism”, or even of real capitalist development, in one country, under the pressure of the world market.
11) NATIONALISM
Seen in this light, we consider nationalism in the current epoch to be reactionary. Nationalism in the period from the French Revolution until approximately World War I could play an historically progressive or even revolutionary role (i.e. in the era of bourgeois revolutions) when the formation of viable nation states out of the old dynastic order (e.g. Germany, Italy) was still possible. This said, the “right of nations to self-determination” was never, as an abstract principle, part of the revolutionary tradition separate from a geopolitical-strategic orientation to the unification of the working class, which is always an international class. Marx supported Irish nationalism against British rule, and Polish nationalism against Russian rule, but opposed Balkan nationalism that might weaken the Ottoman bulwark against Russian expansionism. The nations or Ersatz nations which emerged out of the collapse of the empires (Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) after World War I, or out of the dismantling of the British, French, Dutch, Belgian or Portuguese empires between 1945 and 1975, or finally out of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, have almost without exception, due to the dynamic of (an absent) permanent revolution, failed to solve the “tasks” of the bourgeois revolution, most immediately the completion of the agrarian revolution. The few exceptions (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan) managed to do so as “showcases” in competition with the Stalinist revolutions (China, North Korea, Vietnam) in Asia, with serious land reform, but they still remain viable only—to date—with significant U.S. military assistance.
12) “ANTI-IMPERIALISM”
Despite these developments, a certain “anti-imperialism” has revived, after experiencing an eclipse in the late 1970’s. It is no longer a question of barefoot doctors and people’s communes in China, or guerrilla focos in the Andes, or various and sundry “tricontinental” “national liberation fronts”. Led by the Petro-Peronist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it consists of a loose collection of countries such as Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, (occasionally) Brazil, and then extends to even more questionable forces in the Middle East such as Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine) and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even further from the front lines are Russia and China, hardly troubled to watch the U.S. squander blood and money in its losing wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) and its declining influence throughout the region (Turkey, Pakistan). These “anti-imperialist” forces are cheered on by the World Social Forum and its array of NGOs; North American trade unionists fly to Beijing to have tea with the official state trade union leaders while workers attempting to organize independent unions there are incarcerated. Perhaps if the Taliban reconquer Afghanistan, they too will be joining these “progressive anti-imperialist forces” at the World Social Forum.
13) RACE, CLASS, GENDER, SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’
Concentrated as we are, at least for the moment, in the United States, we necessarily recognize that the “color-blind” Marxism of many left communist currents—a proletarian is a proletarian is a proletarian—is simply...blind Marxism. The largely black and Latino population of U.S. prisons (1% of the U.S. population) or the black and Latino youth gunned down with impunity every year by the police, are excellent “first approximations” showing that the legacy of 350 years of white supremacy in American history is still with us, if somewhat deflated since the 1960’s. Similarly, gender and “normative sexual” questions are hardly resolved, either within the class or in the larger society. We hardly consider it an accident that most of the incremental progress on these questions since the 1960’s, however piecemeal and fragmentary, has mainly benefited what can be broadly characterized as “middle class” and “professional” elements among blacks, Latinos, women and gays. (Our use of the term here is not to be confused with the repellent and ideologically- charged American use of “middle class” when referring to the working class.)
The dynamic between class and race, gender and sexual orientation varies widely from one concrete situation to another. But since the ebb of the vaguely Marxian or pseudo- Marxian climate of the 1960’s and 1970’s, when many of these oppressed groups (we are thinking first of all of the black and Latino nationalists of that period) still felt obligated to articulate their agendas within a broader (mainly Stalinist and/or Third Worldist) “proletarian internationalism”, the emergence of an “identity politics” starting in the late 1970’s dispensed with that framework altogether. A whole industry of NGO’s backed by foundation money came into existence to cement this fragmentation of different groups and to bury the question of class, thus becoming an important anti-working class force, the first line of defense against communist politics in different communities. It was hardly an accident that this ideology and these NGOs and foundations emerged and thrived during decades of defeat, rollback, concessions and factory closings that decimated the living standards of the working class, white, black or brown.
The reunification of a movement on a true class basis, which means a movement that puts the poorest and most downtrodden groups at the center of its problematic, is not something to be solved by a deft theoretical formulation, but something that must emerge from practical experience in struggle. It is therefore a commitment of Insurgent Notes to chronicle those struggles when and where they emerge, to participate in them where possible, and to expose the ideologues of fragmentary, anti-working class “identity” and their foundation (and government) backers.
14) IMMIGRATION
Closely related to the problems posed by race, class and gender, in both the U.S. and in Europe, is the question of immigration. In the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930’s, political and ideological mobilizations against immigrants are emerging as the perfect lightning rod for channeling growing populist rage into struggles among the “native born” and “immigrant” members of the class that “has no fatherland”. The abject failure of “development”, aided by Western policies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and much of Asia for decades, as well from the administration of local bourgeoisies and statist elites in those regions, has turned tens of millions of proletarians and sub-proletarians into refugees from the resulting social and economic vacuum. Far- right groups organized around anti-immigrant feeling have made important breakthroughs in virtually every European country, and with similar developments in the U.S. (first of all along the border with Mexico) becoming a dominant issue here as well.
Mainstream capitalists tend to favor immigration as a source of cheap labor and leave immigrant bashing to the populist right, but will hardly fail to see its uses as serious class antagonism intensifies. Well-meaning but empty calls for international solidarity, in the abstract, will hardly do. From our point of view, and recalling the central role played by an earlier wave of immigration in class struggles in the U.S. before and after World War I, we see immigrant labor as playing a potentially vanguard role again. At the same time we present a programmatic approach to the question, with our perspective of global reconstruction in the transition out of capitalism aimed at undoing the huge imbalances between regions resulting from colonialism, imperialism and capitalist “development” schemes as the ultimate practical common ground between workers in different parts of the world.
15) PROGRAM
We see as essential to our tasks the elaboration of a program for the transition out of capitalism. Too much of the debate in the left communist, ultra-left or libertarian communist milieu revolves around questions of forms of organization, and too much of the conception of a post-capitalist society devolves into highly abstract arguments over “Value”. We see the need to emphasize the “material content” of the transition to be implemented, once political and economic power has been taken away from the capitalists, indispensable to the actual abolition of value, i.e. of the regulation of life by the socially necessary time of reproduction. Given the advanced degree of decay in the West, headed by the U.S. and the U.K., it can no longer be (and never really was) merely a question of “taking over production” and establishing “workers’ control”. In countries with such a high level of employment in socially useless (the FIRE sector of finance- insurgance- real estate) sectors, or socially noxious ones (e.g. armed forces and arms production) or (not too long ago) the automobile (and related) industries, such a vision, inherited from the ferment of the 60’s and 70’s, is almost meaningless. More workplaces will be abolished by the revolution than placed under “workers’ control”. We see it as fundamental to conceive of the future society in use-value terms on a global scale. A linear spread of post-1945 models of consumption in the West–such as individual home ownership and the two-car family– to the entire world is on the face of it a social and environmental absurdity. Such an alterative program will not spring full- blown from the head of some world reformer, but will be, on the contrary, a “work in progress” elaborated by tens of millions, and ultimately billions of people. Nonetheless we can throw out the broad outlines of basic necessities. Already the dismantling of the automobile-steel-oil-rubber complex and its replacement by greatly improved mass transit and rail transport has implications far beyond transportation, namely in the relationship between cities and countryside and in the social organization of space generally; environmental concerns; the huge social waste involved in commuting time; the reorientation to new sources of energy; and the overcoming of the social atomization and social costs induced after World War II by suburbanization and sprawl. The freeing of the tens of millions of people currently employed in state and corporate bureaucracy, in the military and in military production, the FIRE sectors, or police/intelligence and prisons, for socially useful work will also make possible the realization of a key part of the communist program: the radical shortening of the working day. We do not doubt that the collective practical knowledge of working people, once free to reconfigure necessary work from a use-value viewpoint on a truly social (worldwide) scale, will greatly facilitate the implementation of such a broad outline, but we consider it essential to start this discussion now to counter the long-assumed notion that “all this will be worked out in the soviets” after the revolution. Without an active current with some widely-shared vision of a radically different social order, (in the sense that the old Social Democratic/Stalinist vision of nationalization plus state planning was widely shared) there will be a no successful revolution.
16) HOW WE RELATE TO PARTIAL STRUGGLES
Between now and the revolution, local, partial struggles short of the open struggle for the overthrow of capital are emerging and will continue to emerge. Some parts of the left communist scene (we can take the ICC as a reductio ad absurdum but they are hardly alone) tend to relate to such struggles with an attitude that ultimately reads “when you’re ready to form soviets, get in touch”. We reject that kind of posturing abstentionism that hides remoteness from the struggles of ordinary working people behind “big theory”. This posturing results from 40 years in the wilderness in which there were, at least in the West, few mass movements in the streets (as there was in the late 60’s/early 70’s) pressuring such groups to do something more than publish their journals, sell their newspapers and maintain their P.O. boxes or, more recently, their web sites.
That said, serious problems arise in relating to such struggles as they are usually posed, problems represented first of all by the thicket of far-left groups that still work off of Trotskyism and Maoism and which circle around those struggles that do emerge like “vultures circling a dying beast”, as someone once put it. The Trotskyists, in particular, characterize such struggles and rival groups as “reformist”, whereas our starting point is an analysis of the impossibility of consequential reformism ( the latter being something different than saying, as we do, that there can be small temporary victories in the midst of generally bigger defeats). Such groups are still wedded, at best, to the dialectic of reform and revolution that was the outlook of revolutionaries before 1914, such as Rosa Luxemburg in her polemic against Bernstein: revolution THROUGH the struggle for reform.
Unfortunately for that outlook, no reformism for the class as a whole is possible today. The crisis started 40 years ago and has only intensified. Already in the 1970′s “left” parties in the West were backing off from any promises of “reform”. “Reform” today is mainly the war cry of the right, meaning burning and slashing what is left of the old welfare state and labor legislation. It is no secret that the official left since the 1970’s has reinvented itself as the kinder, gentler face of “neo-liberal” capitalism. We hardly need bother with the Democratic Party (Clinton, Obama) and its hangers-on in the U.S. In the U.S. as in Europe, the ever-growing gap between the wealthiest 1% and everyone else has grown relentlessly since 1968, whether “reformists” or “conservatives” are in power. Mitterand in France, Felipe Gonzalez in Spain, Schroeder in Germany, Blair in Britain, now Papandreou in Greece barely deserve any more of a mention: ”reformists” all, “neo- liberal” slashers of workers’ living standards all.
We might consider some recent, disparate but somehow similar struggles of recent years: the piqueteros in Argentina in 2001-2002 or Oaxaca in 2007. All the post-2008 movements and uprisings– the French mass protests of fall 2010, or, in 2011: Tunisia, Egypt, Madison, Madrid, Greece—are linked in some way to the world financial and economic meltdown. Most of these struggles took on a qualitative nature in a huge initial burst of “spontaneity” unleashed by some “spark” in an increasingly explosive situation, (or in the case of Greece, two direct, savage attacks on working-class living standards over the past year). The Argentine uprising began with the total meltdown of the economy and of the Argentine political class, but was brought to a head by the piqueteros, mainly no-future working-class youth, who had been refining their tactics for several years, in actions large and small. Oaxaca began with a provocation by the state government against the initial phase of the normal collective bargaining of the local teachers’ union. Tunisia began with the desperate suicide of an unemployed university graduate, following everyday police harassment. Egypt began with a combination of “normal” everyday state atrocities mixed with the “contagion of struggle” coming from Tunisia, in a worsening economic situation. Madison began, like Oaxaca, with a provocation by the state against public employees.
All of these movements were characterized by a creative “leap” from local forms of protest (even the suicide of the unemployed Tunisian ex-student was the latest in a series by similar people) to a mass spontaneous outburst that no one foresaw, underscoring the always unforeseeable consequences of local acts of defiance.
And most of these movements (with Tunisia and Egypt and now Syria and Yemen, for all their specific differences, still unfolding) have been defeated, and those, like Tunisia and Egypt, find themselves in danger of containment by the usual cast of characters in a facelift of the status quo ante. The Argentine piqueteros were either co-opted into a recomposed Peronist state or dispersed by repression; in Oaxaca, it was straight-up massive repression and the isolation of the movement from the rest of Mexico.
(The situation in Greece remains in abeyance at this writing-July 2011). The French government stonewalled the fall 2010 movements in the streets, and won out. The Madison movement never escaped the embrace of the Democrats and the unions and mainly threw itself into an “anti-Republican” recall campaign. The Spanish Socialist government let the “indignados” (cf. our report on that movement) occupy the central plazas in 50 cities for the better part of a month (police attacks and provocations notwithstanding) until the movement collapsed, with some factional acrimony, of its own weight, like so many others, having taken the first creative step of occupying public space and then being incapable of taking another one.
Communism is a concrete possibility because of what capital “compels the working class to do” (Marx). In the situations described above, what is the relationship between “reform” and revolution?
Before people go massively into the streets, in those struggles that occur, revolutionaries can participate with a “class-wide”, “Toledo Auto-Lite” perspective. The key, in such situations, is always to underscore the “break” with established institutions, such as the unions and the state, and the political pseudo-left that accommodates to those institutions. The perspective should always be “dual power”, however small the forces capable of making that demarcation. The consequences of such a stance are always fluid. Revolutionaries always speak to the “class-for-itself” impulse in the broader movement.
The goal is not the specific “demand” or what in some cases might be temporarily won, but the increased unity of the class through the experience of breaking the barriers between different sectors of workers, or workers and the unemployed, and racial caste and gender separations.
When masses of people are in the streets, as they have been and are, in places such as Argentina or Greece or Egypt, the sole real question is that of state power. This is not to endorse just any putschist adventure: there is a dynamic in play that cannot be forced.
But the successful struggle against the state, and its replacement by class-wide institutions (soviets, workers’ councils, whatever new forms may emerge) requires program (as discussed earlier) and a current formed in advance to take the initial steps to implement that program. This current emerges over time from the networks of the most combative and conscious elements, in the ebbs and flows of struggle, and does not need to belong to any more formalized organization. The latter will come as the intensified rhythm of struggle requires it.
Comments
Point of fact and historical accuracy. These theses produced almost no discussion in IN, save for my opposition to regarding agreement with them as the minimal basis for political cooperation, and my disagreement to the content of many of the theses.
Loren "withdrew" the theses from discussion, acknowledging them as an "overshoot" for determining political agreement..
That was their status when I parted from IN at the end of October. Don't know what's happened to them since then.
More on Madison - Insurgent Notes
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/MadisonProtests_NarayanMahon005.jpg?itok=9nctzvA9)
The following letter synthesizes two e-mails from a comrade, AS, about some disagreements with Loren Goldner’s article on Madison in IN No. 3
I don’t think I was criticizing what you wrote that sharply. I do remember mentioning that one of the first groups out there was the Latino “Immigrant Workers Union” which is a coalition to draw attention to things that affect Latinos in the Madison. In Milwaukee the mood was much different than in Madison. From what I heard from the Milwaukee people, I know the feeling there was much more hopeless generally than in Madison; ‘hopeless’ was the word I heard them use repeatedly. The crisis hit Milwaukee workers really hard. Workers in Madison exist largely in the state and the insurance business and have sources of state-capitalist investment that are more steady than Milwaukee, which needs heavy industry. For me, growing up as a worker in Madison, I could bounce around working at small workshops around the city and never once get my foot in the door at a bigger, better-paid blue collar workplace. For all Milwaukee workers, the deindustrialization has been brutal. Workers at Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee were forced to accept a 50% cut in starting pay just to keep the company from leaving the state. Milwaukee has been a laboratory of this austerity and public education demolition for decades now. The feeling I got from the Milwaukee people was one of despair.
Strange thing is that there is almost no contact with leftists in Milwaukee and Madison at all, even among white leftists, It is as if Milwaukee is on the other side of the continent and not an hour and half away by bus. There were a few contingents that did come from Milwaukee to the protests in Madison, and a few protests in Milwaukee itself, but even there African-Americans were less present than Latinos who were much more active. Your criticisms aren’t much different from mine on the whole. There were contingents of people from the various “First Nations” bands who came to Madison as well. The City of Milwaukee maybe has 500,000 people, maybe a third of them are African-American, I don’t know. It is reaching a point where the Latinos will be equaling them in numbers. The ethnic makeup of people here is heavily German, Scandinavians live further north mostly.
The most positive thing in the protests was the open microphone in the capitol rotunda in Madison where there was an open forum that the DP folks couldn’t control. For a lot of workers this was the first time they ever got to speak in front of other workers and listen to other workers speaking publicly. The most active left group by far was the IWW and they have benefited from this. Their General Strike poster was the most popular poster. Still their activity raises questions in my mind of the nature of the left, even the IWW, in tailing initiatives that are run by the DP/Union nexus of bourgeois power. Even when they have the numbers to undertake their own initiatives, they still tail the “progs”. There was no attempt to raise awareness of state tax increases on the poorest workers, or to link the austerity measures to the constant austerity and repression faced by racial minorities. The Latino presence at the protests also raises questions because they seem obligated, or constrained, as immigrants, to show their patriotism by carrying US flags around to all the protests.
Due to a stretch of unemployment, I took a half-time job late last summer working at the office of AFSCME Local 2412. So, I became the office manager for a union local. In an office of one, I “manage” myself. I saw the whole thing unfold from the defeat of the last contract, to the Walker austerity bill. I was present at the union local meeting where we heard from the higher ups in AFSCME Council 24 that there would be no strike, which was decided and declared from the start. I even sent out the rally notices to the state workers on campus. Now AFSCME Local 2412, and my office neighbors, Local 171, represent respectively the clerical and blue collar sectors of the UW Madison campus. 2412 is the big union on campus and was right at the center of much of these protests. I was fielding calls from the press trying to get information out of me.
This all was strange for me. I had once been a member of Local 171. I had helped animate the Group Internationaliste Ouvrier in Montreal, I helped create Internationalist Notes. I took up left communism after being repeatedly called an ultra-leftist by mainline lefties back in the eighties. Needless to say I’m not that keen on the DP, or the unions. At the same time I feel obligated to participate and be present, which is doubly difficult without funds or propaganda to distribute. A struggle takes on a different tone altogether when it is your friends and family that are there protesting the wage cuts and austerity measures.
I saw the left groups descend on Madison, sell a few papers and then leave. I believe that in what I said to RS, I might have been directing some of this at your article. It is a shame I couldn’t have shown you around a bit, as I do know this area very well. I did make an attempt to contact the ICC but I was too late and the militant they sent came, sold a few papers and then left. I was busy working and sending out the bulletins for the protests and wasn’t doing a lot of propaganda distribution, so it was to them as if I was never even there, at least from what they said. They subsequently denounced the whole thing as a DP/Union maneuver. In ideological content we had the same dominant reformist thinking as in the protests of the “indignados” in Spain today, we even had something of a workers assembly going on in the capitol for a time. Yet they denounced the protests here and praised the protests there. The real question wasn’t the ideological content of these protests but their own participation which brings their praise, or condemnation when they do not participate. The left reformism and DP dominance doesn’t change the fact that there were 150,000 workers in the streets and every scrap of poster board in the county had been turned into picket signs such that all the stores in the county ran out of poster board. It was an extraordinary thing to see.
It seemed to me as though east coast militants only noticed when the protests were almost done, and my own efforts at creating small groups of revolutionaries around the mid-west and the south has been a failure by and large but I think what took place here confirms what I’ve tried to tell militants that workers in the mid-west and the south are important and that there wont be a class struggle in the US without them. It is disheartening when a massive protest of workers comes along the revolutionaries weren’t present even in small numbers and the usual cast of left-ish characters took over playing their role as adjunct to the left arm of the ruling class and its Democratic Party. The “left” in Madison consists of the IWW, the ISO and “Socialist Action” (pro-Castro-ex-trots, Minnesota and Wisconsin based largely). Many of the shop stewards and leaders in AFSCME are supporters of “Labor Notes” as well as being loyal Democrats.
Yes, the electoral stuff is what has taken over. The protests were called off. Some activity has remained sporadically across the state in smaller towns and cities. There were demonstrations in Mount Horeb, a town of 7,000 people had a workers demonstration which drew over a thousand at the peak of the demonstrations; this was happening all over. Now all energies are put into these recalls. People believe it will achieve some sort of victory or stability in the face of the fact that more recalls are being attempted at one time than have ever occurred before. As strikes were ruled out by the unions from the start, and the teacher/student sickout/walkout was called off two days into it, it is seen that a strike is impossible by most people. One justification I heard was that since people are no more than 16 lost work hours away from losing everything they have, to talk about a strike is “irresponsible”. I have argued against this the most successful wave of strikes in US history occurred at the end of WWII and usually lasted for less than five days on average during a time when workers were considerably poorer. I have also argued that the strike tactics that are illegal, sympathy strikes etc., are illegal because they work. The recall effort is feverish. I believe that the workers will be disappointed by the results given the past history of recall elections. The electoral stuff really bled the energy out of the movement.
The whole “Wisconsin’s progressive tradition” propaganda is quite strong and lends unwarranted credibility to DP’s bourgeois power structure. They seem to have forgotten that the last governor, Jim Doyle the Democrat, was the one who gave state workers a rolling layoff amounting to almost three work weeks a year amounting to a sizable cut. Basically the Democrats gave them a pay cut without formally cutting anyone’s hourly pay or benefits. For the bourgeoisie this was a clever maneuver but not brutal enough for the other faction of bourgeois politicos. There was absolutely no attention given by the unions to the layoffs that public sector workers will be facing, almost 22,000 people will lose their jobs and they are told to wait until the recall elections. There was no protest over the gutting of tax credits to the poorest workers in the state in both the public and private sectors either.
The university system is now messing with payroll data so that the unions don’t even know who is paying dues or who is even in the workforce now. It was two members of the Democratic Party who shot down the last contract in the state senate and assembly. They just refused to show up for the vote on the new contract that the state workers unions had negotiated knowing full well that the GOP was going to take over in the next session and be out for blood, so the Democratic Party basically allowed this situation to happen. When the state workers’ union boss, Marty Beil, called the two DP state congressmen “whores”, it was evident that the bosses has just stopped playing ball and no longer considered the unions as necessary for assistance in implementing the austerity measures. I’ve never heard a union leader speak that bluntly about a failed contract, ever, so even last November it was clear that something was going to go down this spring. The union leaderships were not ready for politicians who weren’t interested in playing by the established rules of the game.
AS
Taken from Insurgent Notes website (Originally posted August 2, 2011)
Comments
I think this is a good contribution about the struggle, and also I think makes some good points about clumsy/rigid analysis that the Internationalism article about it (the one here, about the struggle in Madison: In Madison and Elsewhere, Defense of the Unions Prepares the Workers’ Defeat) had. Specifically I think the desire to delineate the struggle to defend collective bargaining and the union's dues checkoff from the actual struggle in the defense of the power and position of the working class may have been written in a way that underestimated the efforts of both the Wisconsin working class and the IWW. But in no way was the article meant to have
denounced the whole thing as a DP/Union maneuver
.
There also may have been an underestimation of something said on another thread:
EdmontonWobbly
the reversion to bad strategy is often because the good strategy has gaping holes in it. The bad strategy is complete and stable because it is easier.
In that article, the criticism of the general strike slogan is followed by a very vague idea about the development of a mass strike dynamic, but the basic idea of self-organization and not indefinite timetables and combining demands, is I think a good one, but of course the working class probably does not have the confidence to do something like that in the US at the moment. So what do we propose concretely? And what do we see our role as in getting to a point where the working class has the confidence and strength to do things like that successfully, and the willingness to try, despite how much easier it is to repeat the failed rituals that we all know and are comfortable with being disappointed by?
I wish I could have been in Madison to have seen more of it. This is a good contribution though, I think, to understanding it and what revolutionaries could have done differently, better, etc.
-soyonstout
S. Artesian
I still don't understand what the disagreements are.
about general strike vs. mass strike, or something else?
[quote=Loren Goldner]The following day, I talked for a couple of hours with a highly knowledgeable Madison academic associated with the Working Families Party.[/quote]
I wish I had seen this during the earlier polemic, which is germane right now because the electoral recall of the 6 Republican Senators is happening today -- and Goldner's primary informant for his various accounts of events in Wisconsin was Joel Rogers, leader of the Working Families Party.
Rogers calls a general strike 'real dangerous.'
[quote=Isthmus]UW-Madison labor scholar Joel Rogers believes that opponents of Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union budget bill need to avoid a general strike and turn instead toward recall efforts to anticipate the upcoming redistricting.
"I'm all for going to these demonstrations," says Rogers, lauded by Newsweek as one of "100 Americans most likely to affect U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century." "But you've got to get at least three [Republican senators] out" through recalls. That would shift the balance in the state Senate from a 19-14 Republican edge to a 17-16 Democratic one.
Rogers, the director of the UW-affiliated Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), says the recalls will affect state government's "next big thing": redistricting, based on new census data.
"You can recover from this bad law," Rogers argues. "You can get another governor. But reapportionment is going to be 10 years. That's going to tremendously change the terms and the rules of the game."[...] [/quote]
link to the complete article from March 17, 2011:
http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=32778
soyonstout
S. Artesian
I still don't understand what the disagreements are.
about general strike vs. mass strike, or something else?
Well that's a non-starter, since Luxemburg's source for the 'anarchist general strike' is a polemic by... Friedrich Engels.
Where in the piece which is composed from email Loren received are there disagreements with Goldner's analysis. Hell, I disagree with his analysis, strenuously, so I know what a disagreement looks like. As hard as I try, I can't find anything in the article that counts as a disagreement
Joseph Kay
soyonstout
S. Artesian
I still don't understand what the disagreements are.
about general strike vs. mass strike, or something else?
Well that's a non-starter, since Luxemburg's source for the 'anarchist general strike' is a polemic by... Friedrich Engels.
I suppose I meant in connection to the Madison events. I agree that the 'anarchist general strike' that Luxemburg sees as "refuted" in her text is a strawman, and actually probably more associated with ideas current in the SDP, specifically the union leaders at that time. But I also still don't think "general strike" is specific enough, and frequently is used by the business unions to mean a single day (or even afternoon) of action, run by them, segmented by them, and policed by them. In France it is not uncommon and has recently been able to stop government reforms.
"Mass strike" is an incredibly vague idea, and linguistically meaningless to most people, but central to most formulations of it is the idea of a series of conflicts on many fronts, not called by bureaucrats, and controlled by organizations created during, for, and accountable to the struggle itself--that and the idea that it is not an event but a bunch of events. Pushing for this is different than resolving in favor of a general strike and even propagandizing for it, if the kind of general strike is not elaborated as one that is self-organized, etc., I think. Perhaps since we mostly don't have "general strikes" in the states after WWII, the audience will think of the old general strikes like Seattle, etc., but the concept itself leaves a lot of room for the union tops, in my opinion.
I also agree with Artesian that it's unclear what the disagreements were and the preface doesn't make much sense without that context.
soyonstout
Perhaps since we mostly don't have "general strikes" in the states after WWII, the audience will think of the old general strikes like Seattle, etc., but the concept itself leaves a lot of room for the union tops, in my opinion.
Huh?
The year with the most citywide general strikes in U.S. history was after WWII, in 1946. Here are the cities and the sectors that sparked off these near-insurrectionary work stoppages:
1. Machinists in Stamford, CT
2. Transit workers in Lancaster, PA
3. City employees in Houston, TX
4. City employees in Rochester, NY
5. Electrical workers in Pittsburg, PA
6. Department store clerks in Oakland, CA
The 1946 Strike Wave was pretty amazing:
—750,000 steel workers walked out in January in the largest single industry strike in U.S. history
—there were strikes by 300,000 meatpackers, 174,000 electrical workers, longshoremen, maritime workers, truckers, autoworkers, in addition to work stoppages in nearly every sector
—a bituminous coal strike caused national brown-outs in the spring, then soft-coal miners went on strike at same time, as well as railroad engineers and trainmen, bringing national commerce to a standstill
—it was the closest to a national general strike ever—or at least since Great Upheaval Railroad Strike of 1877
—with so many workers wildcatting, Truman threatened to draft strikers into the military; coal miners retort with the famous: "Let's see them mine coal with bayonets"
The numbers:
—4,985 strikes
—4,600,000 workers participate
—116,000,000 "man-days" lost to industrial production
All of these statistics are the all-time record for the U.S.; nearly all these actions were wildcats and union bureaucrats did everything they could to try to contain them, usually in vain.
Taft-Hartley in 1947 was the state's response.
Hieronymous, I'm sorry--I can't believe I forgot that--I should have said since Taft-Hartley. In fact I remember you making the point somewhere that the reason people don't talk about the '46/'47 strike wave was that it isn't in history books because it was against the unions. I think I guess I made the same mistake and went back the last general strikes that the leftists talk about, which were mostly before that period and mostly also had the character of being largely self-organized. I suppose I was just trying to distinguish that from the classic CGT general strike which is often only partly observed because they call them sometimes without much connection to the membership, etc.
In the end it is partly a semantic issue, because there's nothing stopping the unions from calling for a "mass strike" rather than a "general strike"--I suppose the important thing, which some in and around the Madison struggle were doing, is to explain the importance of self-organization and not allowing the strike to be limited by any part of the bourgeois order, including the union tops & labor laws & "democratic processes" in the union designed to divide workers. I think the reason the luxemburgist concept of "mass strike" was ever introduced was to critique the (in my opinion misguided) strategy of getting endorsements for a general strike, while acknowledging that the IWW and other organizations there probably did a lot more than just that.
soyonstout
... the reason people don't talk about the '46/'47 strike wave was that it isn't in history books because it was against the unions.
Yeah, that's pretty much correct.
But there is one excellent history that covers that period, which is George Lipsitz's Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. He covers all 6 of those general strikes in 1946, as well as the wildcats and working class militancy of the period.
Sorry to derail the thread.
Insurgent Notes #5, January 2012
Content from issue 5 of this communist journal, mainly themed around the Occupy movement in the United States.
Comments
Globalization of Capital, Globalization of Struggle
Editorial for Insurgent Notes Issue No. 5 on the Occupy Movement.
"Rise like lions after slumber… Ye are many, They are few."
Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
It was a long time coming. Governments collapsing in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and perhaps soon in Yemen and Syria; repeated uprisings against austerity in Greece, riots in Britain, 100,000 “incidents” per year in China, month after month of student mobilization in Chile; finally, the worldwide wave of struggle of 2011 came to the United States in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and subsequent occupations in perhaps as many as 1,000 American cities and towns. For the United States, as for many of the countries in the Middle East, decades of the glaciation of struggle melted away in weeks. 2011 may not have had quite the global reach of 1968, but in the United States at least, in some ways, it surpassed 1968 in the months of sustained confrontation in so many places at the same time. As we said last spring about the important Madison forerunner of the fall Occupy movement, the old mole did its work well. Whatever else may happen from now on, a new historical period has opened up, and the decades in which the grinding post-1970s crisis were borne in silence, or sporadic uprisings were defeated in isolation, are over.
Something has escaped the control of the Democrats, the NGOs, the SEIU and the left sects—of official society and those attempting its mere facelift—which will not be easily brought to heel. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never before been in mass mobilizations (or mobilizations of any kind) found themselves confronting the police, facing tear gas and pepper spray, going to jail and learning in the streets what can never be learned any other way, namely the real role of the state’s “special body of armed men” and the fluidity and ebbs and flows of an unfolding practical movement in motion. As Marx once put it, “one concrete step forward of the real movement is worth a hundred programs.” 2012 shows every sign of being the year of further steps, and all the forces of the old world are scrambling for places in spurious hopes of shunting the movement into the Obama re-election campaign and into a kinder, gentler union movement, one which has for so long declined in its parochial, provincial preoccupation with keeping up the dues base long enough for the current generation of bureaucrats to retire with their multiple pensions and “après nous, le deluge.” (For most people, young or old, black or brown or white, the deluge started long ago.)
Insurgent Notes thus devotes the bulk of this issue to the Occupy movement.
Occupy in the United States of course invites inevitable comparison with the 1960s. And though we do not wish to discourage the great majority of participants in OWS and elsewhere too young to have experienced that decade, by invoking the long shadow of the sixties, a few comments are indeed in order to measure the historical distance from that era. The social and economic situation today is obviously far more dire. True, 1968 was exactly the year in which post-1945 trends toward greater income equality (not just in the United States but throughout the “advanced capitalist” world) were reversed, to become more unequal in the United States today than even in 1929. And one theme common to 1968 and 2011 is that of downwardly-mobile college-educated youth; it’s just that in 1968, the great majority of New Leftists did not yet know that most of them were downwardly mobile. No one today, in contrast to then, is talking about the “affluent society” or the “leisure society” or the looming “ten-hour work week,” conjured up by some post-scarcity-futurologists who didn’t understand that technology per se is not capital, and that capital only exists by exploiting living labor.
The 2011 movement, given the more critical situation which gave rise to it, has been on a much faster learning curve than the United States movement of the 1960s. If we view the “sixties” as lasting, in reality, from 1955 (the Montgomery bus boycott, the mass wildcat in auto against the UAW’s much-touted contract of that year) to 1973 (the “oil crisis,” the end of the postwar boom and the end of the wildcat movement) we note that it was not until 1965 that black militants (whatever their other problems) broke with the earlier pacifism of the civil rights movement, that the movement against the Vietnam War needed years to move from marginality to broad support in the population as a whole, and that the white, middle-class New Left student movement needed similar years to evolve from the vague discontent of the 1962 Port Huron statement to anything resembling an anti-capitalist perspective (however warped the largely Stalinist, Maoist and Third Worldist forms of that “anti-capitalism”) by 1968–69.
By contrast, the Occupy movement of 2011, particularly on the west coast, took only weeks (or less[1]) to see the need to link up with broader working class strata, to begin to question (at least by an important minority) the capitalist system per se, to go beyond its early pacifist outreach to the police, to attempt, with some success, to go beyond its initially white middle-class core to ally with blacks and Latinos, and most importantly, to strike an important chord of sympathy with the broader population.
OWS also echoed the early 1960s New Left in its mistrust of leaders[2], ideologies and demands. This reflected a decade or more of experience by some of its core members in actions before and after the 1999 Seattle mobilization against the WTO, with the consensus meeting format (sometimes diluted to 90 percent or 80 percent agreement) and the “people’s mic.” These methods were developed for many reasons, among them the negative counter-model of older left faction fights and left sect attempts to infiltrate and manipulate meetings in search of recruits. Many “stars,” Hollywood and others, who visited occupied sites in sympathy or support duly accepted the same rules. The consensus format may not survive when more strictly working-class strata go into motion and more divisive questions confront the movement (the latter having already surfaced in Occupy in a number of cities over the question of the police, the presence of Ron Paul sympathizers, the splits between the liberal/social-democratic majority at the origins and the emerging radical currents, etc.), but it did have the merits of forcing speakers to talk succinctly and to the point, to avoid ideological diversions and to keep attentions focused.
Nor should it be forgotten that the early 1960s New Left also began with a distrust of “ideology,” only to wind up in the late 1960s mired in the worst “first time tragedy, second time farce” regurgitation of 1930s variants of Stalinist ideology. “Ideology” is by definition a falsification of reality, to which we counter-pose theory. “Consciousness is something the world must acquire, even if it does not want to,” as someone once wrote.[3] Like all young movements emerging from deep social processes, Occupy will have to confront more clearly where it stands on questions of program, its relationship to the millions of working people who sympathized from afar but went about their daily routines often a block away from the occupations, the dynamic of race and class in American society, not to mention to the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. It was refreshing indeed, in contrast to the 1960s, that the participants in Occupy were clearly struggling for themselves, and not in a vague solidarity with little-understood peasant guerrillas or bureaucratic statist regimes on the other side of the planet. That reality, by itself, turns the page on an era.
OWS and its nationwide offshoots did, however, have a diffuse ideology, and that ideology was populism, a current with deep roots in American history. While the idea of the “99 percent” did serve to capture the popular imagination by highlighting the unprecedented amassing of wealth by the “1 percent” (or the 0.1 percent, or the 0.01 percent) in recent decades, it equally fostered many illusions, beginning with the pacifist outreach to the police. But equally if not more problematic were a series of mystifications, above all the excessive focus on financial institutions as the heart of the crisis, as opposed to a global crisis in the spheres of material production and reproduction underway for decades,[4] of which “financialization,” however defined and however important, is merely a symptom and a response to deeper trends. Amidst the myriad of targets of the occupation movements, “capitalism” was merely one more item on a laundry list, with generally little understanding of what capitalism, or its actual abolition, entails, thus leaving the door wide open to populist slogans from “Abolish the Federal Reserve” to “tax the rich” and “make the rich pay their fair share.” Some significant part of Occupy still remains vulnerable to the Keynesian siren songs of a Joseph Stiglitz or a Jeffrey Sachs.
One of the movement’s strengths was its resistance to the pressure from various outside forces, starting with the media, for “concrete demands,” not to mention for leaders able to negotiate such demands[5] and thus become targets for repression and co-optation. As someone put it, even OWS activists who wanted demands did not know what those demands were. CLR James remarked long ago that the realities of capitalism in its statist phase[6] educate people directly and prepare the point of departure of revolt with an inchoate sense of what is necessary. However diverse and scattered the specific consciousness of participants, the lack or refusal of demands expressed the deep reality of the movement as one of a blocked society, which implied total transformation, however poorly articulated. What were the “demands” in France in May 1968 or in Argentina in 2001/2002, or other situations where “power lay in the streets”? What are the “demands” in Greece today? The total transformation required—we call it revolution—is not something one “demands,” but something one does.
The movement also expresses in its concrete existence what may be its most important practical discovery: after decades of the (mainly) failures of workplace struggle, of the dispersion of the working population in further suburbanization and ex-urbanization, of whole de-industrialized regions, of casualization and the decline of stable, long-term employment in one workplace, the Occupy movement discovered the remaining central public space as the one place of visibility capable of reaching large numbers of people. “Making shame more shameful still by making it public” (Marx[7]) was an important part of what OWS and its spinoffs were about, after decades in which so much degradation and rollback had been suffered in atomized silence, buried by the trashy feel-good media and the enforced anonymity of people who suffered increasing job insecurity, the reality or threat of homelessness, ever-more expensive health care or no health care at all, useless diplomas and “retraining” from dubious fly-by-night educational scams, downsizing, lengthening work weeks and declining real income with two and three precarious jobs, disappearing pensions, skyrocketing school tuitions, arbitrary week-to-week shift changes and scheduling (designed for no other reason than to tire, and demoralize, and fragment any potential workplace solidarity), electronic surveillance, and “just in time” production methods. Like the Argentine piqueteros who realized the increasing limits of struggle focused on the factory, and expanded it instead to the supermarket, the hospital, the police station and the freeway blockage, OWS discovered a form of militant organization in which a thousand different grievances could be aired and made visible, not least through its often skillful use of new electronic media.
Insurgent Notes thus presents in this issue several accounts of the occupation movement in New York City as well as in Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and, perhaps most importantly, in Oakland and Seattle, where the radicalization was arguably (along with Portland) the deepest and where the linkup with workers the most direct. These accounts show, in some important instances, an evolution away from pacifist dreams about the police, the growing participation of working people and working people of color, the different local relations between Occupy, the official labor movement and the rank-and-file (as in Oakland and in Seattle), how the movement (as in Seattle) confronted the problems of violence within the occupation, and how, through experience, a radical current emerged in relation to the liberal/social-democratic forces that were dominant at the outset and, in other instances, where little of that happened.
We would like to acknowledge the reprinting of an Insurgent Notes leaflet, distributed on November 17th at Union Square and Foley Square, in Hella Occupy, a pamphlet distributed across the country on December 12th. We appreciate the additional distribution of our perspective.
We also continue our chronicling of the decomposition of the United States economy and society with an article on US infrastructure; with a letter from Paris on the background of Olivier Besancenot, who made a furtive appearance in New York promoting his disintegrating “New Anti-Capitalist Party,” and finally an update on the “indignados” movement in Barcelona.
Notes
[1] It should not be forgotten that Occupy Portland and Occupy Seattle had before them from the beginning the reality of the (still far from resolved) August confrontation between longshoremen and police in Longview, Washington, which is treated in several contributions to this issue of Insurgent Notes.
[2] OWS and other occupations were not quite as free of “leaders” as was widely touted by both the movement and the media; cf. John Heilemann’s article in the December 2011 issue of New York Magazine or the Oakland “insurrectionist anarchists” mentioned in Jack Gerson’s article in this issue of IN. Over time, these “non-leader leaders” became known as the “1 percent of the 99 percent.”
[3] Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843.
[4] For more on this, see The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain.
[5] Here again, OWS, or parts of it, recalled the success of the 1960s media in setting up spectacular “leaders” who then in one way or another distorted the reality, bringing them their fifteen minutes of fame, and smaller numbers even remembered the battle cry of the I.W.W. from a hundred years ago “We are all leaders.”
[6] CLR James, Facing Reality, Bewick Publications, 1958. James was talking about “state capitalism” as a world phenomenon of the 1950s, but his remark can equally be applied to the arguably more pervasive, quasi-totalitarian expansion of commodity relationships since then.
[7] A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
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OWS and the working class
How has the Occupy Movement impacted the lives of the "traditional" wage-earning working class and how do they see the Occupy? Brief notes from NYC and NJ.
The two most common refrains I’ve heard from people at my job on the Occupy Wall Street movement is that:
1) It is nothing more than a media spectacle, or
2) An ephemeral protest that will die out soon enough.
I have even been told that workers at a Burger King close to Zucotti Park were lamenting their low wages all the while facing signs which demanded an end to wage slavery. As frustrating as this may sound to the left, who are justifiably excited over a revival of radical politics, many workers cannot see the movement’s relevancy to their own lives, yet still feel the pangs of the crisis perhaps more painfully than most. This apparent disconnect, however, is not due to ignorance of the message of OWS or its distortion by the media—as if a precondition of revolutionary consciousness requires taking stock of every shred of information available. Neither can it be explained as a phenomenon related to an urban environment as such. Rather, this gap rests on the mistaken assumption by the Occupiers that their struggle is the common struggle for all of the working class, as exemplified in such opaque terminology as “the 99 percent.” This conflation lays the groundwork for a variety of other problems which reinforce a certain type of radical politics that on one hand “demands nothing/everything,” while at the same time locates crisis in finance and banking. Thus discussions of political pluralism or “diversity of tactics,” which seeks to be as inclusive as possible to all participants, the Occupiers’ support of and commiseration with unions as institutional victims of the crisis as well as attempts to block foreclosures, all provide an ambiguous yet complex picture of a movement grappling with the issue of class and its representation in 21st century America.
One continuing feature of OWS has been the notion of “no demands” and the political heterogeneity of the occupations and movement in general. The occupations officially started on September 17th and were aimed at the “financial heart” of capitalism, namely Wall Street, as it was perceived to be the primary location of where capital reproduces itself and by default, where the core of the crisis emanated. Tents pitched, the Occupiers ended up in Zuccotti Park where they were able to obtain food and other items for living without cost based on donations from supporters who had access to such means.[1] This first stage grew immensely not just across the country, but globally within weeks. The very idea of occupying a public space allowed the movement to become open to all who felt the pangs of the crisis to come and bring their own concerns. This open space was able to absorb all ideas which seemed to be politically marginalized by the media and by politics proper, that is, those of the state. This plurality convinces many that due to the far-ranging political beliefs, all could be accommodated under a broad message no matter what their position or situation was. Fringe right-wing libertarians could stand next to bourgeois environmentalists while both participated in a session of “the People’s Mic” from a socialist lecturing on Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. They may bitterly disagree with one another on an individual basis, but that is not what OWS is about; it is not personal politics but a united politics based on general outrage due to the crisis.
As September turned into October, much of the old guard of the labor movement expressed a mixture of glee and caution to the Occupiers, who they saw as potentially manipulative. However, with the weakened position of unions both due to decades of neoliberal victories and also of the immanent bureaucratic tendencies of union themselves, they were soon joined by thousands of students in a march from Foley Square near City Hall to symbolically join the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park. On October 5th, approximately 20,000 rank and file workers, union leaders, community organizers and students marched in unison. Reactions from onlookers, particularly the working class, were largely positive, with truckers honking their horns, construction workers clapping and restaurant and bar workers throwing fists in the air. The atmosphere seemed to be one of genuine unity from all who felt the pangs of the crisis. One banner which had been unfurled at a fountain at the center of Foley Square announced the “American Autumn.” The unions thus seized upon precisely this opportunity in order to reinvigorate public sympathy and associate their struggle as those of the workers, especially those of the public sector. Rather than taking actions which could indefinitely paralyze the city from working and therefore really put the question of labor’s involvement in OWS in a more pointed and concrete manner, the unions opted to marshal their own on November 17th in order to make sure there would be no confrontation with the NYPD. No general strike, no nothing. The Occupiers, caught up in the left populist rhetoric of understanding the unions as defenders of the working class, have offered no substantial critique of the role of unions, in spite of many opportunities which could have been taken but were missed. Certain socialist elements within OWS have often voiced their complaint about the faint-hearted role of the unions in radicalizing the movement, but were either continually ignored or shouted down for the sake of mass appeal and plurality.
Other strategies which have been somewhat less frequent yet perhaps appeal in a more direct manner to the working class such as walking the picket line and preventing the foreclosure of homes. In Brooklyn, hundreds of Occupiers prevented several families from eviction and the police, whose normally abusive behavior towards OWS seemed to out of character as no mass arrests or acts of violence were committed. These events are ongoing, yet have thus far not materialized into an expansion of the Occupation.
Elsewhere in America…
Since the official start of the crisis in 2008, the working class in New Jersey has also engaged in its fair share of strikes and protests. Public sector workers in New Jersey have been on the defensive since the right-wing Republican governor Chris Christie stepped into office in 2010, first attacking the NJEA, the teachers’ union. Small protests had broken out, but nothing to the extent of what happened in Madison, Wisconsin last winter of 2011. The aggressive campaign against state workers has been justified as to correct New Jersey’s spiraling debt which had reached a peak under the former liberal Democratic governor Jon Corzine.[2]
In September of 2010, longshoremen launched a wildcat strike on the docks of Port Elizabeth in solidarity with their comrades in Camden and in Philadelphia who were being squeezed by Del Monte Fruit Company. Del Monte was attempting to save on shipping costs by moving its operations to a non-unionized (ILA) dock in Camden. The strike spread to Newark, Staten Island and Brooklyn. Hopes were high that it would become national, but ended within a few days that same month. Actions have occurred with or without the unions in New Jersey and elsewhere in America, and rather than opposing financiers, striking workers have come up directly against their own bosses who are in the business of providing “productive” services.[3] Such occurrences, due to their short-lived nature, receive some coverage before being subsumed by sports news and interest pieces on gardening, etc. Few media commentators would ridicule such actions, but in so many empathetic gestures, stress the danger if it were to spread further.
The general opinion of OWS among workers I’ve spoken with has been a combination of dismissal, pride and ridicule—often by the same worker. Dismissal, because they don’t see how the occupation of public spaces like parks and city-owned land could possibly halt the crisis in its tracks. One worker reacted with surprise when he heard that there was outrage on the part of the Occupiers after the OWS Library had been torn down—“It’s not even a real structure, so what do you expect?” At face value, this may seem callous, reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s indignant poet who scolds the illiterate arsonist for burning the Tuileries Library in Paris. Speaking with this worker and others, who have likewise called the initiative of setting up tents in Manhattan as food for the media, have also praised it—“finally, somebody in this country is standing up for something”—and even recognizing that “protests [like OWS] take time.” These contradictory perspectives point to a tendency that in fact wants to see the occupation go beyond their current state to something more militant, and see this as their opportunity to do so. For these workers, however, their critiques also suggest that it is not their fight. In the midst of union revitalization, their fight is to combat the reformist tendencies, the poison pill contracts of the TWU, ILU and SEIU if any progress is to be made in improving their own lives.
“Into the Wild”
Almost two hours south of Zuccotti Park, less than a hundred or so men, women and children have set up tents in the woods outside of Lakewood, New Jersey. They are unemployed chefs, construction workers and retired pensioners—all of whom are looking for jobs. They subsist off of church charity and the site is built like a small town, complete with road signs and visible pathways. Their involuntary displacement in the woods is not symbolic. More and more, the working class finds itself outside in tents, or in other cases, cars. Not just in New Jersey, but also in Florida more of these tent communes have cropped up over the past year. Yet their demands have not been voiced as an attack on greedy bankers and their ideology is one of self-blame. They have already proven months before September 17th that occupying public and private space is feasible, that pulling together without the use of money is possible and that tying one’s belt tighter are all tendencies of survival in the midst of crisis.
Capital can tolerate people leaving their apartments at will to sleep outside, to march, to demonstrate, to occasionally fight and provoke fights with the police. It cannot tolerate when these same people decide to organize their workplaces against the dictates of profit, or to cease working at an NGO and in any of the FIRE industries.[4] It cannot tolerate when they refuse to leave their apartments because of an eviction notice. It cannot tolerate when these same actions multiply en masse and demand further participation that may lead to confrontation with the police and military, not out of ideological rage, but out of necessity. No longer will it then be a question of representation of the working class or preservation of its classic forms of organization, but the total abolition of waged labor by the working class themselves.
Notes
[1] Later a “Finance Committee” was established, having receiving approximately $500,000 in donations.
[2] Corzine has been subpoenaed by a House committee for financial malfeasance in MF Global, a futures broker.
[3] A slogan which both Occupiers as well as their conservative detractors have used to describe any individual who produces something, regardless of their relation to their tools, equipment, the shop-in short, to their relationship to the means of production. Workers, those who have nothing but their capacity to perform work for a wage, find themselves being abstractly lumped together with small business owners and the self-employed. Such a term like “productive class” promotes an identity (like “the 99 percent”) over a social relation, the working class or proletariat.
[4] FIRE = Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.
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Reports From the Occupy Wall Street Events of Mid-November
Just getting started or funeral march? RS takes a look at the events of November 17 ("N17") in New York City and ponders the fate of OWS.
November 15–Dawn of the Dead
By now the story is well known: In the early morning hours of November 15, organized forces of the NYPD stormed the Occupy Wall Street encampment, evicting those who remained in Zuccotti Park by force. Those in the park had been “temporarily” ordered out a few hours earlier under the pretense of allowing access to sanitation crews.
In the lead up to the eviction, social media, email, and phones of those with any connection or interest in the ongoing occupation lit up with calls to come to the defense of the encampment. A similar attempt to clear the park under the rubric of “sanitation” had earlier been abandoned in the face of mass opposition, and there were hopes that this attack too could be turned back.
I had visited the park a few times before since Occupy began, and quite honestly wasn’t impressed. The potential of the movement, revealing itself in short bursts and in various actions, was visible from the beginning; but the actual camp in Zuccotti was quite limited. But although I had no desire to spend my nights in the encampment, I felt a real need to help defend it, driven largely by a deep-seated opposition to the egregious acts of the state.
I arrived just as the shit hit the fan, but was too far away to be hit by the splatter. The police kept onlookers, supporters, those who had fled the encampment, and even members of the media far away from the park—or at least far enough way to prevent them from seeing what was going on.
Most of those involved in the encampment beat a hasty retreat when it became clear that the cops were going to move in. A common theme heard amongst the crowd was that people should avoid arrest so that they could participate in the planned “Day of Action” on November 17. Still, others were adamant that their “new home” in the park had to be defended. For them, simply maintaining the encampment signified victory. In the end, a few dozen stalwarts remained as the police pushed forward, locking themselves together and preparing for what was to come.
Tensions ran high. A few scuffles broke out on the periphery as the baton-wielding police cleared Zuccotti and pushed hard against the wall of humanity that surrounded it.
During all of this and throughout the day, I argued to anyone would listen that it was a mistake to make a fetish out of the physical occupation of the park. I did my best to explain that attempting to maintain the encampment at all costs would in all likelihood lead to an undue expenditure of time, energy and resources (fighting matches, arrests, bail, etc.). I argued that it was necessary at all times to remain flexible, weigh our options, and not get bogged down.
The biggest advance marked by the emergence of the occupation is that it has brought thousands throughout the city, state, and even the world, into contact with each other, opening regular discussions and debates up among people from different ages, regions and industries. Though proponents can come under attack, this state of affairs cannot be arrested, beaten or evicted.
In the early morning, there was little support to be found for my arguments. That would change as the day went on.
In a short period, the eviction was completed, with everyone besides the police and clean up crew forced out and away from the park. Different proposals were raised, though none won over the crowd. There was a feeling of mass confusion. Finally, a group broke off and headed north, through the heavily fortified corridor, to Foley Square.
As the group marched toward its destination it was met by numerous police who apparently were stationed at their posts in advance, in anticipation of just such a turn of events. At every intersection, these cops would come out into the street with each red light, holding back a section and dividing the ragtag group into smaller and smaller pieces. As someone at the head of the pack later explained: “We were marching, then some of us turned around and realized there was no one behind us anymore!” One member of the media described it as “a very professional way of breaking the group up.” By all accounts, the slicing and dicing would have made a butcher proud.
Not everyone was a part of the Foley-bound group. In fact, the only sure thing at that time was that nothing was sure. Different people made different claims and proposals, throwing out the names of numerous locations to serve as the new center.
The biggest development came when a large number headed to Duarte Square, a small public space that borders a fenced-in, undeveloped park-like property owned by a church. By the time I arrived at the area, there were a few hundred people in and around the square, with a few dozen straddling the top of an easy-to-climb wooden fence that lines up one side of the church property. A makeshift encampment was starting to come together inside, and occupy banners hung from the chain link fence that made up the other three sides.
The majority of people were either standing in the public section of Duarte Square or on the sidewalks around the church property. The familiar drum circle appeared. There were very few cops visible.
As I circulated through the group, I argued that the location left a lot to be desired. It was obvious to me that locking yourself into a cage is not a good idea. For the most part I was waved off or ignored, though a few individuals did voice agreement.
The new focus for most became the enclosure. I continued to move around outside, looking for people I recognized and talking to many of those I didn’t. I wound up at the back end of the enclosure, where a number of onlookers had gathered. Suddenly, I saw it: a line of armored police emerged from a side street in military formation. Then another. And another. One by one the groups marched slowly around the square and boxing it in. Most inside the square seemed oblivious. Some of us tried to make others aware of what was materializing, but our warnings largely fell on deaf ears.
Those of us not willing to wait around for the inevitable advance made our way outside of the police line while it was still possible. We joined a growing crowd on the side of the park, watching everything unfold through the links of the fence.
A new square police formation then appeared outside of the other. This one, which faced outward, was meant to keep the small but growing crowd away from the “clean up squad” as it moved in. When the inside formation began its advance, any remaining doubt of what was about to happen was removed. Some fled the enclosure. Others set up shoddy barricades at the gate which appeared to amuse the waiting police more than anything.
Finally a group of armored cops busted in, easily hurdling the knee-high barricade and chasing down those inside the fenced area. Onlookers gasped and yelled as officers hit those trying to retreat with nightsticks from behind. One who managed to wrest a stick free from his would-be-assaulter received the worst of it, coming under the attack of several well armed officers. After receiving his summary beating, he was drug out of the square horizontally.
It was at this time that I began to yell out, over and against the apologia of one particularly unsavory toady among us. Unable to hold back my fury, I raised my voice loud enough to be heard by all, including the line of police standing only a few feet away. What started out as an outburst meshed with the feelings of the crowd, disgusted as they were by what they had just witnessed. To my surprise, despite making the sort of confrontational, openly communist arguments that would usually bring disdain, the crowd became electrified, audibly voicing its approval.
“The police are nothing more than the defenders of capital,” I yelled. “They defend the interests of corporations and banks against the people who actually do all the work, who create all the wealth that they lock in their fucking vaults.” The support grew louder!
To be clear, this is not to say we were on the verge of Another October. But it was certainly the best hearing I’d ever received for such arguments; and it was taking place on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan.
Many individuals in the crowd, which was largely made up of people who had not had any exposure to Occupy before then, shouted out things like “right on,” “exactly,” etc. I continued on, saying something like: “The police will never defend us, never join us, never be on our side. If you’re raped or have your car stolen you’re out of luck. But if you’re a bank or corporation, you have this massive armed apparatus at your disposal, to enforce your interests at the expense of everyone else.” Cheers broke out. The police line that confronted us menacingly only moments earlier grew visibly uncomfortable.
As the raid wound down, members of various media began to approach me, attracted no doubt by my furious pronouncements. I was quite happy to utilize my madness to gain access to a wider audience.
I was asked to state my arguments by an interviewer from an independent news outlet and another from a French radio station. I restated my previous arguments regarding the fetish of the park occupation, the advance the widespread discussions and debates represented, and the need to move forward.
I argued for the need to connect the struggle to active labor. To paraphrase: “Imagine most of the students and even a huge number of office workers came out and started supporting this. Great, right? Now imagine the transit workers that drive the buses and subways joined this. Imagine the truckers that bring everything in and out of the city joined us. That would shut down the entire city. Imagine a replay of the 2005 transit strike that brought the city to a screeching halt, then add in mass support and participation by large numbers of unemployed people, people in other industries, etc.” The crowd, which had by then focused on the question and answer session going on, was nearly unanimous in their agreement. I heard more than a few say that such an action would be a great way forward.
The interviewer from the French radio outlet, who was clearly more familiar with such mass actions than his American counterpart, asked if I was calling for a general strike. I answered that at the present time a general strike in the traditional sense could be problematic due to the existence of a huge number of isolated, desperate, unemployed workers that would almost certainly guarantee a plentiful supply of replacement workers, and the desire of many capitalists to get out from under the workplaces they own. I pointed to examples of factories like the Stella D’Oro cookie plant in the Bronx being shut down following strike action. (The ground under the Stella D’Oro factory was recently sold at a huge profit to make way for yet another set of retail shops). I said that workers shouldn’t, and in all likelihood wouldn’t, take action that would effectively amount to firing themselves.
Instead, I argued that mass strikes in combination with workplace occupations would be the best way forward. I said that workers occupying a factory or other workplace could actually utilize the army of unemployed people by inviting them to come and take part, participate, and share in anything produced. Additionally, I said such occupations would have to move beyond basic demands and raise their sights on worker control of all of society. I was astonished to find these arguments again met with widespread approval by many of those around me. These high points were brief. Soon the square was empty. The line of police remained, but the crowd began to dissolve.
A smaller group of those most interested in what I was saying started to congeal. We started to discuss these questions and more. Most introductions began with a common refrain: I’m in debt, I have no money, I have no job. Most were interested in the occupation since it first made headlines, but only one had actually participated in it before that day.
Eventually, our small group made it back to Zuccotti Park. Not much was happening. A crowd was gathered around. The double ring of barricades was back in place. The park was now occupied by a combination of NYPD officers and private security guards, with everyone else on the outside looking in.
The exterior ring of the barricades was eventually penetrated; first by one, then another, then the whole crowd. Soon we could walk freely between the two sections. Only a portable metal fence and a few dozen cops separated us from the park.
In the hours that followed our little group joined up with a friend of Insurgent Notes and a few others. Some great discussions followed, sometimes bringing in interested parties who overheard our conversation. People came in and out. A large number agreed with my arguments, and a number of contacts were exchanged.
The police presence was large, but the atmosphere seemed incredibly free. From time to time, people would outright defy police orders, the crowd would turn its attention to the conflict, and the police would back down. Even more often, individuals would berate the police stationed in and around the park—calling them the sorts of things that would usually get your arrested, beat down, or both—and then went on about their business. The crowd was quite varied. The left sects were notable only in their absence.
Eventually, a police captain announced over a bullhorn that people would be allowed back inside the park, but would be searched upon entry. Expressly forbidden were the things like tents and sleeping bags that make camping out possible. A small opening was made in the barricade, and people began to file in. At this point, our group had greatly thinned out. I had been out for several hours and decided to depart.
Of course, despite the tensions and conflicts encountered throughout the day, things continued to function normally in most of the city. I was brought back to that reality after leaving the area around Zuccotti. Business as usual… tourists, workers and Wall Street parasites jostled for space on the crowded sidewalk leading back to the subway.
The real isolation of Occupy Wall Street—even on this day, with all its increased visibility, involvement, attention and support—was obvious. This was clearly demonstrated a few hours earlier at a Burger King restaurant across the street from Zuccotti Park. Inside, I overheard workers complaining about management and talking about their plight working for little pay in such a dehumanizing environment. Despite being able to see the encampment through the window of the restaurant, they made no connection between their conditions and what was going on. This is indicative of the situation more generally.
November 17–Day of the Dead
The events of the long-promoted “Day of Action” have been recorded by a large number of observers and participants. Walls of words, photos and video abound, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a little bit of free time. What follows then is more of a reflection on the day’s events than a play-by-play account.
1. In the early morning there was a rally of more than a 1,000 people near Zuccotti Park, which was the starting ground for an announced attempt to disrupt “business as usual” in the Financial District.From the gathering, groups broke off toward Wall Street. Routes were marked by participants carrying flags that signified the perceived threat of arrest.The New York Stock Exchange was approached from several different directions, with groups emerging in various intersections at different times. All streets leading in were barricaded, with more barricades beyond them.
Where I ended up, the crowd forced the police to move a barricade back. The same happened elsewhere. Eventually, the circle had closed in from several sides and we were all closer to the stock exchange. At that point, it wasn’t clear what would happen.
The kinds of scuffles broke out that can be expected. Here and there the police would do in some poor soul, claim they did this or that, and then carry them off to a van headed for jail. In general though, the NYPD seemed more restrained than usual. It appeared they wanted to hold off the crowd rather than deal with mass arrests. Some barricade movements were clearly strategic.
A few small groups penetrated the barricades on their own, but they were all quickly found out and dealt with. Other such incidents found a similar end. Eventually, despite physical advances, the whole thing sort of petered out.
The motto of the action was “Shut Down Wall Street.” That certainly didn’t happen. But the street activity around it was surely disrupted.
The police set up checkpoints in the area, only letting people with suits and/or “proper identification” that indicated they worked in the area through. The rest were kept away.
Plans for “subway occupations” received a lot of attention. Train stations near Wall Street were filled with police and their specially-trained dogs, and officers also rode on the trains themselves. In the end, not much actually materialized in the way of protest activity on the subways. In a handful of stations, exits were reportedly chained open to let passengers board the trains for free.
2. Around noon I headed back to Zuccotti. It was the usual scene, though there was notably less pro-police sentiment than in weeks past. It seemed the events of the 15th had changed a lot of minds, and also drew out more who knew better than to think the cops were our friends or protectors.Illusions in capitalism remained, with more than a few arguing that all that is needed is to get “money out of politics” and “let capitalism work.” Any mention of class politics was for the most part unpopular—after all, “we are all the 99%.” But conversely, there was some rudimentary communist sentiment. At the very least, participants were questioning things, and most were very much open to discussion.There was word of student strikes around. Since the park was more stagnation than standoff at this point, I headed off, eventually stopping at two separate universities. Each had public student meetings that drew no more than a few dozen participants.
3. In the afternoon, there was a student rally in Union Square. Around 1,000 people showed up, mostly from a student march that had originated uptown. It was the typical rally for the most part, though the chant “students and workers, shut the city down” is not one often heard these days in the U.S.Noticeable in the crowd were a number of professionally-made campaign signs typical of the “full-time activist” crowd. This was an indication of what was to come.
4. In the evening I traveled to Foley Square, where the “big rally” was scheduled to happen. When I passed by earlier in the day, I noticed that the area had been cleared out, with police signs announcing a “planned parade.” I had asked many who it was that secured the permits for this rally, but no one in Zuccotti or the morning actions near Wall Street seemed to know.I arrived early on, with the first few handfuls of people. A stage was set up. In front of it, peace marshals signed in and received their instructions.As people began to file in from the subway station in small groups, they snapped up copies of the Insurgent Notes statement. Quite a few expressed their agreement with its calls for moving toward workplace occupations.
Then, there was a shift. Organized contingents suddenly arrived from all sides. In a matter of minutes, the square was full with thousands of people. Banners of most of the unions, joined by the distinct signs of pressure and front groups, flew high above the heads of the various groups who appeared seemingly from nowhere. And the processional activists joined them, with their ready-made signs, sound systems, stages, etc.
The left sects showed up too. There were all there; enough acronyms to fill up a bowl of alphabet soup, though it’d be as hard to swallow as any of their various claims to the mantle of “proletarian vanguard.”
The transformation was as obvious as it was speedy. Despite all attempts at co-option, the Occupy movement had remained well outside of the narrow confines of “acceptable politics.” This event became something else: another good old reformist funeral march.
The militancy that remained, seething under the surface, was drowned out in a sea of mediocre pressure politics.
Many familiar faces of the park occupation and subsequent struggles were sidelined. I saw quite a few sitting dejected in the grassy field at the back of the square, while the deafening tone of screeching “organizers” bellowing hackneyed old phrases blared out from the oversized speakers. One of the contacts I had made on the 15th who was there called it “a fucking circus” and announced her intention to get the hell out of there. Cold and tired, I decided to follow suit. The “regularly scheduled” march, brought to you by the SEIU & Co., was forced to go on without me.
After the parade ended, all but a few packed up their things and went home.
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Reflections on the New School occupation - Arya Zahedi
Arya Zahedi takes analyzes the All-City Student Occupation at The New School in NYC.
His extreme alienation can be contested only through a contestation of the entire society. This critique can in no way be carried out on the student terrain: the student who defines himself as such identifies himself with a pseudovalue that prevents him from becoming aware of his real dispossession, and he thus remains at the height of false consciousness. But everywhere where modern society is beginning to be contested, young people are taking part in that contestation; and this revolt represents the most direct and through critique of student behavior.
–On the poverty of student life
On November 17th, 2011, the Study Center at 90 Fifth Avenue, an office building leased by the New School University, was occupied by participants in the all-city student assembly in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The building was taken during a march from a student rally at Union Square to Foley Square in downtown Manhattan—where the march was supposed to converge with a trade union march on the Brooklyn Bridge. For eight days the study center was occupied and almost from the very beginning conflicts of political nature began to rise within the occupation.
The occupation was not a specific New School occupation, in the sense that it was not conceived and planned by just New School students, revolving around campus issues. It was planned and organized by the city-wide student assembly and had, from the very beginning, been seen as part of the city-wide movement. The reason for taking the building at the New School was logistical and based on the possibility of its success. The occupation, regardless of outcome, was an incredible learning experience. Most importantly it revealed the many different political tendencies at work, as well as where to move forward. It started in a very euphoric mood. Almost immediately, events were set up and coordination among the various student general assemblies was established. The space was quickly transformed into a educational social space for the entire city’s radical movement. Pushing it further than even making it open to all students, one of the struggles for the occupation from the beginning was to make it open to all people regardless of student status.
General assemblies were conducted immediately. Within the space there were daily general assemblies for the occupation, as well as the weekly all-city general assembly. The people’s university, which was previously held in Washington Square Park, was held there. Teach-ins were organized on a variety of topics, mostly dealing with the global capitalist crisis.
Overnight, the space was transformed from a space where the regular everyday life of student-hood was reproduced. A space where automatons sat staring directly, never talking. It was transformed from this to a space where discussions were taking place, on a variety of topics, not just explicitly political ones. But it became a social space where people could come together to work on projects, discuss topics of the day, organize other activities. The space was transformed into something different. People, who had never said a word to each other, from all over the city, were coming together and working and organizing, as well as organizing the day-to-day necessities of the occupation. A radical cinema was set up, with films running constantly, a station was set-up for silk screening and the making of banners and shirts.
The building was leased by the New School from a front company for one of the major banks. The landlord was unsurprisingly hostile, but his main concern was the fire codes. The president of the university, in contrast to his draconian predecessor, attempted to, take a very liberal handed approach to the occupation.
The occupation was never at any point total. Only the second floor was occupied. The security at the front of the building still had control of the main door. There should be no illusion that it was a total occupation with the freedom to completely recreate the space. It was, from the beginning, a negotiated space—whose existence and survival depended on negotiations with the administration. But that should not take anything away from the achievements of the occupation. Even in its limited form the occupation was an experiment; a temporary attempt at a different form of education, a different form of coming together and learning.
A few days into the occupation, the president proposed to resolve the issue by offering a gallery at the Parsons School of Design. The said gallery is open to view from the street and would make an excellent space for such an exhibit at the New School. The irony of it was lost on many of the students. The New School is an institution that uses some myth of radicalism in order to better sell its commodity. For an occupation to be taken and put into an art gallery said more than people were willing to admit. The offer also came with conditions. Most importantly that non–New School students would have to be signed in and that non-students would not be allowed entry, being the real point that changes the relation. The other was that it would only be open till the end of that semester. With all its limitations, the occupation at the original space was miles ahead of whatever could be done at this gallery. Now, there should have been no illusions that the occupation could have lasted forever, but to validate this new space was another matter all together. What was valuable about the occupation would have been completely missing from the new space. Even the educational activities would have been of a different nature. The new space would effectively turn it into another university event space no different from any other. They even put paper up on the walls so students could write graffiti without damaging the walls, as well as big letters on the window stating [“-uck capital.”] with the F removed. This said more than anything the nature of what was happening. This division brought out the real fractions within the existing student component of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
On the sixth day of the occupation, the president of the university called a “town hall” meeting to discuss the issue with the wider student body. Here was when the dissatisfaction of the student body became clear. This was used as an opportunity by the university administration and certain faculty to use the dissatisfaction of these students against the occupation. They were invited by some students present to attend the general assembly at the occupation that evening where the proposal would be discussed. The general assemblies being open to all, this was a vehicle through which an amazing display of bureaucratic manipulation and political opportunism was performed. It was during this general assembly that all the conflicts came to the fore. Students who had been hostile to the occupation from the beginning flooded the general assembly. Most of the people present, including many faculty members, were there only to vote out the occupation and leave. “For many of us the large attendance was a success, but very soon it became clear that the sole goal of the majority of participants present was not discussion, but a yes vote for the destruction of the occupation. The intention was to disrupt any possibility of dialogue and to frame the voting of the assembly in the manner of representational politics and parliamentary theater.”
The assembly turned quite aggressive and inflammatory. Emotions ran high and differences were expressed. Certain differences were apparent. But what were essentially political differences were once again obscured beneath the veil of identity politics. It was during this assembly that this was manifested in its most blatant and vulgar form. A number of students, from the management and business school, began to scream vitriol at the occupiers. These few students, who happened to also be people of color and women, were accusing the occupiers of being children of wealth (one even screamed that the occupiers were from the Hamptons.) Soon the debate was framed in terms of the space being occupied by spoilt rich white male anarchists. Never mind that the real debate was over students that wanted to be given a privileged place according to how much money they spent and those that wanted to make the space open to everybody. It was two different visions of the space. One of these students even stated that “Why should I pay $40,000 a year to let just anyone come and use this space?” Views such as this were held to somehow be more authentic and less bourgeois than the position that the space should be open to all in society and that the relationship between education and private property should be questioned and rearranged and, in so doing, provide a critique of capitalism as a whole. Once again instead of talking politics, the discussion became one of identity and background. The even remotest answer of any of these challenges only feeds into an already dead end. It legitimizes it by its very discussion. By this time an important factor in the occupation had been altered. By having the main discussion not be around the university president’s proposal, as well as the dissatisfaction of New School students, the occupation was effectively reincorporated into a New School issue and dealing with campus politics.
Something that was shocking about the occupation was how identity politics was used in such a reactionary way. The discourse of race and colonialism was used to defend private property. It revealed the worst excesses of the attempt to talk about these issues abstracted from the critique of capitalism. Although there was a great diversity to those who were participating in the occupation, it was always portrayed as something of a white man’s club. There was an illusion that everything was being run by straight white men. This completely ignored all the various women, people of color, queer people, etc., who were participating and making sure that their voices were heard. It was these comrades that made it a point to organize discussions and workshops such as the “safe spaces” workshop. For these people, it was difficult because while they were struggling to make sure the occupation was cognizant of their interests, they had to struggle with being made invisible and having their voices silenced. “Most who have had problems in the space have consistently returned, recognizing that the politics surrounding the occupation are not solidified, but are instead immanent to the space itself.”
Those who were opposed from the beginning to the occupation used this as a means to disrupt any support from the larger student body. A complaint that was often expressed by students who had some up and seen their study space transformed was “You’ve disrupted my routine.” This complaint expresses something deeper than what may be taken at face value. These people missed the point. For some of the student radicals in the occupation, alienating these voices was a source of anxiety. They could not see that one of the objectives of a strike or occupation is precisely the disruption of the flow of everyday life. It is a critique of this everyday life in practical material form. That is exactly the point that the routine was disrupted. This comes from the typical activist mentality that the goal is to gather numbers into some coherent umbrella and organization, and channel it into a form of struggle which does not cause the disruption and in turn the critique of capitalism at its daily experience. It fears that this approach which causes this disruption will be of some detriment to the “student movement,” which they hope they can build for some day, which never seems to come. Instead they could not realize that in a world of total alienation, it is important for people to become conscious of their alienation, and this does not come with the affirmation of that same alienated existence.
A cry that had become quite an important point was that of “alienating the student body.” While the writing of graffiti in many ways may rightly be seen as infantile, the obsession over it with regards to how it would appear to the outside, especially the wider student body, was revealing of many underlying fears and limitations on the part of many who were obsessed with this point. What many of these people failed to understand that the objective was not to have the space be a space for New School students, but for the larger radical community in NYC to have a space to organize. A radical social center in the heart of NYC was something that the city lacked. It was also an occupied space, that makes its own rules, and more importantly is confrontational by nature. As in most occupations, which are illegal and thereby confrontational, it is a reclaiming of space. Not only is the space transformed, but the people participating in this reclamation are also transformed along with the relations between these people. In this process, the space and the people within are in a constant state of becoming and transformation. Unlike the established society, in these moments the rules are not laid out. There is no blueprint, so there are certain excesses and contradictions. If anything, it reveals how ingrained the ideology of the established society is, that this became so incomprehensible to many. The horror at even the most benign acts of illegality, such as writing on the walls, or drinking alcohol in the space, were obsessed over and used by those with a fear of anything outside their control as a scare tactic. And this caused much confusion within the occupation.
The issue of safety within an occupation, especially within a space claiming radicalism, is of utmost importance. But this, in line with the conflict on graffiti, became a point that was used against the occupation. Discussions of people feeling accepted and safe were used to reaffirm a normalcy that just reconstituted what was struggled to overcome.
The plans of the administration worked. They were successful in using the larger student body against the occupation by manipulating their discontent as well as the divisions within the occupation. A vote was taken and the majority decided to move to the new space. A number of occupants decided to stay in the original space and not move to the new one, recognizing that the general assembly had been manipulated and used against the occupation. This threw many of the occupants who had voted to leave into a panic. Their biggest fear was that they would lose the student body’s support forever. But this was not an issue any more. For the struggle was now beyond the confines of the New School. In fear of their political opportunity being sacrificed, many of these elements who are either close to or members of some of the various left parties began a campaign of demonization of the students who had denounced the general assembly and remained. Accusations of vanguardism, ultra-leftism, and conspiritorialism were thrown at this faction of the occupation. This was clearly a process of red-baiting in order to save their own places in the future administration. But it succeeded it revealing political differences. It revealed their confused position. They profess revolution and radical thought, but in the face of something which they cannot control or predict, they retreat into the arms of the stability that they know. They chose to be closer to the administration and present themselves as the good and rational radicals as opposed to the unpredictable anarchists with their disdain for decency and private property.
These students include those who hope to gain future prospects as academics writing about their student radical days and hoping that events like the occupation will make for good publishing material. Then there are those that hope to become the leaders of the “student movement,” which will then give them good political clout in the future. Often these students are involved with one of the various left-political parties and toe their line. They carry hopes of resurrecting a dead form, which was decrepit even in its heyday. They hope to create the student movements of Europe and Latin America and in so doing wrest demands. They hope that in this process they can position themselves as being representative of “the political will of the student movement.” Their hope rests with the idea that this student movement can then attach itself to labor and follow the trade-unions into the sunset.
The experience of the occupation with all its shortcomings and contradictions was an incredibly positive experience. It is in the aftermath of this that we can better see our position in the struggle and where the fractures lay. For eight days a radical social space existed where a new type of learning was taking place. Where even if angry and shouting, people were having discussions that allowed them to think about the world they live in in a different way. It also brought people together, and even in the aftermath it pushed people together who saw that they had political commonalities that they may not have known before. People who had previously not known each other became comrades.
The manipulation from outside by the administration as well as the opportunism of many of the student “radicals” inside the occupation helped clear some of the illusions with regards to student politics. It presents with regards to the movement on the campuses the limits of certain activity, and the way foreword to move beyond into something else. The central division that has now arisen on the university campuses in the aftermath of the occupation is one tendency that wants to affirm a student identity in the hopes of building a “student movement,” and another, which sees its future only in the supersession of this identity, and advancing the struggle to a higher phase.
All these events have now laid out a clearer situation on university campuses throughout New York. The influence of the various student unions, as well as the various left organizations invariably are the main obstacle towards radicalizing the situation on the campuses. By constantly channeling the struggle towards appropriate means they invariably slow down the momentum of struggle that attaches it to the struggle outside of the campuses. The fascination with building a student movement is the hope of expressing its “political will.” This embodying of the representation of the student body is a hope to be in the position of mediator that can provide this representation. Like the trade unions in the work place as well as the left parties this role must be critiqued as well as the administration and the bosses. This activist mentality is what invariably points towards restoration before things have even gotten rolling.
At the New School, perhaps because of the pretensions towards critical thinking, the role of the left organizations is not as direct, but the same role of mediation which is held up for struggle exists through the various student unions and well organized assemblies. Some of these people are members of left organizations, but they don’t do open recruiting on campuses. Yet, many of those that still fall into this line ideologically (for this obsession with democracy and form is nothing if not ideology) have a presence. On the campuses of the City University of New York, the situation is slightly different, if not more serious.
This attack should not be confused with organizing on university campuses. The university is a major place where various forms of social reproduction and capital accumulation take place. So to organize at the university is as important as organizing at the workplace or in the community. But these forces build an obstacle to any meaningful organizing on the campuses, and turn it into a waste of time content with playing the same game, one that will hopefully teach the proper skills and lessons for a career in administration and management. At a time when the role of trade unions is becoming more and more apparent to workers, these students hope to build at best a large scale “revolutionary” student movement, invariably reproducing a form which has long been shown to be superseded.
The “poverty” of organizing around the student identity was realized long ago; to attempt to resurrect an archaic form is to attempt to play catch up with history. It is an attempt to get to a point that the working class seems to need to go beyond. The attempt to build an official student movement, with official representatives, places an obstacle before the real movement of history. The objective of the critique on campuses is to expose the manipulations and maneuverings of petty bureaucrats and would-be professional activists. To expose at all points the limits to our movements both outside and within the movement itself. The attempt to build a movement with a political will that can be clearly articulated, with demands that can be clearly realized, is to fail to understand the necessary flux of history, particularly in high times of struggle. Its results almost always amount to decapitating the real movement, in favor of an orchestrated one. “This method of organizing is one that they are unable to and refuse to transform when confronted with a movement that is against of any form of leadership or representation.”
They know that the struggle today is not in the affirmation of a student identity. Not in the struggle to liberate her student-hood, but to struggle against the existence of student-as-student, as much as worker-as-worker. There needs to be carried out a struggle that does not point to a self-managed democratic alienation. Where the alienation that affects students is not pointed to the increase of a few more tables to study at, or for private school students to struggle for what public school students have lost long ago. To do so is also to misunderstand where we are at historically. Alienation cannot be overcome through alienated modes of struggle.
The organizational question is one of central concern, the shortcoming of the militant is the belief that this question has already been resolved, one has only to realize it. It is quite an historical irony that those who choose to be the standard-bearers of a tradition obsessed with overcoming “trade-union consciousness” seem to do nothing but reify this consciousness and create an obstacle to going beyond it.
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NYC Transit Workers’ Fare Strike 2012: Can Occupy Open Horizons for a Frustrated Labor Movement?
Jon Harvey takes a look at the MTA union bureaucrats and the NYC transit workers
In Cleveland, in 1944, streetcar workers threatened to refuse to collect fares in order to win a pay increase–the City Council gave in before they actually used the tactic…This type of action would in most cases have to be taken outside the union, since few union bureaucrats would use such a clearly class-directed tactic, and thus of necessity the workers would have to organize this themselves.
–Root & Branch[1]
Wall Street and Beyond
For some, Occupy is a long awaited popular resistance to global capital triggered by its most recent crisis and aftermath. Considering the fall in the living conditions of the working class since the largely diverted crisis of the early ’70s, a mass movement against capital (though only a particular form) such as Occupy has been anticipated by many on the Left—since at least the end of the anti-globalization protests. For those of the pro-revolutionary milieu, the exact positive content, trajectory and significance of Occupy is a key question. Despite its varying forms, self-descriptions, promulgations and demands (or lack thereof), one thing is fairly certain: Occupy, with its rhetoric and peculiar actions, has not spread deep enough—into the ghettoes, the ruined towns and cities, among the marginalized, and directly into the sphere of circulation or the point of production.
The bureaucrats at the helm of the labor unions have paid a great deal of lip service towards Occupy. Despite the suspicious motives of these managers of a different stripe, the U.S. labor union movement as a whole has been notably self-critical over the past decade and has been awaiting a burst of energy the likes of Occupy for some time. It can be assumed that the slow decay of the unions and their influence leaves all strata of labor hoping for a resurgence from below, setting aside worries about its direction, cynical or otherwise, for a later time. Still, the working class, unionized or not, employed, underemployed, laid off, or informal have yet to find a galvanizing way of taking Occupy to their workplace or their communities, which is to say, they have yet to risk militant activity against austerity and the general assault against workers.[2]
Occupy has, if at a minimum, made the statement that the proletarian masses (i.e. the global 99 percent or some odd amount) have a profound connection against the power of the few. This statement has a great significance following four decades of fragmentation, culture wars, identity politics, and flight from workers’ identity. Again, at a minimum, Occupy has tried to transcend stale ideological, bureaucratic, institutional or structural forms with its general assemblies, “people’s mic,” abstention from electoral politics and lack of demands. The allusion of this latter ingenuity is those needs that the masses require cannot be demanded but must be commanded or simply implemented. So then, in line with this, the kitchen, library, medics and councils of Zucotti Park are executed by the grassroots of the movement. This core logic (as blemished as it may be in practice) and its attraction have substantial implications for those who look to the self-organization and direct action of the proletariat as the harbinger of revolution. Unfortunately, neither the working class nor the Occupy activists and participants have yet to make full use of this logic, let alone the rank and file, to their own detriment.
The Subway Connection
Transit workers belonging to New York City’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 exhibit a familiar sight in the 21st century U.S. labor movement: broke, angry, slandered, disillusioned, directionless and top heavy. Following the often perceived failure of the 2005 strike, which momentarily realized the transit workers’ power of threatening the symbolic citadel of global financial capital, transit workers’ participation and dues contribution in their union is at an all time low.[3]
What’s more, though once a hard hitting rank and file with untamable militancy, New York’s transit workers lack the organization they once had, the hope they once exhibited and the public support they deserve. In the midst of the current NYC budget crisis, an opportunity presents itself to the rank and file. Talk and agitation of a “fare strike” arises from the interface between the transit workers and Occupy Wall Street. That is, transit worker members of the labor committee of Occupy Wall Street have taken up pamphleteering with this new threat, as contract negotiations loom large.
This inspiration points to the burgeoning possibility of rank and file workers, in a particularly disruptive sector, following the latent logic (or perhaps an interpretation) of Occupy. The extent to which the TWU follows through with it may yield insight into the potential readily available in harnessing the same sentiment and logic that yielded such widespread support in the Occupy movement.
The history of the TWU is something of a tragic story, one of patience, rank and file militance and hope betrayed. The possibility of a fare strike tactic is historically adequate to the needs and capacities of rank and file transit workers today, especially in the present moment, as a result of their past experiences and betrayals after elevating the most radical rhetoric to power inside their union. The current frustrated state of the TWU members derives most immediately from the 2005 strike and its aftermath. However, for a more robust understanding of the weight of this frustration and disillusionment, and how tactics like the fare strike help contemplate moving beyond it, we must detail the sequence of experiences and the impressions they have left.
Brief History of TWU
[4]
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Transit Authority (TA) put forth changes to train operator and conductor scheduling that threatened seniority privileges. A slowdown spread—an easily implemented and effective tool as it reduces revenue while at the same time disrupting the leviathan internal economy of New York City. The slowdown was supported by the burgeoning reform group New Directions (ND). The illegal action lasted over a week and was finally successful, the scheduling threat was rescinded.
In early 1992, a long delayed contract agreement was announced which surrendered a great deal of previous gains. A foreshadowing of automation ruled the tone for the contract, offering cuts to wages and benefits for new hires in exchange for “productivity” bonuses for those senior workers. This pandering to seniority fell on deaf ears as the workers, to their credit, refused to help entrench a two tier contract. A “Vote No” campaign ensued; massive demonstrations, large marches across the Brooklyn Bridge, slowdowns and extensive communication resulted in the first ever contract rejection in Local 100. Through an arbitration threat and paternalistic second call vote, enacted by reigning president Sonny Hall, the contract was finally ratified. Nonetheless, autonomous rank and file activity, dissention and communication networks were set up for the future.
In 1996, the Transit Authority threatened to lay off 2,000 cleaners due to a proclaimed budget deficit. In exchange for a guarantee of their positions, “unorganizable” workfare workers were to be employed in a Clinton-era deal. 1999 seemed to promise good tidings as the contract was set to expire during the December 15th holiday season, giving bargaining power to the workers that allow shoppers to explore the island of Manhattan. With the MTA claiming a surplus in their budgets, the outlook for negotiations looked promising. The insults of the ’90s were building up to strong expectations and a loss of patience. Slowdowns and service disruptions led up to the termination date of the old contract, hinting at the workers’ power to shut the city down.
A mass membership meeting was called on the last day before the end of the contract. Thousands were in attendance lauding calls for a strike. At this meeting, the union local’s own Vice President read an injunction that the then-mayor Rudy Giuliani arrogantly contrived, claiming that Local 100 members were forbidden to strike or even discuss striking![5] Despite the warning, workers were livid and continued to support a strike call. After the meeting members marched to the union hall to hear contract negotiation updates. This powerful display signaled that the rank and file were teeming with anger and confidence. Despite all this, the president of the local negotiated a contract that sacrificed seniority rights and did nothing to deal with the Health Benefit Trust which was very obviously running out of resources. Due to a large wage increase and the passing of the prime strike season, members approved the contract.
Actions Speak Louder than Words
Roger Toussaint, a member of the dissenting New Directions caucus, was elected in 2001. This election signaled that workers were fed up with contract concessions and givebacks. Workers voted in the caucus that had the most radical program. At this moment, the Health Benefit Trust was almost completely out of resources and the union was lacking organization. Toussaint initiated a set of paternalistic top-down initiatives with superficial rank and file gestures. For example, he set up mass steward trainings, but in the end their training was simply to make them better union literature distributers. Also, Toussaint ruled motions calling for rank and file organizing committees out of order. According to Steve Downs, the “strategic choice behind these decisions had lasting effects on the local and limited how much would actually be accomplished.”[6] These actions would prove to be gravely prophetic.
Equally foretelling was Toussaint’s intervention in the strike of Local 100 members against a private bus company regarding their lack of a contract. Liberty Lines workers struck for a contract, but the strike was supported, then called off by Toussaint after only a day. Later, in the summer of 2002, Local 100 bus drivers struck in Queens. These workers were without a contract for over a year at this point. Some of their demands included greater employer contributions to benefits and job security in the face of privatization. Workers struck for five weeks but were betrayed by Toussaint who negotiated a contract behind closed doors that caved in on the job security question. The Vice President of this division led a walkout from an executive board meeting after he denounced Toussaint for hijacking the strike and caving in.
In the face of a budget deficit, the wake of 9/11, and a persistent health benefits funding crisis, New Directions captured some of the rage within the rank and file with the 2002 contract negotiation slogan of “Second Class No More!”[7] This slogan alluded to the fact that TA employees made less wages, had smaller benefits and were disciplined more than the other two transit workers of the MTA: the Long Island Railroad and the Metro North Railroad. The latter two rails were operated by predominantly white workers while TA workers were predominantly black and latino. Toussaint however, merely feigned a strike in 2002 while pushing forward a paltry contract. The sloganeering was sufficient to tap into the complexity of rank and file anger; the talk of a strike gave workers the impression of a militant leadership and the slogans quelled their distrust.
If the tension had reached a boiling point with the misfirings of the 2000s, the pot began to overflow surrounding the 2005 contract. Despite the obvious pressures, no mass mobilizations were organized, no strike preparations were developed, and no connection with “social struggles” were declared. On the MTA’s part, however, there was rabid warmongering. It stated that, despite its $1 billion surplus for the year, none would be set aside for improved wages. In addition, pension contributions would arbitrarily increase for first year workers. This outright disrespect was too much to manage; the executive board was forced to swiftly declare a strike. No clear goals were put forward by the leadership, nothing was rallied around; the union bureaucrats stood on the sidelines, half-hearted and disassociated.[8]
Solidarity existed across divisions as, although no picket trainings occurred, pickets went up around the city. The workers stood out on the cold picket lines with perfectly unified effectiveness; New York City ground to an immediate halt. The workers from different divisions joined together and discussed their grievances. Their goals were clear and obvious: they stood against disrespect, harassment, and “second class” treatment. They stood for healthcare, better working conditions, and a better life. Yet their goals and desires must have been evolving as they met and sensed their incredible power.
Blistering public relations attacks were made by the mayor, the governor, and the MTA; the public was left with a poor perception of the strike and an unclear set of demands; the leadership of other NYC unions and their own International turned their backs. Other unions found the strike too polarizing to give support, while the International directly betrayed Local 100 and stood opposed to the strike.
The executive board, with Toussaint’s helping hand, finally voted, after a mere three days, to end the strike without an agreement or any concessions-even though the power and effectiveness (i.e., in terms of participation) of the strike was brutally successful. Quickly following this, Toussaint agreed to worker contributions for healthcare and allowed wages to be eroded by inflation in a cowardly set of contract givebacks. Defiantly, the contract was rejected by the membership and only ratified later under “binding arbitration.” To add injury to insult, the local was fined, each worker was docked a days’ pay (on top of their lost strike wages), and the local lost the right to automatically deduct dues. Finally, Toussaint was jailed for ten days for presiding over the strike. The politicians and lawmakers would end the local’s militancy the hard way.
Toussaint’s involvement in the two private lines strikes showed that, besides him riding a populist radicalism to presidency, he was more interested in managing struggles in cooperation with employers than leading a powerful and aggressive rank and file-and an influential fraction of NYC (and therefore U.S.) labor. Toussaint led a current of the reform movement leadership that focused on taking power above all else, a strategy that time and again has lead to an upward drifting separation from the grassroots. For Toussaint, this drift led to his ascent to a bureacratic position as Vice President of Strategic Planning with the International, the same body that condemned Local 100′s strike.
Aftermath of Strike
Union participation and rank and file militant activity is currently at an all time low in terms of attendance at membership meetings and talk of striking. A majority of workers don’t pay union dues. This disillusioned majority of a once vibrant and militant union has had enough of the leadership’s chicanery following the called off strike of 2005. Slowdowns however, still occur with a low profile, striking at management without official consent.
Attacks continue, now harder than ever with the overwhelming spread of automation in New York City’s subway system. According to one rank and file bulletin: “In 2010, the MTA hypocrites laid-off 460 Station Agents (SAs), ‘saving’ the MTA about $50 million. Over 900 transit workers were laid-off system-wide last year, about 250 SAs on Mother’s Day weekend alone. Today, 147 remain out of work. Returning them to work is now a contract demand.”[9]
As the footsoldiers of nation/continent-wide austerity programs, municipal governments and economies all over the world are in a fragile state—no less with New York City’s economy—making the stakes now higher than ever for NYC transit workers. Further, anger at the MTA among the citizenry of New York City has reached an apex. Riders find themselves with drastically less service and a transit system that can’t handle a relatively small amount of disruption (as winter 2010 revealed). As for workers, the siege is on all sides as the MTA openly states that “any wage increases during the first three years of a new agreement will be offset by savings from union concessions and that wages will increase at only inflation rate.”[10]
Debt in Service
The heavy reliance on financing has, to many, put the MTA at the behest of Wall Street instead of being funded by tax dollars. Put best by the MTA itself:
The MTA has also proposed borrowing $14.8 billion—the largest amount in its history. Such a heavy reliance on debt would further stress the operating budget. Debt service would reach $3.3 billion annually by 2018, or 64 percent more than in 2011, and would remain at that level through 2031. These estimates do not even consider the cost of the next capital program, which begins in 2015.[11]
The accelerated financialization of the MTA drives transit worker frustration and system-wide instability. In December 2010, the MTA tripled its number of top Wall Street “senior” investment advisors, salesmen, and bond insurers. Bloomberg News estimated that Wall Street firms will collectively earn about $31 million in extra fees for their role in the MTA.[12]
Cuts in funding for the MTA have been a steady pattern amongst politicians, pushing the MTA to turn out bonds to private buyers to fund capital projects. Instead of publically funded services, the MTA can claim that its revenues are not adequate and turn to Wall Street for help. Further, this perpetual indebtedness allows the MTA to cut into labor costs and raise fares in the name of the mere interest collecting on its debts. Today the largest and fastest growing expense of the MTA is its $2 billion annual debt service. In addition, their current policy is to service this debt before all costs, including wages and the very operating expenses of the transit system of one of the world’s largest cities. The downward spiral of indebtedness (and full privatization) is accelerating: “the MTA has a funding gap of $9.9 billion in construction and renovation funding (capital funding) over the next 10 years. To plug the hole over the next 3 years, the MTA will sell a whopping $8 billion in MTA bonds.”[13]
The crux of the budget balancing and bond dividends falls on workers and riders alike. The MTA plans on increasing fares in 2013 and 2015 to help make up for their budget gaps. Pink slips, service cuts, and overtime restriction amount to savings towards another portion. They are counting on TWU givebacks and effective wage freezes (in relation to inflation) to make up the rest.
Fare Strike
Here, the novelty and timeliness of the Occupy inspired fare strike shines through. A fare strike is when a rider or worker physically jars open emergency exits or opens up turnstiles to make commuting free—all the while denying revenues to the MTA like a traditional strike. The connection between transit worker and rider here is a profound one. While, the station agent was previously forced into the role of cashier and security personnel, now the station agent acts in direct solidarity with the rider. In addition to the obvious cosmetic advantages of this maneuver—especially in contrast to the 2005 strike in which transit workers had poor public support and were seen as selfish—these workers are making a class connection in the statement: “We are both being screwed here!”
A fare strike would also be a slap in the face of NYC’s bloated police force. Ever since Giuliani’s heavy handed “Broken Windows” tactic in the late ’90s-early ’00s, “jumping the turnstile,” or getting a free ride on the train, has been comprehensively attacked. It’s not uncommon for police to haul people off to the “tombs” (i.e., central processing jail) for a night for this offense. Cameras and guards are always on the lookout. Often the station agent is seen as an extension of this policing.[14] In this activity, transit workers will be making connections with some of the most devastated and desperate working class communities.
Conclusion
With a history of misplaced trust and betrayals by self-proclaimed radical leaders, New York’s transit workers have had enough of the TWU bureaucracy and their empty promises. The slowdown has been and is an example of rank and file activity that rejects management and unions’ mediation alike. Most recently, transit workers have refused to haul Occupy prisoners, they have been seen stopping their vehicles while holding out union cards when they interact with Occupy rallies and they are participants in working groups of OWS. On November 17th, the anniversary of Occupy, scattered subway stations across NYC were chained open by anonymous activists. The current organizing and agitating for a fare strike by OWS involved transit workers stems from the fusion of rank and file militancy with the autonomist struggle and confidence born of Occupy Wall Street. The possibility of workers taking direct action with the “99 percent” has class-wide implications, however confused the sloganeering may be. Already these connections have been forged and are being built upon by the grassroots interface of the OWS labor committee and transit workers in the pamphleteering, whisper campaigns, and strategizing done around the fare strike idea.[15]
This exciting usage of a strike, in its form and content, drives together class interests—riders and transit workers alike—against the capitalist owners of the MTA and their political minions. Further, it channels anger at ubiquitous and amorphous financial capital towards a specific target, instead of an irrational hysteria towards reclaiming a “Main Street”–driven capitalism. Perhaps most significantly, it decommodifies transportation in the process. Whether or not a fare strike leads up to the coming mid-January contract negotiations, the tactic, along with slowdowns, will be a part of rank and file transit workers’—and riders’—arsenal against the MTA if it is accepted.
Notes
[1] Root & Branch, eds., preface to “The Seattle General Strike,” Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, as quoted in Fare Strike! San Fransisco 2005, by Insane Dialectal Posse.
[2] Outside the posturing of November 17th, etc.
[3] Notably, dues are not automatically deducted from TWU members as a result of a punitive injunction following the 2006 strike.
[4] The following section draws from Steve Downs’s Hell on Wheels: The Success and Failure of Reform in Transport Workers Union Local 100, amongst other narratives. Downs’s work is an account of the failed reform movement within Local 100 which raised the strike-quelling Roger Toussaint to his presidency. As Downs was himself a founder and leading organizer of this reform movement, his short history does a great job of summarizing key contract negotiations, rank and file sentiment, and internal political machination despite its often obvious bias and political bent (i.e., he is a member of the left Trotskyist group, Solidarity).
[5] This was just to emphasize the already illegal act of transit strikes as outlined in New York’s Taylor Law, incidentally enacted following a powerful transit strike in 1967.
[6] Steve Downs, page 26.
[7] “NYC transit workers reject givebacks” by Harry Harrington for the Industrial Worker.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Supplement to “Contract Bulletin #22” by Marty Goodman.
[10] “Financial Outlook for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority,” New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Marty Goodman.
[13] ibid.
[14] Unlike in France or Germany, for example, where station agents, conductors and bus drivers often look the other way when someone does not pay, leaving this job to the municipal security or police.
[15] This article is intentionally discreet regarding specific references to people, parties, actions, and dates involved in the aforementioned organizing.
Comments
Sure, I was actually waiting for the addition of the footnotes to go through, I guess they haven't been approved yet.
Notes on the Fly
SS's notes on N17 and the relationship between the left and other protesters.
November 17th was an amazing day. A few things happened in NYC which my eyes could hardly behold. Hopefully, more of that will happen in the upcoming years of struggle.
I went to the attempt to occupy the Stock Exchange. The numbers were big: several thousand people at 7am-ish. The marches got divided into 3 or 4 smaller ones. The one I was at blocked traffic on Broadway and Pine, I believe. There was a mic-check style debate with 50 people or so on the merits of being in solidarity with the NYPD. While the debates went along usual lines of differences, I want to say it was productive and that there were many more people who wanted to have a clear difference with the NYPD. This has not been my experience in the past. Hopefully, this shows that political lessons are being learned. It seems that at least a 1/3 out of this 50 was against seeing the NYPD as part of the 99 percent—a good development. At the same time many sang the national anthem. I did a mic-check and said, “What would Iraqis have to say about the national anthem with lines like ‘Bombs bursting in the air’?” The crowd had no response. Contradictions; contradictions!
Eventually, we headed back to Liberty Park. What is amazing is that the crowd tore down one entire side of the barricades. Even more interesting for me is that when the police tried to push us back into the park, the crowd rallied and pushed the police back to the edge of the street. I have not seen anything like that in NYC before. My sense is that more and more people are getting confident about their ability to enforce their collective power. I would guess it is fragile and all that, but a different feel in the crowd. I certainly was slightly “high” off the last several days of struggle as well and feeling solidarity with the crowd.
Next, I went to the Graduate Center of CUNY which is in mid-town/business/tourist central. It was attended by 30–40 people. I was a little surprised by the turnout. I rushed over to CUNY-Hunter to see what was up with the strike. It was about 1:30ish when I got there and about 20 students inside Hunter were protesting. I was very surprised by the small turnout. Soon after, I went to Union Square. Very quickly, thousands of students gathered. I was pretty surprised considering how small the other events were. I passed out a bunch of Insurgent Notes literature. I was not able to get into conversations with people, cuz I was just in mass flyering mode, but pretty much everyone took the literature.
What happened next blew my mind away. By the time the march left it was huge. People just took the streets and blocked traffic. We marched through stopped cars, trucks and taxis. The trucks and taxis were in solidarity with us—rolling down their windows, waving, and raising their fists, and honking their horns. It was very powerful. One truck driver of color got out and giving everyone high fives. People rejoiced to see that happen. It was unbelievable to walk through all the various avenues and streets and literally stop traffic. The cops were nowhere to be seen. Eventually on one of the intersections they brought a semi-truck to block the entire road and some cops stood their ground to force us onto the side walk. People just walked around them and back onto the street. I could not believe it.
It was a powerful lesson. I have really had to think about what I think about militancy and I think I have misunderstood it at times. I saw that when people want to do something, they will just do it. I am also wondering what the NYPD higher ups were thinking. Maybe they knew rich Columbia and NYU students were attending and did not want to bust their heads so took a more hands off approach. Not sure. I definitely am against the idea that doing radical shit means you are a superhero—which sometimes the activities of anarchists and others reinforce. What happened yesterday was that many first time protestors did something pretty illegal, but it was in mass numbers.
Eventually we got to the Foley Square. Nothing too exciting! It was evening and I was exhausted. I went home.
Earlier
As many of you know, Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan was cleared. This is part report back and part reflection/analysis. You can check the OWS websites for a more play by play account so I will not get into all that.
I first want to say how inspiring this movement continues to be even with all its contradictions. My fundamental urge, no matter how many disagreements I have with OWS, is that it is on the right side of things, I still feel connected to it, and it has changed this country for the better. I am also being challenged by this movement politically and organizationally. I am seeing many folks with probably less radical politics make the right decisions time after time. And seeing folks with the “correct political” perspective become more and more marginal—including myself, cuz we have little to offer.
I arrived at Occupy Wall Street by 2 am after receiving a text message. The NYPD had closed down Brooklyn Bridge and all subway lines from Brooklyn into Manhattan except the R. I took a cab. I came from a meeting of Anarchists and Marxists on next steps for concrete organizing. The NYPD had created a 2–4 block perimeter around Liberty Square Park. No one was allowed to get in. I gathered with a crowd of 200–300 people. We were not sure what to do until we got text messages from communications of Liberty Square Park that we should meet up at Foley Square. At Foley Square, a debate took place over what to do next.
Take Back Occupy or Survive Till Thursday
I don’t know how many, but some people were very pissed that we had left the Liberty Square folks to get arrested. As the crowed and police gathered, I got up on a platform and argued we should go back and challenge the police. (Later, I found out 1,000 NYPD were at Liberty Square). I believe Sharon Smith from the ISO said no, we should live to survive another day and build for a general strike. While at the specific moment I disagreed with her strongly, looking back I think it was a fair and principled position she argued.
This discussion would happen again and again as we ran through the streets of Manhattan, being chased by lots of NYPD. One by one, protestors would get arrested by the NYPD. I saw maybe 20 arrests happen this way. Some of us would argue for staying around the protestors, but one OWS-er said it well, if we are not going to de-arrest right now, then we need to keep moving. What settled in for me was kind of a guerilla insurgent strategy. If we cannot hold the ground, and are going to be decimated by the police, then we need to keep moving and make ourselves a hard target to pin down. I get it.
I agree with the de-arresting. But it also seems the crowd was not prepared to de-arrest and for all the militant rhetoric of revolutionaries like me, neither was I. So practically that meant evading the police all night—humbling experience of rhetoric versus reality, very humbling. In that way many of the more probably liberal OWS-ers have a better grasp on realty and praxis than I did and probably many other revolutionaries. I would be cool for a militant minority of radical-minded people de-arresting, but there appears to be no such formation. The revolutionary left in NYC at this moment does not exist in any organized form. What it seems to be is a bunch of isolated individuals who have radical critiques of OWS, but no practical alternative or organizational form to demonstrate what something more radical looks like. In NYC there are definitely enough individual revolutionaries to form something, but it has not happened. I also am aware that there are tons of differences in such a broad term as revolutionary.
Lack of militancy
We got in a confrontation with the police around 6 am. About 500 people gathered a couple blocks away from Liberty Square Park. Eventually, the police said we needed to get off the streets. A crowd of 100–200 people gathered to stop the police from breaking through. We locked arms and tried to hold our ground. It was amazing how quickly the police broke through. It was also amazing how peaceful the entire thing was.
It really left some us wondering why the crowd was not more militant. It also left us wondering what the role of revolutionaries should be in escalating militancy. Some of the objective problems are definitely everyone is worried about the police cameras everywhere and the general seriousness of the NYPD. There is also the subjective problem that revolutionaries have no organizational framework through which to operate. Then there are the problems that the feeling of the crowd I get is definitely more of a liberal/nonviolence scene.
I saw some Black Nationalists argue against throwing garbage in the streets. I am not sure what angle they were coming from. Whether it is from a conservative place or whether it was a sensible assessment of reality. I talked with some Anarchists/Marxists about this question. If folks were really serious about violence, what kind of preparation was needed? Frankly, no one came prepared, but we are all talking about it rhetorically. I can agree then with the Black Nationalists about not being violent. If we are gonna be violent, where is our preparation? This is the NYPD, not something to be fucked around with. Look at the crowd. People will just get an ass-whooping and look like fools. It is a more complicated debate than liberal = nonviolent and revolutionary = violent. The reality is that in NYC, the revolutionaries talk about militancy and their militancy is throwing garbage in the streets: Fanon, the Panthers, and IWW’s legacy indeed! (Sarcastic, if it is not obvious.)
As an aside, and to be clear that I am not some bureaucratic fool about this stuff, I went to an anti-Nazi demonstration in Toledo. I don’t know if anyone was prepared other than the Anarchists who came. But a large crowd of Black youth showed up and threw tons of rocks at the Nazis and cops. I don’t know if they had a plan, probably not. It was a good victory against the Nazis that day.
We talked about Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense and Justice. I focused on how it took a long time for the Civil Rights Movement to move from a position of nonviolence to something more militant; how that was a historical development being forced by the situation to develop that, and the difference between the heroic militant like Robert F. Williams and the mass involvement of people on more Pantherish terms.
Throwing Kleenex Around
Probably the most comical thing which occurred during the night was the sight of Anarchists, Marxists and other folks dressed in Black throwing garbage in the streets. Many OWS-ers got very pissed. It was the usual nonviolent and keep-it-civil arguments. While I thought the policing of the Anarchists was off, I have to say this was not very productive as far as I can tell. The only sensible argument I heard from Anarchists why throwing garbage in the street made sense was to slow down cop cars behind us. Although at times, it seemed throwing garbage bags and cans in the street was more of a political statement for some people.
Before I go any further, I want to make it clear I am not against violence. I am for attacking police cars, looting Nike stores, Macy’s, and attacking banks. I see a political point to these things. I can see layers of the lumpen and working class agreeing with it and participating. I have no idea who in society will relate to garbage being thrown in the streets. Again, I really don’t care about garbage in the streets. But the Anarchists make it a political point. I frankly think it makes the whole concept of violence and militancy look rather stupid. Militancy and violence should revolve around the sanctity of private property or the cops, etc. I do not know in what way throwing garbage in the street clarifies those things. It only reinforces what many liberals claim it to be: juvenile, pointless, etc. I also think that when normal people see stuff like garbage thrown in the streets, it only reminds them that this is young white kids playing revolutionary. My point is it raises no debate worth discussing.
I saw very nasty debates inside the movement. I guess my point is, if we are gonna have the debate, do it around something which has real content like the things I mentioned. But I just wonder what this says of the Anarchist/Marxist left at this point. That our militancy is reduced to throwing garbage in the streets—really?
What Has Happened
Regardless of what the New York Times and other media outlets say, it looks like the movement has been galvanized. While the numbers at night were much smaller than I thought. I think maybe 1,000–1,500 people came out to defend the park. By 6 pm in NYC, 3,000–5,000 people were at Liberty Square Park. I will say, I don’t think the rank and file of labor is heavily involved. People kept saying labor is coming and I did not see many workers. Most of the people I saw looked like students, former students, unemployed people who used to be students, etc. I mean workers were there at the park, but in much smaller numbers than the rhetoric about unions supporting the movement. I would say at tops 15 percent of the people were people of color, with Asian-Americans being the largest component of that 15 percent.
Also, and amazingly enough, although serious infrastructure is no longer allowed at Liberty Square Park, many churches and other groups have donated space in the area where Occupy will be running out of. It is an amazing logistical operation in that sense. There is talk of occupying buildings in the winter. I don’t know which buildings and the rest of the details.
There is a lot of excitement about November 17th. Rumor has it unions are bussing in people from out of state so the labor march is gonna be huge. It seems the November 17th stuff has reenergized lots of people.
Guess that is all for now.
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Occupy Oakland: The port shutdown and beyond - All eyes on Longview!
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Jack Gerson discusses the lessons of the Occupy movement and it's future.
On Monday December 12, the Occupy movement shut down the major west coast ports of Oakland, Portland, Longview (Washington), and Seattle. There were partial shutdowns or support actions at the ports of San Diego, Vancouver, and Long Beach, as well as in Hawaii and Japan. Wal-Mart distribution centers were blockaded in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque. Other actions occurred in New York, Houston, Tacoma, and Anchorage. The Seattle, Long Beach, San Diego, and Houston protests were met with police violence.
These coordinated actions showed that the Occupy movement is still very much alive, the various rants to the contrary by the bosses, the mass media, and assorted leftists notwithstanding. This is certainly true in Oakland, where I live. The nearly 10,000 protesters who shut down the port showed that Occupy Oakland’s November 2 Strike and Day of Action was no fluke. The December 12 actions rattled the entire Oakland establishment – corporate Oakland and the liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats who for years have carried their water while cultivating a “progressive” image. And the port shutdowns up and down the coast have delivered a strong message to the world maritime conglomerates: the Occupy movement will rally mass support to defend the longshoremen in Longview WA against a vicious union-busting attack from a multinational conglomerate.
NEXT UP: MASS CONVERGENCE ON LONGVIEW
The Longview longshoremen, ILWU Local 21, are locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Export Grain Terminal corporation (EGT). EGT is a joint venture between three conglomerates: U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Tochu Corporation, and South Korean-based STX Pan Ocean. EGT just spent $200 million to construct a highly automated grain elevator at the Port of Longview. Although EGT signed a lease agreement with the Port promising that all cargo work would be done with ILWU labor, it won’t honor that agreement. EGT tried to hire non-union labor and, when that failed, contracted with another union, Operating Engineers Local 701, that is willing to raid ILWU 21 and to cross their picket lines.
EGT is using tactics straight out of the coal field labor wars of the 1920s. They hired private “security” (Pinkerton-like goons). They’ve enlisted the local cops to stalk, harass, and assault ILWU members – tailing them around town and even dragging them out of their homes in the middle of the night.
Local 21 has fought back. In the course of the battle in Longview, ILWU members and their supporters have blocked trains from bringing grain to the terminal and organized mass pickets to disrupt its operations. 220 of the local’s 226 members have been arrested. Both the Washington and Oregon state labor federations have passed resolutions supporting the Longview ILWU and condemning the Operating Engineers for raiding and for crossing ILWU 21′s picket lines.
This ought to be a central priority for the AFL-CIO, because if EGT succeeds in locking out ILWU 21, it will set a precedent for union-busting up and down the coast. The AFL-CIO ought to provide material support to ILWU 21. It ought to tell the Operating Engineers to either end their raid or face censure and expulsion. And it ought to build towards a general strike against the union-busting. But none of this will happen. AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka won’t take sides and he won’t act. Trumka calls it a “jurisdictional dispute”. Indeed, the AFL-CIO leadership – and not just the top leaders, but most local officials and staffers as well – have for decades bought into the “team concept” of collaboration with management. Fundamentally, they believe that there is no alternative to capitalism. Thus, when the system is in crisis, they try to coerce workers to passively accept austerity (cuts to jobs, compensation, pensions and social security, and public services). So instead of leading mass organizing drives, they raid each other’s unions as union membership dwindles to barely one in ten workers.
A confrontation is imminent. EGT plans to bring in its first ship in mid-January. So with Trumka and the AFL-CIO sitting on their hands, what can be done? Here is where the Occupy movement can play a role. On December 17, Occupy Longview, which has close ties to ILWU 21, called for a mass convergence on Longview in January to block the loading of the EGT ship. On December 21, Occupy Oakland voted overwhelmingly (123 – 2) to respond to Occupy Longview’s call by organizing a caravan to Longview. Occupy organizers are projecting well over 10,000 – perhaps as many as 25,000 – occupiers descending on Longview from around the West. And unlike ILWU International President McEllrath (who opposed the December 12 port shutdown by an “outside group trying to advance a broader agenda”), ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman welcomes support from the Occupy movement. This from Coffman: “On behalf of Local 21, we want to thank the Occupy movement for shedding light on the practices of EGT and for the inspiration of our members”.
In addition to the convergence on Longview, Occupy can support and help propagate the call from ILWU rank and file militants who are urging the International to strike the entire West Coast when the EGT ship arrives – and, if McEllrath won’t issue the call, then the locals and the rank and file need to organize a coast-wide wildcat. Let’s recall that in significant – although admittedly infrequent – cases, ILWU locals (and, in still rarer instances, the entire West Coast ILWU) have acted in defiance of the contract and the law to shut down the ports, even without the spur of community (“outside”) picketers. (To name such instances: the 11-day boycott of South African cargo famously saluted by Nelson Mandela; a one-shift West Coast shutdown to support Mumia; a one-day strike against the war; a shutdown in Los Angeles in solidarity with Australian longshoremen; and a Puget Sound ferry strike in defiance of injunctions.) Shutting down the big ports of Oakland, Portland, and Seattle got the attention of the world maritime industry. Shutting down the twin megaport of Long Beach / Los Angeles would deliver a heavy blow: Long Beach / Los Angeles handles 40% of this country’s shipping, nearly ten times as much as the Port of Oakland.
So we believe that the ILWU can win this immediate battle. But it will take far more to win the long-term war. First of all, it will take identifying the true nature of that war. Today longshore is highly automated and longshoremen are the highest paid but one of the numerically smallest group of workers at the port. Meanwhile, the most numerous workers at the port – the port truckers – are by far the lowest paid, the most exploited, and are completely unorganized (forced to work as independent contractors). There cannot be a long-term victory for labor on the longshore without organizing the unorganized port truckers. But more than forty years ago, the ILWU agreed to deals around containerization / automation that guaranteed high pay, benefits, and job security in exchange for allowing gross attrition of jobs as workers retired. The ILWU has been far too content to rely on this arrangement, rather than reaching out aggressively to support and help organize the port truckers. So although Longview Local 21 is fighting militantly against EGT and is reaching out to Occupy for support, the ILWU International shows zero interest in organizing or otherwise fighting for the truckers. Such organizing remains essential. We ought not to look to the ILWU International to do it.
Our enemies try to play on this weakness to exacerbate the divisions. Thus, from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan:
The people who are planning to stay at the port—do they have families who have trucks that because of the shutdown in the economy may lose those trucks? A day’s pay – $600, $700—could be the difference as to whether they can keep that truck or not.
Quan is disingenuous: most truckers clear less than $100 / day for a long day’s haul – often as little as $50. But she is poking at a weakness, and it’s one that we can ill afford to ignore.
Let’s be clear. Occupy has not ignored the port workers. Indeed, port truckers in Los Angeles’s Latino community were the first to call for a December 12 port action, when they voted to withhold their labor on this day, which is a cultural holiday in the Latino community. In solidarity with them, Occupy LA voted to blockade ports servicing the SSA shipping company, partly owned by Goldman Sachs. Occupy Oakland then joined their call and broadened it, calling for a west coast port shutdown in solidarity with the truckers and with the locked-out longshoremen of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, and to disrupt the profit chain of Goldman Sachs and “Wall Street on the Water”.
In the event, the LA port truckers were unable to repeat their successful wildcat of May 1, 2006, when they effectively organized a significant number of the more than 15,000 southern California port truckers to shut down LA / Long Beach longshore operations. Nevertheless, the successful port shutdowns in Oakland and the Washington and Oregon ports have fully focused attention on the desperate struggle in Longview.
But organized labor has ignored the port workers. And the Occupy movement itself has steered clear of direct labor organizing. It does not educate about the need to organize the unorganized, and Occupy leaders have discouraged efforts to educate internally and organize externally around a set of concrete demands that could speak to the needs of the unorganized and ensure that organized jobs are decent jobs. This leaves such organizing at the mercy of the labor bureaucracy. Can Occupy sustain and deepen a mass movement on this basis? Without at least discussing this question and developing strategy, the Occupy movement is bound to act as a large “solidarity” movement: engaging in episodic disruptive mass actions followed by weeks of lull where organizing slows to a crawl while waiting for new struggles to support and/or new occasions for disruptive direct action; supporting others’ struggles and demands from the outside. This leaves Occupy vulnerable to the nature of those struggles and the content of those demands. To be clear: I am not proposing that the Occupy movement as a whole adopt a set of detailed demands and set out to organize the unorganized. (I think that Occupy derives much strength by remaining essentially a broad united front under the general umbrella sentiment of economic justice and anti-capitalism.) But I do believe that groupings inside of the Occupy movement should do so – and that this should be a priority for Occupy labor outreach groups.
Lesson to the Left: Occupy Oakland Has Not Capitulated to the Democrats
The Occupy movement – and especially Occupy Oakland – has demonstrated remarkable resilience and an almost unprecedented ability to repeatedly mobilize mass actions against economic injustice and police brutality. Many of us have underestimated this movement. Leftist blogs are filled with statements like “Occupy Oakland is dead” and warnings that Occupy is capitulating to the liberals, capitulating to the Democrats, capitulating to the labor bureaucracy — and that unless this or that formula is followed failure is certain. If we are to be taken seriously by this movement – and, perhaps more to the point, if we are to understand it and help it to move forward – we need to first acknowledge that the movement hasn’t corresponded to the preconceived notions of veteran socialists. Moreover, it has far exceeded our expectations. And, despite problems, it continues to act independently of the Democrats and the bureaucrats. Indeed, its deep-seated, if inchoate, anti-capitalist message and its remarkable ability to mobilize mass disruptive protests have left the Oakland establishment dazed and disoriented.
In the weeks preceding the west coast port shutdown, the Oakland establishment engaged in perhaps the most concerted effort to defeat labor solidarity since the campaign to bust the Professional Air Controllers union in 1981. Perhaps the clearest signal of the importance of the port shutdown to world maritime interests was the decision of the Port of Oakland to place an ad in the New York Times (3000 miles away, but the home of Wall Street). The ex-radical, left-liberal politicians who run Oakland city government and their long-time friends and political allies in the local union bureaucracy rallied to the defense of the shipping and financial corporations. Recriminations were hurled by ex-Maoist Mayor Jean Quan (who ranted about “economic violence … a small group of people are going to hold this port, this city, this economy hostage”). Port Commissioner and prominent local labor official Victor Uno, together with his wife Josie Camacho (secretary-treasurer of the local central labor council), argued that a port shutdown would inflict hardship on longshoremen, port truckers, and other workers. ILWU International President Bob McEllrath, under a not-so-veiled threat of a lawsuit by Goldman Sachs (part-owner of shipping conglomerate SSA and a target of the Occupy movement), sent a letter to ILWU members warning, “Support is one thing. Outside groups trying to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process.”
But their campaign failed, and its failure took them by surprise. The cops had estimated that at most 300 protesters would try to shut down the port. But more than 1,000 picketers showed up at the Port of Oakland to shut down the morning shift, and nearly 10,000 shut down the afternoon shift. Now, Occupy Oakland has organized the largest mass militant demonstrations in at least forty years, targeting corporate Oakland and suspending business as usual. And it has done it on multiple occasions.
This has dragged into the open the true role of the ex-radical politicians who run Oakland city government and their long-time friends and allies in the local union bureaucracy. All of these “progressives” operate on the assumption that Oakland’s well-being depends upon the well-being of Oakland business – especially the port, the developers, and the banks. So to them, anything that gets in the way of business hurts the people of Oakland. Thus, Quan argues that shutting down the port is “economic violence” that “holds the city hostage”, and City Council members echo the same refrain. Of course, in the context of the current, deepening global economic crisis, there will be no end to corporate demands for cuts, layoffs, and handouts from the city. The Occupy movement has challenged this assumption, and the politicians are ducking for cover. Their election has been based on their “left” image, but for years they have been pawns of the corporate bosses. Occupy is forcing them to choose: which side are you on? The labor bureaucrats, who have for decades embraced the “team concept” of collaboration with management, are caught in the same bind.
Consequently, cracks are developing in the “progressive” cabal, as long-time Quan allies hedge their bets. Thus, Quan’s long-time comrade Dan Siegel resigned as her legal adviser to distance himself from her authorization of cop violence in October. Oakland Education Association President Betty Olson-Jones, another ally and personal friend, supported the port shutdown (OEA was the only union to support the December 12 action). The local labor council condemned Quan’s authorization of cop violence against Occupy and declared that she is “on the wrong side of history”. Sharon Cornu, a mover and shaker in the local Democratic Party and the former head of the local labor council, resigned as Deputy Mayor. To be sure, they continue to hedge their bets: thus, within days of the port shutdown Olson-Jones was a featured speaker at a mass meeting organized to try to salvage Quan’s career; a few days later the local labor council leadership held a press conference to urge workers to “give the Mayor a chance” so that “she can bring jobs to Oakland”; Cornu continues to praise Quan’s handling of Occupy Oakland.
So Occupy has not capitulated to the liberal politicians. But neither does it pose a political alternative to this leadership. Occupy remains a powerful force, but its power lies exclusively in its ability to mobilize massive but episodic direct actions. It consciously eschews political action. Left unchanged, this will cede political leadership to one set or another of representatives of the bosses. Whether or not the Occupy movement as a whole adopts a specific course of political action, it is important that the movement at least understands the importance of combining mass political action with mass direct action, and creates space and opportunity for its participants to pursue this.
Lesson to the Left: Occupy Oakland Has Not Capitulated to the Bureaucrats
Just as Occupy has not capitulated to the liberal politicians, neither has it capitulated to the labor bureaucracy. It is, however, a fact that much of Occupy Oakland’s labor outreach committee consists of the old “labor left”, including several who have made a career of carrying water for and currying favor with the local labor bureaucrats and the “progressive” politicians. This is one of the factors that have caused many, myself included, to conclude, mistakenly, that the “progressives” had taken charge – or, at a minimum, that capitulation to them was well under way. To be sure, there are problems here – most importantly, perhaps, has been the tendency to overly orient to the labor bureaucrats. This came out most sharply when the Occupy Oakland leaders insisted on treating the local bureaucrats as equal partners in organizing an “Occupy / Labor” rally and march on November 19. They used the terms “labor”, “organized labor”, and “labor leadership” synonymously, and did not seem aware that except in rare instances the bureaucrats can’t or won’t mobilize their members. Thus, although a few thousand marched on November 19 – and although several labor officials spoke at the rally, it was not a “labor march” at all – there were only two or three labor contingents on the march, each of fewer than 10 people. This helped local labor officials strengthen the image they present to their rank and file, without mobilizing the rank and file and without in any way changing their long-term collaboration with management.
Nevertheless, Occupy has not capitulated to the labor bureaucracy. If one does not appreciate this, one cannot really understand the December 12 port shutdowns, when only one union (OEA) supported the action and the full power of corporate Oakland and much of the labor bureaucracy was arrayed against Occupy. Instead, the direction of Occupy Oakland’s labor work continues to be largely determined by the “insurrectionist anarchist” core that has been the power behind the scenes for all of Occupy Oakland since its inception in early October. That direction remains to organize mass disruptive direct action protests, and there is little evidence that they have altered their approach to accommodate labor officials or politicians. The insurrectionists are not about to capitulate to the progressives – at least not in the near future.
But while there has not been a capitulation to the labor bureaucracy, much of Occupy’s labor orientation has been to attempt to engage unions through the union leadership. The interests and actions of workers are not synonymous with the elected leadership of their unions, particularly at the International level. The Internationals, and many locals, are integrated into the Democratic Party machine and act as agents for labor-management collaboration, government ideology and policy in administering concessions and opposing militant action. Thus, as we discussed earlier, the labor movement cannot move forward without an aggressive campaign to organize the unorganized and to provide jobs with adequate pay and decent working conditions. This simply will not happen at the initiative of the labor bureaucracy – indeed, they will squash it and / or try to channel it into a campaign to organize some of the unorganized into rotten sweetheart contracts. It is very important to be clear about this, because without such clarity Occupy will inevitably “leave to Caesar what is Caesar’s” – i.e., to treat the elected labor leadership as though it represents the interests of the organized workers, rather than those of the Democrats, the state, and – at bottom – the bosses.
Originally published by Insurgent Notes
Comments
Jack Gerson was a former leader of the RSL and still has residue from that for approaching class struggle from a Trotskyist perspective. But he's an honest trade union activist who recently retired, but who keeps his union membership status active by substitute teaching. He regularly joins other rank-and-filers to carry the Oakland Education Association banner at marches and rallies, with the rather unpoetic official union slogan: BAILOUT SCHOOLS AND SERVICES NOT BANKS! STOP FORECLOSURES!" He served on the OEA executive board, bargaining team, and was regularly quoted in the press as a union spokesperson. Although he's critical of the present union president, Betty Olson-Jones, he and his caucus campaigned for her slate. And Gerson brings some of that Old/New Left orthodoxy by resisting the lack of demands of the Occupy Movement. His proposal, which is fortunately unsuccessful, is for demands like "JOBS FOR ALL!." And again, he brings the Old Left to mind with slogans like "Organize the unorganized." Which begs the question: does he mean into the AFL-CIO or Change to Win? If Gerson's position is "close to... but not identical" with Insurgent Notes, that means that neither are very far from their common roots in the International Socialists (the Shachtmanites around Hal Draper).
Will Barnes
I think Gerson is correct in his assessment: Neither the Democratic Party apparatus nor union officialdom has captured Occupy Oakland, and for the reason Gerson gives, namely, the insurrectionary anarchists have more or less established political hegemony in the various committees and groups that are most deeply involved in Occupy Oakland.
At the same time, I think there is an element of substitutionalism in these activities, at least in relation to the port workers; or, to utilize Gerson's rather solicitous phrase, Occupy Oakland runs the danger of acting only as a solidarity movement. Here, I think it is important to be specific: I said “an element of substitutionalism” because I do not think it is cut and dried question of activism versus agency. Permit me to explain.
For the most part I think insurrectionary anarchism is a phenomenon of youth. For the most part. [just like freedom. old people only like responsibility, obligation, and routine. Oh, and Maalox.]
Far more important it is the experience of youthful casualization, emphasis on casualization, that is at issue here.
Casualization is a worldwide phenomenon, and we need only to cite a few figures and instantiate specific situations to grasp how pervasive it is: A full 40% of the workforce in Japan and 60% in Korea are casualized, and by my own rough estimate based on Bureau of Labor Statistics there are 82,000,000 casualized workers in the United States (an estimate made some months prior to that moment from which we mark the onset of an open crisis of capital, the collapse of Lehman's in September 2008); or, as a specific example, since the same moment the savage and crushing casualization that has been imposed in Greece where youth unemployment is 40%; or for that matter, in Bosnia and Herzegovina were it is 58%, Macedonia were it is 52.5% and Serbia where it is in excess of 49%. Similar situations obtain across the Maghreb and in Egypt, as well as in coastal China to mention just two further regions where various forms of proletarian resistance to capitalist responses to the crisis have forcibly emerged.
I pointedly mention unemployment in the same sequence as casualization because the two are directly related phenomena. What connects them is not merely the obvious precarity, but the entire historical development from which they sprang... the history of workers defeats in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the class recomposition created by vastly accelerated technological innovation that employers were able to impose following those defeats... and on this basis their contrast with nature of work in the high era of the big factory (Fordism), i.e., the contrast with full-time, far better if not always high waged, benefited work.
Where or not it is a thematic concern, it is the novel situation the collapse of the big factory created that is the point of departure for insurrectionary anarchists: They, and the largely youthful anti-authoritarian milieu as a whole from which they have risen, have no personal connection to the labor movements across the capitalist world (such that they are), more importantly they and that milieu have no personal experience of the history of defeats organized labor has undergone, they and that milieu have few expectations of ever exacting any benefits constituting the social wage (e.g., in the United States, Social Security, Medicare, etc.), and, to boot, they and that milieu confront with various degrees of understanding a Earth as the foundations of human existence subject to relentless plundered by capital and the crisis most associated with it, climate change. While to be sure there are any number of young people involved in the Occupy movement who are not fully proletarianized (say, reproducing themselves socially with the assistance of parents), the insurrectionary anarchists are, with respects to this situation in its entirety, the politically conscious layer of by far and away the most massive largest working class stratum in the world today, the casualized and, as part of it, its largest layer, casualized youth.
In this specific sense, to the extent the Occupy movement is taking its lead from the insurrectionary anarchists its actions are not simply substitutionalist; rather, between two very different layers of a global working class with qualitatively different social and historical experiences, it is a question of elaborating a common project. But in Oakland its elaboration is flawed.
There are two points here. First, in Oakland the insurrectionary anarchists have themselves become bureaucratized. Committees memberships are fixed (i.e., they admit of no new members), decisions are made in closed meetings, and the decisions are non-revocable. Second, Jack Gerson has tacitly suggested a direction in this regard, one I do not accept, that merely yokes the energies of Occupy to a reinvigoration of the labor movement... I shall return to this, momentarily.
Above I stated that insurrectionary anarchists start from the entire historical situation of which collapse of the big factory was, for us, perhaps the most visible aspect. While I suspect there are those who read this who will not wish to follow me here, I think unpacking the meaning and significance of the “entire historical situation” involves an aspect of formation: There is no need to develop this at any length for it is a phenomenon that is highly visible, an aspect of the subjectivity for which the experience of total cultural fact of Fordism is not part of their experience while casualization is. It has everything to do with the manner in which capital has shaped subjectivity: As a matter of practice and political orientation, there is an immediacy that appears absence a long-term analysis and strategic perspective. It finds its most forceful and depoliticized expression in the activity of black bloc anarchists. More than anything else, in Oakland it is this immediatism that internally works to push Occupy down the road of a solidarity movement and drives it into substitutionalist activity...
The second broad issue I shall address concerns unions.
Gerson thinks the crucial issue for the ports is the truckers, or organizing them. He's right about the truckers. In fact, after the 2014 ILWU-PMA contract is negotiated, they may be ever more crucial since without a winning fight at and around Longview longshoremen's numbers may become so marginal due to contractually accepted attrition and full-scale automation of the docks that they will go the way of nineteenth century steamboat engine mechanic.
While Gerson's perspective is that of an honest trade union militant, his prescription for organizing them belongs to another time, specifically to the Fordist era of the big factory. He thinks Occupy is leaving organization to the union bureaucracy (in which case, he appears to suggest it will not get done), but he chastises Occupy “leaders” for discouraging educative efforts “internally” and for not putting forth a “set of concrete demands” that would articulate the needs of the “unorganized,” providing them with “organized,” “decent jobs.” Gerson, in other words, sees the central problem in terms of vastly expanding the existing labor movement, presumably overturning the labor bureaucracy in the process. I suspect Gerson further sees all this in terms of a mass upsurge on the model of the CIO campaigns of the thirties of the last century. But he'll have to speak for himself here (or, since his perspective is close to Insurgent Notes, perhaps Loren could ask him). Similarly, he thinks that in Longview the rank and file in the ILWU will have to do for themselves what labor officials refuse to do. Maybe, but not likely.
Organizing the unorganized, and building rank and file movements in the unions, are perspectives that belong to an era on which the crisis has once and all finally foreclosed on. And while I think unions remain the first line of defense for organized workers, and that we are obligated to defend unionized workers in struggles against employers and against their state in whatever manner we can, the reason that Gerson's perspectives are no longer adequate to our situation today is the crisis of capital has foreclosed on unions as such.
Gerson does not understand this situation in this manner, and he certainly does not grasp the centrality of casualization to this situation. Thus, he thinks of the truckers as disguised proletarians, as independent contractors that are being crushed under the weight of debt (truck payments), maintenance and high fuel costs (a perspective with dovetails with that of the more regressive elements in Occupy who see the world in terms of the 99% in a struggle against greed and the banks and who pursue efforts to leap over the historical present, backwards, to return to an era which is now part of the past). In point of fact, this is a situation that obtains neither in Oakland nor the LA-Long Beach port. About one in twelve truckers in Oakland are waged and the Sikhs, blacks and Spanish speakers who form a large majority of truckers there do not “own” their trucks in the first place but lease them through a broker and are payed a piece rate. Nor do most them get anything like regular, full-time work, hours vary some weeks more than forty others much less. A similar situation characterizes troqueros at LA-Long Beach. All these people are casualized proletarians, and there status as such is fairly obvious... It is highly dubious that the unions can address their situation... I won't elaborate on the ethnic-racial tensions that overlay the differences between the Anglo independent contractors so-called and the nonAnglo truckers in the port in Oakland... and, I would also note the troqueros have already shown a well-developed capacity for self organization. At any rate, the approach to these workers as casualized will and cannot be made along the lines that built the CIO. But this besides the point.
The upsurges that we confront now and into the future will not have the features that characterized the mass production industries during nineteen thirties.
Under today's conditions, the objectives of big factory organizing have also become obsolete. Perhaps the only effective aim of organizing under conditions of extensive casualization of the proletariat entails activity that seeks to achieve provisional agreements not bound by legal contracts, instead of institutionalized collective bargaining, a legalized contract extended over a set duration of time; enforcement of the agreements by irregular (frequency undetermined) or quickie strikes that relies solely on the initiative and self-activity of workers themselves, on their participation and direct confrontation, different in nature from and counterposed to the lengthy, potentially demoralizing strikes of attrition that are infrequently waged by unions. And all of this is aimed at more or less negotiating the terms of non-work, of a time distinct from work as a mediated expression of an intense desire to suppress it altogether.
But these too are merely subordinate considerations because the overriding aim here is to insure that the bond between casualized workers and employers, tenuous among large layers of the casualized, never develops; that, in those upsurges as they more and more openly counterpose capital to workers, the visceral orientation of workers will be altogether to the overthrow of capital on the basis of our organizations as we create them in the context of a revolutionary situation which this activity itself defines.
.
[misspelled names corrected]
The sky is always darkest just before the dawn: class struggle in the US from the 2008 crash to the eve of the occupations movement - Loren Goldner
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Loren Goldner discusses working class and capitalist responses to the crisis since 2008.
Since July of 2011, the mainstream media have been increasingly talking about a “double dip” “recession” in the United States But we can safely assert that for most working people, the “recession” has never ended, and is about to get worse.
Background
To understand the class struggle in the United States since the financial meltdown of 2007–2008, we must briefly consider the history of the previous four decades, since the end of the wildcat insurgency of the late 1960s/early 1970s. The history of the American working class since ca. 1973 (as is well known), has been an almost uninterrupted wave of defeats and rollback. This has been described as a “class war in which only one side was fighting.” Real wages have fallen in those decades by a conservative estimate of 15 percent, and starting as early as 1960, the one-paycheck blue-collar family began to disappear. Today, in a typical working-class family, two to three paychecks are necessary, and at least one is required to cover housing costs (typically 50 percent of household income) alone. The average work week has increased at least 10 percent for those holding full-time jobs; in reality, the work force increasingly resembles the “hourglass society” with “professional strata” working 70-hour weeks, and a majority of the population casualized into irregular part-time work. The top 10 percent of the population has claimed roughly 70 percent of all increases in income over the same period. Large parts of the old industrial Northeast, it is once again well known, have been turned into the “rust bowl,” with low-paying, dead end “service” jobs (e.g. Wal-mart) replacing the old, moderately paid and relatively secure blue-collar jobs. The United States competes with South Korea for having the most dangerous workplaces in the “advanced” capitalist world, with 14 workers killed on the job every day. 2 percent of the population (seven million people),1 largely black and Latino, are awaiting trial, in prison or on parole, in large part the result of the “war on drugs.” With hundreds of thousands of people losing homes and apartments after losing their jobs, homelessness has soared, intensifying the “war on the poor” in police harassment, herding people into fetid shelters that are little more than prisons, and the criminalization of street people.
This, then, is a snapshot of social reality in the “richest country in the world.”
Decline of Strike Activity
In the face of this capitalist offensive since the 1970s, the classical strike, not to mention the wildcat strike, declined to near-invisibility. 20 percent of American workers were involved in strikes or lockouts each year in the 1970s, and only 0.05 percent in 2009. The old industrial unions were seriously weakened by de-industrialization and capital-intensive innovation requiring fewer workers; they fell from 35 percent of the work force in 1955 to 12 percent today, and the majority of those remaining are in public sector unions.2 In order not to be misunderstood: most of the major unions, up to 1973, were fighting the rank-and-file wildcat insurgency, not the capitalists. Nevertheless, their loss of membership reflects in part their inability to even continue the “business unionism” they practiced into the 1970s.) Those workers who retain regular jobs with decent wages and benefits, when they do strike, have almost without exception remained within the bounds of legality and narrowly-defined “bargaining units” that guarantee defeat before the struggle begins.
Pyramiding of Consumer Debt
The American working class and “middle class” (an ideologically-loaded term tied up with the nearly-extinct “American dream” of a steady job, home ownership and a decent retirement) partially compensated for the declining real wages after the 1970s with ever-deepening consumer debt. Beginning in the 1990s, this was complemented by the housing bubble, propagated by the media-touted myth that “housing prices never go down,” and fed in the 2000s by the “sub-prime” bubble, when virtually anyone could get a mortgage and buy a home, or get a second mortgage, and use these imaginary “assets” as a basis for further credit. A large part of the “recovery” from the 2000–2003 meltdown of the dot.com bubble was related to housing construction and the industries feeding into it, such as appliances and furniture. This piling up of consumer debt by working people, blue or white collar, paralleled the unprecedented increase of state (Federal, state and municipal) debt, and the external debt of the United States (total net dollars held abroad, minus U.S. assets abroad) of at least $10 trillion.
Thus the actual eruption of the crisis with the 2007 bursting of the real estate bubble, followed by the spasms set off in 2008 in the banking sector, was merely the culmination of a long process of buying time with debt pyramiding since the 1970s, reflecting an underlying crisis of profit (and ultimately of value in Marx’s sense) in the “real” economy. But that is, for the purposes of this article, another story.
The Political Dynamic
One must not overlook the weight of the November 2008 election of Barack Obama (elected in all probability by the outbreak of the crisis in October, weeks before) in the overall social climate. As in 1929–1934, the great majority of the US population has initially reacted to the crash with stunned silence. Obama, denounced by the “right” (the Republican Party, and in the past two years the radical right Tea Party faction of the Republicans) as a “socialist” (not to mention a “Muslim,” and even a “Marxist”), in fact has carried out policies to the right of his predecessor George W. Bush in almost every area. But the response to them has been muted because his liberal base has given his government every benefit of the doubt. Obama has intensified the “war on terror,” which increasingly is extended to domestic opposition3 ; he has deepened the US involvement in its losing wars in the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan) and drone bombings in Pakistan. His “economic team” included well-known hatchet men such as Lawrence Summers (who as Undersecretary of the Treasury had supervised the pummeling of South Korea in the 1997–98 Asia crisis), Paul Volcker (who as head of the Federal Reserve Bank had administered the deep recession of 1979–1982) and Tim Geithner (former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank). This team has engineered huge bail-outs of the collapsing banks and real estate institutions, guaranteeing trillions of dollars of bad loans at 100 percent, while doing little or nothing for the blue and white-collar workforce, not to mention the ever-growing marginal and homeless population. Obama’s Orwellian health care “reform” (also denounced as “socialist”) was virtually written by the big private health insurance companies, which dominate the retrograde U.S. health care system. In December 2010 Obama extended unemployment benefits in a “deal” with Congress that also extended Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, which had cost the Federal government $200 billion a year in lost revenue every year since 2001, while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $1.5 trillion, if not more. His administration has overseen more deportations of illegal immigrants than in all the Bush years, falling most heavily on the marginal Latin Americans who came into the country during the pre-2007 housing boom to work in construction, and who lost those jobs when the boom collapsed. In the June–July Washington charade over the US Federal deficit, the radical right (Tea Party) minority, with huge leverage over the lower house of Congress, gave Obama cover to shift even further to the right, preparing for big cuts in “entitlements”—another ideologically-loaded term referring to medical care for the poor and elderly and for the Social Security system for retired people. These cuts will emerge from the “bipartisan” super-committee, composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, due to enumerate in November the cuts that no one wanted to specify in the resolution of the summer standoff. All these developments illustrate the historical role of the Democratic Party, namely to enact policies which would arouse serious opposition if carried out by Republicans.
Good cop – bad cop
The American political system has been described as consisting of a right-wing party and a far right-wing party; since at least the 1880s, the two dominant parties have been engaged in a “good cop/bad cop” routine. The poorer 50 percent of the population does not vote, and official politics has receded into a shadow play that feeds a general passivity and cynicism. This is one of the contexts that explain strange phenomena such as the current Tea Party; when people do mobilize, right-wing and (less in evidence today) left-wing populisms (the revolt of the “little guy”) are the first safety valves of the system.
The Tea Party emerged as a force on the right wing of the Republican Party starting in 2009, expressing better than other organized political groupings the right-wing populist rage which has been part of the American political landscape, off and on, since the late 1970s. It represents a “declining demographic” of older, white, “middle” and “upper middle” class people who imagine that America’s problems can be solved by a strict balanced budget at every level of government and therefore a “minimal state” overseeing an unfettered “free market.” Such an economy never existed, even in the pre-1914 era when the state was a much smaller part of “GDP” but still played a central role in tariff policy, Indian removal for the expansion of the southern slave economy, and land seizures for railroads and canals. The real content of this Tea Party mirage would of course be a great strengthening of state repression, and the military maintenance of the (declining) U.S. empire, while gutting all remaining “social” dimensions of the state that the US radical right associates with the “socialist” New Deal of the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” of the 1960s. Its overwhelmingly white social base points to a (largely) unspoken but very real racial agenda of people frightened by demographic trends pointing to a white minority in the population by 2050, and by a black president. The Tea Party’s real function in U.S. politics is to allow the “center” (Obama et al.) to move farther to the right, permitting the “center” to appear as a rational, sane alternative to the “market fundamentalists.”
It is important to note that a near-universal belief that the crisis was “caused” by some elite, whether bankers or government regulators, drowns out any serious analysis of the underlying “crisis of value,” of which banks, consumer credit, real estate bubbles or government regulation are mere epiphenomena.
In November 2010, right-wing populist rage at Obama’s “socialist” measures (the bailout of the banks, health care “reform,” watered-down and mainly symbolic attempts at government regulation of finance) led to massive Republican gains in both houses of the US Congress, wiping out a Democratic majority in the (lower) House of Representatives and almost capturing the Senate. Much of Obama’s 2008 base, disappointed (or disgusted) with his virtually open rule in the interests of big capital, simply stayed home. (One should not overlook the right-wing populist rage, rarely articulated openly, at Obama’s black skin.)
The “Recession” and Muted Resistance
Since fall 2008, the official unemployment rate in the United States has reached 9.1 percent, and is in all likelihood closer to 15 percent, with figures endlessly “revised,” including anyone who works one hour a month as “employed” and not including millions of people who have given up looking for work altogether. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes after losing their jobs, especially in the previous “boom” areas such as California’s Central Valley, Las Vegas, or Florida; millions more are holding mortgages that are “under water” (higher than the actual value of their homes). There are years of backlog of empty houses and real estate prices continue to fall. At this writing—late September 2011—world stock markets have been gyrating wildly, which may outdate these figures within days.
One striking phenomenon connected to the housing collapse is the near-absence of collective resistance to foreclosures and evictions. This is an important contrast to the early 1930s, when in New York City (for example) thousands of people gathered to protect neighbors threatened with evictions,4 or in rural areas where farmers (often armed) attempted to protect farm land from seizure by banks. One comrade in one of the most economically-devastated cities (Baltimore, Maryland), which has rivaled Detroit in decline since the 1970s, reports that the great majority of evicted or foreclosed people there are simply “ashamed” of their situation, conceal it from neighbors, and leave quietly in the night.
Attacks on Health Care and Pensions
Since 2007–2008, overt class struggle has shifted to an important extent from the work place to the confrontation with the bankrupt state, at every level (Federal, state and municipal). But this shift was prepared by the earlier defeat of workers in virtually every blue-collar industrial sector, headed by the auto workers. Public sector workers and their services, after decades of propaganda about the superiority of privatization, can be demonized as privileged, overpaid parasites because they are the last workers still benefiting from relatively secure jobs and benefits. Since blacks are disproportionately represented among public sector workers, this demonization in some quarters also flows from a muted racial agenda.
A near-omnipresent dimension of this confrontation is over health care costs, given America’s retrograde private health care “system.”
The United States is the only “advanced” capitalist country having no universal health care. In 2009, 50 million people had no health insurance. Health care costs amount to 15 percent of “GDP,” and are projected to rise to 20 percent by 2020. Canada, with a universal health system, spends 10 percent. It is estimated that the elimination of private health insurers (HMOs, or Health Management Organizations) and their “administrative costs” would eliminate 20–30 percent of health care costs. Further costs are added by the close relationship between the major pharmaceutical companies (“Big Pharma”) and the political class. (Federal law, for example, forbids states to buy cheaper generic drugs from Canada.) A majority of Americans favor a “single payer” (universal) health system, but the mainstream political parties and the media have imposed a virtual blackout on discussion of that alternative.
Even before the full eruption of the crisis, many of the strikes that did occur were focused on health care.5 (For many people, particularly those with families, the private job-related health plan is as important, sometimes more important, than the wage itself.) As the crisis greatly reduced tax income of states and cities, they were increasingly unable to pay health care and pensions for retired public employees. At every level, politicians, demagogues and think tanks bemoan “spiraling health care costs” but silence any serious discussion of their true sources in the control of health care by private insurance companies and the bloated prices charged by the big pharmaceutical companies.
Starting in 2014, anyone of the 50 million people currently without health insurance will be liable to a considerable fine if they do not sign up with a private health insurer; current rates for an individual are on the order of $500 per month; for a family more than $1000 per month. (While this article was being written, a Federal court ruled this aspect of “health care reform” unconstitutional, but the Obama government will appeal the decision in a higher court.)
The health care crisis goes together with the crisis of pensions in both the private and public sector. Starting in the 1990s, more and more employers shifted from paying for full “defined benefit” pensions to paying into “40lks” where employer and employee both pay into a fund that is then invested…in the stock market, naturally with fees for the stock brokerage. Studies have shown that 40lks leave retirees with only 10 to 33 percent of what the older defined benefit pensions paid (and which only covered one-third of the work force at their peak). This trend, combined with the coming Congressional attacks on Medicare and Social Security, points to accelerating impoverishment of the elderly. The crisis depletes the budgets of state and local governments, leaving them unable to pay the pensions of retired public employees. (In November 2009, for example, Philadelphia transit workers struck for six days to win increased pension benefits.)
The Last Industrial “Worker Fortress”: Collapse of the United Auto Workers
A key victory in the decades-long attack on the US working class—in some sense the end of an era—was the acceptance in 2007 of a two-tier contract at the “Big Three” auto makers (GM, Ford, Chrysler) by the United Auto Workers (UAW), a contract that was rushed through to approval despite wide opposition from rank-and-file workers. Henceforth, new hires at the Big Three started at $14 per hour, compared to $27 per hour for older workers. The UAW contract since World War II had been a “flagship” agreement for many other industrial sectors, and in the next three years the number of two-tier union contracts in the United States increased from 2 percent to 12 percent.
In 2009, in the midst of the financial meltdown, GM and Chrysler both declared bankruptcy and were taken over by the US government. The bankruptcy was merely a strategy to restructure their debt obligations, first of all to retired auto workers. When the two companies emerged from bankruptcy weeks later, the UAW became a major shareholder in both of them. Through the bankruptcy proceedings, the companies had freed themselves of $50 billion owed to the health care fund for retired workers. A new fund, called VEBA (Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association), will be administered by the UAW and will be based exclusively on the market value of GM and Chrysler stocks. A collapse of the stocks, or another bankruptcy by either company, will leave two million UAW retirees and their dependents with no health care, and their pensions would be cut or assumed by the US government at some discount.
Attacks on Public Employees; Wisconsin
Having knocked out the union that had been the model for wage agreements in U.S. industry for sixty years (total employment at the Big Three’s U.S. plants had been declining for decades although foreign auto firms have invested heavily in non-union plants in the South), capital intensified its offensive in 2011 by attacking public employees and public services, best illustrated in the state of Wisconsin but with similar developments in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York (state) and New York City. In Wisconsin, a newly-elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to abolish collective bargaining, leading to the biggest (and most sustained) post-2008 working-class mobilization to date.
In the November 2010 elections, Scott Walker and the Republican Party took over the Wisconsin state government in the general Republican landslide. (It later emerged that Walker had close ties to the far-right billionaire Koch brothers, who clearly saw Wisconsin as an experiment for strategy and tactics to be used elsewhere.) Once in power, they gave major tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations, and then announced a state budget deficit, made far worse by those breaks. Walker proposed legislation for massive cuts in social services, enabling the state government to privatize at whim, and abolishing collective bargaining rights for public employees.6
The basic problem illustrated in the Wisconsin movement was the ability of the Democratic Party and the trade unions to control it and to defuse some real sentiment for a statewide general strike. This pattern was repeated again and again in other states, although nowhere has resistance to similar cuts achieved the depth of what happened in Wisconsin. The Democrats and the unions are closely linked because the latter are the major contributors to party campaign funds, which come from union membership dues. Thus in California, New York state, Minnesota and Connecticut, Democratic governors elected with strong union financial support pushed through cuts for public employees similar to Walker’s, but preserved the appearances of collective bargaining. In other Republican-controlled states, the results were mixed, and in some cases the governments backed off from full confrontation under the impact of the Wisconsin mobilization.
In Wisconsin itself, after the mass mobilization peaked in March, the Democrats and the unions pushed the movement into electoral channels, attempting to recall various Republican politicians and elect Democrats, entirely obscuring the fact that the Democrats who lost power in November 2010 had already imposed serious austerity, and had been planning more.7 Even these meek efforts, as the supposedly safe alternative to mass strike action, failed.
In short, the social controls on resistance to these attacks, the Democrats and the unions, did their work well throughout the country.
Smaller Struggles, Defeats and One Wildcat
Smaller struggles in the United States have also ended in partial or total defeat. In November 2008, workers at the Republic Doors and Windows factory in Chicago started to notice machinery disappearing from the plant during the night, a sure sign of an imminent closing. On December 2, 2008, company management announced that the plant would close in three days. On the scheduled closing day, Dec. 5, the 240 mainly black and Latino workers (members of the United Electrical Workers (UE), a union with a slightly more militant reputation than most) occupied the plant, demanding severance pay and health care benefits, and on Dec. 10 the workers accepted a severance package averaging $7,000 per worker and two months of health care. Management blamed the Bank of America for cutting off credit, but had recently bought a non-union window factory in the nearby state of Iowa. Workers picketed the bank, and workers from elsewhere brought food, blankets and sleeping bags during the occupation.
While the Republic workers had indeed won something, they did lose their jobs, a small fact overlooked in much of the “progressive” labor and left milieu’s hoopla about the struggle.
Another struggle with an even worse outcome for workers was the strike at the Stella d’Oro biscuit company in New York City. On Aug. 13, 2008, 135 workers in the Bakers Union walked out of contract negotiations. Originally a family business, with many workers having decades on the job, Stella d’Oro was taken over by a hedge fund that was demanding a 28 percent pay cut, an end to overtime pay for Saturdays and a 20 percent employee contribution to the health care plan. The union insisted on a legalistic strategy, doing nothing to prevent scabs from entering the plant, truckers from delivering flour, or to expand the strike to other bakeries. In May 2009, the workers offered to return to work without a contract, and were turned down. The union also convinced workers to rely on a favorable ruling from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US government “mediation” body. The strike continued until the end of June 2009, when the government National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) did rule that the hedge fund was engaging in “unfair labor practices” by refusing to bargain with the union. In early July, on the day when the Stella d’Oro workers returned to their jobs, management announced it was closing the plant, and proceeded to do so.
In Boron, California, in late January 2010, five hundred miners working for Rio Tinto (the third largest mining company in the world) were locked out after rejecting a contract which would have eliminated pensions, reduced wages, and introduced labor “flexibility”—justified by “global competition.”
In mid-May, ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) Local 30 accepted a new contract, approved by the workers by a 3-to-1 margin. The new contract included a 2.5 percent-a-year pay increase; for new hires, company-paid pensions will (as discussed above) be replaced with employee-funded 401(k) plans with a 4 percent company contribution. Paid sick days were reduced from 14 to 10 a year.
The ILWU had, once again, conducted the strike on a completely legalistic and localist basis. Scabs and managers, protected by a large-scale police effort, worked throughout the strike despite efforts by the Boron workers to stop them. Widespread support in the area and in nearby Los Angeles was never mobilized. Instead, the union made impotent appeals to Rio Tinto’s shareholder meetings and held American nationalist rallies at the British consulate.
As in the Republic case, the union and the “progressive” left milieu proclaimed victory.
In August of this year, 45,000 telephone workers in the northeastern U.S. went on strike against Verizon, organized in the CWA (Communication Workers of America) and the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). Verizon wanted to “adjust” the contract to cut pensions, change work rules and make employees pay more for health care, citing the steady decline in landline service and the shift to cell phones and the Internet. Once again, health care was the single most important issue. The strike was “suspended” after two weeks, with workers returning to the job with no contract and bargaining continuing with no job action; the CWA claims that the strike showed its “seriousness.”
Finally, to end this survey of strikes on a more positive note, perhaps the most significant wildcat strike in years took place in the Pacific Northwest on Sept. 8. EGT, a Portland-based company, had built a state-of-the-art grain export terminal at the Longview, Washington port, as part of a global supply chain for shipping grain from the US to growing Asian food and bio-fuel markets. EGT is owned by Japan-based Itochu Corp, South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean and St. Louis–based Bunge North America. Itochu ranks 201 on Fortune’s Global 500 list of the world’s largest corporations, and Bunge is number 182. These companies want to operate the grain terminal without workers from the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) breaking the 75-year agreement established for the west coast by the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. In response, union members have been blockading train tracks and holding pickets, which led to confrontations earlier this summer with cops, and a Federal injunction banning all picketing. The union broke this injunction and on the night of September 8th, hundreds of longshore workers broke into the terminal, detained the security guards, and sabotaged the equipment, dumping all the grain on the railroad tracks so the trains would not be able to run. This amounted to millions of dollars of damage, and the companies will have to hire scabs to clean up the mess. There was quite a standoff with the police, and reports of workers essentially intimidating and backing down the cops with baseball bats from which they made their picket signs. In support of this action, the Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett ports had a one-day wildcat shutdown the following day.
ILWU officials claim they don’t know what’s going on, as if it were a spontaneous rank and file upsurge, but it seems there was actually a union meeting called during the day to gather the ranks and discuss further steps after the Longview sabotage action. The ILWU has control of hiring out of their halls (which is exactly what they’re fighting to defend now), and therefore they can call a meeting at anytime where workers won’t work but will go to the meeting instead. This may just be the first step, and there will be more actions to come. So far everything has been done inside the union and has been kept relatively secret, so there was no general call for solidarity actions in Seattle. It remains unclear if the companies will fight hard to set a precedent breaking the ILWU’s 75-year jurisdiction over the ports, starting with Longview, or if they will try the same tactic in other West Coast ports. This could just one local company picking a fight, and they could back down and settle for a compromise in the face of this militancy.
One interpretation of the situation is the ILWU, like the rest of US unions, is up against the ropes and is throwing some punches before it falls to the ground. But another interpretation is that they’ are feeling their strategic position in the current economic conjuncture and are standing up for themselves because they can.
These actions had an instantly electrifying effect among militants in the Seattle area. After a year of struggles against police brutality in Seattle, it was inspiring to many people to see a cop admit he was intimidated when workers confronted him with baseball bats. Some younger unemployed people who often question the relevance of labor struggles are now showing interest because these workers are showing some real backbone against their common enemy.8
Attacks on Public Education and Student Mobilization
Education is another dimension of social reproduction in which state austerity has led to mass mobilization. We can set aside for a moment the nature of education at every level as a vast credentialing machine designed to maintain class distinctions and hierarchy, and to prepare people to accept workplace and social discipline in the tens of millions of jobs that exist (such as the FIRE—finance, insurance, real estate—sector) only because society is capitalist. A communist society will revolutionize education, and “work,” beyond recognition. Be that as it may, beneath the elite (mainly private) schools (which now typically cost $40,000 a year to attend), the “cinder block” state and community colleges, in the aftermath of de-industrialization, remain the main path for working-class youth to jobs above the McDonalds level.
In California, where public education, as late as the 1970s was almost free, tuition at every level (university, state college, community college) has risen to thousands of dollars a year, and most students have to work at least part time to stay in school, as well as accumulate debts from student loans that can total $100,000 upon graduation. Due to cutbacks in elementary and high schools, resulting in part from the right-wing populist “tax revolt” of 1978 and since, the quality of California’s public schools (elementary and high school) dropped over several decades from 1st in the country to almost last, on a level with Mississippi and Louisiana. Schools deal with ever- increasing class size, inadequate materials (textbooks, etc.), attacks on teachers’ unions and the lowest funding per student in the United States. Combined with the soaring rates of incarceration (among the highest in the United States) it became notorious in the 1990s that the state of California had more black men in prison than in college. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have attempted to deal with this long-term crisis by imposing ever-greater regimentation of curriculum, reducing teachers to preparing students at every level for standardized achievement tests. (U.S. students notoriously score at the bottom in comparative international tests of high school students.)
Thus in the fall of 2009, students at the Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses of the University of California (UC) mobilized against further tuition increases, and in Berkeley thousands confronted the police. This was a prelude to a national mobilization on Mar. 4 2010, in which California was again at the cutting edge. This time, the movement extended well beyond the relatively elite UC system to the state colleges and high schools—where teachers and students walked out. In Oakland, California, hundreds of students shut down a major freeway for several hours.9
The California actions were the largest of similar mobilizations in more than 20 states on March 4, none of which succeeded in reversing the cuts.
Strikes in the Georgia, California Prisons
All the trends of contracted social reproduction, from mass unemployment to public unions of police and prison guards10 to the warehousing of black and Latino youth in the prison system, came to a head in the Georgia prison strike of December 2010 and a major prison revolt in California in July of this year.11 The Georgia strike began on Dec. 9 with thousands of prisoners, black, white and Latino, participating in seven prisons around the state. The strikes were coordinated by cell phone. The main demand was a wage for prison labor. Other demands were for more education, better living conditions including better food, access to medical care, and rights to family visits and telephones.
The strike was initially planned for one day, but prisoners decided to continue after guards responded with violence and beatings. Guards destroyed personal property of prisoners, shut off heat and hot water, and put prisoners into solitary confinement. State authorities attempted to play down the extent of the strike, and news coverage disappeared from mainstream media in a few days. The strike ended after six days, with no apparent resolution, except a state promise to “investigate.” In January, seven guards were suspended without pay for violence against prisoners.
For years, California has been in the “vanguard” of maximum security “supermax” prison construction in the United States. One of the most notorious of these installations is in Pelican Bay. For the first three weeks of July, prisoners in the solitary concrete isolation chambers of the “Security Housing Unit” (SHU) at Pelican Bay went on a hunger strike, demanding an end to group punishment and snitching enforced by prison authorities, and demanding educational programs, human contact, weekly phone calls, and access to sunlight and better food. The strike spread to thirteen prisons ultimately involving 6,600 prisoners. SHU prisoners are locked in cells without windows 22 ½ hours per day under permanent fluorescent lights.
The strike ended on July 21 when prison authorities agreed to permit SHU inmates to have wall calendars, woolen caps for the winter time (the cells are unheated) and to “review” the enforced snitching.
Conditions in California prisons (with overcrowding at 200 percent capacity) are so outrageous that the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court found them to be in violation of the US constitutional amendment against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Conclusion
The post–2007/2008 official response to the crisis has been nothing but an attempt to restore the status quo ante for capital, propping up trillions in bank and real estate debt. U.S. companies have stockpiled trillions more but do not invest them; at the same time, they have launched a full-blown attack on the total wage, in terms of pay, health care, pensions, housing foreclosures, and education. Crumbling U.S. infrastructure is estimated by the American Society of Civil Engineers to need $2.3 trillion in repairs and replacement costs. The “social indicators”12 of the “richest country in the world” show it to be a society more polarized than it was prior to the world depression of the 1930s. Since the 1966–1973 working-class strike wave, American workers have undergone decades of rollback, losing one defensive struggle after another. In this “slow crash landing,” and especially since the meltdown of 2007–2008, the whole structure of post-1945 American society has come unraveled. In the midst of this, working-class anger is widespread, with as yet no coherent form of struggle emerging, which moreover stands in rather sharp contrast to recent upsurges in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, France, Britain and Chile. How and when this process will be reversed remains a totally open question.
- 1The increase in the prison population since 1970 almost exactly maps the number of industrial jobs lost in the same period. The United States has 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
- 2A significant percentage of public union membership also consists of anti-working class police and prison guards.
- 3In September 2010, members of the (Marxist-Leninist) Freedom Road Organization, who had been active in the American antiwar movement, were raided by the FBI in several cities, and much of their electronic equipment was seized. They are charged with contacts with “terrorist” groups such as the FARC (Columbia), the PFLP (Palestine), and Hezbollah (Lebanon). It has become within the realm of possibility that writing a favorable article about one of these “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTO’s) can constitute “support for terrorism” under the US Homeland Security Law.
- 4On the early 1930s see this very interesting article: Unemployed Councils, Eviction Riots, and the New Deal.
- 5David Himmelstein et al. in Bleeding the Patient. The Consequences of Corporate Health Care gives a good overview of the situation as of 2000; the situation has only worsened in the past decade.
- 6 For details on the struggle, in February–March of this year, see my article on Madison in Insurgent Notes No. 3 and the letter “More on Madison” in Insurgent Notes No. 4 (August 2011).
The immediate response was a series of walkouts from schools around the state and a “sick-in” by teachers that amounted to a wildcat strike. The state capitol building in Madison was occupied for weeks by thousands of people, and mass demonstrations built every weekend up to March 12, when 125,000 workers massed for a rally. (Signs and slogans of the movement explicitly echoed the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, but unlike in Egypt, the Wisconsin movement failed to overthrow Walker.) - 7In early August, these recall campaigns failed to end the Republican majority in the Wisconsin upper house, after massive expenditure and mobilization.
- 8I thank a Seattle comrade on the scene for most of these details.
- 9See the article of John Garvey, “California is not Dreaming” in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
- 10On the relationship between education, prison guards and public employees unions, cf. John Garvey “From Iron Mines to Iron Bars,” in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
- 11The following information about the hunger strike and California prison conditions is from the Trotskyist newspaper Workers Vanguard, Aug. 5 2011. For a general overview of prisons and law enforcement in the United States since the 1970s, see the book of Christian Parenti, Lockdown America (1999).
- 12The United States, for example, is 42nd in the world in life expectancy, behind a number of developing countries, and has the highest infant mortality rate of any “advanced capitalist” country.
Comments
At this writing—late September 2011—...
It looks like this was written by Loren Goldner about five months ago. Did he just now add this to his website or something? It is, by the way, highly insightful, as with much of his writing. Thanks for posting this!
So, I didn't wait until after work and went ahead read the article.
I think it's a pretty good review of the current class battles being had here in the US during the 2000s. The UE and some longshoremen are stepping up and with the solidarity that came out of it in the northwest is pretty interesting.
Did the UE strike at the Republic plant not win the workers some form of "victory" and a renewed contract, which came up again just a couple of days ago?
I am personally interested in gathering more information regarding neoliberal attacks on pension funds and the continuing allowed collapse of the social security/retirement system through 401k's and other "life insurance" policies being hyped at people's job sites. It beginning to look quite obvious now that Capital has been waging a slow war against our class ever since the social security act and the Great Society policies were enacted, and we have bore the brunt of it. For example, with the insurance and pension fund business, they give us other options, other extra perks, and then before we know it those private options are the only ones left. Though social security funds seem to also be used as revenue within the market there are stronger guarantees but with 401k's and the lot, well they are more volatile and depend on the market, and returns are not as strong. Correct me if I am wrong.
Overall strategy? Well, that's the trick ain't it. It seems that economic and political attacks against our class happen have been slow and very widespread which weaken us over time and then comes the open attacks in times of crisis. Its the same with this crisis, capital succeeded in aquiring 100s of billions of dollars, highway robbery, but it didn't really affect us, until now.
Not a bad article, although the bit about US infrastructure "crumbling" is just so much horseshit and panic mongering.... if you look at the total value of fixed assets and infrastructure in the US, "$2.3 trillion in repairs" amounts to nothing.... but let's get our references right: the correct phrase is "the darkest hour is just before dawn..." from the Shirelles, "This is Dedicated to the One I Love.." a song to, or from, a soldier in Vietnam.
Marx-Trek
Did the UE strike at the Republic plant not win the workers some form of "victory" and a renewed contract, which came up again just a couple of days ago?
No. It wasn't a strike, it was a plant occupation. The company was closing the plant. In Illinois there's a law requiring some payout to workers in the event of plant closure. The company wasn't paying that. The workers occupied the plant to get their severance pay, which they got. Another company later bought the plant and said it would rehire all the workers. It didn't, it only hired some of them, then it announced it was closing the facility again. Now the UE are talking about running it as a worker co-op, which might work but two plant closures in a row makes me wonder if they can run a profitable enough co-op business. We'll see. But anyway, no, Republic occupation did not win any contract.
Insurgent Notes #6, June 2012
Articles from this issue of the journal.
Class Struggle in Vietnam: From the Colonial Yoke to Wage Slavery for Global Capital
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/vietnam.jpg?itok=X2RfzxD1)
Following a recent wave of strikes in Vietnam, Insurgent Notes discuss capitalist development and class struggle in the country. From Insurgent Notes #6.
Geographical and Historical Background
In this text, we will deal only with the struggles which have unfolded since the first big strike wave in 2006. We don’t think it necessary to dwell on the very troubled historical past of this country, a past which goes back much farther than the recent colonial wars and French colonization itself, to the conflict-ridden domination by powerful neighbors (above all China), although this past has influenced and continues to influence recent social and political events.1
On the other hand, we feel it essential to remind the reader of a few basic geographical, economic and social realities which still condition the political orientations, most often beyond whatever the current political system happens to be. The relatively recent political unity of Vietnam is a poor reflection of its political vicissitudes, shaped to a great extent by its varied terrains and the living conditions flowing from them. The 330,000 square kilometers (three-fifths the size of France) inhabited by 90 million people (one and a half times the French population with a density six times higher than the world average), unequally distributed between two poles (the Mekong Delta for Cochinchina and the Red River for Tonkin), separated by roughly 1,500 kilometers of a narrow coastal mountain range where a third pole, Annam, developed. Two-thirds of the territory, therefore, is formed by mountains and high plateaus. The whole history of Vietnam up to the present is bound up with these disparities, which led to integrations and disintegrations with neighboring countries.
The Meaning of the “Independence” Won Militarily in 1975: The Failure of State Capitalism as an Ideology in its Pure, Hard Form
The present economic development of Vietnam, once the reconstruction period at the end of the American occupation was over, can be seen in parallel to that of China, once things are kept in proportion. The occupation of Saigon by the Viet Cong in April 1975 put an end to a long period of warfare but left the country completely ruined and drained, to be rebuilt from an unprecedented level of destruction affecting material conditions, nature and people with short and long-term consequences.2 Nearly thirty years were necessary to overcome this economic handicap, one made even worse by the collapse of the Soviet system and by the autarchy of a strict state capitalism dominated by a very large, totalitarian, corrupt and often incompetent bureaucracy.
The problem posed in 1975, when the victorious Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army took over the whole country, was the survival of a state and political system of an essentially agrarian country (in 2003, in an industrial capitalist world, 68 percent of the Vietnamese population still lived off of agriculture) which for all its diverse natural wealth, cannot survive without interacting with the capitalist world, and without submitting to its laws.
To understand the terms of this necessary economic reorganization, we must emphasize that these peasants, who were the great majority and thus the social base of a political regime established by force of arms, had massively contributed to the successes of the wars against the French and later the Americans but who had, by the same token, borne the brunt of the war (from its military demands to the impact of defoliants). Their commitment and their sufferings were the counterpart of their hopes for a new world: for the peasants, this new world meant the recovery of the land and the chance to till it as they wished, in order to feed themselves and to perhaps, one day, to expand their activities.
The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) at this time mainly lacked any theoretical or precise vision of how to organization rural production while still winning the support of the peasants. The party’s vision was one of total planning of the economy, one whose bureaucratic dimension was supposed to give (or impose upon, if necessary) the peasants a “socialist or—if one prefers—communist” knowledge which they did not have from their earlier evolution in a “capitalist world.” This was a first phase, one necessary to win peasant support in the period when the expanding power of the nationalist struggle was based on the seizure and redistribution of land on an egalitarian basis (or one presumed to be such). But this was in fact only a political strategy, one rapidly replaced, in the framework of the planned economy, by a collectivization of agriculture (the land being in any case state property), a copy on a small scale of what had been done previously in the USSR and of what was then underway in China.
The goal of this collectivization was to have an agriculture providing not merely for the needs of the entire population, but also for it to be an important pawn in the necessary international exchanges. We won’t linger over the details of the collectivization, imposed in 1978, but its result was catastrophic in terms of agricultural production, to the point that Vietnam in 1980, two years later (given the importance of the peasantry), continued to be an importer of basic foodstuffs. This was due to the fact, as everywhere else where forced collectivizations took place, the peasants saw no reason to produce anything above and beyond their own consumption. Further, in the advisory and control structures, experienced local leaders had been replaced by incompetent (and often corrupt) bureaucrats who were being repaid for their loyalty to the party and for their military actions in the “liberation war.”
“Market Socialism” under the Dictatorship of the VCP: the Opening to World Capital and the Mutation of the Ruling Class
The VCP needed to find a solution that fit into the overall program of necessary economic development, which implied the social control of an excess peasant population. Beginning in 1981, and until 1988, the collectives were dismantled; land remained state property but its distribution, through local cooperatives, was finally given to the peasants with usage rights (which could be passed on to others) of 50 years. Similarly, in 1986, a more thoroughgoing measure authorized the creation of private enterprises, most importantly in agriculture.
This turn did not, however, attenuate the control of the VCP over the use of land, or the impact on agricultural production of a melange of local privileges, corruption, subsidies and speculation. From 1990 to 1999, industrialized farming increased by 64 percent for annual rotations, and by 91 percent for non-annual rotations (including an increase in fruit production by 80 percent) whereas the sector producing locally consumed food increased only 30 percent, as did stock breeding. While there was an extension of plantations (coffee, tea, etc.), setting off conflicts involving speculative hoarding (supported by corruption) with the peasants, most notably in mountainous regions, on the other hand, in the areas close to cities, in 2002, the average size of agricultural plots was 0.7 hectares, and 0.3 hectares in the Red River delta in Tonkin,3 and 19 percent of the rural population was made up of “landless peasants.”
Even as it attempts to influence agricultural practices and to fit them into the industrial development plan, the VCP is attempting to tread carefully with the rural population, which makes basic land use problems very complex, caught as they are between regulations and local speculative or custom-driven realities. At the end of 2010, a study on “Land Reform in Vietnam” emphasized: “The situation of rural households is, on one hand, extremely unequal according to the region, and there are cases where the modalities of access to agricultural and forest lands are designed to effectively protect such households, especially the most fragile among them.”4 Recent events, and particularly the world food crisis, reminded Vietnam that the agrarian and peasant questions were not yet solved, and put the rural land question back at the top of the agenda. Responding to this crisis (and a considerable increase in the price of rice) the government decided to freeze the status of more than a million hectares of rice paddies and started a campaign (the “three nong”) whose objective was to rebalance the rural and urban worlds.5
Despite these flip-flops, we might say that on the whole, the peasants did respond to reforms which gave them more control over the land and more power to decide what to do with it. In 2010, Vietnam was not only agriculturally self-sufficient but had become an exporter: it was the fifth largest producer and the second largest exporter of rice; it was the second largest exporter of coffee; the fifth largest exporter of tea; and it had achieved a respectable ranking in other products: cashew nuts, rubber, and in hydroponic production. But, even though it employed the majority of the population and remained an essential factor, the agricultural sector’s share of the total product declined relative to (most importantly) industrial development from 25 percent of GDP in 2000, it represented only 20 percent in 2010 whereas industry had grown from 36 percent to 40 percent; this is, moreover, quite relative, since GDP had tripled between 2002 and 2010.
With these overall figures, it is difficult to get a sense of the general living standards of the peasantry, which is still by far the majority of the population. The small plots under cultivation, as well as variations in climate, in the price of fertilizers and of marketable products all mean that many peasants, even those with land, often live in poverty. We can find some indications in the marginal elements clearly in poor and precarious situations. The roughly 19 percent of the population who are landless peasants (at least 10 million people) live for all intents and purposes in the same conditions as the European agricultural workers of a century ago. One illuminating detail: in April 2008, when the absorption of these poor peasants by industrial development was already well underway, the VCP was worried about the theft of rice in “wildcat” nighttime harvests. The party passed legislation stipulating severe punishment for this kind of theft and outlawing all nighttime use of any implement or vehicle used in the rice harvest. At the same time, peasants were required to post armed guards in their fields night and day.
This pressure on the poor peasants to merely survive is further increased by demographic pressure (an increase in the birth rate but also in life expectancy, now reaching the level of the industrialized countries). Something that might be seen as positive brings with it a risk of social destabilization; the VCP is sufficiently aware of this to adopt a policy of restricting births to two children per couple.6 Overall, we see a combination of factors which, from the necessity of economic development to the maintenance of social peace, by way of the level of poverty and self-sufficiency in food, both compels and allows the VCP to promote industrial development by the entry of foreign capitals, with its competitive advantage of cheap labor power.
The “Doi Moi” (Renewal) policy was developed in 1986. It can be briefly defined: enterprise reform aimed at integrating the country into the world economy, by introducing methods and capitalist relations into a modification of the political apparatus of the party-state. This results in a dynamic of political and economic polarization, pushing the sphere of state power to appropriate for itself the benefits of the economic opening by the creation of increasingly Mafia-like networks. Generalized corruption transforms the party from a structure of domination into an access route to resources and a locus for the concentration of goods. Ideology itself has evolved considerably: personal enrichment is hailed as a contribution to national development, young business men are decorated with the “red star,” and the new millionaires (in dongs) are edified as heroes of the “renewal.”
Formation and Development of a Proletariat: The Sale of the National Work Force on the International Market Underwritten by the Dictatorship of the VCP
Nearly 20 years, however, were necessary before this reform allowed the VCP, in 2007, to request membership in the WTO, i.e., before it was able to open up, without too many risks, to a competitive penetration of the national economy by international trade. Only in 1991 was the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) authorized, allowing foreign capital to benefit not merely from facilities in place and financial and fiscal advantages, but also from conditions for the exploitation of the work force that were particularly enticing for the capital invested. These SEZs are unevenly distributed and will be concentrated in the most populated regions of Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south.7 At first, these investments were not particularly important; as one official put it “One sewing machine, one brush to spread glue on a shoe sole, and we have created a job.” At the beginning of the 2000s, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce advertised its work force on the international market in these terms: “One of our advantages over Indonesia is that the Vietnamese work force is not inclined to involve itself in struggles.” This was confirmed by another official who in 2003 clarified that “if the country is to remain attractive for FDI8 it must furnish a cheap and docile work force.” It is true that, on paper, the dictatorship of the VCP could guarantee rigorous working conditions, an official trade union present in only 10 percent of companies, and a new proletariat which could offer every guarantee of stability; but the bureaucrats, however sure of themselves, could hardly fail to know that a proletariat rapidly becomes conscious of the conditions of its exploitation and starts to struggle.
These changes deeply changed the attitude of the population toward the regime. The worker, peasant and minority revolts against the local party organs and company managements (who were flaunting their ill-gotten gain with insulting ostentation), are clear proof of the way that people kept involuntarily in poverty experience these situations as unbearable.
Workers certainly struck as foreign capital moved in and as people migrated to the centers where the work force was being exploited, and did so all the more when it was seen that the investors barely paid attention to existing labor legislation and that the state authorities not only closed their eyes but violently repressed people who merely asked that the laws be applied. Foreign investors had a weighty argument for getting their special conditions of exploitation: the threat of going elsewhere. According to a study by the official Institute of Workers and Trade Unions, only 60 percent of foreign direct investments offer working conditions compatible with Vietnamese labor legislation. One might think that the media coverage of these struggles in 2005 was not due merely to their dimensions in major workplaces and their geographic extension. One might think, then, that the young generation born after 1986, those whose exploitation began as soon as they finished school, no longer had the same reasons to “respect” the VCP, with its struggle for national liberation, and for the privations accepted by their parents in the patriotic reconstruction of a country ravaged by war. But one factor remained central in the escalation of struggles, a factor which led to the opposition to the totality of extremely harsh working conditions, and that was the inflation which made it impossible to live with very low wages.
This table shows precisely how inflation was progressing after 2002 and how it then surged in 2004 and in the following years.9
The financial crisis and the major devaluation of Asian currencies in 1997 (between 40 and 50 percent relative to the US dollar) rendered more vulnerable the outsourced sector of key industries (textiles, clothing, shows, electronics, etc…) employing many workers. Textile industries alone, for example, employ 500,000 workers. As they became less and less competitive, these industries were forced to constantly lower the outsourced price on many items. The cost of producing one jacket, for example, fell from $4 in 1993 to $3 today. In spite of that, outsourcing contracts brought in less and less money, as did the price for the raw materials (gas, natural rubber, coal, etc…) Vietnam exported. This was an increasingly difficult situation for those who had migrated from agriculture to the factories, out of necessity but also with hopes for a better future.
Who then were these new proletarians who would be revolting?10 As in other Asian countries, including China, they were and are the migrant workers, often those coming from the north to the south of the country. Four and a half million migrated between 1994 and 1999; 6.7 million more between 2004 and 2009; women make up about half of them, but they are much more numerous in the temporary migrations. Starting in 2000, the importance and the character of these migrations can be seen in the 43 percent turnover rate which the bosses complain about, and notably in the fact that after the Tet festival only two-thirds of these migrants return to their jobs in the same factory.
Development and Fluctuations in the Class Struggle: Organization and Repression
Before the major strike wave of 2005–06, a few warning signs had revealed and spread through the media some idea about the conditions of exploitation of the Vietnamese workers. In June 2005, 10,000 workers of a factory in Da Nang (a joint venture with a Hong Kong firm) staged a wildcat strike11 against a whole situation which is too poorly rendered as “working conditions,” a situation found just about everywhere, with a few variations:
* no contract,
* a minimum 12-hour day but often expanded by unpaid overtime,
* two bathroom visits per working day, under surveillance,
* one cup of water during the entire work day,
* no social benefits, no days off for illness or for death of a relative,
* “we are treated like animals,” according to one woman, i.e., not merely insulted, and humiliated, but sometimes hit,
* firings for the first infraction.
The first strike wave took place between December 28, 2005, and January 8, 2006, on the Binh Duong SEZ (Cochinchina). Sixty thousand workers in 50 factories took part, three-fourths of them women between the ages of 18 and 25. The first factory to walk out was a Taiwanese plant with the lowest wages and the worst conditions. This factory employs 1,000 workers, who demanded an increase in the basic monthly salary of €32; they resumed work with a 10 percent pay increase but, to make up for it, management increased the pace of work: 1,200 pieces had to be submitted by 6 pm, as opposed to 8–8:30 pm before the strike. After this first wildcat, the movement spread to other factories in the zone throughout 2006 over salaries and other demands about working conditions. The impact of the strikes was such that the CPV raised the minimum wage by 40 percent in February 2006, but in a differential way: €44 a month in the two biggest cities, Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon); €40 in medium-sized cities and €36 in the rest of the country.12
These strikes (which were always wildcats) marked the beginning of a sort of race between inflation and wage increases, in struggles which have continued up to the present at an uneven rhythm. One can surmise that, after having made these concessions (as in the above examples) management tried to recover their control by other means, most notably in labor time or in speedup, which resulted, given the constant increases in inflation, in a new strike wave. In Hanoi alone, in June 2006, every week saw between 400 and 2,000 workers in wildcat strikes. The official figures at least give some sense of this:
2006: 330 strikes in 6 months;
2007: 700 strikes for the year;
2008: 762;
2009: 218;
2010: 424;
2011: 857 over an 11 month period.
Seventy-five percent of these strikes took place in foreign companies. The falloff in 2009 can be explained by the impact of the crisis in 2008 which reduced the activities of the exporting companies, resulting in the layoff of migrant workers.
One of the first questions we might ask, in guessing the reasons that sparked these struggles, given (stated bluntly) the totality of the conditions of exploitation, is how they broke out and how they spread. On these points, we have little information, beyond official statements and/or on-the-spot accounts of the strikes.
First of all, there is no doubt that these were wildcat, i.e., illegal, strikes; it is difficult to say if low-level organizers of the official trade union were able to participate in sparking the wildcats and/or if they were able to play a role as mediators with management (in 2008, while wildcats strikes were underway in different sectors, one official noted that the wildcats “are becoming more and more common and that is due to the fact that the union cannot play its role as mediator”; the official union was represented in only 10 percent of the foreign export firms and even there was not recognized by the workers as their representatives). In May 2009, during a strike of 500 workers in a textile factory in the south, an official admitted that “the strike was launched independently by an informal group of workers.”
A manager of one of these companies summarized as follows the way in which these strikes unfolded: “The workers remained in the factory in an organized way and designated a representative to talk with management. Some of these workers were aggressive. They fought with the guards and with the police, threw projectiles and destroyed property.” This would not be confirmed by another official during a strike of 800 workers in a Japanese electronics factory: “They didn’t destroy anything. They merely gathered at the factory entrance to protest peacefully.” What is certain is that we can find all possible variants from peaceful occupations to violent confrontations. Some recent examples: on October 19, 2011, in Binh Duong province (south of Ho Chi Minh City), 6,000 workers in a Taiwanese shoe plant occupied the factory, fought with the security guards, blocked the adjacent streets and destroyed equipment. In January 2012, a minister confessed that strikes “imply confrontations, destruction and deaths.” This was undoubtedly an allusion to what happened in June 2011 during a strike in a motorcycle parts plant where a security agent rammed a picket line in a car, killing one woman and injuring six others. It seems that, here or there, strike or struggle committees were formed, and it is quite obvious that the VCP is trying at any cost to prevent these formations from becoming permanent and, even worse for these managers, from coordinating on a regional or national level through political or other channels of opposition. There have been, on one hand, direct forms of police or administrative repression during localized conflicts. From June 24 to 29, the 93,000 workers in the Pou yen Vietnam Co., a shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City (producing mainly for Adidas), struck for a wage increase and for the payment of a bonus; the strike extended to neighboring factories. A thuggish intervention put an end to the strike, with the arrest of 29 workers and the condemnation of three of them—the so-called leaders—to prison terms of 7–9 years.13 There were on the other hand concessions attempting, more or less at the same time, to cool off pressure from the base (one reportage indicated that “every day in this country, there is a strike”); the government raised the minimum wage by 12 percent; another increase followed on October 1.
Such an alternation of repression and concessions is only one aspect of which is only one element among many of the whole apparatus of control and domination by the CPV. But in the last analysis, it is repression which wins out, ranging from direct military and police force to administrative detention, from constant surveillance of the conversations and writings of the population to an ever stricter control of the use of such modern means as cell phones and the Internet. This makes attempts to support struggles from the outside particularly haphazard, as has been the case of the Committee for the Protection of Vietnamese Workers (CPVW) which has been trying to be active in Vietnam itself (with leaflets, support and advice to strike “leaders”) but also with Vietnamese émigrés around the world, for the establishment of independent unions (we might suspect somewhat that, as in other totalitarian countries, such as e.g., China, they are instruments for American penetration, piggy-backing on struggles).
Current Economic Changes Resulting from the World Crisis and Their Impact on Struggles
f, in 2011, the number of strikes had been the highest in years (16 strikes per week) this situation seems to have changed in 2012. This surge of strikes in 2011 and in earlier years is usually explained by the surge of economic activity, which meant that strikers had no fear of being fired, being sure that they could find a new job. It does seem to be the case that the fall off of social conflicts in 2009 corresponded to the impact of the world crisis of 2008. This situation may well recur today. GDP grew at only 4 percent in the first quarter of 2012 and no major conflict cracked the media barrier. Nevertheless, inflation is still high, rising to 16 percent, and poverty levels are also high; roughly 30 percent of the active population is either unemployed or precarious. The average salary for unskilled workers is €100 a month; if it is difficult to estimate what that represents in terms of living standards, the announcement that one-third of all children under five is suffering from malnutrition gives a certain picture. In the same way, a lack of manpower in certain SEZs might indicate that low wages and harsh conditions are no longer attractive for migrants from the country.
The whole economic system is evolving, with the recent emergence of new sectors such as oil exploration and export, or the increasing use of new information technologies.14 To maintain its social dominance, the VCP nonetheless has to take account of this, given that three-fourths of its economy is based on the activity of the SEZs and new investments in FDI. The international crisis is harshly affecting all countries which live essentially off this activity, closely tied to that of importing countries, i.e., the industrialized countries, which are themselves in crisis.
The poverty wages paid to Vietnamese workers undoubtedly remain 30 percent lower than the wages of their Indian or Chinese counterparts, but other elements play a role in investors’ choices in this cutthroat competition over costs of production, namely the global conditions of exploitation.15 One of the first elements is the system’s resistance to workers’ demands both in terms of costs and of social peace; put another way, structural reforms of internal factors of the economy on one hand, and the strengthening of repression on the other. That assumes that the VCP can finance the necessary infrastructure, particularly for energy output and, once again, for guaranteeing social peace.
The older proletariat, which will not have given up its habits of struggle, will be joined by this new, better educated proletariat, which will demand wages and working conditions different from what has been the practice in the past. Last February, interviews at the highest level, and most notably with the head of the official trade union (VLC), were seeking ways to “reduce the number of strikes to attempt to reassure and calm investors.” But the main unknown, when we consider these domestic problems of Vietnam and class resistance, remains the world evolution of the economic crisis. Any forecast would be risky: in all circumstances, the VCP will seek to maintain its power by every means at its disposal. This future depends as much on the ability of world capitalism to overcome the resistance of the proletariat, and in this sense the working-class struggles in Vietnam, even in the absence of direct ties, are connected to the struggle of proletarians everywhere. These struggles are in fact unified because they are a response to a common exploitation and a common intensification of the conditions of exploitation and, while apparently separated by borders and by very different situations, they modify in their way the problematic of survival for a capitalism in crisis.
- 1The most penetrating approach to the struggles in Vietnam, both in the past and today, especially those of the Vietnamese peasantry, is to be found in the different books and articles of Ngo Van, particularly in Vietnam 1920–1945: revolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, (Nautilus Publishers), in his articles in ICO (Informations et Correspondances Ouvrieres) from 1967–72, and in Le joueur de flûte et l’oncle Ho, Vietnam 1945–2005 (Paris-Méditerranée). The main work of Ngo Van available in English is the translation of his autobiography (Au Pays de la Cloche Felée in the French original), also covering the 1920–45 period in the first person, is In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (AK Press, 2010).
- 2 From 1965 to 1975, on this small territory, which was their experimental area, the Americans dropped 7 million bombs, three to four times the tonnage dropped by all belligerents during the Second World War (nearly 200,000 of these unexploded devices still present a latent danger) and 84 million liters of “Agent Orange.” In addition to the pollution of the soils, nearly 5 million Vietnamese have been contaminated for life by this defoliant, as well as their offspring. The American war alone killed one million Vietnamese combatants and five million civilians. These figures do not take account of all the long-term effects of the war among the wounded, the victims of unexploded bombs or mines, or of Agent Orange extended over several generations.
- 30.7 hectares correspond to 7,000 square meters and 0.3 hectares are 3,000 square meters (in reality a large garden), 0.3 à 3,000m². The average grain-producing farm in France covers between 500 and 1,000 hectares.
- 4The question of land use has been central to the peasant revolts which have been more frequent than those making it into the media throughout the years of VCP domination. A revolt by the peasants in the Mekong Delta over the issue of land use in 1987–88 ended bloodily. Four months were needed in 1997 to put an end to an agitation against the exactions of the local VCP cadre in Thai Binh (Tonkin) and Dong Nai (Cochinchina). In February 2001, in the high central plateaus, demonstrations (sometimes with an ethnic coloring) over land use and the granting of land to between 10 and 300,000 migrants from the overpopulated regions of the north and south ended in confrontations and numerous arrests.
- 5Cf. « La réforme foncière au Vietnam », published by Aménagement, Développement, Environnement, Santé et Société (ADES) (September 16, 2010).
- 6 We also find here a disequilibrium common to all of Southeast Asia; due to different discriminatory practices at birth, in Vietnam 112 boys are born for every 100 girls.
- 7f certain SEZs do manage to attract foreign direct investment, others show evidence of a bureaucratic megalomania, one certainly tied to corruption. Thus, for example, in the central region of the high plateaus of Binh Dinh, the 70,000 hectare SEZ Bo Y International was set up at great expense and, over an 8-year period, attracted only a few small factories. It is obvious that the choices of foreign investors are focused on the populated areas where infrastructure facilitates exports at low cost.
- 8FDI: Foreign Direct Investment is the term for investments in a specific country coming from another country for an economic activity under one or another juridical form (creation of a company, a joint venture, the purchase of an existing company) and where production is essentially for export. Three-fourths of all FDI comes from the United States and several Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore).
- 9This persistent inflation may have different sources (capital entry, the export of agricultural products which squeeze the home market, risky credits from local banks in unprofitable operations, the disproportionate weight of the administrative and police apparatus) which can be summed up as an excess of financial liquidity (very poorly distributed socially) for a diminished mass of commodities on the market.
- 10The urbanization resulting from these migrations is developing in southern Nam Bo (Cochinchina) or in the Da Nang region on the central coast. As for exports from the SEZs, the center and the south are more important, because they are situated on the routes of container shipments.
- 11To be legal, strikes must be approved by local authorities and the bureaucrats of the official trade union, with advance notice of 20 days. The fact that the representatives of the official union are paid by the company puts into proportion of such strike approvals, not to mention of a possible strike call.
- 12 It is difficult to compare wages and even more so living standards in different countries. The wage of migrant women might be the complement of the income of a peasant, the latter as well being quite variable according to the extent and fertility of the land, and the degree of overpopulation. The theft of rice during the food crisis of 2008, widespread enough to motivate special legislation, can be evidence of a low living standard, or even, in extreme cases, of famine.
- 13These are not the only ones, because these arrests are rarely covered in the media. Such sentencing means being sent to forced labor camps, often presented as institutions for drug rehabilitation.
- 14] One of the VCP’s problems is how to absorb the annual 260,000 university graduates into economic development. One possibility is opened up by the evolution of competition in attracting FDI and shifting them toward the use of high tech, requiring a better-trained work force. This sector has apparently grown by 38 percent between 2009 and 2010 due to special circumstances: for example, a shift of Japanese factories from Thailand in the wake of the recent floods there, the choice being motivated not only by costs by campaigns of hostility toward Japan in China (also amplified by confrontations over offshore oil exploration). This high-tech development is still quite limited (32,000 workers in 2011 as against 7,000 in 2009) but it remains promising for FDI, with wages in this sector being half those in India and 60 percent of those in China.
- 15 It is quite difficult to give a prognosis when dealing with such contradictory analyses as those appearing recently in the media; cf. “Le Vietnam, eldorado des délocalisations” (“Vietnam, El Dorado of Outsourcing”), Le Figaro February 28, 2012, and “Paradise lost: strikes and riots in the export zones in Vietnam” (libcom, 2012).
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Make sure you don’t fall: Perspectives on the recent social agitation in Chile, part one
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/chile.jpg?itok=qm2qSwtg)
Carlos Lagos P. and Jorge Budrovich S. discuss the massive student movement in Chile and the social unrest which has accompanied it. From Insurgent Notes #6.
…. oh, terrible days of green youth! Ah, on the road nearby, I hear the solitary song of the worker returning to his poor lodging, late, after the revels: and it grips my heart fiercely to think the whole world passes, and scarcely leaves a trace. See: the holiday’s over; some nondescript day follows; time carries off all mortal things.
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti XIII, La sera del dì di festa
To understand and make sense of the recent wave of social unrest in Chile, we have to refer to the history of the last half century of this country: the revolutionary upsurge that had its peak in late 1972, the destruction of the social movement after the military coup, the neo-liberal restructuring imposed by the Pinochet regime and the consolidation of that legacy by successive civilian governments. Such events, which have overshadowed the lives of several generations of Chileans, now emerge in a new light. Recent events seem to suggest that this nightmare was only an interlude between two festivals, and that it was only a matter of time before the old tensions re-emerged. Today, however, these tensions emerge in a much more educated form than forty years ago. Four decades of forced modernization in the economy and the culture had to leave their mark on minds and hearts: revolt has broken out again, but now with a decidedly “citizenist” (“ciudadanista”) cast, full of moderation and very suspicious of the ideologies and grievances that ruined everything in the uprisings of the past. What earlier generations had clearly perceived as class struggle and the abolition of an anachronistic social system, is now viewed with a much friendlier and more optimistic eye. Today the issue is not abolishing the horrible dominant mode of production, but to make it fulfill its promises. Indeed, although the current protest movement is far from homogeneous, it is easy to recognize its fundamental ethos: since it has not yet posed the question of the exploitation of man by man, but only its moderation, what this movement pursues is nothing but the old and incongruous dream of a good capitalism.
This crude affirmation does not mean we condemn this social movement in any way. The revolt that shook Chile over the past year has changed many things for the better, starting with the fact that it has awakened a social force that seemed to be languishing forever, and whose transforming potential we can scarcely foresee today. But this latent revolutionary force will never fully emerge if it is not aware of its own reality, its current limitations and future possibilities. Groping, especially through its most minoritarian and ambitious nuclei, the rebellious movement is trying today to ask the right questions, to arrive at more fruitful answers and to be fully aware of its strength and its real possibilities
With this text we wish to contribute to the social process now underway.
This movement of revolt, so full of unabashed confidence and realism, so free of messianic impulses and so hostile to the drama of the old class struggle, does not claim to change everything, and knows it. But it knows very well, on the other hand, what it does want to change. It wants to wipe out the old oppressive atmosphere which for decades has not allowed anyone to breathe freely, and that on first approach comes from an easily recognizable source: the educational apartheid that is also an outrageously lucrative business; authoritarian political institutions embedded in a constitution imposed by force of arms; the looting by transnational capital of natural resources and the resulting environmental devastation throughout the country, the ruthless exploitation of the labor force and its subjugation by credit, advertising and medication; the despotic control over politics and culture by ten billionaire families whose fortunes amount to one third of GDP …
All this, which was known and accepted as a fact of nature, has suddenly emerged as an intolerable reality. Consequently, there emerges an overwhelming need to change it and the suspicion that, after all, it is possible to change it. Of course, from the simple daily hassles to the consciousness that there is a socio-economic structure which produces them, there is always some distance to be traversed.
These themes had been, so to speak, in the air for some time. In recent years news kiosks have begun to gradually accommodate citizen newspapers, leftist and even anarchist publications, whose headlines challenge the government of the day and sometimes spread openly anti-capitalist positions. Some neighborhood radio and TV channels have developed, although with great difficulty, in various regions of the country.
At the same time, a “popular culture” has emerged at “ground level” with fairs, plays, music concerts, workshops and meeting places, which served as a refuge for many people reluctant to accept the frivolous desert of mass culture. This slow and laborious reconstruction of the initiative and creative power of ordinary people held out steadily and against all odds for decades, and has formed a breeding ground for revolt. The most notable result has been, above all, a certain spirit. Last spring, one felt, at times and everywhere, something of a breath of optimism and of power spreading through people’s countenances and words. One felt, after each day of protest, the joy that comes from the struggle, of any struggle whereby we will no longer be kneeling before our masters. On the walls of the city center one can read: “We will lose a year, but we will win the future,” “We are poor people at war,” “The streets are ours,” “Kill your rector,” “social war,” “joy and subversion”…
The main protagonists of the revolt were the secondary and university students. Since April, when there was the first big march organized by the CONFECH (the Chilean Student Confederation), the movement has never stopped growing in geographical extent and intensity, multiplying since then the occupations of schools, colleges and university campuses. The first manifestations, driven by the university students, focused on the modest demands which had been customary in previous years: more state funding for universities, for scholarships and for the National Student Card.1
Successive government responses to these demands were rejected by the students, which gave greater intensity to their demonstrations, and especially to street actions. This radicalization and extension of the movement forced the government to give in on one of the key demands of the moment: the resignation of Education Minister Joaquin Lavin. That was followed by an increasingly vast and intense escalation, which included calls by the CUT2 for a “national strike,” days of heavy street fighting from early morning until evening, and massive “cacerolazos,” beating on pots and pans in every street and every neighborhood,3
which otherwise had not been used in Chile since 1985, when it was often a form of opposition to military rule.
Only the arrival of the end of the year, with the cessation of academic activities and of uncertainty about the results of a “wasted” school year, defused the intensity of that progression of mutual challenges between the government and the mobilized masses.
The occupation of the local high schools for several months allowed students to develop their initiative in creating workshops and courses, artistic events, forums and lectures… This has not only fueled an increasingly accurate critique of the educational system, but also helped socialize to some extent a more elaborate critique of capitalism. Moreover, the occupied premises served as shelter against the brutal attacks of the police, which had systematically attacked the students with water cannon, tear gas, batons and torture sessions aboard the police vans.
This repression, directly ordered by Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter and his political team, did not, however, prevent the increasingly massive marches from being accompanied in turn by ever more numerous and better organized groups of self-defense, willing to confront the police force with stones, sticks and Molotov cocktails. As the weeks passed, it became common for students to perform lightning actions, leaving the occupied buildings to block the main streets, and stopping traffic early in the morning, thus bringing traffic to a halt in large parts of the capital and in the provinces. Most of these actions were sparked by high school students. The university students were more oriented to marches and “symbolic” protests.
The difference in the fighting methods of both sectors reveals a fairly significant fact, which we will try to elucidate further: during the whole wave of protests, radicalization of the high school students was largely ignored, and sometimes even rejected by the university students, who showed themselves generally more confident in the ability of institutions to provide a “negotiated” end to the crisis. The general perception, as the end of the year approached, is that the university organizations completely abandoned the high school students, and did not even include their demands in the negotiations initiated with the government and parliamentary representatives.
This attitude by the university students seems difficult to understand if one takes literally the central demand of the mobilization, which, moreover, was the same for all sectors: “an end to profits in education, free and public education at all levels.” But, of course, it is better not to take this literally, but rather read between the lines. This slogan expresses the general interests of a large mass of people eager for better living conditions, and who have found a way to express their discontent in a more or less unified and coherent way, but it also tends to hide the fact that this mass is rigidly segregated in sectors experiencing class domination, and the practical struggle against it, in different ways. Though this movement expresses a crisis of the reproduction of capitalist dynamics, and though to understand it we need to include all the actors within the general category defined as exploited labor power, that should not blind us to the fact that within the movement there is a real segregation with real practical and possibly decisive effects.
The demand for free education finds its legitimacy at almost a common sense level for most of the Chilean population, mainly because the increasing privatization of education has only contributed to the deteriorating quality of life for all who must sell their labor power to survive. Those who do not have capital or a rich enough family inheritance see obtaining a college or technical degree the only hope for a job and a decent life. With education being perceived as a vital necessity of the first order, its transformation into a lucrative business controlled by banks could only exacerbate the discontent of people. In fact, the full liberalization of the education business has taken things to disconcerting extremes: in Chile, studying for a university degree costs about $500 monthly, which when paid on credit can add up to $60,000, in a country where the minimum wage is less than $300 and the average wage is around $900. The common perception in this regard is ambivalent: on one hand, Chileans assume that “studying is for those who have money”; on the other hand, they consider professional qualifications as a need so basic that they have long been willing to endure any hardship or indebtedness to get them.
This disproportionate emphasis on professionalism has to do with immediate economic calculation, which in turn is justified by a powerful ideology. Currently two out of three college students are first generation, meaning that for their parents “higher” education was never anything but an impossible dream. The current generation of students and professionals carry with them this new burden of expectations that their parents and grandparents developed in an era of economic growth and of the expansion of individual consumption. Indeed, the idea which has acted as a driving force of the current mobilization is that higher education is not only a necessity but also a fundamental human right which the State must guarantee to all. Such an idea is inseparable from a belief in an unlimited expansion of production, consumption, of the cultural industry and of material well-being, and as such is part and parcel of a powerful faith in the basic logic of capitalism: infinite growth.
But it is not just a mirage. No ideology could hide the fact that in Chile today 60 percent of university graduates do not work in the field for which they studied, and this figure can only increase in the future. That proletarianized families nonetheless continue to make enormous sacrifices to professionalize their children is a result of the severe defeat of the workers in recent decades. As long as the Chilean working class is deprived of the most basic tools of economic struggle, its ability to recover some of the surplus value that the capitalist class takes from them in the production process has been reduced to a minimum. This weakening of the work force in relation to capital is clearly expressed in the very fact of economic growth in Chile: in recent decades almost all of this growth is attributable to corporate profits, while the overall wage bill relative to GDP growth has only decreased to negligible levels.
Given the apparent impossibility of extracting from employers the means for a minimally comfortable subsistence, Chilean workers have had no other way to escape from economic insecurity than to mortgage their hopes on the promises of well-being that professional qualifications imply, either for their children or for themselves. That this defeat of the working class, moreover, has been transformed into a booming capitalist business, is evidenced by the fact that nearly half of higher education is provided by Technical Training Centres (TTCs) and Professional Institutes (PIs), whose slightly lower fees than those of the universities have made their main marketing “target” the middle and lower layers of the population. Significantly, among the ranks of the lower classes, these PIs and TTCs are currently recruiting 87 percent of first-generation students, of whom 40 percent study in the evening in order to work during the day.
This, however, does not prevent these young people from graduating with a bank debt averaging $25,000, with interest rates higher than those imposed on the relatively privileged students at the state universities, whose employment prospects are much higher than those of the poorest students. All told, the increased access of poor families to higher education through these non-university centers does not at all mean that the rigid segregation reflected by the ESOMAR mode4
has become more flexible, since the quality of education that a young person receives and their labor market prospects depend on how much his/her family has paid previously. The industry of technical-professional education, in the best of cases, assures that members of the lower middle strata remain there, which, in any case, seems better than nothing.
The multi-million dollar business of the TTCs and the PIs continues to be presented, nevertheless, as a contribution to the advancement of the workers. Whether the workers believe it or not, the fact is that labor market saturation and the relative stagnation of wages never fail to show that this seeming way out is as illusory as any other within the existing framework of relations between capital and labor. For now, professionalization seems at least to give atomized workers psychological security and self-esteem in an extremely competitive and precarious environment.
For this and other reasons, the preservation of university education is a palpable reality, something concrete to defend, only for one-fourth of the Chilean population, including the most privileged classes. For other strata, “advanced studies” continue to be for the most part out of reach. This persistent social stratification must be taken into account if we seek to understand why, during the last wave of agitation, university and secondary students seemed to take divergent paths. The interests of the former consists, above all, in softening the burden of indebtedness they have had to take on, without forgetting that they did so in exchange for a personal validation already guaranteed them and one which was for life. They are already integrated in the mechanism which assures them of their places in the higher echelons of society, and their struggle is basically to keep increasing costs and debts from pushing them into the strata below them. For them, “an end to profits” in education means ending the risk of losing their relatively privileged socio-economic position.
For the students at the secondary level, taken as a whole, the situation is different. In fact, 40 percent of them study in technical-professional high schools, which set their life trajectory on a clear direction, one quite far from the universities and from the upward social mobility offered as compensation to whose students who “really work hard.” At least for the 65 percent of secondary students, who come from the poorest two-fifths of the population, these promises seem mainly a joke, because they are hardly stupid, and they know that their life situation from an early age gives their life chances an indelible stamp.
As a result, for them the slogan of “an end to profits” in education does not mean improvement in a situation which is already assured them, but rather conquering something they never had and which they will never have if things continue as they are. This is the reason why the occupations, hunger strikes, barricades and confrontations have been carried out mainly by the 75 percent of young people who attend municipal or subsidized high schools, and not by those from the private high schools whose access to the university has been guaranteed from birth.
This also explains other revealing facts. For example: since 2006, the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (CASS) has developed more ambitious sets of demands and more audacious programs for action, going well beyond the timid demands raised year after year by the CONFECH. Further: the CASS, and not the CONFECH, actively solidarized with the casualized miners of El Teniente on strike in May 2011, almost as soon as the last waves of protests began. During this joint march of miners and students, the secondary school youth spontaneously adopted the slogan “nationalization of copper under workers’ control” as a demand of their own, since they know that without structural economic changes, they will never set foot in a university.
But this disconnect between secondary school and university students does not merely reflect a spontaneous divergence of interests, determined by socio-economical stratification. It corresponds to the very logic of a social movement which is being instrumentalized for the specific ends of a political caste. The very existence of a “student” movement delimited as such, mediatized by the celebrities of the university student bureaucracy, fits, like other “citizen” movements, in the programmatic development of a left which, for now, has no other perspective than participation in national political life, which means in the life of the parties in power.
Whether this objective is expressed in calls for a “new kind of politics,” or anything else, is of no importance, because at bottom it is an attempt to expand the parameters of the same old politics, the only kind that is possible in a capitalist economic framework. At least in part, the power of the last mobilization can be explained by this ever more imperious necessity for the left to regain its existence as an active political force. Or, in other words, as an entity floating above the social movement to determine its evolution from the outside, as the active negation of the social.
This helps us answer the question why, today, the student movement is being much more intransigent in its demands than was the “penguin revolution”5 of 2006, or the periodic student “flues” of recent years. The fact is that, in the past several decades, the destruction of the social “tissue” gives the parties of the left and the right the monopoly over formal organizations, as well as over the very initiative and capacity for action of students and workers, in the student centers, federations and unions.
Discontent and rage have always been there, but while Social Democracy was in power, the supporters of the regime—well placed in the open spaces for action and thought in high schools, universities and companies—were able to use them to channel protests into directions that did not endanger the political credibility of the ruling parties. Thus the large mobilization of 2006 was unable to formulate any clear objective beyond the repeal of the general education law and free public transportation for students, remaining in a defensive position. This led to an agreement which helped to strengthen the image of the government then in power. Today, those political militants have quite simply ceased to act, allowing protest energy to flow spontaneously toward the more logical objective: the demand for free education, which was always in the air without being expressed with the clarity and force it took on in the past year.
The “laissez-faire” strategy toward the social movement, however useful it may be for the left and center left parties, also implies a potential loss of control which is difficult to ignore. This potential self-activity is obvious in the proliferation of autonomous means of communication, the assemblies and the independent networks emerging in recent months, through which a distant and cautious attitude toward parties and formal organizations became clear. This attitude was given form in a slogan cropping up repeatedly in the street demonstrations: “The people united moves forward without a party.”6 The spread of the conflict throughout the country also shows in some way this relative autonomy of the social movement from the parties, since the formal organizations have always tended to concentrate their forces in the capital, thus following the modus operandi of bourgeois politics, which centralizes and concentrates things in order to better control them.
In previous years, social agitation did not succeed in changing life in the provinces, where normally action tends to be very isolated and have a merely symbolic character. During the last wave of protests, on the other hand, in many cities, there were road blockages, “cacerolazos” and confrontation. This geographical extension of the conflict is especially revealing of the centrifugal tendencies of the movement, which found a powerful decentralizing impulse in its center, immune to any political manipulation.
The meaning given to all these events varies a great deal, of course, depending on the position one occupies in the order of exploitation; but for everyone it has some meaning, and this is perhaps the most important change: the revolt has forced people to think about how, why and for what they are living. Some, perhaps those most damaged by the capitalist order, have been content to take advantage of the temporary turmoil in a daily asphyxiating routine, throwing their own energies into increasing this turmoil. Others, more confident, have been redoubling their efforts to built up and increase what they call “popular power,” which is nothing else than the power of initiative and the ability to react which are hammered out in the course of the struggle itself. There are always those who, above all, pursue their politics, and those who bend submissively to the temperament of the majority, whatever that may be.
If, finally, one had to point to a dominant discourse which imposed its meaning on virtually all the manifestations of this revolt, this discourse can be summarized as follows: if we have taken to the streets, this means that the history of Chile has once again taken up its old march towards a future which will be most just, more developed, happier and more democratic…
Outside this candid desire for harmony between social classes, in the framework of a “good national capitalism,” there is not much else. An understanding of the how and the why of the categories which define real existing capitalism is something which remains deeply disconnected from the social malaise and its practical expression. Between the clamor about “civil society” and the latter-day regurgitations of Leninism, the radical critique of the system has at best a phantasmagoric presence in the public scene. In Chile, in the last analysis, explosions of mass non-conformity continue to be, as in other epochs, much ado within a disarmed prophecy.
- 1This card is used for discounts on various types of purchases.
- 2The Confederacion Unitaria de Trabajo, the national trade-union confederation.
- 3This method of protest characterized such uprisings as the “piquetero” revolt in Argentina in 2001–02.
- 4A plan for measuring social-economic status.
- 5A shorter-lived student mobilization in 2006, which began to raise some of the demands.
- 6 “El pueblo unido avanza sin partido.” A significant “correction” of the putrefied Popular Front slogan “el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido,” which mass demonstrations were chanting in Santiago just days before the September 1973 overthrow of Allende, and which has been mindlessly taken over by the international left with no apparent understanding of its sinister overtones.
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Subjugation by credit, advertising, and ... medication? What? Don‘t get all conspiracy-theorist.
Insurgent Notes #7, October 2012
Articles from this issue of the journal.
Full content at http://insurgentnotes.com/past-issues/issue-7/
In This Issue
We have a very full issue. As readers will discover, the articles cover a wide range of topics—reports from recent struggles, critical analyses of historical and contemporary issues, discussions and reviews of important books and, as usual, some letters. We realize that it's a lot to read so we encourage you to start with what you're most interested in.
We would like to remind readers that we welcome comments about all our articles (there's an opportunity to comment at the end of each) as well as inquiries from all about the Insurgent Notes project.
We are pleased that, once again, we are able to include articles on developments in countries outside the United States—in this case, Quebec, South Africa and Brazil. Our contributors have provided deeply informative and highly provocative perspectives on the recent student strike in Quebec, the miners' strike at Marikana and the almost decade-long rule of the Workers' Party in Brazil.
We have two critiques and a book review that focus on what might be considered long-standing topics of dispute and debate—Maoism, Leninism and Trotskyism. We believe that each submission brings something new and important to the topics at hand and is of direct relevance to important debates today.
We include two articles on education—one an overview of the current state of affairs in the United States and the other an account of the recent teachers' strike.
In May of this year, AK Press published Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. We believe that the book is an important one and that the complex experiences of STO deserve understanding and exploration for their relevance to revolutionary politics today. We invited former members of the group as well as individuals and organizations who have been influenced by the group's theory and practice to contribute to a symposium. There are eleven contributions and a response by the author.
The book review section includes critical assessments of a book on US working-class history over a fifty year period and of a book on last year's events in Madison, Wisconsin.
Our letter writers hail from Madison and Mexico City.
Let us know what you think!
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Notes towards a critique of Maoism
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/history/cartoon_20100423081449.jpg?itok=nIT1Pm8o)
Loren Goldner's 'bare-bones history' of Maoism. From Insurgent Notes #7
Note to the Reader: The following was written at the request of a west coast comrade after he attended the August 2012 “Everything for Everyone” conference in Seattle, at which many members of the “soft Maoist” Kasama current were present. It is a bare-bones history of Maoism which does not bring to bear a full “left communist” viewpoint, leaving out for the example the sharp debates on possible alliances with the “nationalist bourgeoisie” in the colonial and semi-colonial world at the first three congresses of the Communist International. It was written primarily to provide a critical-historical background on Maoism for a young generation of militants who might be just discovering it. —LG.
Maoism was part of a broader movement in the twentieth century of what might be called “bourgeois revolutions with red flags,” as in Vietnam or North Korea.
To understand this, it is important to see that Maoism was one important result of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in 30 countries (including China itself) which occurred in the years after World War I. The major defeat was in Germany (1918–1921), followed by the defeat of the Russian Revolution (1921 and thereafter), culminating in Stalinism.
Maoism is a variant of Stalinism.1
The first phase of this defeat, where Mao and China are concerned, took place in the years 1925–1927, during which the small but very strategically located Chinese working class was increasingly radicalized in a wave of strikes. This defeat closed the 1917–1927 cycle of post–World War I worker struggles, which included (in addition to Germany and Russia) mass strikes in Britain, workers councils in northern Italy, vast ferment and strikes in Spain, the “rice riots” in Japan, a general strike in Seattle, and many other confrontations.
By 1925–1927, Stalin controlled the Communist Third International (Comintern). From the beginning of the 1920s, Russian advisors worked closely with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) of the bourgeois revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, (leader of the 1911 overthrow of the Manchu dynasty) and with the small but important Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921.
The Third International provided political and military aid to the KMT, which was taken over by Chiang kai-shek (future dictator of Taiwan after 1949); the Comintern in the early to mid-1920s viewed the KMT as a “progressive anti-imperialist” force. Many Chinese Communists actually joined the KMT in these years, some secretly, some openly.
Soviet foreign policy in the mid-1920s involved an internal faction fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky's policy (whatever its flaws, and there were many) was for world revolution as the only solution to the isolation of the Soviet Union. Stalin replied with the slogan “Socialism in One Country,” an aberration unheard of until that time in the internationalist Marxist tradition. Stalin in this period was allied with the right opposition leader Nikolai Bukharin against Trotsky; Soviet and Third International policy reflected this alliance in a “right turn” to strong support for bourgeois nationalism abroad. Chiang kai-shek himself was an honorary member of the Third International Executive Board in this period. The Third International advocated strong support for Chiang's KMT in its campaign against the “warlords” closely allied with the landowning gentry.
It is important to understand that in these same years, Mao Zedong (who was not yet the central leader of the party) criticized this policy from the right, advocating an even closer alliance between the CCP and the KMT.
In the spring of 1927, Chiang kai-shek turned against the CCP and the radicalized working class, massacring thousands of workers and CCP militants in Shanghai and Canton (now known in the West by its actual Chinese name Guangzhou), who had been completely disarmed by the Comintern's support for the KMT.2 This massacre ended the CCP's relationship with the Chinese working class and opened the way for Mao to rise to top leadership by the early 1930s.
The next phase of the CCP was the so-called “Third Period” of the Comintern, which was launched in part in response to the debacle in China. In the Soviet Union, Stalin turned on the Bukharinist “right” (there was in reality no one more reactionary than Stalin) after having finished off the Trotskyist left.3 The Third Period, which lasted from 1928 to 1934, was a period of “ultra-left” adventurism around the world. In China as well as in a number of other colonial and semi-colonial countries, the Third Period involved the slogan of “soviets everywhere.” Not a bad slogan in itself, but its practical, voluntarist implementation was a series of disastrous, isolated uprisings in China and Vietnam in 1930 which were totally out of synch with local conditions, and which led to bloody defeats everywhere.
It was in the recovery from these defeats that Mao became the top leader of the CCP, and began the “Long March” to Yan'an (in remote northwestern China) which became a central Maoist myth, and reoriented the CCP to the Chinese peasantry, a much more numerous social class but not, in Marxist terms, a revolutionary class4 (though it could be an ally of the working-class revolution, as in Russia during the 1917–1921 Civil War).
Japan had invaded Manchuria (northeast China) in 1931 and the CCP from then until the Japanese defeat at the end of World War II was involved in a three-way struggle with the KMT and the Japanese.
After the Third Period policy led to the triumph of Hitler in Germany (where the Communist Party had attacked the “social fascist” Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the “main enemy,” and even worked with the Nazis against the Social Democrats in strikes), the Comintern in 1935 shifted its line again to the “Popular Front,” which meant alliances with “bourgeois democratic” forces against fascism. Throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world, the Communist Parties completely dropped their previous anti-colonial struggle and threw themselves into support for the Western bourgeois democracies. In Vietnam and Algeria, for example, they supported the “democratic” French colonial power. In Spain, they uncritically supported the Republic in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, during which they helped the Republic crush the anarchists (who had two million members), the independent left POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, a “centrist” party denounced at the time as “Trotskyist”) and the Trotskyists themselves. These latter forces had taken over the factories in northeastern Spain and established agrarian communes in the countryside. The Republic and the Communists crushed them all, and then lost the Civil War to Franco.
In China, the Popular Front meant, for the CCP, supporting Chiang kai-shek (who, it will be recalled, had massacred thousands of workers eight years earlier) against Japan.
In the Yan'an refuge of the CCP in these years and through World War II, Mao consolidated his control over the party. His notorious hatchet man Kang Sheng helped him root out any opposition or potential rivals with slanderous rumors, show trials and executions. One memorable case was that of Wang Shiwei. He was a committed Communist and had translated parts of Marx's Capital into Chinese. Mao and Kang set him up and put him through several show trials, breaking him and driving him out of the party. (He was finally executed when the CCP left Yan'an in 1947 in the last phase of the civil war against Chiang kai-shek.)
Mao's peasant army conquered all of China by 1949. The Chinese working class, which had been the party's base until 1927, played absolutely no role in this supposed “socialist revolution.” The one-time “progressive nationalist” Kuomintang was totally discredited as it became the party of the landed gentry, full of corruption, responsible for runaway inflation, and commanded by officers more interested in enriching themselves than fighting either the Japanese (before 1945) or the CCP.
The first phase of Mao's rule was from 1949 to 1957. He made no secret of the fact that the new regime was based on the “bloc of four classes” and was carrying out a bourgeois nationalist revolution. It was essentially the program of the bourgeois nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from 25 years earlier. The corrupt landowning gentry was expropriated and eliminated.
But it is important to remember that “land to the peasants” and the expropriation of the pre-capitalist landholders are the bourgeois revolution, as they have been since the French Revolution of 1789. The regime for this reason was genuinely popular and many overseas Chinese who were not Communists returned to help rebuild the country. Some “progressive capitalists” were retained to continue running their factories. After the chaos of the previous 30 years, this stabilization was a breath of fresh air. The People's Liberation Army also intervened in the Korean War to help Kim il-sung fight the United States and the United Nations forces. But it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that the Korean War was part of a war between the two Cold War blocs, and that what Kim implemented in North Korea after 1953 was another Stalinist “bourgeois revolution with red flags” based on land to the peasants. (North Korea went on to become the first proletarian hereditary monarchy, now in its third incarnation.)
We also have to see the Chinese Revolution in international context. Stalinism (and Maoism is, as mentioned earlier, a variant of Stalinism) emerged from World War II stronger than ever, having appropriated all of eastern Europe, winning in China, on its way to power in (North) Korea and Vietnam, and had huge prestige in struggles around the colonial and semi-colonial world (which was renamed the Third World as the Cold War divided the globe into two antagonistic blocs centered on the United States and the Soviet Union).
There is no question that Mao and the CCP were somewhat independent of Stalin and the Soviet Union. They were their own type of Stalinists. They were also a million miles from the power of soviets and workers' councils that had initially characterized the Russian and German Revolutions, on which basis the Comintern was originally founded in 1919. That is a thorny question that is too complex to be unraveled here. But from 1949 until the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, the Soviet Union sent thousands of technicians and advisors to China, and trained thousands more Chinese cadre in Soviet universities and institutes, as had been the case since the 1920s. The “model” established in power in the 1950s was essentially the Soviet model, adapted to a country with an even more overwhelming peasant majority than was the case in Russia.
World Stalinism was rocked in 1956 by a series of events: the Hungarian Revolution, in which the working class again established workers' councils before it was crushed by Russian intervention; the Polish “October,” in which a worker revolt brought to power a “reformed” Stalinist leadership. These uprisings were preceded by Khruschev's speech to the twentieth Congress of world Communist Parties, in which he revealed many of Stalin's crimes, including the massacre of between five to ten million peasants during the collectivizations of the early 1930s. There were many crimes he did not mention, since he was too implicated in them, and the purpose of his speech was to salvage the Stalinist bureaucracy while disavowing Stalin himself. This was the beginning of “peaceful co-existence” between the Soviet bloc and the West, but the revelations of Stalin's crimes and the worker revolts in eastern Europe (following the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany) were the beginning of the end of the Stalinist myth. Bitterly disillusioned militants all over the world walked out of Communist Parties, after finding out that they had devoted decades of their lives to a lie.
Khruschev's 1956 speech is often referred to by later Maoists as the triumph of “revisionism” in the Soviet Union. The word “revisionism” is itself ideology run amok, since the main thing that was being “revised” was Stalinist terror, which the Maoists and Marxist-Leninists by implication consider to be the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” There were between 10 and 20 million people in forced labor camps in the Soviet Union in 1956, and presumably their release (for those who survived years of slave labor, often at the Arctic Circle) was part of “revisionism.” For the Maoists, the Khruschev speech is often also identified with the “restoration of capitalism,” showing how superficial their “Marxism” is, with the existence of capitalism being based not on any analysis of real social relationships but on the ideology of this or that leader.
Khruschev's speech was not well received by Mao and the leaders of the CCP, whose own regimented rule of China was becoming increasingly unpopular.5 Thus the regime launched a new phase, called the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, in which the “bourgeois intellectuals” who had rallied to the regime, recoiling from the brutality of the KMT, were invited to “let a hundred flowers bloom” and openly voice their criticisms.
The outpouring of criticism was of such an unexpected volume that it was quickly shut down by Mao and the CCP, who began to characterize the Hundred Flowers campaign as “letting the snakes out of their holes” in order to “smash” them once and for all. Many critics were arrested and sent off to forced labor camps.
Internationally, however, Maoism began to become an international tendency, becoming attractive to some people who had left the pro-Soviet Communist Parties after Khrushchev's speech. This was a hard-core ultra-Stalinist minority (who felt, for example, that their own country's CP had not supported the Soviet invasion to crush the Hungarian Revolution forcefully enough). By the early 1960s, in the United States, Europe and around the Third World, these currents would become the “Marxist-Leninist” parties aligned with China against both the United States and Soviet “social imperialism.”
In China itself, the regime needed to shift gears after the disaster of the Hundred Flowers period. There was growing tension at the top levels of the CCP between Mao and the more Soviet-influenced technocratic bureaucrats, who were focused on building up heavy industry. This was the factional situation that led to the “Cultural Revolution” that erupted in 1965.
Therefore Mao launched the country in 1958 on the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” in which Soviet-style heavy industry was to be replaced by enlisting peasants in small industrial “backyard” production everywhere. The peasants were forced into the “People's Communes” and set to work to catch up with the economic level of the capitalist West in 10–15 years. Everywhere pots, pans and utensils as well as family heirlooms were melted down for backyard small kilns to produce steel, at killing paces of work. The result was a huge drain of peasant labor away from raising crops, leading to famine by 1960–1961 in which an estimated 10–20 million people starved to death.6
The debacle of the Great Leap Forward was also a terrible blow to Mao's standing within the CCP. It represented an extreme form of the kind of voluntarism, at the expense of real material conditions, which had always characterized Mao's thinking, as summed up in his famous line about “painting portraits on the blank page of the people” (some Marxist!).7 The Soviet-influenced technocrats around Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping basically kicked Mao upstairs into a symbolic figurehead, too important to purge outright but stripped of all real power. Thus the battle lines were drawn for what became, a few years later, the “Cultural Revolution.”
The “Cultural Revolution” was Mao's attempt at a comeback.8 It was a factional struggle at the top level of the CCP in which millions of university and high school students were mobilized everywhere to attack “revisionism” and return Mao to real power. But this factional struggle, and the previous marginalization of Mao that lay behind it, was hardly advertised as the real reason for this process in which tens of thousands of people were killed and millions of lives were wrecked.9 China was thrown into ideology run amok on a scale arguably even greater than under Stalin at the peak of his power. Millions of educated people suspected of “revisionism” (or merely the victims of some personal feud), including technicians and scientists, were sent off to the countryside (“rustification”) to “learn from the peasants,” which in reality involved them in crushing forced labor in which many were worked to death. “Politics was in command,” with party ideologues and not surgeons, in charge of medical operations in Chinese hospitals—with predictable consequences. Schools were closed for three years in the cities—though not in the countryside (19660–1969)—while young people from universities and high schools ran around the country humiliating and sometimes killing people designated by the Maoist faction as a “revisionist” and a “Liu Shaoqi capitalist roader” (Liu Shaoqi himself died of illness in prison). The economy was wrecked. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping (who also performed hard rural labor during these years) returned to power, Chinese agricultural production per capita was no higher than it had been in 1949.
In such a situation, where revisionist rule was to be replaced by “people's power,” things got out of hand with some currents who took Mao's slogan “It is right to rebel” a bit too far, and began to question the whole nature of CCP rule since 1949. In these cases, as in the “Shanghai Commune” of early 1967, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had to step in against an independent formation that included radicalized workers. The PLA was in fact one of the main “winners” of the Cultural Revolution, for its role in stamping out currents that became a third force against both the “capitalist roaders” and the Maoists.
(During all this, Kang Sheng, the hatchet man of Yan'an, returned to power and helped vilify, oust and sometimes execute Mao's factional opponents, as he had done the first time around.)
Perhaps the most interesting case of things “going too far,” along with the brief Shanghai Commune, before the army marched in, was the Shengwulian current in Mao's own Hunan province. There, workers and students who had gone through the whole process produced a series of documents that became famous throughout China, analyzing the country as being under the control of a “new bureaucratic ruling class.” While the Shengwulian militants disguised their viewpoint with bows to the “thought of Mao tse-tung” and “Marxism-Leninism,” their texts were read throughout China, and at the top levels of the party itself, where they were clearly recognized for what they were: a fundamental challenge to both factions in power. They were mercilessly crushed.10
Further interesting critiques to emerge from the years of the Cultural Revolution were those written by Yu Luoke, at the time an apprentice worker and, later, the manifesto of Wei Jingsheng, a 28-year-old electrician at the Beijing Zoo on the “Democracy Wall” in Beijing in 1978. Yu's text was, like Shengwulian's, diffused and read all over China. It was a critique of the Cultural Revolution's “bloodline” definition of “class” by family background and political reliability, rather than by one's relationship to the means of production. Yu was executed for his troubles in 1970. The Democracy Wall, which was supposed to accompany Deng Xiaoping's return to power, also got out of hand and was suppressed in 1979.
Mao's faction re-emerged triumphant by 1969. This included his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other co-factioneers who would be arrested and deposed as the “Gang of Four”11 shortly after Mao's death in 1976.12 This victory, it is often overlooked, coincided with the beginning of Mao's quiet outreach to the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. There was active but local combat between Chinese and Soviet forces along their mutual border in 1969 and, as a result, Mao banned all transit of Soviet material support to North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, a ban which remained in effect until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Mao received US President Nixon in Beijing in early 1972, while the United States was raining bombs on North Vietnam.
This turn was hardly the first instance of a conservative foreign policy at the expense of movements and countries outside China. Already in 1965, the Chinese regime, based on its prestige as the center of “Marxist-Leninist” opposition to Soviet “revisionism” after the Sino-Soviet split, had encouraged the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) into a close alliance with Indonesia's populist-nationalist leader, Sukarno. It was an exact repeat of the CCP's alliance with Chiang kai-shek in 1927, and it ended the same way, in a bloodbath in which 600,000 PKI members and sympathizers were killed in fall 1965 in a military coup, planned with the help of US advisers and academics. Beijing said nothing about the massacre until 1967 (when it complained that the Chinese embassy in Jakarta had been stoned during the events). In 1971, China also openly applauded the bloody suppression of the Trotskyist student movement in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the same year, it supported (together with the United States and against Soviet ally India), Pakistani dictator Yaya Khan, who oversaw massive repression in Bangladesh when that country (previously part of Pakistan) declared independence.
In 1971, another bizarre turn in domestic policy also took place, echoing Mao's fascination with ancient dynastic court intrigue. Up to that point, Lin Biao had been openly designated as Mao's successor. The Maoist press abroad, as well as the French intelligentsia which at the time was decidedly pro-Maoist, trumpeted the same line. Suddenly Lin Biao disappeared from public view, and in late 1971 it was learned that he, too, supposedly Mao's closest confidant for years, had been a capitalist roader and a deep-cover KMT agent all along. According to the official story, Lin had commandeered a military plane and fled toward the Soviet border; the plane had crashed in Mongolia, killing him and all aboard.13 For months, western Maoists denounced this account, published in the world press, as a pure bourgeois fabrication, including what Simon Leys characterized as the “most important pro-Maoist daily newspaper in the West,” the very high tone Le Monde (Paris), whose Beijing correspondent was a Maoist devotee. Then, when the Chinese government itself confirmed the story, the Western Maoists turned on a dime and howled with the wolves against Lin Biao. Simon Leys remarked that these fervent believers had transformed the old Chinese proverb “Don't beat a dog after it has fallen into the water” into “Don't beat a dog until it has fallen into the water.”
This was merely the beginning of the bizarre turn of Maoist world strategy and Chinese foreign policy. The “main enemy” and “greater danger” was no longer the world imperialism centered in the United States, but Soviet “social imperialism.” Thus, when US-backed Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973, China immediately recognized Pinochet and hailed the coup. When South African troops invaded Angola in 1975 after Angolan independence under the pro-Soviet MPLA, China backed South Africa. During the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75, the Maoist forces there reached out to the far right. Maoist currents throughout western Europe called for the strengthening of NATO against the Soviet threat. China supported Philippine dictator Fernando Marcos in his attempt to crush the Maoist guerrilla movements in that country.
Maoism had had a certain serious impact on New Left forces in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unraveling the factional differences among these groups would take us too far afield, and most of them had faded away by the 1980s. But “Maoism,” as interpreted in different ways, was important in Germany, Italy, France and the United States. Some groups, such as the ultra-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party in the United States, saw the writing on the wall as early as 1969 and broke with China in that year. Most of these groups were characterized by Stalinist thuggery against opponents, and occasionally among themselves.14 Their influence was as diffuse as it was pernicious; ca. 1975, there were hundreds of “Marxist-Leninist” study groups around the United States, and hundreds of cadre had entered the factories to organize the working class. By the mid-1970s, three main Maoist groups had emerged as dominant in the US left: the Revolutionary Union (RU) under Bob Avakian (later renamed the RCP), the October League (OL) under Mike Klonsky, and the Communist Labor Party (CLP). To really understand some of the differences between them, one needed to know their relationship to the old “revisionist” Communist Party USA. The more moderate groups, such as the October League, hearkened back to Earl Browder's leadership during the Popular Front years. More hard-line groups, such as the CLP, looked to the more openly Stalinist William Z. Foster. These and other smaller groups fought ideological battles over the proper attitude to take toward Enver Hoxha's Albania, which for some (after China's pro-US turn) remained, for them, the sole truly “Marxist-Leninist” country in the world. One small group trumpeted the “Three 3's: Third International/Third Period/Third World.”
In Germany, New Left Maoism was on the ascendant after 1968, a process which it gingerly termed the “positive overcoming of the anti-authoritarian movement” of that year. A major current was the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), which fought against the much larger DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, the pro-Soviet party, which itself still barely accounted for 1 percent of the vote in German elections). Out of the KPD came a multitude of smaller “K-Gruppen,” with poetic names such as KPD-ML Rote Heimat (Red Homeland, with distinct populist overtones of “soil”). Only the DKP had any influence in the working class, with its infiltration of the trade unions; it was content to sit back after 1972 when the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt issued its “radical decree” and came down hard on the K-Gruppen, much as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), with 25 percent of the vote in the 1976 elections, not only sat back while the Italian government criminalized the entire far left as “terrorists”; it actively helped the government in the suppression of the far left after the Red Brigades kidnapped and executed the right-wing politician Aldo Moro in spring 1978, as he was on his way to sign the “historical compromise” which would have allowed the PCI to join the Christian Democrats in a grand coalition.
In France, Maoism never had the clout of the much larger main Trotskyist parties (Lutte Ouvriere, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire and the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, all of which are still around today, in the latter two cases under different names). Most of the Maoist “Marxist-Leninist” groups had been discredited by their manipulative role during the May–June 1968 general strike, such as one which marched to the barricades on the night of the most serious street fighting (pitting thousands of people against thousands of cops), announced that the whole thing was a government provocation, and urged everyone to go home, as they themselves proceeded to do. But in the spring of 1970, one small ultra-Stalinist and ultra-militant Maoist group, the Gauche Proletarienne (Proletarian Left), momentarily recruited Jean-Paul Sartre to its defense when the government banned it, following some spectacular militant interventions around the country. Sartre, who had over the previous 20 years been successively pro-Soviet, pro-Cuba and then pro-China, saved the GP from extinction, but it collapsed of its own ideological frenzy shortly thereafter. (It notably produced two particularly cretinous neo-liberal ideologues after 1977, Bernard-Henry Levi and Andre Glucksmann, as well as Serge July, editor-in-chief of the now very respectable daily Liberation, which began as the newspaper of the GP.) Former French Maoists turned up in the strangest places, such as Roland Castro, a fire-eating Maoist in 1968, who became an intimate of Socialist President Francois Mitterand, and was appointed to a leading technocratic position.
Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence, whereas both the Trotskyist Socialist Labor League (SLL) and the IS (later SWP), at their 1970s peaks, had thousands of members and a serious presence in the working class.
In Japan, finally, the most advanced capitalist country in Asia, Maoism (as in Britain and in France), had no chance against the large, sophisticated New Left groups in the militant Zengakuren, which not only had no time for Maoism but not even for Trotskyism, and which characterized both the Soviet Union and China as “state capitalist.” (Only the small underground, pro-North Korean “Red Army” could in any way have been characterized as Maoist.)
In 1976, as mentioned earlier, the Maoist Gang of Four, who up to Mao's death had been at the pinnacle of state power, were arrested, jailed and never heard from again, as the “revisionists” headed by Deng Xiaoping returned to power and prepared to launch China on the road to “market socialism,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” beginning in 1978.
This bizarre ideological period finally ended in 1978–79, when China, now firmly an ally of the United States, attacked Vietnam and was rudely pushed back by the Vietnamese army under General Giap (of Dien Bien Phu fame). Vietnam, still allied with the Soviet Union, had occupied Cambodia to oust the pro-Maoist Khmer Rouge, who had taken over the country in 1975 and who went on to kill upward of one million people. In response to China's attack on Vietnam, the Soviet Union threatened to attack China. For any remaining Western Maoists at this point, the consternation was palpable.
As elsewhere in different forms, the Maoists in the United States did not go quietly into that dark night. Many of those who went into industry or otherwise colonized working-class communities rose to positions of influence in the trade union bureaucracy, such as Bill Fletcher of the Freedom Road group, who was briefly a top aide to John Sweeney when the latter took over the AFL-CIO in 1995. Mike Klonsky of the October League traveled to China in 1976 to be anointed as the official liaison to the Chinese regime after the fall of the Gang of Four, but that did not prevent the OL from fading away. The RCP sent colonizers to West Virginia mining towns, where they were involved in some wildcat strikes (some of those strikes, however, were against teaching Darwin in the schools). The RCP also supported ROAR, the racist anti-busing coalition, during the crisis in Boston in 1975. Bob Avakian, in 1978, with four other RCP members, rushed the podium when Deng Xiaoping appeared at a press conference in Washington with Jimmy Carter to consummate the US-China alliance; they were charged with multiple felonies and Avakian remains in exile in Paris to this day. In 1984 and 1988,15 Maoists of different stripes were deeply involved in Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency, giving rise in 1984 after Jackson lost out to the “Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” phenomenon.
Members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) suffered a worse fate, when in 1979 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina (where they had organized in several textile towns) fired on their rally, killing five of them. But during Occupy Oakland in the fall of 2011, it emerged that no less than Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, as well as some of her key advisors, and high-level members of the Alameda County Labor Council, were former members of the selfsame CWP.
More recently, former members of the RCP who had their fill of Avakian's cult of personality formed the Kasama network, which now has a much larger, if more diffuse influence, at least on the internet.
On a world scale, Maoists recently joined a coalition government in Nepal, and various groups, some reaching back to the 1960s or even earlier, continue to be active in the Philippines. The Indian Naxalites, who were stone Maoists in the 1970s before they were crushed by Indira Gandhi, have made something of a comeback in poor rural areas. The Shining Path group in Peru, which was similarly crushed by Fujimori, has made a steady comeback there, openly referring to such groups as the Cambodian Khmer Rouge as a model.
To conclude, it is important to consider the post-1978 fate of Maoism in China itself.
For the regime which, since 1978, has overseen nearly 35 years of virtually uninterrupted and unprecedented economic growth, averaging close to 10 percent per year over decades, with the methods of “market socialism,” Mao Zedong remains an indispensable icon of the ruling ideology. In officialese, Mao was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.” The “wrong” part usually means the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, although serious discussion and research on those events remains largely if not wholly taboo.
As a result, a rose-tinted nostalgic view of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution has become de rigeur in the so-called Chinese New Left.16 There have even been echoes of Maoism in the recent fall of top-level bureaucrat Bo Xilai, former strongman of Chongqing with a decidedly populist style which led some of his opponents to warn of the dangers of a “new Cultural Revolution.” Given the impossibility, in China, of frank public discussion of the entirety of Mao's years in power (and before), and the small fragments of information available to the young generations about those years, it is hardly surprising that currents opposing the appalling spread of social inequality and insecurity since 1978 would turn back to that mythical past. This hardly makes such a turn less reactionary and dangerous. Everything that happened after 1978 had its origins in the nature of the regime before 1978. There was no “counter-revolution,” still less a transformation of the previously existing social relations of production. Once again, Maoism reveals its highly idealist and voluntarist conception of politics by a focus on the ideology of top leaders, as it previously did with Khruschev's 1956 speech and thaw. China from 1949 to 1978 was preparing the China of 1978 to the present. Even those pointing to the “shattering of the iron rice bowl,” the No. 1 ideological underpinning of the old regime, ignore the practice of significant casualized labor in the industrial centers in the 1950s and 1960s. Until a true “new left” in China seriously rethinks the place of Maoism in the larger context of the history of the Marxist movement, and particularly its origins in Stalinism and not in the true, defeated world proletarian moment of 1917–1921, it is doomed to reproduce, in China as in different parts of the developing world, either grotesque copies of Maoism's periodic ultra-Stalinism (as in Peru) or to be the force that prepares the coming of “market socialism” by destroying the pre-capitalist forms of agriculture and engaging in forced, autarchic industrialization until Western, or Japanese and Korean, or (why not?) Chinese capital17 arrives to allow the full emergence of capitalism.
Originally posted: October 15, 2012 at Insurgent Notes
- 1The term “Stalinism” is used here throughout to describe a new form of class rule by a bureaucratic elite that, in different times and different situations, fought against pre-capitalist social formations (as in China) or against Western capitalism. Some, myself included, see Stalinism as “state capitalism”; a smaller number, influenced by the theory of Max Schactman, see it as “bureaucratic collectivism.” Orthodox Trotskyists call Stalinist regimes “deformed workers' states”; the Bordigists simply call it “capitalism.” Marxist-Leninists see such regimes as…socialism. This is a huge debate which has taken place ever since the 1920s but one could do worse than read Walter Daum's The Life and Death of Stalinism, which, while defending a variant of the Trotskyist view, argues that the Soviet Union and all its “offspring” were state capitalist. Outside those countries where a Stalinist regime has state power, I use the term “Stalinist” to describe those forces which are fighting to establish one, or apologists for one or another version of “real existing socialism.”
- 2All this is recounted in detail in Harold Isaac's book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, first published in 1934 and republished many times since. Readers should be cautioned that Isaacs, a Trotskyist when he wrote the book, later became a “State Department socialist” and toned down the book with each reprint, but later editions still tell the essential story.
- 3These three factions arose after Lenin's death in 1924: the Trotskyist left advocating export of the revolution and an intense industrialization policy based on strong extraction of a surplus from the peasantry; Bukharin argued for “socialism at a snail's pace” with a much laxer attitude toward petty producer capitalism by the peasants, and Stalin “wavering” in between. On this, see the review of the book of John Marot in the current issue of IN.
- 4To put it in a nutshell: the historical trajectory of peasants under pre-capitalist conditions has shown itself in most cases to be toward private small-plot cultivation. In such conditions, as in Russia, they can be the allies of a proletarian revolution, in which the “democratic tasks” of socialist revolution by the workers combine with those of the bourgeois revolution (land to the peasants). There is a bourgeois mode of production (capitalism), there is a transition to the communist mode of production in which the working class is the ruling class (socialism); there is no “peasant mode of production,” which limits the historical role of peasants to being allies of one dominant class or another.
- 5See for example Ygael Gluckstein's early book Mao's China (1955), particularly the chapter entitled “The Regimentation of the Working Class.” Gluckstein (who later became better known under his pseudonym Tony Cliff, leader of the British International Socialists and then renamed the Socialist Workers' Party) was the first person to systematically analyze China as a form of state capitalism.
- 6Some estimates run as high as 35 million. Past a certain point, the exact figures are not so important as the unmitigated disaster caused by the policy.
- 7Apparently neither Mao nor any other member of the CCP had read Marx at the time of its founding in 1921. They emerged out of the many ideological influences current in East Asia before World War I: socialism (vaguely understood), anarchism, Tolstoyan pacificism, and Henry Georgism, among others. “Voluntarism” as the term is used here refers to such episodes as the Great Leap Forward, or the (above-mentioned) characterization of the Soviet bloc as “capitalist” based on Khruschev's speech, or the (more idealist) definition of class in the Cultural Revolution not by an individual's relation to the means of production but by their family background or “revisionist” ideas. For background on the voluntarist ideologies current at the time of the founding of the CCP, cf. Maurice Meisner, Li ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism; on Mao's voluntarism inherited from his early reading of Kant, cf. Frederic Wakeman, History and will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought
- 8The most important analysis of the Cultural Revolution in these terms is Simon Leys's Chairman Mao's New Clothes, published in French in 1969 and translated into English a few years later. Leys also wrote brilliant books on the cultural desert created by Maoism in power, both before and after the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Shadows, The Burning Forest, and Broken Images. His work is required reading for anyone nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution today.
- 9Some flavor of these events is described by the liberal academic Song Yongyi. His book on the massacres of the Cultural Revolution is unfortunately only in French and in Chinese. He also edited an Encyclopedia of the Cultural Revolution which is dry and academic.
- 10For Shengwulian's most important statement (1968) see their text “Whither China?”
- 11The Gang of Four came to be seen as the leaders of the Cultural Revolution towards its end. The original central organ that was directing things both openly and behind the scenes was comprised of 10 people. Among these were Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li and others.
- 12Once again, the books of Simon Leys, cited above, are all beautiful portraits of the ideological and cultural climate in China up to 1976. One curious book, to be read with caution but useful nonetheless, is by Dr. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994). Li was Mao's personal physician from 1956 to 1976 and lived most of those years in the elite Beijing compound with other top party personnel, and traveled with Mao wherever he went. The English translation of the book was greeted with media-driven sensationalist focus on accounts of Mao's voracious sexual appetite for beautiful young women, which actually makes up a minor theme. Its real interest is the portrait of the comings and goings of the top CCP leaderships during the last 20 years of Mao's life, their rises and their downfalls. It also recounts Mao's deep reading in Chinese dynastic history, the so-called “24 dynastic histories” covering the years 221 BC–1644 AD. Mao's fascination was above all with court intrigue. According to Li, he had the greatest admiration for some of the “most ruthless and cruel” emperors, such as Qin Shihuangdi (221–206 BC), who founded the short-lived Qin dynasty. Qin ordered the infamous “Burning of the Books” and executed many Confucian scholars (p. 122). Another favorite was the Emperor Sui Yangdi (604–618), who ordered the building of the Grand Canal by massive conscripted labor, during which thousands died.
- 13But another account surfaced, of which an English translation was published in 1983: Yao Ming-Le, The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao. It purports to be a pseudonymous account written by a high-ranking CCP member who was assigned to develop the cover story of Lin's flight and death. According to Yao, a struggle to the death between Mao and Lin had been underway, and Lin was plotting a coup to overthrow and kill Mao. The plot was discovered, and Lin Biao was arrested and executed. No less a skeptic of sources coming out of China than Simon Leys, in his book The Burning Forest, argues that Yao's account agrees with other known facts
- 14For a full account, see Max Elbaum's book Revolution in the Air, which purports to see these groups as the “best and the brightest” to emerge from the American 60s. For a short course, see my polemical review of Elbaum, “Didn't See The Same Movie.”
- 15This foray into Democratic Party politics is enthusiastically recounted in Max Elbaum's book cited above.
- 16See the article of Lance Carter on the Chinese New Left in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
- 17Chinese investment in Africa in recent years, aimed first of all at the procurement of raw materials, has taken on serious dimensions; already some African leaders are warning of a “new colonialism.” On the level of high comedy, Western leaders have the effrontery to solemnly warn China “not to exploit Africa's natural resources.”
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"KPD-ML Rote Heimat" ... never heard of it
and also the rest of stuff about German Maoism only reveals that the author knows very little on that specific topic
In Germany, New Left Maoism was on the ascendant after 1968, a process which it gingerly termed the “positive overcoming of the anti-authoritarian movement” of that year. A major current was the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands),
the KPD/AO, founded in 1970, it was probably only the third or fourth largest Maoist group
which fought against the much larger DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, the pro-Soviet party, which itself still barely accounted for 1 percent of the vote in German elections). Out of the KPD came a multitude of smaller “K-Gruppen,” with poetic names such as KPD-ML Rote Heimat (Red Homeland, with distinct populist overtones of “soil”).
wrong, the only major splits from the KPD/AO was around the time of its dissolution in 1980, some of the founding members of the KPD/ML and the KABD (today MLPD) came out of the "old" pro-Soviet KPD which in its vast majority became the DKP in 1968 a 'KPD-ML Rote Heimat' (if it ever existed) must have been a minuscule group, like the KPD/AO, most of the K-Gruppen emerged out of the student movement (local brnches of the German SDS becoming the cores of different ML orgs) and other social movements
Only the DKP had any influence in the working class
wrong again, groups like two strongest Maoist orgs, KBW and KB and also the KPD/ML-Roter Morgen and the KABD/MLPD were serious rivals of the DKP in quite a lot number of factories and drew many of their members from the post-1968 "apprentices' rebellion"
with its infiltration of the trade unions; it was content to sit back after 1972 when the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt issued its “radical decree” and came down hard on the K-Gruppen,
wrong again, the majority of victims of the "radical decree" were members of the DKP or its front organizations
We'll have to confirm these corrections. In the meantime, what did you think of the substance of the article?
FWITW and FYI......This is a pretty interesting & informative book by A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, Autonomedia, Brooklyn 1988.
Yeah, it isn't bad although it is never clear how the author articles his understanding of Marxism relative to Trotskyism or Maoism.
automattick
Yeah, it isn't bad although it is never clear how the author articles his understanding of Marxism relative to Trotskyism or Maoism.
Sorry, educate me here. As I'm not a marxist, I just gathered that the author was sorta ultra-left marxist. It's more an impression (and maybe cause of the publisher).
I thought the book was decent. And, lots of the descriptions, etc seemed to conform with my living observations of large swathes of the period in question.
You're on Libcom, surely there must be enough materials for you here to read about Marxism. I will say that Goldner's critique is relevant more for today than the book in which you referred to a few posts ago.
automattick
You're on Libcom, surely there must be enough materials for you here to read about Marxism. I will say that Goldner's critique is relevant more for today than the book in which you referred to a few posts ago.
OK, I don't read most of the marxist stuff here. But you implied something and I was curious as to what you were implying. Like yoiu have some idea of his marxism. So, my impression of what I read is just that.
Considering the book ended sometime in the 1980s, I thought was a decent enough book for the period it covered. To each their own.
Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence, whereas both the Trotskyist Socialist Labor League (SLL) and the IS (later SWP), at their 1970s peaks, had thousands of members and a serious presence in the working class.
The IS were, I think, as much predominantly student-based as the SWP still are. I don't think SWP have ever claimed over 4,000 for what is a very transient membership, and SLP would've probably been considerably less. So neither group, with probably only a few thousand members between them, could ever really be said to have any "serious presence in the working class" in the UK - most of the w/c probably not being aware of their existence. The only group of that time to the left of the Labour Party one might possibly describe that way would be the old CP, which did have long-term strongholds in a few industrial working class communities (eg Welsh & Scots miners, print) and which held a power within some union bureaucracies far disproportionate to its quite low level of Party membership. But even the old CP never had anything remotely close to the influence of the larger CPs of Western Europe, eg France, Italy etc - which was a genuinely "serious presence in the working class".
I thought it would've made sense for LG to say a bit more in the article about the Nepali maoists, seeing as this has been the main focus of western maoists in recent years.
Yeah he could also added a bit more about Maoism in India and the Philippines, as in both countries it did gain popular support in certain areas.
From a quick skim read (and plse correct me if i missed something) but i think the article did not really capture why maoism (in both party and non-party forms - it wasn't all about forming Maoist parties) was trendy in some left wing circles in high income countries amongst in the 60s and 70s - eg. the whole 'serve the poor' religious moralism, 'direct action Maoism' (eg. attempts to organise unofficial strikes), the whole fervour around people taking trips to China and coming back with stories of a paradise, the image that the Maoists were 'more anarchist than the anarchists' (according to an old anarchist i asked about this) with their militantism, direct action, anti-bureaucracy etc thing, the belief that they were anti-Stalinists and had a classless and anti-bureaucratic society, and esp. the belief that Maoism was an authentic third world revolutionary 'anti-imperialst' movement. No doubt Loren knows this, but thoiught i would add it. (in NZ Maoists are still around, and were the biggest current on the radical left in the 1960s and 1970s if not 1980s, and even today are a part of NZ biggest radical leftist party - with a shockingly massive memership of 20-30-40!!)
I think this quote from Simon Leys sums up the fashion for Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. He says the fashion for Mao was
“remarkably similar in their dynamic to the passion for all chinoiserie in the eighteenth century. It is a new exoticism based, like the earlier ones, on ignorance and imagination…Like in the eighteenth century China is far away; this very distance…now allows philosophers to give Maoism whatever shape they fancy…With the same quiet and assured contempt for obvious facts, various pilgrims try to make the West believe that Maoist China has veered somewhat from Stalinism. Obviously their enthusiasm for Mao…excuses them from seeing to what use the thoughts of Stalin are put (often on the same level of importance as those of Mao Tse-tung himself) in Peking’s ideological publications'.
And their enthusiasm made them overlook a whole lot of other things as well...
Red Marriott
Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence, whereas both the Trotskyist Socialist Labor League (SLL) and the IS (later SWP), at their 1970s peaks, had thousands of members and a serious presence in the working class.
The IS were, I think, as much predominantly student-based as the SWP still are. I don't think SWP have ever claimed over 4,000 for what is a very transient membership, and SLP would've probably been considerably less. So neither group, with probably only a few thousand members between them, could ever really be said to have any "serious presence in the working class" in the UK - most of the w/c probably not being aware of their existence. The only group of that time to the left of the Labour Party one might possibly describe that way would be the old CP, which did have long-term strongholds in a few industrial working class communities (eg Welsh & Scots miners, print) and which held a power within some union bureaucracies far disproportionate to its quite low level of Party membership. But even the old CP never had anything remotely close to the influence of the larger CPs of Western Europe, eg France, Italy etc - which was a genuinely "serious presence in the working class".
I thought it would've made sense for LG to say a bit more in the article about the Nepali maoists, seeing as this has been the main focus of western maoists in recent years.
I think if you go back a few years to the time of their 'rank and file' groups, the SWP certainly had more influence within the working class than it has today. "Serious presence" would be perhaps stretching it though.
We were talking about producing a pamphlet on Maoism when I was in the ICC. The ICC had groups in four of the countries that the Maoists call the "big five", and we were going to focus a section on each of them plus the US as an example of Maoism in the West, and some historical stuff. It got pulled though.
Devrim
Skraeling
I think this quote from Simon Leys sums up the fashion for Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. He says the fashion for Mao was
“remarkably similar in their dynamic to the passion for all chinoiserie in the eighteenth century. It is a new exoticism based, like the earlier ones, on ignorance and imagination…Like in the eighteenth century China is far away; this very distance…now allows philosophers to give Maoism whatever shape they fancy…With the same quiet and assured contempt for obvious facts, various pilgrims try to make the West believe that Maoist China has veered somewhat from Stalinism. Obviously their enthusiasm for Mao…excuses them from seeing to what use the thoughts of Stalin are put (often on the same level of importance as those of Mao Tse-tung himself) in Peking’s ideological publications'.
And their enthusiasm made them overlook a whole lot of other things as well...
typically mordant prose from leys, i always enjoyed reading him
i know it is fun to make fun of the IST currents usually cause of their student base, but are not students working class? (not all obviously, but...)
also i've definitely at least seen generations of the ISO to have fairly working class composition. depends on if you are talking about marxist class analysis or sociological...or do you mean have a concentration in the labor unions?
if not a hegemony within the class though surely hegemony in the revolutionary left.
@ sabotage;'Student' is no more a definition of class than 'schoolchild' is. Most of the upper and ruling class were students at some point - did they suddenly become working class during their studies? That doesn't make any sense to me, unless one is trying to obscure some truth about class society. We were also talking about the 70s when far less working class people went into higher education.
But we are talking above of the old UK International Socialists, not ISO or IST.
Devrim
I think if you go back a few years to the time of their 'rank and file' groups, the SWP certainly had more influence within the working class than it has today. "Serious presence" would be perhaps stretching it though.
Yes, they did have some factory branches etc for a few years in the 70s and rank'n'file activity for a while. But it was a bit of a flash in the pan, didn't really grow deep roots and soon disappeared - in contrast to the CP, which retained such industrial influences for most of the 20thC. So, yes, I think it's stretching it way too far.
@ Skraeling; the Leys quote describing 60s & 70s Western pro-maoists could just as easily describe the recent attitude of the Kasama/revleft maoists relationship to Nepal. Except 'Prachanda Path's' present non-revolutionary bourgeois character is now so blatant that they've all gone deafeningly silent.
you wanna critique of Maoism. read Sohn Rethel's book on epistemology -- his shortcomings in an otherwise outstanding critique of value is illluminating
Kasama/revleft maoists relationship to Nepal. Except 'Prachanda Path's' present non-revolutionary bourgeois character is now so blatant that they've all gone deafeningly silent.
To be fair to Kasama they and their sister sites have been moving away from Prachanda to supporting either the Maoist breakaway and or Maoist affiliated actions and groups in Nepal.
Reddebrek
To be fair to Kasama they and their sister sites have been moving away from Prachanda to supporting either the Maoist breakaway and or Maoist affiliated actions and groups in Nepal.
The politics of the other factions in Nepal are narrowly nationalistic, federalist, opportunist and/or Stalinist. For years Kasama-ites were the most uncritical supporters of Prachanda & his Party - even as all the facts and developments were making obvious their predictable accommodation with mainstream bourgeois politics. "To be fair", anyone who pointed this out was subjected to disinformation, lame excuses, distortions and sometimes personal slander by Kasama-ites and their revleft pro-maoist pals. They've only "been moving away" from supporting Prachanda & co, not thru any independently-made conclusions or insights, but because the Baidya faction have split from Prachanda's Party - their illusions as to the possibility of success for Baidya are as much fantasy as the ones they once had in the mother Party. Baidya & co can be romanticised from afar as more radical as he has, for now, rejected parliamentarism (having been out-manouevred in that arena) - the same parliamentarism which, until recently, was stoutly defended by him and by all Western pro-maoists loyal to the Nepali Party 'revolutionary' line.
Their softer Stalinism remains useless as an analytical tool for explaining such developments; after being slavishly hailed as those 'torch-bearers of the world's exploited masses' etc Prachanda and his 'Path' dogma led them to becoming, apparently almost overnight, counter-revolutionary 'revisionists'. None of which even really touches on the bourgeois conception of social change held by Nepali Maoists and their romanticising Western devotees. See linked articles below;
http://libcom.org/library/myths-realities-nepalese-maoists-their-strike-ban-legislations
http://libcom.org/news/predictable-rise-red-bourgeoisie-end-mythical-nepalese-maoist-revolution-24022012
I started writing a response to both this and the response of "NPC" from Kasama ("The Historical Failures of Maoism"), but decided not to devote so much time to that - partly because I generally agree with Goldner's overall political argument (so debating might seem pedantic, or like I'm trying to defend Maoism). Maybe after NPC/ Kasama complete the longer piece they're working on I'll write something more formal.
For now I’ll just direct people to my 2010 article “A Commune in Sichuan?” – a review of the book “Red Earth” where I reflected on some of these questions in relation to more recent scholarship (and my own interviews with peasants who lived through the Mao era), and came up with some different answers than those in either Goldner’s piece or NPC’s response. It’s way too long, so you might want to skip down to the conclusion, “What Could Have Been Done Differently…?”
Also see this Libcom thread where I argue that Mao-era China was not “capitalist” but something we might call “developmental proto-capitalism” (or simply “socialism”) since the law of value was operating only indirectly via the “law of development” driven by military competition with properly capitalist states such as the US (In “A Commune in Sichuan” I refine this and talk about other factors…)
Here are some notes I wrote after reading Goldner’s article and NPC’s response:
(1) not really “capitalist” (see above)
(2) Peasantry – not necessarily “non-revolutionary,” examples: many pre-capitalist peasant rebellions in Europe and China, including communistic tendencies as in the German Peasants War, the Diggers, and also in capitalist contexts – 1917 Russia and Ukraine, 1936 Spain, the Zapatistas – in all cases some peasants took active role in collectivizing land, forming federations of co-ops, etc., not simply fighting for bourgeois measures.
(3) Great Leap Forward – more complicated (see “Commune in Sichuan”)
(4) The “Cultural Revolution” didn’t really “wreck” the economy – and that is why it was not a rev! The strikes and unrest of 1966 to 1967 did lead to a slowing of economic growth – which is why Mao et al suppressed it and called for “promoting production (while) grasping revolution,” and rejecting the workers’ concerns as “economistic.”
(5) Agricultural productivity DID increase (especially per unit land, but also per labor-hour – especially when “modern scientific inputs” finally became available in the 1970s) – see figures from my article. And if there had been no increase in productivity, how could it be considered “bourgeois rev” – an unsuccessful bourgeois rev?
(6) ‘There was no “counter-revolution,” still less a transformation of the previously existing social relations of production.’ I agree there was no “counter-revolution,” but I would say there was a transformation – namely a privatization of bureaucratic power, the commoditization of labor-power (in the Mao era workers and peasants were more not really free to choose their own jobs), marketization of social relations (in the Mao era money couldn’t buy much – you got necessities such as housing in kind or with ration tickets from your “work unit”; or if you were a peasant you produced things for yourself – after 1958 through the mediation of the “commune” or “production team”). But it is true that most of the new capitalists that emerged from this transformation were the relatives and cronies of the same Mao-era bureaucrats…
In response to NPC’s critique of Goldner:
I don’t think any “communization” occurred during the Mao era. During the GLF and in the “people’s commune” system in general I think it’s more helpful to say that some “communistic” elements emerged but were warped by their subordination to a system whose primary function was surplus-value extraction. In the CR the situation was different: whereas the communistic elements of the GLF/people’s commune system I think mainly came from the actual desire for something like communism shared by both some peasants and some party leaders (wrongly believed to go hand in hand with a rapid increase in “development of the forces of production” and increased extraction of surplus-value), in the CR the most communistic tendencies were mainly not intended by the central maoist leaders – it was more a matter of proletarians (and to some extent peasants) taking advantage of the opportunity to push their own “economistic” demands that threatened the system (mainly through strikes), and inspired a small amount of “ultra-left” theory that pointed toward something like communization. LG seems confused here to say the CR “wrecked the economy” – this seems to repeat the narrative shared by Dengists and liberals. One thing Yiching emphasizes is how the central maoist leaders used the need to restore economic growth as an excuse to put workers back to work and supress street fighting, etc. – the slogan (from the original 16 points) was “promote production (while) embracing revolution.” I suspect LG is able to make this mistake b/c of his own productivism (and what Théorie Commuiste calls “programmatism”) – he thinks of communist rev as involving a continuation of economic growth under workers control, rather than the destruction of the economy as such.
But here I also disagree with NPC, in that I think the closest the CR got to communization was these two rudimentary elements: (1) strikes and disruption of the economy (especially the shanghai general strike in december 1966), and (2) the mere ideas being proposed by groups like shengwulian, but not acted upon (they didn’t get a chance to act on them, and it may have already been too late anyway). Yiching basically argues that the “shanghai commune” was already a compromise between the striking workers and the maoist leaders who wanted to restore order. Yes it was later also suppressed and reorganized into a “3-in-1 revolutionary committee” where the party and military had more control over it, but the “commune” itself was already the first step toward recuperation.
Later there were things like weapons seizures in Wuhan, but my understanding is that this was mainly about factional struggles among the various rebel groups that had “seized power” (with military backing – so it was really just the spectacle of power). They wanted weapons so they could more effectively kill the other faction leaders and hold onto the illusion of power themselves, not so they could transform the system. In other words, most of this was about political rev (coup d’etat) not social rev.
I recently talked to a former CR rebel in Chongqing and he re-emphasized this to me, since already at that time he was beginning to critique the other rebels (including his own faction) for not recognizing the diff between political and social rev, but he said no one agreed with him. Much later he learned about the ultra-left currents and basically agreed with them (although he became a liberal – as did most of the ultra-leftists).
Given that wall of text much of it apropos nothing at all I see your quite touchy about this a pity your lecturing someone who A: doesn't hold any of the positions your attacking and B: couldn't care less either way.
"The politics of the other factions in Nepal are narrowly nationalistic, federalist, opportunist and/or Stalinist. "
Show me were I indicated otherwise or made any value judgement whatsoever about any of them.
"For years Kasama-ites were the most uncritical supporters of Prachanda & his Party"
I know this and said as much in my comment "have been moving away " is a bit of a clue that they've been moving about for sometime.
"even as all the facts and developments were making obvious their predictable accommodation with mainstream bourgeois politics." I very much doubt they are the only people in history to make such a mistake.
"anyone who pointed this out was subjected to disinformation, lame excuses, distortions and sometimes personal slander by Kasama-ites and their revleft pro-maoist pals."
Speaking from personal experience are we? What does this actually have to do with anything I wonder? Rudeness and childish behaviour isn't a unique phenomenon on the internet. They aren't the only people to resort to bitterness when defending something they've invested a lot of time in, I really don't see why you brought this up it reads like a personal gripe against a userbase, which seems a bit off topic for a theory article, are you trying to say that because they're arseholes we don't have to bother being accurate in our criticism or analysis of them?
"They've only "been moving away" from supporting Prachanda & co, not thru any independently-made conclusions or insights, but because the Baidya faction have split from Prachanda's Party - "
A: You admit that they have been moving away from Prachanda yes? so your "Deafeningly silent" statement is incorrect.
B: How exactly are you using the word Independently? Unless Baidya is actively controlling them or made them some kind of deal then yes the switching of support regardless of reason was independently made.
"their illusions as to the possibility of success for Baidya are as much fantasy as the ones they once had in the mother Party."
More confirmation that they have in fact changed there position good to see.
"Their softer Stalinism remains useless as an analytical tool for explaining such developments; after being slavishly hailed as those 'torch-bearers of the world's exploited masses' etc Prachanda and his 'Path' dogma led them to becoming, apparently almost overnight, counter-revolutionary 'revisionists'. None of which even really touches on the bourgeois conception of social change held by Nepali Maoists and their romanticising Western devotees. See linked articles below; "
Well no actually I won't see those articles below because I've both already read them and know they have nothing to do with my comment. It really is quite curious how common this practice of seeing something that isn't actually there is on this site. I simply pointed out that they had changed there position making your comment outdated, thats it so you can spare me the value inferences on your part. In a roundabout way you've actually admitted this is true so why you felt the need to bury that admission with tons and tons of superfluous reasons why you don't like those guys eludes me. You may call it a nitpick (I'm surprised you didn't given your views on the subject) but it is quite important, criticising some one or a group for something they've done in the past has its place but acting like they're doing it this very second doesn't. All you do is make yourself look outdated and give them an excuse to ignore you.
Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence,
but where it did show it had a pernicious influence- 1970s in Glasgow young working class militants diverted into playing soldiers and getting hefty jail sentences for half baked guerilla adventures, thuggish enforcement of party discipline that bound people into party activities through fear and extortion of funds from supporters beyond their ability to pay.
In the prisons they lied to and flattered long term prisoners- creating an illusion that they had an organisation on the outside that could support them in prison insurrections on the inside.
If you want a look at a parallel universe then take a squatch at : http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.firstwave/index.htm#wps
reddebrek
Given that wall of text much of it apropos nothing at all I see your quite touchy about this a pity your lecturing someone who A: doesn't hold any of the positions your attacking and B: couldn't care less either way.
My "wall of text" is little more than a couple of paragraphs - much less than your angry reply which looks about 3x the length; so perhaps it's you, though claiming you "couldn't care less either way", who looks a little "touchy". In any case it wasn't meant as a personal criticism (never mind a "lecture"!), but a more general informative contribution to the discussion - so I don't really know why the antagonistic response. Maybe it's sparked cos you have friends among or sympathies for Kasama, I don't know (or care).
brekk
Red
"The politics of the other factions in Nepal are narrowly nationalistic, federalist, opportunist and/or Stalinist. "
Show me were I indicated otherwise or made any value judgement whatsoever about any of them.
No need, as I didn't accuse you of such things - but it's the nature of net threads that, in the space of one post, a poster can reply to an individual and can also, with other comments, contribute info/opinion applicable to, and addressed to, the wider discussion on the thread.
brekk
Red
"anyone who pointed this out was subjected to disinformation, lame excuses, distortions and sometimes personal slander by Kasama-ites and their revleft pro-maoist pals."
Speaking from personal experience are we?
Yes, and those others who criticised supporting Nepali Maoism were treated similarly. Eg, old revleft threads are full of it. But nothing necessarily wrong with personal experience as either a way of learning or a motive, surely?
brekk
What does this actually have to do with anything I wonder? Rudeness and childish behaviour isn't a unique phenomenon on the internet. They aren't the only people to resort to bitterness when defending something they've invested a lot of time in, I really don't see why you brought this up it reads like a personal gripe against a userbase, which seems a bit off topic for a theory article,
The article above this thread is about the historical appeal of Maoism - which includes the western pro-maoists' romanticising of faraway struggles and periodic quick about-face changes of political lines in typical Stalinist fashion, as pointed out in the LG article. I pointed out that this behaviour had continued in the relation between western pro-maoists and Nepal - that seems relevant to me. And the nature of some of their responses to criticism is always worth being aware of and can also be seen as part of a Stalinist-type continuum. It was clear from some of the debates and articles that many pro-maoists knew little or nothing about Nepal but what they'd been told by Maoists and their supporters and that most of them were simply toeing the Party line, disinterested in developing any of their own understanding or broadening their knowledge. Again, a continuum with Bolshevik conceptions of slavish Party line-ism - which, where it exists, is worthy of critique.
brekk
A: You admit that they have been moving away from Prachanda yes? so your "Deafeningly silent" statement is incorrect.
B: How exactly are you using the word Independently? Unless Baidya is actively controlling them or made them some kind of deal then yes the switching of support regardless of reason was independently made.
Perhaps, to avoid such hairsplitting, I should've said "Except 'Prachanda Path's' present non-revolutionary bourgeois character is now so blatant that they've all gone deafeningly silent ON THIS PARTICULAR SUBJECT." But it should be clear from the context, by "silent" I meant they've become oddly quiet (ie, no substantial critique/historical explanation) on many of the things they once so loudly defended - parliamentarism, denial of strike bans, massive parliamentary salaries, Prachanda Path being the great revolutionary theory of 21stC etc (especially when compared to the many heated articles & threads they wrote to defend their former positions) - declaring it all as simply being due to some ahistorical textbook 'revisionism'. So I don't see any contradiction in saying they've been quiet about that and that they've also simply moved their allegiances to the Baidya faction. That seems a case of you seeing some contradiction "that isn't actually there". Eg, until recently parts of revleft were constantly full of uncritical triumphalism by Nepali Maoist supporters - but now they are generally "deafeningly silent".
brekk
criticising some one or a group for something they've done in the past has its place but acting like they're doing it this very second doesn't. All you do is make yourself look outdated and give them an excuse to ignore you.
If they've just transferred the same kind of romanticising allegiance and narrow Party line-type obedience to Baidya's faction then imo they are carrying on the same errors. If anything is "outdated", it's that. But I'm happy to be ignored by pro-maoists, I've had enough of their attention.
"My "wall of text" is little more than a couple of paragraphs" in reply to a two line comment...
"much less than your angry reply which looks about 3x the length" Which was a reply to your much longer comment dealing with it point by point bit of a false comparison. In fact given that your comment is longer then mine I could easily throw your words right back at you; still this comment will probably be even longer so I won't.
so perhaps it's you, though claiming you "couldn't care less either way", who looks a little "touchy"." Yes because as we all know writing a comment on the internet is an arduous task that takes up an entire day and a lot of energy.
"so I don't really know why the antagonistic response." So disagreement = antagonism does it? Thanks for letting me know., I'll make sure to be sunshine and smiles from now on.
"Maybe it's sparked cos you have friends among or sympathies for Kasama," Very conspiratorial of you, good to see your keeping a level head. "I don't know (or care)." Yeah I'd believe you don't care if you hadn't stated in the very same paragraph that commenting=caring so I guess you do actually care.
"but it's the nature of net threads that, in the space of one post, a poster can reply to an individual and can also, with other comments, contribute info/opinion applicable to, and addressed to, the wider discussion on the thread. "
Indeed, however it is also the nature of the English language that when you quote someone in a conversation and then use their words to make a point; especially a contrary one you are making it a direct reply or rebuttal. So if you do wish to make it a general point you have to make it clear where the response ends (which you did not) and the general commentary begins otherwise your building a strawman which is the textual equivalent of putting words in someone else's mouth, whether you meant to or not is actually irrelevant since the other person can't read your thoughts.
"quick about-face changes of political lines in typical Stalinist fashion, as pointed out in the LG article. I pointed out that this behaviour had continued in the relation between western pro-maoists and Nepal - that seems relevant to me." Well then with respect that isn't what you were doing at all. You weren't talking about there changes of opinion there, you were complaining about there behaviour in regards to their original position. You made no comment on there "about-face changes" because they hadn't made any changes at the time, you were just listing of rudeness and childish behaviour which is why I don't see the relevance of it here.
"And the nature of some of their responses to criticism is always worth being aware of and can also be seen as part of a Stalinist-type continuum." My apologies, I wasn't aware that being thick headed and insulting people telling you things you don't like was a purely ideological phenomenon. I guess Stalin must be the hero of 90% of thirteen year olds. Sorry mate but that isn't ideological if it is anything at all it would be tactical and the thing about tactics is that anyone regardless of ideas and experience can use them so long as they are physically capable. All you've said so far is that a certain group of internet based guys get really arsey and immature when someone starts questioning and challenging something they hold quite dear to them. If you can explain why that's a Maoist exclusive trait that somehow became globally popular then fine I'll take back what I said till then I still don't see what the point of it was.
"Perhaps, to avoid such hairsplitting, I should've said "Except 'Prachanda Path's' present non-revolutionary bourgeois character is now so blatant that they've all gone deafeningly silent ON THIS PARTICULAR SUBJECT."
Except that still isn't true though is it. In addition to shifting support to another guy whom currently rejects most of Prachanda's positions which implies that they by extension they have also come to a similar change (but we'll see how long that lasts) they have also posted articles that criticise Prachanda's group, not that many especially compared to their large number of positive pieces, but they do exist I've read a couple, which is why your "deafeningly silent" is not only incorrect but also problematic if it appeared in an actual criticism or analysis.
Its a very old trick to take one flaw in an argument and use association to undermine the entire argument being presented. If for example there was an article on Kasama, or Nepalese Maoists and their support in the West and the author made a similar criticism, all Kasama would have to do is quote that particular part and link a couple of articles where they did actually say something and then say the author didn't do the research and thus doesn't know what he's talking about. Judging by some of your comments you apparently don't care if this happens, if that's the case then why even bother? The point of an article is to expand knowledge by popularising their findings with an audience, however if the one part of the audience can discredit the article all your doing is preaching to the converted.
"I meant they've become oddly quiet (ie, no substantial critique/historical explanation)" Unfortunately your splitting hairs again what do you mean by substantial? I'm not being nitpicky here that term means different things to different people. I personally agree with you but unless they did absolutely nothing there's no way to prove that, its the same problem worded differently.
"So I don't see any contradiction in saying they've been quiet about that and that they've also simply moved their allegiances to the Baidya faction." Except you didn't say that, at first and the second comment was quite confusing it read far more like a description of a conspiracy of controlled actions. I do agree that some of them are more interesting in having hero's and mentors to copy rather then objective analysis though so I'm happy to wrap this up.
"That seems a case of you seeing some contradiction "that isn't actually there"." No that's a case of you not being very good at communicating a point, just look at your comments each one changes what you actually said from "silent" to "silent plus switching support" to "switching support and not doing enough in my opinion to account for the original error".
"Eg, until recently parts of revleft were constantly full of uncritical triumphalism by Nepali Maoist supporters - but now they are generally "deafeningly silent"."
Your example is as poor as your attempt at wit. I don't know anything about Revleft and never spoke about it in any of my comments and so gave you no reason to think otherwise. So that example doesn't reflect upon me at all, perhaps you saw something that wasn't there. The closest I ever got was questioning your criticism of both sites forum etiquette, I also see that you've now change your point a fourth time by adding a qualifier of "generally" there.
"If anything is "outdated", it's that." Be that as it may it doesn't change your own antiquated criticism. There's a difference between criticising past and present actions and the underlying ideas and behaviour cultivated that drives them. You originally didn't do the latter in the point I contested, still nice to see you've come around in part.
"But I'm happy to be ignored by pro-maoists, I've had enough of their attention." If that truly is the case then what exactly is the point of your continued criticism? Criticism without purpose is nothing more then moaning, which can be fun and therapeutic but doesn't lead to constructive actions.
brekk
Red
"much less than your angry reply which looks about 3x the length"
Which was a reply to your much longer comment dealing with it point by point bit of a false comparison. In fact given that your comment is longer then mine I could easily throw your words right back at you; still this comment will probably be even longer so I won't.
Then you're clearly all mixed up - I made no comment here "dealing with it point by point". I think you're confusing the post below mine - which is by the poster called husunzi (with the 'weirdest boner' pic) - and thinking it's a continuation of my post. So your ranting is, for the most part, not even directed at the right person. And you try to criticise me for not being precise enough with language.... Duh. Regardless, I find little interesting or substantial in your rant other than attempted hairsplitting and point-scoring.
brekk
I don't know anything about Revleft and never spoke about it in any of my comments and so gave you no reason to think otherwise. So that example doesn't reflect upon me at all, perhaps you saw something that wasn't there.
Not everything is about you. But just cos something isn't about you doesn't mean it can't be mentioned or isn't relevant. But if you don't know about the several heated debates on revleft about Nepal - some of which are linked to in the articles you say you've read - then you probably haven't seen the pro-maoists at their arrogant worst or seen the contrast between their loud triumphalist heyday and their quietness now.
But this is an odd question;
brekk
Red
"But I'm happy to be ignored by pro-maoists, I've had enough of their attention."
If that truly is the case then what exactly is the point of your continued criticism? Criticism without purpose is nothing more then moaning, which can be fun and therapeutic but doesn't lead to constructive actions.
So those who criticised the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution or in Spain 1936 (not that I'm implying that Nepal has anything like the same historical importance) - unless those critics were directing their critique at the Bolsheviks and trying to influence them, there was no value in what they said or usefulness to anyone else in their critique? I disagree with that logic applied to past or present, in fact some of those critiques still have a certain usefulness today.
But this is all really derailing from the more interesting topic of the article above.
For Alfred Sohn-Rethel - who famously resisted the Nazis and worked with the German Frankfurt school, but by the 1960s came to identify with Mao's China, the social synthesis in capitalism is undertaken by commodity exchange. For Robert Kurz it is not made by exchange, but by value itself. For the latter, the essential determination under capitalism is value.
Sohn Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour (London 1978)
"Then you're clearly all mixed up -" No mate you are I was clearly referring to my own post explaining why your snide little remark about our comment lengths doesn't really gel.
"I think you're confusing the post below mine - which is by the poster called husunzi (with the 'weirdest boner' pic)" No I'm not, and it is quite obvious that I am not, this smacks of a childish attempt to duck responsibility.
"So your ranting is, for the most part, not even directed at the right person." Ranting hey? And to think you accused me of being the angry one. You know I was originally being flippant with my "touched a nerve" remark but given the tone of your following comments I see it had a lot of truth to it. I mean not only have you seen fit to repeatedly accuse me of anger and antagonism, being a kasamite, and ranting even after you grudgingly conceded that I had a point.
"And you try to criticise me for not being precise enough with language.... Duh" Indeed I do and your latest comment is a perfect example of why that criticism is valid. Perhaps you should try heeding my advice rather than waste your time trying to one up me in word play.
"Regardless, I find little interesting or substantial in your rant other than attempted hairsplitting and point-scoring." Funny I can easily say the same thing to you, your constant changing of tune and common personal remarks in place of a rebuttal are testament to that.
"Not everything is about you. " Yeah I knew you'd pull this one, sorry mate but that really doesn't work here. Lets have a look at what you actually said shall we
"That seems a case of you seeing some contradiction "that isn't actually there". Eg, until recently parts of revleft were constantly full of uncritical triumphalism by Nepali Maoist supporters - but now they are generally "deafeningly silent".
You directly accused me of "seeing things that aren't there" then used revleft as an example to substantiate the point. It was clearly directed at me and if it wasn't then your English simply isn't very good. Here's how its supposed to work, you make a point then in order to substantiate your point you provide evidence, guess what an example is, that's right a form of evidence, which means the evidence is attached to your point. Since your point was directly personally towards me that means so is your evidence, so then if your point is questioning my judgement (which you did) then your evidence should support that. So how does a forum that I don't go on and did not make a judgement upon affect my judgement? The answer is it doesn't, but then silly me I forgot your direct quoting of me and snide personal remark have nothing at all to do with me.
"- some of which are linked to in the articles you say you've read -" Oh, so you have seen those articles too have you? So your original error has no excuse beyond your laziness and desire to point score, good to see another roundabout admission from you.
"then you probably haven't seen the pro-maoists at their arrogant worst" Maybe I have maybe I haven't is that the worst they can be or can they top that I don't know. However I've reread our little conversation and its interesting but you seem to demonstrate most of the behaviours you criticise them for, ignorance, slander and insults lets see shall we.
"anyone who pointed this out was subjected to disinformation, lame excuses, distortions and sometimes personal slander by Kasama-ites and their revleft pro-maoist pals."
Other then disinformation as I don't believe you intentionally tried to mislead you've done the lot, perhaps someone's been fighting monsters for too long?
"unless those critics were directing their critique at the Bolsheviks and trying to influence them, there was no value in what they said or usefulness to anyone else in their critique?"
If that critique is based on flawed and/or outdated information then yes there is no value beyond group satisfaction at slagging off another group. Exactly who do you help by given them an easily rebuffed argument? In fact I'm very glad you picked the examples you did, one of if not the most important reason the Bolsheviks and the groups whom emulated them were practically immune to attacks from the left was because the arguments against them were dominated by Capitalist nations and supporters whom weren't fussed about objectivity and honesty. This was so pervasive that an source of information critical of the USSR could be written off as part of the same web of lies and the question became a simple pro or anti choice.
And once again I point out that isn't entirely what you were doing. Your criticism contained a flaw I attempted to correct that flaw and gave you reason as to why you should. You then came up with a childish "i don't care attitude" to which I asked if that were true since you know you claim commenting equals caring what exactly you hoped to gain then. I see you haven't answered that and have tried to shift the conversation away from it.
"But this is all really derailing from the more interesting topic of the article above."
Indeed it is perhaps you should of thought of that before you tried covering your arse for a simple correction. I'm happy (I'm sorry I mean angry) to wrap this up at any time its you whose kept this thing going as long as it has.
Well you can certainly churn it out, but ... you remain confused. You said you were replying to my "much longer comment dealing with it point by point" - so where is that comment? Not on this thread.
"Well you can certainly churn it out, but ... you remain confused." Sadly no you are still the one whose confused, or dishonest or simply thick the evidence could go either way really.
" so where is that comment? Not on this thread. " Then you need to get your eyes checked its the very first reply you made to me. My wording may have been ambiguous but it certainly wasn't vague enough to cause you this much confusion shall I break this one down for you as well? Very well then here's what I actually said
"Which was a reply to your much longer comment dealing with it point by point bit of a false comparison. In fact given that your comment is longer then mine I could easily throw your words right back at you; still this comment will probably be even longer so I won't."
Is that clearer, to be even more exact you were trying to be clever by throwing my "wall of text" comment back at me. I simply pointed out why that doesn't wash given that you somehow managed to take a simple two line comment into a seizable vehicle to unload your personal frustration, while I took on said comment on a point by point basis. There does that make everything nice and simple for you? I noticed something about your replies, you often quote a small piece of text then pretend to be confused, when in fact the full passage makes my meaning much clearer.
Oh and before I go I'd just like to point out that even if you did somehow fail to understand my meaning originally by attempting to drag this out for as long as you have you are pretty much guilty of hair splitting... Committing the same acts that you accuse others of is something of habit with you huh? Perhaps you should get that checked out before you start wagging the finger at others.
Good day.
I suggest you try some English comprehension lessons and a course in anger management. Also stop taking yourself so seriously and get a sense of humour. And try to be more interesting.
Tart
Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence,
but where it did show it had a pernicious influence
Nonsense.
Persisting in the face of every difficulty
In 1979 was formed our new party, a glorious victory.
[youtube]UXEDZy4Z8os[/youtube]
Sorry to change the subject from Maoism in the UK, but some readers might be interested in the debate about "really existing" Maoism in China: I reposted excerpts from the three-way exchange between Goldner, NPC from Red Spark, and myself here:
http://chinastudygroup.net/2012/10/maoism-communism-debate/
One interesting response is from Lang Yan:
http://chinastudygroup.net/2012/10/maoism-communism-debate/#comment-6935
1). I agree with Husunzi that the political-economy of Maoist China should not be characterized as capitalist, but as a form of socialist developmentalism.
2). I think that some in the guoqingpai in China, who make this developmentalism central to their argument about Chinese development and the present moment, especially in rural China, miss the teleology of Maoism, its futurity. Certainly, the Maoist period can be characterized by its drive to industrialize in competition with the west, and this was accelerated by the Korean War. But we should also take seriously the drive towards egalitarianism as well. I would argue that some Chinese leaders, Mao included, truly believed that such equality was necessary to the social and economic development they were after. Now, what we want to call that is an open question, as is, of course, what might have been if the politics of the 1970s (or 1960s) had turned in a different direction. But it was not a pure economic or industrial developmentalism.
3). With the weakness of the industrial economy in China (I think it was about a quarter the size per capita in 1949 compared to Russia in 1917!), the only way to develop the rural economy from which surplus had to be extracted for industrialization was to rely heavily on rapidly increasing the absolute surplus extracted. Raising the relative surplus, in terms of productivity, was not really an option in the 1950s. This meant increasing the absolute amount that rural laborers worked–especially in the off season–and that meant raising the capacity of the rural state to control and organize the rural population. We could say that the Maoist period was characterized as the formal subsumption of rural labor to socialist developmentalism. The Great Leap Forward seems to have been a failed attempt to both raise the absolute surplus and relative surplus at the same time. But the technology and organization for the latter was just not there.
4). By the 1970s, however, this formal subsumption (of absolute surplus expansion) had largely won the gains it could, and the industrial economy had also developed significantly. The state turned, not without a great amount of contestation within the fractured leadership, towards real subsumption and raising the productivity of rural workers with new inputs and technology.
5). The shift, marked by the beginning of the reform period, was a continuation of trends from the early 1970s towards raising productivity and modernizing technology–shifting from quantitative to qualitative expansion. But with the added components of changing the egalitarian remuneration policies that seemed to the reformist leadership to conflict with doing so and of opening to the west in order to import advanced technology. Together these trends led the Chinese economy being integrated within global capitalism. Chinese developmental socialism and its futurity largely ended then. The reforms since that time have mostly been designed and have worked to further smooth China’s integration to capitalism.
6). Thus the Maoist political economy could be characterized as one that largely aimed at raising the absolute extraction of surplus in order to pay for the basic industrialization of China. While the aim might have been to produce an egalitarian society in the future, that future was cut short by the very process and politics of shifting towards a goal of raising productivity and modernizing technology. Much of this was driven by international competition and a fear of war. This is not to argue a determinitive path, there was certainly enough contingency (and space for politics) then that China could have gone in a different direction.
7). To legitimate this developmentalism politically, the CCP had to make a deal with the population that life would be more stable–again, I am not making an argument one way or the other about the real intentions of the leadership in the CCP, although that can be debated. For peasants this largely meant they would no longer be landless; for workers it meant guaranteed employment, housing, retirement, and food (the danwei system) and a say in working conditions, something that continued to be a struggle throughout the Maoist period and on. The reform period is characterized by an end to this bargain, and its protests marked by this fact–clear in Tiananmen 1989, for example.
iexist
wrong again, groups like two strongest Maoist orgs, KBW and KB and also the KPD/ML-Roter Morgen and the KABD/MLPD were serious rivals of the DKP in quite a lot number of factories and drew many of their members from the post-1968 "apprentices' rebellion"
What was the apprentices' rebellion?
a widespread unrest among young (15-20 years old) workers, especially among those in apprenticeships which were in Germany back then quite harsh, especially in small and medium businesses: spending 2-3 years with very very little or even no pay, authoritarian and paternalistic regime by the employer/mentor, loads of additional duties beside work, often crappy training where only a fraction of the time was used to teach you something useful for the profession, you're supposed to learn. Ignited through the student movement in 1967, there was first a widespread participation of apprentices and other young workers in students demonstrations, than in late 1968/69 a series of strikes, demonstrations, etc. by apprentices, themselves, also leading to self-organized structures, both inside and outside the unions. After the most urgent demands (on pay, labour rights, etc.) had been met, the movement ebbed down was partly incorporated into the unions, more radical groups often aligned themselves to groups of the left or became the core of newly-emerging orgs (the "spirit" of the movement was exceptionally influential inside the KB, the least dogmatic ML group in Germany whose core became politicised in the apprentices movement)
My favourite critique of Maoism was on some London demo in the late 1980s. A motley bunch of Anarchist Communist Federation and Direct Action Movement people were marching near to the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement contingent. The RIM megaphone was belting out the most tedious, mind-numbing Maoist shite imaginable; shite which was then being parroted verbatim by the RIM faithful, who all sounded about as enthusiastic about it as Marvin the Paranoid Android. We were taking the piss relentlessly out of this but it didn't seem to be having much effect. Finally, we all lauched into "Chairman Mao's a wanker... na na na na!" to the tune of "Let's all do the conga". Worked a fucking treat and they were not at all happy :D
when the RIM held a rally in honour of the Shining Path's Presidente Gonzalo in the early 1990ies on a square in Berlin-Kreuzberg, someone constantly played very loud the awful song Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone from his balcony
Serge Forward
Marvin the Paranoid Android
are they by any chance related?
Silences on the suppression of workers self-emancipation: historical problems with CLR James's interpretation of V.I. Lenin
![CLR James](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/CLR-James.jpg?itok=cMGJ0OZk)
Matthew Quest, writing for Insurgent Notes, details CLR James' treatment of Lenin across decades of James' work. While CLR James broke with with Trotskyism and Trotsky as well as the Leninist party form, he never properly broke with Lenin or his works. From Insurgent Notes #7.
CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.
CLR James believed one of his major intellectual legacies was the clarification of the wisdom of V.I. Lenin. However, James's readings fail in making Lenin's role in history and politics transparent. James's Leninism attempts to reconcile the validity of workers self-management and the aspirations of a political party to seize state power. This is in conflict with James's own genuine and original political legacy: clarifying the direct democratic gathering forces which will create the new society.1
James's Lenin: Never Deceitful or Dictatorial?
James's Lenin appears to be against stifling the revolutionary self-organization of ordinary people and against a bureaucratic mentality. Lenin, insists James, was never deceitful nor dictatorial. James was never Lenin's public or historical critic. For James, Lenin was an enemy of and his policies do not anticipate Stalinism. Lenin always placed workers' self-activity or the popular will, which James reminded Lenin always observed very closely, above his party. James admired Lenin's ability to discard outmoded concepts and break through rhetoric to get at problems of maintaining what James believed was a revolutionary regime in state power.2 These are propositions associated with an uncritical reception of James's Leninism.
We will dispute how much clarity James brings to understanding Lenin and the terms for Lenin's close observation of labor's self-emancipation. For our purposes, we might divide how James viewed Lenin into four broad frameworks: Lenin's anti-imperialism and vision of self-determination for colonies, Lenin's purported “shift” from the centrality of the vanguard party to embracing the Soviets, Lenin's stance during the “trade union debate,” and Lenin's last prescriptions for a peripheral society under state capitalism as opposed to socialism. We must be alert to how James's Lenin first saw Russia politically as a relatively advanced capitalist country suited for modern politics, and only later sees Russia as emblematic of an underdeveloped peripheral peasant country. While James did not believe in the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which has a retreating internationalism, James and Lenin often view the prospects of direct democracy and popular self-management as they relate to the liberation of one nation at a time. James's meditations on Lenin's last writings on peasants, cooperatives and literacy campaigns were not the basis of rigorous criticism of postcolonial states in the Third World that they first appeared. Finally, we will uncover some silences in James's public career and contours of what he knew about the Russian leader.
“Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War”
First, James admired Lenin's position during World War I as a member of the Zimmerwald Left.3 While leading this coalition of revolutionary socialist thinkers, Lenin denounced the emergence of conservative social democratic thinkers, who liquidated their “anti-war” stance when their own nation states declared war. Many of Lenin's adversaries offered support to their own ruling classes, even if under the premise of parliamentary or electoral criticism as a loyal opposition. Lenin's viewpoint was captured best with his slogan, “Turn imperialist war into civil war.”4 To the extent James was inspired by this aspect of Lenin's anti-colonialism and analysis of empire it is a consistent radical influence for him.
Lenin, as an insurgent activist, was for replacing bourgeois patriotism and national unity, even in times of war, with political efforts toward the defeat of classes above society in one's own nation. He insisted on a revolutionary socialist perspective, which is not mere aesthetic meditation and does not assume historical defeat. Lenin's “anti-war” policy was to support social revolution against empire, not merely abroad, but within his own nation-state. James's Lenin had anti-imperialist perspectives that importantly are not merely diagnostic analysis of dependency of peripheral nations in the capitalist world system as they have been invented subsequently by many scholars. Lenin, James insisted, did not make a fetish of the unequal exchange of commodities under mercantilism, or in world trade between imperial and peripheral nations, or see one imperialist or bloc of nation-states as more democratic than the other. While Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism had some of these themes and could be read as anticipating others, the anti-colonial Lenin did not agitate on the basis that revolution was the more efficient management of capitalism. He neither, while it was certainly an aspect of colonial oppression, centered that imperialists did not allow middle classes from certain countries equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy.
In peripheral nation-states in the world system, under certain conditions, the nationalist middle classes were imagined by Lenin and James as tactical allies, if not to be trusted fully in anti-colonial revolt against military, economic, and cultural domination by a foreign power. James's Lenin wields an outlook of “critical support” of nationalist middle-class politicians, rarely in Russia, but, before the defeat of imperial relations, for the rest of the world. This alliance can partially foster democratic struggles from below among toilers—if necessary, radicals can carry out this tactic at the middle-classes' expense. James's Lenin does not mean for revolutionary socialists to subordinate themselves politically to the nationalist middle classes.5
A Libertarian Lenin?: James Invents A Lenin that Rejected Vanguards
Second, James invented a Lenin who repudiated his earlier vanguardism, by leaving behind What Is To Be Done? (1903) and writing State and Revolution (1917). James imagined Lenin as someone who adjusted his perspectives and strategies to the self-activity of ordinary people whom he observed very closely. Thus, James's Lenin, before attaining state power, is constructed, as shifting his approach from emphasizing the building of a vanguard party toward “All Power to the Soviets.” But Lenin's flexibility in his observations of working class self-activity could be misunderstood.
James came to view Lenin's What Is To Be Done? (1903), a call for the building of a party of a professional cadre who will tutor the working masses toward socialism, as obsolete in nations distinguished by modern industrial workers. James feels his viewpoint is confirmed because he views Lenin as breaking with this conception, as evidenced by not merely Lenin's State and Revolution but also the April Theses, The Dual Power, and Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?.6
In these essays, James's Lenin appeared to be a defender of proletarian democracy which he sometimes called “primitive democracy.” Lenin advocated a government of workers councils, where “every cook can govern” or be an administrator in every department of society “ in rotation” so long as they are “literate.” James's Lenin was an advocate of “instant recall” of unaccountable delegates to constituent or representative assemblies by working people. Inspired by Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin seemed to advocate the abolition of the state, specifically the professional army and police, and promoted their replacement by popular militias or the armed people. Yet, even in these writings, Lenin desired a government which “cannot properly be called a state” which he insists is “not a utopian vision” and is in fact a Jacobin style regime. A close reading of Lenin, even in his writings with a libertarian socialist tone, reveal a desire to “train” workers to be administrators, not to allow them to place forward programs and perspectives of their own.
Still James's Lenin argued that the idea that it is necessary to direct the state by officials from above is basically false and undemocratic. The introduction of an appointed officialdom should not be tolerated. Rather, government must be based only on those popular councils, committees, and assemblies created by the local people themselves.7 Lenin did not want Russia organized around parliamentary democracy. Rather, a republic with Soviets “from top to bottom.”8 This was a bit confusing because a republic is explicitly a government of minority rule led by philosophers who believe the masses do not have the wisdom to directly govern. Lenin, after the Soviets appeared and before seizing state power, argued labor did have the wisdom to directly govern and believed a revolutionary state cannot forbid demonstrations or any expression of mass power on the part of toilers, or any socialist group or radical party. However, Lenin's vision in state power is of Soviets, if still present, as an appendage.9
Lenin saw clearly that the best road to state power was a united front, not opposition to radical democratic forces he in fact disagreed with. Lenin as agitator does not craft a coalition which prioritizes progressive or reformist allies in state power but accentuated all ideas which sought to tear it down and showed a desire for its replacement by direct democracy. He desired to “stir up” adherents to direct democracy and workers' self-management, “float along the wave” set up by their direct actions, and be carried by its “crest” to state power through a dual power where the self-governing institutions created by everyday people themselves would stand side by side with the existing order's institutions and, by their example, condemn them to illegitimacy.10
Lenin saw direct democratic ideas as methods of agitation but not as principles to which he was bound permanently.11
A Rare Admission and Never In Public: James Knew Lenin Suppressed The Soviets
James, in his invention of his “libertarian Lenin,” affirmed every cook “an administrator” (though elsewhere he underlined “every cook can govern,” which though James did not say “ought or must,” perhaps has more radical implications). He saw Lenin as a great popularizer of soviet democracy. Yet he recognized that on one level Lenin usurped the power of the soviets with his party in theory and practice, even as James conceived of Lenin as coming to reject the vanguard party and thus often called into question this premise on his own authority. In 1947–1948, when James was working out a new conception of revolutionary political theory, a conception that was not primarily a critical assessment of Lenin in history, he knew that Lenin's initial vision after seizing state power did not make his state socialist. James, as he theorized, subtly rebuked Lenin for an imprecise phrase “workers' control of production.” For CLR James in 1947–1948, workers' self-management, in both politics and economics, must precede the seizure and smashing of state power and was the socialist society itself, “it cannot come after.”12 James embellished Lenin with a spirit of workers self-emancipation by saying what he meant was the “uncoiling” of labor's “creativity imbedded” in the sense of humans by alienating the technological processes of economic production itself. This pointed to a direct democratic intention that simply does not pan out.
Lenin, not merely Trotsky whom James critiqued for such a view, saw nationalization of property as a revolutionary weapon or “gain” of a workers' state. It was not meant to be an economic formula for general welfare. Rather, first it was used against owners of businesses who did not want to recognize the workers' councils, whose self-organization independent of the Bolsheviks strived to take over their workplaces in the Russian Revolution. It was subsequently used to liquidate the power of the workers councils who would not be loyal to the Bolshevik state.
Third, James rarely admitted, and never for public discussion, Lenin's suppression of popular councils of toilers with direct self-managing ambitions. At the same time, James occasionally and privately affirmed Lenin's role in “the trade union debate” of 1920,13
as pragmatic and insightful where Lenin makes a mockery of those who advocate an extreme democracy or a syndicalist vision of workers self-management.14
James explained in a private study group: “it seems the Bolsheviks suppressed workers councils because to have supported [them] would have blown everything sky high.”15
In 1967, James viewed Lenin as saying a central committee cannot compel workers who take over their workplaces to do anything without jeopardizing their hold on state power. James compliments Lenin for using proletarian courts to get workers to police themselves for not working efficiently under the Bolshevik State, under which there were wage freezes, suppression of radical literature and strike action was criminalized.16
Practical People Know Self-Governing Workers Are Fairytales
The Lenin of 1918–1922 was no longer the Lenin of 1917. He no longer spoke of direct democracy or workers' self-management of the economy by rotation of the literate worker. Lenin no longer has any use for the syndicalist vision he himself had placed forward.17 Lenin began to argue “does every worker know how to rule the country? Practical people know that these are fairy tales.” While admitting people of working class backgrounds to administrative departments, Lenin saw a severe shortage of people from the trade unions qualified to be managers. By this emphasis, he meant managers of a capitalist economy. Feeling harassed by the persistent discussion of trade union management of the national economy, Lenin now said it was “syndicalist twaddle” and an “absurdity.” This is Lenin's reaction to the clause in his party platform that he wrote himself.18 Scholars of James's life and work have yet to record either debate, confusion, or outrage by those sympathetic with James's full archive for perhaps suggesting that direct democracy or workers self-management were not possible at certain historical moments or in certain sectors of the world.
James's Lenin argued to follow through on allowing the trade unions to manage the national economy would negate the party by an overwhelming majority of people who do not share the party's politics. Lenin now believes the trade unions should function as part of “an inspection” of the state but not manage the economy. Lenin argues if the trade unions alone nominated the people to both manage the economy and govern, it may sound very democratic, but this would destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat by which he meant the Bolshevik hold on state power.19
James's Lenin believed the trade unions should be non-political, even as he wished them to defend workers interests against excessive bureaucracy. Still they must be guided by discipline and unity under the state. Factories must be run by trained businessmen. Trade unions (like workers) should never interfere in the administration of the enterprise and to do so was recognized as injurious and outlawed.20
Both Lenin and Stalin's Russia Maintained Capitalist Laws of Value Production
Lenin in 1921 reintroduces the wage scale and collective bargaining. Trade unions were charged with regulating wages. Strikes were legally forbidden. These policies cannot be attributed to Stalin alone as James seemed to do at times. These policies reveal that James's analysis of how the law of value functioned under Stalinism elides the distinction that this is how Lenin desired to manage Russia as well.21 Lenin insisted “disputes between the Soviet Administrators” and the workers must not be seen from a “class” point of view but in accordance with the general interests of the nation. Remarkably, Lenin's policies on labor-management relations mirror or are worse than those of the welfare state and trade union bureaucracy that CLR James and Martin Glaberman argued against during the Age of the CIO.
When James's Lenin shifted from advocating War Communism to the New Economic Policy for Russia, he was perceived as sensitive to workers' and peasants' concerns, and appeared self-critical of his own mistaken perspectives on government policies above society. Yet James asserted Lenin was a consistent advocate of state capitalism both early and later in his career. James's later Lenin repeatedly underscored “there can be no socialism in Russia.” This is the context of James's veneration of Lenin's last writings which advocate literacy campaigns, peasant co-operatives, and a workers and peasant inspection of the state. James's Lenin is saying in fact every cook cannot govern where he now assessed Russia as a fatally limited underdeveloped nation, even as James viewed Lenin as having a renewed sensitivity toward the peasantry. He never discussed in public how Lenin actually treated the peasantry other than to say Lenin wrote of and was sympathetic to the tyranny of landlord-sharecropper relations.22
Fantastic: Lenin and the Problem with Workers Associations for the Third World
James projected this invention of Lenin as a model for democratizing Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana in the essay “Lenin and the Problem.” It has been overlooked how much Nkrumah's later years in state power resemble CLR James's Leninist prescriptions. This was despite James's rupturing with him. Further, James saw Julius Nyerere's vision of Ujamaa Socialism for Tanzania favorably, for what he perceived as Nyerere's similar approach to Lenin.23
] James's account, in just that context, has some severe blemishes. James's “Lenin and the Problem” affirmed Lenin's discarding of direct democracy, insisting it is “fantastic” (by which Lenin and now James meant absurd) to conceive of building socialism “by means of all types of workers' associations,” rather than finding more “simple,” “intelligible” and “easy ways” for the peasantry to participate under state power. James never explained persuasively why indirect “self-reliance” was proper, instead of self-directed liberating activity for toilers of peripheral nations, other than to fall back on their material and cultural underdevelopment. Yet James's Lenin maintained that those who cannot directly govern are in fact “the real masses of the population.”24
James conceived that it was possible for Lenin to fight bureaucracy from a position of state power where workers and peasants, importantly selected for their political loyalty to the Bolsheviks, will function as a type of ombudsman with no direct policymaking power. Rather, this inspection will check the one-party state's vanity and corruption by elevating its power to below the party's central committee. The peasant cooperatives are imagined as a transitional model under the New Economic Policy, a mixed economic plan, where people viewed as illiterate, by Lenin, were to be given “incentives” (small farmers will be allowed to produce under capitalist relations) so long as they show qualitatively their growing embrace of “socialism” as monitored by the Bolshevik state. The trade unions, not politically independent of this regime, will be consulted on economic production alone. Workers will not have any power directly over governance. To allow them to act independently to defend themselves in their unions would be to allow them to challenge the state and act in a supposed privileged fashion toward the peasantry. By this logic independent labor was suppressed in both Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and Julius Nyerere's Tanzania.25
How Early Did James Know That Lenin Betrayed All His Professed Principles?
How did toilers miraculously become so dumb in Lenin's Russia where a social revolution against the Czar through mass popular activity had just been made? This is also important comparatively for understanding how James evaluated anti-colonial revolutions at the post-colonial moment. We can begin to understand James's silences about Lenin's politics by centering the critique of Lenin in Boris Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, that James translated from French very early in his political career.
Boris Souvarine explained how Lenin abandoned, one by one, all of his October Theses: Soviet democracy; peasant control of land; abolition of professional police, army, and bureaucracy; equality of wages; the right of self-determination of oppressed nationalities. Souvarine argued that Lenin publicly admitted many economic planning mistakes. However, he never admitted the abandonment of soviet or direct democracy was a mistake or dictatorial measures against his opponents whether workers or peasants, revolutionaries or socialists were mistaken. All rival radical ideas and parties were outlawed (Left Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists, independent trade unionists, Tolstoyans). While a legal opposition was eventually allowed led by Martov of the Mensheviks, exclusive power was held by Lenin's Bolsheviks. Lenin believed neither in liberty, equality, nor workers' democracy if he found them contrary to “the theory of labor” or “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” by which he meant the one-party state. Congresses of Soviets developed into meetings of paid officials compelled to take instructions from above, yet it was said by Lenin to be the result of apathy and lack of culture.26 It is remarkable that CLR James translated a book published in 1939 that underscored crucial political and historical matters that he was muted about for the rest of his career.
James's Contours On the Soviets: Were the Soviets Self-Managing Workers Councils or Mere Evidence of Workers Self-Activity?
Perhaps Oskar Anweiler's The Soviets is the best introductory survey of how the Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers councils functioned from 1905–1921. Were Soviets suited for government administration or were they a permanent riot? Were they a mere barometer of the masses' changing moods or were they forms of freedom with a clear program of popular self-management? Anweiler suggested while they could be seen as all these things, we must understand that the Soviets were battlegrounds of various political tendencies. They were a market place of revolutionary ideas, a meeting pot of intellectuals and toilers, and they often in their factory council form began to govern and carry out politics at the point of production. The Soviets were as powerful and directly democratic as the politics which were advocated and administered by them. But they were also undermined in various ways by Lenin's Bolshevik state including the maintenance of multiple layers of indirect workers' representation to compete with and undermine them.27 Thus, we need to be aware of the Lenin who oriented to the Soviets and critically inquire why in order to understand the contours of James's interpretation. They were perceived as tools of insurrection to secure state power but also means of containing workers' autonomy as Lenin's tactics shifted.
James tended to place Lenin and the Soviets in conversation in a peculiar fashion. James's Lenin believed if the Bolsheviks want to carry any program out at all they have to go toward or enter the Soviets. On the one hand, they were organs of popular self-management that no elites or vanguards invented or taught to workers—they appeared to have self-sufficiency as self-governing institutions. Soviets, an enhancement of the political general strike including armed extension of struggle, “tell us things which no experts on the powerlessness of permanently alienated populations dare even to think.” James emphasized they do not “wait on any [political] party.” From another angle, Soviets are the masses' self-activity which should be engaged by revolutionists who did not create them or previously thought them unimportant—this can reduce their stature to inconsistent protest activity. James's Lenin could proclaim that the self-organization of the working class carried out a higher type of social organization but this did not emerge from moral wishes but from the crisis of material relations which his party had to tactically adapt. Yet James knows Lenin said some “savage” things about the Soviets.28
James, in a January 2, 1951, letter to William Gorman, acknowledged Gorman uttered a great truth in their private correspondence when he concluded the revolution and counter-revolution were tied together in the Bolshevik leadership in Russia from 1918 to 1925. This was substantially Lenin's regime's responsibility, not Stalin's, and it would appear Gorman's sympathy for the Bolsheviks is overstated. Nevertheless, James continued to believe Lenin embodied the highest stage radical political thought had reached and it was the task of contemporary revolutionaries to clarify and extend the historical lessons of that tragedy.29
Yet, for James, the tragedy was not Lenin's way of seeing but that the toilers, both proletariat and peasantry, could not do what was required. Apparently their creativity and self-governing potential had its limits and they could not directly re-organize society because Russia was not modern enough and rejected working on other than capitalist terms.30
Anarchism and Syndicalism: Bourgeois Movements to Be Vanquished?
Lenin saw no self-emancipating workers because those who are inspired by a different anti-capitalist or more libertarian socialist perspective he suppresses. Where Mensheviks, SRs, or Left SRs gained a majority in the Soviets, he would either disband them or expel the offending forces and deliver the Soviets to Communist Party members or functionaries who then steered the Soviets to conformity with government policy. This amounted to a coup by the Bolsheviks against the system of sovereign popular committees their party had advocated.31 Lenin, months later after suggesting every cook could govern and advocating abolition of the professional coercive apparatus of the state, proclaimed anarchism and syndicalism are “bourgeois” movements to be “vanquished.” From April 11–18, 1918, Lenin's Bolshevik State broke the anarchist movement by a military “pogrom.” He closed its newspapers, smashed its offices, arrested and assassinated its prominent members. Over forty anarchists were killed or wounded. 500 were taken prisoner.32
In 1918, Lenin said the party of the Left Social-Revolutionists was the only party which expresses the will of the peasants. He acknowledged this so long as they remained in a loyal opposition to his policies. This changed with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk where the Left SRs attempted to assassinate the German ambassador in revolt against Lenin's retreat on self-determination for oppressed nationalities. Lenin's state now said the Left SRs were accomplices of the White Guards, landlords and capitalists and attempted to suppress them. The Left-SRs responded by going underground, as they did through much of their existence against the Czar, and conducted armed struggle against the Bolshevik state.33 Notably the SRs who did not go underground retreated to the Volga, a stronghold of theirs for years. They advocated the restoration of the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviks had abolished, as “a soviet” of a united and independent Russia, projecting a type of provisional government against the Bolsheviks. Their political program rejected workplace committees and instead advocated municipal assemblies, the restoration of private property and suspension of socialist experiments declaring it was impossible to abolish capitalist forms of industry at the present time—a stance Lenin would soon embrace.
The anarchist Nestor Makhno was a major leader of the national liberation movement in the Ukraine. A few days before surrendering the Ukraine to Germany, where the Bolsheviks made a treaty with the imperialists, Lenin and Trotsky had the leadership cadre of Makhno's army shot. They also sabotaged Makhno's army's supply line, just as Stalin's Russia did the Aragon Front in the Spanish Civil War.34
Lenin on Soviet Power: A Nature of Jellyfish?
On April 23, 1918, Lenin addressed the Moscow Soviet, and said “the Soviet Power” had a nature of “jellyfish not of iron” and that, in many instances, was not efficient or determined against the counter-revolution. Lenin saw the workers and peasants and every radical idea or party he didn't control in the Soviets, which of course are popular councils which desired a more direct democracy, as “disorganized and petty-bourgeois forces.” Lenin began a wave of terror against the independent power of the workers' councils. Two weeks after, Lenin argued for the most part the Civil War with pro-imperialist counter-revolutionists had come to an end. Thus one cannot confuse his wave of terror against forces to his Left with them having been collaborators in the Civil War with pro-imperialist forces.35
By June of 1918, the withdrawal of political support by the majority of the social groups that had supported the Bolsheviks in October—workers, soldiers, and peasants—was plunging the regime into crisis. The problems, including rising unemployment, inflation, famine, popular unrest (both peaceful and insurgent); and the possibility that the opposition parties might replace the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition in winning majorities in the Soviets compelled Lenin to wonder whether his government would survive until the next day.36 On June 28th, the Council of People's Commisars passed a nationalization decree. Implemented gradually until completion at the beginning of the next year, under the premise of rooting out disorganization of production and supply, the Bolshevik state outlawed the remaining Soviets they did not control in mining, metals, textiles, steam driven mills, utilities, railways, and other sectors.37
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan, a former anarchist turned SR, tried to assassinate Lenin, firing several bullets into him at point blank range outside a Moscow factory. His health never recovered. An official “Red Terror” was proclaimed in response where all legal limits on the Cheka, the state secret police, were removed and roundups of opponents followed, with unknown thousands being executed or placed in concentration camps for real and suspected offenses. Victor Serge, a well known “socialist humanist” and ex-Communist, was convinced that the formation of the Cheka chapters in different parts of Russia and the inquisition they carried out, instead of popular tribunals, was “the gravest error” of 1918.38
On Sept 20th of 1918, Lenin launched a campaign against workers and entire factories who viewed the Bolshevik State as they did the capitalist employer and thus desired to give their bosses as little work as possible.39 Jonathan Aves has called this the volyna (go slow) movement.40 James analyzed such a stance in the United States as labor striving to directly govern but made no critique of Lenin for campaigning against workers local grievances and strategy of work to rule.
By 1919 there were major strikes in Petrograd and Moscow. Workers demanded that the peasants be allowed to sell grain on the free market, the removal of military coercion blocking food being brought to the cities, and restoration of civil liberties to all anti-capitalist forces. Somehow, James commended Lenin for observing workers' self-activity closely and supposedly correcting mistakes but never highlighted toilers' actual thoughts and actions which take the revolutionary lead in Russia after Lenin achieved state power. Radical socialist and direct democratic workers and soldiers were being accused by Lenin of being accomplices of imperialism. James was not even sympathetic to the Workers Opposition, led by Alexandra Kollontai and A.G. Shliapnikov, which was a disciplined minority faction within the Bolsheviks that called for allowance of more direct democracy and workers control. Instead, James affirms Lenin for offering financial bonuses to workers to build socialism on capitalist terms.41
“Enemies of the People”: Lenin's Attack on Self-Governing Farmers
Often lost in “kulak” discourse, Lenin attacked the peasantry for not producing grain and food under conditions of scarcity of commodities, inflation, and coercion to those who wished to sell their produce on the market. The system of producing grain had broken down partially because of the loss of the Ukraine and partially because trade was abolished between town and country. Farmers were called “enemies of the people” by Lenin and attacked by “committees of poor peasants” that included state organized hoodlums from the cities. Lenin said: “that we brought civil war to the village is something that we hold up as a merit.” James felt Lenin was aware and sensitive to the tyranny of landlords against sharecroppers in Russia's rural outposts. However, whole villages that did not produce enough grain were subject to mass whippings (a method employed previously by the Czars but also over one hundred years before by Toussaint L'Ouverture's post-colonial state in the Haitian Revolution when ex-slaves rebelled against their own economic arrangements). In the summer of 1920, prominent toilers in the co-operative movement became the focus of the most intense persecution. They were arrested, thrown into prisons on trumped up charges of economic sabotage and collaboration with capitalism.42 All of these are important historical preludes to understanding Lenin's last writings on peasants and cooperatives but also how he to evaluate his own state capitalist initiatives.
Lenin hoped to terrorize the peasants into full state regimentation before shifting to the more moderate New Economic Policy (NEP). NEP, which gave “incentives” but in fact merely allowed peasants finally to produce under market relations, divided peasant resistance movements, like A.S. Antonov's Green Movement in the Tambov region, and in effect saved Lenin's regime from itself.43 James shared with Lenin uncritical contempt for most Mensheviks, in spite of the fact that the latter initially advised the more moderate path of state capitalism that Lenin finally chose.44 James also felt, as did Lenin, that, within the peasantry, not just their landlords, existed an inherent and dangerous capitalist impulse. James's Lenin was critical of the romantic impulse of past Russian radicals who saw an inherent collectivist impulse in rural life. We must be aware that human nature is prone to both competitiveness and possessive individualism but also mutual aid and a self-directed creativity in the quality of their autonomously managed work. That these dueling spirits have not been resolved for all time (and likely will never be) need not be an obstacle to a self-managing cooperative society.
Something “Tragic” To Witness But “Foolish” To Defend: James Sides with the Bolshevik State Against the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921
For CLR James, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 represented a breakthrough toward a type of third revolution against both the one party state and the welfare state. But James, in his treatment of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, the sailors who supported revolution against V.I. Lenin's Bolshevik regime after a long trail of abuses of Russian workers—especially broad layers of labor in Petrograd and those identified with anarchist and libertarian socialist activism — does not support the self-mobilization of working people as a historian or political theorist. The Kronstadt rebellion, like the events in Hungary thirty five years later, lasted for a very short time, and was a flash of light which illuminated the conflicting tendencies within actual existing socialism. James often elevates the political statements of statesmen, from V.I. Lenin to Julius Nyerere, all out of proportion to their real worth given their actual political practice. Often he presents these as remarkable—the finest—political statements overtaking and overturning anything Rousseau, Aristotle, Plato, or Locke could ever comprehend. James's readers and audiences tend to fall for this hyperbole even as they also accept that mass movements for liberation often seize historical moments but very often cannot find adequate leadership to plan and theorize and create opportunities. While taking in strains of racial and anti-colonial vindication it is often missed that all of these figures are advocates of various forms of a republic—a regime led by a minority professional ruling elite—not a popular government where working people place forward perspectives of their own and carry them out.
James often inquired about the spontaneous and instinctive qualities of working people and repeatedly extended the implications of their elemental drive toward self-government. But never has James placed before his audiences direct democratic political statements by self-emancipating workers. Kronstadt was his opportunity. The Sailors had a political statement that was so vivid it put fear in the heart of Lenin's regime—it actually advocated “a Third Revolution.” Let us examine some of their demands. We must remember, like the Hungarian workers of 1956, they were not making mere calls for reform. For, as part of the military, they were the law in practice and on their own authority threatened to be the armed backing of the dual power of independent labor retaking of the factory councils in Russia.
The Kronstadt Sailors called for immediate new elections to the Soviets (the “popular” councils) which they boldly stated under a police state no longer expressed the wishes of workers and peasants. While they were not the first to proclaim it, they were in the best position for self-defense while saying it. The sailors called for all sectors of the military to associate with this and other resolutions. They called for the secret ballot and insisted the vote should be after a period of free political propaganda of all Left parties, all of whom, besides the Bolsheviks, were suppressed. Freedom of the press and speech was explicitly called for anarchists—which most accounts of the Russian Revolution favoring the Bolsheviks, whether Trotsky or Stalin, have been written out of these historical events.
A Congress of “non-party workers and soldiers” was called for at Kronstadt consistent with a general call for freedom of assembly. The Sailors called for a stop to the Bolshevik monopoly of the press and finances to spread political ideas. They rejected the idea that all military guard detachments could receive political education from only one source and called for a proliferation of independent cultural associations and a taking into account of what rank and file workers were actually thinking. A Commission was called for to look into those detained in “concentration camps” as distinct from a demand that all political prisoners from Left Parties were to be released immediately.
The Sailors exposed the premise of the Russian Revolution, under Lenin's regime, as a consolidation of the revolt against value production itself sponsored by the state—as James's State Capitalism & World Revolution viewed it—and called for an equality of wages, save for those workers who toiled in unsanitary or dangerous conditions. Ida Mett, a scholar of Kronstadt, reminded us that this also placed out in the open the lie by Trotsky that the Sailors wanted privileges while the masses went hungry—a stock false premise that would be used against independent labor by Third World regimes who admired the Bolshevik state time and again. The Sailors underlined that the peasants' self-government over their own land was to be restored, with sovereignty over their own soil and cattle, as well as small handicraft artisans, provided they didn't employ wage labor. The Sailors rejected the idea that the state could fight bureaucracy and the lie that they wished toilers to inspect the ethics of the state—mobile workers' control groups would be maintained autonomously to police the state.45
Oskar Anweiler reminds us that the Kronstadt Sailors did not criticize Lenin and blamed primarily Trotsky and Zinoviev for the bloody conflict. But they turned the concept “All Power to the People” against the Bolshevik State and rejected a counter-revolution of both left and right. Anweiler, while a critic of the Bolsheviks, sees both an irrational faith and a vitality in the council concept as embodied in the Sailors' declaration.46 Paul Avrich, perhaps the most definitive scholar of the Kronstadt Sailors, argued that Lenin, in contrast to the repeated claims by CLR James of Lenin's affinity for workers' self-activity, repeatedly distrusted the spontaneous actions of independent labor. Lenin feared that “organs of local democracy” could end up advocating and sustaining any type of politics. While that was true, Avrich explains fairly the Sailors did not defend a historical retreat to more conservative politics as they were falsely accused by the state. In fact, the Sailors were not advocates of “equal rights and liberties for all” but only for the numerous political tendencies among the Left. Their sense of freedom was not for landlords, capitalists and the middle classes—only for workers and peasants. They were for direct democracy and had no use for representative government—something James embraced in the Hungarian workers but not for the Kronstadt Sailors.47
All James could see in Kronstadt was a tragic dilemma for a revolutionary statesman. He thought Lenin was bound to crush this rebellion. Then the Bolsheviks could admit some past mistakes, institute economic reforms which would let the state retreat into a more free capitalist market, and continue to suppress direct democratic expressions of labor. This became James's model for the conflict between Toussaint and Moise in the Haitian Revolution and his justification for the suppression of independent labor among the ex-slaves at the post-colonial, post-abolition moment. This degrading of the direct democratic potential is what is really behind James's Leninist prescriptions and advice for underdeveloped formerly colonized countries.48
James could be subtle and concerned with ethical dilemmas in his public career. Yet, particularly in his writing of World Revolution, 1917–1936 and The Black Jacobins, it may take several readings to understand better what is at stake. However, if one reads the marginalia in his personal copy of R.V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution, one of the first scholarly studies of the Russian Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century to highlight the conflict between the Bolshevik state and workers' self-management, it is clear that James was hostile to any notion that Lenin's state should not be defended against accusations of dictatorship—even when it suppressed self-managing workers.
Daniels explained that when Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to retreat from the extremes of War Communism, the economic plan which desired to abolish the market by military means, “the party leadership found doctrinaire criticism from the Ultra-Left intolerable.” James wrote in the margins of his book “fool!” expressing impulsively that Daniels, to his mind, did not understand the art of social revolution.49 But we can watch further as James reads Daniels.
Undoubtedly the Kronstadt revolt could have been forestalled by timely reforms, but such a course would have been too embarrassing and might well have been a serious blow to the authority of the government. Petrograd was in the throes of a wildcat strike wave, upon which Menshevik and SR undergrounders were allegedly trying to capitalize, and the Soviet authorities had all they could do to keep the situation in hand there. For the Communist leaders it was more natural at the time of crisis to tighten up. Given the state of popular discontent, an admission by the government that the Kronstadters had a case that could be discussed might have brought the Soviet regime crashing down everywhere. It was essential above all for the Communist Party to suppress the idea of Kronstadt as a movement which defended the principles of the October Revolution against the Communists—the idea of the 'third revolution.'50
James writes in the margins “quite thus always.” He seems to confirm what we find in his commentary on Kronstadt in his The Black Jacobins many years before—there is agreement with Daniels that the Kronstadt Sailors were “ultra left”—a pejorative term—and they would have had no basis for projecting their proposals if Lenin had pushed reforms through sooner. Within the Bolshevik Party, it was permissible for Lenin and the leadership to acknowledge “mistakes” but these were mistakes of administration not of intention. One could not permit any attacks on the authority of the Bolshevik government—for it embodied the revolution, not the workers' actual thoughts and action after state power was seized. The Kronstadt rebels represented not a mutiny of Sailors alone. It embodied one of many popular committees of labor which were in motion everywhere against the regime—especially across the water in the wildcat strikes of Petrograd. So not only did the meaning of Kronstadt have to be suppressed by the Bolsheviks but in a certain respect it had to be denied by CLR James in his public political thought. James thus is annoyed with Daniels and writes “fool” again in the margins, where he discusses in public “from the standpoint of the party leadership, such explosive criticism had to be disarmed permanently.”51 James is satisfied with the strategic issues being documented but not the implied evaluation, for Daniels appeared to criticize the Bolsheviks too much for James though Daniels's historical perspective was clearly that he still wanted them to succeed in retaining state power.
Daniels believed the “Ultra-Left had held the ideal while the party leadership, through the progressive canonization of bureaucratic expedients into the law of the revolution had departed from the spirit of 1917.” Daniels is correct to point out that Alexandra Kollontai's faction among the party, known as the Workers' Opposition, whom James never identified with anyway, actually represented “a failure to deviate along with Lenin when he abandoned the anarcho-syndicalist aspects of the Bolshevik program.” CLR. in his marginalia, continues to believe Daniels's assessment is “fool[ish]” and asked “why?”52 It should be clear that James's valorization of the Soviets as the creative self-management of labor in 1905 and 1917 should not be mistaken as an “anarchist” thread of his political principles. It is not a principle he is willing to sustain when they confronted Lenin's state power or a state power he deems progressive for an underdeveloped country.
We see CLR's perspective on “socialism from below” was really a way of seeing the self-activity of labor as a measure of what statesmen must do to retain state power—a project he sees as a huge priority—over and above the self-organization and self-emancipation of labor at “the post-colonial moment” for Russia after the Czar. CLR terms the following assessment by Daniels as “wicked”:
The proletariat of itself was held to be incapable of rising above the level of mere trade union-consciousness. To dispute this was an unpardonable theoretical regression from Marxism, which no genuine proletarian could commit. Granting his premises, Lenin had an airtight case. Any manifestation of independent revolutionary thought among the workers which would seem to refute Lenin's characterization of them naturally had to challenge the authority of the party which purported to do the proletariat's thinking for it
There was nothing evil or malicious about Daniels' interpretation. But his view does conflict with James's claim that Lenin left behind the perspectives of What Is To Be Done? Lenin did not see vanguard ideas as obsolete. James would insist that Lenin never saw his party or state as politically thinking for, or providing government for, the workers. But James never even used one of his more modest formulations at Lenin's expense. He never assessed Lenin as being “pushed from behind” by the Russian workers once he had achieved state power. Their self-directed political activities suggested corrections in state policy but their actions, and their actual political thought, never clearly expressed the programmatic desire for popular self-management in James's mind's eye. He wished to maintain the illusion that toilers could not find adequate leadership side by side with their historical tendency to rebel in ways of their own invention. Yet this for James never implied that Lenin's statecraft was illegitimate. Thus CLR insisted Daniels was “all wrong” when Daniels asserted the pattern of 1921 relied on the old organizational tradition of Bolshevism to “conceal, rationalize, and explain away the failure of the regime to live up to its original social ideals.”54 James falsely saw Lenin's last writings as a form of decentralization within the context of accepting Lenin's admission that socialism in Russia was impossible. Lenin, in fact, was defending and legitimating his own plan for industrialization by invitation to multi-national capitalists, while he threatened all socialist thinkers to his left, many for workers' self-management, with repression.
James believed, at his finest, that the greatest obstacle humanity placed in its own path was the notion that social revolution through self-emancipation was not possible. But Maurice Brinton in his introduction to Ida Mett's The Kronstadt Uprising sets up a supposition relevant to a critical study of James:
When Stalinists or Trotskyists speak of Kronstadt as “an essential action against the class enemy,” when more “sophisticated” revolutionaries refer to it as “a tragic necessity,” one is entitled to pause for a moment. One is entitled to ask how seriously they accept Marx's dictum that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.” Do they take this seriously or do they pay mere lip service to the words? Do they identify socialism with the autonomy (organizational and ideological) of the working class? Or do they see themselves, with their wisdom as to the “historical interests” of others, and with their judgments as to what should be “permitted,” as the leadership around which the future elite will crystallize and develop? One is entitled not only to ask…but also to suggest the answer!
One can't help but see James as “the sophisticated revolutionary” who refers to Kronstadt as “a tragic necessity” after a close reading of his World Revolution and The Black Jacobins. For James, the quarrel over the events of Kronstadt in 1921 represented more than a historical instance of direct democracy or workers' self-management challenging state power. It was an event which could be used, and was by defenders of the capitalist world system, to call into question not merely Stalinism, but “the whole Marxist-Leninist heritage.”55
James's Dictatorship of the Proletariat: A Nuanced or Vulgar Materialist Concept in James's Intellectual Legacies?
Why did James go so far in his development of direct democracy and workers self-management as the socialist future but often capitulated subtly to oppressive notions associated with Lenin? A better understanding of the concept of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” suggests a further avenue of inquiry. James appears to embrace this concept before and after he saw state capitalism as an obstacle to the self-emancipation of modern industrial workers as expressed in his writings during the Age of the CIO and on Hungary.
State capitalism evolved in his political thought to have a double value—especially where he saw it as progressive for former colonial and plantation societies. Where state capitalism was viewed as progressive by James it was merely an application of the theory of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” to the Third World. But this theory had little to do with labor's self-emancipation in any nation.
James explained that global capitalism inevitably developed into huge monopolies, and these gradually control the economic and financial life of the larger capitalist nations. There is an increasing tendency to separate the ownership of finance capital from industrial initiatives, or seek economic production in the lowest wage sectors in the world economy by the capitalists. It follows for James's Leninist political economy that the supremacy of finance capital suggests perhaps a tendency to hesitate to re-invest or lack of desire to invest surplus capital to raise the standard of living of the masses, for this would mean a decrease in profits. It should be clear that this is not an anti-capitalist discourse but a nationalist discourse about capitalist development for an underdeveloped nation (wherever it may be found).56
James, again arguing about Lenin's Soviet Union, explained that, in 1937, capitalism and socialism were not economic entities that were already fixed. A decaying capitalism could overthrow an aspiring socialist state, or an aspiring socialist state might organize working people to strike blows against capitalism.57 These were not class struggles, as in self-directed initiatives of workers, but economic clashes among nation-states and aspiring rulers within the world economic structure.
When Lenin desired for a more advanced capitalist country to come to the aid of Russia (or a socialist revolution in another country) or Russia would surely fail—he meant the same thing. Internationalist workers would not so much aid Russia as he was hoping for another nation-state like his own. So when James's Lenin argued it was impossible to pass from capitalism to socialism without breaking “national frameworks” he did not mean a rupture with nationalism or the nation-state but the creation of blocs among nation-states which might share capital but operated on the terms of capital and subordinate wage labor with a progressive varnish. This was essentially what Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, and CLR James mean about Caribbean and African federation.58
James's concern to describe the importance of “an advanced society” was remarkably, in terms of Leninist political economy, similar to his prescriptions for a colonial or peripheral nation. A modern industrial nation could have both urban and agricultural workers, but have a greater number of urban ones which live close to and intertwined with the middle classes. Having a majority of industrialized workers, or a peripheral nation's push to get to that quota, is not a prelude to a direct democracy in James's Leninist formulations (whether nationalist or internationalist). Instead they anticipate the proletariat's representatives remolding society by smashing the bourgeois state and creating a new type of bourgeois state of their own often called progressive or socialist. James's assertion that Lenin “saw the form of the new state” in the Soviets, while consistent with a strict textual reading of Lenin's State and Revolution and other writings, is either a rupture with James's and Lenin's actual political economy or telling a neglected truth. The Soviets were merely a battering ram to secure a nationalist-capitalist state which would reinvest capital, where possible and if present, in subordinate workers' development.
James's explanation of “the real task of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as expressed in World Revolution, and in historical defense of Lenin's Bolshevik state, “was to increase production and create such abundance” that the middle classes “would be drawn on the basis of their own experience,” which we assume generally is not concerned with social revolution, “to support the proletariat.” “A series of economic transformations extending over many years” would ultimately reveal that the new order was obviously better than private ownership of the means of production. But James inadvertently reveals that no new order would be instituted for it was rooted in the assumption that “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased productivity of labor.” A welfare state, nationalized property, or a one-party state with monopoly of foreign trade (all in shifting gradations) would make the increased development of state capitalism possible. When James then says “capitalism retards this development” he meant merely the unfettered global free market kind.59
James reminded us in World Revolution, and for our concern with national liberation struggles we might pay close attention, that both Marx and Lenin agreed that the seizure of state power and the property of the rich was not “socialism.” But if what James argued in that text is true, that the quality of a political system “cannot rise higher than the technical level of [economic] production,” then Marx teaches that socialism was impossible in both imperial and peripheral nations.
Yet James complicated matters when he says properly what about “the part the workers” play in a social revolution? Workers under capitalism, whether in imperial or peripheral nations, in their self-organized leap over the constraints of the means of production throughout history, suggest the preoccupation with capitalist development of modes of production by socialists is a grave distortion. James underscored however that “ultimately, the standard of education, of fitness for the complicated duties of citizenship, rested on the level of production.” When James argued that Lenin, like no other statesman, believed in the creativity of the masses, he makes clear that besides Lenin's self-discarded chants about soviet power replacing state power, he only intended for labor to participate as subordinates in the higher productivity of capitalist development.60
James in World Revolution embraced at times a vulgar Marxist materialism which underscored that it was “inescapable” that labor's self-emancipation was tied to capitalist development. Not merely the contradictions of capitalist development which compel upheavals, he argued that unfettered free market capitalism was an obstacle to rational or progressive capitalist development.
James's later turn to an explicit direct democracy and workers self-management had to be birthed through the medium of a critique of not merely Stalinism but rationalism, progress, “production for production's sake,” and the insults of the welfare state and one-party state whose only conception of “socialism” was that “workers would work” and not directly govern. But direct democracy was in constant tension not just with James's Leninism but with his nationalism (both of which rejected imperialism but not capitalism upon a close reading).
James interprets the dictatorship of the proletariat as an economic dictatorship, not a personal dictatorship, under capitalism. To be clear, this is not synonymous with working people directly governing. The statesmen can be imagined as validly patriotic or nationalist and this can be its only “socialist” content in a hostile world. James argued it can only be evaluated in the context of a given time and circumstances—this only appears to be a nuanced stance. Those circumstances are the rate of the economic transition to socialism, the economic resources the country holds, and a country's relationship with other nation-states. Thus, the determining factor on the progressive nature of state capitalism is not the self-management of labor which would be its negation but the quality of socialist statesmanship who explained the “retreat,” and maintained some semblance of freedom of discussion under what is essentially a real dictatorship over workers.61 James's literary framework which often presented Lenin, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Kwame Nkrumah in terms of tragedy, papered over what was in fact a vulgar historical materialist framework that erased or justified the smashing of independent labor.
In Conclusion
James, like Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours, saw the heritage of Marx and Lenin as not merely synonymous with the art and science of world revolution, but with his own claim to be a great historical actor. He was wrong on both counts. “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was a concept developed by Marx and Lenin. There were many others placed forward by these two men, which were authoritarian capitalist concepts that, in the name of workers, betrayed a fear of their self-emancipation. James's greatest contribution to emancipation was as an enchanter of direct democracy and workers' self-management. James shares that legacy with many libertarian socialists, most of whom are commonly rejected by adherents of Marxism and Leninism, no matter how they imagine their own political identity. James was correct to reject the notion that past historical atrocities demonstrated that the desire for social revolution “was wrong from the start.” But preventing expressions of popular self-management from tarnishing the legacies of those, like Lenin, who (in aspiring to be progressive guardians above society in state power) smashed these forms of freedom, was an error so grave that it was fundamental.62
This error has been a great obstacle to clarifying the revolutionary content of James's political thought. Further, the error has obstructed a proper assessment of the presence, contours, function, and absence of direct democracy and workers' self-management in James's view of national liberation in colonized and peripheral nations. Yet we must always be alert that these contours, which often seem absurd or idiosyncratic from the perspective of a consistent advocacy of popular self-management can be explained more consistently through the pathways of James's Leninism.
James's view of Lenin as more sensitive to peasants than Stalin, and his sympathy for Lenin's advocacy of a workers' and peasant's inspection soon after the Bolshevik state's attacks on independent toilers in factories and fields reveal something crucial. James's insistence on underscoring the vanguard party and the one-party state were not central or special doctrine of Lenin's was a grave mistake. His repeated assertion that Lenin as a dictator is “a lie stuck in people's minds” by bourgeois media is false and complicated a reality of world politics he understands elsewhere. One does not make an assessment of social revolution based on what imperialists say about a regime alone. Rather, the criteria should be whether toilers directly govern in that society.63
Lenin, an ascetic never motivated by desiring a privileged life, nevertheless behaved very autocratically in state power. Most crucially for our study, James's Lenin, while he at times popularized libertarian socialist ideas, made clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that direct democracy and workers' self-management could be discarded. For James's Lenin state power was not in fact reconcilable with self-governing labor. Further James's Lenin, in state power, discredited and repressed the self-emancipation of workers and peasants, and the libertarian socialists who consistently defended them.
James's Leninism existed in tension with his politics of direct democracy and workers self-management for modern industrial nations—aspects of which appear in his historical narratives of peripheral nations as well. We are partially indebted to his more libertarian socialist writings as a basis for making this criticism. Nevertheless, James's Leninism and labor's self-emancipation are not intellectual legacies which can be reconciled uncritically, save for scholars and activists who wish to elevate the banner of labor's self-emancipation only to discipline and discard working people when they have their opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy.
Reproduced from http://insurgentnotes.com/2012/10/silences-on-the-suppression-of-workers-self-emancipation-historical-problems-with-clr-jamess-interpretation-of-v-i-lenin/#silences-on-the-suppression-of-workers-self-emancipation-historical-problems-with-clr-jamess-interpretation-of-v-i-lenin-n-24
- 1CLR James did not see these two intellectual legacies in conflict. See CLR James, with Paul Buhle, James Early, Noel Ignatin, and Ethelbert Miller, “Interview,” CLR James: His Life and Work, Paul Buhle ed., London: Allison & Busby (1986), p. 164.
- 2Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: CLR James and the Struggle for A New Society, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press (2008), pp. 54–60
- 3An excellent study of this aspect of Lenin's career is the following: R. Craig Nation, War On War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and The Origins of Communist Internationalism, Durham, NC: Duke UP (1989).
- 4See CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, (1937), Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1993), pp. 74–75; CLR James, “State and Counter-Revolution,” New International, vol. 6, no. 7, August 1940, pp. 137–140.
- 5See C.L. Rudder (CLR James), “Popular Fronts in Past Times,” Fight, vol. 1, no. 2, December 2, 1936, p. 16; C.L. Rudder (CLR James), “The Leninist Attitude To War,” Fight, vol. 1, no. 3, January 1937, p. 16. These issues of Fight have been bound with others as Staffan Lindhe, ed., Fight: Fascimile Edition of British Trotskyist Journals of the 1930s, Goteborg, Sweden: SL. Publications (1999).
- 6These texts can be found in Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, New York: W.W. Norton (1975).
- 7G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), p. 23.
- 8Ibid., p. 22.
- 9Ibid., p. 24.
- 10Ibid., p. 25.
- 11Ibid., p. 27.
- 12CLR James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, “On Marx's Essays from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts” (1947), in At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, London: Allison & Busby (1984), p. 67.
- 13The Trade Union debate within the Bolshevik Party included Trotsky, Martov, Bukharin, and Alexandra Kollontai's Workers Opposition. James mistakenly viewed this debate of 1920 as proof of the democratic character of the Bolshevik one-party state, and the freedom of discussion allowed. Despite this claim, what was conceived as a debate about the role of labor in workers control of production, was something else entirely when an important matter was considered. Almost all the trade unions had been co-opted by the state or were outlawed. They earlier were used to overtake some Soviets and suppress others. James's analysis may have benefited from his normative critique of trade union bureaucracy as militantly hostile to independent labor action during the Age of the CIO. We can fruitfully apply James's insights from elsewhere here.
- 14CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” part 1 (1967), in You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James, David Austin ed., Oakland: AK Press (2009), pp. 161–162.
- 15Ibid., p. 166.
- 16Ibid., p. 173.
- 17Manya Gordon, Workers Before and After Lenin, New York: E.P. Dutton (1941), p. 84.
- 18Ibid., p. 85.
- 19Ibid., pp. 86–87.
- 20Ibid., pp. 88–93.
- 21CLR James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, State Capitalism & World Revolution (1950), Chicago: Charles H. Kerr (1986), p. 47.
- 22See CLR James, “Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question” (1947) in CLR James on “The Negro Question,” Scott McLemee ed., Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi (1996), pp. 130–32.
- 23CLR James, A History of Pan African Revolt (1939, 1969), Chicago: Charles H Kerr (1995), pp. 148–150.
- 24CLR James, “Lenin and the Problem” (1964), in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, Westport, CT: Lawrence & Hill (1977), pp. 202–203.
- 25See forthcoming Matthew Quest, In the Shadow of State Power: CLR James, Direct Democracy and National Liberation Struggles, Atlanta: On Our Own Authority!
- 26Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, translated by CLR James, New York: Alliance (1939), pp. 255–257, 261
- 27Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, New York: Pantheon (1974), pp. 111–112
- 28CLR James, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Vanguard Party, Detroit: Facing Reality (1964), pp. 3–4; CLR James, Modern Politics, Detroit: Bewick (1973), pp. 46–47; CLR James, Marxism and the Intellectuals, Detroit: Facing Reality (1962), p. 24; CLR James, with George Rawick, Martin Glaberman, and William Gorman, The Gathering Forces, Unpublished Manuscript. George P. Rawick Papers. Western Manuscript Archives, University of Missouri at St. Louis (1967), p. 4.
- 29CLR James, Letter to William Gorman, January 2, 1951, Martin Glaberman Collection, Walter Reuther Labor Archives, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
- 30CLR James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, Westport, CT: Lawrence & Hill (1977), p. 211; CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, (1937), Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1993), pp. 125–126.
- 31Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, vol. 3, New York: Continuum (2004), pp. 267 and 271; Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP (1994), p. 16.
- 32G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 37–38; Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution, foreword by Andrew Zonneveld, Atlanta: On Our Own Authority! (2012), p. 96.
- 33G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), p. 39.
- 34G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 108–109; See also Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921, London: Freedom Press (1987); Voline, The Unknown Revolution, Montreal: Black Rose Books (1990), pp. 541–711.
- 35 G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 52–53.
- 36Vladimir Brovokin, The Mensheviks After October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP (1987), p. 199.
- 37Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution, pp. 106–107.
- 38Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, pp. 272–273; Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1901–1941, New York: Oxford UP (1963), pp. 80–81.
- 39G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, pp. 80–81.
- 40Jonathan Aves, Workers Against Lenin: Labour Protest and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, London: Tauris (1996). See especially chapter 4
- 41 CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” part 1 and 2 (1967), in You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James, pp. 179, 192–193.
- 42G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, pp. 132–133; Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, pp. 286.
- 43See Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press (1976).
- 44 G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, pp. 71.
- 45 See Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising, London: Solidarity (1967), pp. 37–41; Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921, New York: W.W. Norton, (1970), especially chapter 5.
- 46Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, pp. 250–251.
- 47Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921, pp. 161–162.
- 48CLR James, The Black Jacobins, (1938) New York: Vintage (1963), pp. 282–286; CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, p. 135.
- 49R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, London: Oxford UP (1970), p. 138. This, and all of the following citations, come from CLR James's personal copy found in the CLR James Collection in the West Indiana Collection of the Alma Jordan Library, University of West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.
- 50R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 144.
- 51R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 146.
- 52R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 147.
- 53R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 147.
- 54R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 147.
- 55CLR James, “Discussion II,” London (1964), vol. 2, Unpublished Oral History Transcript. Martin Glaberman Collection. Walter Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
- 56CLR James, World Revolution, pp. 118–119.
- 57 Ibid., p. 120
- 58James, in contrast to Nkrumah and Padmore, would often raise the idea of a constituent assembly, an aspect of direct democracy that he forced on middle class politicians, in the hope they would have to account for criticism of the form federation would take. But with statesmen in the lead such an assembly could be discarded like Lenin discarded the Soviets.
- 59Ibid, p. 122
- 60Ibid., p. 123.
- 61Ibid., p. 133–135
- 62CLR James, “Discussion II,” London (1964), vol. 3, Unpublished Oral History Transcript. Martin Glaberman Collection. Walter Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
- 63CLR James, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Vanguard Party, p. 3; CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” part 1 (1967), in You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James, pp. 174–175.
Attachments
Comments
Symposium: Truth and revolution
![](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/3465.jpg?itok=bC2kH_hz)
A symposium on Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. From Insurgent Notes #7.
In May of this year, AK Press published Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. Sojourner Truth Organization was most often known as and spoken of as STO.
Insurgent Notes invited members of STO that we were able to contact and individuals of organization that we knew had been influenced by one or more of the aspects of STO's theory or practice to respond to a series of questions:
For STO members:
1. What aspects of the STO history do you think that MS most accurately captured and which aspects, if any, do you think that he might have missed?
2. What do you think are the lessons of the history of STO for today's revolutionaries, including those of you who still consider yourselves as such?
3. What else, if anything, would you like to say about the organization or the book?
For those who have been influenced by the organization:
1. What aspects of the history, as presented by MS, were most surprising and why?
2. What do you think are the lessons of the history of STO for today's revolutionaries?
3. What would you have liked to learn more about?
Not surprisingly, our respondents didn't always answer the questions we asked. But what they wrote is well worth reading. We look forward to further discussions on the book and on the politics of the Sojourner Truth Organization.
We have arranged the submissions of STO members more or less in the order of their entry into the organization. The comments of non-members are not organized in any special fashion.
Originally posted: October 15, 2012 at Insurgent Notes
Comments
I always enjoy folks taking first hand. So this is of interest. Always good to see how people view their past, what they think they gained or lost and so forth. I'm not a fan of STO, but folks should prolly give these accounts a read.
Just got a copy. Started reading. Had to move from the theoretical stuff to the other stuff. Theory makes the eyes glaze. So I'll come back to it after I read the rest. I was surprised that the book is as long as it is. Seems at least well written.
Noel Ignatiev
One of the principal tasks of the historian is to periodize. Mike divides the history of STO into three periods, a workplace-organizing period, an anti-imperialist solidarity era, and a direct-action, tendency-building phase. While I might still label the periods differently, I think on the whole he gets it right, thereby providing a necessary tool for analysis. I shall direct my remarks to the first of these, and conclude by posing some questions.
STO's line on workplace organizing and its experience in implementing it were, and in my opinion remain, the most distinctive and valuable aspect of its history. It is that aspect, more than anything else, which justifies John Garvey's description of STO as “the single most remarkable political organization of its era.”
STO had about forty members in Chicago and northwest Indiana in the early 1970s. It included people in heavy and light industry, in hospitals, in unionized and non-unionized workplaces, and some unemployed. They were organized in three branches, largely geographically-based; one of the branches, as I recall, took on political work in the military, although not as its exclusive focus. Although many of the members had campus backgrounds, I don't recall any students. Among them the forty were situated well enough that they naturally heard about and were able to connect to virtually any workers' uprising that took place. Perhaps the biggest tribute to STO's work was the report, which we heard through the grapevine, that the CP was concerned about our growing influence.1
Briefly put, STO saw itself and sought to act as the organization of the anti-white- supremacist workers councils.2 Given the American context, “anti-white-supremacist” and “workers' councils” were necessarily linked.3 But the joining of the two created problems. The greatest sympathy for extra-unionism was among black workers, and the greatest clarity on the role of unions was among black revolutionaries.4 For reasons that have been widely discussed, most black revolutionaries at the time were committed to building all-black organizations. We in STO respected that, but whether we did or not, their commitment to that path cut down on our ability to gain members from among the pool of experienced black revolutionaries who shared our politics, and condemned us to being an organization mainly of “white” people. It was a paradox we would strive to live with, but it was never easy.5
My aim in writing these comments is not to tell war stories; Mike recounts some, and some are reflected in the sample of shop papers and leaflets published as an appendix to Workplace Papers. (Although Workplace Papers is online at the STO Digital Archive, the appendix is not; I am willing to copy and send it out electronically to people who write and ask me to do so.) I hope the renewed interest in STO reflected in Mike's book and this symposium will persuade someone to make available more of the shop papers and leaflets than the few reproduced in the appendix. Those interested in learning more should get in touch with veterans of those years and get them to tell their stories while they are still able.
My aim in writing this comment is to reflect upon the lessons of my experiences in STO, and to pose some questions. I shall do this in a series of numbered points. Never in my life have I gained such a political education as I did in the years 1970 to 1975:
1. STO developed its members' ability to distinguish one political line from another in practice.
2. It examined and decided tactics on the basis of strategy.
3. It stressed the need to seek out and debate the programmatic implications of theoretical differences, and to search for the theoretical roots of programmatic differences.
4. It encouraged its members to engage positions at their strongest points, and to eschew demagogy.
Those were some of the things I learned in the first five years of STO.6
Around 1975, the organization began shifting its emphasis from point-of-production organizing to what Mike calls anti-imperialist solidarity, which came to mean direct support for the national liberation movements.7 (Before proceeding further, I want to say that while STO held the view that workers in large-scale production, communications and transport had a special role to play in the revolution, it did not limit itself to issues that arose in that sector: in 1971 it undertook a city-wide campaign for a general strike against the Vietnam War. To avoid ridicule I add that we did not really believe we could pull it off; we were simply hoping to provide a framework for the work we were doing in various workplaces.) Moreover, the group was always willing to engage with people outside of production, for example around police violence and consumer issues.
I didn't like the shift. I had always believed that the best support US revolutionaries could give to the peoples oppressed by US imperialism was to wage the class struggle in the United States, and I felt that the shift represented a shirking of that responsibility. In spite of my misgivings, I didn't oppose it. I grumbIed, I dragged my feet. I think everyone knew I didn't like it, but I didn't oppose it or offer an alternative.8 My reasons for failing to do so are instructive.
In 1973 a reform candidate, Ed Sadlowski, had been elected director of district 31 (Chicago–northwest Indiana) of the steelworkers union. Alone among radicals in the steel industry, STO had not taken part in his campaign. Now the reformers decided to run him for president of the International and Jim Balanoff, president of the local at Inland Steel and a longtime CP labor activist, for director of district 31.9
What to do? I had worked at US Steel Gary Works since 1971, during which time I had made friends among my fellow workers, taken part in direct actions of no consequence, organized together with others in our branch public meetings that were poorly attended, waged a campaign that went nowhere against the racial policies of the Company and the Union, and published several issues of a regional paper that elicited no response from the popular audience at which it was aimed. I had even worked for a friend in his unsuccessful campaign to replace the division committeeman (justifying my participation on the basis of friendship and “tactics”). But there was no way I was going into the swamp of union reform exemplified by the coming “battle” for President of the USWA.10 Meanwhile, I had nothing to show for my efforts to pursue a different course. Our branch in Gary, which at one time had ten or so members, had evaporated, more from discouragement than political differences. (Without a political or personal commitment, who would want to live in northwest Indiana?) In 1975 I said farewell to my beloved steelworkers (who I am told were also Lenin's favorites) and left the mill. My years there largely coincided with what I now consider STO's best period (although I did not know it at the time) and indeed with the best years of my political life (so far).
I tell this story because I think it is representative of what was going on with STO people generally at the time, even if the problems were not equally in evidence everywhere. STO called it a period of “lull.” Let me suggest a thought experiment: Suppose we had accepted the fact that the struggle at the workplace had ebbed. Could we have become more open to engaging in struggles elsewhere without abandoning the classic Marxist position that the workplace, where workers are “disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself,” occupies a central place in strategy? Suppose further that we had been able, by an effort of will, to maintain a direct presence in industries we deemed strategically significant. Could I have kept working at Gary Works while looking beyond it for the political activity that gave meaning to my life? Could I even have quit the mill and gone to Harvard and become a professor while continuing to maintain ties with workers in large-scale manufacture, transport and communication?11
The lull is coming to an end. Like the first daffodils of spring, mass resistance is beginning to sprout. So far, with the exception of a few places (dockworkers in the Pacific northwest, Republic Windows in Chicago), the struggles have not yet reached the workplace. As sure as god made little green apples, they will. How different would the situation be had STO maintained even a skeletal presence in large-scale industry, transport and communication? (Other radical groups have maintained ties with the workplaces; but they don't have STO's politics.)
I want to close this comment with two stories: the first deals with the Communist Party of Portugal. When the Salazar dictatorship collapsed in 1974, the CP held its first public meetings in almost a half-century. Despite the repression it suffered during its years of underground existence—the 36 members of the Party's Central Committee had, in the aggregate, experienced more than 300 years in jail—it had burrowed among the workers at the Lisnave shipyards and the Lisbon docks and the agricultural workers in the Alentejo region. And it had preserved its apparatus (with the help of Moscow). The day the dictatorship fell, CP cadres occupied the headquarters of the regime's labor-front unions, and quickly became a contender for power in Portugal. I hope I do not have say that I hate the Portuguese CP, that I would rather live under the miserabilist social-democratic regime that governs the country now than under the regime of the Stalinist CP head Alvaro Cunhal. But its example is instructive.
My second story concerns the Communist Party of China. After reactionaries crushed the workers' movement of 1925–27 and slaughtered Communists in the cities, Mao Tse-tung led a faction of the Party to the countryside. There they built a peasant army that, as everyone knows, overthrew the feudal regime and brought the CP to power. I am in awe at Mao's accomplishment in getting fastidious Chinese students, schoolteachers, librarians (he himself was a librarian), and mandarins, more steeped in traditions of class superiority than any other people on earth, to go and live with diseased peasants and eat out of filthy bowls and pick lice out of their bodies. It was one of the most heroic episodes in history, and one of the greatest revolutions. But—and this the point of my story—although Mao and his comrades called themselves, and undoubtedly believed they were, Communists, it was not a communist revolution, nor could it be, because it was not based in the proletariat, and when it comes to revolution, communist and proletarian are interchangeable terms.
People looking for substitutes for the working class (and those currently infatuated with Maoism) need to ponder that lesson.
Could STO have combined the dedication of the Portuguese and Chinese CPs with its autonomist politics and the focus on the workplace of its first five years, and would the situation be different today had it done so?
One final point: On reading Mike's book I was amazed by the amount of work we did and the many areas in which we were involved (some of which I had forgotten). Yet even with all his research, he left out some important things, for instance the Joanne Little defense work; I think others are writing about this, so I won't say more. All things considered, STO was greater than the sum of its members. As individuals, we are less than we were when we were part of STO.
- 1I am limiting this discussion to the Chicago area. Groups in Kansas City and the Quad Cities that had independent histories and would later become part of STO had rich experiences in workplace struggles, in some cases richer than Chicago's; those experiences are not adequately represented in Mike's book, but no book can include everything, and the omissions do not fundamentally alter my opinions.
- 2The term was an adaptation of Gramsci's description of Ordine Nuovo as the newspaper of the factory councils. STO arrived at extra-unionism largely independently of Gramsci, but it recognized itself in him, and one of the first pamphlets it published was Soviets in Italy, a collection of his 1919–20 articles, reprinted from, as I recall, New Left Review. Another was a factory-by-factory account of the May 1968 General Strike in France, reprinted from I-forget-where. Another was an account of extra-union struggles at FIAT during the Hot Autumn of 1969, reprinted from Radical America.
- 3The Italian group, Potere Operaio, recognized the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as the American expression of extra-unionism, and North African workers at Renault and Citroen played a big part in the “French” General Strike.
- 4It was in the air. In the days before the Democratic Convention, black transit workers struck against the CTA and their union; I passed out leaflets on their behalf at carbarns. Similar things were happening in Mahwah, New Jersey, Fremont, California, and around the country. I attended a conference in 1968 or early ’69 in New York City where I first met people from the League, Harlem Fightback, and others who clearly articulated the politics of extra-unionism against the entire conventional left. I recall a League activist telling, in a matter-of-fact tone devoid of personal animosity, one of the radical union reformers, a person with a long history of opposition in the UAW who was lecturing him that his rejection of union reform was sectarian, that she was a “racist.” Up until then I had, without thinking about it, operated with the standard leftist assumption that if there is no union the job was to organize one and, where there is a union, the job is to organize a rank-and-file caucus to oust the incumbent reactionary leadership. The presence of people from the League and similar groups electrified me and their arguments stayed with and influenced me.
- 5In its second period STO did recruit several “people of color,” individuals who for one reason or another joined STO rather than one of the organizations of “national liberation.” The situation was problematic since they had chosen not to join organizations which STO was doing its best to support and maintain close ties with, and it led to big troubles for them and for STO as a whole; but that is beyond the scope of this comment.
- 6While I played the biggest role in formulating, popularizing and defending STO positions on race and unionism, especially important in the first five years of the organization's existence, the person most responsible for integrating these positions and developing an organization that could put them into practice was Don Hamerquist. When I speak of what I gained from STO as distinct from what I brought to it, I am acknowledging my debt to Don.
- 7Lowell makes the important point that the shift occurred almost imperceptibly, being seen at first as merely a tactical move, a “flank attack,” and only later becoming a matter of strategy.
- 8With one exception: at a national meeting in Kansas City I forget-what-year, one other person and I made a presentation challenging the whole direction and calling for a return to a point-of-production concentration. The discussion got pretty hot. One person who is a dear friend today told me then that if my position prevailed he would quit the organization. He had no reason to fear; we were resoundingly defeated, smashed, quelled, annihilated. Looking back, I'm not sure we wanted to win and weren't provoking a debate for the fun of it. If there is a serious point here, it is that we felt free to do so because we knew that the organization would yank us back from the precipice.
- 9Many US unions are known as “Internationals” on the strength of their having members in Canada, the title having little to do with their politics. The early seventies was a period of hope for labor reformers; encouraged by the election of Arnold Miller in the UMWA and similar stirrings elsewhere (all of them now forgotten except by diehard sectarian leftwing union reformers).
- 10My issues with trade unionism were captured in an exchange I had with a local union official in front of the union hall. “What's your grievance?” he asked me. “This job sucks,” I replied. “That's not a grievance, that's a gripe,” he said. He was in effect saying that if the Company was not paying me the rate that had been set by the contract, or if they were not respecting seniority, he could fix it. As for the situation of the worker in the capitalist system, to address that was beyond his powers. His answer explains why I and millions of other workers had lost interest in unions.
- 11Only in the United States, and to a lesser degree Britain, both lands where Puritanism reigns supreme, was it widely held that in order to do political work in the working class it was necessary to be a worker. I understand that Dave Ranney has written a piece critical of the idea of a lull, arguing that it should be seen instead as a period of capitalist counter-offensive following the popular upsurge of the 1960s. I think Dave is right, but I am not convinced it would it have made a difference had we adopted his view of the period instead of the one we did adopt.
Comments
Carole Travis
Mike Staudenmaier did a good job of understanding who Sojourner Truth Organization was and capturing some sense of us, quite an undertaking. Thanks to Mike for the book and to John Garvey for this symposium/addendum. Reading the book has taken me back, I am personally grateful. Thinking about the symposium has given me a chance to think about what has changed over the past 30 years—and what hasn't. I look forward to reading everyone's memories and thoughts.
Looking Back
In STO, we were revolutionaries—energetic, optimistic, experienced and talented organizers who believed in the possibility of insurrection, replacing capitalism with a truly egalitarian economic order—communism—“from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.” We understood that to accomplish revolution, you have to focus on revolution. For work to be worth our time it had to have some revolutionary aspect; meaningful reform was not enough.
Small yet undeterred, we expected to be near the center of the revolutionary storm. We hoped that the day-to-day experience of working people being exploited at the workplace along with our philosophical clarity would provide the essential ingredients necessary to transform wildcats into uprisings, insurgencies into revolution. We understood white privilege as the barrier to class unity; we believed the party would emerge from the activity of the class and the struggle for national liberation.
We knew unions were not class organizations which “…always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” Unions are organizations of identifiable groups of workers, striving for their members to get better wages and benefits under capitalism. Unions mediate class relations; they do not challenge them even when they are striking. Some strikers' issues will be broader than others, e.g., teachers that may include issues pertinent to education; healthcare workers may include standards of care, etc. Some strikers will be for backward demands, like keeping prisons open or fighting for jobs to build pipelines, etc. For STO the central questions for any of our mass work was—is it a progressive struggle, if so, how do you work on it to best clarify the need for, and or the potential of revolution. With this understanding, we focused on mass autonomous action at the point of production, in communities, wherever we were engaged.
We organized before de-industrialization had totally transformed the Midwest into the rustbelt. Some of our workplaces were huge, none small. We lived our lives on alert for opportunities to collectively challenge exploitation and confront white skin privilege, not as grievance filers, but as activists. We marched en masse to foremen's desks, sat down until something was resolved or like John Strucker did—hid co-workers from La Migra. I loved going to work, even in the most oppressive workplaces; I was on a mission in a place that promoted solidarity, collectivity.
The big shops were almost villages, all kinds of people: readers, gamblers, cooks, singers, thinkers, hustlers, dopers, bikers, immigrants and hillbillies. There were unlikely pairings of friends—Black and Mexican, Hillbilly and Black, old and young. Sometimes we spent more hours there with each other than anywhere else. We felt at home wherever we worked.
It is often assumed that people who work with their hands are less smart than people who work with their minds. The distribution of intelligence or talent or kindness is spread equally in the population. In the shittiest jobs, among the homeless or unemployed, in prison cages, shantytowns, refugee camps…everywhere, are smart, talented and kind people.
We thought that on basic levels of life experience it was clear that capitalism was not a good way to run the world. We looked for ways of illustrating that understanding by activity, not just saying it. We understood that people are philosophers, whether or not their philosophy is conscious or coherent. We acted to change their philosophy through our collective activity. We acted to demonstrate the need and the possibility of us running the world for ourselves together rather than living and toiling in the existing system designed for the profit of a few. Our co-workers were our comrades—we were “no condescending saviors.”
Our work discussions were discussions of theory and our theory discussions were discussions of work—it was a question of emphasis. Revolutionary thought and activity is necessarily intertwined. Our mass work and life experience clarified our theoretical understanding; it was the grist for our thought.
Our job was to notice and make noticeable to others how society works. What creates the context of our lives goes unnoticed, it is background, it is assumed to “be just the way things are.' When we allow it, that “background” shapes who we are. In our personal lives often the work of women is unnoticed; in the society it is the work of workers and the relations of capitalism that go unnoticed. Our job was to show it is not “fixed,” “final,” or the only way to be, to demonstrate that we have power to change our world if only we can see that and then exercise that power, together. Our mass work deepened our understanding; and we were learning to be more creative in our mass activity and written materials.
We looked for fissures in the seemingly solid society: places where people experienced outrage at inequities or their own collective power or some indication of break in the 'normal.' We sought places, movements, moments to intervene, interact and deepen those fissures. We spent years in factories, communities, doing solidarity work. I was a founding member (in 1969) and stayed until 1983. We had various levels of interaction and success. We made many friends and changed people's understanding of their own lives. And yet it wasn'tenough. We didn't pull “it” off.
If a people's revolution is to happen, it must be worked on explicitly. That does not mean mass work harps on revolution; sometimes it should, sometimes it shouldn't. Revolutionaries should harp on creating a vision of another way to live.
Dave Ranney is quoted in the book as saying that we were probably more influenced by the Communist Party than we realized. He meant it as a criticism. I think he's right, but I think it was a good, not a bad, influence. Our roots were not in participatory democracy, churches, Democratic Party liberalism, Quaker circles or the women's movement. Our frame of reference probably was The Party, although much of what we believed was in reaction against both its theory and its practice. We had vigorous discussions, encouraged questioning. We made decisions by majority votes. Having an agreed upon form and practice for an organization simplified functioning. [The General Assemblies of Occupy today had difficulties making decisions—from who gets to vote to modified consensus. By breaking up into smaller focused work groups they have had better success.]
We were Gramscians, not Stalinists, Maoists or Trotskyites. We understood the role of philosophy to test activity with ideas and ideas with activity. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it.” We ruminated about hegemony, superstructure, contradictions and organic intellectuals. We believed in the centrality of the working class because as workers we were socialized to act collectively and because the people who did the work were the class that could change capitalist relations of production. [Capitalists need workers; workers don't need capitalists.] We were accused of being dual unionists, but actually we were interested in dual consciousness and dual power. Like other Left groups, we had a coherent worldview and a willingness to make collective decisions about how and where we would work. We were alive, connected to each other, the class and history. It was electric, heady.
* * *
Way before STO imploded (I was gone for several years by then), the scent of people's revolution was no longer in the air. We could not have changed that. Staudenmaier identifies a problem, more accurately a contradiction, about our organization's sense of itself that inevitably led to its demise.
We did not recruit enough. As we did our mass work, only select workers knew us as communist members of STO. We didn't think that was important. What mattered was the ability of the class to coalesce and act as a class. We thought that the activity of the class would explode [like Egypt or Occupy or Flint, Michigan, in 1937] and the leadership of the class would emerge. We thought whatever happened we could join or intervene because we would be respected leaders from our own plants [or community or solidarity work] or, at minimum, as printers. We never built STO as aggressively as other Left organizations did. Most groups focused on workplace organizing knew of STO, so too Black Nationalist organizations, Chicago Puerto Rican nationalists and various European organizations. But we were not widely known or considered by those in the larger national white communist organizations or among enough of the workers we worked with. We recruited workers, but not lots, but we didn't recruit lots of anybody. Except for Bread and Roses and Insurgent Workers our extensive mass materials were not under the name STO. Our Left pamphlets and journals got around, but not as much as they should have, although we tried.
We were relying on mass insurgencies to shift everything, but that is the only way a revolution can develop. With the passing of a revolutionary period, naturally, we would fade away; there would be no activity to elaborate thinking. The problem with that is in a new revolutionary period there is no continuum of practice or easily found mentors.
Political Defense Work
For STO most of the nation's prisoners were political prisoners whether or not anyone ever heard of them and whether or not they were in political organizations. The fact they were in the criminal “justice” system made their cases, de facto, political. Some cases were better than others for communities to pull together to stand up for the defendant and to experience their power…in the best instances. We defended regular people against regular crimes and the people doing the defending were from their own communities. Lynn French, Patty Bigelow, Hilda Ignatin and I did this work. The Joe Green case was the best and most successful example of our approach and done early in our history. The JoAnne Little case was several years later; it sheds light on the work of the Chicago Women's Defense Committee, an organization that we were influential in pulling together; by then Lynn, Hilda and Patty had left STO.
Joe Green, a Cabrini Green (Chicago Housing Project) resident, a young Black man, was picked up the police and then used by Edward Hanrahan (the State's Attorney who assassinated Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton) to take the fall. Hanrahan was overheard saying “Joe Green could either get convicted of murder or produce the actual killer.” Hanrahan was holding Green hostage. Hanrahan needed to convict anyone for this Black on white murder.
Late on a hot Saturday in Old Town, a Greenwich Village–like area on Chicago's Northside, a white young man and his fiancé returned to their car several blocks from the noise and lights of the clubs on a dark street near the projects. They were robbed and the young man was shot and killed by a young Black man in front of his fiancé. Joe Green was arrested for the murder. With little investigation it was clear that Joe was innocent. We worked in cooperation with the Green family, Joe's attorney, Howard Savage, and Savage's private investigator, Joe Butler. We knocked on doors in the projects, visited area churches, talked to ministers and other community leaders, got help from the staff at the Chicago Park District Field House where Joe was a basketball coach for younger boys.
By the time the trial started we had 2 buses lined up to take people to the court every day to sit with Joe's family as a sign of support for Joe. All the people were Black except Patty, Hilda, and several members of the Young Lords Hilda had brought and me: old, young, neighborhood people, ministers, sometimes a teacher of a Park District employee, all dressed in their best clothes mostly quietly witnessing the proceedings with occasional spontaneous sighs or groans or looking at each other and shaking our heads. People brown bagged it for lunch and would eat together in the hallways, quietly talking. For the entire two weeks, the courtroom was full and by the end of the trial it was overflowing. The case was the talk of the projects, how people were coming together to support Joe. There is absolutely no question that without that support, Joe Green would have been convicted and likely received the death penalty. In addition to getting Joe off, we demonstrated a collective way of neighbors defending people beyond lawyer's arguments.
Several years later we were doing defense work again, through the Chicago Women's Defense Committee, an organization that Alarie and I pulled together with friends and contacts from my high school days and our social worker days including networks from the Welfare Rights Movement. Our committee varied between 10 and 30 women, mostly Black from the South and West sides, although there was a connection between Ginger Mack on the Southside and Big and Little Dovie on the Northside that led to some citywide work around welfare issues. We took on several cases, but none as big as the Little case.
JoAnne Little was a cause célèbre of the black movement, the anti-death penalty and women's movements. Ms. Little was in a North Carolina jail cell on shoplifting charges when her jailer raped her; she stabbed and killed him in the course of the rape. A national defense was already getting underway when we heard about her and she was out on bail. We contacted her lawyers and arranged for her to come to Chicago.
We plastered posters all over the Southside and filled a Church on 49th and Dorchester with an overflowing a crowd of mostly Black women of all ages. We used the occasion to introduce some of the local cases we were working on. We explained the importance of going to court with people so that they weren't alone and so that the judge or the jury would witness the support they had from the community. Her case catapulted our Committee into prominence in Chicago's Black community.
When Ms. Little arrived she was almost hugged to her death. While she spoke people cried. At one point in the rally, we were collecting money, with a few women counting it during the speeches. Ginger Mack was moderating the program. As the speeches filled the hall, several of us kept the collection plates moving through the crowd. We were near the end of the rally when a very small old shriveled dark and dusty woman shuffled out from one of the rows into the aisle where I was standing. Reaching into her brassiere, she pulled out a sock that held a small leather change purse in its toe. She clicked open the purse and pulled out a tiny many times folded $5 bill. She pressed it in my hand. There was a break in the speaking, I held up the bill and said, “$5 more from…(her name).” Ginger conferred for a moment and shouted into the microphone in delight “that makes a round total of $800”—the place went crazy with happiness, the old lady and I hugged. She wept. I was ecstatic.
We sent ten Black women from the South and West side to North Carolina for the opening day of JoAnne Little's trial. Leotta Johnson remembers all this and more to this day. Ms. Little was acquitted. It was an astonishing inconceivable outcome—a jailed Black woman acquitted of killing a white sheriff in the south!
We defended about 14 or 15 individuals. But our work did not leave any lasting organization. The Chicago Women's Defense Committee did not last more than 18 months.
A Few Print Shop Observations…Plus
Staudenmaier noted the importance of our print shop. In addition to being able to produce all our own left and mass literature, the print shop was an organizing tool. We could show up to places where activity had broken out but we knew no one and volunteer to print for them [Western Electric and the Truck Strike were examples of this]. We saw it as so useful we set up shops in St. Louis, K.C., and Denver. All of the shops were privately owned, C and D by me and Don originally [hence the name], later by Don and Janeen. We printed literally tons of literature. Some things that are still available, but also tens of thousands of leaflets, shop newsletters, posters, stickers for mass work, all of it long gone, passed out. Alas I have memories of giving away the few pieces I kept as a file, one at a time as people came through Chicago who were interested in our work. I remember thinking I would regret this, but thought the activity of the moment was more important than history.
Quite naturally I am a fan of print shops, but maybe they are not so important anymore—the Internet has in many ways replaced paper, but not in every way. Occupy Oakland still uses posters. They have a silk screen set up at most of the big days, producing posters and T-shirts on the spot. Occupy Wall Street had three gorgeous broadsides in English and Spanish while it was happening—300,000 copies of the first two papers were printed on Long Island and distributed out of Zuccotti Park. I like stuff you can hold, touch, put on the wall or wear and they become part of our culture.
All cultural expressions that challenge authority are important in undermining the strength of the dominant culture. They signal, drive, inform, exhort—give us ways to express our humanity, our rage, despair, joy, love, determination, stance. Music, poetry, graffiti, movies, comedy, videos are especially important in this chaotic time with great reach and speed of reach. I highly recommend you sing, dance, beat the drums, laugh, make videos, rap, paint, love when you can. These are revolutionary acts and this is your life.
A Few Thoughts About The Present
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the beginning of capitalism, the world has undergone continuous change at ever-increasing speed. This is not the world of 1848, 1886, 1905, 1917, 1937 or 1968. We need strategies for today.
Revolt is happening in the world today. We have seen stirrings here with Occupy, but nothing like Egypt or Syria or even Greece yet.
Global finance capital is the ruling capitalist sector: not the owners of the means of production. These most significant centers of capital cannot be seized, banks and stock exchanges transact in cyberspace. Only hackers could hurt them, but that is not a collective act.
There are fewer workers and easily replaced; what used to take hundreds of humans is done by machinery.
The United States is the only superpower. We wage pre-emptive war, explicitly torture, hold people without trial, spy on everyone everywhere, have drone strikes on people we are not “at war” with. We have 23 million people unemployed, 2.5 million human beings caged [80,000+ in solitary, some for decades].
As wealth accumulates at the top, immiseration spreads. Conditions will worsen even without factoring in catastrophic impacts from climate change. Water is increasingly a commodity and will become scarce. The earth is suffering, if not already dying.
Capitalism teetered on the verge of worldwide systemic collapse in 2008. It still is unstable [we Marxists have been saying that for 175 years]. Ruling classes are no longer interested [or able to?] in providing generous distributions of wealth and privilege to pay for social stability for the populations of the countries once at capital's core—Europe and the United States. The lives of the masses of people at the center will no longer be so much better than the rest of the world's. Sticks instead of carrots will be used to control us. Police control and austerity is the hegemonic mantra. The cloak of democracy is shredding.
The ruling class has had the Cato and Heritage Foundations working for decades figuring out how to manipulate and divide us. Propaganda is their highly developed art. They confuse us and reinforce the reality that serves them. They are masterful, ruthless, shameless and murderous. Their work is central to the maintenance of our consent to live like we do. They prop up and paste over those fissures in the cracking structures of bourgeois democracy. They might have read Gramsci too.
The population is armed to the teeth and their guns are not pointed at the bourgeoisie. White people, who see themselves as white more than as people, are increasingly nervous as US demographics indicate they will soon be a minority. They are a mass base for fascism. The police have lots of tools and technology. So, socialism or barbarism? I'd say the bad stuff has a head start.
People will occupy, riot and rise up. Threat and opportunity, two sides of a coin—the same Chinese character for both.
Looking Forward: On Uprising
I always thought mass general strike would be the vehicle for successful anti-capitalist revolt. By definition, large numbers in concerted activity, solidarity in action—common action for the common good. Mass general strikes can shut down everything. If people stop work, they can shift economic social relations “mid-air,” by “simply” throwing off their current view of the world and seeing the world as it is and comprehending their power to change it. Then work could begin again, for what we need, for each other, not for the bosses or financiers, the polluters, but for us…and then the transition to something new is not so perplexing…theoretically.
But now it is hard to imagine US employed workers in political general strikes. Jobs are so scarce they are a privilege. Europe is class conscious, has a tradition of political strikes, but not us. With good reason today it is difficult to get people to strike at all, when they do, it's for their own needs; that may be good, even great and essential, but it is not enough, and not “…represent[ing] the interests of the movement as a whole.”
The eviction of Occupy is not the end of revolt. Small eruptions portend the big ones. The economic irrelevance to capitalism of vast numbers of people, especially youth, will find expression. At some point[s] the dispossessed, the youth, the hungry, the desperate will rise up. But uprising does not mean revolution and revolution does not mean victory. Disruption is one thing, revolution, transition to a new society and survival are additional “things.” For an anti-capitalist revolution to succeed, masses of employed workers will have to join.
The old formula for revolution—the working class will seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie—will not work today [not that it ever did happen]. Disruptions, occupations, riots will take different paths. History, culture, level of hardship and expectation, response of the state, geography, capacity to survive autonomously etc., etc., etc., will determine the trajectories and scope of each revolt separately. Movements grow, die, explode, surge in waves, unexpectedly stop and start. They influence each other and impact the political terrain.
A shift in the political terrain [a break in the cultural hegemony], in the ideas and understanding that bind us, is critical to revolution, not just desperation or fear or rage. A shared vision of a new future across population sectors can inspire grand activity and reveal the potential of success. There will be argument and a need to listen and compromise. To win we need more than people willing to go to flash mob or occupy or go to some barricades, we need a groundswell, enough…to heave in a mass, to become a human tsunami, a population that…swarms.
A Few Final Ruminations
The rapid shift in the earth's balance has some environmentalists debating the necessity of disruptive direct action to keep the Earth habitable. Around the world from every stratum of society, conscious people are quite rightly panicked. Some, of course, are becoming anti-capitalist. This makes for a much bigger pool of potential allies.
It is not a given that various forces, such as those that ideologically oppose capitalism and populations who are suffering under capital's heel, can be allied. But conceivably, they could be and they should be. The youth, the dispossessed, the environmentally conscious and workers of the world united together may be the only hope to create the world we need and every single on of us deserves.
Struggles for reform are part of the path to revolution, but the relation to revolution is complex. [This is a big subject that is best played out in life, not in theory alone.] Reform is by definition not revolution: it stops short. Reform is easier; it is customary, it means a less protracted struggle, not being “unreasonable.” It is a victory to get reforms, concessions. Concessions are limited; if, in no other way, they are limited to issues posed only by those in motion. These days in the economic arena it appears the concessions may be harder to come by, they may not even be offered at all. Heavy-handed repression is the handmaiden of austerity. We may all be on the road to being less entitled and more oppressed, and that may also be the road to revolutionary confrontation.
The social and economic changes needed to cut back the flow of CO2 enough to keep the plant habitable are also revolutionary—nothing less will do.
The globe has shrunk. Maybe a worldwide movement is possible. All it takes is worldwide understanding [that has begun] and alliances and action. It will take a lot of work to make a new and better world, but all people seek meaningful work.
Comments
Small yet undeterred, we expected to be near the center of the revolutionary storm. We hoped that the day-to-day experience of working people being exploited at the workplace along with our philosophical clarity would provide the essential ingredients necessary to transform wildcats into uprisings, insurgencies into revolution.
We, less the heavy writings, felt the same way about our little group: the Libertarian Workers Group (NYC, 1978-1984). In the sea of many left organizations (maoists & trots mostly), we believed our daily activities as anarcho-syndicalists would prevail....one day.
FWIW, spirit and determination is so much of the drive that keeps organizations and militants going. These two ingredients stoke the fires of struggle, stoke the fire to do the very best to advance what you believe to be the best practices and life changing ideas in trying to build a better organization and a new world.
Ken Lawrence
This is a good project, and Mike has written a fine book, though not the one we'd have written.
One aspect that I think misleads readers, and probably distorted Mike's own perception of STO, is his dichotomy between the so-called “heavies” (Don, Noel, and me) and the rest of STO's membership. In fact, there was never a time when the three of us were in agreement on fundamental doctrine, let alone personal style. And we each came to STO from widely different political groundings and experience. Often other members perceived those differences to be even greater than they actually were, which tended to energize their engagement in political debates. But there was never an instance when the three of us were united at one pole and the rest at the other pole.
I was the person who introduced STO to James, and James to STO, when I invited Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev) to a public meeting in Chicago with Nello as the speaker in 1968. Noel described that event and its effect on him in his “Meeting in Chicago” chapter of C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, the Summer 1981 special issue of STO's journal Urgent Tasks. Noel was better known on the left for having popularized the term “white skin privilege” in his 1967 pamphlet White Blindspot (published originally under the byline J.H. Kagin), which was based on lessons that he had drawn from Du Bois's Black Reconstruction.
At the time, Noel and I were friends. His politics were Stalinist; mine were not, but I did not regard Stalinists as enemies. I had met Noel originally at the 1960 national conference of the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States, where he gave a humorous report on his trip to Cuba, along with Theodore W. Allen (known in the POC as Molly Pitcher). Ted was later Noel's collaborator, author of a public letter to Noel that came to be titled Can White Workers Radicals be Radicalized? in reprint editions of the White Blindspot pamphlet. The POC was an ultra-left split from the Communist Party; among its original leaders was Harry Haywood (Haywood Hall, Jr.), the author of the CP's old line on the Negro Question that had advocated self-determination for the Black Belt.
Noel and I had both been founding members of the Union of (White) Organizers, a group of Chicago leftists who were attempting to honor the Black Power challenge. Among younger white radicals at the time, and as SDS was splitting into three warring factions with worse to come, those issues and opposition to the US war in Vietnam were more central to our political lives than attitudes toward the USSR, China, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and other international flashpoints that absorbed the Old Left. (The co-founder of STO with Noel, Don Hamerquist, had been an important figure in the Communist Party, slated for greatness until he opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.)
I had followed an entirely separate political trajectory after that. I still possess the copies of White Blindspot by J.H. Kagin that Noel gave me to reintroduce himself to me, probably in 1967. While I was gratified that his position and M's (Ted Allen, whom I had met as Milton Palmer and Molly Pitcher) in the pamphlet were much closer to Facing Reality than to any of the major Marxist parties, I did not and do not like the slogan “Repudiate White Skin Privilege.” Noel has a penchant for slogans that surprise and puzzle people to whom they are addressed, in hopes of challenging them to think, a useful didactic gambit but a poor political one. The actual result was and is more likely to confuse. Noel enjoys explaining, “No, that isn't what I mean,” but it also means that his slogans don't communicate, incite, and/or inspire on their own, do not convene a constituency that roars with a single voice, and without his guidance are often misconstrued or misunderstood. A few months ago on the SNCC listserv I took the trouble to demystify privilege as a method of social control—deployed in many ways, not just or mainly by skin color—in response to visceral resistance to Noel's old slogan. I have a similar objection to Treason to Whiteness. These are fine concepts as theoretical constructs, but bad as agitational slogans.
Even Mike didn't quite “get it” when he wrote, “But the traditional idea of privileges granted by capital and the state…” Privileges were imposed, not granted. They were and remain a curse, not a blessing, and their importance as a method of social control, one of many, varies a lot from time to time. But they don't exist because white workers requested them while the bourgeoisie resisted, preferring to treat all their subjects equally. Yet nothing prevents the ruling class from reversing racial or caste privileges in a particular conflict, such as employing previously excluded workers as strikebreakers. This misconstruction is typical, and illustrates well how faulty the slogan is.
Besides that, Noel's politics were always Marxist/-pre-Leninist, never fully embracing Imperialism, either theoretically or in its strategic consequences. He reminded me more than once about POC leadership debates, when Armando Roman would hold forth about the Puerto Rican independence struggle and Harry Haywood would reply, “If it's so important to him, why doesn't he go there?” For Noel, exploitation always overshadowed national oppression as the cause of revolutionary struggle, though he seldom challenged the STO line directly and accepted the line as discipline required.
Don was almost the opposite. When Noel introduced me to Don, possibly around the time of the National Conference for New Politics gathering in Chicago, they gave me a copy of Don's mimeographed book, Notes for Development of Revolutionary Strategy, annotated by Noel, which I still have. Don was still in the CP, but obviously on his way out. Compared to the CP line, it represented a major improvement, but fell short of the infectious revolutionary current of the time. Don was plainly the Leninist that Noel wasn't, and was prepared even to subordinate or marginalize pre-imperialist struggles in order to make a priority of the most radical insurgency that was manifest at the time. Whatever fad was dominant among scholastic Marxists, Don wanted to join the debate (Althusser, Gorz, Emmanuel, Eurocommunism, capitalist restructuring, and so forth). To me those were mostly a waste of time and a distraction. But Don did dwell on dual power, which was the central and essential point of strategic agreement among us all, a point that every STO member embraced yet is not developed in Mike's book.
Temperamentally, both Don and Noel were Bolsheviks and I wasn't. Noel sent me a copy of “An Organization for the Workplace” in May of 1970 (date of the postmark). Regardless of my sympathetic reading, I would not join STO at that time, if only because I had no desire to be a member of an organization that included George Schmidt. [George was the most visible STO member to my spouse and to other comrades I worked closely with at the time. He meant well, but made a nuisance of himself, and had a well-deserved reputation for factionalism and undemocratic manipulation.] But Noel and I worked together in the Union of (White) Organizers, which was mainly a federation of RYM I and II activists citywide. By the time I did join STO in about 1976, I was in Mississippi, so my day-to-day political work wasn't much subject to collective scrutiny. Overall discipline, yes, but that's why the Third World Caucus split was unavoidable. I had no resistance to reporting my work to Pam and Scottie (two women who were leaders of STO's Third World Caucus) and did so by mail, but the idea that their direction from Chicago could override or contravene requests or instructions from Imari Obadele or Chokwe Lumumba, with whom I was working continually on a basis of trust, was preposterous and, as the debate unfolded, unprincipled. It would have amounted to outside manipulation of the RNA. Otherwise I was more Third-Worldist than either Don or Noel, with particular affection for revolutions in Africa (I introduced STO to SAMRAF) and Latin America.
Mike reported a snarky comment by Kingsley (Clarke) about my use of the name Jasper Collins, but never asked me about it or explained the actual reason for using it. For years before I joined STO, my political work was in other organizations—by the mid-1970s mainly SCEF (board, staff, writer, and editor), Covert Action Information Bulletin (writer, researcher, and member of the editorial collective), AFSC (full-time staff and director of a statewide anti-surveillance project), United Methodist Voluntary Service, and National Anti-Klan Network. My political views were well known to everyone I worked with in those groups, but my roles in some of them required that they be my primary organizational identifiers. AFSC made this explicit. I was not a pacifist, but to be the head of an AFSC project meant that I could not, while so identified, publicly declare support for armed struggle. CPUSA and PWOC members on the AFSC staff operated by the same rules I did. Covert Action was a united front with “no enemies on the left.” To have publicized my STO affiliation, and authorship of positions that provoked intense disagreement and debate on the revolutionary left, would have been a betrayal of the sort we condemned when Maoists and Trotskyists used positions of respect and influence in mass movements for partisan advantage.
Furthermore, every revolutionary organization addresses this requirement in the same manner, which is why labor is invariably divided between people whose assigned duties are mainly for the organization and others whose duties are mainly in mass movements or outside coalitions.
Mike stated that STO “never fully understood the extent to which the personal is political.” To the contrary, we not only understood it, we repudiated it as an operating principle. He cited papers by STO women in support of the concept, but never explicitly reported that they were defeated. He cited the Phantom Pheminists, but failed to report that they were defeated, that one of the authors (Cathy) herself repudiated and apologized for the PP initiative, and that the only aspect that was upheld was a specific charge of male chauvinism that would have been equally upheld by any decent Marxist organization of earlier vintage, while a second charge was defeated, despite one-sided lurid personal evidence that went unanswered by the accused. Our unambiguous position was that the personal is not political except to the extent that it is unavoidable, a position that caused both STO and Facing Reality to reject Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa's Wages for Housework line, which also was rejected by Big Flame, but was supported by such comrades as Kit Komatsu. Mike is entitled to his own position on feminism, but ought to have differentiated, say, the revolutionary feminists of Redstockings, who had my support whenever they sought it, and their leftish enemies, such as Gloria Steinem. STO supported and built CARASA, and opposed NARAL, which was a principled, positive intervention in the women's movement.
Iranian politics are caricatured and STO's political stance is garbled in Mike's telling, evidently based on Ed Voci's anecdotes of sectarian silliness in Chicago, which was at least partly warped by the disruptive presence of SAVAK agent George Youssefi at the Central YMCA. Even on that narrow terrain, I think Beth Henson probably has a more sympathetic and generous view of the ISA. However, Chicago wasn't the only place where STO and STO allies engaged in Iranian solidarity activity. Here is a more straightforward summary of the Iranian background and the groups we supported:
In 1953, the CIA and MI-6 overthrew the leftist-nationalist elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne. The shah's government violently crushed all opposition, ruthlessly and with severe cruelty that included medieval and Nazi torture. The Tudeh party (pro-Soviet CP) had been the mass left formation, but was shattered. In the wake of the coup, the Tudeh party adopted a strategy of “survival,” meaning postpone all public political activity until the regime relaxed its terroristic grip, and maintain a skeleton illegal structure to await that opportunity. By 1970, a new generation, including young members of the radical Islamic National Front, refused to await the opening that never had come. The Organization of Iranian People's Fedayee Guerrillas was formed out of this younger radical nucleus, and one of their members, Amir-Parviz Pouyan, wrote their manifesto, The Necessity of Armed Struggle and Refutation of the Theory of “Survival.” Pouyan's book was important to STO's development, and to our Puerto Rican comrades, far beyond anyone's involvement in Iran solidarity work.
Pouyan argued that the absence of opposition was a consequence of the Iranian state's monopoly of violence. If a challenge to that monopoly were raised, revolutionaries would rally to the group that led the attack on the shah's police. In keeping with that doctrine, the OIPFG launched the armed struggle in 1971 with an attack on the gendarmerie at a small town called Siahkal. Nearly all the guerrillas who participated in the attack were captured, tortured, and executed, but the event electrified the public, made the people aware that the guerrilla movement existed, that it was capable of clandestine existence and surprise attack. Dozens of young people joined.
Another of the early members, Massoud Amadzadeh, wrote a more elaborate doctrinal manual, Armed Struggle: Both a Strategy and a Tactic, which he based on Régis Debray's so-called foco theory set forth in the then-faddish book Revolution in the Revolution? Both Pouyan and Amadzadeh had been members of the National Front before they joined the OIPFG, and lacked backgrounds in or understanding of mass mobilization that was central to Marxist tradition. Both were martyred—in 1971 and 1972, respectively—before they ever faced a political challenge to their doctrine. Their line was based on the view that revolution was at hand, and needed only the example of courageous guerrilla actions to bring down the regime. It was as mistaken as Che Guevara's expectations in Bolivia, the basis of Debray's book.
The Tehran center of OIPFG had been built by veterans of the Tudeh's youth group; one of the leaders there, Bizhan Jazani, wrote an alternative manifesto that became the OIPFG majority doctrine: Armed Struggle in Iran, the Road to Mobilization of the Masses. Under Jazani's line, armed actions were subordinate to political, social, economic, and ideological activity, and in concert with it. In addition to the OIPFG, a quasi-Marxist Islamic group, the People's Mojahedin of Iran, and a Trotskyist group called Left Platform, engaged in armed actions. OIPFG and PMOI had an arrangement of mutual recruitment, with secular recruits being referred to OIPFG and religious recruits to PMOI. All these groups had a large presence among Iranian students in the United States, and each comprised an ISA faction.
After Siahkal, the most important event in advancing the revolutionary struggle was the 1974 treason trial of the communist poet Khosro Golsorkhi, accused of conspiring to kidnap the shah's son. Golsorkhi's trial was televised, and he turned it into a reprise of the Dimitrov trial, bringing radical and revolutionary Marxist opposition to the regime into every Iranian household, but using poetic and religious language of the masses. I am lucky enough to have viewed it with simultaneous English translation at the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival. Golsorkhi's trial tactics outshined any political defense I've seen in a US courtroom.
Those events were the backdrop to the various factions of the Iranian Student Association when we became involved with them, and we supported them all unconditionally. We debated them all privately, but in practice the OIPFG, and later the IPFG, were the ones who preferred to relate to us, which is why we became publishers of their political manifestos despite our political rejection of their Stalinism and Amadzadeh's foco strategy. When I was arrested and convicted for inciting a riot during an Iranian student demonstration at Jackson State University, it was IPFG Ashraf Dehghani followers and PMOI Massoud Rajavi followers who freed me. After that, they supplied me with English translations of their positions for STO to publish.
* * *
Postscript:
I never understood how individual examples of moral courage could contradict spontaneous mass self-emancipation; it seemed clear to me that they would be complementary. Karl Marx thought so too, as Jasper Collins (my pen name when writing for Sojourner Truth Organization) showed in 1978, in the Preface to the second edition of STO's pamphlet on White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question:
Marx wrote that “the proletariat, which will not allow itself to be treated as rabble, regards its courage, self-confidence, independence, and sense of personal dignity as more necessary than its daily bread.” Some will argue that this quote from 1847 reflects a youthful humanism which Marx later outgrew. That isn't true either.
Here is how Marx ended his Inaugural Address launching the First International in 1864:
If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. The shameless approval, mock sympathy, or idiotic indifference, with which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed the mountain fortress of the Caucasus falling a prey to, and heroic Poland being assassinated by, Russia; the immense and unresisted encroachments of that barbarous power, whose head is at St. Petersburg, and whose hands are in every Cabinet of Europe, have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective Governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.
The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.
Proletarians of all countries, Unite! [my emphasis]
Marx felt so strongly about this that he quoted the lines about proletarian morality in the opening lines of the 1871 pamphlet, The Civil War in France, his stirring defense of the Paris Commune.
In September 1865 the International unanimously adopted a resolution addressed “To the People of the United States of America”:
Since we have had the honor of expressing sympathy with your sufferings, a word of encouragement for your efforts, and of congratulation for the results, permit us to add a word of counsel for the future.
As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease. Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve.
If you fail to give them citizens' rights, while you demand citizens' duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people's blood.
The eyes of Europe and of the world are fixed upon your efforts at re-construction, and enemies are ever ready to sound the knell of the downfall of republican institutions when the slightest chance is given.
We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom's limb, and your victory will be complete.
Finally, in May 1869, Marx wrote the “Address to the National Labor Union of the United States.” In it the International urged the NLU to oppose vigorously moves by the US government toward war with England, just as the English workers had prevented the European powers from going to war for slavery in the United States. The victorious war against slavery “opened a new epoch in the annals of the working class.” A war would crush this movement. What follows next is the most explicit statement of our argument to be found in Marx:
The next palpable effect of the civil war was, of course, to deteriorate the position of the American workman. In the United States, as in Europe, the monster incubus of a national debt was shifted from hand to hand, to settle down on the shoulders of the working class. The prices of necessaries, says one of your statesmen, have since 1860 risen 78 per cent, while the wages of unskilled labor rose 50 per cent, those of skilled labor 60 per cent only. “Pauperism,” he complains, “grows now in America faster than population.” Moreover, the sufferings of the working classes set off as a foil the new-fangled luxury of financial aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats, and similar vermin bred by wars. Yet for all this the civil war did compensate by freeing the slave and the consequent moral impetus it gave to your own class movement. [my emphasis]
Comments
John Strucker
To locate myself on the STO timeline, I joined the organization in early 1971 and remained a member until 1978, when I quit over the issue of autonomy for the Third World Caucus. I worked at the Stewart-Warner (S-W) auto parts factory on the near-Northwest Side of Chicago from late 1970 until 1983, toiling as an automatic screw machine operator—a job for which I displayed astoundingly little aptitude and almost no learning curve. At S-W I helped found and put out STO's in-plant newspaper Talk Back. My other STO work included Puerto Rican solidarity and support for the Farah strike and the independent truckers' shutdown in 1974.
Michael Staudenmaier (hereinafter “Mike”) has done an incredible job with Truth and Revolution (T&R). He has written a history that is detailed, comprehensive, and scrupulously fair (no easy task) to the various factions and personalities that developed, coalesced, and occasionally split from STO. I gradually lost touch with the details of what happened after I quit in 1978, so the book also filled me in on what I missed. But T&R is no dry recitation of dates and facts. Mike projects STO's story against the social, cultural, and economic backdrops of those times, he meticulously documents the shape-shifting of the US and European left in that period, and he does a masterful job of explaining and interpreting for modern-day readers the political ideas that distinguished STO. In fact, you could learn a ton of Marxism just by reading Mike's discussions of STO's position papers and internal debates, because Mike takes the time to summarize the classic texts and STO's interpretations of them.
I was never a leader or “heavy” in STO, but I was nearly always in whole-hearted agreement with the majority positions while I was in the organization. I want to be clear: I don't blame Don, Noel, Carole, or Ken for where I think we went wrong—STO's mistakes were almost always my mistakes. Indeed, it is only in hindsight and with a hefty nudge from Truth and Revolution that I can begin to identify and articulate some of those missteps.
First, I now believe that our devotion to Leninism may have been our most serious and costly mistake. To be fair to the times, STO and the other new communist organizations had little choice in this area: Leninism was in the air in 1970, and any group had to lay claim to it if they were to have a prayer of attracting new members. I certainly subscribe to the well-known knocks on Leninism, such as it was more suited to achieving a one-off coup d'etat in the tottering Tsarist autocracy than to waging protracted struggle against the multi-faceted capitalist hegemony of a modern state. But Leninism had some deleterious effects on STO that were unique to us. Nowadays, it seems obvious to me that our Leninist view of the party (albeit more democratic than most) was in tension with our simultaneously held Gramscian view of the party. Gramsci described the party as a kind of school or research lab where militants from the working class and radical intellectuals learned together and from each other by analyzing, reflecting on, and responding to changing conditions.
In the early 1970s when revolution seemed just around the corner, one could argue that our version of Leninism made more sense: rising mass movement party-as-spearhead = revolution. But once the “lull”1 started, Leninism not only became increasingly less relevant, it may have impaired our ability to make a clear-eyed reassessment of the situation. We never really figured out how to fight what Gramsci called “a war of position.” As the mass movement subsided and US factories began to close, our Leninist convictions ultimately led STO to focus more heavily on party-building and gradually shift out of factory work and other mass work. Although I was far too myopic to realize it at the time, I now agree that we were right to shift away from factory work.
However, we were also wrong to focus on party building or at least the specific party building approach we took. STO's approach involved committing the majority of our people and resources to the active support of liberation struggles (Puerto Rican, Iranian, South African) in hopes of recruiting the North American radicals working in and around those struggles. I don't mean to imply that we weren't genuinely in support of these struggles for intrinsic political reasons, only that a major part of our motivation was party building.
In any small organization, to concentrate on one thing is to exclude not only doing but even contemplating doing something else. Faced with the lull, what were our alternatives? It would have been unthinkable to me then, but it makes sense in hindsight to have interpreted our understanding of the need to fight white supremacy in the context of the “new working class” (NWC). NWC theories had circulated in the early days of SDS, but they were roundly denounced by the Revolutionary Youth Movement and Progressive Labor that came to define SDS.
Yet now we see the subsequent evolution of various NWC occupations—teachers, social workers, healthcare workers, office workers, and some lawyers. Since 1975, these professions have added huge percentages of women and African American and Latino workers. The fields of education, medical care, and law have been involved in major economic battles over the distribution of resources to the working poor and the working class as well as key human rights battles on behalf of minorities, women, and LGBT communities. I'm not saying that if STO had gotten involved in organizing in the NWC we would have grown by leaps and bounds, much less brought on revolution—only that it surprises me now that we never really considered this option.
One of aspect of Leninism that backfired on STO was Lenin's insistence on the necessity of clarifying political differences. STO was justly proud of the intellectual strength of our writings, and during the lull STO became more convinced than ever that political clarity was our main selling point to potential recruits. What's not to like about clarity? Well, premature clarity or incomplete clarity is not so great. Organizations can be clearly wrong as well as clearly right, and clarity based on a wistful out-of-date analysis of objective conditions runs the risk of being clearly wrong. To put it another way, the three splits in STO during my time in the organization involved clarifying our ideas and excluding or dismissing others. What if we had been willing to live with more ambiguity on the splitting questions involving trade union participation, democratic centralism, and the role of third world cadre?
How could we know that Mike Goldfield and those who supported him were wrong to argue for engaging in trade union struggles? We had no evidence; we deduced that they were wrong by clarifying our line through explication de texte and logical, legalistic arguments.2 Speaking of the new working class, I remember one comrade who was successfully engaged in organizing substitute teachers. He got little support and recognition in STO for his efforts from me or other comrades. On what evidence did we conclude that he was on the wrong track? In another example, we relied heavily on the work of STO lawyers for our neighborhood workers' rights centers, but saw their legal work as a means to an end and their profession as not worth organizing. The Third World Caucus split, of which I was a part, saw an organization—whose centerpiece was the fight against white supremacy—place its version of democratic centralism above the expressed preferences of its own third world members. What harm would have occurred if we had allowed the five third world members to exist in an ambiguous relationship to democratic centralism?
To put it another way, if we had been more “Gramsci than Lenin,” viewing STO as more of a workshop or school, perhaps we would have been more willing to live with ambiguity on issues where the evidence had yet to be gathered. Moreover, if we had been more “Marx than Lenin,” perhaps we would have viewed the lull as the time to gather more evidence about a changing world and conduct some good-faith experiments, rather than trying to build a party primarily on ideological clarity. Reading Mike's history of STO in the years after I quit left me with some sadness. It seemed like fewer projects were generated within the organization as STO appeared to rush from one issue or coalition to another.
Being interviewed by Mike and then reading T&R dredged up powerful memories. It forced me to re-examine issues and events that over the years I had compartmentalized or flat-out attempted to delete. Good histories should have that effect on you. I take strong exception, however, to Mike's musings that “sections of an increasingly globalized capitalist class will jettison traditional forms of white supremacy just as they are quickly relieving themselves of most vulgar forms of homophobia,” or later in the same paragraph where he writes “the traditional idea of [white skin] privileges granted by capital and the state may come to mean less and less as the new century progresses” (T&R, p. 312). Despite the fact that the one-percenters have integrated Martha's Vineyard, white skin privilege is alive and well in today's America—whether one looks at the black and brown gulag that is the US prison system, the growth in child poverty, or the continuing increases in inequality in employment, education, health, and housing.
I don't think Mike missed much of STO's story except for couple of areas. First, many of us in STO we were very close to each other—we saw each other at work, at weekly meetings, and over many a long night in the print shop. Don, Carole, and Noel were like older siblings to me, so leaving the organization was very wrenching. We lent each other money and cars and helped each other through divorces. As part of that closeness, we had a lot of fun together. This doesn't come across in the organization's somber tomes, but it can be glimpsed in some of our plant newspapers, or in random acts of hilarity. One time a young worker from Stewart-Warner accompanied us to an Iranian student demonstration in downtown Chicago. Like other production workers, the pounding noise of the factory had done a number on his hearing. When the chant went up, “The Shah is a fascist butcher—down with the Shah!” he began to intone, “The Shah is a fascist booger…!” Interestingly, his Shah-as-booger version immediately caught on among those standing around us and drew angry stares from others. Following on the last point, the story that remains to be told is what became of the workers and community residents who worked closely with us and in some cases briefly joined our group? What is their take on those times and their experiences? How did they resume “normal life”?
One of Carole Travis's favorite admonitions about our political work was that people could well ask us, “If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?” (That is, if you radicals know so much, why aren't you successful?) There were a lot of reasons beyond our control why STO didn't strike it rich in the sense of making a revolution. I don't fault myself or STO for that. But I do wish we had left more to guide the generations who will follow us. I wish we had tried and evaluated more things and left more pitons in the rock. On the other hand, we should thank Mike for writing T&R and for reminding us that sometimes in those days we wrought better than we thought, and that some of what we thought still resonates.
- 1As the “lull” dragged into its third or fourth year, I remember Ted Allen’s remark on the dormant state of the mass movement: “We keep waiting for capitalism's ‘other shoe to drop,’ but sometimes I think we might be dealing with a one-legged man.”
- 2For their part, most of the groups who split with STO were just as obsessed with clarity. It reminds one of the old joke about the two Trotskyist groups that called a unity conference which, after days of debate, resulted in five Trotskyist groups.
Comments
Dave Ranney
My remarks focus on the second question which will spill a bit into the third.
Having observed some of the current interaction of today's activists with unions, I think that a lot of young activists are confused about the trade union question. Therefore the discussion of STO's independent mass organization concept in Mike's book is very important. But more about the context of that concept needs to be discussed. It is a mistake (which Mike touches on) to think that the reason for our stance was that unions are always corrupt or that they are limited because of some Leninist notion of the limits of “trade union consciousness.” Some of us had this limited view at the time. This made us, similarly to activists today, vulnerable to the wiles of “good unions” or ones that use radical rhetoric. Trade unions based on labor laws that are designed to maintain the capitalist system will always attempt to limit and contain labor activism that threatens the system. But there are some particularities in the United States that are also important. Today's US trade unions are all the product of an era when trade unions made a deal with capitalism in the period after World War II. A share of the considerable bounty from the post war boom was traded for assurances of continuity of production and support for US foreign policy, undermining radical labor activism at the time. Part of this deal involved a purge of radical forces within unions and in this weakened state the unions accepted labor legislation that institutionalized the arrangement. When we were active in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, the capitalist class was in the process of canceling their end of the bargain by moving jobs to lower wage regions of the world. We interpreted, incorrectly in my view, the ongoing process and the resulting worker discouragement as a “lull” rather than an attack on labor by the ruling class. It led to the shift in STO that Mike describes in the book. What was needed at the time was an all out attack on organized labor from the left and an effort to defy and render useless, labor law itself. I am of the opinion that now as then we are in a period of a massive shift in the way capitalism works globally. Unions are concerned about their future viability as institutions and will fight even harder against left forces that could threaten existing labor unions. The recent actions of unions to contain the insurgency in Wisconsin and that of the longshoremen on the West Coast are examples of this.
This leads me to a related point. Mike rightfully placed a great deal of emphasis on the shift in STO from an emphasis on point of production organizing to support for national liberation movements. I was at the meeting when this decision was made. The main justification for this was the slowing of militant workplace activism by workers resulting in the decline of mass organizations at the workplace generally including those we had been involved in organizing. STO interpreted this development as “a lull.” And as an organization we increasingly involved ourselves in the support of national liberation struggles—particularly Black and Puerto Rican nationalist organizations. In hindsight the notion of a lull did not begin to get at what was going on. Capitalism was in a state of classic crisis and the ruling class was preparing an all out assault on workers in the industrialized nations of the world. None of us saw this which would have had important implications for our practice. At the very time the industrial working class was under attack we abandoned the industrial project. All of the information needed to make this analysis was available at the time. Yet none of us (including me) had the inclination to make a detailed analysis of objective/subjective conditions. I raise this not as a point of self criticism but because I believe we are at a similar juncture today and would hope that young activists do not interpret the decline of fortunes of parts of the Occupy movement as something akin to a “lull.” There is much, much, more going on out there.
Finally, I want to say a few words about STO's white skin privilege analysis. I thought that the point made by Mike, that the white skin privilege line could easily be vulgarized was well taken. Despite efforts by Noel and others to combat this, a number of groups—some supportive and some hostile to the analysis and its practice—avoided the relationship of class and race when characterizing our ideas. We did leave ourselves open to this by not being sharper about both the racial dimension of class and the class dimension of race. This was weakness inside STO as well. This is because the form of presentation was often a critique of other groups' positions (like PL's “smash racism”) or other groups' priorities in specific activities. But also our lack of clarity inside STO led us to broad characterizations of Black and Latino groupings as “Third World” or “The Black Community,” etc. And this weakness became greater as we shifted priorities from the workplace where the class dimension was clear to the national liberation struggles where it was blurred. This is very important today. The white skin privilege analysis needs to be worked out anew in the context of ongoing struggles. Today's activists face a world in which black and Latino leaders from the President of the United States, to academicians, politicians, and clergy claim to speak for the “community” while representing the ruling class. And while the original conception of color as a political rather than a racial category is still critically important, many more people of color are being admitted to “the club.”
Comments
Hayworth Sempione
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy…
—William Butler Yeats
According to Truth and Revolution, Sojourner Truth Organization's history is “fundamentally a tragic tale” (p. 307), and “the overall trajectory of STO's strategy was undeniably toward failure” (p. 327). This writer and former STO member disagrees. Radical political organizations never disappear; they disperse into the future with anticipation of periods of joy. Nonetheless Truth and Revolution has achieved a couple of things.
First, the book recounts in substantial detail STO's significant achievements and major contributions to theory and strategy (white skin privilege, dual consciousness and autonomy of agency which are explained and discussed throughout the book and summed up at p. 310) and its organizational functioning (p. 331):
[STO] emphasized…the priority of common action over strict adherence to a precise theoretical line, the need for a highly democratic internal culture of debate, and the responsibility of the party to “articulate and organize popular aspirations in a framework of class struggle,” rather than to provide top-down leadership and direction to the masses [citations omitted].
Secondly, with this book Sojourner Truth Organization now has a substantial, independently published history. In addition, others have archived, disseminated and referenced STO's various publications and documents. Still others claim to be its progeny. No other group of revolutionary North Americans from the latter half of the twentieth century, excepting the Black Panther Party, is comparable.
Truth and Revolution surpassed this writer's expectations both in depth and scope. Aside from a few lapses into typical leftist jargon (e.g., “the personal is political,” p. 324), it is well written. Although the interview methodology is spotty, the thoroughness, references, summaries and organization of STO's documentary record is generally commendable. However, the book's value ends with that chore (at p. 306). Putting aside several other quibbles, Truth and Revolution's conclusions are its major weakness (its conclusions are spread throughout, but drawn up in chief at pp. 307–333, “Conclusions: Reading STO Politically”) and “lessons learned” (p. 322).
The weakness is due in large part to the book's success/failure fetish and its desire to please current political faddists (the anti-hierarchy milieu, mostly), but also because of incomplete or imperfect information. That STO did not “make” a North American revolution (p. 332) or “catalyz[e] or inspir[e] insurgent mass movements” (p. 333) are short-sighted, if not silly, metrics. The book claims not to take a “linear approach to revolution” (p. 307, fn. 2), but its political conclusions are lineal: because the formally organized STO did not in some way result in a social movement that resulted in revolution, STO is a failure. Particularly revealing of the book's analogue analysis is its pontification that “revolution […] was arguably further away” after 15 years of STO's functioning (p. 307). This kind of outlandish assessment brings to mind Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character who, when faced with Charlie Wilson's celebrating the CIA's war against the Soviets in Afghanistan as a categorical success, quotes a zen master: “Well, we'll see.” As to STO's influence, well, we shall see and, even then, we shall see.
With respect to imperfect information, Truth and Revolution, for example, concludes without citation to authority that STO's activities with and among the Iranian Student Associations “was marked by failure on almost every level” (p. 177). Rather than discover and cite to fact, the book makes a factually inaccurate appeal to melodramatic sensibilities:
Unfortunately, the eventual fate [after the Islamic Revolution] of most of the returning exiles was imprisonment, death, or imposed political withdrawal and silence. Halfway across the globe, STO was largely helpless to assist its comrades and, despite many lessons learned [!] the groups experience with Iranian solidarity work was marked by failure on almost every level.1
Anecdotally, less than 5 percent of the Iranian students in North America returned to Iran and many of those who did return sided with the Islamic Republic. Most remained in North America or ventured to other Western Countries (word came that STO was known among cab drivers in Paris during the 1980s). Furthermore, after the Islamic Revolution STO remained in contact with Left-ISA members and assisted with campaigns and demands to various United Nations bodies for intervention against the persecution of Khomeini opponents (both in Iran or to prevent or delay deportation of ISA members or other regime opponents to Iran from European or Middle East countries).
More significantly, Truth and Revolution misses the priority mission of the Iranian Student Associations in North America: organizing other expatriate Iranians against the Shah and later against the Khomeini regime. With this task STO's involvement achieved much. At ISA meetings publicized by STO-printed leaflets, STO members spoke to enthusiastic audiences. An STO member appeared in the media speaking about the mistreatment of Iranian students by the police, FBI and immigration agents and documentation of the mistreatment was disseminated nationally and internationally. Another STO member, as part of a larger demonstration, disrupted a speech by Jimmy Carter after he hosted the Shah in exile. On another occasion, hundreds of Puerto Ricans, Iranians, Palestinians, Native Americans, Central Americans and North Americans marched through the night from Gary, Indiana, to downtown Chicago protesting US support for the Shah. STO played a large supporting role in organizing the protest which drew considerable attention. In fact, ISA events were frequently better attended than most North American leftist meetings. All of this activity by STO supported and contributed to a vibrant Iranian student movement which equaled or surpassed its North American counterpart and converged with the radical North American internationalist milieu.
Other than to Truth and Revolution (pp. 175–176), STO's formal position to defend the Islamic revolution against US intervention mattered little and Iranians had much to do with informing it. The ISA call for international opposition to the Khomeini regime often blended with American hysteria during the embassy hostage episode, something which STO carefully recognized and carefully avoided. (As one veteran ISA member who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Shah's police wryly opined to STO about the Khomeini regime: “Shah? Not such a bad guy.”) What mattered more to ISA was STO's active support on the ground for ISA's organizing Iranians against the Shah and subsequently against the Khomeini regime. This support was substantial and also informed at least a slice of North Americans at large about the historic US domination of Iran at a time when the US government was forming intervention contingencies.
The book makes too much of both STO's formal organizational ending and the reasons for its ending. If a metric is useful at all, it may be whether and how STO's former members are currently engaged. The current period of mass movements across much of the globe includes Occupy Wall Street in North America—which Ignatiev rightly assessed as the most significant social movement since the 1960s (speech to Occupy Boston, November 15, 2011). While for some former STO members the cock has crowed thrice, others have persevered having been prepared to act either with or without organizational formalities. Still others have veered off (“I'm not engaged at all”; “I'm a union hack”). If as Lenin, Ignatiev, and many others (including Truth and Revolution, p. 307, fn. 2; p. 313) have observed (repeatedly in Ignatiev's case), revolutions are unpredictable and can happen at any moment, “How many people did STO prepare for this unknown eventuality?” is one of only three relevant questions. The second question is: “What are these people doing now in a period of global motion?” The third: “How do they politically justify their actions?”
“Shifting objective conditions” and a “failure of will” (p. 308) may be necessary parts of explaining the banality of STO's formal disintegration, but it is hardly sufficient. Shifting conditions are part and parcel of political life and dealing with such are its essence. Failures of will and lack of individual resiliency, on the other hand, usually have specific precipitating causes.
The book cites “de-industrialization” (p. 308), lack of quantitative growth (p. 329), and “informal hierarchy” (p. 328) as factors in STO's organizational demise. Each will be addressed here, but the book does not attribute the unraveling to concern over risk-taking attendant to STO's involvement with “direct action” and, for some (Katz and Zeskind most notably) over Zionism. On the latter, the book does not recount how the massacre of over 3,000 Palestinians at the Sabra and Shitila refugee camps during the 1982 war in Lebanon (including the bombing of a US Marine barracks) fueled STO's foray into Palestine arena most significantly by sponsoring the splendid speaking and multi-media presentation tour by Maher Ahmed (now “Ahmad”). Ahmed's recorded presentations were requested by and sent to the STO Kansas City branch where the debate around Zionism was particularly intense due in large part to Zeskind's presence.
On the former, i.e., differences over risk-taking, the book does recount some of STO's activities around the mass illegal activity theme, but does not capture how facing personal risks created deep tensions (internally and externally) or how many members viewed STO's direct action (its own “self-activity”) not as abandoning its commitment to theory, but rather as applying dialectics by intervening in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic (“it is only by risking life that freedom is obtained,” Urgent Tasks, vol. 7, p. 22). It was an approach that assessed who—among the masses and among STO itself—was at that point of consciousness, had a willingness to act and wanted to organize around action. Some simply did not “have the stomach for it.”
Truth and Revolution cites “de-industrialization” as the result of “globalization from above” or “neo-liberalism” (p. 308). The book does not explain or expound on the term “neo-liberalism.” Even Professor Bracey in his “Foreword” declines to elaborate on “neo-liberalism” (“…whatever that is…,” p. vii) despite David Harvey's having written A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism. Harvey identifies neo-liberalism's origins as political movement initiated by Hayek and Friedman at a Swiss spa in 1946. The neo-liberal grouping consisted of pro-capitalist theoreticians who set out to remove all statist constraints on capital and to apply statist policies solely to protect capital from any interference. Foucault places neo-liberalism's origins with Walter Lippmann and French intellectuals in 1937 France where and when the term “neo-liberal” was supposedly coined. Hayek's vision for the neo-liberal project is haunting: “…dispense with the need for conscious control and…provide inducements which will make individuals do desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do” (quoted by Engelmann, p. 148, Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality).
The neo-liberal movement has profoundly influenced the political mainstream in North America, South America and Europe. The leading popular exponents of neo-liberalism were Thatcher (her mentor was Hayek) and Reagan (Friedman was his). The movement had been furthered along in North America by the likes of Gary Becker, Lewis Powell, Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Richard Posner and, if Posner is correct, Bill Clinton (Greenspan and Posner, at least, recanted during the 2008 crisis). Truth and Revolution's giving short shrift to neo-liberalism is likely explained by its anti-Leninist bias displayed in its murky critique of STO's Leninism (pp. 315–316). Lenin also famously used Switzerland as a base of operations during his exile in 1917 but also, ironically, at a Swiss spa during earlier years.
The neo-liberals, these pro-capital “Leninists,” have emphatically proven a point that is uncomfortable for Truth and Revolution: a small group of highly committed and skilled people with theoretical muscle can indeed (literally, in deed) change the world. This accomplishment by the neo-liberal movement should come as no surprise since Truth and Revolution heaps attention on STO's grasp of the dualities involved with consciousness and revolution itself, i.e., both having the potentials of rightwing (fascist) negations.
Truth and Revolution misplaces “de-industrialization” at the hands of the neo-liberals and because it misses the arguments against Hamerquist's “secular crisis” position (that capital was restructuring, i.e., “de-industrializing”) in the late 1970s and early 1980s (pp. 2820–284). Hamerquist argued that the Asian Third World would leapfrog industrialization just as he had argued that Third World national liberation movements would leapfrog capital and construct socialism directly out of wars of national liberation. The secular crisis critiques argued that the secular crisis position assumed the replication in East Asia of North American capital's organic composition; essentially that automated production would obviate the need for human labor to an unprecedented degree internationally. The critics argued that capital's flow to East Asia was orthodox intra-class wage competition that Marx saw as the principal pillar of capital's domination of labor. The “deindustrialization” of North America meant the industrialization of East Asia since it had not yet (1970s) been penetrated by advanced international capital. The critics proved to be correct as dramatically evidenced by Foxconn and other factories in Guadong Provence and in scores of other East Asian production centers replete with class antagonisms and rebellious worker self-activity. The point here, in terms of STO's formal demise, is that regardless of whether or how capital has shifted, flowed or deviated from its orthodox constitution, the tasks of revolutionaries never disappear; they change and modulate in intensity.
Finally, Truth and Revolution finds more failure in STO's “informal hierarchy” that resulted from the functioning of a more experienced and more talented few casually referred to as “the heavies” (p. 328). The book gives due credit to the heavies' heavy lifting in preparing the extensive dialectics training materials and organizing the study sessions, but decries the fact that they remained as a leading force. Sadly, the organizational utopia that Truth and Revolution fancies for STO failed to materialize. The fact is that many STO members were enriched by the dialectics materials and sessions and emerged as leaders of one stripe or another.
Truth and Revolution offers vague and, from its own point of view, troubling solutions to “informal hierarchy” by “establishing precise limits on this power .…” [and] …other measures to broaden and deepen the available pool of leaders…”) (p. 329). Interestingly, the “establishing precise limits on this power” part sounds like instituting hierarchy over the hierarchy! Because of its hierarchy fetish (“STO's […] standard sort of appeal to authority that sounds dated and sectarian to contemporary ears” p. 316) Truth and Revolution views gifted individuals as a problem as opposed to a strength. The problem more likely rested among those who were not comfortable or not capable of dealing with extraordinary or stronger intellects and extensive experience. Many STO members were unable to successfully challenge the “heavies” and this inability sometimes led to frustration and at other times to accusations of one kind or another. Nonetheless the “heavies” not only faced this situation squarely through the dialectics training generally speaking, but also in stark particularity with a study question from the dialectics syllabus: “How does the ‘average person’ retain his/her views in the face of a superior intellect?” (Urgent Tasks, No. 7, “How to Think,” p.26). Ken Lawrence's answer to this question in one of the early dialectics sessions was, “on faith.” And therein lies the rub, since taking anything “on faith” was anathema to the dialectics training itself and to STO's staunch anti-Stalinism. Marx's famous communist formulation, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” expresses the universal differentials within the realm of human abilities and needs. Tensions among them can only be superseded through a process of takings (“to each”) and givings (“from each”). This dialectic occurred within the voluntary associations of STO. A brain surgeon by virtue of her or his ability has a hierarchal (master) relationship to the patient (slave), yet at the same time the patient or collectively the patients (now masters) need continual service from the brain surgeon or collectively brain surgeons (now slaves). If both actors voluntarily associate in an unmediated social situation (and have a multiplicity of such unmediated voluntary relationships), they have constituted communism. A similar dialectic operated within STO and the rest, as they say, was in details of misunderstanding, jealousy, whining, or disingenuous posturing.
Furthermore, the book misses the important point when it claims merely that the dialectics training did “raise the overall level of theoretical discussion” (p. 329). The point of the dialectics training was to “impart an ability to evaluate political situations critically and to decide independently on proper courses of action […] to elevate the effectiveness of our political work by elevating the quality of our ‘product.’ […] we are concerned with the organization and presentation of criticism, whether of strategy, general tactics, or as issue-oriented practical work…” (Urgent Tasks, Vol. 7, pp. 19–20). Noel Ignatin once said: “Look, you and I could take a lot of time and I could impart to you all that I know and even then you might not attain my level of ability. The prudent thing is to take a shorter, intense time and develop in you a capacity of how to think about what you need to know to function politically.” The “heavies” inculcated (a dangerous word no doubt) in the membership that STO's potential was a Gramscian “army of generals.” Many members took that challenge seriously and the resulting uplift in self-confidence was palpable. Members, who rarely spoke, spoke up. Those, who rarely volunteered for uncomfortable tasks, began to volunteer. Those who rarely or never wrote for Urgent Tasks or the Internal Discussion Bulletin began to do so. Again, if one is so disposed, assessing whether and how former STO members are currently engaged during this period of global movements and Occupy Wall Street might be the better measure of how and whether the “informal hierarchy” was resolved.
Truth and Revolution may serve some people as a “Sparks Notes” of sorts to the life and times of STO (the dialectics syllabus was seen by STO as “the Marxist equivalent to a Berlitz language course”). It may also serve as an introduction to serious radical politics or as an antidote to political fads and hack Leftism. At the very least it is a refresher source and a trip down memory lane for those who lived and continue to live STO.
- 1Truth and Revolution, p. 178.
Comments
Lowell
For those of us who witnessed much of the tangled history of STO, this book represents a bold and well appreciated achievement. I don't have any problem with Michael casting his analysis of STO in the framework of his own political views, though some of the references to anarchist alternatives felt grafted on, but I do think that the author's political baggage projected the STO history down paths that were in some cases inaccurate and to a large degree counterproductive in our common desire to learn the most to do the best.
Let me confess at the outset that I realize I may have been able to contribute some of these observations as the manuscript was in development, and probably should have.
A methodological error begins in the opening chapter in laying out the historical groundwork. The rendition of the ’60s struck me as more empirical than analytical, more sociology than politics, more lineal than interactive. Michael suggests that it was a spate of wildcat strikes that inspired the turn towards workplace organizing. I believe such actions were more effect than cause. The unrest in factories, like that among youth in the student and anti-war movements and women, was inspired by the Black civil rights initiatives—which created the initial crack in the wall—and that in turn was inspired by stiffening anti-imperialist/nationalist movements that swept the world beginning well before the sixties but culminating then. Contrary to what is suggested in the book, the whirlwind of ideas and action arising out of the rise and fall of SDS, including the turn toward the workplace, was not essentially a disconnected phenomenon, but was profoundly linked to an underlying context. In my view, it was in this incubator that STO's founders learned in real world circumstances from the working class in both its national and racial forms early on and in its general form later, about the bedrock politics of white skin privilege and dual consciousness.
The initial failure to cast the rise of STO as a creation as well as a creator of mass activity belies a problem that plagues the script throughout and eventually leads to a set of wrong conclusions that gives STO too much credit in the beginning and concomitantly too much blame in the end, too much emphasis on the few and the subjective and too little on the mass and objective conditions. This overemphasis on the members of STO finally leads Michael to treat the organization as a failure because its membership disbanded, but I would argue that to the extent STO expressed rebellious impulses in practical theory that informs our movement to this day, the demise of STO as described in this book was greatly exaggerated.
In the process, we see a number of indicators of this basic misstep. From the use of obscuring terms like middle class in chapter 1, to the definition (p. 283) of our view of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as a dynamic that has no humans as forces of production (!), to the criticism of Noel for holding white workers accountable for being “given” privileges—all of this and more takes responsibility, subjectivity and even identity from workers, and transmits them to various activists.
It should come as no surprise then that Michael finds the problem with STO's shift from the workplace to more activist arenas as a series of errors that arose from the heads of the members, rather than the fact that we broke—in steps that were so small that they were virtually imperceptible (certainly to me)—away from the class. It would not occur to those who do not appreciate the role of water, that taking fish out of water is fatal. Not that STO couldn't have survived the lull, but only if we had not broken so thoroughly with our class base, only if we had maintained that strategic orientation in fact instead of just in form, where we consciously accepted that direct organizing work in the factories was no longer as available, and that the structural shift would involve a perhaps lengthy period without such contact, but that in that time we should stay porous to the event, to use the more recent vernacular. What would it have meant to STO and the class had we been around when the P9 struggle broke out? The uprising in southern Mexico? The austerity struggles? Madison? Michael says at one point that the Chinese revolution undercut class orientation, but that's only true if you use empiricism as your instrument. What Noel had learned and written in his piece on state capitalism could have forewarned and forearmed us to the possibility that the Chinese “revolution” was to be a means to more effectively develop capitalism and a huge new section of proletarians, as we have seen.
Instead, we, well most of us, succumbed to the lure of the activist milieu and warnings that we were in the midst of cataclysmic crisis. This was the mistake that doomed STO as an organization, namely that we went to a place that Michael and the anarchists, for the most part, actually think, as a general proposition, we should be.
Acknowledging the tremendous amount of excellent work that Michael poured into this book, I would still like people to come away with a different set of lessons, ones that realize that we hold ourselves in high revolutionary esteem at our own peril, that there is a reason why the highest and best organic relationship for revolutionary purposes has been the working class and the more associated with creating commodities that are useful and openly stolen, the better, and that radical subjectivity on the part of activists is useful only when it is informed by and embraceable and embraced by the broader class.
Finally, for now anyway, as a person who has been heavily involved in the rebirth and use of the dialectics course, I would be remiss if I didn't respond to what has become standard critique of the course, that it's outdated. This is true if the course were about things, events, issues—but it's essentially not. It's about what it says it is about: how to think—or more particularly how to think in terms of changing categories of thought so that we don't think of things like nationalism as static entities. It's about how change has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, how reality is often obscured by the apparent, and a number of other concepts that I firmly believe would make a difference in our common ability to forge a common path.
Comments
Beth Henson
I think this book is as near perfect as a book of its sort can be. I do think that my advisors would say that it is theoretically naïve and lacks a theory of historiography itself, that it is insufficiently self-reflective, without an analysis of its own narrative. In that case, I would disagree with my advisors. I hope Mike's own experience in graduate school does not encumber his ability to tell a story.
I have read a number of histories, memoirs, and biographies of the new left, in English and Spanish; this is the only accounting that combines useful intellectual history with a vivid sense of lived experience. He understands what we were about—the dilemmas we faced, our theoretical underpinnings, and the larger context where we worked. That someone his age could do that gives me hope.
The most difficult kind of history is that of the still living: one is a pioneer, without a previous analytical or thematic scaffolding. But more important is the need to protect the living, to avoid alienating sources, to avoid reviving old conflicts, to choose between versions of events which still have partisans and which could still affect people's lives. These are difficult decisions.
I noted two places where Mike's discretion was apparent and where I think he made the right choice. One was his omission of the events that followed on the Phantom Pheminists: the trial and punishment of a male leader by the Women's Commission. He was right to let that go; some of us were holding our breath, wondering just how many dirty sheets would be laundered. This may have added to the opacity of the discussion of gender relations, which could hardly be coherent without naming names, but it saved us the descent to titillation and gossip.
Another place where Mike finessed the discussion had to do with our relations with the MLN and the PR underground. For decades I have wanted to tell certain stories as cautionary tales and I have not figured out how to do so without putting people in danger, since the lived experience that is the center of the narrative cannot be told.
Finally, I would like to know who excerpted from my memoir and sent it to Mike without my knowledge. It would have been nice to inform me, especially since it was later extensively rewritten. Did you think I wouldn't notice?
Comments
Matthew Lyons
I first became aware of STO in the late 1980s, a few years after the organization disbanded. Compared with most of the left groups I was aware of, STO seemed like a breath of fresh air. Here was a Marxist organization that promoted both revolutionary politics and genuine open debate, and that combined practical work with nuanced, sophisticated analyses of major issues like white supremacy and fascism. Whatever its failings, I knew this was a model worth learning from.
In Truth and Revolution, Mike Staudenmaier writes about how STO developed the dialectics study to help strengthen and equalize theoretical understanding within the group. I took the dialectics course in 1989, taught by two former STO members, and I remember them emphasizing that if you want people to be able to provide constructive leadership and make good political decisions, then people have to be able to think for themselves. The course format itself reflected this, in that our teachers welcomed suggestions from participants for changes to the curriculum and encouraged all of us to take turns leading the discussions. The dialectics study and related STO readings had a big impact on me. They didn't make me a sophisticated thinker in terms of high theory, but they helped me develop some practical analytical tools, based especially on treating contradiction as a dynamic process and a crucial historical reality.
The analysis of white skin privilege, which was central to STO politics from beginning to end, highlights what was distinctive about STO's theoretical approach. Lots of leftists and liberals have embraced the white skin privilege concept over the past forty-odd years, but too many of them have interpreted it to mean that white people, including white workers, are simply bought off, co-opted into being supporters of the status quo. To me, the key thing about STO's take on this issue is that it treats white workers' situation as contradictory. STO said that white workers have a material stake in the system of racial oppression but are still part of an exploited class that has the potential to make a revolution. And this contradictory situation embodies part of the basic contradiction of capitalism, which is internal to the working class itself.
STO's analysis of fascism is one of its contributions that has most directly affected my own work. Mike's book traces how, in the late 1970s, STO shifted from a conventional Marxist view of fascism (as the last defense of capitalism when bourgeois democracy fails), to an understanding that fascism has its own dynamic and an important degree of autonomy from capitalist control; that it has a genuine revolutionary, anti-capitalist dimension; and that it has the potential to gain a mass following, specifically within the white working class. Here again, the analysis hinges on the idea of contradiction, specifically, fascism's contradictory relationship with the capitalist system. STO came to regard fascist movements and state repression as threats that were interrelated but also distinct and increasingly at odds with each other. By the early 1980s, STO was treating anti-fascist organizing as an area of strategic importance in its own right. Within the framework of building a defensive united front against fascism, STO promoted a militant approach that rejected reliance on the state.
One other area of STO's legacy that I want to highlight concerns the politics of solidarity.
Truth and Revolution details the organization's work in support of national liberation and “Third World” revolutionary groups, especially between the mid 1970s and early eighties. Parts of this account are not very flattering. For example, STO defended the Khomeini government as a bulwark against US imperialism, and “while it was quite willing to criticize other anti-imperialist organizations…for subordinating themselves to the organizational or ideological outlook of various revolutionary nationalist groups, in practice STO all too often did the exact same thing…” (p. 320). Yet the former STO members I met in the late 1980s were vividly aware of these mistakes. While recognizing that white (and US) privilege was a factor that could not be wished away, they were sharply critical of the model that said white leftists should simply “take leadership” from Third World revolutionaries, an issue I was struggling to untangle at the time. One of them recounted a situation where STO received opposite instructions from a black nationalist group and a Puerto Rican group they were working with closely, which underscored the point that they had to figure it out for themselves.
STO made many contributions and had many shortcomings, and I think Truth and Revolution does an excellent job of highlighting both in a fair and constructive way. But from the standpoint of learning from its legacy, it seems to me that STO's strengths are much more distinctive than its weaknesses. Many of the problems that Mike discusses—the informal hierarchy, the imbalance between men's and women's participation, the millenarianism leading to burnout, the failure to stick with one strategic direction for more than a few years, the failure to grow—were and are common problems on the left and beyond the left. That doesn't mean we should minimize or excuse them, but rather that we probably need to look beyond the specifics of STO's story to understand and avoid these problems. By contrast, STO's contributions to revolutionary theory, its efforts to promote critical thinking as a necessary complement to practical work, its fundamental humility regarding its own role in building a revolutionary mass movement—these were and are much more rare.
Comments
Tyler Zimmerman
I am a member of Unity and Struggle in Atlanta and I volunteered to respond to Insurgent Notes's invitation to participate in a symposium on Michael Staudenmaier's STO history book. I'm presently the only one in U&S who has read the book, though as a group we have been significantly influenced by the writings of the Sojourner Truth Organization. These are my perspectives and they don't necessarily reflect the views of Unity and Struggle.
I had a personal history with STO before joining U&S. I was formerly a part of a now defunct propaganda circle that was active in Kansas City, MO, in the early part of the 2000s. We made the acquaintance of an ex-STO militant who would play the role of a sometimes mentor and who made available their writing. The relationship we had with him would be short-lived but the influence of what we read would be profound. While we were not successful in building a functional organization, a couple of us felt it urgent to make STO's literature available to other revolutionaries and latent formations who might benefit from it because of the originality and theoretical deftness of what we had read. We initiated a website devoted to those writings. We were right. This web archiving project would serve as a bridge in our activity which put us in contact with other militants, including Staudenmaier, and some in Unity and Struggle, which I joined later.
Communists then and now live with the ghosts of social democracy, Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, but the "ultra-left" reading of Marx and Lenin that STO had as well as the centrality of W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and C.L.R. James, who were of largely marginal importance to the orthodox Marxism's listed above, opened a world of unorthodox interpretations, and to Marx himself, whose writings, according to the STO, “must be considered a totality” (a category unknown to official Marxism).
I'm going to respond to question two since that is by far the most pressing and relevant question asked of revolutionaries inspired by the legacy of the STO. As I see it, the lessons of STO are twofold. There's that of their organizational experience, internally and externally, and that of their written work. These things are certainly a dynamic; their practical work and experience no doubt influenced their theory and politics and new conclusions led to new orientations and practices. STO shouldn't have been alone amongst the New Communist movement in living that dynamic but they were and this is both unfortunate but also what has generated so much new interest in them among the Left in this period of crisis and regroupment.
For our purposes, I'm going to focus on the issues of communist organization and regroupment, the racial composition within STO, and their analysis of white-skin privilege and its relationship to the current era.
Organizational Experience
A key lesson for militants to take from the STO experience is the question of communist organization and regroupment. In the early years of the organization, the line was essentially that theory was of secondary importance while practice required the utmost unity. The separation of theory and practice this way necessarily had grave consequences for the group. While there was broad agreement on questions of race and white supremacy, the bankruptcy of the unions, and the need for direct action at the point of production, the actual experience of factory work without a higher level of agreement led to splits in STO within a few short years: a rightist split, that tended toward a more party-centric approach and a short time later, a leftward split that believed that STO should dissolve itself into factory organizations. Each of these splits was the result of underdeveloped theory on the role of an interventionist organization and the behavior of the unions. The results of this led what remained of STO to place a higher premium on theoretical agreement. Of course, this experience was necessary for them to discover why theory should be so critical.
Of equal importance is the question of the racial composition of STO, specifically the fact that they failed in the long term to build a multiracial and majority people of color revolutionary cadre organization. This remains one of the essential tasks of revolutionaries today in the US.
This failure is not without an aspect of irony as black Marxists James and Du Bois, who saw the immediacy of black struggle, were among their greatest influences and in large measure so was the concept of autonomy which lays at the feet of the oppressed the task of liberating themselves. White supremacy lives still—though not as it did in STO's time. The subjectivity that will be responsible for overthrowing this institution will be those objectified by it. This means it is the task of people of color in building forms of organization to do this.
However, this does not mean that white supremacy does not affect white working people and that they don't have a role to play in its destruction. For Marx, what makes humans human, or a “species being,” is that they change their material world and, in the process, are changed by their own doings. Under capitalism, humans are divided into manual laborers and mental ones, whereas communism is the revolutionary reunification of thought and action, or what Marx called practical-critical activity or praxis. When white workers fight alongside people of color they are transformed by this experience and assume an identity more likened to their species-beings.
STO can't bear the sole blame for its composition as this was a material and historical problem of their era, but what is useful in Staudenmaier's history were the mistakes and internal dissension over these questions which no doubt contributed to its overwhelmingly white membership. They couldn't seem to find a role for people of color in STO even though they viewed "Third World" struggles as the vanguard of revolutionary change. This took the form of encouragement by some in the organization for members of color to be active in revolutionary Third World organizations within “their” community. For people of color within STO, this meant joining largely Stalinist organizations that were in diametric opposition to the liberatory current that STO was building.
Theoretical Advances
Without a doubt, STO's development of a theory of white-skin privilege placed them head and shoulders above the entire revolutionary Left in their time and eventually this theory became hegemonic, though with certain costs. White-skin privilege pointed to a material basis for white supremacy rather than using the un-Marxist “false consciousness” argument that white workers were just victims of racist propaganda. Rather, they were given tangible incentives to oppose the black struggle which benefitted them as white labor-power but opposed them as alienated labor. In fact, white-skin privilege tied them more closely to their capitalist masters. The black struggle, though an effect of the particular experience of black people, had a universality that stood to benefit the global working class though it undercut the logic of the benefits of white labor-power. This perspective of the inequality of labor-powers through the form of race is what made STO more unorthodox but yet more Marxist than the existing tendencies of their time.
Today, there's been downward pressure on the white working class which has taken away a lot of the privileges it received in the 1970s. White-skin privilege has less use for the ruling class since there's no insurgent black movement threatening to destabilize capitalist social relations. In one sense, this is proof that white workers haven't in the long run benefitted from privilege. The various white ethnic patronage systems that were powerful machines in some cities 30 and 40 years ago have overseen the dismantling of entire industries where privilege was institutionalized. The consequences of white workers' acceptance of privileges decades ago have made their social position more precarious in the contemporary period.
White supremacy today is nowhere more apparent than in the absorption of the black power movement into black “representation” and the election of black mayors, police chiefs and, much later, black presidents. It has meant having a seat at the table of the management of capital. Black representation has rubber stamped and overseen the deepening of white supremacy as black folks continue to be incarcerated at higher rates, have higher rates of mortality, are murdered by police far more often, less likely to be employed, earn less wages, etc. Black representation is white supremacy in new form. Jim Crow and even white liberal democracy could not rule in the old way and had to incorporate black struggle in order to rebuild legitimacy. Capital accumulation and management had to assume new forms.
There's much more that could be said about the Sojourner Truth Organization. Aside from its commitment to rigorous internal and democratic debate, an emphasis on direct action, workplace strategy and tactics, and a critique of the unions retains much relevance for revolutionaries today and we in Unity and Struggle have taken inspiration from all of the above.
Comments
Mamos, Amaranto, and The Fish
Mamos, Black Orchid Collective
Amaranto, Black Orchid Collective
The Fish, Advance the Struggle
In August 2012, members of Advance the Struggle, Black Orchid Collective, one revolutionary from New York, and several comrades from Seattle and Oakland came together in Oakland to discuss and learn from each other. Instead of a conference aiming to hash out a comprehensive program, this was more of a combined study group and strategizing meeting, blending theory and practice. In the weeks leading up to the conference, we had read and discussed several texts together, including Truth and Revolution, and had begun critically reflecting on our own interventions in the Decolonize/Occupy movement. During the conference, we participated in a workshop that analyzed key themes from Truth and Revolution and from our recent experiences in struggle. We are sharing our notes from this workshop in the hope that other groupings, collectives, communities, and crews around the country might find them useful in their own reflection processes.
We decided that the goal of our collaboration with each other is not to immediately form a small national cadre organization and then recruit people to it. We are simply coming together to share skills and tools with each other so that we can draw new lessons from the struggles we've been through the past years that gave birth to our organizations and shaped them—especially our different experiences intervening in the Occupy upsurge and its aftermath. This workshop is an example of the kind of discussions we've been having. In the upcoming year, we hope to open up these conversations to include more revolutionaries from other regions and political tendencies, and we hope to engage more with similar conversations that are happening among other revolutionary networks. We hope that sharing this workshop can help with this process, and we hope that over time this process will start to gather revolutionary forces around a common trajectory of theory and practice that could lead to new breakthroughs in revolutionary struggle and revolutionary organization.
We are not sharing our answers to all of the workshop questions for several reasons. First, we have different answers, not a solidified organizational line. Secondly, in the current moment, any answers to these questions are provisional since our generation has only just begun to struggle and reflect at the level necessary to really generate new theories and long term strategies. It will take a while yet to answer all of these questions. Thirdly, in the current climate of the US Left, there is a tendency to freeze groupings into positions based on one or two things they say at a specific moment, instead of seeing our organizations and crews as dynamic works in progress. At our early stage of development, this is frustrating and harmful.
If other groupings are studying Truth and Revolution, we hope they find this workshop useful, and we are looking forward to hearing their answers to these questions, and sharing our own.
Part I: Race, Ruptures, and Revolutionary Consciousness
Objectives:
1. to debate how revolutionary consciousness emerges
2. to understand the forces of capitalist hegemony that prevent it from emerging, especially white supremacy
3. to debate the role of revolutionary organizations in breaking down this hegemony, and unleashing this consciousness.
Texts covered: Chapter 3 of the STO book
The previous day, we discussed the concept of class composition, based on the Italian autonomist Marxist movements documented in Steve Wright's book Storming Heaven. Class composition is the idea that the proletariat is not some fixed identity; it is always changing as proletarians struggle against the way capitalism is organized, and the capitalists reply by co-opting, crushing, or incorporating their resistance, creating more dynamic forms of capitalism that reorganize the proletariat. In reply, the workers then reorganize themselves to initiate a new cycle of struggle. To study class composition, we can do what Marx called workers inquiry—interviewing, learning about how workplaces, cities, working class culture, etc., are changing, and learning about how people are fighting on the job and outside of it.
Class Composition, Ruptures, and Class Consciousness (20–40 min)
Here are three different positions on how class composition relates to the creation of revolutionary consciousness:
1. Economic determinism: the class composition at any moment automatically determines the ways in which the working class struggles. The working class will automatically struggle in these ways, even if they are not fully conscious of it.
2. Class consciousness comes from ruptures: Don Hamerquist argues that revolutionary working class consciousness is not automatically determined by class composition. Instead, it emerges through events that serve as conscious ruptures from the status quo. Something is a rupture if it is a beginning that ensures new beginnings—a reference point that builds our confidence as working class people to break with the legitimacy of capitalist “business as usual,” including its forms of acceptable and easily dismissed protest. So the next time a crisis emerges, instead of reaching for the usual activist tools that involve pleading with government officials or bosses, we turn toward more disruptive and creative methods like unpermitted demonstrations, blockades, wildcat actions on the job, strikes and walkouts, etc. All of these require a reasonable hope that we can get each other's backs under intense pressure, and that hope is a lot more concrete when we know we did it before. Of course, the struggles that generate ruptures are often in response to the given class composition at any time.
Based on these criteria, what are some examples of ruptures? How can we tell whether something is a rupture or not?
3. Position held by some people in the Kasama network: There is conflict in society over oppression and political power, but it is not necessarily always about class. Class composition does not determine revolutionary consciousness. Instead, we need to build a “revolutionary people,” which includes people from various classes who have developed communist consciousness. Communist consciousness comes from events and ruptures, but primarily from the way in which revolutionaries interpret and believe in the power of these ruptures. As Alain Badiou puts it, to be a revolutionary you need to “live in fidelity to the event.” In other words, revolutionaries create new values, new ideas, and new culture through our collective willpower.
Spectrum debate on these 3 positions: Everyone who agrees most with the economic determinist position goes to one side of the room; everyone who agrees most with the first position goes to one side of the room, everyone who agrees most with the third goes to the other side, and everyone who agrees with the second goes to the middle. People in between each position line up on a spectrum between them, depending on which one they are closest to. Then the facilitator asks people from each pole in the debate to present their positions and then facilitates each pole responding to the other ones. People can move closer to another pole if they are convinced by arguments that people in that pole are making.
Note: In this debate, most of us were close to the second pole, the idea that class consciousness comes from ruptures, but there was significant discussion about what exactly constitutes a rupture and how you can tell when one is happening.
Follow up question: How do these different theoretical positions generate different organizational practices? What is the right balance between working class flyering/organizing/consistent community building on the one hand, and rapid, flying-squad interventions in ruptures like Occupy on the other hand?
Discussion questions on hegemony, white supremacy, and class consciousness (20 minutes):
1. What happened at the Melrose Harvester plant? How does this show STOs perspective on race, especially in the workplace?
2. What is hegemony? How is white supremacy an example of hegemony?
3. What were W.E.B. Du Bois's arguments about race and class in America? How did STO draw from these?
4. What were Ted Allen's arguments about how white supremacy started?
5. Why did the civil rights movement make these issues so central for radicals in the 1960s? Think about the experience of SNCC. What do we think about the conclusions that radicals drew from this experience?
6. Was STO a multiracial organization or a white solidarity organization? What contradictions did they have around this? Why did those contradictions emerge? How did STO relate to Black-only or Latino-only organizations? Do you agree or disagree?
7. Summarize the concept of privilege politics and the critique of it that some folks in our tendency have made. How is STO's line similar to privilege politics? How is it different?
8. Who were the Weathermen? How was Noel Ignatin's argument about white skin privilege different from the Weathermen's idea of privilege?
9. How did STO relate to Latino workers (pp. 98, 99)?
10. What were Ignatin's arguments in his Black Worker, White Worker speech? Do you agree or disagree?
11. What were the main critiques of Ignatin's speech from other factions in STO? Do you agree or disagree with these critiques?
Consciousness, Struggle, and Revolutionary Organization (20 min):
How do workers become revolutionaries? Here are three positions discussed in Truth and Revolution. Different people and factions in STO emphasized aspects of these three positions at different times in the organization's history, which lead to a tension in the organization that was sometimes productive, sometimes destructive, and sometimes both.
CLR James: Gardener/seeds of socialism/invading socialist society: everyday working class life includes seeds of the new socialist society growing within the shell of the old. For example, in the 1960s, aspects of daily life in Black communities, Black popular culture, and Black resistance at work all pointed in a socialist direction. The role of revolutionaries is to be a gardener: simply to “recognize and record” these seeds as they organically grow.
Gramsci: Dual consciousness: workers have contradictions. To some extent, they have bourgeois consciousness, and to some extent they have working class consciousness. Through struggle, working class consciousness grows beyond its own limits of class belonging, becoming communist consciousness. They key thing is to embrace struggles that go beyond the limits of “legitimate” protest, which often means breaking with legality. It is through these kinds of experiences of “getting each others' backs” under pressure that communist consciousness grows.
For example, there is a civil war in the minds of white workers—on the one hand, they buy into their white skin privilege, but on the other hand, they realize it doesn't compensate for their exploitation as workers, and that they need to fight side by side with Black workers to end this exploitation. The role of revolutionaries is to convince white workers to side with Black workers' militant demands, and to show that these demands are actually in their own class interest. In this way, they overcome their racism.
Orthodox Leninism: Workers on their own can only develop “trade union consciousness.” Communist consciousness comes from the outside, from petty bourgeois intellectuals who build revolutionary organizations that bring consciousness to the workers.
For example, white workers have “false consciousness” and are blinded by their own racism. That's why we need to build a revolutionary organization which can teach them not to be racist.
Discussion question: Which of these positions is Noel Ignatin's Black Worker, White Worker closest to? Why?
Spectrum debate on these three positions: CLR Jamesian “seeds of socialism” on one side, orthodox Leninism on the other, and Gramscian dual consciousness in the middle.
Part 2: Interventions
Texts Covered: Chapter 2 of the STO book
Chapter 2 Summary
The inherited Marxism of the New Left led to a focus on employed heavy industrial workers. The May ’68 experience radicalized the world, and showed how the labor bureaucracy often plays a negative role. The Italian Hot Autumn showed that rank-and-file insurgency was still possible. The DRUM showed that US workers could insurrect in a revolutionary way, organized around the demands of black workers. STO drew from Antonio Gramsci's idea of “hegemony,” meaning the influence of the ideas of the ruling class. They saw the primary form of hegemonic ideas in the United States as white supremacy, and focused much of their agitation on that. STO rejected trade unions as vehicles for healthy workplace organization, and instead promoted independent workplace groups. Many workplace orientations in the Chicago area, tension always between supporting workers no matter their decisions and agitating for certain approaches and politics.
Interventions:
Group 1:
STO Western Electric: 6-day long wildcat in response to lay-offs and speedup. Union told the workers to wait for an investigation, but they struck instead. They demanded reduction in work, new bathroom, removal of a racist foreman and a direct negotiating committee with management. Chicago left tried to orient to it, but the workers were like “we don't need any of that socialist shit.” STO persisted and offered legal advice and the use of their printing press, and STO accepted this support role. Management offered a deal: “we'll give you your demands if you stop discussing this struggle with other workers.” STO was just in a support role, and so they didn't intervene. Compare to an intervention of your own.
Group 2:
STO Truckers' Struggle: Went on several day wildcat in response to an increase in gas prices. They demanded a price control on gasoline. STO members moved to a local truck stop in Gary, Indiana, and helped the strikers produce propaganda. They also offered technical assistance in organizing meetings and reaching out to contacts. Eventually had strategic discussions about where the strike was going. Compare to your own interventions.
STO Gateway Industries: A factory staffed almost entirely by immigrant women from Mexico prepared to close and move to Mexico; the workers found STO at their labor legal clinic. STO “prompted” them to organize against the plant closure. When a manager offered to meet with an STO lawyer, the workers organized a sneak attack and confronted him. He offered the women jobs at a new factory, but after discussion they tore up the contract STO had brokered with the management.
Your experience here—themes to think about:
Intervention vs. autonomy
Political vs. economic
2b: Types of Workplace Organization
Spectrum Debate!
Surplus Populations / Noel Ignatiev: unionized workers are conservative; unions being destroyed is good and the new insurgency will come from the unemployed and the 89 percent.
STO: unions are labor managers, independent workplace organizations are the form for workers' struggle that moves in a revolutionary direction.
Orthodox Trotskyism: unions are mass working-class organizations with bad leadership that we should regain control of and push towards revolution.
3. Organizational Forms
Texts covered: Chapters 1 and 4 of the STO book
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Split, Chicago, June 1969
The collapse of SDS shows how loose networks can all of the sudden transform into hardened organizations based on the pressure of events.
Factions:
Could we see existing networks today hardening? If so, into what factions?
STO Splits
Defining Democratic Centralism
Boston Group's definition of democratic centralism: “precisely the organizational form recognizing the necessity for a single direction of the proletariat and disciplined democratic discussion of its strategic and tactical options.” It is opposed to federalism which “implies the equality and inviolable integrity of different political lines… but liberalism of this kind is incompatible with an organization seeking to serve the interests of the oppressed and exploited” (p. 120)
STO X's definition of democratic centralism—“For the [Federation], democratic centralism means a decision to carry out joint activity… without such a decision, and such activities, it is quite possible to continue to function as if every position and tendency has equal status. Second, it means implementation of divisions into clear majorities and minorities on all disputed questions with the understanding that the majority ‘rules.’ This, it means that a minimum concern with developing our political positions into a coherent perspective entails the organizational purging of elements which consistently adopt minority positions which are closer to that of other political tendencies than to the [Federation]. Fourth it means a very careful and reasoned concern with not mechanically imposing a majority decision on the minority, for the simple reason that no minority that is serious will accept such treatment in a grouping so new and so weak. Fifth, it means definite protections of the right of minorities to argue their positions.” (p. 121)
Spectrum Debate: Everyone who agrees most with the network position goes to one side of the room and everyone who agrees most with the national cadre / programmatic development position goes to one side of the room.
Networks: We can find provisional unity in developing a fighting network. We can figure out the theory as we go because we cannot use theory to predict the future. We don't even know our real dividing lines of debate; we will only discover this through struggling together.
National Cadre / Programmatic development: We need to promote theoretical unity before regroupment. Taking actions with those of different political tendencies will tear us apart. We need to prepare for future upsurges and we can only do this by starting with theoretical unity and recruiting to it.
Note: Below is a summary of one position between the poles.
Coming Together So that We Can Turn Outwards: Our network should avoid the twin pitfalls of a) prematurely building a Marxist cadre organization that closes us off from broader multi-tendency revolutionary networks and b) liquidating our political tendency into the ideological confusion that currently exists within broader multi-tendency revolutionary networks. Instead we should form an informal network prioritizing our own collective learning and development, with little overhead in terms of structure. The primary purpose of this network should be to help each other develop a clear strategy for how to intervene in broader struggles in collaboration with people from other tendencies. We should agitate folks we collaborate with, by proposing solid strategies around organization, race, gender, workplace organizing, and class struggle in ways that don't cut us off from the rest of the milieus through sectarian polemics and dogmatism. Studying the Marxist method together is a key part of developing our capacity to make these interventions in a non-dogmatic way.
Comments
Response by Michael Staudenmaier
From the moment I embarked on the project of writing a book-length history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, I hoped that it would be received as a political intervention with relevance to contemporary revolutionary struggles. It is therefore highly gratifying to see the intensity of response to the book, not only in this forum but also in the sort of collective discussions described in the submission from the Black Orchid Collective. Anyone who waded through the acknowledgements in Truth and Revolution knows that I have a tendency to over-thank people, but I want to begin by recognizing the substantial effort that John Garvey has put into organizing this roundtable. I am also grateful for the contributions from so many former members, as well as from a number of younger revolutionaries. Thank you all for sharing your memories, your perspectives and your experiences.
There are a number of issues raised here that deserve significant attention. Given limited space and time, I can only address some of them. In this piece I will deal specifically with the question of success and failure, the contrast between objective and subjective conditions, the vagaries of privilege based narratives of oppression, and the matter of history from the top down and bottom up, followed by a few closing comments on Marxism, anarchism, the legacy of STO, and finally a public apology.
The most frequent criticism I have received since the book was published concerns my assertion that “the history of STO is fundamentally a tragic tale” (p. 307). Some version of this criticism is shared in this forum by former members Lowell May and Heyworth Sempione. To be clear, I didn't and don't intend “failure” and “tragedy” to suggest that no positive outcomes emerged from STO's experience. If I believed that, I wouldn't have written the book. Instead, I hoped to acknowledge the rather enormous task that the founders of the group set for themselves, one that was shared by those who came after them. As Carole Travis puts it, “We hoped that the day-to-day experience of working people being exploited at the workplace along with our philosophical clarity would provide the essential ingredients necessary to transform wildcats into uprisings, insurgencies into revolution.” Of course, as Carole says, “We didn't pull ‘it’ off.” This failure was not unique to STO; all revolutionary history to this point is the history of failure. At a book talk I gave in this summer, someone suggested that my perspective was one-sided, even un-dialectical. I answered that it only appears to be un-dialectical if we believe that history has stopped. I don't. I am a revolutionary optimist, so tales of failure (or at least the lessons we can learn from them) inspire rather than deflate me. I hope other readers view things similarly.
Lowell also suggests that I place “too much emphasis on the few and the subjective and too little on the mass and objective conditions.” While I think he misinterprets my views on the few vs. the mass (more on that in a minute), I will definitely agree that I tend to focus on subjective rather than objective conditions. I have always been more of a voluntarist than a determinist. I think this is better than the opposite, but I struggle as a historian to maintain a proper balance.
John Strucker challenges my prognosis regarding white skin privilege. He is absolutely correct that white supremacy and white skin privilege persist and in many ways have gotten worse since STO ceased to exist, especially regarding the criminal justice system. In this regard, I think Tyler Zimmerman's commentary on the ways in which black “representation” has been progressively incorporated into the functioning of white supremacy expresses my own position on the subject more clearly than I did in the conclusion to my book. Part of my mistake involved conflating the actions of capital with those of the state, especially in the context of the prison industrial complex. While the latter continues and accelerates its devastating attacks on black communities, within capital the tendency to disregard white skin privileges has become more and more pronounced in recent decades, though this process is not without countervailing tendencies.
Then there is the classic issue of history from the top down vs. the bottom up. I have always been a “from below” person, but a number of people have pointed out that my depiction of STO itself is top-down, driven in particular by the intellectual production of the “heavies” as opposed to the organizing efforts of the rank and file members of the organization. Comments from Carole, John and Dave Ranney remind me that I spent far too little time trying to recover the experiences of the factory workers, community members, and activists who encountered STO over the years. As John aptly puts it, this is a “story that remains to be told.”
In terms of the heavies, Ken Lawrence argues that “there was never an instance when the three of us were united at one pole and the rest at the other pole.” My primary point was not that he, Noel and Don didn't disagree, but in fact that their frequent disagreement was precisely the thing that kept them in positions of power so consistently. Truth and Revolution suffers from too much attention to them, or at least from too little attention to others, but this is symptomatic of the imbalance between intellectual and social history for which I apologized in the introduction.
There is another aspect here, which gets back to Lowell's point about the few and the mass. It is notable that Lowell and Heyworth, despite a shared rejection of my assertions regarding “tragedy” and “failure,” fundamentally disagree on this particular question. Heyworth's odd but spirited defense of Leninist cadre formations on the grounds of their formal similarity to the grouplets that facilitated the rise of neo-liberalism is a far cry from Lowell's concern that my narrative “takes responsibility, subjectivity and even identity from workers, and transmits them to various activists.” While I am skeptical of Heyworth's top-down sketch of the rise of neo-liberalism as primarily the outgrowth of a small cabal of intellectuals, my general point was never that narrowly constructed cadre formations can't change the world by themselves, but rather that it is frequently not a good thing when they do. In my estimation, despite their otherwise vast differences, the histories of the Soviet Union post-1917 and Chile post-1973 testify to this basic anti-authoritarian position.
Thus, it will hopefully be clear that Lowell misjudges my version of anarchism when he suggests I think the focus ought to be squarely on small groups of activists intervening in moments of crisis. In fact, I—along with the broad class struggle tendency within anarchism with which I identify—fully share his conviction that “radical subjectivity on the part of activists is useful only when it is informed by and embraceable and embraced by the broader class.” In this sense, STO was both creation and creator, and I tried to capture this dialectical interplay in various ways throughout the book. To the extent that Lowell doesn't see it, others may not either, which would be a failure on my part. To say the least, I didn't pay enough attention to the international context within which STO emerged, developed, and eventually collapsed. My book tended to be national, regional and local, rather than transnational, in scope.
Given more space, I would also love to wade more deeply into the perpetual left conversation on Marx, Lenin, and their respective -isms. As an anarchist who has spent the past several years sympathetically engaging with one small branch of the Leninist family tree, it is sometimes wrongly assumed that I aspire to a libertarian Marxism stripped of its Leninist (authoritarian) distortions. If anything, writing Truth and Revolution convinced me that Lenin's brilliance as a strategist of revolution was fatally compromised by an authoritarian and amoral impulse embedded within Marxism from the very beginning.
There is much more left to be said about STO's resurgence as a focus of inquiry for contemporary revolutionaries, a trend that clearly accelerated during the time I spent working on the book. I hope that Truth and Revolution helps raise the group's profile among younger radicals while simultaneously puncturing any unexamined assumptions that STO represents the model of a perfect revolutionary organization to which all contemporary formations should aspire.
One small correction is in order. Noel suggests that the appendix to the Workplace Papers collection is not available on the internet, but it can in fact be found on the STO web archive.
Finally, I owe Beth Henson an apology. I can say with certainty that Noel sent me the excerpt from her manuscript back in 2006, but I take full responsibility for failing to follow up with her directly once I received it. I certainly made many errors in the process of completing this book, but as someone whose politics have been heavily influenced by multiple strands of feminism, this one is especially embarrassing. Several years too late, I apologize.
Comments
Insurgent Notes #9, October 2013
Articles from this issue of the journal.
Full contents at: http://insurgentnotes.com/past-issues/issue-9/
Comments
Yugoslav self-management: Capitalism under the red banner - Juraj Katalenac
![Kardelj and Tito Kardelj and Tito](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/RpTtMh2Ksd8SgIYu.v.jpg?itok=OPvagwrP)
Analysis of Yugoslav socialism and its system of self-management. From Insrugent Notes #9.
All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.
Lenin
Yugoslav self-management is a unique historical experiment. Furthermore, it is one of the most interesting formations of, so called, real-socialism up to today, as Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and initiated its own specific economic, political and ideological way. It was a system which publicly criticized “bureaucratic deviations” of the Soviet Union, which shouted “workplaces to the workers,” which “abolished” its own Communist Party and set its own path in Cold War politics. But it was also a system of its own contradictions, a system that criticized the bureaucracy of others while its own was growing, a system that stood for workers’ self-management only on paper while technocrats and managers ran the economy in practice, a system that “abolished” the One Party by just renaming it and a system that raged against imperialism while it took an active role in it. Also, if we take a look at questions of federalism and centralism or the national question(s) within Yugoslavia, we will get one really complex and interesting picture. Still, self-management, especially with the new social movements that spawned recently and that are attracted to such ideas, remains a crucial and relevant topic. For the same reason, it is a really big shame that in an era of the Fukuyamist “triumph of democracy,” few people study Yugoslavia and, on Croatian faculties, it is mentioned only through post-90s liberal-nationalist mythology.
The aim of this article is to give a Marxist critique of Yugoslav self-management. I think that Marxism is not “defeated” and that Marx’s critique of capitalism can be applied to so-called “socialist” countries. Because of that, I consider “socialist” Yugoslavia as a capitalist society. As a Marxist, I completely reject the Stalinist hoax of “socialism in one country,” but also, I analyze economic and political relations based on a Marxist analysis of capitalism instead of mere proclamations and documents that these systems published. In my critique of the Yugoslav economy, I’m relying on the works of Marxists such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Paresh Chattopadhyay and their analyzes of the Soviet Union, as there are a lot of similarities and useful approaches. Using Marx’s method, I accept that the fundamental criterion to characterize an economy is in its specific social relations in production. They reveal the specific ways in which workers and the means of production are combined for production—or in class society—“the specific form in which the unpaid surplus labour is pumped out from the immediate producer” (Marx in Chattopadhyay 1994:5). By using this method, as Dunayevskaya and Chattopadhyay did in the case of the Soviet Union, or as I’ll try in the case of Yugoslavia, we can notice specific social relations in production on which society is based, i.e. the ways of appropriation and use of surplus labour of that society. We can also mention the need of these economies for “enlarged reproduction of the relations of production that determined specific existential forms of ownership, exchange, and distribution” (Chattopadhyay 1994:6). For an analysis of capitalism, it is important to present the dual meaning of Marx’s concept of capital: economic and legal, upon which we will analyze relations within “socialist” Yugoslavia. Also, it is important to tackle the revision of Marxism by Marxist-Leninists such as Stalin and the Soviet intelligentsia, but also Yugoslav intelligentsia such as Tito, Edvard Kardelj, Boris Kidrič and economist Branko Horvat (see his book ABC of Yugoslav Socialism (1989).
In the discussion about workers’ self-management, I’ll also analyze its critique by Yugoslav intellectuals around the philosophical journal Praxis. In the #3-4 issue in 1971, Praxis presented its critique of Yugoslavia that in some works, like in Rudi Supek’s “Contradictions and ambiguities of Yugoslav self-managing socialism” (1971), marked Yugoslavia as a capitalist society, but still stood behind self-management as a path to communism.
This subject is too large to be adequately processed in such a short form. A lot of “episodes” and “moments” of the Yugoslav system will be left out. As this is my first serious article, I’m hoping that certain mistakes will be pointed out in critiques and comments I’ll receive upon individuals’ reading of this one. I’d like to thank all the people whose comments helped me to shape this article. Also, I’d like to express my gratitude to the editors of Insurgent Notes to allow me to contribute to this issue.
BIRTH OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA
It is impossible to talk about Titoism or Yugoslav self-management without knowing certain historical contexts which helped to spawn these ideas. In order to do that, we need to analyze the politics of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and its national branches, working class self-activity, and the international official communist movement, which was by then heavily infected with post-October, now Stalinist, counter-revolution.
It is really important to state right away that communist revolution never happened in Yugoslavia. The CPY won power because it came out on the winning side after the Second World War, because of the strength of Soviet imperialism, i.e. the Soviet Red Army, which it supported and because it succeeded in securing its ruling position in the inner-Yugoslav power struggles with the royalists. Furthermore, during the Second World War, the CPY was the leading force in the National Liberation Movement (NOP)[1], an inter-class anti-fascist popular front movement, which allowed bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements to enter on an equal basis, unidentified with their old political banners. NOP was a broad movement and the Party recruited most of their militants, regardless of class affiliation, to form the cadre and the executive apparatus for a new stage of counter-revolution (James 1986:89). Even leftists like to repeat Yugoslav mythology about the NOP being a revolutionary movement; its documents, such as the February 1943 Statement of NOV i POJ and AVNOJ’s HQ [2] , prove otherwise. In that document, it is clearly stated how they consider “private property sacrosanct” and advocate the “full possibility of self-initiative in industry, trade and agriculture” (Petranović 1988:342).
One of the first tasks of the CPY was the reconstruction of Yugoslavia and establishing full control over Yugoslav territory. The number of victims of the Second World War was huge. The demographic loss was 1,706,000 people[3]; 3.5 million people lost their homes and production was only at 30 percent of its pre-war capacity. 36.5 percent of industry and 52 percent of railway tracks were destroyed in the War (Bilandžić 1974:16). Following the “Soviet model” of nationalisation and establishment of state property, the CPY thought it could reconstruct the economy and launch industrialisation which would help it to accumulate a vast amount of means of production.
When I say that the CPY “copied” the Soviet Union, it is really important to state that, back then, to most CPY members, the Soviet Union meant “socialism,” which is a reason why the masses and the rank-and-file of the CPY were really enthusiastic about the creation of a new society. It is really important to state that most members of the CPY did not actually know what was happening in the Soviet Union and that they idolised it as a symbol of proletarian victory and salvation. That cannot be said for the leadership of the Party which was very familiar with events in the Soviet Union, especially since most of the leaders of the CPY were agents of the NKVD[4]. According to various Yugoslav historians, the CPY—as the most loyal follower of the Communist International—thought that the Soviet Union had developed the “right experiences” in building socialist socio-economic relations and a political system which could be applied to all “socialist states” and which could be accepted by all communist parties. The CPY thought that the “Soviet model,” i.e., the “Russian way,” was the only possible right way to socialism, in the sense of building state property and an administrative-centrist system of managing society, especially the economy. The Yugoslav leadership declared that nationalisation meant socialism because all property was confiscated by the people’s authority and because that confiscated property had passed into the hands of a “working people’s state” which had become manager of that property. It is really interesting to mention here Tito’s interview in Borba (eng. Struggle ) from November 29th 1951 in which he talked about the development of the “revolution” in Yugoslavia. Through this interview we can clearly understand the ideological paradigms of Stalinism which were deeply rooted in the CPY’s policies. He talked about four revolutionary actions of Yugoslav communists: (i) the uprising against the occupiers, (ii) the struggle against domestic traitors, (iii) the destruction of the state apparatus which served the occupiers by the people, and (iv) the creation of a “popular government.” He also talked about the national question of the Yugoslav people and about the transfer of the means of production to the hands of “working people.” As we can read in C.R. James’s State Capitalism and World Revolution (1986), where he quoted the Yugoslav leadership, “nationalisation was well prepared organizationally and was carried out in such way that sabotage and damage were made impossible. All enterprises in the entire country were taken over on the same day and almost at the same time without the stopping of production” (James 1986:90). What we have here is classical example of “socialism in one country,” i.e., Stalinist state capitalism.
Long before coming to power, the CPY tried to destroy working class self-activity and to subordinate it under its banner. The CPY managed to become the one and the only representative of the working class in Yugoslavia and victory in the War only strengthened their position. For example, in the press of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) from Italy, also known as Battaglia Communista, we can find interesting “moments” from the time when Titoist forces entered Trieste. These “moments” concern executions of anarchists and communists by Tito’s forces, but also they also show how Tito’s forces did not allow the Trieste proletariat to carry red banners, but only Yugoslav and Italian national flags (Battaglia Comunista 1947, 2012; Erba 2012). This pretty much demonstrates the anti-proletarian nature of popular front politics. When it comes to the CPY’s actions “at home,” militant trade unions were destroyed and sucked into the new state:
“Under the construction of the new Yugoslavia, after the nationalisation of industry, and as a result of the quick tempo of socialist building, the workers’ class is no longer a class of bare-handed proletarians which must fight a daily political and economic struggle, which must fight for more bread. This class today—in alliance with other working masses—holds the authority—holds the greater part of the means of production, and its future depends in the first place on itself, on its work, and on its unity with other toilers, on the mobilisation of all toilers in socialist building” (CPY in James 1986:80).
Also, one of the reasons for the destruction of unions was the unification of manual and intellectual workers in the Labour Front of the new “corporate state.” The new role of unions became to organise “socialist competition and shock work, rationalisation and innovation (…) fight for work discipline, to improve the quality of work, to guard the people’s property, to struggle against damage, against absenteeism, against careless work and similar things” (CPY in James 1986:81). They became the guard dogs of the “new” system, whose task was to secure work discipline and working class obedience. When it came to increasing the speed of production, the Yugoslav leadership used Soviet methods which had been proven in practice, such as Stakhanovism[5]. One such experience is described in a book Prvi radnički savjet (eng. First Workers Council; 1985) by Dragutin Grgurević, which describess how workers who raised production levels were rewarded much in the same way as Soviet Stakhanovites. Of course, production was organized on the principle of hierarchy in production. This continued with the 1947 First Five-Year Plan where Yugoslav leadership talked of “utilising working hours (…) progressive payments for work over and above the norm, as well as a system of premiums for engineering and technical staffs” (CPY in James 1986:84), incentive pay for the bureaucracy in order to inspire them to intensify exploitation of workers, etc.
In short, the CPY was a regular run-of-the-mill Stalinist party. And it was really one of the finest examples of Stalinist parties. As C.L.R. James put it, “Titoism has been able to achieve in a few short years the counter-revolutionary climax which it took Stalin nearly two decades to accomplish”(James 1986:79). According to him, Stalin had to struggle against the remains of the revolutionary Bolshevik tradition, while Tito and his followers had only to pledge their loyalty to him and they could easily justify all the policies for which Stalin had to struggle for decades. Good examples of that are the creation of “our people’s, our socialist intelligentsia” (James 1986:83), which Stalin managed to put into the 1936 Constitution of Soviet Union, while Tito did so after a few years in power.
Still, even today, many Marxists and different kinds of leftists deny the fact that Titosim was anything but a national version of Stalinism implied to Yugoslavia, as Maoism was Chinese Stalinism or Hoxhaism was Albanian. That pretty much puts the idea of “socialism in one country” under the eyeglass—especially its inability to bring communism as it, funnily enough, develops quite anti-communist sentiments. But to our Marxists and leftists, Titoism is something special and inspiring, because of the conflict between the CPY and CPSU in 1984 which resulted in the CPY being expelled from the Cominform and developing its “own” ideology of socialist self-management. In the next part of the article, I’ll examine the Yugoslav conflict with Stalin and the reasons for development of the ideology of socialist self-management which later become known as Titoism.
CONFLICT WITH STALIN AND BEGINING OF "DESTALINASATION"
After the Second World War, the CPY wasn’t the only party which followed the “Soviet model.” The Communist parties of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania followed the same policies after they conquered power in their countries. In September of 1947, the CPSU, in the absence of the Comintern which Stalin had shut down in 1940, created an international political body which consisted of nine communist parties called the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform). At the founding congress of the Cominform, Andrei Zhdanov made a speech in which he said that today’s world was divided into two “camps”—the western imperialist, with the United States of America (USA) as its leader and the socialist, with the Soviet Union as its leader. When it came to the “other” side, the USA came out with the Truman Doctrine in March of 1947, according to which the USA would give to every country, which was threatened by communism, military, technical and financial help. The same year, the USA came out with the Marshall Plan, according to which the USA would give financial help to European countries in order to help them develop their defensive capabilities against the Soviet Union and in order to help them maintain stability, i.e. to destroy working class resistance.
In this early political polarisation, Yugoslavia stuck strongly to the Soviet Union. In the diplomatic battle for Trieste and Istria, the CPY was counting on strong Soviet support, as was also the case with the first Five Year Plan (1947–1951). The leadership of the CPY was so loyal to the Soviet Union that Edvard Kardelj once said to the Soviet ambassador that the Yugoslav leadership saw Yugoslavia as one of the Soviet Union’s future states, of course through economic and political contracts. This is why, when the CPY won power in Yugoslavia, the party leadership forced integration with the Soviet Union much faster and broader than the Soviet Union initially demanded. This integration had its statist, political-economic and cultural aspects, and the beginning of integration was confirmed with the Contract about friendship, mutual aid and post-war cooperation of Yugoslavia and Soviet Union [6] signed on April 11th 1945. Similar contracts were signed with all Soviet satellites. At the CPY’s demand, the Soviet Union had sent numerous experts to Yugoslavia, both civil and military, which were placed in important positions within the Yugoslav army, police, economy and state apparatus. But soon this “Soviet-Yugoslav idyll” would come to an end.
Tensions first rose during the Trieste crisis, in which Yugoslavia was in a dispute with Italy and the West on the delineation of borders in Istria and Slovenia and for the town of Trieste. On March 18th 1948, Stalin had withdrawn the Soviet experts who were working on resolving the dispute. Without Soviet backup, the Yugoslav political position was incredibly weakened. The day after, the Tripartite declaration was signed, in which the Free Territory of Trieste was assigned to Italy. The second tensions were related to Yugoslav support for the Greek partisans (1946–1949). Namely, the CPY wanted to create a so-called Balkan Federation and it was discussing it with the CP’s of Albania and Bulgaria. Greece was also supposed to be part of the Balkan Federation, which is the reason why Yugoslavia supported the Greek CP and its partisans in their uprising. This support was mainly logistical, but also economic and military. In this struggle, Yugoslavia was also counting on the help of the Soviet Union, but the leadership of the CPY did not know about an agreement between the Soviet Union and Great Britain from October of 1944. According to that agreement, Greece was part of the British interest zone and the British government helped Greek royalist forces in their fight against the communists. Also, this agreement meant that the Soviet Union was supposed to give up on “communist” Greece, by not helping the Greek communists—not even during their uprising against British and royalist repression—in exchange for other political and territorial compromises. Besides these two examples, tensions between Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were growing because Yugoslavia did not agree to create so called “associated companies.” “Associated companies” were the main component of Soviet imperialism towards its satellites. They were created from joint capital—i.e. Soviet capital plus capital of the satellite country in which an enterprise was opened—but most of the profits were sent for reconstruction of the Soviet Union.
Because of its objections to Soviet wishes, the Soviet leadership accused the leadership of the CPY of “lacking of internationalism.” This conflict hit the ceiling with a Resolution of the Cominform from July 28th 1948 which stated that Tito was “a champion of Western powers,” that there was a need for changing the leadership of the CPY and a return of the CPY to the line of Marxism-Leninism. In a state of quiet shock, at the 5th Party’s congress, the Yugoslav leadership gave its support to Tito and his clique and voted against the Resolution. This caused an escalation in the conflict between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria and Albania, on one side, and Yugoslavia, on the other. Just a few years after the Second World War, Yugoslavia found itself faced with another possible conflict. But for Stalin, military intervention was the last option. He tried to secure his hegemony through CPY cadre which still pledged its loyalty to him and which opposed decisions from the CPY’s congress and supported the Resolution. These people were known in Yugoslavia as “ibeovci” and “Stalinists”[7] and they were repressed and persecuted by the Yugoslav system, which culminated with the opening of two concentration camps for them called “Goli otok” and “Sveti Grgur”[8].
Conflict with the Soviet Union pushed Yugoslavia into isolation from the rest of the “communist” world. Soviet experts withdrew from Yugoslavia; the administrative system collapsed because of isolation; the economic crisis intensified, and there were great dangers of social unrest inspired by both ideological and economic reasons. The need for a theoretical explanation of the conflict, along with the greater economic and political crisis of Yugoslav system, resulted in what Yugoslav regime historians called “reviewing of Marxism-Leninism and organising of ‘socialism in one country’”(Bilandžić 1974). According to Bilandžić, the CPY’s intelligentsia turned to the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, especially Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin’s State and Revolution. Through this, the CPY tried to “prove” how it was still on “the line” of Marxism-Leninism and how it was criticising “Stalinism” and the Soviet Union from that position. They argued that state ownership of the means of production is the lowest form of public ownership and it was really important to transcend it as soon as possible because it can lead to bureaucratism, i.e. the bureaucracy controlling surplus value and, by that, to the degeneration of “socialist society.” They saw the biggest problem in the Soviet Union precisely in bureaucratism, i.e., in the growth of a bureaucratic machinery, which allows bureaucracy to form quickly and to usurp the rights for which the working class struggled. To fight against this, the CPY’s intelligentsia proposed decentralisation of state power and repealing of hierarchical organisation inside of enterprises.
One of the first indications of the new ideological-political conceptions was Edvard Kardelj’s report On peoples democracy in Yugoslavia [9] (1949) submitted on May 28th 1949 to the National Assembly of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia during the envision of Peoples committee act [10]. In this report, Kardelj was wrangling with the “Stalinist” understanding of power in socialist countries and he was advocating further democratisation and a greater role of the masses:
“There’s no perfect bureaucratic apparatus, no matter what kind of genius leadership stood at the helm, which can build socialism. Socialism can only grow from the initiative of masses of millions with the right leadership role of a proletarian party. Thus, the development of socialism cannot go any other way than the way of constant deepening of socialist democracy in the sense of greater self-governing of the masses of people, in the sense of their greater attraction towards the work of the state machinery—from lowest organs to highest, in the sense of greater participation in direct managing in every single enterprise, institution etc.” (Kardelj in Bilandžić 1999:316).
Kardelj also emphasized Marx and Engels’ analysis of the Paris Commune which pointed out the danger of bureaucratism after the proletariat’s victory over the bourgeoisie in the revolution, but also the “methods” which the proletariat can use to secure itself against bureaucratism. These “methods” are electability and changeability of all officials, a wage system which will prevent fighting for leading positions and about attracting the masses towards the state apparatus, in the way, as Kardelj paraphrased Lenin, that everyone will be a “bureaucrat” for one period of time and by doing that nobody will be able to become a bureaucrat. This report gave a sketch for the idea of socialist self-management.
On November 23, 1949 Boris Kidrič and Đuro Šalaj signed Instruction on forming and work of workers councils [11] in which it was said that workers’ councils have to actively participate in the making of the most important decisions. However, this document stated that self-management should be introduced only in the biggest enterprises. On June 27th 1950, workers’ self-management was introduced by law with the Basic law on managing of state enterprises and higher economic associations by workers’ collectives [12] , popularly called Law on giving factories to workers to manage them or workers’ self-management act (Holjevac Tuković 2003:132) . The first section of this law gave us a vision of Yugoslav self-management: “Factories, mines, traffic, transport, trade, agricultural, forest, communal and other state enterprises, along with other people’s property, in the name of community are managed by workers’ collectives in the framework of state plan, according to rights and duties identified by laws and other juridical regulations” (Jugoslavija 1985a:1023). According to the law, worker collectives exercised their right to self-management through workers’ councils and steering committees of enterprises or so-called “higher economic associations,” which consisted of several associated enterprises. The council was elected on a one year mandate, while council members were able to be recalled before the expiry of their mandate. The workers’ council consisted of between 15 and 120 members, except in the case of enterprises which employed fewer than 30 workers, where the whole collective was the council. It had an elected and revolving steering committee, whose job was to run the enterprise and to answer to the workers’ council and competent state organs. The director was an ex officio member of the steering committee. Ana Holjevac Tuković claims in her article “Socio-economical reforms 1950–1952 and their reflection on administration of Peoples Republic of Croatia” (2003) that although the Workers self-management act officially acknowledged factory councils, their powers were still limited by the Party. Operational independence, in this period, was exercised only in the field of technological and expert questions, while all material questions were dependent on the state’s policy.
One more step towards socialist self-management was established with the General Law on People’s Committees from 1952. People’s committees were defined in the first section of the Law as “local organs of state power (…) organs of people’s self-management in boroughs, districts and towns” (Jugoslavija 1985c:1025). This law established units of local self-governance, so called people’s committees, which were supposed to enable self-management on a local level. These people’s committees did have certain powers, for example, they were able to make budgets on their own (Section 14). The highlight of these legislative changes was the Constitutional Law on Basics of Societal and Political Association of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and Federal Organs of Power from 1953. The Constitutional Law constituted the political order in Yugoslavia which continued to develop in the next decades. Self-management became a fundamental part of the state. Self-management is mentioned in the 2nd section of the Law, which says that power in the FPRY belongs to “working people” who practice it through various organs of self-management. The 4th section states that the basis of the socio-political organization of Yugoslavia is “public ownership of the means of production, producers’ self-management in the economy and self-management of working people in boroughs, towns and counties” (Jugoslavija 1985d:1028). Producers’ self-management in the economy was further defined in the 6th section which states that working collectives have the right to manage the economy directly and through worker’s councils, agricultural cooperatives, assemblies, etc., and that workers have a right to choose and to be chosen in worker’s councils. A very interesting part is about the right of an economical organisation (enterprise, cooperative etc.) to set its own economical plans, that, after finishing its duty, it independently disposes of the organization’s income (the law even sets a minimum which must stay in the enterprise), that it can independently set the wages of its workers (the law even sets a minimum wage). Self-management of “working people” in boroughs, districts, towns etc. is established with the 7th section. Citizens choose and recall their representatives in the Producers’ Council of the People’s Committee of every town. Every citizen can choose and be chosen in People’s Committees and they have right to participate in the “exercising of power” through referendums, voters’ committees, citizen councils etc. Because of these two, economical and municipal, forms of self-management, the Yugoslav Federal National Assembly had two homes: the Federal Council and the Producers’ Council.
One of the best examples of the CPY’s theoretical explanation of the “new path” can be found in Bilandžić’s article “Self-Management 1950–1974” (1974) where he claims that, because of following the “Stalinist” model, the CPY found itself at a crossroads where it had to choose between a bureaucratic and centralist system of management and the “revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses.” According to him, the CPY took the side of the masses with its idea of the transformation of revolutionary socialist statism into self-managing socialism and with a resurrection of Marxist positions on the state. He wrote how the “new quality (…) was in the fact that the CPY switched from theory into revolutionary praxis by saying that the process of withering away of the state cannot be prolonged for the future—as Stalin used to say—but it must start right away, especially in the field of managing the economy” (Bilandžić 1974:23). Svetozar Stojanović, one of the members of the Yugoslav Marxist-Humanist[13] group Praxis, stated in his article “From Post-Revolutionary Dictatorship to Socialist Democracy” (1971) that “there is no real evidence that the historical process of the withering away of the state and transcending of politics as alienated power dominated by professional groups started [in Yugoslavia]” (Stojanović 1972:385), and he continued, “it is really naive to believe in that the state started to die out when the Party is still ruling” (Stojanović 1972:386). He claimed that the Yugoslav political crisis, which happened in the 60s and 70s, was rooted in the inability to radically “destalinise” Yugoslavia.
If we expand Stojanović’s critique with a little bit of Marxist class analysis, we can notice a certain “Yugoslav oxymoron.” On the one hand, we have the Yugoslav establishment’s attack on the bureaucratism of “Stalinism” and the alienation of the Soviet intelligentsia from its base, calls for de-professionalization of politics and the wider inclusion of the masses in the political process, especially in the economy, but at the same time the Party accumulated total political power, which strengthened its state apparatus, especially its repressive functions against the working class and political enemies. This “Yugoslav oxymoron” will be examined in a future text, along with the whole system of self-management and its class character.
YUGOSLAV SELF-MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE
Charles Lindblom in his book Politics and Markets (1977) dedicates entire chapter to “Yugoslav innovations,” i.e. so called market socialism. Funnily enough, Lindblom explains why Yugoslavia developed market socialism by using Tito’s explanation where Tito is actually paraphrasing Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations regarding the division of labour in which he found the fundamentals of market socialism:
“backward, weak and small enterprises cannot participate in the international division of labour. That is why integration and complete specialisation in production are necessary so that production can be as inexpensive as possible, of the widest possible assortment, and of the highest quality” (Tito in Lindblom 1977:339).
Furthermore, Lindblom explains Yugoslav political reforms since 1952 when the Yugoslav leadership started to replace central direction with substantial central direction intermixed with market direction, until 1965 when a major reform was implemented. He claims that, since then, central administrative control in Yugoslavia has been “roughly of the same sort as is found in the market-oriented polyarchies[14]” (Lindblom 1977:340). Central administrative control is not achieved through a central production plan but by “ad hoc interventions through taxation, occasional subsidies, specific regulations binding on particular industries and both central and ‘national’ (that is, provincial)[15] control over major new investment” (Lindblom 1997:340). Yugoslav enterprises produced what they found profitable to produce. The enterprise bought inputs freely on the market – both national and international. When it came to the national market, of course, there were other enterprises which are selling certain commodities and inputs which were used in the production of certain goods. The enterprise rented land from the government, but also from private owners. Also, it hired labour, but it is important to point that, above the minimum wage, workers received income in the form of shares in profits, which, of course, depended on their work. Like every other capitalist enterprise, a Yugoslav enterprise must cover its costs, like the minimum level of wages. It was free to look for new markets, to establish diversity of production, to apportion its profits between wages, collective benefits to its workers or reinvestment in the growth of the enterprise. New enterprises could be started by any individual or a group; even though usually they were mostly opened by units of local self-government or existing enterprises. After founding, all enterprises – except those small private ones with less than five employees – were turned to “social ownership.” Also, certain Yugoslav enterprises were joined to certain foreign corporations and had mixed partial “social ownership” from the Yugoslav side and partial private ownership. To fight monopoly, the Yugoslav government used a whole spectrum of different methods, such as tariff reduction and removal of import restrictions. It is important to mention how Yugoslav legal formalism equalized producers and intermediary organisations (banks, markets, foreign trade companies), i.e. “those that produce surplus value and those that manage the disposal ofsurplus value in the shape of means of production” (Supek 1971:355). In conditions of market competition, that led to the monopoly of intermediary organisations.
It is also important to mention agriculture. Formerly collectivised, large parts of agriculture were now given to private holdings and farmers. 10–15 percent of arable land was in possession of state farms which were prominent in providing the supplies for domestic and foreign markets. This sudden turnaround from collective to private farming was justified, as Lindblom puts it, “as an expedient, necessary until such time as the development of the communist new man would once again make collective agriculture possible”(Lindblom 1977:341).
Trade unions were important participants in enterprises, often competing with workers’ councils. Yugoslav historians and ideologues often liked to emphasize, and so did Lindblom, that unions and workers’ councils were instruments “through which employees can defend their own occupational interests” (Lindblom 1977:341). Even Lindblom acknowledges how these institutions were “still also an instrument of party and government direction of enterprises and the work force” (Lindblom 1977:341). To justify this thesis, we can just take a look at statistics he presented. Between 1958 and 1966, almost 1400 strikes were reported, while none has been officially reported since 1968. Did workers’ struggles just stop because Yugoslav society reached the communist goal of a classless society or did unions just fulfil their institutional role in capitalist society—suppressing workers’ struggles?
Certain answers can be found in Tito’s text “On Workers’ Managing Economic Enterprises” (1950), where he writes that the state influence in the economy did not case to exist, but it was weakened and it calls on workers to take on its functions. Tito emphasizes how the state will wither away gradually and the speed of its withering depends on the advance of cultural development. Cultural development is necessary because before the “revolution” in Yugoslavia the working class did not exist (sic!) and after industrialisation of undeveloped parts of Yugoslavia was implemented peasants become members of the working class. Because of that, it is important that the Party and state educate and raise peasants according to “values of socialism,” so that they could evolve into a new working class and self-manage production. The leading role in this education of workers was up to the unions, which don’t have to struggle for workers’ rights like before because workers now “own the state,” but the new task of unions is to educate workers so that they can manage society through workers’ councils. Self-management is necessary so that bureaucratism could be avoided, because a system in which technocrats are managing the working class is “the greatest enemy of socialism” (Tito 1950:232). It is quite clear that the Yugoslav leadership used unions, as mass organisations of the working class, to establish systematic control deeply rooted in workplaces, so that any kind of industrial or class unrest was prevented. Unions were also allies of the political forces within the League of Communists of Yugoslavia[16] which were fond of extensive liberalisation of the market. For example, at 1957’s Congress, they’ve asked for removal of state regulations, lower taxes, greater autonomy of enterprise for investments, etc. Younger party cadres were also their strongest allies, since they did not have the experience of the Second World War or the revolutionary wave of the 20s and they were inclined to liberal ideas.
Hungarian anarchist Arpad Kovacs writes that behind the idea of self-management was the belief that workers should set their own work day and decide the ways they’d produce something, etc., because, according to Tito, that was the right way to reach communism from socialism. Kovacs also notes how the workers’ councils’ function was to make decisions on most of the aspects related to management of the enterprise, while managers were in charge of planning and implementing the plan. The workers’ council was superior to managers and it could choose and recall the steering committee or its individual members. Steering committees were made of experts that had previous management experience and the state would appoint them to certain enterprises. Being a manager in a steering committee was permanent employment, while workers’ councils exclusively consisted of workers employed in certain enterprises. When it came to the process of managing companies, if we look behind the ideological curtains unfolded by the LCY, enterprises were managed by managers and not workers. Managers were subject to party control and they were instructed to pursue profits. They were also subjected to control trough local government, banks, industrial chambers, professional associations and youth organisations. Even as the Yugoslav leadership denounced the Soviet Union for its bureaucracy and marked it as one of the biggest enemies of socialist development in almost every text, bureaucracy in Yugoslavia flourished with the “new course.” The workers’ council election of the steering committee was nothing but a mere formality and while, on paper, the Yugoslav leadership was calling for workers’ participation in the steering committees, in practice, steering committees were professionalised, employing only university educated lawyers and economists, making for greater differences between workers and managers. Hierarchical relations in productions still remained. Initially, wage differences between managers and workers were 1:3.5 but from 1967 they rose to 1:20. In spite of all this, Michael Lebowitz remained a fan of self-management.[17]
I’d like to quote a worker from a self-managed metalwork factory from the north of Croatia whom I interviewed regarding a struggle in which he and his workmates participated. When I asked him about power relations between the director and the workers’ council during Socialist Yugoslavia, he replied:
“In terms of managing, there was a workers’ council. Members of the workers’ council were elected from the list, and everything was according to the dictate of the LCY and every work unit had its branch. The League came with suggestions, which meant that nobody was allowed to protest against them. I remember how, in 1987, I was the first who protested in the front of workers against the League making decisions about who would represent us in the workers’ council or in the central workers’ council (…) It seemed that workers liked my protest so they elected me for our workers’ council, because I wasn’t a member of the League which until then were the only eligible people. Workers were motivated by this statement of mine as some kind of rebellion against the regime or who knows what, so they elected me and management had to accept that. That was the first time that workers chose who would represent them [in this factory]. It was presented to workers that they are managing, but they did not. (…) The director was, of course, the God – the law, and you couldn’t get to the director to complain, because the pyramid was structured in that way. You could only see the director if his driver drove by you, but otherwise they were Gods.” (ITAS 2012a).
All this is pretty much summarized by Susan Woodward:
“a primary goal of the introduction of workers councils in 1949–50 was to deprive the unions of their bargaining power (…) Elected representative of skilled production workers were to be consulted by managers on how to cut labour costs. The aim was to have workers accept limits on wages and benefits within enterprise net revenue, approve capital investment even if they cut into incomes and sanction dismissal of workers when required by budgets or modernisation programs. The essence of self-management (…) was this attempt to enforce incomes policies and financial discipline without state involvement or central regulation” (Woodward 1995:261).
The LCY, in order to impose better control over enterprises, over time evolved into an organization of managers and technocrats. That made workers really sceptical about joining the party. In 1960, half of the League consisted of bureaucrats while working class members were only one third.
Introduced in 1952, self-management was followed by extremely rapid growth and a rise of living standards. Between 1954 and 1964, GDP increased almost 9 percent a year, which put Yugoslavia among the very fastest growing economies in the world (Lindblom 1977:342). But what was behind this rapid growth? It was a rapid increase in means of production which was not followed by an increase in means of consumption. We could compare the extent of this growth with the USSR during the New Economic Policy (1921–1928). From the 60s, Yugoslavia was fully open towards the Western markets and it made several trade agreements. It is also important to note that Yugoslav decentralisation was highly supported by the International Monetary Fund (Musić 2010:180).
One of the big problems of the Yugoslav economy was unemployment. In 1965, unemployment in Yugoslavia was 8.8 percent which was around 326.000 workers. To solve this problem, Yugoslav leadership allowed workers to emigrate to Western Europe, mostly West Germany, which had work force shortages.
The 60s marked the crisis of “Yugoslav socialism.” Until 1972, there were big struggles inside Yugoslavia and attacks on Tito’s regime. The regime was attacked from different fronts. For example, inspired by the world’s revolutionary movements of 1968 and the writings of the Praxis group, Yugoslav students denied the communist nature of Yugoslavia and demanded “full communism”; in Kosovo, Albanians demanded to be treated as a “nation”[18] and demanded that Kosovo be acknowledged as a Yugoslav republic, instead of province; in Croatia, the 70s were marked by a “Croatian spring” nationalist movement which demanded further liberalisation and that more profits stay in Croatia, i.e., on the republic instead of the federal level. After these events, the Party was cleansed of nationalists, liberals and, more importantly, its left. 1974’s Constitution acknowledged the republics as the main body of political and economical discussion and negotiations within the Yugoslavia. This meant that, although rhetorically the Constitution made some changes in favour of “real workers’ self-management,” nationalist-liberals won a great victory in their battle for the greater political liberalisation of country. The really important thing is that unions and workers’ councils, especially in these times of great crisis in Yugoslavia, always sided with liberal-nationalists who advocated liberalisation of market. They did that because they were sceptical towards the LCY’s bureaucrats and directors they had to deal with in the everyday life of their enterprise and their attempts to reduce their rights and wages. While liberal-nationalists promoted ideas of market efficiency with their maxim “to each according to its work” (Musić 2010:185), workers believed that by giving greater economical autonomy to the republics and with greater profit staying in their republic, their wages would increase.
1980 was an essential year for Yugoslavia. Not just because of the world oil crisis, but because Marshall Tito died. Already in 1981, the Yugoslav government was on the verge of bankruptcy with more than 20 million dollars debt (Musić 2010:187). That led to “stabilisation programs” that increased competitiveness in the world market, but also led to a decline in wages of 30 percent. Considering “stabilisation programs,” it is important to note that between 1979 and 1988, Yugoslavia signed six arrangements with the IMF, which later called for austerity measures, lowering of wages, a fall in production and in living standards (Lončar 2012:12). In 1988, Yugoslavia managed to retrieve its 1960s standard, but the crisis of the system was still enormous. In an economy oriented towards efficiency instead of the satisfaction of human needs, the Yugoslav elite saw a way out of the crisis only in the sacking of two million workers, while Yugoslavia already had one million unemployed. Since the elite had never made such drastic measures before, the crisis caused industrial insurgency. In 1980, there were 247 registered strikes with 13.507 workers participating, while eight years later, in 1988, the number of registered strikes rose to 1851 with 386.123 workers participating. These strikes were not merely products of economic struggle, but also political ones, where workers were again allies of liberal-nationalists demanding liberalisation of economical and political system. Liberalisation of the political system, and consequently abandonment of the “no-minority-no-majority” principle, together with the demand for the greater economical autonomy of republics, lead to the disintegration and finally collapse of Yugoslavia.
SO, WHY CAPITALISM?
To claim that the Yugoslav economy was nothing but capitalism is not anything new. Stalinists all over the world were claiming that since Tito and Stalin broke up in 1948. One of the most popular texts on that subject is certainly Is Yugoslavia A Socialist Country (1963) written by editorial departments of the Chinese papers People’s Daily and Red Flag in 1963 after Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union moved towards more friendly politics when it came to Yugoslavia. The Chinese Stalinists wrote that: “all Marxist-Leninists hold that Yugoslavia is not a socialist country. The leading clique of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has betrayed Marxism-Leninism and the Yugoslav people and consists of renegades from international communist movement and lackeys of imperialism” ( People’s Daily; Red Flag 1963:1). While this text is mostly directed towards the Soviet turn in politics and Khrushchev’s calling Yugoslavia an “’advanced’ socialist country” (PD; RF 1963:2), what makes Yugoslavia capitalist can be summed up in the existence of private property and the abandonment of agricultural collectivisation, Yugoslav dependency on US loans and US imperialism in general. While these accusations make sense and certainly are reflections of Yugoslavia’s capitalist nature, they represent a weak and superficial critique, whose only purpose was to defend Stalinism as a political ideology, but also, more importantly, as political praxis. In this analysis, I intend to put forward a more fundamental critique of Yugoslav capitalism, a critique that will also include other Stalinist regimes.
Regarding ideological justifications of Yugoslav economic realities, Yugoslav communists claimed that the “law of value was an ‘objective economic law,’ influencing socialist societies as equally as capitalist ones” (Musić 2010:176). According to them, every action against the law of value leads to bureaucratism. Consequently, they believed that the market played an essential role in “socialist distribution,” since “exchange through the market, grounded in the law of value, together with collective ownership (…) provided the only objective criterion for socialist distribution” (Musić 2010:177). Because of “social property,” the worker is no longer the one that gets a wage from the state, but he is a part of the enterprise he works for. We can find these ideas systematically developed in the works of Croatian economist Branko Horvat who is considered, although he expressed strong disagreements with Yugoslav development after 1970s, one of the most important economic theoreticians of self-management and market socialism. In his book ABC jugoslavenskog samoupravljanja (eng. ABC of Yugoslav Self-Management, 1989)[19], he criticized Yugoslavia for being “too statist” and proposed solutions for Yugoslavia to reach socialism. According to Horvat, statism, or “Stalinism,” is based upon a monopoly of political power and, in such systems, class exploitation comes mainly through political means, unlike in capitalism where this power is based on private property and class exploitation is mainly economic. His solution is socialism, which he defines as:
“order in which concentration of economical and political power is abolished and the possibility for abolishing economical exploitation is created. In that sense, socialism is a society of equal citizens. In an institutional sense, it means social property, a market controlled by a plan and a political system without the Party, i.e., radical political and economical democracy and division according to work” (Horvat 1989:12).
For Horvat, socialism cannot exist without self-management. In order for self-management to exist, the market, commodity production, division of labour, law of value etc. must exist or, as he puts it without any attempt at argument, the “[market] is necessary because without a market there’s no self-management, and without self-management there is no socialism” (Horvat 1989:16). While discussing the “socialist market” he claims that “commodity production is not creating capitalism, but the reverse” (Horvat 1989:15) and how “every socio-economical formation had its own type of market which generated socio-economical relations of that formation” (Horvat 1989:16). According to him, we shouldn’t ask ourselves if we should abolish the market, like old Marxists with “naive views” did, but what type of market fits socialism. In self-management, one of the most important things is the autonomy of workers’ collectives. The market is really important because it is a “tool” against monopoly as healthy market competition destroys it. Still, market competition produces a certain alienation, which Horvat sees as a negative but inevitable outcome of a market system. Another “naive” and “childish” idea is to abolish the labour market. In socialism, the labour force is an economic input and workers “associate their labour where it is the most productive, i.e. where is the biggest income” (Horvat 1989:17). “In order for the market to function, the institution of property is necessary, because the basic purpose of that institution is to regulate the market of economic values” (Horvat 1989:38). Social property is a form of property which is necessary for socialism. Horvat writes that there are three reasons why social property does not exploit the working class. First, “every member of society has a full right to work” (Horvat 1989:29). Second, “every member of society has a full right to compete for every workplace according to his capabilities and qualifications” (Horvat 1989:29). And finally, “every member of society has the right to participate in the managing of production” (Horvat 1989:29). Also, social property implies a division according to work where income belongs to society and an individual can only appropriate income from work. The worker is exchanging the fruit of his labour with society for products of the same value as products he used to produce that labour. The market is the mechanism which grades individuals’ work contribution. But although a self-managing socialist system is based upon social property, it doesn’t exclude other forms of property such as private “property, partnership, cooperative property, contractual organization of associated labour and communal and state property” (Horvat 1989:29). Of course, profit is not anything alien to socialism, because while the capitalist system tends to maximise profits, a socialist system uses profit to satisfy the needs of its citizens. “As a social category, profit is, the same as a market, defined by the socio-economic system. Looking at it analytically, profit, or income, is simply the difference between income and expenses, production’s value and its costs” and “needs can be maximally satisfied only with maximization of production” (Horvat 1989:17). Horvat’s maxim is “maximization of democracy with maximization of efficiency” (Horvat 1989:21), i.e., it is necessary to make decisions in democratic way in order to avoid sabotage and lower productivity. He is applying a liberal definition of democracy according to which democracy is decision making by the majority, but with the “acknowledgment of minority rights” (Horvat 1989:21).
The difference between a “liberal capitalist economy” and self-managing socialism lies in the existence of a social plan. The plan has four functions: it is an instrument of predictions (its function is to make the most economical movements accessible to producers); it is an instrument of coordination of economic decisions (it makes directives only for state companies while the rest can just follow it as an economic direction); it is an instrument for the direction of economical growth, and it is a commitment for body which made and it is a directive for all its organs. The Plan adds cooperation and solidarity to the market economy, limiting markets’ destructive functions. No wonder that Ernest Mandel wrote how Horvat “is much more an adept of the Cambridge school of welfare economics than a Marxist” (Mandel 1967).
But let’s compare the official positions of Yugoslav economic ideology, which are certainly not anything new, with official Soviet ideas about socialism in economic practice. In his text “Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR” (1952), which was actually a sketch for a Soviet economics textbook, Stalin debates with certain “comrades” who do not share his opinions on certain economic laws and solutions. In this text, Stalin claims that Engels’ formula from Anti-Dühring, according to which “the moment that society takes the means for production it its hands it abolishes commodity production and by that the rule of products over producers” (Engels in Stalin 1981:707), along with the abolition of certain economic laws, cannot be applied to the Soviet Union, because it had not developed the industrial capacities for “socialist production.” This is the main reason why the economic laws of capitalism, which Stalin, much like Horvat, is trying to present as universal laws of every economy, still exist in the Soviet Union. One of these laws is the law of commodity production, which shouldn’t, according to Stalin, be connected with capitalist production and which cannot be abolished.
“Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private ownership of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity. Without this there is no such thing as capitalist production.” (Stalin 1981:710)
Also, since commodity production exists, the law of value also must exist, because, as Stalin says: “wherever commodities and commodity production exist, there the law of value must also exist. (…) It existed before capitalism, and it still exists, as commodity production, after the collapse of capitalism…” (Stalin 1981:713,727). In socialism, however, the law of value is limited by the “social” property of the means of production and by social planning of the economy. The law of value is, before all, a basic law of commodity production. The difference between capitalist and socialist commodity production is that “monopolistic capitalism doesn’t demand any profit, but maximum profit” (Stalin 1981:728), while the socialist law of value is defined by “securing the maximum satisfaction of constantly growing material and cultural needs of the whole society through continuous growth and perfecting of socialist production” (Stalin 1981:729).
The point of using Stalin here is not to call out the most notorious liberal boogieman, but precisely the opposite – to show the influence of bourgeois economics of capitalism on both Soviet and Yugoslav systems and their ideologies. In both cases, we face revisionism of Marx’s basic concepts and ideas because, if we look at Marx’s analysis, we would quickly conclude that both systems were capitalist. Or we could comment using a bit of Marx’s wit on Proudhon’s account, which fits so well in this case, “we may well, therefore, be astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production” (Marx 1947:516). In opening a discussion about the class nature of both the Soviet Union and – more importantly, at least for this article – Yugoslavia (was it a socialist or capitalist society, it is also necessary to comment on certain statements that come from the “Marxist camp” about how it is not possible to use Marxist analysis when analysing such systems. In his book Marxian Concept of Capital and Soviet Experience (1994), Paresh Chattopadhyay looks back on comments from theoreticians such as Louis Althusser, Paul Sweezy, John Roemer and Charles Bettelheim. These theoreticians, in their own way, tried to dispute the possibility of a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union and similar regimes. Besides insisting on a division between “Marx’s Marxism” and “Lenin’s Marxism,” as Raya Dunayevskaya has put it, i.e., the difference between Marx’s doctrine and the Eastern Bloc’s reality, Chattopadhyay points out that Marx’s method is quite applicable in the making of such analysis. Marx considered his method as dialectical. The main criterion in the characterization of a certain economy, according to this method, is an analysis of social relations in production—how is surplus labour “pumped out” from immediate producers. It is popular to use Cold War rhetoric about the division of the World into “communist” and “capitalist,” but if we apply Marx’s criterion for analysis of social relations in production, we don’t have reason to believe that “Western capitalism” represents the only way of capitalist production. Quite the contrary, “whatever the different forms of manifestation of an economy, if the latter is based on labourers’ separation from the conditions of labour, necessarily rendering labour as wage labour, then the economy in question is capitalist” (Chattopadhyay 1994:6). Also, unlike Roemer, and many more, who claims that “social,” i.e., state, property of the means for production implies socialism, when Marx talks about the abolition of private property he’s talking about the abolition of class property, instead of individual property. There’s no insinuation in Marx’s texts that, in the case of “social” property, exploitation is eliminated. Exploitation will exist as long as capital exists, and capital can exist under private and “social” property. This view is also shared by Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that, in the case of “social” property, it is important to state that the means for production are capital and how workers’ labour is still alienated from them in the form of commodities and services which are available to the bureaucracy. She concludes, “the Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise” (Dunayevskaya 1941). The bureaucracy did not create any new social mode of production – they’ve just continued to reproduce capitalist class relations.
Chattopadhyay also draws our attention to Marx’s concept of capital and its twofold existence—in a juridical and economic sense. When we are talking about the economic existence of capital, we are talking about social relations in production based upon the separation of labour from conditions of labour that bind wage labour and capital. The economic existence of capital has two sub-moments: an essential reality, where capital is a social totality, and a phenomenal reality, where capital exists as mutually autonomous individual capitals, i.e. fragments of capital as social totality. When we are talking about the juridical existence of capital, it is connected with proprietary relations of capital. Capital is here defined negatively, as non-property of workers, i.e. the private property of a class. This is a fundamental meaning of private property for Marx, even though jurisprudence doesn’t acknowledge it in that way. What jurisprudence acknowledges as private property is individual private property, as a specific form of private property of the capitalist class. Private property in its first, class sense exists, as long as capital exists.
Let’s look at Yugoslavia more deeply. Did wage labour exist in Yugoslavia? Surely it did. Workers were quite aware of the fact that they are working for wages, that someone else was taking surplus labour they produced and that the whole system was based upon wage earning. They were also quite aware of workplace hierarchy and wage differences between themselves and management and, in the end they saw themselves as wage earners. They were also aware that in other capitalist countries, such as West Germany where the majority of Yugoslav labourers immigrated to work, workers earned more than in Yugoslavia. If we take that into account, it is not so surprising that workers supported liberal fractions in the LCY which wanted to turn the Yugoslav economy into an image of the West. By recognizing that wage labour existed in Yugoslavia and concluding that the working class worked for wages, we have to ask the question of for whom did they work? Who paid the wages to workers? If we ask ourselves that question, we are assuming that Yugoslavia was a class society. This is of course the truth. The Yugoslav ruling class came from the technocracy and other bureaucrats that constituted the core of the LCY. Many leftists would say that we cannot talk about a Yugoslav ruling class because there was no private property over means of production. Well, they are quite wrong because private property, as class property, existed in Yugoslavia under the name of social property. The ruling class managed that property in the name of “working people” and appropriated its surplus value. When it comes to forms of private property, Yugoslavia is pretty much easier to analyze than Soviet Union, because its capitalist nature is quite easy to notice. In Yugoslavia different forms of private property existed, from social property, to individual private property in small enterprises, to joint property with multinational corporations, cooperative property in agriculture, etc.
What makes Yugoslavia easier to analyze is its dependence on the global market and movements of capital. As any other capitalist country, Yugoslavia was heavily affected by different capitalist crises (such as the oil crisis) and, especially towards late 80s, the Yugoslav ruling class responded to crisis much in the same way as other national bourgeoisies of the West: with austerity measures, sacking, privatization and bigger liberalisations of the market. Since Yugoslavia wasn’t part of the Eastern Bloc it had to have deeper connections with the West, not just because of military protection in case of possible Soviet intervention (for example in early 50s), but mostly because it is impossible to have a self-sufficient economy in capitalism. This is why Yugoslavia participated in the world market in a full sense, just like any other capitalist country.
If we have a class system, sooner or later there will be class struggles. Yugoslavia did not lack for workers’ struggles which mostly were economic struggles for better wages and work conditions. Even though some workplace struggles, especially after the 70s, were connected with support of the bourgeoisie and demanded more economic liberalisation or other nationalist goals that would benefit their position, workers’ struggles in Yugoslavia shouldn’t ever only be reduced to that. A lot of workplace struggles were motivated because workers wanted to have a stronger role in managing their enterprise, especially wages, or because management tried to lower workers’ wages to “save their skin.” Here it is once again important to say that, in every industrial action, workers had to rely on themselves and on wildcat strikes, because unions were part of the state machinery. Unions in Yugoslavia were designed as institutions where the official ideology was presented to workers and through which the Party could control workplaces. In other words, unions had the same functions as they have in other capitalist countries or in today’s countries of the ex-Yugoslavia, or anywhere in the world for that matter. Workers’ councils also had similar functions. Since the LCY nominated managers and even the workers who could be in councils, it is quite obvious that they’ve tried to control them as much as possible.
Usually when leftists in their studies acknowledge certain mistakes or oversights of Yugoslav self-management, they end up concluding how we need “the real self-management” which would mark a successful transformation from capitalism to socialism. Yugoslav self-management always serves, if not as inspiration, but then at least as one of the biggest examples of self-management in practice. We can see that in works of Lebowtiz, Kovacs, but also in some of the works about economic democracy and direct democracy that were products of student or Occupy movements from 2009 onwards. Such positions were also advocated in Yugoslavia at one time. Intellectuals from the Praxis group, although they were critical of Yugoslavia, never rejected self-management as a concept. For Rudi Supek, the concept of self-management is not wrong because.“. man-producer has the right to decide about results of his work, (…) state doesn’t alienate and arbitrarily disposes of surplus labour created by working class (…) that all workers have the real right of managing of work organisations in which they work” (Supek 1971:351). For him, self-management is the only model that can be used in developed Western countries—it is a balance between maximalism and statism; it is accepted by Marxist intelligentsia and academics around the World; it is the logical conclusion of working class offensives in Western countries and the logical conclusion of democratisation of conditions in production and chance for working class to get higher managing rights (Supek 1971:348–350). He accuses the Yugoslav leadership of choking self-management with a market economy and capitalist relations, for being Proudhonist and here he engages in an academic discussion about Proudhonist influences on the Yugoslav economy. But to attack the Yugoslav model for being Prudhonist, while defending the idea of “real” self-management at the same time, is an oxymoron. Is not the idea of gradual evolution from capitalism to socialism through networks self-managed workers’ cooperatives and enterprises the essence of Proudhonism? Proudhonism is essentially the idea of “socialism in one workplace,” an idea which proposes a local “solution” to a global problem. Actually, we can apply some aspects of the old Marxist critique of Proudhonism to Yugoslav self-management. Proudhon’s system was based on individual exchange, market and the free will of buyer and seller above all. In his critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx analyzed how such a system is not anything but an apologia for and preservation of bourgeois economy. But, as Amadeo Bordiga notes, this individual exchange leads to exchange between factories, workshops and enterprises managed by workers and it is presented as a goal of socialism that the factory is run by local workers.
The idea of workers’ self-management was never a part of the Marxist tradition, but quite to the contrary, it was an ideology of various reformist currents within the workers’ movement, from anarchism, Bernsteinism, and syndicalism to the “new left.” Of course, behind the Marxist rejection of workers’ self-management stands Marx’s materialist analysis of the former, instead of “dogmatism” or “catechism” as “critics” of Marxism like to point out all the time. As Marx once said, and Engels and Lenin repeated so many times: revolution is not a question of forms of organisation. Therefore, to put form above content, to fetishise a certain form while neglecting its content, is one of the most dangerous, but yet classical mistakes that leftists make.
The ideology of self-management is based upon the idea of “force which struggles against the constituted power and asserts its autonomy by breaking all links with the central State, and sometimes as a form which manages a new economy”(Bordiga 1957). In the case of utopian socialists, the idea was to build “revolutionary communes” that would later spread to the whole society, while in the case of Yugoslavia, the idea was to set up a new interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and a new path to communism that would, in its opposition to the Soviet central state and bureaucracy, end up in a decentralisation of society masked under “withering away of the state.” Of course, this decentralisation, in an economic and juridical sense, was marked by liberalisation and market ideology, because there was no other mechanism to stick with, while real political and economic power was still concentrated—like in the case of any other class society—in the hands of its ruling class. A lot of leftists here, like the Praxis group, while pointing out the mistakes and defects of Yugoslav self-management, still advocate “the real self-management” which is based on a real autonomy of producers and where workers really manage production and their workplaces. But the answer to the problem of capitalism was never in greater “autonomy” of the working class through workers’ councils and management of production. The problem with workers’ councils is much the same as with trade or industrial unions, which are marked with rank-and-file restrictions in dealing with problems of one small sector of production, presented in a single enterprise, instead of society as whole. Therefore, we cannot expect that changes in individual workplaces, managed by workers’ councils, will lead us to a “latter stage” or communism. Communist society is not marked by workers’ control, workers’ management or giving power to producers. In communist society, there are no more producers or non-producers as there are no classes. The point of communism is the disappearance of the proletariat as a class, along with the wage system, exchange and in the end – individual enterprises. “There will be nothing to control and manage and nobody to demand autonomy from” (Bordiga 1957). Or in Marx’s words:
"In a future society, in which class antagonism would have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the social time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.” (Marx 1959:52)
One of the big problems of the idea of self-management is reducing the historical conflict from national to local, communal or workplace level instead of extending it onto an international scale—onto the problem of the capitalist system as whole. In this moment, we can see the whole idea of self-management constantly returns to its ideal form of “autonomous commune,” the first capitalist form from the end of the Middle-Ages. While in Marxist circles, the term “petty-bourgeois” is too often used as an insult or denunciation in petty ideological discussions, in case of self-management that term would go pretty well with its class nature. Self-management is an ideology of the self-employed, craftsmen and peasants that want a market system without monopoly in which they can freely compete. Of course, in the case of Yugoslavia there were quite obvious monopolies and the market wasn’t as “free” as some would want. Also, the renaming of the CPY to the LCY wasn’t accidental. Its essence is the movement of the focus from “class” to “people,” i.e., declassing of the working class in the confusion of the term “people,” which made ideological excuses for the existence of classes, class society, but also of increasing nationalism. All together, it is really interesting how, unlike most of today’s left, the ultra-right neo-classical economist Ludwig von Mises, pretty much hit the spot in his analysis, of course in his own way:
“The syndicalistically organized state would be no socialist state but a state of worker capitalism, since the individual worker groups would be owners of the capital. Syndicalism would make all re-patterning of production impossible; it leaves no room free for economic progress. In its entire intellectual character it suits the age of peasants and craftsmen, in which economic relations are rather stationary.” (von Mises 1983:199)
CONCLUSION
Yugoslavia was a capitalist society. As I’ve pointed out, we cannot analyze an economic system by accepting its proclamations or documents, but by materialist relations in production. Capitalist systems are marked with the existence of class relations in production, wage, exchange, commodity production, etc., while communism is a movement which abolishes these relations. Yugoslavia had all the features of a capitalist system; no matter how much time its ideologues spent on masking them. For example, social property was nothing but property of a ruling class that appropriated its surplus value. Also, there was no socialist and/or communist revolution in Yugoslavia. Communist revolution is marked by an uprising of the proletariat which, together with its class Party, “abolishes the present state of things” (Marx). In the case of Yugoslavia, the CPY won power after war while relations in production didn’t change at all.
The idea of self-management was never part of the Marxist tradition and it never was and never will be able to tackle capitalism and to replace it. Quite the contrary, in the case of Yugoslavia, self-management only increased the power of the ruling class and integrated the working class into the state, just like the welfare state in the West. Furthermore, Yugoslav self-management kept capitalist relations safe, declared the law of value, commodity production and market exchange as mere “economic tools” that exist in every economy, and solved every economic and political crisis with broader liberalisation as the main austerity measure. If self-management was supposed to show “another way” of organization of a socialist state, it failed—as socialism in one country is a wasted project. Communist transformation is only possible on international scale.
Although one would have to be completely blind not to notice the difference between basic living conditions in Yugoslavia and today’s ex-Yugoslav countries, one shouldn’t fall into the trap of nostalgia or calling for the refurbishment of Yugoslav relations. Yugonostalgia in the political arena is nothing but an a-political populism or superficial analysis. Instead of feasting on Yugonostalgia, one should concentrate on understanding the conditions and relations that existed within Yugoslavia, their dialectical development in the ex-Yugoslav countries and how that affected the lives of the proletarians in order to strive for a classless society of tomorrow. We have to be constantly aware that struggle for a classless society involves understanding of present day relations in production, class dynamics but also historical lessons, where a resurrection of state socialist regimes isn’t a goal but an obstacle.
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Musić, Goran. 2010. “Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self—Management as State Paradigm”; in Ours to Master and Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, Immanuel Ness i Dario Azzellini, ed., Chicago: Haymarket Books, pp. 172 – 190.
People’s Daily; Red Flag. 1963. Is Yugoslavia A Socialist Country?; Peking: Foreign Language Press.
Perlman, Fredy. 1969. Birth of Revolutionary Movement in Yugoslavia; Kalamazoo: Black & Red.
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Pirjevac, Jože. 2012. Tito i drugovi; Zagreb: Mozaik knjiga.
Rizzi, Bruno. 1983. Birokratski kolektivizam. Zagreb: Globus.
Schulze, Theo. 1962. “Yugoslavia’s Way: The Workers’ Councils System.” International Socialist Review, vol. 23 No. 3, Summer 1962, pp. 84–86, 90.
Staljin, Josip. 1981. “Ekonomski problemi socijalizma u SSSR-u”; in Pitanja lenjinizma, Dragutin Lalović, ed., Zagreb: Centar društvenih djelatnosti saveza socijalističke omladine Hrvatske, pp. 701 – 734.
Stojanović, Svetozar. 1972. “Od Postrevolucionarne diktature ka socijalističkoj demokratiji.” Praxis #3-4, pp. 375—399.
Supek, Rudi. 1971. “Protuvuriječnosti i nedorečenosti jugoslavenskog samoupravnog socijalizma”; Praxis #3-4, pp. 347–371.
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Tito. Josip Broz. 1950. “Workers Manage Factories in Yugoslavia.”
Tito. Josip Broz. 1959. “O radničkom upravljanju privrednim poduzećima,” in Govori i članci, knjiga 5., Zagreb: Naprijed, pp. 220–253.
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Van der Linden, Marcel. 2007. Western Marxism and Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917; Boston: Brill.
Von Mises, Ludwig. 1983. Nation, State and Economy; New York: New York University Press.
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NOTES
[1] Serb-Cro. Narodno oslobodilački pokret (NOP) was a Popular Front movement in Yugoslavia during the Second World War.
[2] Serb-Cro. Izjava Vrhovnog štaba NOV i POJ i AVNOJ-a; NOV i POJ stands for Peoples Liberation Army and Partisan Units of Yugoslavia and AVNOJ stands for Antifascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia.
[3] In his book Samoupravljanje 1950–1974 (eng. Self-Management 1950–1974; 1974, ) Yugoslav historian Dr. Dušan Bilandžić claims that 1,706,000 Yugoslav people were killed in the Second World War, i.e. every tenth citizen of Yugoslavia. Actually, he’s talking about demographic loss, i.e. the number which marked how many citizens the country lost. This number was presented as the number killed at the peace conference in Paris, so that Yugoslavia could maximize its sufferings.
[4] Rus. Народный комиссариат внутренних дел was the Soviet secret police.
[5] Stakhanovism was a “trend” among Russian workers, called after Alexei Stakhanov, miner which, inspired by Stalin’s speech from May 1935, excavated more than 102 tons of coal in just 6 hours, which was 14 times above his quota. Stakhanovists demanded that equal wages should be abolished and that workers should be paid on their merits. Appearance of this “trend” was followed with an increase in extreme wage differences, surcease in rationalisation and the beginning of production of luxury commodities. On November 15th 1935, the All-Russian Conference of Stakhanovists was held where they were declared, by Pravda, to be “leaders of the people” (Dunayevskaya 1942). Increase in Stakhanovist wages enabled them faster advance in society. Unlike them, regular workers found themselves in situation where it was harder and harder for them to buy goods they could afford during rationing. In Yugoslavia Stakhnovists were called “udarnici” (eng. outstanding workers).
[6] The Serbo-Croatian title is Ugovor o prijateljstvu, uzajamnoj pomoći i poslijeratnoj suradnji, Jugoslavije i SSSR-a .
[7] While in the most of the text I use Stalinism as another name for Marxism-Leninism, when I refer to “Stalinism” in quotes I’m referring to denunciations which the Yugoslav leadership used against Soviet Union’s ideology and its followers in Yugoslavia. I’m using quotes because, in the case of Yugoslav leadership, their denouncing of the Soviet Union as “Stalinist” doesn’t have any material explanation or argument and it does not question fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism, or Stalinism, as I’ve done so far and as I’ll continue in this article, since I don’t consider Marxism-Leninism as Marxism in the first place.
[8] “Goli otok“ (eng. Naked Island) was the most famous Yugoslav concentration camp for leftist ideological enemies of the regime, usually “Stalinists.” This camp was primarily for male prisoners, while “Sveti Grgur” (eng. Saint George) was for females.
[9] The Serbo-Croatian title is O narodnoj demokraciji u Jugoslaviji.
[10] The Serbo-Croatian title is Zakon o narodnim odborima.
[11] The Serbo-Croatian title is Uputstvo o osnivanju i radnu radničkih savjeta.
[12] The Serbo-Croatian title is Osnovni zakon o upravljanju državnim privrednim poduzećima i višim privrednim poduzećima od strane radnih kolektiva.
[13] Even if it is common to put the Praxis group in the Marxist-Humanist camp, I oppose such a classification. For me, Marxist-Humanism is a tendency which is based around works of Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James and the so called Johnson-Forest Tendency, which politically shares really little, if anything, with the Praxis group. Even though members of the Praxis group were highly critical of the Yugoslav system, they did not share the Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Soviet Union and similar regimes, i.e. they did not support the theory of state capitalism. Also, I believe that no-one can say that there was political and ideological unity among members of the Praxis group, which explains that while some were trying to articulate some sort of Marxist critique of Yugoslavia, others turned to liberal ideas of “democracy” and “democratisation,” completely abandoning historical materialism and class analysis. The fact that the second current won can easily been seen from the last issues of Praxis which were completely dedicated to liberal “civil society” theories and which were dominated by articles of Croatian liberal-nationalist philosophers.
[14] Polyarchy is a term invented by Robert A. Dahl, which he used to describe forms of rule where power is in the hand of three or more persons. Polyarchy is a nation-state which has certain procedures which are necessary to implement the “democratic principle.”
[15] With the term “national,” Lindblom is actually referring to individual Yugoslav republics, i.e. Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia or Montenegro. It is a mistake to refer to them as “provinces,” because Yugoslavia was a federation of “socialist” republics, but also because that could cause certain confusion since Serbia consisted of two “autonomous provinces”: Vojvodina and Kosovo.
[16] In 1952, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia renamed itself as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The reason for changing the party’s name was Tito’s idea that in socialism there was no need for a Communist Party, since “working people” controlled the state. Once “working people” controlled the state, the Communist Party had fulfilled its historical task. Also, CP’s were vanguard parties of the proletariat, while “working people” were not just proletarians, but also craftsmen, peasants, etc—all of whom must participate in the construction of Yugoslav society.
[17] Lebowitz argues that while the party was imposing directors, workers’ councils had certain autonomy to accept or reject directors and they used it. He also pointed to other bodies involved in managing enterprises such as workshop councils and special commissions, stating how certain researches showed how one third of workers in enterprise participated in one of the councils or commissions, how people used to rotate on their functions and how functions were limited to two year mandates (Lebowitz 2004).
[18] In Yugoslavia, when it comes to the national question, the ideology of “brotherhood and unity” and “no-minority-no-majority” prevailed till its last days. Behind that policy was a division on “nations” and “nationalities.” “Nations” were Slovenians, Croats, Bosniacs, Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians, i.e. “nations” had their own republics. “Nationalities” were actually national and ethnic minorities such as Albanians, Czechs, Hungarians, Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, Turks, etc. Kosovo Albanians were actually a really big “minority,” which is why they have constantly demanded that Kosovo become republic, instead of being an “autonomous province.”
[19] ABC of Yugoslav Self-Management is a book that Horvat thought of as a short account on Yugoslavia for Yugoslavs as part of his greater study Political Economy of Socialism (1983) published in English. Political Economy of Socialism is probably the most important book when discussing market socialism.
Originally published in Insurgent Notes #9, October 3
Comments
Quite interesting, thanks for posting. Maybe will give some thought and comment later.
Thanks for posting this Iskra. It's far to long to reply to without a lot of thought, however.
Good to know you're still around too - I've not seen you about of late.
really fantastic essay!
however from what i read , it seems as though it was an anarchist economic system , just not civicly
A very interesting part is about the right of an economical organisation (enterprise, cooperative etc.) to set its own economical plans, that, after finishing its duty, it independently disposes of the organization’s income (the law even sets a minimum which must stay in the enterprise), that it can independently set the wages of its workers
also these major problems listed :
Yugoslav self-management kept capitalist relations safe, declared the law of value, commodity production and market exchange as mere “economic tools” that exist in every economy,
One of the big problems of the Yugoslav economy was unemployment
are not necessarily anti capitalist , many Anarchists posit keeping market relations intact.
apart from the presence of a state , which probably did some bad things (like killing anarchists) , the system seemed very anarchist to me , indeed it seems as though it was generally accepted to be proudhonist!
Hierarchical relations in productions still remained. Initially, wage differences between managers and workers were 1:3.5 but from 1967 they rose to 1:20.
this is also not necessarily anti capitalist , as they were free to vote for these people to the council , i guess it shows the importance of pareconism though
also
Formerly collectivised, large parts of agriculture were now given to private holdings and farmers... This sudden turnaround from collective to private farming was justified, as Lindblom puts it, “as an expedient, necessary until such time as the development of the communist new man would once again make collective agriculture possible
why do you think collectivization was reversed? if personal , private holdings are more efficient then collectivization, that would effectively disprove the efficiency of communism
Between 1958 and 1966, almost 1400 strikes were reported
what was the main reason for these strikes?
vicent
it seems as though it was an anarchist economic system , just not civicly
what exactly is anarchist economic system? I mean, what makes it different from present day economic system, systems that existed and communist alternative? by answering to those questions I might understand how can Yugoslavia be an example of "an anarchist economic system"
are not necessarily anti capitalist , many Anarchists posit keeping market relations intact.
apart from the presence of a state , which probably did some bad things (like killing anarchists) , the system seemed very anarchist to me , indeed it seems as though it was generally accepted to be proudhonist!
well in that case, those anarchists are not against capitalism. in fact, they are petty-bourgeois
this is also not necessarily anti capitalist , as they were free to vote for these people to the council , i guess it shows the importance of pareconism though
what? I'm having troubles understanding this.
why do you think collectivization was reversed? if personal , private holdings are more efficient then collectivization, that would effectively disprove the efficiency of communism
in communism all means of production are centralized on worlds level. there's no "personal" when it comes to means of production. for "personal" we have capitalism.
vicent
what was the main reason for these strikes?
mostly problems with management, demands for more managing rights and better work conditions. also a lot of wages related issues. around 70's, strikes become more related to preserving profits and for greater liberalisation of marked/economy etc.
I think capitalism means a class system where there are people with property - bourgeois and people without - proletariat .
"whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is" - humbolt (edit - just realised this quote works against my argument)
so a system where everyone in an enterprise is in full control would no longer be capitalist it would be anarchist
Quote:
this is also not necessarily anti capitalist , as they were free to vote for these people to the council , i guess it shows the importance of pareconism thoughwhat? I'm having troubles understanding this.
even under anarchism youd probably still have people with more power eg. doctors, technicians etc as these people would know more. however that the workers vote for and can recall these people from admin positions would mean an anarchist system.
(i dont know much about anarchism btw)
(i think the problem is im looking at the essay from an anarchist perspective not a full communist one)
capitalism isn't defined just by "who manages" (i.e bourgeoisie or everyone) but by "what does one manages" (i.e. capital). as long as there is capital there is capitalism.
also, it's not a question of individual power (or authority) that defines mode of production but individual relationship to means of production and his/her place in production... (on this individual level).
well then i'm a capitalist ... still great essay ive always wanted to know about that era, i wonder if venezuela today has similar characteristics ...
That's right - "self-management" is a slogan that can easily be taken up by capitalist realities,
And the "market anarchists" are just a variety of capitalists who believe in the nonsense of markets' regulatory properties and that the effects of surplus accumulation can somehow be mitigated by the good will of the accumulators.
Review: Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking past terror: Islamism and critical theory on the Left (Verso, 2003)
![Review: Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003) Critique of Susan Buck-Morss](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/images/library/khomeini1.jpg?itok=hT3iNYjA)
Arya Zahedi takes critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss to task on positing political Islam as a "Middle Eastern" answer to the fight against capitalism in the region. From Insurgent Notes #9.
The current global crisis has once again brought the questions of global struggle and world revolution into a position of importance. The basic questions posed are whether it is possible to build a “global Left” and how to rethink the idea of universal human liberation, which was the utopia once central to the left, and which has perhaps re-emerged once again. The unity of the world is indeed clearest to us in times of crisis. Susan Buck-Morss’s book on the relationship between critical theory and political Islam is an interesting and important contribution to this discussion, as it attempt to create a dialogue between critical thought in the “west” and that within the Islamic world. In keeping with her previous work on Hegel and the Haitian Revolution, she attempts to resurrect and redeem the idea of universality after it had become a bad word among many in the academic activist milieu. Although the book was published some time ago, its relevance has only increased.
The loss of any conception of human universality, especially as it relates to the political struggle, has affected the understanding of social revolution. Many events have occurred since the publication of the book that demonstrate the importance of returning to the discussion of the world revolution and the universal subject that is supposed to be the agent of this revolution. Events such as the “Arab Spring” and the Iranian “Green Movement,” the riots and strikes against austerity, the unrest in Brazil in the midst of the World Cup qualifiers, Occupy Wall Street, all demonstrate some sort of global shift.
For the past twenty to thirty years, it has been almost an article of faith that any attempt to posit a universal subject should be looked upon with scorn. Indeed the word has been associated with another taboo word, “humanism.” Any advocacy of either one can be attacked for essentialism, Euro-centrism, or Orientalism, at best, and in extreme cases, even totalitarianism. One of the strengths of Buck-Morss’s approach is that she is not satisfied with just positing a universal subject from the past and dismissing the variety of these critiques, particularly that of the Eurocentric conception of the universal subject. She doesn’t just resurrect an old conception of universality; she attempts to point towards a new way of thinking about universality and the promise of human liberation. She attempts to develop an understanding of universality that remains critical of Euro-centrism.
The book carries on a theoretical struggle to understand the negotiation between universality and difference. But while the questions Buck-Morss asks are of great importance, and indeed correct in my opinion, the conclusions she draws and the method she uses to get there are way off the mark.
CAN THERE BE A GLOBAL LEFT?
Her argument also has a definite historical foundation which, she believes, can offer the potential for a more universal and hence more emancipatory left. She highlights the importance of the fact that now, more than ever, we live in a global interconnected world—what she calls “global immanence.” She writes:
Globalization is not new, but global “immanence” is. I use this term to refer to the fact that in our era of global capital, global production, global labor migrations, and global penetration by technologies of communication, there is no spatial outside, no “other” of peoples, territory or environment against which some of us could conveniently define ourselves and, holding ourselves apart, control our fate.1
One can assume that what Buck-Morss means by this statement is that the globalization of capitalism and interconnectedness itself is not novel or unique, but the fact that we are all “immanent” or contained within this global interconnected world is something new. It is new that there is no more inside or outside with regard to capitalism. How new or how long this tendency stretches back can be debated, but let’s agree that it is more true today than in the past. This means, and we are still in agreement here, that any struggle that hopes to deal with the problems humanity faces must, like that very global system to which we are all subject, be global in thought and in action.
It is however where she goes after this that the confusion begins. Indeed, she sees the main force of opposition to capitalism in the Middle East in the Islamic movements. Actually, it is more correct to say that she sees the vanguard of critical thought against contemporary modernity in Islamist political theories of a variety of stripes. Either way, one is forced to raise eyebrows. It indeed reflects a fascination among theorists on the left in the “west” towards thinkers who articulate their ideas using religious language. The fact that this exists among many self-proclaimed Marxists is an even more curious occurrence. But there is something to be learned if we examine this further, and perhaps we can point to answers for these very same questions, but ones that lead us down a different path.
Her answer comes from a belief that Islamic political movements and their theoreticians are somehow more authentic than other secular opposition forces. This accusation is more often than not pointed in the direction of Marxism. In some ways it reflects the self-loathing nature of the western, particularly US, academic left. Now whether this is true or not (it is certainly not) we perhaps should go further and scrutinize this search for authenticity. What is it about Islamism that evokes the fascination of theorists? What is it about the “jargon of authenticity” accepted by theorists that causes them to be enamored when they would otherwise be critical of such a discourse? Buck-Morss constantly reiterates that there is a wide diversity among Islamist writers. This is certainly true. There is a world of difference between Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Shariati, and Abdulkarim Soroush. There are in fact wide differences, among theorists from the same nation, but even more so among those that come from different cultures and historical contexts. There is such variety and diversity that one wonders what use there is in talking as if there is some commonality. As Buck-Morss makes her argument, no matter how many times she says otherwise, there is something she sees as essential and more “grounded” in a discourse coming in a religious language. This is essentializing by default. It takes Islam to be definitive of the political culture of the region. There is absolutely no doubt that Islamism is an integral and important feature of Middle Eastern political culture, just as Christian populism is for the United States or Catholic liberation theology is for Latin America. But that does not make it the most representative.2
In many ways this quest for authenticity reflects the residue of the Third Worldist discourse. The ideology of anti-imperialism in Third World guise equated those more exotic and unlike “us” as the more revolutionary force, as the one least tarnished by the virus of capitalist modernity. In particular it was the Third World peasant that really got the romanticism of the western academic left going. While part of this phenomenon is the fetishism of the “other,” we must also remember that this is not unique to our views of the Third World, but is also a feature of all forms of populism. The folksy jargon of praise for the authentic German peasant, who is honorable and works with his hands and who is pure and unsoiled by the cheapness of bourgeois urban life, was an important ideological component of fascism. It is surprising that a theorist who sees her thought rooted in the tradition of the Frankfurt School does not realize this, because one of the theoretical achievements of this tradition was a clear analysis of the cultural and ideological foundations of National Socialism.3 One aspect of this analysis was the recognition that the “jargon of authenticity” was also reflected in much of the philosophy popular at the time, particularly existentialism. This was the other side of their critique of positivism. Indeed they recognized that both positivism and obscurantism, or irrationalism, were part of the same dialectic of modernity.
If we want to think in postcolonial terms, the other side to the dominant Eurocentric ideology of capitalism consists of ideologies of various Third Worldist stripes, including its greatest expression, Islamist Third Worldism. All the more so, perhaps, because they are not so much different sides of the same coin, as different reflections of the same phenomena, two parts of a dialectical whole if you will. Islamism is Eurocentric because it holds the “west” to be some kind of trans-historical entity. What Buck-Morss fails to recognize is that many of these “Islam-centric models” are Eurocentric. They are Eurocentric because they take “the West” as something with an essential character, one existing as the “other” against which Islamic identity can be posited and recognized. For someone who wants to emphasize “global immanence,” Buck-Morss places too much emphasis on the categories of “within” and “without.”
Third Worldism was an ideology that combined anti-imperialism with populism. The particular variety that developed in the Islamic world was common to both Islamic parties and to many Marxist-Leninist groups. This was rooted in a conception of something essential about the West and, conversely, something essential and authentic about the Islamic, Arab, Iranian, or Eastern worlds, however one’s different views framed this opposition. Perhaps its most sinister effect was to obscure the disagreements differentiating socialism from the politics of the Islamic parties. Because of the focus on western hegemony, those who could prove themselves to be the most anti-imperialist won the hearts of the masses. This disarmed the left during the Iranian Revolution, as it was unable to show that it was more “authentic” than the Islamist factions within the revolution. We live in a different world, as Buck-Morss constantly reminds us, so why return to a tradition that is now defunct? That tradition is as defunct as the Marxist-Leninist groups of the same era. The only difference is their exotic nature, because their references are so foreign to those unfamiliar with the culture. We can think of this as a “politics of despair,” whereby we no longer see any potential for socialist revolution on the horizon, and thus acquiesce before the dominant ideology.
A critical theory of society has as its task the critique of ideology in contemporary society. This does not mean to side with one over the other, or to play mix and match in the marketplace of ideas. It means rather to shatter ideologies, to attempt to demystify a reified and obscure world, all the while knowing that the real critique that changes conditions does not merely take place in the realm of theory, but in the act of changing social relationships. This includes the critique of Marxism as an ideology, as it served as for most of the twentieth century. The greatest weapon against ideology was itself turned into an ideology and a strong one.
We should also ask about the connection between these thinkers to whom Buck-Morss is referring and what they developed into. Of course they are not a monolithic group. But let’s say there is some commonality and common points of critique. This is particularly true in the two places where there is a commonality in terms of similarity and influence, namely in the cases of Egypt and Iran, and in the two thinkers who particularly interest Buck-Morss—on the one hand, Sayyed Qutb, an important thinker in the history of the region and one of the intellectual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and on the other hand Ali Shariati, whose ideas shaped many of the youth partaking in the Iranian revolutionary uprising of 1978–79 and whose death, in the months before the revolution, made him into a somewhat mythical figure among Iranian opposition groups. His unique blend of Shia imagery with Third World Marxist slogans was a direct reflection of the time and, one could say, the best reflection of this hybrid ideology, a Third World populism specifically tailored for Iran.
Buck-Morss writes that “there is no universal law of the market that can guarantee us a benevolent future.” Here we come to an important theoretical confusion. There is certainly no law that could “guarantee us a benevolent future,” but perhaps there are laws which, unless altered by human struggle, may bring a tragic future. We need to understand how “laws” are understood in Marxian theory. It is not that laws don’t exist, but rather that they are historical, a product of human creation over time. An important law for Marx, as well as for many of the early critical theorists, was the law of value. The idea or hope was that a revolution would “abolish” the law so that human life could be freed from the tyranny of the commodity-form.
The book points to a perhaps more important question in its attempt to think about where we are and what a future society would mean. We want to move beyond an understanding of universality and world revolution that is grounded in a Eurocentric conception of universal history, and at the same time we want to retain such a universal understanding of history. This is perhaps the central problematic the book points to and its most important contribution is indeed in bringing this problem to light.
There is currently a lack of any normative basis for critique. And this problem reveals itself here. The consequence is then to see all critiques of modernity as the same. What do we mean by capitalism and “communism” in the twenty-first century? What, exactly, are we at least struggling against, if we are not certain what we are fighting for? Going back to this politics of despair, we seem to have lost all vision and basis on which our critique of this society stands. In the hopes of abandoning an ideological understanding of socialism that history demonstrated to be defunct, we have become so eclectic and diluted that there is nothing to differentiate a radical critique of modernity from any critique of modernity.
The thinking exemplified by Buck-Morss’s book is so desperate for some common voice of struggle she wants to grab at any critique of modernity and claim common ground. The cultural difference obscures the reality. Orientalism, like many ideologies, works in ironic and mysterious ways. Our task should not simply be to unite all critiques of modernity into some common hodge-podge to rally around. Our task, or rather the task of a critical theory of society, is to critique modernity, but also to critique the critiques of modernity. This is the critique that can help arm us against ideology rearing its ugly head at times when the struggle reaches a high point. It is precisely during high points of struggle that the critique of ideology is most necessary. It is these various critiques of modernity that will prove dangerous when the time comes for history to finally judge the modern era. It is in these times when it looks as if humans are reshaping history in their own image that ideology will serve to pump life back into capitalism’s veins.
The positive critique of modernity comes in the streets, in the workplaces, communities, and schools; anywhere that people reproduce their daily existence. The positive supersession of capitalist society is not the work of critical theory. Critical theory can only point to the possibilities, but it is in the power of negativity to critique what the obstacles are and will be for the times when the “old mole” reappears. During the struggle against the Shah’s regime, when it reached its climax during the general strike of 1978–79, workers’ councils were formed throughout the country. They properly served as a force of dual power. Then, when the state collapsed, they served as the primary power. These councils were not just in the factories, but in offices, neighborhoods, schools and universities, as well as in the provinces. The ideology of an Islamic populism helped rein in these forces. One should not forget the direct repression of the state, but we should also understand the role that ideology played in obscuring the conflict that was taking place. No one was immune from this understanding of a false sense of “unity.” We should also acknowledge that it was not the “fundamentalists” that began the attack on the popular councils, but the “liberals” of the provisional government, many of whom were associates and friends of the late Dr. Shariati.
In one part of the book, Buck-Morss, using the work of another scholar sympathetic to the Islamist movement in Iran, claims that Ayatollah Khomeini, by not speaking with references to western political concepts, “has managed a triumphal escape from Western hegemony.”4 But this immediately begs the question: can one escape from Western hegemony by changing the concepts one uses? What does it mean to institute an “autonomous discourse” in a capitalist world? This is an extremely idealist notion if there ever was one. How can one have autonomy from a totally “immanent” world, to use Buck-Morss’s understanding, yet establish an autonomous sphere merely through discourse? This alone can have a very ideological effect, one which has plagued post-colonial theory. It sees capitalism and colonialism with such an emphasis on discourse that it can lead people to the blind alley of thinking that an alteration in the discourse can make for an alteration in the actual relations of power.
What surprises the reader is the virtual absence of any acknowledgement of the actually existing historical left in the Middle East. Buck Morss writes as if there was so little of a left tradition that she really needed to stretch to find common ground with forces in the region. The history of the actually existing left in Iran or Egypt is nowhere to be found. It is conveniently brushed aside. But this seems to be no mere accident, or something that can simply be attributed to ignorance. This seems, rather, more connected to the general disillusionment with anything connected to the left.
Speaking of the left in the region, Buck-Morss’s few passing comments give the impression that the left in the Middle East was nothing but a second-rate impersonation of the left in Europe. This is a common misconception, but one with quite problematic conclusions. One often gets the impression that socialism was also a colonial imposition on the Islamic world, and, even worse, that socialists from those countries were merely parroting the movement in the West. But indeed nothing could be further from the truth. The movement in many of the nations, but especially in those bordering what was the Russia and Central Asia, such as Iran and Turkey, grew in symbiotic relationship with the movement in Russia. The origins of the Communist Party of Iran are closely tied to the development of the Bolshevik party. The socialist movement of Iran, going back even earlier, was born out of migrant Iranian workers who had been employed in the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan. Indeed, many workers from the surrounding areas—mostly Muslim lands—had travelled to the Russian Empire, and to Baku in particular, to work on the oil fields, but also in the ports and factories. These workers became involved in the organizing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, taking part in the Revolution of 1905. They soon returned to their home countries and used the organizing skills they had learned in organizing in their nascent home industries as well as in establishing socialist parties.
Buck-Morss claims that the secular left in the Middle East carried what she calls an “apologist discourse,”5 meaning that its general outlook was one that was not critical of modernity. It shared the values of a Eurocentric modernity, that was technology-and development-centered, and which also shared the values of secularism and distrust for tradition.
The “apologist discourse” which she accuses the secular left in the Middle East of having was by no means unique to it but was also shared by many currents within the Islamist movement. Perhaps this hostility to Marxism, evident in the works of Islamist scholars, is not rooted in a critique of developmentalism or authoritarianism, as Buck-Morss suggests, but has a different source; one to which the history of Europe in the twentieth century is no stranger.
This is an historical lesson that needs to be remembered. There are critiques of modernity that point towards a revolutionary supersession of existing conditions and there is a critique of modernity that serves reaction. Fascism also carried with it a definite critique of modernity, one that stressed the authenticity of the pure German working man against the decadence of a modern bourgeois society serving only money instead of the values of pride, honor, and valor. There is also the critique of technology that existed in Europe in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting a reactionary fear of society, which has dissolved in the face of capitalist modernity. And that term, capitalist modernity, is precisely the issue.
How we understand the past and the present directly affects how we understand the future as well as the struggle to get there. This is why not all critiques are on equal footing. Some reflect the condition of modernity better than others. Are we to understand our condition as one of good versus evil, or as one that emphasizes some abstract concept of justice against oppression? What does oppression exactly mean? For some it is the rule of capital over everyday life; for others there are more obscure understandings of the world we live in.
This confusion reflects a worldview that is in many ways the ideological expression of our current era, namely the idea that all ideas and “narratives” stand on equal footing with each other. Since none possesses a final claim to a “truth,” none is truer than any other. One can just pick up and put down any ideas that one feels serve the purpose at the time. And anything can mean anything. Not realized in this confusion is that this is the worldview reflecting contemporary capitalism, the universal exchange of equivalents. One does not have to believe in absolute truths to believe that some understandings of the world are more correct than others. Instead, we get the ongoing confusion among many academics who want to remain within the Marxist fold but who bow to the ideological influence of our “post-modern” period.
Marxist concepts are not just another conceptual apparatus because we feel that they sound better. It is also not because Marx happened to say them. It is because they more correctly reflect the social reality in which we find ourselves. Being historical concepts, they are constantly changing in order to more correctly reflect the social reality and we can and must abandon them if they no longer suffice in reflecting this reality. It therefore makes a difference whether someone sees the main problem as capitalism, as a system that alienates living human labor to reproduce itself, or if one sees the problem as being alienation from our “Islamic roots” and our subjection to “westoxication.” Otherwise, there is nothing separating the communist critique of capitalism from any other.
The book suffers from wanting to have its cake and eat it too. I suppose that all of us are who are attempting to think through the idea of a universal, global social movement in the twenty-first century and are attempting to think through the idea of world revolution with the understanding of the effects of colonialism on history and capitalism. What the book fails to do is to point towards new forms of collective struggle based on the actual struggles that exist. Instead, it points to a way of conceiving struggle that, in the past, reinforced the worst ideological effects of the struggles of the people in the region.
Another negative effect of Buck-Morss’s insistence on the necessity of grounding discourse in some traditional or “authentic” discourse is the limits it places on the scope of the discourse itself. By forcing all discussion of particular social questions faced by the people in the region today to be framed in this very narrow way, it immediately rules out the multiple ways, many not yet imagined, by which people may rethink their lives and how they may see themselves and their place in the world. By insisting on seeing Islamism as the more or even most authentic discourse, we limit the ways in which the right questions can be asked. What of all the activists who choose to articulate their struggles in a discourse other than that of religion? Are they being “apologists”?
Buck-Morss writes: “To accomplish a global critique, however, it is the object criticized that must have priority, not the discursive model.”6
Yes, but what if the difference is about what that object is? What if it is the difference that makes for the difference in the discursive model? Is breaking free from western hegemony something that can be achieved through discourse? But we have to think further; if we are in agreement with this statement we must ask another question. If this is indeed the case, why should we then choose to reify the very identities that are the product of the Eurocentric worldview? Buck-Morss constantly reiterates the point that Islamism is not a monolithic entity. True, point taken. But now what? Do we abandon our critique? Indeed, what surprises us is that, for a work of critical theory, how uncritical her work really is.
- 1Buck-Morss, op. cit., 93
- 2One thinks of Hamid Dabashi’s point that Islamism is “integral but not definitive” to the political culture.
- 3See Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Grove Press (1969), pp. 3–42.
- 4Ibid.
- 5Ibid., p.99.
- 6Ibid., p. 99.
Comments
Insurgent Notes #11, January 2015
Selected articles from the special Michael Brown-Eric Garner issue of this journal.
Full contents at http://insurgentnotes.com/past-issues/issue-11/
Comments
No more Missouri compromises - John Garvey
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Like many others, we at Insurgent Notes have been paying a great deal of attention to the events in Ferguson, Missouri, that began with the murder of Michael Brown in August. We have been inspired by the courage, determination and endurance of the people from Ferguson, and other nearby cities, that have refused to let his murder simply pass by—in spite of the overwhelming police/military power that has confronted them. From Insurgent Notes #11.
Introduction
I am completing this article, in mid-November, as news reports indicate that the grand jury’s decisions will be announced in the near future. Unlike perhaps too many others, however, I do not intend to offer unsolicited advice to the young activists who have maintained a steady presence on the streets about what they should do next. They did well enough on their own at the beginning and they have undoubtedly learned from the events of the last two months. By way of example, a recent article on VICE described developments within the movement this way:
Some protesters had never really thought much about the civil rights movement before, let alone imagined that their activism would be likened to it.
“I thought it was just a protest, but my brother, who’s a little older than me, was like, ‘No, this is a civil rights movement,” Dontey Carter, a leader of the Lost Voices and a regular presence at the protests, told VICE News. “I was like, ‘Really?’ I didn’t really put it in that perspective. I thought I was just a protester, but he’s like, ‘No, you’re a civil rights leader,’ and I was like, ‘Wow…’ ”
Carter, a 23-year-old former Crips member and a father of two small children, had never been to a protest prior to August 9, when Brown was shot. He was at a friend’s house in Ferguson when he saw television news broadcasts of the crowd assembling on Canfield Drive.
“I went down there and people started protesting and standing up, and I was like, ‘This is where it’s at,’ ” he said. “Me being there by myself felt kind of weird, but when we all did it together, it was amazing.”
By the time Brown was buried at a funeral attended by thousands of people, Carter and nine others he met on the streets had formed the Lost Voices—a group of Ferguson youth that camped out on West Florissant Avenue, the epicenter of the protests, for weeks before police eventually removed them, as Carter put it, “because we were taking too much of a stand.”
But that was just the beginning.
“It went bigger than camping out. Camping out was just to make a statement, to show that we would not be moved,” Carter said. “The officers talked to the business owners, saying that they would get some type of violation, but we still kept the movement going.”
The group was at “ground zero,” as its members called it, every night—facing SWAT teams, tear gas, and even a noose that someone left in a parking lot near their encampment. When VICE News spoke with two girls from the group at Brown’s funeral, they told us they called themselves Lost Voices because they wanted to speak for a generation of poor and marginalized black youth who had never been listened to.
Less than two months later, the group had gained dozens of friends in Ferguson and hundreds of supporters on Facebook. In October they dropped the “lost” and changed their name to Found Voices.
“Once we were lost but now we are found,” Carter said. “We were the Lost Voices but then people got a hold of who we really are, what this movement is truly about. It became our voice. We’re not lost anymore.”
Carter described the past two months as a “spiritual awakening.”
“My life changed radically,” he remarked. “I had friends die left and right—drugs, gangs, violence—and I’ve pulled away from all of that working for the movement.”
He’s not the only one. Ferguson’s black community became united during the protests, with groups setting beefs aside to march on the streets with a common purpose. Protesters recognize that police brutality is just one form of violence that intrudes on their lives. As they work to redress this, they have also come together in other ways.
“There was so much depression going on around here. It’s hard for you to actually think straight, to do something with yourself, cause there’s so much around you that’s negative,” Carter said, adding that the movement has changed that. “It wasn’t all about me. Other friends that were all about gangs and violence, they let all of that go, and they stood together. They weren’t too concerned about any of the stuff that was going on beforehand.”
“People are gonna wake up, they’re gonna take the wool off their eyes, and they’re gonna see the truth, cause only the truth can set you free,” he went on, switching into the protest leader role he naturally adopted. “I’ve seen the truth. I understand what’s going on. I understand how the system works, and I just want the people that’s unaware of what’s going on to be conscious of how the system works.”
On the other hand, I do have some ideas about the larger set of circumstances that resulted in Michael Brown’s murder and some suggestions for things that might be done to bring the fight where it needs to be fought beyond the streets of Ferguson.
My major points will be the following:
- There are, somewhat predictable, scripts of reaction, which the police, their organizations, the prosecutors, the elected officials, and even many of those who oppose what the police do follow in the aftermath of police killings and it would be wise if we recognized their unfolding.
- The events surrounding Michael Brown’s murder are the product of a complex set of historical developments in the St. Louis area. Those developments include: the central place of Missouri in the struggle over slavery; patterns of racial discrimination across the better part of the twentieth century; deindustrialization and the emergence of the financial and real estate sectors as centers of economic activity over the last forty years; policing practices; and the development of a “new whiteness” in the post–Civil Rights era.
- The key to mounting a fight against police harassment, assaults, and killings is to break up the social bloc that supports the cops. In the case of the St. Louis area, this bloc largely resides in the suburbs with large numbers of white residents that are the legacy of almost one hundred years of making segregation.
The Scripts
As most readers will probably know, police killings are not all that uncommon. When they occur, a somewhat typical train of events ensues. The authorities (at the local and federal levels) promise investigations. The police unions quickly insist that no one should pre-judge the cop involved. Indeed, they usually claim that there’s a good chance that the victim had been involved in some kind of criminal behavior and/or that he (almost always) had engaged in threatening behavior. In the Michael Brown case and that of Eric Garner in Staten Island (in New York City), those arguments needed to be softened a bit because of the availability of video evidence about what had actually happened.
In any case, after the killing has occurred, legal proceedings are initiated which stretch out for as long as possible—to buy time for the anger that emerged in response to the killing to die down. In Ferguson, this approach has not worked very well because those on the streets have been determined to refuse to let the anger “die down.” Michael Brown’s reputation was still fair game, however. During the drawn-out proceedings, leaks from various sources are used to suggest that, once again, the victim was not a law-abiding citizen in the past and that perhaps there is good reason to suspect that he got what he more or less deserved. Meanwhile, efforts to support the accused killer are put into full gear—support organizations are formed, funds are raised, buttons are sold and rallies are held. Not surprisingly, relatives and friends of police officers play a prominent role in these efforts. And everyone waits to see what the grand jury will do.
Which brings us to the moment that we’re at now. Many are convinced that no charges will be made against Officer Wilson; some (including this writer) think that the grand jury will return a number of less than really serious indictments with the expectation that Officer Wilson will be found innocent of the most serious and possibly guilty of the least serious; almost no one seems to believe that he will face serious charges.
Different groups are preparing. The police equip themselves with more weapons to use against protesters and develop plans for how they’re going to deal with various scenarios of violence and the governor considers calling out the National Guard.[1]
Some, mostly well-meaning folks, offer suggestions for how to keep things under control. See, for example, the statement of the Don’t Shoot Coalition
Other radical groups are preparing to urge the activists in Ferguson to return to the streets and engage once again in rebellious, if not riotous, actions. As I mentioned above, I’ll abstain from giving advice to the activists on the streets of Ferguson. But I do have some advice for others:
- They should not cooperate with the government.
- They should pay more attention to the social base of the support for Officer Wilson and try to imagine how they might mount a challenge to that support in the communities where it is concentrated. In other words, they should think about confronting not just the police on the streets of Ferguson but their supporters across the white belt of suburbs around St. Louis.
Which is why I’ll now turn to an effort to understand the historical development of that base of support.
Historical Developments
Missouri—Not Far From the Center of the Country
If we leave out Alaska and Hawaii, the geographical center of the United States is in northern Kansas, but Missouri, its neighboring state, has probably played a more central role in the nation’s history. Missouri was among the territories claimed by the United States under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, part of the fallout of the defeat of Napoleon’s army by the free people of Haiti. From soon afterwards, slavery was the defining issue.
In 1820, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state along with Maine as a free state. At the same time, the so-called Missouri Compromise prohibited the extension of slavery to any other parts of the territory covered by the Purchase (territory that includes what is now Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, as well as Louisiana west of the Mississippi River). Here’s a map with.a bit of an explanation of the geography:
While slavery was legal in the state, not all African Americans were enslaved. This seems to have especially been true in St. Louis. Furthermore, as was the case in many Southern cities, slaves who could perform various kinds of skilled labor were often “rented out” to individuals or businesses. To some extent, these workers were able to move around the city. As a result, both free and enslaved individuals were in frequent contact with each other. At the same time, this hardly meant that slavery was not a permanent reality, and St. Louis became a major center for the buying and selling of slaves. By the 1840s, about 5 percent of the population in St. Louis was black—approximately two-thirds of whom were enslaved. As elsewhere, the stage was set for a battle between the supporters and opponents of slavery.
The Road to the Civil War
Elijah Lovejoy moved to Missouri in 1827 and became the editor of the St. Louis Observer He subsequently became a.Presbyterianminister and established a church. His Observer editorials criticized slavery (he identified himself as an abolitionist—in favor of the abolition of slavery) and other church denominations for their failure to do the same. In May 1836, after anti-abolitionist opponents in St. Louis destroyed his printing press for the third time, Lovejoy moved across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois (a free state). He began publishing the Alton Observer On November 7, 1837, a pro-slavery mob attacked the warehouse where the printing press was housed. Lovejoy and his supporters exchanged shots with the mob and he was fatally wounded. He became an abolitionist hero.
In 1846, Dred Scott (a slave who had often been “rented out”) sued for his, his wife’s and their two daughters’ freedom in St. Louis. Scott had traveled with his owner John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, who was frequently transferred to different army bases. During these transfers, Scott spent time in Illinois, a free state, and the Wisconsin Territory, now Minnesota—where slavery was prohibited because of the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. .[2] Subsequently, the army transferred Emerson to St. Louis and then to Louisiana (places where slavery was legal). After getting married in Louisiana, Emerson commanded the Scotts to return to him. They did so.
The Emersons and the Scotts returned to Missouri in 1840. In 1842, Emerson left the army but died soon afterward. His widow inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after Emerson’s death, she continued to hire out the Scotts. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family’s freedom, but Mrs. Emerson refused, leading Scott to file his suit in St. Louis Circuit Court. The Scott v. Emerson case was first tried in 1847. The judgment went against Scott but the judge called for a retrial because of problems with the evidence. In 1850, a second jury found that Scott and his wife should be freed since they had been illegally held as slaves during their time in the free jurisdictions of Illinois and Wisconsin. Mrs. Emerson appealed. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the lower court ruling, and ruled that the precedent of “once free always free” was no longer the case, overturning 28 years of legal precedent.
Under Missouri law at the time, after Dr. Emerson had died, the powers of the Emerson estate were transferred to his wife’s brother, John Sanford. Because Sanford was a citizen of New York, Scott’s lawyers argued that the case should be brought before federal courts. After losing again in federal district court, they appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney delivered the majority opinion. The Court ruled that any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, was not a citizen of the United States and that neither the Ordinance of 1787 nor the Missouri Compromise legislation could grant either freedom or citizenship to non-white individuals. The Court also ruled that because Scott was the private property of his owners he was subject to the provision of the Fifth Amendment that prohibited the taking of property from its owner “without due process.”
Following the ruling, Scott and his family were returned to Emerson’s widow. Due to changes in Mrs. Emerson’s circumstances (she had married into an abolitionist family), the Scott family was set free less than three months after the decision. While the consequences of the decision were not devastating to the Scotts, the decision nonetheless made clear the determination of the slave power to preserve the bondage of millions of people.
Scott went to work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel but died less than two years later. He was originally interred in Wesleyan Cemetery in St. Louis, but his coffin was later moved to the Catholic Calvary Cemetery.[3]
A video filmed in the cemetery offers a moving appreciation of the significance of Dred Scott and the decision that bears his name.
Scott’s wife survived him by 18 years and there are descendants of the family still living in the St. Louis area.[4]
The prohibition against slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territories had already been effectively ended by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which stipulated that the slave or free status of those states would be decided by the popular sovereignty (votes) of white males. That legislation opened up the chapter now known as Bloody Kansas, in which slavery supporters from Missouri served as shock troops to terrorize those who had moved to Kansas to oppose slavery. Which brings us to John Brown in Missouri.
In December 1858, Brown heard that a slave named Daniels from Missouri had crossed into Kansas looking for assistance in rescuing his family from sale to another slave owner. By the next day, Brown had organized a raiding party of nearly twenty abolitionists. The band split up into two groups so that they might be able to free other slaves on the same trip. Brown’s group captured Daniels’s owner, Harvey Hicklan, and rescued the Daniels family. All told, the two groups freed eleven slaves. Slave owners and their supporters were outraged by the theft of property and the killing of one of their own that had taken place during the raid. The governor of Missouri offered a $3,000 reward for Brown’s capture immediately afterward.But Brown was not done. For three winter months, he led the rescued slaves across Nebraska and Iowa. Along the way, anti-slavery folks provided food, clothing, accommodations and protection for the fugitives. The freed people secretly boarded a train to Chicago and another one to Detroit. Finally, they took a ferry to freedom in Windsor, Canada. But John Brown did not rest. The Missouri raid launched him on the last great deed of his life—the assault on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Although the assault failed and Brown was executed, it “startled the South into madness” and led step by step to the war of slave emancipation.[5]
The Civil War
While Missouri had been a slave state, it was not clear which side it would be on during the Civil War. In part, this was the result of the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants in the St. Louis area during the 1850s. Some of them were refugees from the failed German revolution of 1848, and some were followers of Karl Marx, including Joseph Wedemeyer.[6] They began to make their presence felt in 1861. On New Year’s Day, German immigrants stormed a slave auction to stop it from going forward. At the same time, the St. Louis Arsenal housed a large supply of weapons and ammunition. The pro-slavery governor of the state launched a plan to seize it. German immigrants with some Irish and native-born allies mobilized against the plot. Eventually more than 5,000 men assembled to protect the arsenal. When the Confederate supporters attempted an attack on the arsenal, they were overwhelmed by a superior force and surrendered without a fight. Soon afterward, many of those German immigrants volunteered to serve in the Union Army, but not much actual fighting took place in Missouri.
After the end of the war, Missouri adopted a new state constitution that prohibited slavery and required that African-American children be enrolled in schools (that would only enroll black children). Soon afterward, the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the establishment of Reconstruction governments across the South appeared to herald a new day. But the promise would not last and the end was tragic. Instead, the Reconstruction era launched at the end of the war ended in tragedy, with all of the promise of emancipation squandered, and, as W.E.B. Du Bois commented, “Democracy died, save in the hearts of Black folk.”[7]
The Making of a Segregated Metropolitan Area
During the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the black population of St. Louis grew. Black and white residents mostly lived in separate parts of the city but housing conditions were not necessarily worse in the black sections. But soon enough, whites adopted a method to their madness. In 1915, voters approved a local law that prohibited any one from moving to a block where more than 75 percent of residents were of a different race. When the law was overthrown by a court decision, the St. Louis Real Estate Board supported the establishment of neighborhood associations whose members signed fifty-year covenants forbidding sales to non-whites. That practice would not be outlawed until a Supreme Court decision in 1949.
In the years before fair housing laws passed, black real estate brokers faced death threats, assault and bombings of their residences by angry whites intent on policing the color line. Furthermore, white vigilantes frequently attacked blacks that were attempting to move into white neighborhoods or to use whites-only recreational facilities. According to George Lipsitz,
When the city of St. Louis announced the desegregation of its municipally owned and operated swimming pool in Fairgrounds Park in 1949, thirty Black children showed up for a swim. More than two hundred whites brandishing weapons and shouting racist epithets surrounded the pool to drive them out. Police officers escorted the Black youths to safety, but whites began attacking Blacks they encountered in and around the park. By nightfall, five thousand whites assembled at the site. They cornered Black pedestrians, attacking them with lead pipes, baseball bats, and knives. Two white men advised the crowd to “get bricks and smash their heads.” Police officers restored order temporarily but in response to the upheaval the city rescinded the desegregation order and closed its pools entirely.[8]
In that same year, the American Housing Act dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in urban renewal and the construction of public housing. In St. Louis, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority expanded the Gateway Mall (a green belt that stretches from the Arch at the Mississippi River through downtown) by tearing down what were considered to be slums, and the Housing Authority quickly launched plans for the building of 5,000 units of low-rent public housing in five major locations—Plaza Square, Cochran Gardens, Darst-Webbe, the Vaughn Apartments and the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments. While the “projects” were initially welcomed as a great benefit and were somewhat integrated, they quite rapidly lost their appeal; the white residents left and, as the developments filled with black tenants, they were effectively abandoned. Soon enough, many of those black residents left for other dwellings.[9]
By the end of the 1960s, blacks had been crowded into the north side of the city. In How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz summarized the developments:
In a city where direct discrimination confined Blacks to an artificially constricted housing market, landlords and real estate brokers were free to charge them high costs for inferior and unhealthy dwellings. Slum clearance, urban renewal, and redevelopment programs made a bad situation worse by bulldozing houses inhabited by Blacks without providing adequate replacement housing. The majestic Gateway Arch on the river-front, the corridor of municipal buildings and parks near City Hall and Union Station, the midtown redevelopment area near St. Louis University, and the downtown baseball and football stadia all stand on land formerly occupied by housing available to Blacks. Seventy-five percent of the people displaced by construction of new federal highway interchanges in the downtown area were Blacks. Redevelopment in the Mill Creek Valley area alone displaced some twenty thousand Black residents, creating new overcrowded slums in the areas into which they were able to relocate.[10]
From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration used strict “redlining” guarantees to determine eligibility for its subsidized home mortgage loans. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government’s highway building program increased the value of homes in racially exclusive suburbs. Lipsitz writes about St. Louis:
Even after direct references to race disappeared from federal appraisers’ manuals, race remained the crucial factor in determining whether borrowers receive federally supported mortgage loans. Only 3.3 percent of the 400,000 FHA mortgages in the greater St. Louis area went to Blacks between 1962 and 1967, most of them in the central city. Only 56 mortgages (less than 1 percent ) went to Blacks in the suburbs of St. Louis County. Three savings-and-loan companies with assets of more than a billion dollars worked together to redline the city effectively, lending less than $100,000 on residential property inside the city limits in 1975. The local savings-and-loan institutions made loans totaling $500 million in the greater St. Louis area in 1977, but just $25 million of that total (less than 6 percent ) went to the city, almost all of it to the two mostly whites zip codes at the municipality’s southern border.[11]
A 1990 survey reported that St. Louis was the eleventh-most segregated city among the more than two hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States. (The stark character of the segregation is well known in St. Louis and is reflected in the common use of the term “Delmar Divide” to specify the boundary between white and black St. Louis. The “Divide” has even become the topic of a BBC documentary.)
While the disadvantages of segregation for blacks are often enough acknowledged, what is not usually acknowledged are the advantages for “whites.” Lipsitz argues:
Although many of the practices that secured these gains initially were outlawed by the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the gains whites received for them were already locked in place . Even more important, nearly every significant decision made since then about urban planning, education, employment, transportation, taxes, housing, and health care has served to protect the preferences, privileges and property that whites first acquired from an expressly and overtly discriminate market [emphases added].[12]
For the white folks, their relative advantages led them “to believe that people with problems are problems, that the conditions inside the ghetto are created by ghetto residents themselves.”
Not surprisingly, many of the black people held more or less captive in undesirable circumstances in the city of St. Louis looked to get out. But they did not escape the effects of segregation. Once again, Lipsitz:
Since the 1970s, Blacks have gradually started moving to the suburbs. Yet Black suburbanization is largely concentrated in areas with falling rents and declining property values, most often in older inner ring suburbs. For example, census tracts that had more than 25 percent Black populations in St. Louis County in 1990 were concentrated in one corridor adjacent to the city’s north side. Suburbs with Black populations above 60 percent (Bel Ridge, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Hillsdale, Kinloch, Northwoods, Norwood Court, Pagedale, Pinelawn, Uplands Park, and Wellston) lay in contiguous territory outside the city limits.[13]
Things have not changed much since. Earlier this year, researchers at Washington University and St. Louis University reported that African Americans constituted between 45 percent and 97 percent of the population in the zip codes covering the northern part of the city and the suburban cities just north of them (including Ferguson). At the same time, in the zip code areas south and west of the city, African Americans constituted less than 5 percent of the population.
This profound cleavage and the sharp differences in living conditions and life possibilities that it both creates and symbolizes has left its marks in the minds of the residents of both the white and the black communities. Here’s an illuminating, and contemptible, recent video by a white man traveling in his car through the heart of the black community of St. Louis.
I wasn’t able to find any comparable travelogue produced by a black journey through the white suburbs, but I believe that it’s not too hard to imagine why we have witnessed the extraordinary solidarity on the streets of Ferguson. That solidarity “stems not so much from an abstract idealism as from necessity. Pervasive housing discrimination and the segregation it consolidates leaves Blacks with a clearly recognizable linked fate. Because it is difficult to move away from other members of their group, they struggle to turn the radical divisiveness created by overcrowding and competition for scarce resources into mutual recognition and respect.”[14]
Deindustrialization, the FIRE Economy and Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era
At more or less the same time as the segregated world of St. Louis was being solidified, momentous changes began to change the shape of the United States economy and the lives of people across the country. St. Louis was in the center of the maelstrom.
Let’s go back. By 1900, St. Louis had a population of 575,000 people (the fourth largest in the country at a time when New York City’s population was about 3.5 million) and had become a large manufacturing and transportation center. By 1930, it had grown to about 820,000 people while New York had doubled to just under 7 million. The city was still a vibrant center of manufacturing. But, starting with the beginning of the Depression, the city lost half of its manufacturing production; more than 30 percent of the population was unemployed and black unemployment was at 80 percent. Only with the introduction of large scale war production in anticipation of the entry of the United States into World War II, and the further expansion of that production once the United States joined the conflict, did the number of jobs and residents increase again. But the uptick was short-lived and, as soon as Japan surrendered, war contracts were terminated and thousands lost their jobs. By 1960, the city’s population had declined to about 750,000. To some extent, the decline within the city was offset by the rapid suburbanization that took place afterward—made possible by the construction of new highways and thereby spreading the population ever further away from the center of town.[15] However, a relatively high level of industrial employment was maintained until the 1970s. But then the bottom started falling out—between 1979 and 1982, St. Louis lost 44,000 industrial jobs. This led to the loss of still more people from the city.
The decline of St. Louis reflected the emergence of a new era in American social and economic life—an era characterized by:
- factory closures and plant transfers to lower-waged locations;
- elimination of jobs through automation;
- extensive technical innovation in communication, transportation and production—resulting in still more job losses;
- the development of finance as a major source of profits (even for industrial firms);
- a rise in part-time or temporary jobs as primary employment;
- the depopulation and physical destruction of cities (such as St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore);
- gentrification in many urban neighborhoods and the rise in political importance of the social groups formed by that gentrification (although this is not much of a reality in St. Louis);
- sharp decreases in unionization rates in the private sector;
- lowered wages and reduced benefits;
- the establishment of credit (at either normal or usury rates) as an indispensable way of life for many members of the middle and working classes.
These large developments have had specific features in St. Louis.
Land and property have been important for a long time. The importance they have in cities is quite different from the importance they have elsewhere. Within the cities, the value of the land has little to do with its fertility or the resources hidden beneath its surface. Instead, it has a great deal to do with relative desirability. Residential real estate speculation within cities has been preoccupied with manipulating desirability—most recently symbolized by gentrification. But gentrification, at least in the forms that it has taken in cities like Washington and New York, has not been a major development in St. Louis. At the same time, commercial real estate speculation has been preoccupied with the value of attractions—things that bring people with money to places where they will spend it—museums, monuments, theaters, parks and sports arenas. This speculation has constituted the predominant model of urban economic development for the last few decades and has fostered intense inter-city and intra-city competition to provide developers with the most favorable terms. Which brings us to professional sports.
Lipsitz begins his third chapter, “Spectatorship and Citizenship,” with a sports story—the St. Louis Rams’ win in the 2000 Super Bowl over the Tennessee Titans:
When the St. Louis Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans on January 23, 2000, to win the National Football League Super Bowl championship, the team’s players, coaches, and management deserved only part of the credit. Sports journalists covering the games cited the passing of Kurt Warner and the running of Marshall Faulk as the key factors in the Rams victory. Others acknowledged the game plan designed by head coach Dick Vermeil and the player personnel moves made by general manager John Shaw. But no one publicly recognized the contributions made by 45,473 children enrolled in the St. Louis city school system to the Rams’ victory. Eighty-five percent of these students were so poor that they qualified for federally subsidized lunches. Eighty percent of them were African-American. They did not score touchdowns, make tackles, kick field goals, or intercept passes for the team. But revenue diverted from the St. Louis school system through tax abatements and other subsidies to the Rams made a crucial difference in giving the football team the resources to win the Super Bowl.[16]
While the schools were starving, tax deals like the one for the Rams were taking away seventeen million dollars every year from public education.
Lipsitz argues that the stadium “would have never been built without government funds and subsidies—because stadiums don’t make money,” and he explains that recovering the costs involved in the debt for the construction would require the scheduling of a total of more than 500 “events” in the stadium each year—an obviously impossible possibility. But Lipsitz reminds us that the actual debt is only part of the story—debt demands interest. He writes, “At least twenty-four million dollars a year in city, county, and state tax dollars will continue to be spent on the St. Louis stadium project through the year 2022.” But even that’s not enough—provisions of the contract that the Rams have with the city allows the team to leave for still another city if the subsidies don’t match what other teams are getting or if the stadium’s attractions are considered not as good as those in other places. Lipsitz bitterly comments:
The Rams can always move again. After all, they were the Cleveland Rams before they were the Los Angeles Rams. Even inside Los Angeles, the team moved from the Los Angeles Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium after officials in that suburban city expanded the size of their facility from 43,250 to 70,000 seats, constructed new executive offices for the team’s use, and built 100 luxury boxes for use by Rams fans.
…
Subsidies to previous franchises did not prevent St. Louis from losing the basketball Hawks to Atlanta or the football Cardinals to Phoenix. In fact, by using subsidies to provide the Rams with more profit in a metropolitan area with three million people than they could get in one with more than nine million, the backers of the stadium have unwittingly increased the number of their potential competitors. With subsidies like these, professional football franchises can move virtually anywhere and make a profit. The Tennessee Titans, defeated by the Rams in the 2000 Super Bowl, previously played in Houston as the Oilers, until a subsidized stadium in Nashville persuaded team owner Bud Adams to move his operations there. He could make more money in a smaller city because of government subsidies.[17]
In 1975, state and local governments sold $6.2 billion of tax-exempt bonds for commercial projects; by 1982, the total was $44 billion. At the same time, bond sales for the construction of schools, hospitals, housing, sewer and water mains, and other public works projects declined. According to Lipsitz:
Twenty-nine new sports facilities were constructed in US cities between 1999 and 2003 at a total cost of nearly nine billion dollars. Sixty-four percent of the funds to build those arenas—approximately $5.7 billion—came directly from taxpayers. In Philadelphia, construction of a new baseball stadium for the Phillies and a new football stadium for the Eagles cost $1.1 billion. City funds supplied $394 million, and state tax revenue contributed an additional $180 million.[18]
Just recently, the City of Detroit, in spite of being bankrupt, agreed to contribute $200 million in tax increment financing to subsidize the construction of a new arena for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team.[19]
This pattern reflects an intense competition between different cities which “produces new inequalities that can be used in a race to the bottom by capital, promoting bidding wars between government bodies to reduce property taxes and other obligations while increasing subsidies and the provision of free services to corporations.” Lipsitz argues:
The subsidies offered to support structures like the domed stadium in St. Louis proceed from this general pattern. In the Keynesian era, St. Louis financial institutions invested in their own region. But since the 1980s they have been shifting investments elsewhere, exporting locally generated wealth to sites around the world with greater potential for rich and rapid returns. Building the domed stadium offered them an opportunity to create a potential source of high profit for outside investors in their region. Large projects like this generate some new short-term local spending on construction, financing, and services. They clear out large blocks of underutilized land for future development. But because they are so heavily subsidized, projects like the domed stadium wind up costing the local economy more than they bring in while they funnel windfall profits toward wealthy investors from other cities.
The ability of local and state governments to sell these projects depends fundamentally on the genuine popularity of professional sports, especially football. Lipsitz has something interesting to say about this:
[P]rofessional sports fill a void. They provide a limited sense of place for contemporary urban dwellers, offering them a rooting interest that promises at least the illusion of inclusion in connection with others. The illusion is not diminished by contrary evidence, by the fact that every St. Louis Ram would become a Tennessee Titan and every Tennessee Titan would become a St. Louis Ram tomorrow if they could make more money by doing so, by the fact that team owners preach the virtues of unbridled capitalism while enjoying subsidies that free them from the rigors of competition and risk, by the fact that impoverished and often ill schoolchildren are called upon to subsidize the recreation of some of the society’s wealthiest and healthiest citizens.[20]
Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era
Everyday in Ferguson, its surrounding areas and all across the country, the police stop, mostly young, black men. Most of the everyday encounters are not recorded—other than in the memories of the young people themselves and, in quite different ways, in the memories of the cops involved—for others to see. If recordings were available, what we’d likely see are encounters that include verbal and physical abuse designed to intimidate and humiliate—cops reaching into the young men’s pants, pulling down their pants, throwing them to the ground or against a wall. In virtually all of these instances, the cops have the upper hand—they have the handcuffs, clubs and guns; they have their fellow cops ready to back them up; they have the ability to fabricate charges and they can rely on the slow administration of justice to make sure that they will face no consequences. Perhaps others can understand why the young people are outraged at what happens to them and why the cops may very well be terrified because of their understandable concern that the young people have not forgotten and, as they have done in Ferguson, that they might take things into their own hands and that others might join with them.
Perhaps it’s this fear that we see when we look at what happens when shots are fired and the cops are involved—a cop shoots somebody or, less often, somebody shoots a cop. In either case, lots of cops arrive in minutes, with sirens screaming, from all directions—they put up their yellow tape and they tell everyone to keep away. They answer no questions and they threaten anyone who keeps asking. They make sure that the cop involved is quickly removed from the scene. The contrast with what the cops did after Michael Brown was shot is excruciating—there they arrived in their usual numbers and they made sure that people stayed away but there was no urgency about Michael Brown—he was just left lying on the ground for hours. It would be a really good question to ask them—WHY? Dead was not enough?
In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) was quick to come to Darren Wilson’s defense. It purchased newspaper ads and wrote letters to people like Attorney General Eric Holder. Its arguments were not vulgar ones—they insisted that the facts were not yet known and that people should wait to see what the investigations revealed. Its messages are clearly designed to shape the ways in which cops across the country think about and talk about the issues and, in turn, to shape the ways in which the supporters of the police think and talk about them.[21] NAPO is no two-bit operation. It currently includes organizations that represent approximately 240,000 police officers (including cops in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York and Portland, as well as St. Louis) and 100,000 civilian supporters. They all stand ready to defend cops just about anywhere.
As is often the case, the details of the regularly awful things that happen everyday only emerge into daylight when something “really awful” happens—as with the killing of Michael Brown. In the cities north of St. Louis and in Ferguson, in particular, the everyday routines of police harassment of black people have taken on a particularly mercenary character. It appears that, because Ferguson is a small city and does not have the real estate tax base that it needs to support its budget (in spite of the fact that the city is home to a Fortune 500 corporation, Emerson Electric), the city relies heavily on public safety and court fines that have skyrocketed in recent years.[22] A recent review of the city’s financial statements indicated that court fines accounted for twenty percent of its revenue. The city took in more than $2.5 million in court revenues in the last fiscal year, an 80 percent increase from two years earlier. This is no accident—it’s a business plan. A local law professor, Bryan Roediger, estimates that the court—which only holds three sessions a month—heard 200 to 300 cases an hour on some days. A recent report also argues that the court routinely begins hearing cases 30 minutes before the scheduled start time and then locks the doors 5 minutes after the official start. Those who arrive late face an additional charge for failing to appear. According to Governing, “the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases in 2013, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”
Ferguson is not the only city that plays the traffic stop game. Often enough, when someone is stopped in one jurisdiction, it’s discovered that there are outstanding warrants in other ones. As a result, the person gets sent first to one jail until a bond is posted, then to another and then to another—with money being collected at each stop along the way.
The anger that is fueling the rebellion in Ferguson has been shaped day in and day out by these experiences for many years. A reporter from. VICE suggested that the scope of the anger is “best captured by one of the protesters’ favorite slogans: ‘ The whole damn system is guilty as hell.’ ”[23]
A New Whiteness
As many have argued, whiteness is historical. It is not a natural condition—like being left-handed. Over time, groups once excluded from it were allowed in. The only group permanently excluded was the blacks. But these last two decades or so had provided a good deal of evidence to suggest that whiteness is not quite what it used to be—such as on the one hand, the presence of black individuals at the head of Fortune 500 corporations and, perhaps needless to say, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and, on the other hand, the ineffectiveness of the traditional privileges of whiteness in protecting white workers from being thrown out of their jobs when the factories shut down. However, I’d like to suggest that the white question has not been settled.
In addition to the more or less open white supremacist groups on the far right, there are many who want to preserve, if not enhance, the privileges accorded to those considered white. Their convictions and their assumptions reflect the material circumstances of their lives as well as a good deal of absent-mindedness and historical amnesia. As George Lipsitz has convincingly argued, the legacy effects of previous discrimination are very significant and they are, in many ways, crystallized in the sharp demarcation between the concentrations of blacks in hollowed out center cities and in inner-ring suburbs and the wide dispersal of “whites” across the broad suburban landscapes around the cities. Lipsitz:
Racialized space enables the advocates of expressly racist policies to disavow any racial intent. They speak on behalf of whiteness and its accumulated privileges and immunities, but rather than having to speak as whites, they present themselves as racially unmarked homeowners, citizens and taxpayers, whose preferred policies just happen to sustain white privilege and power.
With or without being asked, many police officers have been actively engaged in enforcing the racial separations defined by space. At the same time, it is clear that there are some, perhaps many, in the highest political and economic circles who would prefer that policing be conducted in accordance with the protection of civil rights and civil liberties but, at least in this instance, they do not always have the last word.[24] The police’s jobs are to protect property and to deal with the all but inevitable consequences of the immiseration that has become pervasive in the last forty years—as a result of the transformations in the American economy described above. To a not insignificant extent, however, the police often act autonomously and they are seldom called to account when they do so. In that context, the power of police unions (especially as reflected in their ability to influence politicians seeking their support) plays a major part in maintaining their protection. These unions have come a long way—they seldom have any need for any recourse, at least publicly, to explicit pronouncements of any racial intent. The “new whiteness” is perhaps the lie that does not have to speak in its own name.
Conclusion
By way of a conclusion, I would repeat my earlier point about the central task of confronting the social bloc that the police count on for support. At the same time, it remains essential to support and defend those who have taken the lead in Ferguson. But, we should also not underestimate the need to address the profound shaping of the lives of the people involved by the larger set of circumstances created and sustained by the particular ways in which capital rules St. Louis.
- [1] In what might be considered a parallel process of attempting to control the situation (or to win over at least some local residents), institutions, such as Emerson Electric and St. Louis University, have committed themselves to various improvement efforts. See, for example, “Emerson donating $4.4 million for Ferguson scholarships, job training,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Here’s the Agreement that Ended the Occupation of Saint Louis University,” Riverfront Times ↩
- [2] . The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789 had prohibited slavery in the territory that now includes Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. ↩
- [3] William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union Army General whose March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and led to the North’s victory, is buried in the same cemetery. ↩
- [4] The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the defining feature of the city’s landscape, was designed as a memorial to the westward expansion of the United States (initiated by the Louisiana Purchase) and to the early European explorers. No memorial was built about the consequences of that expansion for the Native American peoples who were pushed off their lands. Subsequently, the Arch was incorporated within the Jefferson National Park to also include the city’s Old Courthouse (the scene of the two Dred Scott trials). The whole project seems to be a fitting symbol for the ways in which the writers of what we might consider the “good” version of American history want to have it both ways—celebrating the frontier and freedom while obscuring the ways in which, for many years, it was the official policy of the United States government to implement the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of those of African descent. ↩
- [5] For more on John Brown, see W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, Modern Library Classics (2014). ↩
- [6] Marx and Engels closely followed the developments in the United States leading up to the Civil War and during it. They wrote numerous articles about the events, a limited number of which are available online More important, they played a major role in ensuring that the International Workingmen’s Association would be a mainstay in the effort to prevent England from entering the war on the side of the South and to enforce a boycott of Southern cotton—even when it meant lost jobs for English factory workers. ↩
- [7] . W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (The Free Press: 1988), p. 30. ↩
- [8] George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Temple University Press: 2011), p. 26. Lipsitz’s book was an invaluable source for most of the information and analysis in this section. ↩
- [9] At this point, only Plaza Square, which had been sold to private owners, remains standing. All of the others have been demolished. Most infamously, one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings was blown up for the world to watch in 1972 (less than twenty years after they had been built). What remains in most instances are empty, and over-grown, lots. ↩
- [10] Lipsitz, p. 76. ↩
- [11] Lipsitz, p. 75. ↩
- [12] Lipsitz, p. 3. ↩
- [13] Lipsitz, pp. 55–56. ↩
- [14] Lipsitz, p. 56. ↩
- [15] These trends have continued for the last fifty years. In 2013, St. Louis’s population was down to approximately 318,000 (making it the fifty-eighth largest city in the country). At the same time that the city’s population was declining, the population in what is called the Metropolitan Statistical Area (that includes the suburbs) had grown to about 2,795,000. This means that the city itself only constitutes a bit over 10 percent of the population in the area. By comparison, New York City constitutes about 40 percent of the population in its area. ↩
- [16] Lipsitz details the grim realities in the St. Louis public school system that were exacerbated by underfunding—underpaid and inexperienced teachers, a low high school graduation rate and a dropout rate that, at times, was more than three times the state average. See pages 73–74. ↩
- [17] Lipsitz, pp. 90–91. In spite of all this, I suspect that George Lipsitz might be a Rams fan. If I’m right, I admire his willingness to share his analysis with the rest of us who are fans of other football teams or not fans of any. ↩
- [18] Lipsitz, p. 86. ↩
- [19] On Detroit, see “New Detroit Red Wings Arena: Plenty of Public Subsidies; Few Public Benefits,” Planetizen. ↩
- [20] . Lipsitz, pp. 92–93. ↩
- [21] The text of the message that NAPO sent to its members is available ↩
- [22] . In 2009, Emerson Electric received state income tax credits and local property tax abatements to support its construction of a new computer center on its headquarters campus. Perhaps that’s why traffic stops had to increase ↩
- [23] In 1941, CLR James wrote about the attitudes of sharecroppers who were fighting against their conditions in southeast Missouri that: “[T]hese workers, in a fundamental sense, are among the most advanced in America. For, to any Marxist, an advanced worker is someone who, looking at the system under which he lives, wants to tear it to pieces. That is exactly what the most articulate think of capitalism in southeast Missouri.” Perhaps the same might be said of the people on the streets of Ferguson in 2014. ↩
- [24] I’d suggest that the dispatching of Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson to express his concerns and to promise an investigation was not just an exercise in going through the motions—they would really prefer that the cops be equal opportunity upholders of the law. It’s also the case that many of these same people have been responsible for and supportive of the equipping of police departments with battlefield quality weaponry and equipment—such as were seen on the streets of Ferguson and during the police occupation of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing. Whatever their views might be on the question of race, there is no question about the extent of their commitment to the preservation of the rule of capital—by any means necessary. ↩
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Review: Chris Rhomberg, The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor (2012)
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A critical review of Chris Rhomberg's The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor. From Insurgent Notes #11.
For an academic work, this is a quite good, fact-packed, but flawed, book about a militant strike in the United States, the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995–2000, which took place during a generally bleak decade for class struggle. Clowns such as Bill Clinton’s then–Labor Secretary Robert Reich openly wondered whether unions still had a role in the much touted, “entrepreneurial,” (and now happily forgotten) “new economy” of the dot.com bubble. One must, of course, be wary of a book plugged by Kate Bronfenbrenner, who runs Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and for whom Rhomberg’s book shows why “worker-community solidarity and filing legal challenges are no longer enough to win strikes.” That is indeed what Rhomberg’ s book shows, but ultimately not for reasons Bronfenbrenner, or perhaps Rhomberg himself, is about to discuss in a book pitched to a respectable audience of labor academics, labor lawyers and trade unionists. Another flashing yellow light is an endorsement by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who in 1995 lent his voice to the bubbly enthusiasm among “progressive academics” for newly-elected and ultimately hapless AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.
Rhomberg, as he shows in this book and in an earlier work on Oakland, California entitled No There There1 , is anything but naive. His historical portrait of post-1945 Detroit, as background to the strike, is an almost textbook case of the race-class dynamic in America. Detroit, coming out of the mass CIO strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, was the American union town par excellence; in 1945, 60 percent of the population belonged to a union or was related to a union member. Yet, at the very height of the 1943 wildcat strikes in auto, against the no-strike pledge, Detroit was also torn apart by race riots in which 34 people died—17 of them blacks killed by police. The post-war era saw little respite, with white opposition to integrated housing an ongoing reality.2 White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s and, as early as 1958, there were 25 new suburban auto plants; that flight accelerated after the 1967 riots in which 43 people were killed. By 1990, 2.9 million people, 95 percent white, lived in a suburban ring, surrounding a hollowed-out city of less than one million, majority black people and shuttered factories. (Contemporary propaganda blaming “overpaid auto workers” for the current devastation of Detroit is naturally silent on this dynamic.).
Militant late 1960s actions by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers had forced auto companies to hire black foremen and also forced the United Auto Workers (UAW) to hire black staff.3 In 1973, Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young, who remained in office for 20 years. The decline, however, was relentless: Detroit in 1950 had 1.8 million people and 300,000 manufacturing jobs; by 2000, 62,000 such jobs remained within the city. Following the 1967 riots, a much-trumpeted attempt to remake the dying downtown area, where unrented commercial space abounded, was a failure; it featured the ill-fated “Renaissance Center,” which lost $130 million in its first five years. By 1982, 250,000 auto workers had lost their jobs; 42 auto-related companies closed between 1978 and 1981 alone. Membership in the UAW fell by nearly half, from 1.5 million in the late 1970s to 800,000 by the late 1990s.
(A more up-to-date, undoubtedly ill-fated, renewal attempt is underway today, focused on the renovating powers of the so-called “creative classes”—yuppies—a renovation which of course offers nothing to the remaining long-term, overwhelmingly black residents except higher rents and further marginalization.)
The 1990s had also seen a small “rebirth” in the pathetic (and not only in Detroit) “post-industrial” turn to casinos and sports arenas.As background to the dynamics of the strike, Rhomberg provides interesting material on the history of the newspaper in the United States, tracing out the demise of the small town paper as well as of the multi-paper urban press; as early as 1960, 90 percent of newspapers had no local competitor. Total US daily circulation peaked in 1974 at 63 million and fell to 55.8 million by 2000. Detroit by the 1990s still had two papers, the News and the Free Press . In contrast to many of the “suburbs in search of a city” that had grown up in the Sun Belt in the postwar era, Detroit’s papers were rooted in gritty urban realities and by the very nature of Detroit provided labor coverage long after most big urban dailies had closed down their labor beats and were covering strikes primarily in terms of inconvenience to the “consumer.” By the mid-1990s, the News and the Free Press were the ninth and tenth largest newspapers in the United States, and still had strong ties in what remained of the local community. But they were hardly immune to the larger trends; in the 1970s and 1980s, technology eliminated more than half the jobs, wages fell by 25 percent, and finally the News and Free Press were forced to merge.
The 1990s were not as strike-free as they might have seemed in the hangover of the 1989–91 recession and the deceptive glitz of the Clinton years. Coal miners in Pittston, Virginia, had fought off an attempt to shred their UMW contract in 1989–90; the New York Daily News was also struck in 1990, as was Colt Firearms in Hartford, Connecticut; under duress, beleaguered unions were making more serious attempts at community outreach, as in SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. In spite of all the downsizing, there were still 600,000 union members in southeastern Michigan in 1995, creating a broad base of sympathy, rooted in the history of the region, which would have been available to strikers in few other American cities. In 1997, around the time that the militant actions of the Detroit newspaper strikers had been rerouted into years of ultimately futile (and predictable) NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and court proceedings, the Teamsters struck UPS nationwide for two weeks, one of the few winning strikes of significance against a backdrop of general rout. The UPS strikers won wage increases and the conversion of 10,000 part timers to full time, while holding the line on pensions, with very strong and visible support from the “public,” i.e., a good part of the working class which was reeling from nearly two decades of rollback.
One of the more arresting parts of Rhomberg’s book is his detailed description of how the management of the News and Free Press prepared for the 1995 strike for two full years in advance, far more carefully than the unions, spending $2 million in the process. Rhomberg frames his overall analysis in terms of a clash between a declining set of labor-management relations left over from the New Deal and the new open season on workers that took off in the 1980s, where management simply walked away from the “broken table.” Such a framing, while obviously of some validity, overlooks a long history, from the mid-1950s at the latest, of wildcat strikes and rank-and-file revolts,4 quite outside any postwar “accord.” But let that go for the moment. The fusion of the Gannett ( News ) and Knight-Ridder ( Free Press ) managements into the Detroit Newspaper Association (DNA) had brought on hardball tactics of a kind for which the multiple unions under contract with the two papers were ill prepared.5 The DNA carefully studied the two-week strike of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, involving 2600 workers in 1994. They enlisted Huffmaster, Inc., a private strike security firm. They cultivated ties with the police department of suburban Sterling Heights, where a new printing plant was located. (While there was a still more modern plant in Detroit itself, management felt that their strikebreaking activities would be poorly received in Detroit proper, and that the plant would be harder to defend.) Their goals were a much greater use of merit pay in the newsroom, elimination of overtime in the already downsized pressroom, replacing full-time with part-time staff in the mailroom (organized by the Teamsters), and further restructuring of the circulation department, whose work force had already been reduced by 80 percent since the previous contract. Even though the papers had turned a profit of $55 million the previous year, management was out to impose a “far more wrenching change” on the various unions involved. Plans for security guards, quasi-military equipment and blueprints for the Sterling Heights Police Department (SHPD) were worked out down to the smallest detail, such as providing hot meals for scabs on the job. The SHPD contacted police forces in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn more about the Chronicle-Examiner strike. The police were informed by DNA management that “a strike was likely, that it would be violent, and that the SHPD would need to develop anti-riot capacity.” Police trained in the use of riot gear outside Sterling Heights City Hall. In contrast to previous contract negotiations, sensing that new printing technology put them even more on the defensive, the unions did show unity against a management strategy to pick them off one by one. But as in other US strikes of the 1980s and 1990s, the Detroit newspaper unions, organized in the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU) were still trapped in the mindset of the superannuated postwar “accord,” such as it had been. Headed by chief negotiator John Jaske, the DNA stunned the unions with its opening offer, which amounted to a demand for almost total surrender. On April 30, 1995, contracts covering 2,500 employees expired. The DNA was partially successful in breaking the front of the several unions involved, and set a June 30 deadline for settling the contracts. As things moved inexorably toward a strike, hundreds of potential scabs (my word; Rhomberg’s terminology is more polite) “were being housed in hotels and motels across southeastern Michigan.” Prior to the strike deadline, the DNA offered most of the unions 10–11 percent wage increases over the three years of the contracts, but with so many clauses undermining the old relationships on the job that, as one member put it, “when it’s all over with, we’re not going to have enough membership to survive.”
On July 13, the unions struck. Given the DNA’s superior bargaining position and two years’ preparation, “for the newspapers, the striking employees were now perhaps little more than a problem of waste disposal, a hazard to be controlled.”
The unions organized in the MCNU did everything they were “supposed to do,” according to the long-superseded script of post-World War II “labor relations.”They got considerable material support from other unions in the region, especially the UAW; they organized a boycott of the two papers; subscriptions were cancelled, most newsstands stopped carrying both the News and the Free Press and circulation plummeted. Many businesses pulled their advertising. Many local politicians and religious leaders implored the DNA to come to its senses and restore the happy family of the status quo ante. There was picketing throughout the region, breaking down old professional and craft divisions among the strikers and broader parts of what Rhomberg problematically calls “civil society,” in a bow to post-Marxist academic jargon. (One presumes that calls for solidarity strikes in other sectors, which was never attempted, is not part of the vocabulary of “civil society.”) The AFL-CIO got into the act, and even then-President Bill Clinton “ordered his executive staff members to decline interviews” with the struck papers. Despite the excessive heat and storms of a Midwest summer, the unions managed to establish 24-hour pickets at far-flung sites. Most strikers, unfortunately, ran through savings fairly quickly and within a few months, the already-low union strike benefits were exhausted; strikers began seeking and sometimes finding other jobs for the duration.
One key factor in management strategy, which had already proved decisive in otherstrikes of the new era, was the 1938 Mackay decision by the United States Supreme Court allowing struck employers to use “replacement workers” (i.e., scabs) who could become permanent employees after the settlement, unless the NLRB ruled that “unfair labor practices” had provoked the strike. Mackay had rarely been invoked in the three decades of the postwar “accord” but was increasingly dusted off during long strikes, as in the “three strikes” of 1993–95 in Decatur, Illinois.6 Even militant post-1980 strikes, (in contrast to pre-New Deal “good old union tactics”) that stop short of physically preventing scabs from working, have been and continue to be defeated as long as workers, contained within the legalistic union framework, continue to play by the old rules. To break with those rules, as the Detroit strikers on occasion did, would mean breaking with a New Deal legal structure that, among other things, bans strikes (i.e., wildcats) during the life of a contract, and also means breaking with the union apparatus that enforces rules drawn up and approved by the class enemy. Immediately, the News and the Free Press had 500 scabs at work, including many flown in from other cities from elsewhere in the Gannett and Knight-Ritter newspaper chains. Some scabs received a $750 weekly bonus and slept and were fed on site; others were housed in dormitories and bussed in. Guards escorted the distribution trucks. Scab carriers were given cars, cell phones and beepers; the DNA “rented six hundred cars, occupied one thousand hotel rooms, and put nine thousand cellular phones into use.”
The workers and their allies struck back. “Vandals,” according to Rhomberg, damaged two thousand newspaper racks per week. All in all, however, the DNA “never missed a day of delivery,” however thinned down the papers were. Picketing at the Sterling Heights plant immediately led to violent confrontations with police and security guards, as the latter periodically opened gates for trucks to enter and exit. Strikers followed these trucks, and security guards followed these strikers, ramming cars and forcing them off the road. Thugs from the Huffmaster security services “verbally and physically taunted” strikers to the point of irritating the Sterling Heights police; Huffmeister thugs went to strikers’ homes to harass them, enough so that the DNA had to terminate them in early August. Large Saturday night pickets at the printing plant, intended to stop delivery of the Sunday edition, were attacked by police, with arrests and serious injuries. According to one estimate, the DNA was spending $600,000 a day in the early weeks to defeat the strike. The Knight-Ridder owners of the Free Press had had a more laid-back management style than the Gannett owners of the News ; in 1994, the Free Press had even criticized the defeat in Congress of a bill forbidding the use of “replacement workers.” By early August, 1995, however, Free Press management issued an ultimatum, threatening to use just such scabs, and by late August 40 percent of newsroom employees had crossed the picket lines and returned to work. The Free Press also criticized the unity of the unions which “yoked” reporters and other “professional” employees to solidarity with, God forbid, the Teamsters, and invoked such “class” distinctions in personal phone calls to strikers, with some (but by no means complete) success in getting people to cross the picket lines. By the end of August, the Free Press as well was hiring one new scab a day.
The ante was upped as both papers began calling the scabs “permanent replacement workers.” Newly-hired Vance security personnel increasingly replaced the weary Sterling Heights police (some of whom were friends and relatives of the strikers) at the plant gates, fully provided with riot helmets and bullet-proof vests. On the Labor Day weekend, a nearby rally of three thousand joined four hundred pickets at the plant gate, ultimately countered by reinforcements from twenty suburban police departments. In the early hours of September 3, a full-blown battle ensued as the strikers and their supporters rained bricks, bottles and picket signs on trucks attempting to leave the plant. The DNA countered with a convoy of semi-tractortrailer trucks attempting to ram another gate. Only the following morning, when the crowd had dwindled, did trucks manage to leave the plant. On Labor Day itself, Monday September 4, “big labor” brought in its heavy artillery, including then–AFL-CIO president Tom Donahue and his soon-to-be successor John Sweeney, then president of SEIU. Other luminaries were left Democratic Congressman John Conyers and the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (Such spectacles, however well intended some of the participants may be, are usually a symptom that a struggle is losing momentum.) These luminaries led a march of 5,000 people. This peaceful mobilization of the left wing of the establishment did not prevent a battle involving three hundred pickets at the Sterling Heights plant that night, when they were attacked by police using batons and pepper spray, to which the pickets responded with sticks, rocks and ultimately five-inch steel rods found nearby. One striker, Ben Solomon, was “gassed, beaten, arrested and detained” and later hit with multiple charges, along with fifteen others. (Many years later, in 2000, after the defeat, Solomon won $2.5 million for punitive damages.)
The following weekend, two thousand pickets kept the plant shut for ten hours, after which the DNA brought in helicopters, managing to take out only one-fourth of the Sunday edition. At 4 AM, a caravan of tractor trailers exited the plant, some at considerable speed; there were, however, only a few minor injuries to pickets. Three days later, a judge issued an injunction restricting pickets to ten at the main plant entrance. This anticipated move nonetheless back-footed the union leaders, who claimed it was not clear how many people were willing to risk an escalation of possible fines and jail sentences.7 The decision to halt mass picketing as a result of the injunction provoked some serious opposition from rank-and-file militants; Rhomberg does not mention this,8 nor does he mention that both the recent Pittston strike of 1989–90 and a more recent Teamsters strike in 1994 had defied injunctions and won. Whatever its limitations and its immersion in exactly the New Deal “accord” touted by Rhomberg, the CIO in the 1930s was itself built by defying court injunctions.9 The unions instead fell back on their “corporate campaign” strategy of circulation and advertising boycotts, and pickets went to distribution centers around the city. The DNA ultimately lost $90 million in the first six months of the strike, but they had shown a willingness to escalate by “any means necessary,” an escalation the unions and their rank-and-file were, for better or for worse, unwilling and/or unable to match.
Rhomberg regrets the demise of the New Deal order, which “served to steer the actors toward a peaceful, negotiated settlement.” Again, he forgets a bit quickly the “dark underside” of that order, as in the showcase union, the UAW, where management granted wages increases and benefits while taking full day-to-day control of the shop floor, where banned wildcat strikes increasingly became the main practical alternative to a slow, ineffective grievance procedure and where the shop steward increasingly became a cop enforcing the contract against his or her own base. This dichotomy had erupted into plain sight as early as 1955 when Walter Reuther, then head of the UAW, came back from “Big Three” negotiations with what he thought was a great contract for wages and benefits, only to be stunned by wildcat strikes across the Midwest in response. This same downsized UAW had also not lifted a finger during the mass layoffs in the auto industry of the 1980s and 1990s, part of the general employer offensive of which the Detroit newspaper strike was one example. Neither does Rhomberg say much about the large sectors of the work force which had been specifically omitted from “peaceful, negotiated settlements,” starting with farm labor; for an author otherwise attentive to a race and class problematic, he does not mention other ways in which New Deal labor law had been written to remain virtually a dead letter in the Jim Crow South in order to keep the “Dixiecrats” within the New Deal coalition. The increased use of “permanent replacements” after 1980 under “Mackay” accelerated; in more than 300 strikes, “walkouts last an average of 217 days when permanent replacements were used”; 46 percent of “contract negotiations involving major violence” involved the use of such scabs. All this, of course, undermined workers’ legal right to strike, as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Permanent replacement workers—scabs—increase management’s incentive to go to the mat in order to get rid of the previous work force; one Knight-Ridder spokesman said in October 1995 that the cost of the strike “would be recouped in long-term savings from operating with a smaller and more efficient workforce.” (A Detroit regional NLRB did later rule that DNA management had engaged in “unfair labor practices” at the outset of the strike, implying that all strikers must be rehired and scabs let go; that decision was, of course, overturned on appeal.)
Leaders of the unions at the international level in October 1995 “began informally to raise the possibility of the Detroit locals making an unconditional offer to return to work”10 ; local MCNU leaders rejected the move, along with many rank-and-filers, who rightly saw it as unconditional surrender. Instead, the MCNU offered a “conditional” return to work with a “good faith” agreement to negotiate job cuts and come up with $15 million in savings in labor costs for the DNA. Management rejected this proposal peremptorily, saying “it would not fire the replacement workers.” The DNA by October 1995 was intent on eliminating the striking work force, which remained on the picket lines; it also specified that it would take back no worker guilty of “misconduct” during the strike. Strains had developed between the DNA and Sterling Heights officials because of the increasing expense borne by the city for the “super bowl of labor disputes.” The DNA responded by immediately writing checks to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars for police overtime, riot gear and related costs, saying it was a “good corporate citizen.” When the payments became known, the strikers were further enraged, flashing signs saying “Bought and Paid For” at the Sterling Heights police. Ultimately, however, more than two hundred strikers were fired for misconduct during the strike; some of those cases were reversed “but only after years of litigation, and many fired workers never got their jobs back.” Firings occurred for alleged “punching and spitting on picket line crossers, vandalizing property, throwing rocks and star nails, and threatening persons with physical harm.” Many cases were dismissed because of “fabricated evidence, collusion by company witnesses” and “reports filed months after the fact.” Of these cases, 121 were only overturned in 1999.Violence intensified in the fall of 1995 at sites around the Detroit area. One striker had his skull fractured by a security guard; another was run over by a scab van, but survived. No one was charged in either case. Militant and sometimes violent demonstrations of several hundred strikers kept some distribution centers closed on Sunday mornings but such centers were only a fraction of the total, and the DNA stood fast. Individual violence increased on both sides. Then, in mid-November, just before Thanksgiving and “its anticipated heavy advertising volume,” the DNA charged the unions with conspiracy under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, with possible huge fines and expenses.11 DNA management was pushing for unconditional surrender. One striker said “I never thought in Detroit I would see the level of raw power demonstrated against ordinary working people….”
Finally, with the approach of Christmas, the Detroit mayor, a US senator for Michigan and a Roman Catholic cardinal pleaded for a resumption of negotiations. In a four-hour meeting in the mayor’s office, management insisted on the reduction of 650 positions, on its right to retain 1,400 replacement workers, and rejected amnesty for strikers accused of misconduct. Management further urged retirement for 289 workers who were eligible. Retirement or relocation was management’s main suggestion to the strikers. Nothing came of the meeting. (Dennis Archer, the mayor, had earlier defended the deployment of hundreds of Detroit cops to assure distribution of the Sunday papers, saying it was necessary to create a “good business climate” to attract investment to Detroit.)12 Having been checkmated on the picket lines by the fierce management offensive described above, the unions in early 1996 turned to what Rhomberg calls “new areas in civil society and the state.” However interesting some of these attempts may have been, they were clearly a fallback line of defense in what was shaping up as a near total defeat. A strikers’ newspaper, the Detroit Sunday Journal, was founded in late 1995. A coalition called “Readers United” (RU) talked, thank you, of “the responsibilities of the newspapers and their civic function in the community.” (To be fair, RU did carry out some militant actions later on.) The newspapers responded with their own attempt to frame the strike. The unions turned to the state to determine “whether (the strike) was an ‘economic’ one or an ‘unfair labor practice’ strike.” Rhomberg, with some justification but with some serious dose of apparent naïveté, once again posed his own overarching analysis of “the ascendant anti-union regime” and “a declining New Deal order.” That order was indeed breaking down, and “the institutions intended to reinforce negotiation gave way to litigation instead.” Does Rhomberg seriously think that the capitalist state (our term) was ever, when the chips were down, a neutral arbiter of class struggle?One can hardly quibble that outreach to other workers (as opposed to the “public”) in a long strike is a necessity in getting struggle beyond the “shop floor” and the plant gate. This was exactly what was missing—an attempt to broaden the strike to other parts of the Detroit and regional working class—from the strike strategy, and given the union leadership’s turf mentality, probably inevitably. Television played its mystifying role, showing slick presentations by management and counter-posing to them “the first person who would talk to them on the picket line,” as often as not a foul-mouthed Teamster. Top labor officials such as John Sweeney and Newspaper Guild president Laura Foley bankrolled the Detroit Sunday Journal, which by summer 1996 was self-supporting and ran 165,000 copies per week, ultimately becoming the “largest weekly and third-largest Sunday paper in the state.” This was followed by a “corporate campaign” of the kind which “Mr. Strikeout Artist” Ray Rogers had attempted in a series of losing strikes in the 1980s (such as the previously mentioned, ill-fated P-9 meatpacking strike in Minnesota). This involved an advertising and circulation boycott of management’s other newspapers, such as Gannett’s USA Today. In April 1996 strikers and supporters intervened—politely—in Knight-Ridder’s annual board meeting. Shortly thereafter, 500 strikers and supporters, including Teamster president Ron Carey, intervened at the Gannett board of directors meeting, with similarly little result. Corporate campaigners spread out through the country raising support. Back in Detroit, renewed pressure was brought to bear on advertisers and with “ambulatory picketing,” whereby pickets followed newspaper carriers on their routes. A Teamster organizer who had played a role in the 1989 Pittston coal strike, a relative (defensive) victory, was brought in.13 Several hundred strikers were trained in non-violent direct action tactics, and in the spring and summer of 1996 carried out militant demonstrations at the homes of DNA executives. With these and other tactics, in Rhomberg’s view, “the unions pushed their activity into the community and outward toward a larger public sphere…they challenged the distinctions between the private economy and the public good, the boundaries between commercial property and civic space.” Religious leaders became involved, deploring “the use of violence, both personal and institutional, by anyone involved on either side.” The previously mentioned Readers United and other groups staged a series of non-violent actions, involving arrest by high-profile religious and union figures such as a UAW regional director and retired UAW president Doug Fraser. Several hundred people were arrested in such actions. The DNA, for its part, predictably reacted to such protests with indifference and contempt, though it did put out reams of what one source called “company agitprop masquerading as news,” against what was deemed the pro-strike bias of local television and other media. The papers retailed the now-familiar mantra about the unions as “privileged” and “featherbedders,” a ploy that resonated with some after decades in which hundreds of thousands of other jobs had been eliminated. As has been seen in many later attacks on public employees, decades of gutting private sector industrial unions have made it easy for capital to portray the last unions standing as “privileged”; this does not absolve the workers in such unions from reaching out on a class-wide basis to the larger downsized and casualized strata to raise general wages and benefits and to counter the inexorable “race to the bottom.”
The DNA also played the race card in overwhelmingly black Detroit, which enraged black strikers but was not without its effects in the city at large. Rhomberg provides figures showing that of the 2,025 “replacement workers” hired during the strike, 487 were hired as part-time or casual employees, among whom blacks outnumbered whites 3:1 and of whom one-third were terminated by June 1996. A great majority of those blacks hired were enlisted as janitors and mail handlers, while only 8 percent of new reporters were black. But such figures were largely unknown at the time and the papers, which had only 18 percent total blacks on the pre-strike payroll, had some success in portraying the strike as “white” and “suburban” to the “large, dependent and low-wage labor pool” left over from massive industrial downsizing, especially given Detroit’s race and class dynamic since at least the 1940s, as previously presented by Rhomberg. The fact that the papers, and not the unions, were doing the pre-strike hiring was lost from view.
Starting in 1996, the struggle was, fatally, increasingly fought out at the NLRB and in the courts. In July of that year, an NLRB decision in Washington compelled the unions to sign an agreement promising to cease violence, coercion and threats against scabs. Some advertisers used the NLRB to force unions to stop “picketing, blocking entrances, intimidating customers, and engaging in an unlawful secondary boycott.” A “non-violent guerrilla war” was fought with police over the right to continue leafleting and residential picketing on public property. The UAW was added to the DNA’s RICO lawsuit. The unions had to disavow some non-violent direct actions by groups such as Readers United. The different fronts in the struggle, for Rhomberg, “signaled the extent to which contemporary labor disputes exceeded their traditional boundaries, spilling over into multiple areas of civil society and the state.” Detroit mayor Dennis Archer again proposed to mediate the strike, but the newspaper “categorically rejected” the proposal. More ritual ensued on Labor Day, 1996, when the new AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and secretary-treasurer Rich Trumka (former head of the United Mine Workers) came to town to be arrested for civil disobedience along with other high-profile union, religious and political leaders; everything in this gambit was choreographed in advance with the Detroit police.
Nonetheless, concludes Rhomberg, “for a year and a half, the strikers had fought and in many ways won the battle of Detroit, But the newspapers’ response raised doubts as to whether the struggle could be decided at the urban metropolitan level.” International leaders of the six unions were increasingly pushing for a “settlement.” Responding to this pressure, the unions in the MCNU in February 1997 decided to make an unconditional offer to return to work14 and to gamble on having the strike declared the result of unfair labor practices, which would require reinstatement of strikers and “back pay liabilities of $250,000 per day.” The papers insisted it was an economic strike and took back only certain strikers. Some of those taken back were generally downgraded and took major pay cuts while scabs took over their original jobs. Returning printers had to attend a week-long “orientation” that consisted of a large dose of “verbal abuse, gloating and sarcastic treatment.” They were later put in an isolation room with nothing to do, and “had to ask permission to go to the bathroom or get coffee.” They remained in what was dubbed the “decomposing room “ until February 1998, costing the company $1 million, before they were finally put back to work in the composing room. The focus turned to the NLRB. The unions were planning a huge march, “Action! Motown 1997,” beginning on June 20, with supporters coming from as far away as San Francisco. This was further pitched, says Rhomberg, as “part of the renewal of the United States labor movement under AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.”15 Emotions were further ramped up on June 19, the day before the weekend event was to begin, when a local NLRB judge ruled that the newspapers had indeed been guilty of unfair labor practices, implying almost total victory to the strikers: reinstatement with full back pay and all scabs laid off. Euphoria took hold. The weekend included a teach-in at Wayne State, benefit concerts for locked-out workers, an interfaith religious service and nonviolent protests (one at the home of a DNA CEO in upscale Grosse Pointe Farms); all of this was followed by a march of perhaps 100,000 people and a mass rally. Trade unionists came from 45 states and from twelve countries. It was in fact the largest rally in Detroit since the 1947 UAW demonstration against the Taft-Hartley Act, and was unfortunately destined to be no more successful. Sweeney spoke of “dignity and respect,” and Trumka called on the newspapers to be accountable to a “democratic public.” For Rhomberg, furthermore, the NLRB ruling “illustrated the power of the state to fix the meaning of events.” Indeed.With almost 20 years hindsight, and knowing what ultimately happened, it is hard not to be cynical. The culminating weekend event, Action! Motown 1997, impressive as it may have been, had the smell of respectability about it, what French militants call “la manif de l’enterrement,” i.e., the funeral demo. The institutions of official society—“civil society” in Rhomberg’s idiom—had held together, and justice seemed to be at hand, won ultimately not in the streets or at the plant gate, but through the NLRB. And even that eventually proved to be an illusion. Despite the euphoria, the newspapers were not beaten, and were preparing an appeal of the NLRB decision. Various contract complexities created a “shell game” that lawyers on both sides would fight out in a legal labyrinth. One might say that the unions and the papers had battled each other to a standstill “on the ground,” and henceforth everything would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. Where was the spirit of the old IWW, for which lawyers were “shysters” and barred from membership? Rhomberg is quite right that the institutions of the New Deal were confronting a new drive against workers, but was not the problem precisely those institutions’ ongoing ability to channel militant struggle onto the terrain where raw power—class power—was no longer decisive?
The legal labyrinth cannot be described here. Amendment 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act under Taft Hartley seemed to promise expedited enforcement of the unions’ apparent victory at the local NLRB, thereby avoiding processes that could, and ultimately did, take months or years. The newspapers brought in new legal heavy hitters, including a lawyer who had authored a Wharton Business School manual entitled Operating During Strikes . Five weeks after Action! Motown 1997, the lawyers for the two sides confronted each other at an August 1 hearing. The key issue was the full reinstatement of the strikers and dismissal of the “replacement workers.” Two weeks later, after further shell games, the judge issued a decision saying that an “unfair labor practices” ruling would have to await completion of the full appeal process. This decision “tilted the balance of power toward those actors with greater resources and staying power,” namely the newspapers. Litigation would in fact continue for three more years. The DNA CEO had said “the companies would drag out the appeals for so long that the strikers would eventually get other jobs, retire, or die,” which is more or less exactly what happened. Only one-third of the strikers returned after the final settlement at the end of 2000; up to 20 died during the five years of the strike and the appeals. Protest actions, boycotts and publication of the strikers’ Sunday Journal continued through 1997 and 1998, by a group of rank-and-filers, but it was an uphill battle. James R. Hoffa, son of the late Jimmy Hoffa, was elected president of the Teamsters in December 1998, and promptly fired a Teamster activist who had helped keep the movement alive. The Detroit Sunday Journal ceased publication in November 1999, after four years’ publication. The strikers’ main remaining leverage was the huge back pay settlement, if the unfair labor practices ruling held through the final appeal. The end came in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in May 2000, presided over by three judges appointed by Ronald Reagan. The court’s July 7 decision completely reversed the unfair labor practice ruling. In late 2000, the various unions signed contracts with open shop clauses, hefty wage reductions, and merit pay. Lawsuits were dropped, including the newspapers’ RICO charges. James P. Hoffa ended the circulation and advertising boycotts. The Detroit newspaper strike was over.
Rhomberg concludes his book with a balance sheet of the strike and attempts to generalize some of its lessons, above all in the post-1980 assault on the right to strike as supposedly codified in the National Labor Relations Act. He points to some of the specific factors in the length and depth of the strike, such as Detroit’s character as a “union town.” He reiterates his thesis about the “deinstitutionalization” of unions in the new era, and goes on to say that “bringing civil society back in illustrates how the meaning of strike action has changed in the post-accord era” (though apparently not enough to win anything). In this era, he says, the strike has become a “more basic struggle…to reconstitute the spaces governing labor relations and workers’ rights.” He points out, as indicated previously, that the newspapers benefited from the long-term racial divide in Detroit, and that despite support from “civil rights and liberal leaders…many ordinary black Detroiters felt distant from both sides and did not see the struggle as their own,” given the “disproportionately white, relative to the central-city population” work force. He contrasts it with the victorious UPS strike of August 1997 (which took place just as the Detroit newspaper strike had made its turn to the NLRB and the courts), and the factors that made it possible for the Teamsters to force UPS to make 10,000 part-time jobs into full time and to rescind its threat to pull out of the pension plan. He argues that “widening the scope of collective action” (as in the greater involvement of “civil society”) “can also enlarge the spaces for public engagement and civic mediation between management and unions.” He argues that Gannett’s “scorched earth” policy not only led to $130 million in expenses but questions whether such a stance “benefited the workplace, the community or even the shareholders in the long run.” After the final defeat of the strike in the courts, Detroit newspaper circulation was down 32 percent from 1995
And, by 2011, was down by half a million readers. This is to be seen in an overall crisis of the newspaper industry, as witnessed by the fall in Gannett’s stock for $91 per share in 2004 to $1.85 in the first quarter of 2009. “The past few decades,” Rhomberg writes, “have seen a profound reduction in the social accountability of private enterprise,” under the offensive of “unfettered market power.” Karl Marx wrote long ago ( Communist Manifesto ) that, win or lose, the real gain of struggles such as the Detroit newspaper strike was the “ever-growing unification of the working class.” In reality, the strike described by Rhomberg joined the long list of post-1980 defeats, beginning with PATCO, by way of the Greyhound strike (1983), the Phelps-Dodge copper strike (1984), the P-9 meatpackers’ strike (1985–86), the Jay, Maine pulp and paper workers’ strike (1987–88), and the “three strikes” in Decatur Illinois (Caterpillar, Bridgestone-Firestone, and Staley) of 1993–95. The period, however, was not entirely bleak. In addition to the above-mentioned Pittston coal miners’ strike of 1989–90 and the Teamster strike at UPS in 1997, other workers fought and won against the general rollback. A group of Latino cannery workers in 1985 in Watsonville, California, rejected a sweetheart contract full of givebacks, threw out the leadership of their Teamster local, and in 1987 finally won a contract restoring much of what management had tried to take away. Non-academic employees at Yale University struck nine times between 1968 and 2003, mostly successfully, and in the latter year won an 8-year contract with 5.8 percent wage increases per year. 750 Latino workers struck the food giant ConAgra in King City, California for two years and prevailed in 2001.
The post-1980 period has certainly been characterized by more defeats than victories, but a recomposition of the working class in the United States is in fits and starts remaking the class terrain. A new breakthrough will probably not be centered on the remaining auto or steel industries, as with the CIO in the 1930s, but will, in all likelihood, feature the Latino workforce, greatly expanded by immigration, militant nurses who have distinguished themselves at the likes of the California health care giant Kaiser, or the truckers in the west coast ports, who are increasingly organized and militant, or perhaps even the sped-up and fed-up workers at Amazon and Wal-mart.16
If and when such a breakthrough occurs, it will be essential to recall the wisdom of Marx’s advice regarding the growing unification of the working class—WIN OR LOSE. It is clear that such unification will seldom happen automatically; instead, militants must be prepared to advance the efficacy of strategies and tactics explicitly aligned with such a goal. More than anything else on offer, increased working class unity, as exemplified by the independent collective actions of workers across workplaces and communities (and not by ritualized performances orchestrated by union leaderships), might shift the balance of forces.Rhomberg cannot of course be faulted for not offering such a perspective on the years after the Detroit newspaper strike. Looking back, and taking account of the experiences of all the major defeats that preceded it, it is difficult to see how theDetroit newspaper workers could have won in the period 1995–2000 when they were forced to strike. One can fault Rhomberg, however, for paying little or no attention to the rank-and-file dissidents of the newspaper unions who did attempt to oppose the “corporate campaign” strategy that increasingly imposed itself after the September 1995 injunction against mass picketing at the Sterling Hills printing plant. There was in fact at least a militant minority that, contrary to the “unions” which Rhomberg discusses as an uncritical, undifferentiated whole, was prepared to take the risks of defying the injunction. The strike may well have been defeated anyway, but the injunction was clearly the moment at which it embarked on the road to more or less certain defeat. Raw class power, and not corporate campaigns, NLRB rulings and court decisions, not mass demonstrations led by the John Sweeneys and Rich Trumkas (not to mention scripted “arrests” of such notables) is, in the first and last instance, all the working class has.Rhomberg does not seem aware of the extent to which the New Deal “accord” of the three decades after 1945 shackled the American working class, in ways to which we have alluded. Even militant unions of the rank-and-file have to deal with 500-page contracts requiring teams of lawyers; eviscerated grievance procedures; Taft-Hartley restrictions on wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes and boycotts; and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 giving the United States Department of Labor direct oversight of internal union affairs.The next upsurge of workers in the United States will look more like the classic IWW of the pre–New Deal period than like the CIO, which ultimately put such strictures in place.
Originally posted: August 12, 2014 at Insurgent Notes
- 1Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class and Political Community in Oakland (University of California Press, 2004). This book shows, against Gertrude Stein’s remark used in the title, that in fact a great deal happened in Oakland, from mass KKK rallies in the 1920s to the general strike of 1946 to the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
- 2See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996).
- 3James A. Geschwender, Class, Race and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge UP, 1977).
- 4See Stan Weir, “The Rank-and-File Revolt,” in George Lipsitz, ed., Singlejack Solidarity, 2000.
- 5Gannett in particular owned many other newspapers around the country, most of them non-union, and had an eye on Wall Street’s evaluation of its profit margins. It represented the more hardball force in management, which the Knight-Ridder management of the Free Press did not oppose.
- 6See Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes (New York, 2001).
- 7They asked strikers and supporters as an alternative to drive around the plant and snarl traffic, which resulted mainly in lots of traffic tickets. (See Labor Notes, October 1995, p. 9.) Other union leaders argued against mass picketing at the plant with an eye to the Sterling Heights elections on November 7, in hopes of re-electing the majority on the city council which had forced the resignation of the city manager in charge of earlier mass police repression. (I bid .)
- 8One somewhat exasperating aspect of Rhomberg’s book is his use of the term “unions” with absolutely no critical attention to dissidence within them, In fact, a “Unity for Victory Caucus” had formed precisely to pressure union leaders to return to Sterling Heights (ibid). ACOSS (Action Coalition of Strikers and Supporters) was another independent pressure group pushing for national action.
- 9 One Teamster said later, in spring 1997: “[F]or much of the strike, (our energy) was bottled up by the old-style tactics of the presidents of the six striking unions. They seemed to feel we could win the strike by walking in circles outside the plant gates…in an era of replacement workers (this attrition strategy) no longer works. We made a huge error in the strike’s early months by not defying the injunction that prohibited mass picketing…We had crippled the papers’ Sunday distribution…when we let the courts open the gates, we took away our main weapon…” Labor Notes, April 1997, p. 9. No statement of this kind is quoted by Rhomberg.
- 10 This echoed, for example, the more intense pressure brought to bear on Local P-9 of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985–86, the only local to reject the shredding of the union contract, and which then struck for 18 months, with broad outside support, before going down to defeat.
- 11The RICO law was ostensibly created to combat organized crime, but it seems to have been used more against unions. The DNA lawsuits were only settled out of court in 2000.
- 12 Labor Notes, November 1995, p. 5, not quoted by Rhomberg.
- 13The 1989–90 strike was set off by an attempt of the Pittston Coal Company to halt health care and pension benefits to miners, their families and retirees, an attempt which was defeated by miner militancy at the pits and a solidarity campaign by the United Mine Workers that brought tens of thousands of working-class supporters to southwest Virginia. Despite Rhomberg’s occasional references to the non-violent character of the Pittston strike, there was plenty of low-key violence brought to bear in guerrilla actions by miners, often at night and primarily against company property.
- 14 Once again, Rhomberg omits a key “fact”: the New York Times reported, in early 1997, on the occasion of Clinton’s second inauguration, that Teamster president Ron Carey, CWA (Communication Workers of America) president Morton Bahr, and other top union leaders had decided to order the Detroit strikers back to work with no membership vote. Eric Chester wrote in the Industrial Worker (newspaper of the IWW) that “Last summer [1996 —LG] union leaders began secretly discussing a plan to end the strike. This fall, as Carey sought re-election in a hotly-contested campaign, he neither explained how he would win the Detroit strike nor did he reveal the ongoing discussion to end it. Once the election was over, and the votes counted, Carey joined two other international presidents in unilaterally ending the strike with an unconditional offer to return to work. This decision was not only made without consulting the rank-and-file, but over its adamant objection.” Reprinted in Impact, v. 5 no. 3, June 1997.
- 15One laid-off worker from the defeated Staley strike in Decatur, Illinois, asked the appropriate question: “Will the weekend be more than a symbolic display of unity?” Labor Notes, June 1997, p. 7. Unfortunately, given the high-profile labor principals involved in the mobilization, from Sweeney on down, that is exactly what it was.
- 16On the latter, see the concise book on the computerized and surveillanced work place by Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014).
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Insurgent Notes #25 (2023) Special Issue on Ukraine
![insurgent-notes-25cov.png](https://files.libcom.org/files/styles/small_wide/public/2024-02/insurgent-notes-25cov.png?itok=BWqTreA-)
2023 issue of this Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, with articles from a range of authors on the war in Ukraine.
Contents
- Introduction to the Special Issue on Ukraine - Ross Wolfe
- Capitalist Crisis and the War in Ukraine - Sanderr
- Against the Russia Invasion of Ukraine, for the Successful Resistance of the Ukrainian People - John Garvey
- Untimely Thoughts: Notes on Revolution and Ukraine- Andrew
- War of the Decomposition of Russian Capitalism: Neo-Imperialism, Exacerbated Violence, and Global Civil War - Pablo Jiménez
- Contra Leninist Anti-Imperialism: Capital War Means Social Peace - Antithesi
- Response to John Garvey - Karmína
- The Warn in Ukraine Through Some Memories of the Yugoslav Wars - Rob Myers
- Revolutionary Defeatism Today - Devrim Valerian
- Peace Is War - Gilles Dauvé
- Contradictions in the German Discourse Around the War in Ukraine - Konstantin Bethscheider
- Another Russia Is Possible: On the Moral Responsibility of Western Leaders for the War in Ukraine - Grigory Yudin
- Behind the Frontlines: An Interview with Andrew After the Ukrainian Counteroffensive - Kosmoprolet
- War as Spectacle - Ricardo Noronha
- Two Short Texts on the Invasion of Ukraine: Death and Extinction & Nothing Is Resolved - Jacques Camatte
Attachments
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Revolutionary Defeatism Today - Devrim Valerian
An article on the Ukraine-Russia war, from Insurgent Notes from December 2022.
Winter is drawing in. The first year of the Ukrainian war is coming to an end. The war itself though looks set to continue. The mere passage of time will not stop the horrors. Russia is talking of the war ultimately needing a negotiated settlement. The key word here is “ultimately.” There is no sign of light at the end of the tunnel. Neither side has the ability to win outright. At the moment there seems to be no basis around which a compromise can be made. In these conditions there seems to be no alternative to the atrocities continuing. We in Konflikt believe the war will go on and on.
The response of the vast majority of the left to the war is akin to that of the American public at the start of February. People across the land decide which team they are going to root for in the Super Bowl. The left, too, is doing the same thing. It treats war and human catastrophe as some sort of game where one has to pick a team to support. This is a more serious intellectual game. On a superficial level the arguments seem to have more depth than “the Rams suck,” but not by much.
On the most basic level, supporters of each side have accused the other of being “Nazis.” Those supporting Ukraine accuse Putin of being a fascist. Those supporting Russia say that the Ukrainians are World War II Nazis reborn. Putin himself, accused by some of being another Hitler, throws the same accusation back and talks of the “denazification of Ukraine.” The very word “Nazi” itself has become yet another slogan to encourage workers to go out and kill each other. On a slightly more sophisticated level, there are those who talk of Ukraine’s “right to self-determination.” They talk of freedom, and the right of people to govern themselves. Others claim that Russia is fighting against imperialism. They, too, talk of freedom. Only this time it is freedom from American, not Russian, domination. We don’t want to address these arguments in this article, as we’ve dealt with them before at length.1
In this piece we want to tackle a different subject, about what “revolutionary defeatism” means today. In a world where the working class is weak, and revolution seems further away than ever, does it even have any meaning to bring up ideas and approaches from a century ago, or is it just the same sort of leftist pontificating as the slogans of the rest of the left? The argument of the “defeatists” is a simple one. At heart it says that the interests of the working class are opposed to their own bosses, and aligned with those of workers in other countries. It’s the same argument as that of Lenin and the revolutionaries in 1914. Opposed to the rabid pro-war jingoism of most “socialist” parties, the revolutionaries argued that workers should oppose the war, and rather than kill other workers to make the bosses in their own country richer, they should overthrow their own governments, and stop the war. In the end it was workers refusal to fight each other, and willingness to fight against their own governments that ended the war.
Today though, virtually nobody on the left takes this line. Nearly all groups claiming to be in the revolutionary tradition agree that it was the right line to take in 1914, but not now. If asked to explain in what way it was different, they have a host of answers to the question. Those who support Ukraine talk of how it is one small country being attacked by a bigger, more powerful one. It’s as if they have the idea that before communists can take a position against war, both sides must be exactly equally powerful. Of course this will never happen, so these “communists” will never actually have to oppose any wars. In fact, what happened in 1914 when the huge Austro-Hungarian Empire attacked little Serbia was that Serbian socialists rejected the idea of national defense, and resolutely came out against the war and both sides. This was because they believed that the war couldn’t be viewed in isolation, and it had to be seen within the context of imperial rivalry. The defenders of Ukraine today avoid this completely. They are completely blind that this “brave small country” is armed to the teeth by all the Western powers. America alone has supplied Ukraine with more money for arms already than Russia’s defense budget for an entire year. This war truly is a conflict between rival imperialisms, America/nato versus Russia. “nato socialists” talk with some leftwing veneer whilst all the time supporting the same sort of line as their own government.
Those who support Russia do talk of imperialism. They just refuse to see that Russia is an imperialist state too. Usually they justify this by some talk of finance capital that they clearly don’t understand. For them, every state or movement that is opposed to America is somehow “anti-imperialist.” They fail to see that imperialism today is a world system that no state can stand apart from. In their view, Russian bombs are good, whereas American ones are bad. The export of Chinese finance capital to Africa somehow takes on a progressive character, as opposed to America’s “evil” exploitation of Africa. While certainly in one way it’s not quite so repulsive as supporting your own government’s policies, it’s still calling on the workers of the world to unite behind anti-working class capitalist states. Those who are supporting Russia in this war tend to take up other “anti-imperialist” causes, such as supporting Iran’s suppression of anti-government protestors, as they claim they are all organized by the cia. What both of them have in common though is that when they come across people rejecting the war, they come out with the same line. When people say that workers on both sides should refuse to die to make the rich rich, they reply that it’s not realistic. Which brings us to the question of what the term “revolutionary defeatism” means today.
“There is no possibility of revolution today,” say those who decry the idea of revolutionary defeatism. “In a perfect world it would be possible, but not today,” they bemoan. Leaving aside the fact that if we lived in a perfect world there wouldn’t be this terrible war, it seems clear that most of the “left” have abandoned any idea of a revolutionary perspective at all. Any idea of workers’ power is put off until some unknown point in the future. It leaves the “left” as little more than cheerleaders in some game of international geopolitics.
Nevertheless, we must realize the reality of the situation. The working class is weak, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but internationally. While we may be seeing an upturn in the class struggle currently, we are still a far cry from the level of class struggle that existed in the period of the late 1960s to early 1980s. Are we completely out of touch with reality to talk of revolution and defeatism today?
We think not. It’s not just revolution that could stop the war. Rising class struggle itself could force the belligerents to the negotiating table. If workers in the West refuse to bear the costs of the war, and workers in the warzone refuse to fight and die in it, then the rival imperialists may feel forced to look for an end to the slaughter.
If the so-called revolutionaries are unclear on this, then the ruling class are not. In the United Kingdom, the Western country currently suffering most acutely from the crisis, and seeing the highest level of workers’ response to it, the governing party is in no doubt on this question. The chairman of the Conservative Party has openly told striking nurses that they shouldn’t ask for more money as it helps Putin and damages the war effort. “This is a time to come together and to send a very clear message to Mr. Putin that we’re not going to be divided in this way… our message to the unions is to say this is not a time to strike, this is a time to try to negotiate,” implored Nadhim Zahawi.2
The message is very clear. Workers should shut their mouths, and accept below inflation pay rises, essentially pay cuts in order to enable the country to fund death and destruction in the war in the East. Nurses’ leaders have been quick to condemn these words. “[It is] a new low [for the government to] use Russia’s war in Ukraine as a justification for a real-terms pay cut for nurses in the United Kingdom,” said Pat Cullen.3
We believe that the United Kingdom government is clearly expressing its class interests here. The crisis and the war has caused massive inflation, and if Western regimes are to finance this war, they need to make the working class pay for it.4
Although the strike wave that is slowly spreading across Western countries is based upon economic demands, it ultimately raises deeper questions of whether the working class can be forced to pay for the war.
The American state is also very clear on this with Joe Biden using Congress to impose a settlement to stop a potential rail workers’ strike. Even here in Bulgaria, a country which has a low level of class struggle, the state has used its courts to declare workers strikes illegal. One hundred and thirty-six nurses in Dobrich were individually prosecuted in order to discourage discontent in the health system.5
The message is crystal clear. Nothing must be allowed to break national unity and the ability of the West to finance its war. The converse is also true. It’s not only that workers need large pay rises just to maintain already low living standards, but also that a massive pay revolt could threaten the war effort.
If the class is to build unity in order to fight these struggles, one of the potential obstacles to this is divisions over which side to support in wars. In the West, the relevance of this point may appear moot. But in countries like Bulgaria, where there are historic and cultural ties to Russia (and therefore more sympathy for it), there have been cases of physical fighting in the streets of the capital. Not between Russians and Ukrainians, of whom there are many here, but between Bulgarians themselves. This was on a very low level, but as the war intensifies and drags on it could well get worse. In the wars of the Middle East, it’s a much more salient point.
The Syrian war always had the potential to spread across borders. The same ethnic and religious groups exist across all the borders of the region. The same forces that exist in Syria also exist in Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon. Iraq has been war-torn for years now, Turkey has its near four decade long barbaric war against the Kurds, and Lebanon has seen firefights between the protagonists in the Syrian war. The threat of the war spreading there was very, very real.
For communists the question is clear. It’s not possible to build class unity around support for factions in a foreign war when the sides in that ethnosectarian war are built along the very same divides that are pulling the working class apart at home. Taking an internationalist position and arguing against all ethnosectarian factions abroad is an intrinsic part of building class unity at home, and stopping the war from spreading across borders.
This isn’t the war to end all wars. War has become a constant. The decline of America and the rise of China will lead to new conflicts. While the working class in America and the West has not been divided along pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian lines, we’ve seen in the past how war has been used to reinforce divisions in the working class in the endless conflicts in the Middle East, and the bile and hatred thrown at workers from Muslim and Middle Eastern backgrounds.
For us, a refusal to take sides in the war is a basic step towards building the class unity that will be required to build a movement that can, if not overthrow the states involved in the war, then at least force them to stop the slaughter.
Then of course we remember that at the start of the First World War, the revolutionaries were a tiny minority. Yet four years later they stopped the war. This war will continue, and the situation at the front will get worse, and the crisis will cause economic attacks on workers in other countries to increase. We should always remember that “there are weeks when decades happen.”6
- 1Those who want to return to those arguments can see how we approached them here: Konflikt, “The Real End of History is the End of War,” 8 April 2022
- 2Rob Merrick, “Nurses Must Drop Pay Demands to ‘Send Clear Message to Putin,’ Cabinet Minister Says,” The Independent, 4 December 2022.
- 3Rowena Mason, “Tory Chairman’s ‘NHS Strikes Help Putin’ Claim Dismissed as ‘Ludicrous’,” The Guardian, 4 December 2022.
- 4Konflikt, “What Inflation Means to the Workers,” 22 January 2022.
- 5Konflikt, “Призив за солидарност,” 10 November 2022.
- 6Apocryphal quoted attributed to Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen” [«Есть десятилетия, когда ничего не происходит; и бывают недели, когда происходят десятилетия»].
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The First World Slaughter was ended by mass desertion of one army, in the same manner as the First Gulf War was ended. Following on from this was further mass slaughter and the reimposition of bourgeois order. Other inter-bourgeos wars ended by overwhelming military force, such as the War On Vietnam and the War On Gaza. Wars end, peace is reinstated necessitating further wars.
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That quote is from "The…
That quote is from "The German Ideology", not "The Communist Manifesto"...
The Manifesto of the…
The Manifesto of the communist party was penned solely by Karl Marx and, "The basic thought running through the Manifesto belongs solely and exclusively to Marx", according to Friedrich Engels in 1883. The two men did not share an "intellectual bank account", merely a common stock fund.
Der Kommunismus ist für uns…
Die deutsche Ideologies, Karl Marx, 1932. English translation by deepl.com (7/2/2024)
Source: http://mlwerke.de/me/me03/me03_017.htm
Heh! That’s funny. It’s from…
Heh! That’s funny. It’s from the “masthead” page on the Insurgent Notes website.
Three glaring faults with…
Three glaring faults with the mast head. No wonder the hot air went out of its sails.
We insurgents should note the addition of wird, the German word for "will be", to the text of The German Ideology. It is reminiscent of the corruption of the First Letter of John by the addition of the verse, "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one", to fit in with the false teaching—the Trinity—promulgated by Christianity, for which many innocents lost their lives.