Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

Today, material conditions for the vast majority of working people have sharply deteriorated as the capitalist class shifts the entire burden of the crisis and the recovery of their profits onto the backs of wage and salaried classes. One of the striking aspects of this sustained and on-going roll-back of living standards is the absence of a major social upheaval so far. Greece and Spain, with over 50% unemployment among its 16-24 year olds and nearly 25% general unemployment, have experienced a dozen general strikes and numerous multi-million person national protests; but these have failed to produce any real change in regime or policies. The mass firings and painful salary, wage, pension and social services cuts continue. In other countries, like Italy, France, and England, protests and discontent find expression in the electoral arena, with incumbents voted out and replaced by the traditional opposition. Yet throughout the social turmoil and profound socio-economic erosion of living and working conditions, the dominant ideology informing the movements, trade unions and political opposition is reformist: Issuing calls to defend existing social benefits, increase public spending and investments, and expand the role of the state where private sector activity has failed to invest or employ. In other words, the left proposes to conserve a past when capitalism was harnessed to the welfare state.

The problem is that this ‘capitalism of the past’ is gone and a new more virulent and intransigent capitalism has emerged forging a new worldwide framework and a powerful entrenched state apparatus immune to all calls for ‘reform’ and reorientation. The confusion, frustration, and misdirection of mass popular opposition is, in part, due to the adoption by leftist writers, journalists, and academics of the concepts and language espoused by its capitalist adversaries: language designed to obfuscate the true social relations of brutal exploitation, the central role of the ruling classes in reversing social gains and the profound links between the capitalist class and the state. Capitalist publicists, academics and journalists have elaborated a whole litany of concepts and terms which perpetuate capitalist rule and distract its critics and victims from the perpetrators of their steep slide toward mass impoverishment.

Even as they formulate their critiques and denunciations, the critics of capitalism use the language and concepts of its apologists. Insofar as the language of capitalism has entered the general parlance of the left, the capitalist class has established hegemony or dominance over its erstwhile adversaries. Worse, the left, by combining some of the basic concepts of capitalism with sharp criticism, creates illusions about the possibility of reforming ‘the market’ to serve popular ends. This fails to identify the principle social forces that must be ousted from the commanding heights of the economy and the imperative to dismantle the class-dominated state. While the left denounces the capitalist crisis and state bailouts, its own poverty of thought undermines the development of mass political action. In this context the ‘language’ of obfuscation becomes a ‘material force’ – a vehicle of capitalist power, whose primary use is to disorient and disarm its anti-capitalist and working class adversaries. It does so by co-opting its intellectual critics through the use of terms, conceptual framework and language which dominate the discussion of the capitalist crisis.

Key Euphemisms at the Service of the Capitalist Offensive

Euphemisms have a double meaning: What terms connote and what they really mean. Euphemistic conceptions under capitalism connote a favorable reality or acceptable behavior and activity totally dissociated from the aggrandizement of elite wealth and concentration of power and privilege. Euphemisms disguise the drive of power elites to impose class-specific measures and to repress without being properly identified, held responsible and opposed by mass popular action.

The most common euphemism is the term ‘market’, which is endowed with human characteristics and powers. As such, we are told ‘the market demands wage cuts’ disassociated from the capitalist class. Markets, the exchange of commodities or the buying and selling of goods, have existed for thousands of years in different social systems in highly differentiated contexts. These have been global, national, regional and local. They involve different socio-economic actors, and comprise very different economic units, which range from giant state-promoted trading-houses to semi-subsistence peasant villages and town squares. ‘Markets’ existed in all complex societies: slave, feudal, mercantile and early and late competitive, monopoly industrial and finance capitalist societies.

When discussing and analyzing ‘markets’ and to make sense of the transactions (who benefits and who loses), one must clearly identify the principle social classes dominating economic transactions. To write in general about ‘markets’ is deceptive because markets do not exist independent of the social relations defining what is produced and sold, how it is produced and what class configurations shape the behavior of producers, sellers and labor. Today’s market reality is defined by giant multi-national banks and corporations, which dominate the labor and commodity markets. To write of ‘markets’ as if they operated in a sphere above and beyond brutal class inequalities is to hide the essence of contemporary class relations.

Fundamental to any understanding, but left out of contemporary discussion, is the unchallenged power of the capitalist owners of the means of production and distribution, the capitalist ownership of advertising, the capitalist bankers who provide or deny credit and the capitalist-appointed state officials who ‘regulate’ or deregulate exchange relations. The outcomes of their policies are attributed to euphemistic ‘market’ demands which seem to be divorced from the brutal reality. Therefore, as the propagandists imply, to go against ‘the market’ is to oppose the exchange of goods: This is clearly nonsense. In contrast, to identify capitalist demands on labor, including reductions in wages, welfare and safety, is to confront a specific exploitative form of market behavior where capitalists seek to earn higher profits against the interests and welfare majority of wage and salaried workers.

By conflating exploitative market relations under capitalism with markets in general, the ideologues achieve several results: They disguise the principle role of capitalists while evoking an institution with positive connotations, that is, a ‘market’ where people purchase consumer goods and ‘socialize’ with friends and acquaintances. In other words, when ‘the market’, which is portrayed as a friend and benefactor of society, imposes painful policies presumably it is for the welfare of the community. At least that is what the business propagandists want the public to believe by marketing their virtuous image of the ‘market’; they mask private capital’s predatory behavior as it chases greater profits.

One of the most common euphemisms thrown about in the midst of this economic crisis is ‘austerity’, a term used to cover-up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increase in regressive taxes (VAT). ‘Austerity’ measures mean policies to protect and even increase state subsidies to businesses, and create higher profits for capital and greater inequalities between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. ‘Austerity’ implies self-discipline, simplicity, thrift, saving, responsibility, limits on luxuries and spending, avoidance of immediate gratification for future security – a kind of collective Calvinism. It connotes shared sacrifice today for the future welfare of all.

However, in practice ‘austerity’ describes policies that are designed by the financial elite to implement class-specific reductions in the standard of living and social services (such as health and education) available for workers and salaried employees. It means public funds can be diverted to an even greater extent to pay high interest rates to wealthy bondholders while subjecting public policy to the dictates of the overlords of finance capital.

Rather than talking of ‘austerity’, with its connotation of stern self-discipline, leftist critics should clearly describe ruling class policies against the working and salaried classes, which increase inequalities and concentrate even more wealth and power at the top. ‘Austerity’ policies are therefore an expression of how the ruling classes use the state to shift the burden of the cost of their economic crisis onto labor.

The ideologues of the ruling classes co-opted concepts and terms, which the left originally used to advance improvements in living standards and turned them on their heads. Two of these euphemisms, co-opted from the left, are ‘reform’ and ‘structural adjustment’. ‘Reform’, for many centuries, referred to changes, which lessened inequalities and increased popular representation. ‘Reforms’ were positive changes enhancing public welfare and constraining the abuse of power by oligarchic or plutocratic regimes. Over the past three decades, however, leading academic economists, journalists and international banking officials have subverted the meaning of ‘reform’ into its opposite: it now refers to the elimination of labor rights, the end of public regulation of capital and the curtailment of public subsidies making food and fuel affordable to the poor. In today’s capitalist vocabulary ‘reform’ means reversing progressive changes and restoring the privileges of private monopolies. ‘Reform’ means ending job security and facilitating massive layoffs of workers by lowering or eliminating mandatory severance pay. ‘Reform’ no longer means positive social changes; it now means reversing those hard fought changes and restoring the unrestrained power of capital. It means a return to capital’s earlier and most brutal phase, before labor organizations existed and when class struggle was suppressed. Hence ‘reform’ now means restoring privileges, power, and profit for the rich.

In a similar fashion, the linguistic courtesans of the economic profession have co-opted the term ‘structural’ as in ‘structural adjustment’ to service the unbridled power of capital. As late as the 1970’s, ‘structural’ change referred to the redistribution of land from the big landlords to the landless; a shift in power from plutocrats to popular classes. ‘Structures’ referred to the organization of concentrated private power in the state and economy. Today, however, ‘structure’ refers to the public institutions and public policies, which grew out of labor and citizen struggles to provide social security, for protecting the welfare, health and retirement of workers. ‘Structural changes’ now are the euphemism for smashing those public institutions, ending the constraints on capital’s predatory behavior and destroying labor’s capacity to negotiate, struggle or preserve its social advances.

The term ‘adjustment’, as in ‘structural adjustment’ (SA), is itself a bland euphemism implying fine-tuning , the careful modulation of public institutions and policies back to health and balance. But, in reality, ‘structural adjustment’ represents a frontal attack on the public sector and a wholesale dismantling of protective legislation and public agencies organized to protect labor, the environment and consumers. ‘Structural adjustment’ masks a systematic assault on the people’s living standards for the benefit of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class has cultivated a crop of economists and journalists who peddle brutal policies in bland, evasive and deceptive language in order to neutralize popular opposition. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leftist’ critics tend to rely on the same terminology.

Given the widespread corruption of language so pervasive in contemporary discussions about the crisis of capitalism the left should stop relying on this deceptive set of euphemisms co-opted by the ruling class. It is frustrating to see how easily the following terms enter our discourse:

Market discipline – The euphemism ‘discipline’ connotes serious, conscientious strength of character in the face of challenges as opposed to irresponsible, escapist behavior. In reality, when paired with ‘market’, it refers to capitalists taking advantage of unemployed workers and using their political influence and power lay-off masses workers and intimidate those remaining employees into greater exploitation and overwork, thereby producing more profit for less pay. It also covers the capacity of capitalist overlords to raise their rate of profit by slashing the social costs of production, such as worker and environmental protection, health coverage and pensions.

Market shock – This refers to capitalists engaging in brutal massive, abrupt firings, cuts in wages and slashing of health plans and pensions in order to improve stock quotations, augment profits and secure bigger bonuses for the bosses. By linking the bland, neutral term, ‘market’ to ‘shock’, the apologists of capital disguise the identity of those responsible for these measures, their brutal consequences and the immense benefits enjoyed by the elite.

Market Demands – This euphemistic phrase is designed to anthropomorphize an economic category, to diffuse criticism away from real flesh and blood power-holders, their class interests and their despotic strangle-hold over labor. Instead of ‘market demands’, the phrase should read: ‘the capitalist class commands the workers to sacrifice their own wages and health to secure more profit for the multi-national corporations’ – a clear concept more likely to arouse the ire of those adversely affected.

Free Enterprise – An euphemism spliced together from two real concepts: private enterprise for private profit and free competition. By eliminating the underlying image of private gain for the few against the interests of the many, the apologists of capital have invented a concept that emphasizes individual virtues of ‘enterprise’ and ‘freedom’ as opposed to the real economic vices of greed and exploitation.

Free Market – A euphemism implying free, fair and equal competition in unregulated markets glossing over the reality of market domination by monopolies and oligopolies dependent on massive state bailouts in times of capitalist crisis. ‘Free’ refers specifically to the absence of public regulations and state intervention to defend workers safety as well as consumer and environmental protection. In other words, ‘freedom’ masks the wanton destruction of the civic order by private capitalists through their unbridled exercise of economic and political power. ‘Free market’ is the euphemism for the absolute rule of capitalists over the rights and livelihood of millions of citizens, in essence, a true denial of freedom.

Economic Recovery – This euphemistic phrase means the recovery of profits by the major corporations. It disguises the total absence of recovery of living standards for the working and middle classes, the reversal of social benefits and the economic losses of mortgage holders, debtors, the long-term unemployed and bankrupted small business owners. What is glossed over in the term ‘economic recovery’ is how mass immiseration became a key condition for the recovery of corporate profits.

Privatization – This describes the transfer of public enterprises, usually the profitable ones, to well-connected, large scale private capitalists at prices well below their real value, leading to the loss of public services, stable public employment and higher costs to consumers as the new private owners jack up prices and lay-off workers — all in the name of another euphemism, ‘efficiency’.

Efficiency – Efficiency here refers only to the balance sheets of an enterprise; it does not reflect the heavy costs of ‘privatization’ borne by related sectors of the economy. For example, ‘privatization’ of transport adds costs to upstream and downstream businesses by making them less competitive compared with competitors in other countries; ‘privatization’ eliminates services in regions that are less profitable, leading to local economic collapse and isolation from national markets. Frequently, public officials, who are aligned with private capitalists, will deliberately disinvest in public enterprises and appoint incompetent political cronies as part of patronage politics, in order to degrade services and foment public discontent. This creates a public opinion favorable to ‘privatizing’ the enterprise. In other words ‘privatization’ is not a result of the inherent inefficiencies of public enterprises, as the capitalist ideologues like to argue, but a deliberate political act designed to enhance private capital gain at the cost of public welfare.

Conclusion

Language, concepts, and euphemisms are important weapons in the class struggle ‘from above’ designed by capitalist journalists and economists to maximize the wealth and power of capital. To the degree that progressive and leftist critics adopt these euphemisms and their frame of reference, their own critiques and the alternatives they propose are limited by the rhetoric of capital. Putting ‘quotation marks’ around the euphemisms may be a mark of disapproval but this does nothing to advance a different analytical framework necessary for successful class struggle ‘from below’. Equally important, it side-steps the need for a fundamental break with the capitalist system including its corrupted language and deceptive concepts. Capitalists have overturned the most fundamental gains of the working class and we are falling back toward the absolute rule of capital. This must raise anew the issue of a socialist transformation of the state, economy and class structure. An integral part of that process must be the complete rejection of the euphemisms used by capitalist ideologues and their systematic replacement by terms and concepts that truly reflect the harsh reality, that clearly identify the perpetrators of this decline and that define the social agencies for political transformation.

“These awards by SSU are reprehensible in light of Sandy Weill’s role in bringing about the economic crisis that has seized this nation,” said SSU sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The consequences have been dire for the SSU community of faculty, staff, students, graduates, alumni and their families, in the form of elevated tuition, reduced funding for education, auctioned homes, dashed dreams, burdensome debts, loss of employment opportunities, and resultant tragedies of an array of sorts.”

“The chaos resulting from the financial meltdown has cost us millions of jobs, throwing probably four to ten million people out of work,” added political science professor John Kramer. “Many folks define their lives, their responsibilities, and their worth to their families and to society by their work. When their work is lost, all too often their lives collapse. Their likelihood of dying in the next year increases. Suicide rates increase. More babies are born underweight and more of them die. We know of suicides here in Sonoma County whose proximate cause is loss of a job. Sandy Weill helped to create this vast tragedy.”

This year’s graduation was a disgrace. When it was announced that the Weills would receive an honorary degree, students, faculty, and alumni began organizing a direct action against that dishonorable degree. Occupy activists and other community members joined them, as did groups such as the Living Wage Coalition and the Peace and Justice Center.

With respect for the hard-working graduating students who earned their degrees, the peaceful action focused on educating the 10,000 students, faculty, family members, and friends who attended the two graduation ceremonies. Thousands of flyers documenting Weill’s substantial abuses as the architect of subprime mortgages and consequential foreclosures and evictions were passed out. Dozens of articles appeared in publications around the region, nationally, and even internationally. Radio stations and a television station reported the action on news and talk shows.

Dressed in black, students, family members, faculty, alumni, and others turned their backs in a dignified shunning when the doctorates were bestowed.

Christopher Bowers graduated on May 12 with a master’s degree in counseling. He turned has back on the Weills and later said, “SSU’s administration has had, for years, an incredible lack of accountability to its faculty, students and the community at large. This protest was for those who have had enough of that kind of cut-throat, dehumanizing culture that SSU continues to perpetuate.”

The last issue of the student newspaper, the May 8 Star, ran the banner “Day of Shame at SSU” across the top of the front-page with an article written by the news editor. The opinion page had two further articles, one entitled “Day of Shame: Wrong Place, Wrong Time” by the editor-in-chief. Those articles, as well as others, are at ShameOnSSU.org.

The newspaper appeared on stands Monday; it was soon taken away. A faculty member wrote the following on the faculty email listserve: “An SSU staff member observed SSU employees removing issues of the Star that had front page information on the controversy regarding the honorary degree process. This is truly disheartening.”

An SSU vice-president admitted, “Some newspapers were removed as part of efforts to clean the campus for graduation — something they do every year. I have directed the Facilities Team to return the papers.”

However, another faculty member reported the following: “I remember there being Star newspapers after nearly every Spring semester I’ve worked here. Some years I’ve been able to grab a copy well into July.” Though copies may have been temporarily returned, they soon vanished again.

“The editor of the Star estimates that 95 percent of newspapers have been removed,” wrote the Star’s faculty advisor. “This is unacceptable and a shot across the bow of the First Amendment. These so-called cleaning efforts that included the Star removal are an affront to free speech. The Day of Shame is now. Is this some attempt to cover up our controversies? I join with those who believe in freedom of speech to ask that a full accounting of what happened to these papers be made.”

Activists describe Weill as a “predator,” given the predatory lending practices that he used while CEO of Citigroup, once the largest bank in the world. A billionaire, he has been on Forbes’ Magazine’s list as one of the 100 most-wealthy Americans.

Weill retired and then spent $31 million dollars to buy a vineyard in Sonoma County in 2010. The wine industry is a primary presence of the 1% in our semi-rural county, which used to have a more diversified food-growing agriculture. It is now a monoculture of alcohol farming and industrial wine production.

As full-time residents in this beloved county, activists do not want other predator bankers and corporate managers to follow and retire with their big bucks and think they can move here without consequences. It is their intention to continue dogging Weill and others who think they can buy public education, join the wine industry, and spend the rest of the lives comfortably spending their ill-gotten wealth.

California’s greatness is due partly to its extensive public higher education, which used to be available here. That system is being privatized and corporatized by the 1% to further meet its elite needs, as these bought doctorates reveal.

To be sure, progressivism demands that LGBTQ share the same rights as every other person, and the United States president’s affirmation of that right is important, but it should be a given — not a sudden, monumental revelation. Yet, even though Obama has tepidly espoused a tenet of progressivism, endorsement of one or two progressivist principles does not make one a progressive.

Obama’s evilism (it’s definitely not lesser) lost (or it should have lost) a while back the support of progressives. When a presidential candidate promises change (and gullible people start to envision an end to warring, an end to torture, an end to incarceration without habeas corpus, and an end to unfair distribution of wealth, and other progressive moves) and carries on with the extremist status quo of warring and neoliberalism, what reaction should one expect from progressives?

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the right of workers to form unions unencumbered — which is vital to ensuring workplace safety, protecting worker rights, and attaining a fair wage for their labor.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of all humans to have a job — especially a decent paying job that upholds the integrity of labor.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the right of all citizens to universal, easy access to healthcare whether poor or well off.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans, and Palestinians to live free from the fear of drone attack and US or US-backed military assault.

Back in the homeland, the president does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of citizens to escape the clutches of financial robber barons. His administration has been surveilling the Occupation movement. Whose side is Obama on? He bails out the 1% and he spies on the 99%.

Wealth at any given moment is finite. Imagine if one divides the economic pizza in a crowd of 100 people, and 100 slices are cut. That is one slice for everyone, and everyone should be satisfied, no? However, what if one person grabs 67 slices of pizza and leaves 33 slices for the rest of the people? How will the 99% feel then? It seems very clear to see what would happen. There is a reason why the Occupation movement arose.

While average citizens were being foreclosed and jobs were disappearing, Obama bailed out the 1% with cash — much of it created by the blood, sweat, and tears of working people, and yet he says nothing meaningful about the right of the 99% to have their slice of the economic pie.

Workers cannot even retire secure in the knowledge that they will be provided for in their retirement years under Obama.

Why can Cuba provide free education right through university, universal healthcare, and high employment with poverty constrained? What does the Cuban Revolution know about progressivism and an egalitarian society that stymies Obama and the others who follow the Washington Consensus through its economic collapses, bailouts, and to whichever economic precipice looms next on the dark capitalist horizon?

Anyway, at least gays can now sleep well knowing that the president has drummed up the gumption to say it is okay for them to marry.

The two traditional parties, pillars of the neoliberal policies, lost more than half of their previous vote. Combined together, they make now just a 32% of the electorate, in comparison to 77% they had scored in the 2009 elections. New Democracy has dropped from 33% in 2009 to 19%, while PASOK has sunk even more dramatically from 44% to 13%, losing more than 2.000.000 votes. This was the punishment for their reactionary “Memorandum” policies, which they followed in cooperation with the European Union and the IMF. These policies led to a vast impoverishment of the majority of the people and a mass unemployment officially already at 23%, resulting even to a plethora of suicides by desperate men and women.

The vote of the broad left rose from a modest 12% in 2009 to an impressive 35.5% (17% for SYRIZA, 8.5% for KKE, 1.2% for the anticapitalist left party ANTARSYA and some 6.1% for the Democratic Left and 2.9% for the Greens). However the prospect of a left government is made problematic since the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is an ultra-Stalinist party, denying beforehand any cooperation with “opportunists”, which it considers to be all other left parties except from itself. Moreover, the Democratic Left and the Greens are moderate center-left parties, which do not differ radically from PASOK and have supported until lately a rather conservative agenda. Even so, the collective result of the three radical left parties, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, an impressive 26.5%, makes it possible to have some real hope for the future.

The other significant feature of the elections is the abrupt rise of the ultra-right, jumping together to an astonishing 20.5%. Formerly represented by just one party, LAOS, which had scored a modest 6% 3 years ago, the ultra-right now was able to present three major parties, Independent Greeks, LAOS, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which took respectively 10.6%, 2.9% and 7%. LAOS paid for its support of the Papadimos government, holding office during the last months in Greece to implement the austerity programs of the Troika, falling just short from the required 3% to enter the parliament.

However, the shocking 7% achieved by Golden Dawn, an openly neo-Nazi and racist anti-immigrant party, marks perhaps more than anything else the result of the Greek elections. It is the first time such a party not only enters the parliament but gains mass support, which the Nazis lacked during the whole political history of Greece, famous for its resistance movement in 1941-45.

This result had been anticipated by left activists and publicists, between others by our group in Marxist Thought, which devoted its whole last issue to the problem of fascism, neo-fascism, and the new ultra-right. There was a mass mobilization by left organizations during the last three weeks calling the attention of the people to the danger of the neo-Nazi gangs. However, all this proved largely ineffective, as they have gained hold during the last years in degraded neighborhoods and within the unemployed youth. The stance of the Stalinist KKE, which not only is doing absolutely nothing to fight the ultra-right but gives shelter to nationalists like the notorious journalist Liana Kanelli, and even went so far as to welcome the Golden Dawn representatives at the Halyvourgiki strike through the local workers’ union it controls, added largely to the problem.

It is true that the ultra-right gathered together “only” 20.5%, in comparison to the radical left’s 26.5%. However, it is also true that it more than tripled its forces, while the radical left “just” doubled them.

The ensuing situation has been utilized by conservative commentators of the media and the Press, to interpret the result as an illogical expression of anger, pushing to extremes, against the demands of logic and caution. According to this reading, people were carried away by the false promises of demagogues, which are impossible to fulfill. The correct way would have been to foster the reactionary “reforms” that would eventually lead to an overcoming of the crisis through development and higher productivity and an improvement of democracy. Dora Bakogianni, the leader of the ultra neo-liberal (and falsely called so) Democratic Alliance, which failed to enter the Parliament by a narrow margin, has many times argued so in the most clear cut way.

This type of argument has in fact a double purpose. On the one hand, it attempts to equate in a tricky way the ultra-right menace and the prospect of left change as two complementary facets of the problem facing Greece, thus presenting the left as a danger too and denying beforehand there can be any radical positive solution. And on the other hand it seeks to embellish the corrupted Greek parliamentary system and make the parties of the establishment look like a guarantee for stability and improvement, while they are in fact the cause of the problem and of the ultra-right menace too. In Greece, corruption of leading politicians and public officials has been extremely widespread, taking enormous proportions with practically no one of them being ever punished. This decay has been one of the main causes that facilitated the rise of ultra-right and neo-Nazism. Yet, we are urged now to believe that these very forces that produced this situation have the magic clue to lead the country out of the crisis, and this by following the recipes that made it so deep. In fact, when reactionary politicians like Bakogianni are talking about “improving productivity” they only mean more layoffs and a new lowering of wages in the public and private sectors, thus making the existing bad situation even more desperate.

SYRIZA has countered these stereotypes in a successful way, by proposing the formation of a government of the left, which attracted much support from the people. The charismatic personality of its president, Alexis Tsipras, played a part in this too. Other radical left parties like KKE and ANTARSYA failed to make an equivalent impression. The KKE insisted on an ultra-sectarian policy, calling for the establishment of a front for the direct overthrow of the system by a “popular power”, connecting every fight for a bettering of the sad lot of the people with this prospect and denying harshly that anything could be done before establishing the “popular power.” This in fact meant condemning itself to passivity and a bureaucratic break with reality under the deceptive guise of fighting for the revolution, as has so often been the case with Stalinism. ANTARSYA had a much better approach and has played a vital role in the fight against the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis during the last years. Yet it paid for its lack of strong bonds with the people and its inability to cooperate with other left forces. This it failed to do not only with SYRIZA, with which it has a number of programmatic differences, but even with the FSO (Front of Solidarity and Overthrow), a small radical left formation led by Alekos Alavanos, a former eminent SYRIZA leader who broke with SYRIZA and kept largely aside in these elections.

The KKE has been accusing SYRIZA for being opportunistic and spreading illusions to the people by proposing a government of the left, since such a government would be no better than the existing ones. Aleka Papariga, the dogmatist General Secretary of the KKE, has even gone so far as to suggest that taking part in such a government would mean to betray the people for some ministerial “chairs” and state that the KKE would give no vote of confidence to it, should it appear before the Greek Parliament. Their political estimate after the elections was that the rise of support for SYRIZA signifies an attempt by the system to thwart the radicalization of the people and channel it to roads acceptable to the ruling classes. Moreover, Papariga has plainly refused even to meet A. Tsipras who took yesterday the mandate to form a government, after A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, failed to do so and resigned his mandate.

All this however and the assertion of the KKE leadership that no change at all can be achieved in a parliamentary way is highly sectarian dogmatism. Of course socialism cannot be finally established in a parliamentary way, to achieve that a revolution by the people is needed. Yet the experience of Chavez in Venezuela shows that with the support of a mass movement big radical changes can be initiated using the parliament as a lever, and there is no real reason that this should be in principle impossible for Greece.

Real problems, however, start from this point on. To enforce such a radical change with the help of a left government based on a parliamentary majority, a mass front is needed, which will lend support to the whole project. This is all the more essential in Greece, to be able to withstand the strong pressure by foreign lenders and the European governments and imperialist institutions. However, neither such a majority, nor a front exists presently. And while numbers might make the government of the left abstractly possible at a later stage, it is not at all certain that it will materialize.

The KKE stance is the main problem to that. This party has the support of a significant part of the industrial working class, the fighting elements of which would strengthen and cement the proposed front. However, the KKE, after a break in 1991, has followed for two decades an increasingly Stalinist course. This has gone to the length of not only rehabilitating recently Nikos Zahariadis, the authoritarian and cynical Stalinist General Secretary of the KKE in 1931-56, but also presenting Stalin as one of the greatest of all Marxists, accepting the validity of the Moscow trials and adopting the accusations that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Bolshevik leaders were agents of the Gestapo. A number of hard Stalinist pseudo-theorists like politburo members Makis Mailis and Stefanos Loukas have formed a circle directing the party’s inner political and ideological life, thus lowering the level of its members and making it vulnerable to all kinds of careerists and opportunists.

The KKE has repudiated the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the great movements of the “indignados” in Greece and Europe as being suspect and perhaps even guided by organs of the imperialistic secret services, refusing to take part in them. Instead of that it calls the people to unite in party fabricated “fronts” that are directed from above and have little connection with the people. Recently it has gone so far as to ignore the dramatic suicide of Dimitris Christoulas, a 77 year old man who shot himself at Syntagma and left a moving message to the younger generation, urging it to fight against the corrupt rulers. Christoulas was a member of the “indignados” movement and so “Rizospastis,” the official organ of the KKE, in the few lines it devoted to the incident did not even mention his name (calling him “the 77 year old man”) and shamelessly censored his message, reaching even the point off hurling accusations at him that his action was in the interests of the ruling classes, who want the people to commit suicide. Alekos Halvatzis, the son of Spyros Halvatzis, the KKE spokesman in the parliament, left the KKE one or two years ago, accusing the Papariga leadership of having filled the party with “stowaways.”

The SYRIZA is on the other hand a coalition of various groups including Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, left and moderate reformists, greens, and a number of other tendencies. The party has a genuinely democratic character and this variety of views lends it liveliness, as a center of discussion and production of ideas. However, in the grave situation facing Greece it could also prove a problem, by preventing at a critical moment a unified stance on crucial questions on which the various components hold different views. For the moment, of course, the electoral success strengthens the unity of the party, but this cannot be sure to hold indefinitely in the future.

The KKE, with its usual fanaticism, seems likely to “bet” on the possibility that a balancing of views will not be possible in SYRIZA and after a probable failure of the attempt to set up a left government or pursue it properly in case it is established, in the not very remote future the Greek people might turn to them. Such a hope can be sustained by the fact that SYRIZA does not have strong bonds with the masses that came over to it in the present elections, and its foothold is not in the working class but mainly in civil servants and the youth. It is a vain hope though in the sense that if SYRIZA fails to cope with the difficulties, chaos will be made universal, and in such a situation the ultra-right and not the KKE will be the one most likely to benefit.

The SYRIZA victory has coincided with the victory of Francois Hollande in France. Yet, it should be made clear, these are two events of an entirely different character. Hollande’s success, even if he has gained the support of many left voters, signifies just a shift of policy within the ruling classes and its parties. It may lead to some partial changes and adjustments, a somewhat different tone and orientation, but it will leave the general foundations of European policies untouched. The turn to SYRIZA in Greece however has a potential to challenge the very foundations of the austerity policies and the domination of the markets. It may serve as an example, especially if it is successful, for other countries facing similar problems, like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, and instigate a general and real European movement to the left.

The ruling European elites, as represented by Merkel, Schäuble, Barroso, etc, are fully conscious of this and have reacted nervously, either by intervening shamelessly before the elections to dictate the result, or by simply stating that the country’s obligations, signed by the previous government, must be fulfilled. Their fears are certainly justified, especially in the case that a broader movement to the radical left takes place in Europe. However the really urgent question is: how will SYRIZA cope with their intensified pressure during the following months and what it will strive and be able to achieve at a moment the reactionary forces still remain stronger in Europe as a whole?

SYRIZA’s program aims at a denouncement of the “Memorandum” and a re-negotiation of debt, which will include cancelling a large part of it as odious. It also claims a 3-year period of suspension of debt obligations, which would be an important relief step, if achieved. SYRIZA aims at nationalizing a number of banks, heavier taxation of the rich and improving the situation of the people, to a restoration of their former living standards. After having received the mandate, Tsipras proposed a 5-point program which is a concretization of this.

Other left forces like ANTARSYA argue, however, that this is not enough and that a unilateral repudiation of debt will be needed, which will mean that the country will have to leave the Euro zone and return to its national currency. This position is largely held also by the Left Current, a significant component of SYRIZA headed by its parliamentary spokesman Panagiotis Lafazanis, while a number of influential Greek economists, like Kostas Lapavitsas, have also argued this way. Significantly, the KKE connects the cancelation of debt too with the “popular power” slogan, considering it to be impossible under parliamentary conditions. This, of course, is an absurdity since the repudiation of debt is a reform that concerns the system of distribution leaving untouched the capitalist system of production as such. Thus it is perfectly conceivable under capitalism, as a number of examples show (Ecuador, Russia, etc.).

The difficulty with the unilateral repudiation of debt is that, although being in the long run most beneficial to the people, it will cause in its initial stages significant problems and disorganization. To minimize this and avoid an experience like that of Argentina in 2001, it is essential that the majority of the people are convinced for its necessity and it is pursued in an ordered way by a left government that is determined and conscious of its aims. This means that while the European left is still on the defensive, the attempt to implement the “compromising” program of SYRIZA and reach an agreement with the EU should be made. If, as it is quite possible, the neoliberal EU elites refuse to make any real and significant concessions, then this could convince the Greek people for the necessity of more radical steps. Prospectively, it will be ideal if this course coincides will a general revival of mass movements in Europe, especially in Europe’s south, leading to a “European Spring,” like the Arab one.

This prospect is not so remote as it may seem. The ruling classes in Greece and Europe are taking it seriously and making preparations to face the challenge it will pose to their system. The recent rise of the ultra-right in Greece, openly supported by a part of the media, capitalist circles, and the state security machine, is a part of this.

The breakup of the Greek political system has been compared in this respect with the downfall of the Weimar Republic and it is true that there is a number of striking analogies. Under a similar situation of deep economic crisis, mass unemployment, and poverty, we attend the bankruptcy not only of the formerly leading political parties but of the parliamentary system as well. The Papadimos government was important in this regard, as it signified a first step away from normal democratic government, towards technocratic-bureaucratic administration, reminiscent in many ways of the Brüning government in Weimar. The program of the newly created Independent Greeks party, headed by Panos Kammenos (a former New Democracy minister), contains a number of even more dangerous reactionary points, combining an ultra-privatization plan with proposals of appointing the chiefs of police and the army ministers of security and national defense respectively. This is clearly a Bonapartist plan, which would open up a threat to the very foundations of bourgeois democracy and of the labor movement. For the time being, such measures are supported only by the Kammenos party and those even more to the right (LAOS, Golden Dawn). It is not to be excluded that as the crisis intensifies, the more traditional parties, PASOK and New Democracy, or at least certain groups within them, might turn to similar directions.

The May 6th elections had the important consequence of producing a stalemate, not allowing the formation of any viable government. PASOK and New Democracy together have 149 seats, which do not give the needed parliamentary majority of 151. But even if they possessed this, forming a government would be out of question since it would be weak and without authority. This excludes also the possibility of a government being formed by these two parties together the Democratic Left, which would indeed possess a majority of 168 seats. Democratic Left has wisely excluded this possibility, as it would mean to identify itself with the two formerly big parties which were condemned by the people. The broad left on the other hand cannot form a majority, even if we count together all its disunited components. The possibility of forming a “national government” supported by a broad spectrum of forces except the ultra right, as proposed by PASOK and New Democracy leaders, is also excluded since it would simply mean to involve the left in the memorandum policies.

Greece is heading therefore almost inevitably to new elections, which will take place somewhere in the middle of June. These new elections have the potential to provoke a further impressive restructuring of the political scene.

SYRIZA’s tactics will be to unite around it the other left forces, which failed to enter the parliament (KKE of course has declared it is against unity under all conditions). That includes not only the Greens and ANTARSYA, but possibly some other groups that broke from PASOK like the small (and farily conservative) “Social Agreement” party. SYRIZA may also draw votes from KKE and improve its performance in the agrarian areas, which voted more conservative than the big cities (SYRIZA got more than 20% of the vote in Athens but much less in the countryside). If all this materializes, SYRIZA will almost certainly come first and take advantage of the 50 seats bonus the illogical electoral law grants the first party. This could augment its parliamentary force from 52 seats now to some 120, facilitating greatly the formation of a left government.

However, the ruling class parties have some prospects of countering this. The New Democracy party might be able to unite with the two small ultra-neoliberal parties, Bakogianni’s Democratic Alliance and Action of Stefanos Manos (a Greek big capitalist), which gathered together a respectable 5% of the electorate. Should such a regrouping be achieved, then first place in the coming elections will be a very open issue. However, A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, is not in good terms with the leaders of the other two parties, so it will be rather difficult to happen (although the New Democracy leader has already made the proposal). Alternatively, it is quite possible that the two ultra-neoliberal parties will make a joint appearance, but this, while ensuring their representation in the new parliament, would not stop SYRIZA from coming first.

There is also a possibility of mass desertions of New Democracy and PASOK voters towards the “Independent Greeks” party, which poses as a patriotic and popular right, defending the interests of the people. This might take big proportions if certain sections of the ruling classes and media, who still supported the traditional parties, decide to move towards Kammenos as their only viable representative. However, there is a 7% difference in favor of SYRIZA now, so this movement would have to be very pronounced to enable the Independent Greeks to take the lead. A convergence between the Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn is not very likely since the Independent Greeks leadership takes pains to dissociate itself from Nazism. It will be very interesting though to see what will be the result of Golden Dawn in these new elections.

One thing is certain. After the next elections, the hour of truth will come for Greece. It will also be the hour of truth for the Greek radical left. Developments will show if it is able to unite, withstand the enormous pressures the EU authorities will apply and open up a new progressive way for Greece and a window of hope for the rest of Europe.

Update

Developments are running fast here in Greece, so that the situation changes abruptly and forecasts may prove wrong or inexact in just a few hours.

After E. Venizelos, the PASOK leader, took the mandate from President Papoulias this day, he had a meeting with Fotis Kouvelis, the leader of the Democratic Left. In it, there was a proposal by Kouvelis of forming an “Ecumenical government” of so-called limited purpose, which will supposedly renegotiate the Memorandum and hold office until the 2014 European parliament elections. Venizelos reacted positively to that, saying that it practically coincides with PASOK’s proposal for a government of “National salvation.”
So it seems that for the first time there is a real prospect of a government being formed after the stalemate of the last days.

This government will in fact be the New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left government, which Kouvelis himself had excluded just a few days ago. SYRIZA almost certainly will not take part in it, as will also be the case with the other parties represented in the Greek parliament. However, for obvious reasons of legitimization, the three parties will try to make it appear as something different, perhaps by appointing Kouvelis as Prime Minister and limiting or even wholly avoiding the participation of PASOK and New Democracy.
If this prospect materializes, it will be a flagrant violation of the will of the people, as expressed in the elections. Its real aim will be to continue the Memorandum policies, albeit in a slightly different manner, by extracting a few rather insignificant concessions from the European Union and make it appear as a great achievement. It will also signify a further step towards political anomaly, as it will be based mainly in the two formerly ruling parties condemned for their policies and will represent just 37% of the total vote.

Alexis Tsipras has justly called this plan an attempt by PASOK and New Democracy to find a “left Karatzaferis” – comparing thus Kouvelis with Giorgos Karatzaferis, the leader of the ultra-right LAOS, who had supported, with PASOK and New Democracy, the former Papadimos government, his party failing to enter the new parliament for that reason. The plan to establish such a government shows how horrified the ruling circles are from the prospect of a new election which might give a clear victory to SYRIZA and the left (some polls having already shown an increase of the support for SYRIZA after the election to the level of 25%). It is also a sign of how much the European Union governments and institutions are worried from the prospect of a left government in Greece and strongly press behind the scene for this kind of solution.

It remains to be seen if during the meeting of the Political Leaders with President Papoulias, which the constitution provides for as an attempt to form a government when the circle of mandates ends, it will become possible to reach this solution. The meeting will take place at most after 3 days, if Venizelos exhausts the duration of his mandate. Even if it is established, however, such a government will be patently weak and will not have any real prospect of solving the grave problems of Greece. It is doubtful therefore – although not impossible – if the three parties will take the risk of appointing it and coming to a total failure which will be blamed upon them after a few months.

Given his role as the President, one would hope that his public appearances and remarks would serve useful purposes such as providing substantive and honest information regarding policy positions and government activity.  His responses during the YouTube Q&A were not totally egregious, but the superficial behavior at these Correspondents’ Dinners is just depressing.  Performing skits and telling jokes was the top priority last year while Operation Neptune Spear was being carried out. Again, the show had to go on.  The subjects tackled during this year’s Dinner included eating dogs, Young Jeezy, and casual homophobia.  The funniest bit, however, was the greasy comment on what he declared to be a great American tradition: “a free press that isn’t afraid to ask questions, to examine and to criticize.”

Whether or not those questions get answered, the free press he was referring to is far from traditional.  For one thing the spectrum of representative interest is sharply polarized.

For example, there are blogs and there are media conglomerates much like there are local coffee shops and there are Starbuckses.  Even though both provide similar commodities, the two sides operate in different ways because they exist for different reasons.  So even though neither ThinkProgress nor the Wall Street Journal is under any coercion, the latter is still owned by the multibillion dollar News Corporation which exists to make profits for investors.

This has two major implications for an outlet like WSJ.  Firstly, as a corporate subordinate, its terminal function is to contribute to wealth consolidation.  It may not accomplish this explicitly (e.g. “playing politics”), but it would not have been absorbed if it did not contribute to Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line.  Secondly, its massive financial backing inexorably enables it to be ultra-prominent and consequently ultra-powerful.  Its elite status will obviously influence its content by filtering out writers with non- or anti-elite sentiments.  These principles generalize to other dominant media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So just whose views are the big three free press outlets representing?  An April report published by FAIR looked into which perspectives were being represented on their op-ed pages during September and October 2011 when the Occupy movement was in full swing: the movement which is now recognized to have dramatically shifted political discourse in the U.S. as recent articles in the Post and in Rolling Stone make clear.  The report revealed that elites from academia, think tanks, big business, and government institutions made up 84%, 84%, and 73% of the guest column bylines in the Times, the Journal, and the Post respectively.  Those proportions aren’t surprising because they’re pretty much taken for granted: you wouldn’t expect anyone else’s opinion to be important enough to be featured.  The study also found that op-ed writers were overwhelmingly white males: 80-90%.  Furthermore, the Occupy movement was barely discussed in the opinion pages of all three papers.  Again, given the structure of American society, it’s not that surprising. However, the connection you’re not supposed to make is the obvious one that contradicts principles of a “free press.”

To make this connection, we can start by acknowledging some major domestic concerns which, unsurprisingly, include job creation, Social Security, education, and Medicare.  The problem is that elites from academia, think tanks, big business, and government are the least burdened by these concerns.  The fact remains that there are people that depend on Social Security for survival.

Another hot issue involves reproductive rights and the War on Women.  Male op-ed writers comprised 80%, 84%, and 87% of the NYT, the Post, and the Journal respectively.  When the topics include obstetrical sonograms, contraception, abortion, and equal pay/benefits for women, the integrity of the discussion is going to suffer when male perspectives dominate.

The same logic applies to race issues.  Latinos make up 16% of the U.S. population, but their voice was confined to less than half a percent of the op-ed bylines which might not bode well for discussions on immigrant rights or border control.  Blacks were under-represented too which has frightening implications.  Michelle Alexander’s newly popular book, The New Jim Crow, discusses the scandalous incarceration rate in the United States (highest in the world) that disproportionately targets the black population and supplements a growing “undercaste”.  She traces it back to the Nixon and Reagan administrations’ schemes to exploit white working class racism and fear to gain political power.  It’s a national horror that just so happens to not really involve white elites from academia, business, think tanks, and government or their friends or their families.

The race issue is particularly egregious.  Blacks are incarcerated at a rate that is comparatively appalling and often for petty drug crimes such as marijuana possession. In prison, they’re basically free (slave) labor.  When they get out they are disenfranchised, barred from juries, and struggle to find employment and therefore health care.  The fiscal consequences of the War on Drugs or the ethics of incarceration versus treatment are topics that are usually discussed in the papers.  Lucid commentary on the grave human damage does come out, but infrequently, which is remarkable because the issue is so deeply offensive to principles of compassion and liberty that it ought to be making headlines.

Incidentally the major assertions made by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow are not groundbreaking or radical.  The trajectory of the War on Drugs and its disproportionate effect on the black population had already been figured out by the mid-90s but mainstream discourse was just not ready for that kind of information.. Alexander’s study, which is deeply researched and excellently delivered, just came out at the right time.  (Actually it took two years for it to get popular). This reveals a great deal about the nature of our press.

Well, if the press’ function is to inform the public mind so as to facilitate democratic participation and influence political discourse, what can we expect to hear from elected and appointed officials?  Gil Kerlikowske, the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy gave a talk a few days ago on drug policy reform at the Center for American Progress.  I work in the same building and I happened to walk by him on the way in: I wouldn’t have known about it otherwise.  Even with prodding by the Center’s president Neera Tanden to address incarceration, Kerlikowske managed to avoid talking about drug war casualties by focusing strictly on drug abuse treatment.  In this capacity, he labeled the Affordable Care Act “revolutionary” for its requiring insurers to treat drug addiction like any other disease.  There was barely any mention of the incarceration disaster and absolutely no mention of the effects on the black population.

His lauding of the AFA, however, is interesting.  Obama’s health plan and his drug control strategy are similar in their ostensibly liberal motivations.  Furthermore, these superficialities are reinforced by the White House and the press.  Obamacare expands coverage which helps the poor and sick so therefore it must be populist, liberal, and benign and so on.  Similarly, the drug control strategy will treat addiction and help ex-convicts find housing and not relapse so therefore it’s humane and progressive .

Unfortunately, the sinister and anemic properties of either are rarely addressed. Obamacare’s expanded coverage is a blessing to the very entities that are responsible for the health crisis: it funnels billions to private insurers and pharmaceutical companies (24).  Similarly, targeting addiction is not an answer to the incarceration problem nor does it confront the damage to black communities.

But for the White House to highlight the hidden problems would irritate investors that influence campaigns through lobbying.  Private correction corporations such as CCA and GEO profit off of taxpayer funded incarceration.  Studies have shown private prison population grew in the last decade as their lobbying dollars increased.  A Boston Phoenix article reads: “Despite clear racial, economic, and cultural disparities, cries from constituents fell on deaf ears while law-enforcement lobbyists successfully cajoled and frightened congressional leaders”.  Operating through outfits like ALEC, they push for legislation that harshen sentencing for crimes.

Health insurance and pharmaceutical companies similarly influence the Affordable Care Act and thus the rhetoric available to Obama.

Given that vast sectors of the American population hang in the balance in all of these issues, you might assume that the “great American free press” that isn’t afraid to question or criticize would actually ask questions or speak critically in regards to these discrepancies.  But the lives and careers of politicians, business executives, and elite journalists are so intertwined and symbiotic that the public has to be marginalized.  The reason is simple, their interests are opposed.  Furthermore, the public mind is clouded by superficial dichotomies such as Democrats vs. Republicans, pro-life vs. pro-choice, drug treatment vs. overpolicing, etc.

For an elite journalist, these topics are perfectly valid on intellectual and professional levels.  For a politician, they serve invaluable rhetorical purposes.  Forgotten, suppressed, and marginalized, however, are the issues pertinent to the millions that personally have to worry about food, rent, health care, education, transportation, debt, and retirement.  That’s the real skit.  That’s the funniest joke.

 Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

— Hebert Marcuse¹

[A potential solution to the financial crisis is] a global neo-Keynesianism… to save capitalism from itself and from potential radical challenges from below.

— William I. Robinson²

Ice Cream and Social Change

In the midst of the slow-down of the Occupy movement in the early months of 2012, a strange creation emerged from its dense horizontal network of assemblies, spokes-councils, and working groups. Dubbed the Movement Resource Group (MRG), its nature drew controversy – and for many, condemnation – from the movement that it claimed to represent. It appeared as a vertical blip on the flat radar screen, an image of wealth operating in a space where class and rampant material accumulation were adamantly questioned.

The MRG’s aim was to act as a conduit for funding for the movement, seeking to ease Occupy “as it transitions from being a series of spontaneous actions to a more strategic national movement.”³ It was first launched by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the progressive-minded Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. They were quickly joined by other high profile left-wing millionaires and figureheads: Anna Burger of the SEIU labor union, entertainment moguls Danny Goldberg and Richard Foos, and others. Maybe it was because Ben and Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, is a member of the much maligned American Legislative Exchange Council. Or maybe it is because the image of money cozying up to Occupy reeks of the age-old tradition of progressive co-option – a threat very real to all that seek real change. Regardless, MRG did not seem to make much headway, and attention has shifted in both the Occupy movement and the media at large to a new grassroots movement sporting the same rhetoric and tactics of its predecessor – the 99% Spring.

The brainchild of the professional left, the 99% Spring is a joint project of a myriad of organizations, ranging from the Rainforest Action Network to the Institute for Policy Studies to 350.org, all taking part in helping push their agenda far beyond Occupy, transforming its energy and ethos into a structured complex. MRG members don’t seem to be very far from the action, with Anna Burger’s SEIU and Ben Cohen’s USAction adding their support for the 99% Spring.

Critics, rightfully skeptical of power of the professional left (particularly in light of the never ending cascade of letdowns and broken promises from President Barack Obama) have repeatedly drawn attention to the pro-Democratic Party attitudes of so many in the 99% Spring Coalition. These analyses have been published in many well-known and well-read publications such as Truth-Out, CounterPunch, and others. Yet an immediate backlash against these viewpoints has come in torrents. One article put forth by PRWatch quotes one 99% Spring affiliate as saying that the criticisms are “misplaced,” while another dismisses critiques of the professional left as being akin to a “Glenn Beck rant.” ⁴

Individuals who are pointing out the obvious and glaring correlations between the promoters of this new “grassroots” movement are being labeled as conspiracy theorists or cranks, bent on seeing patterns that aren’t there and avoiding to contribute meaningfully in the push to the fix the nation and the world. Never mind that Coffee Party, a 99% Springer, was founded by an organizer from United for Obama; or that the founder of Code Pink, another coalition member, garnered between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president’s 2008 campaign. Never mind that their partner, the Working Families Party, has been a longtime endorser of Obama, even hosting an image on their website informing visitors that “voting for Obama is good.”

This article will not attempt to summarize all of the data collected by the various detractors of the 99% Spring, though I’ve compiled links to various articles below in the notes.⁵  However, it will attempt to refute the ideas that there is no ideological link between the 99% Spring and the Democratic Party and that this sudden mobilization has nothing to do with the impending round of elections. In order to do that, primarily two organizations backing the 99% Spring will be looked at: MoveOn and the AFL-CIO; their history and their extended ties will be summarized, albeit in an extremely abridged fashion. Following this, the rhetoric and mentality of the 99% Spring and their backers will be examined and placed into a wider theoretical perspective on the nature of the current capitalist epoch.

From MoveOn to Big Labor to the American Dream

At the center of the controversy surrounding the 99% Spring is the question of MoveOn’s allegiance – the “conspiracy theorists” charge that MoveOn is an unofficial astroturfing organization that acts on behalf of the Democratic Party, while other critics maintain that there has been an important “cross pollination” of ideas and rhetoric between the organization and the more radically-inclined left. These critics, however, are framing their debate strictly around the currently unfolding events, ignoring the history of MoveOn and its ongoing ties to the Democratic establishment. However, these simplistic diversionary tactics, when placed into an overarching context, fall short of proper analysis and largely negate one of the central visions of the Occupy movement; namely, that “another world is possible.”

If one doubts MoveOn’s current affiliations with Democratic politics, one needs to look no further than one of the email blasts that was sent out on April 17th by their campaign director Steven Biel. Titled “Republican Political Suicide,” it carefully navigates around outright support for President Obama, though it makes it clear that MoveOn is preparing to once again act as the grassroots wings of the upcoming reelection campaign. “In 2008, young people voted in record numbers and went for President Obama over John McCain by more than 2-to-1,” the email reads, before stating that because of Congressional gridlock and the student debt crisis, “Republicans have handed us a golden opportunity to fire up young people to vote in 2012.” Biel then unveils his organization’s plan: “To make sure young people know what’s happening, we’re launching one of the largest online ad campaigns in MoveOn history.” MoveOn then asks for $5 donations to help with their emergent strategy – one that is rooted directly in electoral politics consumed in the divisive two-party paradigm that so many in the Occupy movement have spoken out against. Yet this is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that MoveOn has worked in tandem with the Democratic Party.

Perhaps the most notable example of MoveOn’s relationship with the liberal political party was its role as a coalition member of the Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), which had begun its life as an anti-war lobby in 2007. It became rapidly apparent, however, that the AAEI was closely connected to the Democratic Party – for example, it was staffed by members of the public relations firm Hildebrand Tewes Consulting, which at the same time was working with the Obama presidential campaign. One of the firm’s founders, Steve Hildebrand, had served as the director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, while his partner, Paul Tewes, would go on to serve as then-Senator Obama’s Iowa campaign manager. Likewise, AAEI staffer Brad Woodhouse went on to act as a director of communications at the Democratic National Committee.

With the slew of connections forming to what would eventually become an extremely successful campaign for the Oval Office, eyebrows were certainly raised — grassroots protestors, working in alignment with figures from a party that had thrown its support behind the opposition’s war efforts. Despite these lingering questions raised by skeptics, the AAEI went on to rally massive support for Obama in the anti-war movement – yet in the aftermath, the president of hope and change rapidly descended into what could only be described as business as usual.

In further considering MoveOn’s ongoing ties to the Democratic Party, the best place to begin is with the long biography of Tom Matzzie, the organization’s former Washington director and perhaps one of its most important members. Matziee had been the leader of the AAEI, and is of immediate interest to the 99% Spring, as he is currently an online strategist for the New Organizing Institute (NOI). The NOI is closely connected to MoveOn, with many of MoveOn’s executives and founders operating on its advisory board. Furthermore, NOI’s Joy Cushman, who worked as the director of the Obama campaign in Georgia, is credited with having “full-time on the 99% Spring plan.”⁶

Matzzie’s skills with online organizing date back to his pre-MoveOn days, when he worked as a director for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign in 2004. Two years later, when he was officially affiliated with MoveOn, he was working in Washington politics again by running the Campaign to Defend America, a spin-off outfit from the AAEI that ran anti-Republican ads in the build-up to the 2008 election cycle. Matzzie was joined at the Campaign by MoveOn founder Wes Boyd and Jeff Blum, the executive director of Ben Cohen’s USAction. The Campaign’s pro-Democrat media blitz was heavily subsidized by the heavyweights of “progressive liberalism,” including SEIU leader and future MRG member Anna Burger; Mother Jones’ director Robert McKay; Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta ; and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Burger, McKay, and Soros went on to act as leaders in the Democracy Alliance (a coalition of centrist philanthropists), while Podesta headed up the Obama-Biden Transition Team and runs a lobbying organization that represents megacorporations like Wal-Mart on Capital Hill.⁷

Matzzie has also served on the board of directors of Progressive Majority, a network of Democratic operators that seeks to “elect progressive champions” by “identifying and recruiting the best progressive leaders to run for office; coaching and supporting their candidacies by providing strategic message, campaign, and technical support.”⁸ While the mission statement touts their commitment to electing “people of color” and propelling new faces into Washington, the majority of Progressive Majority’s directors are directly linked to either the Democratic Party or the AFL-CIO labor union – the importance of which will be summarized momentarily. For now, however, a cursory mention of some of Matzzie’s cohorts in Progressive Majority is in order:

Karen Ackerman, a political director for the AFL-CIO.

Ellen Golombek, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, now affiliated with the SEIU.

William Lux, one of the AFL-CIO’s in the early 1990s. Following this, he served as President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison before becoming in 1996 the Vice Chair for the Democratic National Business Council. Later, he was the co-founder of the Progressive Donor Network, a fundraising body for Democrat candidates.

Terry Liarman, elected as the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party in 2004. Prior to this he served as the National Finance Chair for Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It should be noted that prior to his loss to John Kerry, Dean was financially backed by many of the major centrist moneymen – including the aforementioned McKay, Podesta, and Soros.⁹

Clearly, Matzzie – as well as MoveOn – has historically operated in a close-knit sphere of Democratic Party organizers and operators; specifically, the people who build up campaigns by selecting the politicians, financing them, raising awareness for them, and, in short, helping them secure the White House. They are the unseen players who keep the political machine oiled and running. It is interesting to note the prominence of the AFL-CIO in this network, as big labor has been quite often viewed as an autonomous unit from Washington politics since the collapse of the New Deal politics of yesteryear. Thus, it is notable that Matzzie himself helps to bridge the gap between labor and Democrats, as he worked for the AFL-CIO in the early part of the 2000s, incorporating online activism as part of their movement building program. It might also be worthwhile to consider that MoveOn and the AFL-CIO share the same PR firm, Fenton Communications, which also represents Soros’ Open Society Institute and Ben & Jerry’s.

The AFL-CIO has been a major supporter of the 99% Spring – the name of the union’s current president, Richard Trumka, can be found on the list of signatories of the letter that initially launched the movement. But even after the AFL-CIO declared its support for this grassroots mobilization that is allegedly outside of the Democratic Party, the website OpenSecrets revealed that the union’s political action committee was working hard to raise money for Democrat candidates.¹⁰ A month earlier Trumka announced that the union was formally endorsing Barack Obama, commending him for his progressive rhetoric and passing the $800 billion stimulus package.¹¹ But rhetoric falls short without real change; as many left-wing commentators have noted countless times, Obama’s so-called reforms – the so-called “ObamaCare” and his attitude towards Wall Street – have been empty promises, nothing more than populist imagery hiding pro-business agendas. Regardless, the AFL-CIO plans on launching a strategy of “door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and registration drives to help President Barack Obama and other Democrats.”

The AFL-CIO has been no stranger to Washington; for the entire duration of its existence it has operated closely with big politics and big business in curbing radical grassroots demands for structural change. When it was simply the American Federation of Labor (it merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO in 1955), it was led by Samuel Gompers. During this time Gompers was also serving as vice-president of the National Civic Federation (NCF), a pro-collective bargaining organization that was led primarily by representatives from leading industrial and financial firms. Gompers’ boss at the NCF, the mining magnate and Republican “king-maker” Mark Hanna, had viewed the promotion of “conservative trade unions” such as the AFL as beneficial to capitalism, noting that they would “play a constructive role in reducing labor strife and in helping American business sell its products overseas.”¹²  While Republican benevolence to collective bargaining certainly seems an oddity in the modern post-Reagan world, sociologist G. William Domhoff writes that the NCF’s stance “involved a narrowing of worker demands to a manageable level.” Continuing on, he charges that collective bargaining “contained the potential for satisfying most workers at the expense of the socialists among them, meaning that it removed the possibility of a challenge to the capitalist system itself…”

In the decade following the AFL-CIO merger, the union, working in conjunction with the Kennedy administration, began to export this moderate unionism overseas through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Funded by USAID and operating closely with the CIA, the AIFLD adopted a militantly anti-Communist perspective and assisted in a series of US-backed interventions across Latin America, including the infamous coup against Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende.¹³  Later the AIFLD underwent a transformation into the Solidarity Center, a subsidiary organization of the US government’s primary vehicle for “democracy promotion” abroad, the National Endowment for Democracy. Importantly, Trumka has served as the head of the Solidarity Center’s board of trustees – making him a de facto member of the US foreign policy establishment.

If all of these connections and ties isn’t convincing enough that the 99% Spring doesn’t bare the hallmarks of Beltway wheeling and dealing, there is the upcoming “Take Back the American Dream” conference, which is being put together by Progressive Majority and Rebuild the Dream – the latter of which is one of the key 99% Spring planners. The conference is being hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future, (CAF) which counts both Richard Trumka and his predecessor, John Sweeney, on its board of directors. Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s chairman of the board, is also an official at CAF. This is not the organization’s only tie to MoveOn; CAF is a coalition member of Healthcare for America Now, a lobbying organization for Obama’s health care plan, alongside MoveOn, Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and Ben Cohen’s USAction.

Another CAF leader, Robert Borosage, is married to Barbara Shailor, the director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs division. He also serves alongside Tom Matzzie on the board of Progressive Majority, while an organization that he is a former director of, the Institute for Policy Studies, is part of the 99% Spring movement. He still maintains close ties with the Institute: he is currently on the board of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, right alongside Wes Boyd and Joan Blades from MoveOn and the NOI, and Bill Fletcher, a high-ranking official in the AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the current co-chair of United for Peace and Justice – yet another 99% Spring coalition member.

While Borosage, who incidentally is one of the keynote speakers at the Take Back the American Dream conference (along with Howard Dean and Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones)¹⁴ has been critical of Obama’s willingness to bend to corporate America’s demands, Campaign for America’s Future has not minced words about electoral agenda: “Just five months before what could be the most important set of elections in our lifetimes, thousands of progressives will convene in the nation’s capital to energize the movement to Take Back the American Dream.”

Disruption and Redirection (or the End of Neoliberalism)

Borosage’s anti-corporatist tone leads us to one of the major criticisms that defenders of the 99% Spring have of its detractors. MoveOn and its adjunct organizations such as the AFL-CIO and Rebuild the Dream have led activists to protest the corruption surrounding mega corporations, including GE and Bank of America. How can something that does try to bring these abusers of democracy to justice be a negative factor in the activist landscape? The answer to this question is more complicated, yet it is something vital to be discussed in today’s world of the perpetually evolving “flexible capitalism.”

First off, it is important to take note that MoveOn and the extended progressive network does not necessarily practice what it preaches. For example, MoveOn’s “brand-based imagery” for the 99% Spring was crafted with help from Berlinrosen, a “communications consultancy” that operates out of D.C. and New York City.¹⁵ The firm, whose Washington director is a former communications director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, lists on its website MoveOn Political Action (MoveOn’s political fundraising arm), SEIU, Healthcare for Americans Now, and Brookfield Properties as clients. Brookfield, incidentally, is the owner of the now-famous Zucotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street set up camp before its eviction in mid-November, 2011. Brookfield Properties, later revealed to be in contact with Federal agencies just prior to a raid, is in turn owned by Brookfield Asset Management – an Ontario based corporation that counts George Soros as a shareholder and is represented in Washington by a member of the Podesta family.¹⁶  If these people – all tied in one way or another to the 99% Spring – are against corporate malfeasance and are truly in solidarity with the Occupy movement, one would certainly think that they would cut monetary ties with outfits like Brookfield.

Aside from that puzzling detour, the relationship between the “professional left” and capitalism is important to look at. Recent and influential treaties, such as The Shock Doctrine and The Corporation, or the articles published in progressive magazines such as The Nation and Mother Jones, have raised awareness about the destructive tendencies of neoliberalism, showing how they dissolve national boundaries, exploit poor and undeveloped countries, and curtail representative democratic practices by buying off politicians. Yet these publications, for the most part, tend to equate capitalism with its current neoliberal incarnation, and also serve to position corporations – not the underlying structures of the capitalist mode of production – as the problem. While all these works play a critically important role, they simply do not go far enough – overall, their analysis is unfortunately superficial.

This framework – where corporations, not market economies dictated by uneven wealth distribution, finds its physical expression in the works of moderate liberal economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. While their individual approaches may differ, all of these individuals maintain a pro-market rhetoric that avoids undermining the ultimate Washington consensus that reasons that private enterprise and individual greed is the cornerstone of equality. Stiglitz himself appeared at an Occupy Wall Street rally and told protests “The fact is that the system is not working right… Our financial markets have an important role to play.  They’re supposed to allocate capital, manage risks.  We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds.” ¹⁷  But as the Monthly Review’s Michael Yates retorts, Stiglitz is wrong: the system is working correctly. “It is working exactly as capitalist systems work.  They have always been marked by poles of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed by recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve armies of labor, a few winners and many losers, alienating workplaces, the theft of peasant lands, despoiled environments, in a word, the rule of capital.” What Yates is expressing here is a clear and undeniable truth. We cannot attack corporations solely, because they are not the cause of the problem. They are only the symptom of it.

The AFL-CIO and SEIU are also indicative of this mentality, with their perpetual protest slogan of “protect the middle class.” Such a phrase or symbol it represents clashes directly with anti-capitalist sentiments; it’s rooted in the inner-workings of the classist system and is generated solely by workplace hierarchies and capital flows that trickle down ever so slowly. It is true that the world of globalized neoliberalism is dissolving the middle class; this is the result of the breakdown of the social contracts of the Keynesian era, which allowed unionism to flourish and mild redistributive policies to take place. But look at the unofficial label given to the heyday of Keynesianism – “the Golden Age of Capitalism”. ¹⁸  It was the time when the American Dream in all of its illusionary splendor was at its peak; is it any wonder why one of the 99% Spring’s most prominent backers is Rebuild the Dream, or the Campaign for America’s Future’s upcoming conference is called “Take Back the American Dream”? It is as French economist Guy Sorman argued: “I think that the liberal society needs a welfare state… people will accept the capitalist adventure if there is an indispensible amount of social security.”¹⁹

World systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein once said that “we’ve been living in the wake of 1968 ever since, everywhere.” What Wallerstein was alluding to was the dramatic upheaval that happened across the globe in that year, with a surge of left-wing consciousness and revolutionary mobilization from America to Germany to France and beyond. For a brief moment – particularly as France was paralyzed by widespread wildcat strikes – it looked as if a victory was at hand, but it was not.

Within a handful of years the neoliberal project had begun, and capitalism was launched into its current flexible stage. As deregulation became central legislative policy and free trade agreements interconnected the globe in a myriad of ways, the newly unleashed capitalism also took on a rather curious, almost human appearance. For every public asset auctioned off, more and more “socially aware companies” spring up, for every worker protection removed, a corporation unveils an environmentally sustainable plan of action. For every transnational behemoth, there is a corporation that reworks its caste system into networks of interlocking team members. Slavoj Zizek has written about this phenomenon at length, identifying it as a capitalism tailor-made for the post-’68 world:

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful liberation revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism – a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bill Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. (emphasis in original)²⁰

French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have tackled this problem, drawing directly from the malaise that settled in their country after the revolt of ’68 lost its power. Writing in highly verbose theory-talk, they explain it by appropriating terminology from anthropology – capitalism’s power results in deterritorialization, but this is quickly reterritorialized before the process is complete. ²¹ What this means is that capitalism is destructive in an absolute sense, gobbling up and breaking down nation states, cultures, religion, social structures – all things that result in discontents or other internal tensions that threaten to undermine its functionality. But through “reterritorialization” these tensions are acknowledged and measures are taken to smooth them out, to fix them in way that surplus value can still be extracted from the dominated labor force.

Antonio Gramsci called this the “Passive Revolution”: in order to protect themselves in the long run, the capitalist elite (or certain sectors of the elite, depending on which time of business interests are threatened) bend to measures that seem contrary to their short-term benefits of the system. This is precisely what gives rise to things such as corporate philanthropy or socially aware business models and practices – and this in turn, to put it in Zizek’s words, separates the “basic ideological dispositif of capitalism” (individual greed) from “its concrete socio-economic condition.” ²²  No longer is capitalism bad; it is the people running the corporations that are bad. Capitalism, when purged of those who exploit it, can work for the betterment of all. This paradigm is reiterated by Drummond Pike, the founder and head of the Tides Foundation (a progressive philanthropy that funds many of the 99% Spring organizations), who rebuked charges that he and his colleagues were socialists by saying “Tides may be progressive, but we are enthusiastically American. Were it not for the capitalist system, not a dollar would flow through Tides.” ²³

Of course, the debate being covered here – whether or not the 99% Spring is connected with the Democratic Party – is simply a microcosm of this wider, more theoretical and abstract meditations on the shifting nuances of capitalism. These avenues of analysis do, however, provide important insight into the nature of this latest clash between the haves and have-nots.

Is it undeniable that MoveOn and its cohorts are intricately bound to a specific aspect of the political machine – the “underbelly” where PR firms, communication consultants, and brand imagery collide to build campaigns. Conducting this kind of business requires a widespread manipulation of people’s emotions by crafting images that play on people’s hopes and desires, their fear and distrust. In short, it is a sphere of politics that is based entirely in propaganda of action, aiming to mobilize mass groups across the nation into a voter base. If MoveOn and other promoters of the 99% Spring are connected to this world, immediate suspicion must be cast on their true aspirations.

The question still lingers on their anti-corporatist rhetoric, but as noted above, this does not necessarily contradict the “reterritorializations” of capitalism. During Keynesianism, the state more or less acted as a limiting agent for capital flow; it was antagonist towards capitalism for the benefit of capitalism. The state was subsequently “deterrioralized” through neoliberalism, and now we’re seeing a sort of “return of the state”. It first occurred with the outright rejection of neoliberalism with the slew of bail-outs, and now that a grassroots movement has arisen challenging these perspectives from a leftist point of view, another movement has risen to re-inject the state itself (through its emphasis on electoral politics) into a dialogue that up to this point has been driven instead by classist dispute.

With the demands of anti-corporate, localized capitalism, what is being posed is the idea of the state acting as an arbiter to limit the exponential growth of the neoliberal project. This is not a new idea – limits to capitalist growth was posed in the 1970s by the Club of Rome, a little know yet influential technocratic organization that counted some of the leading financiers and industrialists of its day as members.²⁴  More recently the Club has made some rather interesting recommendations for the future of capitalism, going beyond the idea of limiting growth: “…capitalism needs a reliable frame. It means that the trend since the late 1970s of weakening the state must come to an end and should be reversed.” ²⁵ Intriguingly, some of the founding members of the Club were leaders from the United Auto Workers union, which today is one of the backers of the 99% Spring.

So what happens now? Capitalism, in its neoliberalism form, is broken. The ongoing global financial crises reflect the inherent instability and structural defects of the transnational trade system. A return to Keynesianism and the state power may be a temporary solution, but economic legislation ebbs and flows with the changing of administrations. Keynesianism tomorrow could bring a new stability, but it will be most likely repealed at some point again and neoliberalism will return. There is also no guarantee that Democrats will ever hold to their campaign promise of economic justice; those that were roped into voting for Obama under MoveOn’s image of the senator as the anti-war candidate will tell you that words without action are nothing.

What it boils down to is simply that the question is not over whether to side with the 99% Spring or not, whether to allow co-option to take root and proliferate. The question, in actuality, concerns what kind of change we truly want to see. Is it the world of limited growth capitalism, managed by the state through representative candidates, or is it a brand new world where real democracy is realized, where power is returned to the people and the capitalist system is finally overturned?

1. Herbert Marcuse One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society Routledge Classics, 2002
2. Quoted in Michael Barker “Who Wants a One World Government?” Swans Commentary April 6, 2009
3. “Make a donation” Movement Resource Group
4. Mary Bottari,  “99% Spring has Sprung: Shareholder Actions Underway Across the Country” PRWatch, April 29, 2012 ; Bryan Farrell,  “Conspiracy Theorists takes Swings at Tar Sands Action but Misses” April 25, 2012
5. The following links are to articles criticizing the 99% Spring, as well as its earlier incarnations:  Steve Horn, “MoveOn.org and Friends Attempt to Co-Op Occupy Wall Street”, Truth-Out,  October 11, 2011; Edmund Berger,  “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power”,  Dissident Voice, December 21, 2011;  The Insider, “The Guns That Smoked: 99 Percent Spring: the Latest MoveOn Front for the Democratic Party”, CounterPunch, March 16-18, 2012; The Insider, “Fooled Again? MoveOn’s 99% Spring, Obama, and the Dems in Lock-Step”, CounterPunch, April 12, 2012; Charles M. Young,  “’Front Groups, Not Issues!’ Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud”,  CounterPunch, April 13-15, 2012; Edmund Berger, “Harnessing People Power: Co-Option at Work in America Today”,  Swans Commentary,  April 23, 2012
6. “Nonprofit Quarterly: The 99% Spring is Here: An Interview with Organizer Ai-jen Poo”, Change to Win Strategic Organizing Center, Tuesday, April 10, 2012
7. Podesta, as well as his organization the Center for American Progress, are discussed in my article, “Intervention Mentality and the Spectacle of Joseph Kony”,  Dissident Voice, April 14, 2012
8. “Mission Statement”, Progressive Majority
9. Walt Contreras Sheasby, “George Soros and the Rise of the Neo-Centrists”, Citizine, December, 2003
10. “AFL-CIO Worker’s Voice PAC Summary”,  OpenSecrets
11. Sam Hananel,  “AFL-CIO boosts ground support for Obama, Democrats”,  Yahoo News, March 14, 2012
12. G. William Domhoff,  The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America, Aldine de Gruyter, 1990, pgs. 72-73
13. The role of the AIFLD as an arm of US foreign policy will be covered in my forthcoming book on American democracy promotion.
14. “Speakers at Take Back the American Dream”,  Campaign for America’s Future
15. Arun Gupta,  “How to Rebrand Occupy”,  Truth-out,  April 30, 2012
16. This, curiously, has only been reported on in right-wing media outlets. See Aaron Klein, “Look whose relatives just got a $135.8 Million Energy Loan”, World Net Daily,  October 11, 2011
17. Michael Yates,  “Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists”,  MRZine, October 23, 2011
18. Meghnad Desai,  Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism Verso, 2004 pg. 216
19. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Verso, 2009 pg. 26
20. Ibid., pg. 56
21. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Penguin, 2006. 6th edition
22. Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,  pg. 35
23. Drummond Pike,  “Why does the Right Hate Soros?” Politico,  October 29, 2010
24. The Club of Rome published its recommendations for a reworked capitalist economy in the 1972 book Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Today, one Club of Rome member, David Korten, is the co-founder of Yes! Magazine, which counts Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones on its advisory board and has also published pro-Rebuild the Dream and 99% Spring material. Korten himself has gone from working with the Ford Foundation and USAID to espousing an anti-corporatist rhetoric on Occupy rallies. See Stuart Jeane Bramhall,  “The Club of Rome and the Sustainability Movement”,  Dissident Voice,  April 21^st, 2012
25. Ernst Ulrich Weizsäcker, Oran R. Young, Matthias Finger (ed.) Limits to Privatization: How to Avoid Too Much of a Good Thing, Earthscan, 2005 pg. 186

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela.

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include: (1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations; (2) their relatively independent foreign policy pronouncements especially regarding US intervention and sanctions policies; (3) their ideological rhetoric rejecting US-led regional bodies and favoring Latin American centered organizations; (4) their populist electoral campaign programs regarding social equity, environmentalism, and human rights; (5) their vehement rejection of ‘neo-liberalism’ and traditional neo-liberal personalities, parties and privatizations; (6) their strategic perspective that envisions a prolonged process of social transformation that emphasizes an agenda featuring modernization, developementalist priorities, and high levels of investment oriented toward global markets; (7) their prolonged political incumbency based on constitutional reforms permitting re-election justified by the need for completing the transformative vision.

The progressive camp has a self-image, projected inward to its electorate as representing a rupture or ‘historical’ break with the past, first with regard to the traditional neo-liberal oligarchy and secondly with the ‘statist’ left. In the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela they frequently resort to rhetoric evoking “21st century socialism”. The potency of the appeal to radical novelty has a limited time span dependent on the degree to which the regimes pursue policies in variance with the preceding neo-liberal regime.

The ‘Left-Right Division’ as Represented by the Progressive Camp (PC)

The perceptions of the objective and subjective divergence between the progressive camp and the right vary according to whether they emanate from official sources or from a critical empirical investigation.

According to the ideologues of the “Progressive Camp” (PC) there are at least five major policy areas which reflect the radical rupture with the traditional neo-liberal right.

(1) Nationalism: (a) the PC through renegotiations of contracts with extractive MNC secures a higher rate of taxation, increasing revenues for the national treasury; (b) via increased state investment it converts wholly owned private firms into public-private joint ventures; (c) through increases in royalty payments it lessens ‘foreign exploitation’; (d) through the greater presence of ‘local technocrats’ it increases national oversight of strategic economic decisions.
(2) Foreign Policy: The progressive camp has pursued an independent, if not explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy. The progressive camp has established several Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations which deliberately exclude the presence of North American and European imperial countries such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). The PC has rejected sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Gaza and opposed the US-backed NATO war against Libya. They criticized the US position at the Summit of the America’s meeting in April 2012 on at least three major issues – inclusion of Cuba, opposition to British colonial control of the Malvinas, and the de-penalization of drugs. The PC has expressed its opposition to US hegemony, to IMF “structural reforms” and Euro-US control over international lending institutions. With the exception of Venezuela, the PC has diversified its export markets. For example Brazil exports to the US only 12.5% of its goods and services, Argentina 6.9%, and Bolivia 8.2%.
(3) Social Policy: The PC has increased social expenditures, especially toward reducing rural poverty; increased the minimum wage; approved salary and wage increases. In a few countries they provide easy credit and financing to small and medium businesses, have given legal title to land squatters and distributed plots of uncultivated public lands as a kind of ‘agrarian reform’.
(4) Regulation: The PC has, with varying degree of consistency, imposed controls over the financial sector, regulating the flow of speculative capital and the volatility of financial markets. With regard to the extractive sector regulations have been relaxed to permit the large-scale inflow of capital and the pervasive use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds by agro-business. They have permitted the expansion of mining, agriculture, and the timber industry into Indigenous people’s and natural reservations. They have financed large-scale infrastructure projects linking extractive enterprises to export outlets trespassing onto previously regulated, protected natural habitats. Regulatory norms have been harnessed to facilitate ‘productive’ extractive developmentalism and to limit the financialization of the economy.
(5) Labor Policy: has been based on a ‘corporatist model’ of business-state-trade union (tri partite) negotiations and conciliation to limit lockouts and strikes and maintain growth, exports and revenue flows. Labor policy has been conditioned by the policy of limiting budget deficits, fixing wage increases, to the rate of inflation. In line with orthodox fiscal policies, pensions for public sector workers have been frozen or reduced especially among the middle and high end functionaries. Traditional job security guarantees have been maintained not augmented and severance pay has not been raised. Strikes by public sector workers, especially among teachers, medical staff and social service workers have been frequent and have led to government mediation and marginal gains. Government policy has been oriented toward protecting managerial prerogatives, while respecting and upholding the legal status, collective bargaining rights of trade unions. Within nationalized firms, state-appointed directors rule; there is no move toward worker self-management or ‘co-management’-except in limited cases in Venezuela. The structure of labor relations follows the private corporate hierarchical model Labor has, at best, an advisory role regarding health and safety but no determining influences or investment within this corporate framework. Pressure via strikes and protest by trade unions have been necessary, frequently in alliance with community groups, to rectify the most egregious corporate violations of health and safety rules. While the progressive regimes publically eschew neo-liberal “labor flexibility” policies they have done little to expand and deepen labor prerogatives over the labor and productive process.

The principle difference in labor policy between the progressive regimes and the traditional right is the ‘open door’ to labor leaders, their willingness to mediate and grant incremental wage increases, especially of the minimum wage and generally, the reduction of harsh, violent repression.

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

Writers, academics, and journalists on the Right and Center-left emphasize the difference between the progressive and the past neo-liberal regimes, overlooking the large-scale socio-economic and political structural continuities. A more nuanced, balanced, and objective analysis requires that these continuities be taken into account because they play a major role in discussing the limitations and emerging conflicts and crises facing the progressive regimes. Moreover, these limitations, based on the continuities, highlight the importance of alternative development models proposed by popular social movements.

The agro-mineral export model has demonstrated profound strategic deficiencies in its very structure and performance. The promotion of agro-mineral exports has been accompanied by the large-scale, long-term entrance of foreign capital which in turn determines the rates of investment, the sources for inputs of machinery, technology and ‘know-how’, as well as control over the marketing and processing of raw materials. The MNC “partners” of the progressive regimes have conditioned their involvement on the bases of (a) the de-regulation of environmental controls; (b) the termination of price controls and the introduction of “international prices” for sales to the domestic market; (c) freedom to control foreign exchange earnings and to remit profits overseas.

They also control decisions regarding the exploitation of mineral reserves. Expansion of production is dependent on their own global criteria rather on the needs of the ‘host’ country. As a result, despite the “re-negotiated” contracts, which the progressive regimes hail as a “giant advance” toward “nationalization”, the cumulative losses in revenues and in rebalancing the economy are substantial. If one looks beyond the agro-mineral enclave the negative impact to further development are substantial. The very limited impact that the agro-mineral model has on the economy as whole has led to occasional conflicts between the MNC and the progressive host governments. A case in point is the conflict between the nominally Spanish oil company Repsol and the Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez in April 2012. Repsol’s behavior illustrates all the pitfalls of collaboration with foreign overseas extractive corporations. Repsol refused to increase investments, claiming that local regulated prices reduced profit margins. As a result Argentina’s energy bill rose three-fold between 2010 and 2011 from $3 billion to $9 billion. Furthermore, Repsol repatriated its profits, paid high dividends to overseas stockholders and thus had little impact in creating domestic industries producing inputs or refineries to process petroleum. The attempt by the deceased President Kirchner to increase ‘national ownership’ by bringing in a local private capitalist, (the Peterson Group) had no positive impact, merely entrenching Repsol’s control. When Fernandez took majority shares in order establish public control and increase local production, the entire Eurozone leadership led by the Spanish government and the Western financial press launched a virulent campaign, threatened litigation and predicted economic disaster. The problem of ‘inviting’ foreign MNCs to invest is that it is hard to disinvite them. Once they enter a country no matter how unfavorable their performance, it is difficult to rectify or undo the damage and move onto a new public centered model of development.

All the progressive regimes with the possible exception of Venezuela have signed long-term large-scale contracts with major foreign extractive multi-nationals. Apart from the increase in royalties these agreements do not differ greatly from contracts signed by preceding right-wing neo-liberal regimes.

Evo Morales signed a large-scale exploitation contract with Jindal, an Indian multi-national to exploit the iron-mine Mutun with virtually all inputs — machinery, transport, etc. — imported and with very limited ‘industrializing’ of the raw iron ore, mostly simple iron ‘nuggets’. The bulk of Bolivia’s gas and oil is exploited by foreign MNC-public ‘joint ventures’ and is shipped abroad, leaving most of the 60% rural households without piped gas,and resulting in Bolivia’s importing most of its diesel.

Ecuador under President Correa, another leading progressive president, signed two big contracts with foreign oil groups in February 2012, despite the opposition of the majority of Indian organizations including CONAI. In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, big oil and gas companies, while raising objections to the re-negotiations of contracts leading to an increase in royalty payments and an increased presence of public officials, retain a privileged position in crucial decisions regarding management, marketing, technology and investment. Despite claims to the contrary, the leaders of the progressive regimes sign off on these strategic agreements without consulting the communities affected. Decisions are based exclusively on executive privilege. The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between the progressive governments and the multi-nationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes. Moreover, in both Ecuador and Bolivia many of the “technocrats” and administrators who worked under the previous neoliberal regimes play a prominent role in running the joint venture.

While progressive regimes have pursued anti-poverty programs and have registered some successes in reducing poverty levels, they do so as a result of the growth of the economy not via the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the progressive regimes have not pursued redistributive polices: income and land concentrations, including high levels of inequality remain intact. In fact the hierarchy of the class structure has not been altered and in most cases has been reinforced by the inclusion of new entrants into the upper and middle class. These include many former leaders and activists from the lower middle and working class who have entered the government as well as ‘new capitalists’ benefiting from state contract agreements with the progressive regime.

The financial system has remained intact and prospered under the progressive regimes, especially because of the regimes tight fiscal policies, build-up foreign reserves, control over government spending and low rates of inflation. Financial sector profits are especially high in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Brazil, in particular, has attracted large inflows of speculative capital from Wall Streets and the City of London because of its high interest rates relative to the rates in North America and Europe.

Alongside the concentration of ownership in the extractive and financial sector, the progressive regimes have not introduced progressive taxes to reduce the disparities of wealth. The income of the agro-business elites in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador are several hundred times that of the bulk of subsistence farmers, peasants and rural laborers. Many of latter remain subject to brutal working and living conditions. In many cases, the progressive regimes have done little to enforce the labor and health codes in the giant agro-business plantations while workers are subject to unregulated toxic chemical sprays.

If the configuration of ownership and wealth remains relatively unchanged from the neo-liberal past, the progressive governments have accentuated the tendencies toward export specialization. Under the progressive governments the economies have become less diversified and more dependent on agro-mineral and energy exports, and more dependent on large-scale long-term foreign investments for growth. State revenue and growth are more dependent on primary product exports.

The free market policies of the progressive agro-mineral export regimes have stimulated the growth of large-scale commercial activity. The commercial sector is increasingly influenced by the large-scale entrance of foreign owned multi-nationals, like Wal-Mart, who source their products overseas, undermining local-small scale producers and retailers.

The appreciation of the currency has adversely affected traditional manufacturers and the transport industry causing significant job losses especially in textiles, footwear and automobiles in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Moreover, favorable polices promoting large-scale agro-mineral exporters has been accompanied by a credit squeeze on local small business people, especially, producers for local markets who have been bit hard by the import of cheap consumer goods (from Asia). Farmers producing food for local markets have been downgraded in the drive to expand cultivation of export crops like soya.

In summary, the progressive regimes have pursued a multi-faceted double discourse: an anti-imperialist, nationalist and populist rhetoric for domestic consumption while putting into practice a policy of fomenting and expanding the role of foreign extractive capital in joint ventures with the state and a rising new national bourgeoisie. The progressive regimes articulate a narrative of socialism and participatory democracy but in practice pursue policies linking development with the concentration and centralization of capital and executive power.

The progressive regimes preach a doctrine of social justice and equity and a practice of co-optation of social leaders and clientalism via poverty programs for the poorest sectors of society.

The progressive regimes have combined incremented income policies with large-scale structural changes, benefiting the extractive-primary sector. Stability of the PC is utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices, and open markets. The progressive regimes have successfully linked trade union and sectors of the peasant movement to the state and have undermined or weakened independent class organizations and replaced them with corporate tri-partite structures.

The progressives have successfully ‘reformed’ or replaced the chaotic, de-regulated, conflictual, racialist policies of their predecessors and institutionalized “normal capitalism.” They have introduced rules and procedures favorable to institutional stability, fiscal discipline, and incremental but unequal gains. In other words, the “parameters of neo-liberalism” are now effectively administered and legitimated by faux nationalism based on greater political autonomy and market diversification. Centralized executive decision making based on agreements which require extractive MNC to invest and develop the forces of production is legitimated by an electoral framework and a multi-class political coalition.

The domestic and foreign policies of the progressive extractive regimes reflect two contradictory experiences: their radical origins in the lead-up to taking power and their subsequent adoption of an agro-mineral developementalist export strategy, favored by neo-liberal technocrats. The “synthesis” of these two apparently “contradictory” experiences finds expression in the adoption of an independent, critical political position toward imperialist militarism and interventionism and economic collaboration with the agencies of economic imperialism, namely the signing of long-term and large-scale contracts with US-EU-Canadian agro-mining and energy multi-nationals. In other words, the progressive extractive regimes have ‘redefined’ or reduced imperialism to mean its state structures and policies rather than its economic components (MNC) which are engaged in the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of labor. In the same fashion, they redefine ‘anti-imperialism’ to mean opposition to political-military interventions and a ‘fair distribution’ of profits between the regime and its MNC “partner”. This redefinition allows the progressive regimes to claim popular legitimacy on the bases of periodical criticisms of the policies and practices of the imperial state while collaboration and agreements with the MNC allow the progressive regimes to retain support from domestic and overseas business interests. When a progressive regime, as is the case of Argentina ruled by Cristina Fernandez, decides to “nationalize” or more correctly secure the majority shares in Repsol, the nominally Spanish oil multi-national, the entire financial press, the European Union, and Washington denounce the move and threaten reprisals. In other words, the unstated pact between the progressive camp and the imperial regimes is that political differences are tolerable but nationalist economic measures are not acceptable. Renegotiations of contracts to increase state revenues may cause a temporary suspension of new investments but not a political confrontation. However, the public takeover of a foreign extractive firm evokes predictable hostility and retaliation from the imperial states. The Argentine progressive regime’s embrace of a policy of economic nationalism was, however, enterprise and sector specific. The Fernandez regime did not, and has no future plans, to expropriate other extractive firms, nor was the measure part of a general nationalist strategy to shift toward greater public ownership. Rather Repsol’s refusal to increase investments and production was increasing Argentina’s dependence on imported oil, which was deteriorating its balance of payments and foreign currency reserves. Repsol’s refusal to comply with Argentina’s developementalist agenda was based on the Fernandez policy of maintaining the retail price of oil for the domestic market below the international price. Repsol’s decline in production was a way of leveraging the regime to lift price controls. However, a higher petrol price would have a negative impact on industrial and private consumers, raising costs and reducing the competitiveness of the Argentine exporters and domestic producers. In effect, Repsol’s intransigence threatened to undermine the social and political balance of forces between labor and capital and between extractive exporters and popular consumers, which sustained the regimes majoritarian coalition. In brief, the measure was nationalist in form but capitalist developementalist in content.

Even so the measure polarized the global economy between the imperial west and the Latin American left, with the usual imperial satraps in Latin America (Mexico’s Calderon and Colombia’s Santos) backing Repsol.

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

Prior to coming to power via electoral processes, the progressive leaders maintained close ties and actively supported and participated in the ‘street action’ and mass struggle of the social movements. They embraced the banners of economic nationalism, ecological conservation and respect for the natural reserves of the Indigenous communities, social equality, and reconsideration of the foreign debt including the repudiation of ‘illegal debts’.

The social movements played a major role in politicizing and mobilizing the working and peasant classes to elect the progressive presidents. This convergence was short-lived. Once in power, the progressive regime appointed orthodox economic ministers to run the economy. They adopted the extractive strategy, shifted from a nationalist public sector economy, designed to diversify the economy, to a ‘mixed economy’ based on joint ventures with overseas extractive capital. First, the Indigenous communities of Peru, Ecuador, and some sectors in Bolivia went into opposition, on the bases that their interests were neglected and they were not consulted. Second, sectors of the working class and public employees struck demanding higher salaries, an increase in public spending. Small farmers and manufacturers demanded economic stimulus for family farms and local industry rather than subsidies for agro-mineral MNC, fiscal orthodoxy, and export strategies based on lower labor costs and neglect of the domestic market.

Radical trade union peasant and Indigenous leaders of the social movements called into question the entire agro-mineral extractive strategy, the distribution and administration of state revenues and expenditures. They reasserted their support for a social program embracing agrarian reform, including the expropriation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to landless peasants. Workers’ leaders called for an industrial policy to process ‘raw materials’ in order to create manufacturing jobs. Some trade unionists called for the nationalization of strategic industries and banks. However, despite some major protests, the bulk of the followers of the social movements and the majority of their leaders soon shifted from radical rejection of the extractive model to demands for a bigger share of the revenues. The progressive regimes attracted the bulk of the social leaders to tri-partite councils of conciliation to negotiate and secure incremental changes. The progressive regimes highlighted their opposition to “neo-liberalism.” They redefined it as unregulated capitalism based on low royalties and underfunding of social programs. The progressive regimes successfully divided the social movements between “utopian” radical opponents and progressive reformists. In time of social strife, the progressive regimes evoked a “left-right alliance,” charging their social critics of acting on behalf of imperialism, impervious to their own collaboration with imperial based multi-nationals. Presidential appeals, a nationalist populist discourse, and increased revenues which funded increased social expenditures weakened the left opposition. Moderate but sustained increases in anti-poverty programs and minimum wages neutralized the appeal of the radical leaders in the social movements. Despite the progressive regime’s break with its ‘radical egalitarian roots,’ it was more than able to secure large-scale mass-electoral support, based on the overall dynamic growth of the economy and steady growth of income. Both were underpinned by long-term high commodity prices.

Popular extractivist presidents repeatedly won elections by substantial majorities and were able to mobilize sectors of the moderate social movements to counter anti-extractivist social movements. The high prices of commodities and multiple opportunities for exploitation of resources attracted foreign investors despite higher royalty payments. Foreign investors were attracted by the social stability ensured by the progressive regimes in contrast to the instability of the previous neo-liberal regimes. The progressive regimes thrived on economic ties with the MNC and an electoral alliance with the lower classes.

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

While the seven regimes which form the ‘progressive camp’ share a common development strategy based on the export of primary commodities there are significant differences in the levels of diversity of their economies, the nature and character of the commodities which they export, the degrees of social polarization and social cohesion and the size and scope of the opposition. In line with these differences there are also substantial differences in the degree to which the “progressive and extractive model” is sustainable or subject to upheaval or reversal.

The progressive camp can be divided in many ways: between those regimes based on charismatic leaders and extreme dependence on primary exports (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and those with developed industrial sectors and ‘institutionalized political leadership (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). There are also significant differences in the degree of class and ethnic conflict: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are experiencing significant mass resistance from substantial Indigenous communities, while in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, where the Indigenous population is sparse, there is only isolated opposition. In terms of class struggles, Bolivia, has experienced widespread protests by health, education, mining, and factory workers. Venezuela has faced lockouts and boycotts organized by the economic elite (“class struggle from above”). Ecuador faced widespread protests from the police. Most of the rest of the countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) faced limited strikes largely on wage issues. With the exception of Bolivia, the major trade union confederations work closely and collaborate with the progressive regimes; in contrast, the peasant and rural workers movements in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have retained a greater degree of independence and militancy largely because they have been the most prejudiced by the agro-mineral export strategies. In Venezuela and Brazil, landlord’s private armies have played a major role in combatting land reform beneficiaries with relative impunity.

The most pervasive and environmental degradation has occurred in Brazil, where millions of acres of rainforest have been “cleared” during the decade of Workers Party rule. Chemical exploitation of agriculture is strong in most countries especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where soya production has become a dominant crop. All the major agro-industrial exporters (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) rely on toxic chemicals and GM seeds with numerous cases of toxic consequences for indigenous residents and their natural habitat. The issue of toxicity and environmental degradation resulting from the giant mining and timber companies has been well documented in Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Overall, the greater the urban population and the more dispersed the rural communities adversely, affected, the smaller the environmental protest and the likelihood that NGO ecologists play a leading role in protest.

Since the extractive industries are outside of the major urban centers, since most of the major trade union confederations collaborate with the progressive regimes and secure incremental wage increases, and since the overall economy has been growing and unemployment has declined, macro-economic imbalances, commodity dependency and related structural vulnerabilities have not resulted in major confrontations between labor and capital. The most contentious conflicts which have occurred have been between the orthodox neoliberal elites backed by US and European powers and the progressive regimes. Several cases come to mind.

On April 12, 2002 and in December 2002-February 2003 the Venezuelan capitalist class backed by the US and Spain organized an abortive coup which was reversed and a petrol industry lockout that was defeated. An uprising in 2011 led by the police in Ecuador and an abortive coup in Bolivia were put down successfully, before they gained traction. A large-scale agro business protest in Argentina in 2008 which paralyzed the agro-export sector against an export tax ended with regime concessions.

In large part, these “class struggles from above” worked in favor of the progressive regimes because it allowed them to pose the issue as one between a popular democratic regime and a retrograde authoritarian oligarchy. As a result the progressive regimes were able to neutralize, at least temporarily, internal critics from the left. The defeat of “the Right” burnished the credentials of the progressive camp and raised their popularity.

While popular support was important in sustaining the progressive regimes against US and EU backed rightest destabilization campaigns, of equal or greater importance was the backing of the military, sectors of the business elite and extractive capitalists. The progressives by adopting “moderate policies” – including business subsidies and generous pay hikes to the military – were able to divide the elite, retain support of the military and isolate the right-wing opposition. The right-wing has remained electorally marginal and provide very limited leverage for US-EU interference and influence over the progressive agenda.

The degree of “progressiveness” within the progressive extractive capitalist camp varies substantially.

The Chavez government has advanced an anti-imperialist and socialist agenda involving the rejection of US coups, wars and blockade of independent states; it has supported the re-renationalization of oil, aluminum, and other raw material, mining, and energy sources. Its extensive agrarian reform benefiting 300,000 families is aimed at food self-sufficiency. Universal free public health and higher education and subsidized basic food prices via publicly owned supermarkets; and large-scale low-cost public housing for the poor along with literacy campaigns and the formation of thousands of neighborhood councils to adjudicate and resolve local issues have deepened and extended the socialization process

On a far lesser scale, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina have pursued independent foreign policies. Their partial and selective nationalizations are designed to increase revenues rather than as part of a long-term, large-scale strategy of transformation. They have not followed Chavez’s lead on agrarian reform and on greater enhancement of social spending on health, housing, and higher education. They offer remote, public lands of dubious quality as “land reform.” They have been advocates of incremental changes involving wage and social benefits commensurate with the rise in revenues from commodity exports and in line with the rate of inflation, Bolivia and Ecuador have dislodged land squatters and defended the major agro-business land holdings. The least ‘reformist’ regimes with the most dubious ‘progressive’ credentials are Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru (under Ollanta Humala) which have adopted a free-market agenda; they actively promote large inflows of unregulated foreign investments, degrade millions of acres of the rain forests (Brazil especially), promote agro-business and oppose agrarian reform in all of its forms, relying on the dispersion of peasants and landless to the cities, towns where they serve as a labor reserve for capital or join the low paying informal sector. These “moderate” progressive regimes have signed military accords with the US, and adopt a low profile in opposition to US imperial policies in the Middle East. Their “progressiveness” is found in their support of regional integration, their opposition to US hemispheric hegemonism (opposing the US coup in Honduras, blockade of Cuba and interference in Venezuela), and the diversification of overseas markets. Brazil leads the way in catering to Wall Street speculators and in government anti-poverty spending on minimum food baskets. Poverty reduction is matched by the spectacular growth of millionaires linked to the finance and agro-mineral export sector. The “moderate” progressives have the most egregious (and well-documented) record of ongoing environmental degradation. In Peru, Humala has given the green light to mining exploitation threatening the livelihood of thousands of peasants and local business in Cajamarca; Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, of the Workers Party, promoted the destruction of millions of acres of the Amazon rain forest and displacement of scores of Indian communities in a decade. In Uruguay, the Broad Front Presidents Tabaré Vasquez and Mujica promoted the highly polluting Botina cellulose factory contaminating the Parana River despite mass protests.

In summary, it is difficult to generalize about the performance of the progressive camp given the divergences in social and economic policies. But a “report card” of sorts can be drawn up.

All regimes have lowered poverty levels and increased dependence on agro-mineral exports and investments. All have signed and/or renegotiated contracts with extractive MNC’ few have diversified their economies. Those with a substantial industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Peru) have suffered a severe decline in the manufacturing sector because of appreciating currencies and loss of competitiveness resulting from high prices for commodity exports. Incremental wage agreements have led to low level social conflicts in the cities (except in Bolivia), but displacement of peasants and degradation have intensified conflicts in the interior between rural communities and the MNC leading to state repression (Peru).

The social impact of the progressive regimes has the widest variation, with Venezuela registering the most far-reaching structural changes and the rest lacking any vision or project for redistributing wealth, income, or land. Their common support for regional integration is matched by important divergences in accommodation to US military policy. Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the members of ALBA, reject military treaties, while Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru have signed military agreements with the Pentagon.

The overall economic performance is mixed. Brazil’s economy, especially its manufacturing sector, is stagnating with zero or negative growth in 2011-2012, Venezuela is recovering, but with over a 20% rate of inflation while the rest of the PC is experiencing steady growth, but increasing dependence on commodity exports to the Asian (China) market.

Alternatives to the status quo extractive economies vary enormously. In Venezuela, the regime has made diversification a high priority; the Brazilian and Argentine regimes are taking protectionist measures to promote industry with limited success especially as their policies are countermanded by the real expansion of acreage for soya production and exports. Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia talk of diversification but have avoided taking measures to shift to food production and family farming and have yet to take concrete measures to stimulate local industry via a publicly funded industrialization policy.

Let’s take his reply point by point to dispel every last wisp of the dense fog of mendacity and distortion that Anderson spews in his reply:

1. The mendacity begins in only the second sentence of Anderson’s reply, when he writes: “Is that what he [Kaufman] means by ‘politricks’ and ‘the dark side of politics’?” There’s only one problem here: I never used either quoted word or the quoted phrase anywhere in my article. Here we get a prompt foretaste of the dishonesty that runs like a bright thread throughout Anderson’s reply.

2. If Rocky Anderson wanted to effectively quash any impression that his campaign was claiming Nader’s endorsement, the staffer’s post with the word “endorse” could have been taken down. It never was.

3. Rocky Anderson’s campaign and his Justice Party are indeed both shadowy in origins and equivocal in political orientation. The party was not, and has never been, a grassroots organization that arose from on-the-ground activism around clear progressive issues; it has always been a consequence, organizationally and politically, of Rocky Anderson’s ambition to run for president.

4. I gave clear quotations to document Rocky Anderson’s aversion to any identification with the left, including his disparaging comments about the Green Party (“just a sliver of the left”) in explaining to Amy Goodman why he did not seek the Green nomination rather than starting his own vanity party.

5. Anderson trumpets his high-minded support for various social issues, such as “expanding rights for inmates, suits for police abuse, my presidency of the Board of the Utah ACLU, my work with Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, my progressive leadership as Mayor of Salt Lake City, and my founding of High Road for Human Rights.” It’s a time-honored ploy of pseudo-progressive Democrats to cite their noble declarations of support for civil liberties, abortion, and other socio-cultural issues while increasingly converging with Republicans on the 1-percent/neoliberal agenda of Chicago-school free-market economics. Notice that Anderson nowhere denies—or even honestly addresses—the nub of my analysis of his campaign’s failure to call for a repeal of WTO/NAFTA and of Taft-Hartley, two pieces of legislation that are most directly responsible for the depressed living standards of working class Americans: WTO/NAFTA through the hemorrhaging of high-quality manufacturing jobs abroad, and Taft-Hartley through a steady and alarming erosion in the power of the union movement and a consequent thwarting of its ability to press for higher wages and better benefits and working conditions. How revealing that on these specific economic and class issues, Anderson is curiously muted on his Web site and silent in his reply to me.

6. On Mitt Romney: Anderson claims that “Kaufman neglected to disclose any of that to his readers.” “That” here means that the Romney that Anderson warmly endorsed in 2002 (and who endorsed Anderson a year later) was some sort of apostle of reason and light who embraced all manner of progressive positions. And exactly what were these examples of Romney’s purportedly enlightened outlook? Anderson claims that he “supported gay and lesbian rights and a woman’s right to choose abortion.” But Romney has never supported marriage rights for gays. He has demagogued abortion this way and that, depending on which audience he was speaking to for which office he was seeking. When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994, he accepted the endorsement of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, a zealous anti-abortion group; when he was thinking of running for governor of Utah, he wrote a letter to a newspaper there stating that he was unequivocally against abortion, just as he does now. As Ted Kennedy wittily observed, “Mitt Romney isn’t pro-choice or anti-choice; he’s multiple-choice.”

More important is the fact that when Anderson endorsed him, Romney was pro-war, pro-gun, anti-labor, pro-WTO/NAFTA, opposed to public funding of elections, opposed to raising the minimum wage, opposed to more progressive taxation, opposed to cutting the military budget, opposed to cracking down on corporate crime and fraud and corporate welfare, in favor of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, opposed to regulating the derivatives that would later wreck the economy, and so on. In short, Anderson warmly endorsed a militant and loyal defender of the interests of the 1 percent against the 99 percent, as I accurately observed in my article. Again we see in bold relief Anderson’s indifference to the class and economic issues that distinguish the true progressive from the neoliberal demagogue; in the Anderson-Romney world of expensively coiffed Janus faces, a warm clasp of the hand of someone who temporarily favors abortion is just dandy, even if it means helping to advance the political career of an avowed adversary of the interests of working people and nearly all of the progressive agenda.

Finally, as for Anderson’s assertion that I “failed to disclose to [my] readers” Anderson’s frail rationalizations for supporting Romney in 2002, this is simply a blatant lie; I quoted in full the lame excuse he gave Amy Goodman.

7. On the carbon tax: Anderson reproaches me for failing to quote this part of his statement in support of Wall Street’s favorite non-solution to the climate crisis—cap and trade: “but support and defend the authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions if market mechanisms are not promptly put in place by Congress or prove insufficient.” This is completely irrelevant. We are talking about a carbon tax. The EPA doesn’t have the power to levy a tax—only Congress does. Can Anderson, the would-be president, really be this grossly ignorant of the Constitution? Moreover, the EPA is already charged with the regulation of environmental toxins, so Anderson is just spinning his wheels here. I’m not concealing anything—but Anderson is clearly still concealing his failure to advocate a carbon tax by underscoring his advocacy of the EPA’s doing . . . what it is already doing. How pathetic, how ignorant, and again . . . how dishonest.

But the ignorance doesn’t end there. Anderson, the man who would be president, evidently doesn’t even know that the EPA is only just now beginning (as in three weeks ago!) to address the issue of carbon emissions from power plants, and that its powers are very limited. In the words of Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator, Office of Air and Radiation:

There is currently no uniform national limit on the amount of carbon pollution new power plants can emit, and the standard we proposed last week is common-sense, achievable and in line with the direction the industry has been moving for a decade. As the [EPA] Administrator and I said repeatedly when we announced this proposal last week, this standard only applies to new sources – that is, power plants that will be constructed in the future. This standard would never apply to existing power plants. And we have no plans to address existing power plants.

And this feeble regulatory regime is what Anderson appends, as an afterthought, to his cap-and-trade folly in the midst of a planet emergency so severe that many leading climate scientists think it may already be too late to avert feedback-driven disaster.

Anderson, obviously no expert in such matters, again parrots the neoliberal party line when he writes, “cap and trade systems were successfully utilized to address both acid rain and the destruction of the ozone level.” This is one of the hoariest myths of the neoliberal cap and traders. Someone who is a world-renowned expert in this area, James E. Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, disposes of this myth in an op-ed piece on this subject in the New York Times:

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.

Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be ‘grandfathered,’ avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

See also Ralph Nader’s devastating critique of cap and trade in his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “We Need a Global Carbon Tax: The Cap-and-Trade Approach Won’t Stop Global Warming.”

Devoid of any compunctions about seeking a hedge-fund-financed shortcut to ballot status in all fifty states courtesy of Americans Elect (another key point that Anderson revealingly and dishonestly dodges in his reply), Anderson is also conscience-free about placing the fate of the planet earth in the hands of the Wall Street banksters whose arcane scams have brought the U.S. economy to its knees. The noted progressive economist Dean Baker explains why Goldman Sachs echoes Rocky Anderson’s enthusiasm for cap and trade:

The outstanding value of carbon permits will almost certainly run into the trillions of dollars once the system is fully up and running. The annual trading in these permits and various derivative instruments (e.g., options, futures, swaps of various types) is likely to also run into the trillions of dollars, perhaps tens of trillions. A market that trades $10 trillion a year would generate $25 billion a year in revenue, if fees and commissions average 0.25 percent. If Goldman can capture 30 percent of these trades by getting in on the ground floor, then it stands to generate more than $8 billion each year in revenue from carbon trading. This is enough to explain Goldman’s enthusiasm for cap and trade – it’s all about as clear as it can possibly be.

And whom does Anderson cite as his “experts” in support of this unworkable and reckless bankster fraud? Gary Hart? Van Jones? Gus Speth? Not one of them is a scientist—just the usual suspects: Democratic Party/Obama loyalists whose main job it is to find rationales for the Democrats’ ever-accelerating collapse into free-market rapacity. By Anderson’s chosen neoliberal authorities, ye shall know him.

8. Anderson fails to address my critique of his forceful advocacy of “a balanced budget except in times of war or national emergency”. (Note that, not coincidentally, Anderson routinely dodges my critiques of his flagrant neoliberal positions on economic and class issues). In a blog interview, Anderson was asked, “Why do you support the neoliberal economic concept of a balanced budget or surplus?” In his response, Anderson parrots the rightist Chicago School meme that “accruing debt that is left for future generations is a form of intergenerational tyranny, which is an irresponsible and unjust thing to do.” It is truly staggering to see a self-designated progressive thumping away at this fallacy, which Anderson and many mainstream Democrats have plucked unashamedly from the neoliberal-right-wing-free-market-fundamentalist playbook. As Joseph Stiglitz has written, “a premature ‘exit’ from deficit spending risks pushing the economy back into recession. This is one of the lessons we should have learned from America’s experience in the Great Depression; it is also one of the lessons to emerge from Japan’s experience in the late 1990s.”

As for the Anderson’s recycled right-wing myth of burdening future generations, the progressive economists Dean Baker and Dean Rosnick have observed:

It is easy to see that the national debt is not really a measure of intergenerational burden.  While the taxpayers collectively can be seen as owing the debt, taxpayers (or at least some of them) also own the debt. This is not a payment across generations; it is a payment within generations…

Whether or not the debt has made future generations poorer will depend on how it was incurred.  If we ran up debts so that we could finance schools and colleges, and make sure that our children and grandchildren were well educated, then we probably made them richer than if we didn’t run up debt but left them illiterate. Similarly, if we ran up the debt to construct a modern physical and information infrastructure, then we probably will have made future generations much wealthier than if we had handed them a country that was debt free, but had no Internet and no computers.

Anderson would know all this if he didn’t have his head stuck in the same Milton Friedman-inspired academic bibles that dictate the talking points of the bipartisan Washington corporate elite. Yet this man, who proudly flies in the same deficit-hawk flock as the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan, has the impudence to present himself as a “progressive” alternative.

9. On health care: Anderson just cannot bring himself to advocate, simply and without qualification, a publicly funded single-payer health care system that would once and for all put an end to the superfluous, dysfunctional, piratical private-insurance middlemen. Anderson evidently considers such programmatic clarity “doctrinaire” (his word), another tell-tale sign of his contempt for unambiguously progressive solutions to socioeconomic problems. Maintaining any role for private insurers is an invitation to more of the redundant billing chaos and inefficiencies that hobble our current system. Perhaps Anderson, in line with his other neoliberal tropisms, just can’t bring himself to forthrightly advocate putting a large sector of the U.S. economy in the public sector, no matter what the efficiencies achieved or the money and lives saved. Why not just come out in support of single payer and putting the private insurers out the health care racket? I mean, the guy supports the cap-and-trade Wall Street scam—so you figure it out.

10. On the issue of Michael McGee: I e-mailed a query to the main address of the Justice Party and the main address of the Rocky Anderson campaign, and I cc’d most of Anderson’s campaign staff, including Mick Johnson, his campaign manager; Nancy Karter, the campaign office manager; and Walter Mason, the campaign’s ballot access manager (since some of my questions were about ballot access—see documentation, below). So I most certainly did make a good-faith effort to reach all the responsible parties at the Anderson campaign. The only person who got back to me was Michael McGee, both in an e-mail and a follow-up one-hour phone interview in which he most certainly did identify himself as the leading strategist in Anderson’s campaign; he told me that he is Co-Chair of the Justice Party (as he is listed on the party’s Web site) and a member of the Steering Committee of the campaign. So McGee clearly has a major role in shaping campaign strategy; these are not minor titles or roles–this is clearly someone in the upper echelons of the Anderson campaign.

In our interview, McGee detailed—at great length—the swing-states-dropout-angle-for-a-cabinet-post strategy that he had also conveyed to Jill Stein and her campaign manager, Ben Manski, in conference calls last September and October. Both Stein and Manski corroborated McGee’s swing-state gambit 100-percent in my conversations with them. Manski, Jill Stein, and I all heard exactly the same story from McGee, who identified himself to all of us as authorized to speak on behalf of Anderson. Anderson maliciously implies that I made up this whole swing-state scenario, but since McGee served up the same line of patter to Manski and Stein, does Anderson wish to imply that they are liars, too? That they and I, who have had never spoken to one another until ten days ago, just happened to concoct the same lie about Michael McGee?

In my initial e-mail, I asked nearly the entire Anderson staff to respond to my queries, and only Michael McGee responded. Now Anderson is cynically disowning McGee because he spoke truthfully to me about the campaign’s strategic ploys when the others would not speak at all. (My e-mail to the Anderson campaign, complete with all the addressees, is reproduced below, along with McGee’s written acknowledgment that we spoke on the phone, along with McGee’s cc to Anderson campaign staff members about his conversation with me).

Truth is an orphan in this world, as Anderson’s verbal contortions above sadly illustrate. My article, by contrast, is entirely truthful—far too much so for Anderson’s taste, evidently. Now that I have exposed the unsightly neoliberal politics and self-aggrandizing maneuvering behind the smiling, fake-progressive mask of Anderson’s campaign, he scurries to conceal the truth with a desperate, diversionary flurry of evasion, distortion, and malice.

Here are the key questions for a would-be presidential standard-bearer of the independent left in 2012: Does the candidate advance a principled, unequivocally progressive agenda on the pivotal class, economic, and climate/environmental issues of our day? Does he/she seek to build a movement that is clearly independent of the ideology, funding, and interests of the 1-percent Wall Street banksters and hedge funders? On all these critical counts, it is clear that this Rocky is more pretender than contender.

1. My e-mail to the main officials in the Rocky Anderson campaign:

From: William Kaufman
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 8:08 PM
To: ‘gro.asuytrapecitsujnull@tcatnoc’
Cc: ‘moc.liamgnull@bewykcoretov’; ‘moc.liamgnull@ecitsuj.nosnhojkcim’; ‘moc.liamgnull@ecitsuj.nosamretlaw’; ‘moc.liamgnull@ecitsuj.retrakycnan’
Subject: Need Information for Article on Justice Party

Hi—
I am writing an article on the Justice Party and the Rocky Anderson candidacy that I plan to submit to the Web zine CounterPunch,[ed note: I ended up submitting the piece to Dissident Voice instead, of course] where I have published several articles in the past.
I need to get some basic information—I was hoping that someone could answer, via e-mail or a brief phone interview (my number is XXX-XXX-XXXX), the following basic questions (a phone interview would be preferable in case I have follow-up questions based on your answers):

1. Has the Justice Party held a nominating convention per FEC requirements? If not, have you scheduled one or announced the date for it?
2. In how many states has the Rocky Anderson presidential candidacy already obtained ballot status? In how many states do you realistically expect to achieve ballot status by election day?
3. How many functioning state branches of the Justice Party are there?
4. How many members do you estimate the party has, either in terms of registered voters or people who have volunteered to work for the party?
5. Does the party accept corporate financing, either through bundled contributions or PACs?
6. Who, besides Rocky Anderson, are the officers of the party, and what are their titles and duties?
I hope to have the article finished over the weekend, so I would be grateful to receive an e-mailed or telephoned response on Friday. If you call, please call after 2:00 p.m. eastern time. Or, if you would prefer that I call you, please e-mail me a phone number and suggested time frame.

Thanks,
Bill Kaufman

2. Written evidence that I talked to Michael McGee:

From: Michael McGEE [mailto:moc.liamgnull@1.eegcm.leahcim]
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 2:10 AM
To: ten.knilhtraenull@484namk
Cc: Michael McGee; Lenny Brody; Walter Mason; clbonham
Subject: Answers to “Need Information for Article on Justice Party”

Hello Bill,
Good talking to you. Here is some further information for your CounterPunch article on the Justice Party. You will also find an attached Word document with the contacts for members of the National Justice Party Steering Committee. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need any more information.

Yours in solidarity,
Michael McGee
Justice Party Co-chair

Sure, that might be the mantra for the New Faculty Majority, but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/contingent/temporary/migratory/irregular/at-will/auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

At one school where I recently taught, Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington, the battle for the minds and hearts of students is fought with almost 70 percent of the faculty hitched to the quasi-indentured servitude label, “adjunct.”

My fellow colleague, philosophy adjunct Keith Hoeller, lives a typical story of teaching 20 years at 10 colleges to cobble together a living. “The use of adjunct faculty is higher education’s way of outsourcing,” he recently said.

For this Puget Sound region, all 3.3 million of us, the April 20 teach-in – “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” – was somewhat historic, so says several faculty involved in the break-away group of adjunct instructors organizing this event. A few of the GRAFA members – Green River Adjunct Faculty Association – have been teaching at GRCC for more than two decades each.

The two speakers both had global and localized perspectives on adjuncts – Frank Cosco with Vancouver Community College Faculty Association and Jack Longmate, Olympic College English instructor who is at the center of a battle with both the college and faculty union on moonlighting and academic freedom and retaliation.¹

Both are the authors of “Program for Change, 2010-2030,” a manifesto festooned to the New Faculty Movement’s impetus to activate adjuncts around the North America, Mexico and other countries, to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, since the new majority is part-time and non-tenure track faculty:

The dysfunctional state of faculty employment in post-secondary education in 2010 is well documented and well known. Over the last few decades, corporatization has fragmented faculty. It has resulted in a caste-like structure with primarily two tiers. The majority of the faculty occupies the lower tier and is recognized as performing only a portion of the job, classroom instruction; these faculty tend to be compensated at a rate of pay in violation of the principle of ―equal pay for equal work, often resulting in a poverty-level income. They work in complete insecurity. They are left to draw upon the satisfaction of working with students as their chief inspiration to continue because of their dismal working conditions and the equally dismal prospects for improvement.

Cosco is a full-time VCC faculty member in ESOL and has worked with normalizing adjuncts since the 1980s. He’s also been a key official with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). This GRCC teach-in was made up of students, adjuncts and full-time faculty – and three faculty union folk, two TT and one PT.

We filmed it for You Tube distribution.

Union-led and Unionist-Thinking, and Proud of It.

It was clear early on in the teach-in that the Vancouver, BC, model is the pie in the sky for many US adjuncts who cannot imagine what VCC has gained through hard-fought union collective bargaining. Frank Cosco is pugnacious, diplomatic and a man with a mission – “The very point of a union and our duty as a faculty union is to fight for those who are the least able to speak, the most vulnerable. It’s about creating one community of faculty, so when one group is disregarded, the union leadership has to fight for their inclusion.”

So, “the weakest and most vulnerable,” non-tenured, have gained equal pay for equal work, and more:

• salary and workload equity, to include immediate pay scale; pay for vacation and holidays
• paid professional development days
• hiring equity and reappointment rights, to include one hiring process per career and right to seniority reappointment after six months
• evaluation transparency, to include strong grievance procedures
• conversion right from term faculty to regular faculty, to include automatic regularization of the person, not the position
• college health and pension benefits
• seniority rights, pro-rated
• maternity leave that doesn’t disadvantage faculty
• right to participate equally in union and professional matters
• and more.

The US national percentage of “adjuncts” teaching in all institutions of higher education, including private colleges, state universities, community/technical colleges, as well as for profits and on-line schools, is reaching the 8 out 10 mark. Twenty percent of faculty now are tenure track workers.

In Washington State, just counting the 34 community and technical colleges, 46 percent of all state-supported instruction is taught by adjuncts. I think of it this way: 8,059 PT to 3,598 FT (2010, SBCTC).

Castes, Untouchables/Two tiers, Two lives

It gets worse., according to Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Policy Institute in his piece, “The ‘Untouchables’ of Higher Education.”² :

American universities and colleges are riddled with a caste system that violates our societal sense of fairness, justice, and decency. Neither the general public, nor parents, nor the large majority of students are even aware of its existence. College administrators and tenured faculty, who are acutely aware of the system, have done little or nothing to remedy the problem. It is a festering sore that threatens not only the quality of higher education but the system’s ability to recruit and retain good teachers.

Here we are, now, with a caste system, viewed as untouchables, and, for many, we are considered disposable people. Right now, more than 540,000 adjuncts fill the rosters of part-time faculties, and another 240,000 are full-time, off tenure track who are quarterly or semester by semester hired as full time, or maybe with a yearly contract.

Full-loads, Freeway Flying, One-third the Pay

I’ve taught a full load at one institution, Spokane Falls Community College, with some other college duties funded through soft money (memos of understanding). My sum total for that couple of years? Less than 50 percent of what a full-timer would have been paid. I worked on campus-wide curriculum development, served on two committees, headed up the college’s sustainability efforts, and organized one year-long series of highly public events tied to climate change and helped organize a themed year event. Oh yeah, I advised the general population of students and served as the Earth Club faculty coordinator.

Why? I love students, I love working with new focuses in cross-disciplinary communications, and I love being fully engaged in political-public-private-non-profit connections to our community colleges. Part of that motivation, too, was to try and work just at one college campus while pulling down around $28,000. The other projects I worked on included a weekly hour public affairs community radio show where I interviewed such people at Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Naomi Wolf, Amy Goodman, authors, poets, social justice advocates and dozens of actors in the climate change and sustainability arena. Then there was a paid column in the weekly alternative newspaper. Finally, I ended up working with several City- and County-wide task forces looking at Spokane’s educational needs tied to the high dropout rate. Add to that a writer in the schools gig and my advisory role status with the large literary event, Get Lit!, part of Eastern Washington University’s week-long writing festival.

The reason for inserting this brief narrative for several of my total 10 years in Spokane is that my work was part of the larger frame of why adjuncts are more than just interchangeable, underclass workers that “help” the bottom line needs of colleges to be flexible when enrollments swell or contract: we’re professionals who in the current culture of education are whipping posts for such things as the falling achievement and performance gaps, as well as the threat against tenure.

Where I went and worked outside the college, everyone knew my college association.

Forget the fact that adjuncts publish, research, carry through with massive amounts of continuing education, present at conferences, and go onto completing other graduate degrees.

It’s the economy, stupid could be replaced with, It’s the fragmentation thing. In the eyes of by the privatizers who seem to be the soldiers of the vulture and parasitic capitalists who are emboldened by a divide and conquer program pitting TT faculty against PT faculty.

For now, the goals of adjuncts and graduate students tie into developing distinct and sometimes separate union issues since Full-time Tenure Track folk supervise us, determine how many classes we get, and where and when. It’s obvious the huge faculty unions have failed at defending this attack on higher education and failed to stop the evisceration of the collective bargaining movement. The administrations are swelling their ranks, and as a cost saver, ramping up cheap-rate and insecure jobs.

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work” as Ulrich Beck illustrates it in his book, The Brave New World of Work (Polity Press, 2000).

1. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2012, “Adjunct Challenges College’s Accreditation Over Alleged Failure to Stop Union Retaliation” by Peter Schmidt.
2. Huffington Post, 29 June, 2010.
3. See Activism through Art and 2255 Films.

The “purer” the form of capitalism the faster, the rise of fascism. There is a dark and bitter grace to this: Fascism is the deranged agency that sends the capitalist machine into systemic runaway, thus the system crashes and burns — and out of its ashes and debris…a more humane system can come into being.

Although the yearning for freedom is inborn, as is the case with the development of any skill or talent, one must open oneself to its promise by discipline and practice. Otherwise, attempts at exercising freedom — free will’s dance with resistant and changing circumstance — can be an ugly sight to behold.

Witness the following litany of the lost evinced by us, the denizens of late-stage capitalism: The dismal air haunted and minds distracted … cluttered by the ceaseless chatter of those dim ghosts of human discourse known as text messages and tweets; the parade of preening narcissists and prattling sub-cretins that is celebrity culture and Reality Television; the joyless bacchanal termed the nation’s epidemic of obesity.

Experiencing freedom involves risk, imagination, and discipline. In contrast, choosing between purchasing a bag of Cheetos or a bag of Doritos … amounts to not quite the same thing. Resisting the call to freedom leaves an individual empty, and bag after bag of salted snack food will not sate the hollow ache within when one chooses the benumbing safety of culturally proffered palliatives over living out the truth of one’s being.

A thousand text messages will never replace a single kiss…because a kiss conjures both the soul’s numinosity and brings earthly complications — the stuff of freedom.

When your heart aches, you are experiencing or being beckoned towards your destiny. Depending on the choices that you make, you can become waylaid at a fast food drive-thru or risk the road towards freedom that unfurls before you.

Hint: The excessive heft acquired by your hindquarters will begin to shrink as you begin a long distance trek in the direction of freedom.

What forces unloose titanic appetites, devoid of reason and restraint? Why is more than you can ever need never enough?

How is it that a trillion dollars can be spent on military weaponry, but the collective psyche of this nation continues to be gripped by nebulous fear?

Expressed in mythopoeic lexicon: The appetite of a Titan (e.g., the limit-devoid greed and empty appetite of late capitalism) will grow so random and ravenous that he will devour his own young, while his presence will cause the young to construct Icarusian wings…but an (infantilized by the internalization of consumerist impulsiveness) adult-child of the corporate state can never devour enough sky, thus put enough distance between himself and his own titanic need to escape earthly circumstance, until his wings of wax are undone by the steadfast sun, and he is returned to the inhuman eternity of the sea’s briny womb (e.g., languishing in the media hologram, avoiding the implications of personal destiny-denied and global-wide ecocide).

The appetite of the earth is insatiable. Life must live on death. To become fully human, one must make peace with this fact by an acceptance of limits, by drawing lines of demarcation between necessity and titanic want.

Storytellers, poets, novelists i.e, myth makers have told this ageless tale of woe and warning for millenia. To ignore the admonition above amounts to insertion of your name into the following list: Tantalus, Midas, Lady Macbeth, George Babbitt, Captain Ahab, Gatsby, Cthulhu, Fred C. Dobbs, Marquise de Merteuil, Patrick Bateman, Mr. Burns, Gollem, the denizens of both Goldman Sachs and your local mall’s food court. Ignore the warning and insert your name here: .

One needs one’s emptiness every bit as much as one has the need to be “fulfilled.” How so? Because room is required within so that new awareness can grow. Therefore, love your inner, empty places. It is the method that you live your way into the future.

From time to time, I have been asked, how does one cope with the ever increasing “complexity” of our age. Short answer: It would be ill-advised to become adapted to a madhouse.

Instead, attempt to view complexity as future compost. At this stage, a song of grief is as resonate as a song of ebullience…Rot ensures renewal; the future is compost and compost is the future. Thus: Rejoice in the reek. Mortification restores our humanity, turning us away from the tyranny of unchecked proliferation. It bestows us with the ability to love our limits.

In this, it is synonymous with grace.

In a nation defined by vast wealth disparity and the deprivation it causes others on the planet, by means of impoverished lives and ecological devastation, taking more than one’s share contributes to the vast harm done. The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism.

There is a need in both the besieged psyche of an individual and its societal analog — in our own case, in the collective psyche of a declining nation — to worship and fear phantoms and view flesh and blood as phantasmal. As a culture, for example, we elevate celebrity culture to cultic status while ignoring the suffering of the poor; the teabagger crowd is accepted as a legitimate political movement, not as corporate state Astroturf; that there exist people known as Islamo-Fascists; and the acceptance as fact by all too many the noxious corporate media fiction that the energies of the Occupy Wall Street movement have faded — but the outcomes of the overpriced theatrical artifice of U.S. election cycles represents the democratic expression of the political will of a free people.

Phantoms arrive in the psyche when one refuses life’s ongoing invitation to commune with flesh and blood beings; to engage the rigors of insightful thought; to know both the agony and the release of heart-opening engagement and falsity-cleaving insight.

Apropos: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” –Carl Jung

As we are surrounded by gibbering, imploring media phantoms, our hunger to regain a resonate relationship with the world at large grows…yet the corporate state proffers drive thru window cuisine. We give them our life blood — and, in return, we settle for an evening at Applebees. And the plundering class insist we are privileged to be offered this, that our plight could be worse; we could spend our hours languishing in one of their foreign sweatshops.

As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly.

“Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.” — James Hillman

To the mind of a child, his/her parent’s view of the world constitutes the very architecture of their psyche. The world carries the imprimatur of their parents’ face. A child’s character begins to develop when he/she begins to compare what they carry within, forged by paternal admonition and action, to their experiences outside the home. If the child remains in a passive position, then his/her personal destiny becomes arrested. This is the poisoned apple proffered to the dormant beauty within us all. Conversely, we must accept the small, hidden aspects of our character (our helpful dwarves) that dwell in a deep forests within, far from the cold castles of paternal expectation, to be able to awaken to hidden potential.

Life in an authoritarian state, which is paternalistic by nature, arrests the psyche’s drive to self-awareness; it puts one to sleep with infantilizing bribes — e.g., all the bright and shiny things of the consumer state — as it manipulates by means of coercive fear — e.g., the looming dragons of poverty and police state intimidation.

“In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions–hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…” –James Hillman

There exist few viable alternatives within the present political set-up to address the degradations inflicted by the corporate state and the machinery of duopoly in place to maintain the systems reach and power — and there will not arrive a mainstream prince to confront the vain usurpers and slay the institutional dragons who cling to power in the present era. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is true nevertheless. The sooner one faces this reality: the hopelessly corrupt nature of the present system — the closer we, collectively, move towards the creation of alternative arrangements when the current one collapses from its own corruption.

Poets of previous generations warned that one’s soul could be lost in blind pursuit of vaults of riches and limitless knowledge. It is difficult not to laugh in derision or weep in anguish for a people who sell their soul for access to the contents of a convenience store. Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.

In timeless stories, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the awakening kiss of a princely figure should not be misapprehended with gender-based overtones of exclusively male power and dominance. Instead, the symbolic prince should be read as — the possibility that unfolds as one’s true calling when one awakens to one’s circumstance. In our time, this timeless tale plays out as: The ongoing challenge we have been given to face and struggle against the life-devouring, institutional dragons of corporate state governance.

Of course, there will never arrive a tacked-on, Disneyesque “happily ever after” ending. There is no distant kingdom of the mind that exists beyond the reach of harm or corruption. If there were, new stories would cease to unfold. By this method, this world beckons us to live out our own unique tale.

Shotwell’s writing is humorous, acerbic and to the point. As part of a democratic movement in the UAW, he was one of many that fought hard to prevent the tidal wave of layoffs, plant closings and destruction of benefits the union leadership not only allowed but seemed to encourage. The missives published in this book are the textual equivalent to the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Mr. Block cartoons. For those who aren’t aware of Mr. Block, let me quote IWW agitator Walker C. Smith:

Mr. Block is legion. He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw… [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him… the personification of all that a worker should not be.

In other words, Mr. Block was a satirical character created to call attention to workers and union bosses who identified with the owners and management at the expense of their fellow workers.

Autoworkers Under the Gun makes it very clear how the auto industry’s exorbitant payments to its executives and management, combined with a penchant for bankruptcy, destroyed it. Calling globalization a “four bit word for sweatshop,” Shotwell points out how CEOs and their co-conspirators control the discussion about the economy by blaming the workers for wanting to earn a living and pension. As most readers know, the other part of this scenario involves those executives purposely downsizing the corporation by moving jobs offshore. His biting commentary reminds the reader how intentional this entire process is.

Unlike most mainstream reporting on the demise of the auto industry, Shotwell gives the reader the view from the shop floor. It’s not just the harassment from management he describes, he also tells stories about workers using their power to fight back. After one particular attack on management’s machinations to undermine the workers and their union that drew a strong reaction from the bosses, Shotwell arrived for his shift to find his machine taken apart in a show of solidarity. Without that machine, the line was shut down for the entire shift.

Questioning the value of strikes that are not industry wide because of the International’s cowardice or because of the law, Shotwell urges workers to consider alternatives like occupations and working to rule. The point of the former is to prevent management from closing factories. After all, they can’t close a building if people are inside it. Working to rule, meanwhile, has multiple effects. It slows down the speedups imposed by management to increase production while also preventing shop closures. In addition, working to rule can create overtime or, even better, the necessity to hire more people. The underlying point of both tactics is to emphasize that it is the workers who run the factory, not the CEOs and their minions.

It was more than a year ago that thousands of Wisconsin workers and supporters occupied the Capitol building in the city of Madison. The reason for the occupation was to try and prevent the anti-worker governor and legislature from passing legislation that would end collective bargaining for all state employees except firefighters and state police, end dues check-off from paychecks, and force unions to re-certify every year. Under the guise of solving a budget crisis (that was created by giving mammoth tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in Wisconsin), this bill was forced through the legislature despite the protests. Nonetheless, the protests were a welcome reaction to the never-ending attacks on working people in the United States.

Naturally, a few books have been published about this event, now known as the Wisconsin Uprising. Of those texts that wrote favorably, most have done a fairly decent job of describing the flow of the protests, the workers culture that was celebrated, and the intense feeling of solidarity felt by the participants. Not all have done as good of a job analyzing why the protests failed and what they mean for the future of workers’ movements in the United States.

There is one entry; however, that does broach both of these subjects with some depth. Titled Wisconsin Uprising, this book, edited by labor writer Michael Yates, provides a genuinely left analysis. The collection of essays is divided into two main sections, one discussing the protests, their background and their organization. The other discusses the future of workplace organizing in the wake of the legislation’s success and the concomitant attacks on working people around the world.

The first section takes its subject and looks at the international aspects of the protest (austerity protests in Greece, Britain, etc.), its roots in capitalist crisis, and the lack of resistance experience among protesters. It was this latter element that gave the protesters false hope regarding the role police play, as well as the role unions play. Indeed, much like the points made in Shotwell’s text, union leadership often concedes benefits, conditions and wages just to keep union dues structure intact and their paychecks coming in. This strategy eventually backfires because it weakens the unions in the eyes of the workers. Seeing this, corporations and governments attack unions, hoping to further weaken their standing in the eyes of members. Once the union has been defanged, as occurred in Wisconsin after the aforementioned legislation was rammed through in the middle of the night, the rank and file often stops paying dues out of fear or after drawing the conclusion that the union has no power.

The solution to this is simple. Like Shotwell emphasizes in his book, the best response to the attacks on workers and their unions is simple: more actions, more solidarity and less complacency. The most positive conclusion to be drawn from the Wisconsin uprising is that there is an understanding in the United States that workers not only are being screwed, but that they will fight back. The narrative here echoes the hope found in other books about the uprising in Wisconsin and the occupy movement that followed. However, it tempers that hope with an understanding of what labor is up against in this latest battle with capital. It is an understanding that comes from the years of experience between the collection of contributors and their leftist comprehension of how monopoly capitalism works.

Shotwell explains why Wisconsin happened in a piece discussing concessions when he writes:

The nation that kicked off the struggle for the eight hour day is logging more hours than any modern .industrialized nation on earth. Every household needs two wage slaves and every wage slave needs a vehicle to keep them on the treadmill. The turmoil is designed to foil collective action. The degradation of workers is not natural, accidental or unavoidable. It is a plan. Put the jigsaw pieces together and the picture is clear as glass and sharp as pain.

The complementary reason to Shotwell’s concise explanation of neoliberal capital’s plan for the world is that workers ignored the writing on the wall as long as it happened to someone else, while those that were unionized saw themselves as clients of the union when they needed to be fighters in solidarity with those that were the “someone else.” Check out these books for their analysis, their insight and their rabble rousing. Then go do some rabble-rousing of your own.

The profit impulse fueling this drive is understandable.  All it takes is a cursory look at the economic landscape to see why these speculators are drooling at the prospect of privatizing education.  Millions of students pulling up stakes, bailing out of the public school system, and enrolling in private or charter schools?  Are you kidding?  Just think of the money that would generate.

Mind you, these “education reformers” are the same people who want to privatize the world—the same people who want to add more toll roads, who want hikers to pay trail fees, who want city parks and public beaches to charge admission.  Indeed, they’re members of the same tribe who convinced a thirsty nation to voluntarily pay for drinking water that it was heretofore getting for free.

Let’s revisit for a moment that bottled water craze—that stunning marketing bonanza that made beverage companies wealthy and added a billion non-biodegradable plastic bottles to our landfills and oceans.  For the record, since passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), municipal water, unlike bottled, has been stringently regulated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), which is why bottled water contains more impurities and bacteria.  It’s true.  City water is safer, cheaper and better for the environment.

Of course, there are people who categorically refuse to believe even one word the government (municipal, state or federal) tells them.  They don’t believe the census numbers, they don’t believe the figures in the federal budget, and they regard EPA statistics as little more than state-sponsored propaganda.  Fine.  You’ll never get these pathological skeptics to change their minds, so save your breath.  Let them, Grover Norquist, and Orly Taitz do whatever it is they do.

And then you have your beverage connoisseurs who (even though blind taste-tests tend to dispute this) insist that they can not only tell the difference between bottled and tap water, but can differentiate between varying brands of bottled water (Is it Evian or Dasani?).  Taste-test evidence aside, I’m not suggesting that these epicureans don’t have the right to make such claims.  All I’m saying is that they have abused the privilege.

Offer a glass of tap water to a beverage connoisseur (who, before the bottled water craze swept the nation, had happily guzzled city water his entire life), and he’ll flinch, he’ll recoil in horror, he’ll practically get the dry heaves, as if you’d suggested he drink from your toilet. I’ve joked with these people that if I ever introduced a brand of bottled water, I would name it “Placebo.”

Back to education.  The thing about private schools is that they’re very much like bottled water.  For one thing, you’re being asked to pay for something you can get free, and for another, they are largely unregulated.  Take California schools, for example.  In order to teach in a California public school (elementary, intermediate or high school), you must have both a college degree and a teaching credential.  The private schools require neither.

Not only can you teach in a private without a credential or degree, but private teachers earn significantly less than their public counterparts.  Less education, less certification, and less salary raises the obvious question:  Which institution—private or public—is going to attract the better instructor?  Put another way, would we ever choose a medical doctor with these startling deficiencies?  Yet, free enterprise hounds continue to extol the virtues of privatization, pretending it’s the cure for what ails us.

Another component to this anti-public education campaign is the Republican Party’s on-going attempt to subvert organized labor by attributing the flaws in our public school system to the teachers’ union.  In 2008, labor is reported to have donated $400 million to the Democratic Party, which has been a rallying cry for Republicans ever since.  Their stated goal is to neutralize the Democrats by crippling organized labor.

The irony here is that labor is furious at the Democrats for having more or less abandoned them.  America’s labor unions dump $400 million into the Democrats’ war chest, and what did they get in return?  A pat on the head and a condescending lecture on the virtues of patience from Rahm Emanuel.  Talk about a placebo.

Greece is Ground Zero of the austerity onslaught, a massive, global re-engineering of capitalist societies designed to roll back workers’ gains of the past century into a neo-feudal state of debt peonage. In Greece, public sector wages have been cut by 20 to 30 per cent, while tens of thousands of civil servants have been put on partial pay. Pensions have been cut by 20 to 40 per cent. Health and education spending have been slashed as well.

Last week, a 77-year-old retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, in despair over what international bankers have done to his country, shot himself in the head in front the Greek parliament. Many Greeks believe his death was not a suicide but a murder by capitalism. His death prompted mass mourning and protest.

Austerity is not only killing the future, it is also killing the past. A new law passed as part of the austerity measures requires the Greek Ministry of Culture to cut 30 to 50 per cent of its personnel.

Today 66 administrative departments of antiquities throughout the country handle the workload and law enforcement pertaining to Greece’s cultural heritage, including permits for use of land where archaeological treasures are thought to be buried, the organisation and running of archaeological sites and museums, excavations and archaeological surveys, and archaeological scientific research.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism is comprised of 7000 employees, including 950 archaeologists, civil servants, and 2000 guards and night-guards. Moreover, each year 3500 extra employees are hired on short term contracts. In November 2011, 10 percent of the total workforce of the Ministry of Culture that represented the most experienced employees (with more than 33 years of experience) was forced to leave the service and retire, as part of plans to reduce the total number of public sector employees in Greece.

In recent months, there have been burglaries at National and Municipal Galleries, and an armed robbery at the Museum of Olympia, the site of the first Olympic Games.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including “a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases.”

In Italy, a similar fate is befalling ancient artifacts because of austerity cuts. According to an April 9 report,

Fragments of the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre — now at the centre of a busy road junction and blackened with pollution — have begun falling down and the restoration project’s start date of March is looking increasingly unlikely.

Meanwhile, at the archaeological site of Pompeii near Naples, which has also been hit by a series of alarming collapses in recent months, the long-mooted prospect of bringing in private investors is still a distant prospect.

Italy, like Greece, is now turning to privitization schemes to keep its cultural heritage sites standing. Greece has offered the Acropolis to “advertising firms, movie companies and other ventures.” And even though Italy, the fourth biggest tourism destination in the world, devotes only 0.21 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product to culture, austerity measures have seen cuts of 17 million euros to the La Scala opera house and Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

The latest victim of capitalist austerity, the ancient past in Italy and Greece, echoes the destruction of ancient cultural sites and artifacts in Afghanistan and Iraq following US-led invasions.

Following the entry of US forces into Baghdad in April 2003, a wave of looting broke out that targeted the country’s cultural institutions, with the National Museum of Iraq, which holds one of the world’s most important collections of Mesopotamian antiquities, being looted, the National Library and Archives burned and other institutions up and down the country, including museums, archaeological sites, schools and universities looted or destroyed.

In an interview that appeared in this newspaper at the time, Mounir Bouchenaki, then assistant director-general for culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, in Paris, spoke of his shock at crunching through the 20cm of ash covering the floors of the burned-out Iraqi National Library on a fact-finding mission to Baghdad.

An estimated 400,000 to 600,000 artifacts were looted from Iraqi archeological sites between 2003 and 2005, and at least 25 per cent of the Iraqi National Library’s holdings were destroyed in the fires of April 2003.

Some 60 percent of the country’s Ottoman and Hashemite archives were destroyed. While some 600-700 Islamic manuscripts were apparently destroyed in the fires that destroyed the library of the Ministry of Awqaf on 13-14 April 2003, a further 5,250 had been moved off site, though their whereabouts is unknown. The Ministry’s collection of 45,000 printed books, including rare Ottoman Turkish works, was destroyed.

The imperialist wars for oil and other resources, as well as strategic military positioning in the region, wiped out artifacts and sites of cultures that were over 5,000 years old, in the so-called “cradle of civilization.” Now the ancient cultures of Italy and Greece are facing the same capitalist pillaging.

The Italian Autonomist Franco Berardi once said, “The future now seems imaginable only as the intersection of catastrophic tendencies. Paradoxically, only from the interference between the various planes of catastrophe does it seem possible to imagine a salvation.” When the catastrophic history of the austerity agenda is finally written, one wonders what other histories will remain?

This support is understandable given his current positions on financial assistance and debt relief, and his occasional anti-neoliberal rhetoric. There is also a sense that he was the ‘best of a bad crowd’ and that if he had succeeded in his bid this would have broken the undemocratic top-down practice of Washington appointed leaders to date.

His supporters, however, seemed to forget his long history of promoting neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ across the developing world. Sachs’ recommendations in the past included promoting the reform agenda regularly imposed by the IMF since the 1980s, such as the freezing of wages, the removal of state subsidies and price controls on oil and food, the downsizing and privatisation of state companies, drastic cuts in government social spending and the dismantling of tariff barriers to trade. The only divergence in Sachs’ recommendations from his more neoliberal Harvard colleagues during his government advisory years was his advocacy of debt relief and increased economic aid alongside neoliberal structural reforms. But the result of the neoliberal policies Sachs recommended around the world created what Naomi Klein described as a “gaping wound” for which increased aid served as little more than a “band aid”.

Also, unlike many of his neoliberal colleagues, and apparently as a matter of principle, Sachs refused to advise unelected governments. But he had no problem advising and supporting policies implemented by governments for which they had absolutely no electoral mandate. Thus in the 1980s and 1990s he either personally recommended or praised from afar policies implemented by the so called ‘bait and switch’ leaders of a number of Latin American governments.

What became known as the ‘bait and switch’ phenomenon was the strategy whereby leaders (usually with a track record of left-wing polices) ran for government on an anti-neoliberal platform in order to ‘bait’ the electorate but once in government ‘switched’ to enact deep cutting neoliberal reforms, for example in Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and Brazil. The degradation of democratic legitimacy in Latin America as a result of the ‘bait and switch’ strategy has been far-reaching, resulting in some cases in the collapse of the party political system, the rise of political populism and a steep decline in electoral participation. Yet Sachs was still being praised years later by the New York Times as an “evangelist for democratic capitalism”.

Bolivia

The role Jeffrey Sachs played in curbing hyperinflation in Bolivia is regarded as one of his greatest achievements. This was during his period as an official economic advisor to the first ‘bait and switch’ leader, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, in 1985-6. Paz had been re-elected because of the legacy of his first term as President, when he had started to redistribute land to Bolivia’s indigenous peasants and nationalised the tin mines. But once returned to power he proceeded to enact the most radical neoliberal restructuring programme ever attempted in a democracy.

Hyperinflation was successfully tackled but the social costs of the reform period were very high. Sachs’ advised removal of government subsidies sparked a crisis in Bolivia’s small business sector. Nationalised companies were downsized and thousands of public sector jobs cut. The cumulative result was a drastic increase in unemployment. Just two years after the reforms were initiated the informal sector had mushroomed to embrace 70% of the entire urban workforce . For those still in employment, wages remained at third world levels while the prices of food and basic amenities soured thanks to Sachs’ advised removal of price controls. Labour flexibilisation eroded long fought for workers rights as well as weakening Bolivia’s once strong trade unions.

Naturally, the poorest elements of society were hit hardest, and it is estimated that the unemployment crisis forced one in ten workers into some involvement in the cocaine industry. In their book, Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes, Catherine Conaghan and James Malloy claim that this boost to the cocaine industry helped stabilise the Bolivian economy: “in addition to generating income, the injection of ‘coca-dollars’ into the banking system is believed to have helped stabilize the currency”. This is an issue on which proponents of Sachs’ shock therapy maintain a conspicuous silence.

A leaked US diplomatic cable revealed that even the US believed that neoliberal reforms in Bolivia had “clearly failed to meet public expectations for increased incomes and jobs”. The cable referred to the rise in inequality, particularly between those of European and indigenous decent,stating that “race-based social and economic differences have exacerbated the sense of racial separation, and amount, in the view of some critics, to a kind of de facto economic apartheid”.

The neoliberal reform period in Latin America was characterised by a great increase in inequality and poverty, a sharp decline in real wages, labour rights and job security and a rise in living costs, the degradation of democratic legitimacy and the exclusion of large groups of society from basic health care and education services. Even in countries that achieved economic growth and decreased inflation over this period, such as Chile and Argentina, the social costs were immense due to the negative effects of economic reform falling disproportionately on the poor. Yet Sachs went on in the 1990s to advise precisely the same policy prescriptions (accompanied by the ‘band aid’ of Western aid packages) to transitioning post-Soviet states, prioritising monetary stability over basic standards of living.

Russia

The most spectacular failure of Sachs’ advisory missions in the former Soviet republics was the case of Russia itself, where his neoliberal ideology led him simply to dismiss the advice of numerous international economists who advocated supporting a gradual transition to capitalism with an emphasis on democratic consensus building. The impatient approach supported by Sachs’ ultimately led to the collapse of the Russian economy, the transfer of Russia’s vast state owned recourses into the hands of a corrupt oligarchy, and the plummeting of real wages, life expectancy, GDP and industrial output. Even the US Government Accountability Office found itself forced to investigate if the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) had acted in breach of US law by channeling hundreds of millions of USAID money to corrupt privatizers, and to what extent Harvard advisors had personally profited from the process. The conclusions of the report led to the firing of Jonathan Hay (HIID’s General Director in Moscow) and Andrei Schleifer (Director of HIID’s Russia Project). This followed the withdrawal of millions in USAID funding amid allegations that the HIID had “abused the trust of the United States Government by using personal relationships…for private gain”.

Jeffrey Sachs, reformed man?

Sachs has since moved on from neoliberal reform to become an advocate of aid and debt relief. He even appeared to a cheering crowd (and a small number of outraged Latin American activists) at the Occupy Wall Street protest, decrying the greed of bankers and handing out free copies of his book. Much to the dismay of the Occupy Nigeria Movement, however, Sachs has openly praised the Nigerian neoliberal economic reform agenda which is being led by the IMF and Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, himself fresh from a top post at the World Bank. “If the president and his team carry through on their plans for bold, honest, equitable and transparent reforms, they are well placed to usher in a new day for Nigeria”, he wrote. His praise extended to President Goodluck Jonathon’s unexpected removal of oil subsidies in January, a decision that sparked mass strikes and demonstrations as the immediate doubling of fuel costs inevitably hit the poorest hardest.

Most worrying, however, is his total failure to acknowledge any of his past interventions as mistaken. In fact, he continues to boast about the purely monetary successes of these interventions, rarely referring to their social consequences which he is now so quick to identify in the actions of others. Sachs’ simplistic ideological conviction was that the same policy formula would work in virtually any situation, regardless of acute political, historical and socially diverse environments.

This is the same simplistic and destructive approach to development economics that has led to a global counter-movement demanding reform of world financial institutions. To assume, therefore, that Sachs would have represented some radically different future for the World Bank is misguided. At best, his history and current views on development economics demonstrate that he remains firmly within the post-Washington consensus, advocating what has been coined ‘neo-liberalism with a human face’; the same old unequal system with a bit more financial assistance and a bit less debt to lessen the effects of the wrecking ball.

Lessons for the Future

As Broad and Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies argue, the progressives of the world should have backed the best progressive candidate for the job of heading the World Bank rather than promoting Jeffrey Sachs’ bid, on the simplistic basis that he represents the lesser of two evils. They highlight not only the consequences of Sachs’ history of neoliberal shock therapy but also his present day “top-down and formulaic” approach to development.

A more suitable candidate would have garnered a far greater support base in the global South and the result would have been a more global push to reform the current system of Washington appointed World Bank leaders. Suggested candidates have included former President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva for his efforts to unite the global South to push for World Bank, IMF and WTO policies that reflect the needs of both developed and developing countries, former head of the United Nations Development Programme, Gus Speth, and  Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen. Instead, the progressive Western press and a handful of countries backed the bid of a man who the majority of the developing world still see as a leading architect of the doctrines of economic reform that caused such serious hardship among many of the poorest societies on earth. A great opportunity to open a real global debate on democratic reform of the financial institutions has been lost but perhaps lessons have been learned for the future.

When the Egyptian people began to gather in Tahrir Square in January 2011, the embers of the immolation that consumed Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had already sparked the prairie fire that overthrew the dictatorial ruler Ben Ali. The protest in Tahrir Square was the first manifestation of that fire in Egypt but certainly not the last. As everyone must know by now, the fires of protest in Egypt tossed out their dictator less than two months after Mr. Ben Ali was deposed. The feat of that overthrow was not only momentous within the borders of Egypt itself; its repercussions were felt in the halls of Arabia, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome and on Wall Street, there was plenty of catching up to do. Neither the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency or the black ops mangers of the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the end of the Mubarak regime. Indeed, it wasn’t until the bitter end that the political powers in the aforementioned capitals began to side with (and subvert) the popular uprising in the streets of Egypt.

After Mubarak’s fall, the revolutionary fire spread like flames whipped by warm Santa Ana winds. Bahrain to Libya. Yemen to Syria. London and New York. Athens and Oakland. The insurrectionary wave was in motion and nowhere was it more powerful than in the Arab world. Also, nowhere was it met with more determined (and murderous) resistance from the powers that be, internally and externally. Underlying the insurrectionary tide were the economic facts of neoliberalism’s struggle to maintain its global dominance. When it became apparent that this goal could not always be accomplished by continuing to support the old regimes, the capitols of capitalism inserted their agents into the opposition and did their best to manipulate the rebellion into serving the agencies of those capitols. The IMF, World Bank and the rest of the usual suspects saw their moments in each instance and made their moves. As I write, the entire insurrectionary wave is at a stalemate between the forces of popular social justice and just another new face for western imperialism.

Naturally, very little has been written about this aspect of the revolutionary upsurge of 2011-2012 in the organs of neoliberalism. Instead, the fact of IMF arrangements with the post-Mubarak Egypt and the new Tunisia are interspersed with superficial analyses of the rebellions that would have the reader believe that it was social media that provoked them. Even more revealing of the mainstream media’s allegiance to the imperial regime in the insurrection is its lack of coverage of the continuing popular resistance in the Pentagon’s shipyard Bahrain. Instead, we are presented with an ongoing litany of unconfirmed atrocities committed by the Syrian military and a portrayal of the resistance there as essentially untainted by its affiliation with outside governments and militaries.

Fortunately, we have Vijay Prashad. His latest book, titled Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, attacks the western interpretation of the transitions in Egypt and Libya and explores the actual events from a perspective that explains the players in terms of their allegiances, holdings and politics. In Prashad’s work, the differences between the fighters on the ground and the suits on television are not only acknowledged, they are examined in terms of their meaning to the future. In discussing Egypt, Prashad describes the conflagration of Washington’s imperial needs, Tel Aviv’s paranoiac perception of its security, and the Mubarak clique’s desire to maintain power. He gives lie to the West’s claim that it was interested in democracy (a relatively simple task to be sure), explaining that in the western mindset democracy doesn’t mean democracy, it means a guarantee that the interests and holdings of capital will not be upset. The common term one hears, states Prashad, is stability.

Most of this book is about the battle for Libya. Prashad’s text provides the most detailed description of the events both on the ground and in the office suites. He exposes the humanitarian intervention by NATO for what it was. That is, a means for the western powers to regain unfettered access to Libyan oil and rid themselves of an at best erratic client—Muammar Gaddafi. Unlike many on the Left, Prashad does not take sides for or against the rebellion. Instead, he explains the uprising as a popular and positive thing that was manipulated by the forces of the G7 and NATO. Simultaneously, he discusses Gaddafi’s reign as one that began with many positive changes yet ultimately was a victim of its own excess and greed. If there are any good guys in his narrative, it would be the masses that risked their lives to overthrow the autocracy that had Gaddafi at its helm. Their opposite would be the men on both sides of the battle whose only real interest was in keeping their bank accounts plush while serving their masters in the stock exchanges of the neoliberal world.

Interesting, and as yet not very closely examined, is the role of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Jordan and Morocco. Prashad makes note of the fact that the western capitals have said very little about the harsh repression visited on the Bahraini uprising or the Saudi intervention there. He also explores the military role played by Qatar in Libya, its current role in Syria, and the inclusion of some GCC states in a NATO adjunct. Perhaps, writes Prashad, this adjunct of NATO will be able to stand in for NATO in future operations in the Arab world, thereby creating another shadow in the workings of modern imperialism.

Despite the (probably) millions of words written about the Libyan uprising and the NATO intervention, nothing written in English has come near the truth. After reading Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, it seems that when all is said and done, Prashad’s work will come the closest.

Superintendent Deasy and the like-minded neoliberal BOE members — Monica Garcia, Tamar Galatsan, Dr. Richard Vladovic, and Nury Martinez — didn’t expect much resistance to their cuts, and had planned to vote on their education massacre on Valentines’s Day. Fortunately political pressure emanating from a broad and dynamic movement spearheaded by Adult Education students, allowed BOE member Steve Zimmer to move not only to delay the vote, but to instruct the Superintendent to provide a budget with different options. The BOE, some of them quite reluctantly, voted yes on Zimmer’s motion, temporarily saving not only adult education, but the other programs slated for elimination.

Within days of learning that the District intended to cut the entire program, students and teachers began organizing a coordinated response that was unprecedented in its scale and scope. Since the DACE program serves some 347,000 students, there was a sizable pool of individuals willing to get involved and save their schools. One of the first actions was a citywide petition drive. Students, activists, and teachers worked frantically to collect signatures supporting DACE. By Valentines’s Day Adult Education was able to provide the BOE with petitions containing 220,000 signatures of support. Reaching out to the business community, as a sector which benefits greatly from an educated workforce, activists were able to get large numbers of business to display signs stating their support. These were photographed and sent as evidence of broader community support.

Websites were set up for both the student organization — United Adult Students (UAS), but also a general website for the campaign. Activists set up a phone system that allowed callers to dial in and just by entering a code for their school, would connect them to the appropriate BOE member to make their feelings known. As the campaign progressed, phone calls started being routed to other public officials. In addition, letter writing campaigns were launched. In many cases local politicians were asked to write the BOE expressing their support for DACE.

Activities weren’t limited to lobbying style, however. Large rallys and pickets held at individual schoolsites brought excellent media coverage, particularly in the Korean and Spanish media, and more public exposure in general. Since large numbers of Korean and Spanish speakers are enrolled in DACE English Language Learner programs, the media coverage mobilized large numbers of community members who otherwise might not have known that Garcia and Deasy had Adult Education on the chopping block. The individual rallys culminated in a large 3,500 person protest at LAUSD headquarters on the Thursday before the BOE vote.

Adult Education supporters again showed up on Valentines’s Day to join supporters of the other threatened programs, closing down Beaudry Avenue. While thousands thronged the streets with banners and signs condemning the cuts, the LAUSD Board Room was packed with DACE supporters and speakers. All of the outreach to local politicians paid off. Among the speakers supporting Adult Education were Los Angeles City Council Members, representatives from other local politicians, and the Mayor of the City of Huntington Park. Other speakers included graduates of DACE, currently enrolled students, and educators. One of the most moving speeches was by social justice educator José Lara, who finished his presentation with a scathing indictment of the cuts by saying “ladies and gentlemen, this is an educational injustice.”

The campaign has also received national attention, with the Washington D.C. based National Coalition for Literacy publishing a series of articles from students, educators, and activists on the ground, each highlighting various aspects of the struggle. The series, entitled, Cut the Excuses, not education, is an excellent resource both in terms of the documenting the struggle, but also providing ideas for other struggles.

Despite the massive outpouring of community support and widespread political support, the BOE Members supporting the neoliberal agenda of the Coalition for School Reform — a right-wing organization funded by the likes of Philip Anschutz, Eli Broad, Jerry Perenchio, and others — are intractable, as evidenced by Tamar Galatsan’s March 10, 2012 Op-Ed in the Daily News, where she insisted that there’s no money and the cuts have to be made. This simply isn’t true, as there are literally hundreds of millions of dollars that could be cut in other areas:

… More sickening is that LAUSD actually has money as evidenced by massive spending on useless assessments and consultants, highly discredited value added methodologies, and nine figure real estate giveaways to lucrative charter corporations …

On March 13, 2013, the Superintendent presented a budget that still zeroed out many programs including DACE, but explained that the District would revise the budget based on two conditions: first that the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) take yet another pay cut (most likely in the form of furlough days), and second, that the state somehow is able to bolster the District’s budget. The BOE voted six to one in favor of the demoralizing budget. While many see this as a hardball negotiating tactic against the union, the effect on student morale has been severe.

Fortunately, neither the students, nor the educators that serve them are considering giving up the fight. Preparations for future actions are underway, and the continual outreach to organizations like Neighborhood Councils hasn’t stopped. There’s a great deal of work to do, but the stakes are too high for the community to give up.

However, the spark was lit. The eruption of popular protest against the neoliberal corporate agenda that most of the world had already experienced by the winter of 2011 had finally reached the nation most responsible for that agenda — the United States. The rest of the year would see the expansion of that protest across the United States grow in dimension and breadth. From further State Capitol occupations to the occupations of city parks, the masterminds and profiteers of the neoliberal economy were put on notice. Meanwhile, protest from like minded citizens of the rest of the world also continued to spread. Politicians scrambled as they figured out how to respond to what was clearly a left-oriented popular movement against those who had bought and sold them long ago.

Naturally, there have been millions of words written and published about this wave of people power. A very recent collection of some of those words edited by Wisconsinites Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, is titled It Started In Wisconsin. Essentially a collection of essays written by various participants and organizers of the Wisconsin protests, It Started In Wisconsin provides a reasonable and objective look at the movement. By discussing its structures and organizational strategies, the politics of the movement are also examined. Like the Wisconsin movement itself, the parameters of the discussion tend to remain limited to the parameters of the liberal-progressive spectrum.

The book begins with the first essayist attempting to place the protests firmly in the tradition of the great Progressive Robert LaFollette. However, the very fact that the movement ended up being confined to the traditional Democrat-Republican contest made even the more left elements of the Progressive philosophy irrelevant in the final outcome. It Started In Wisconsin tends to examine the uprising and its politics from a generally anti-corporate perspective but, like the movement itself, never truly challenges capitalism at its roots as an essentially unequal system that by its nature requires growing levels of inequality.

There is one essay that stands out from the rest of those that analyze the movement in that it does look beyond the façade of neoliberalism. That essay, titled “The Role of Corporations” by Roger Bybee, is the most radical in the book. Radical, that is, in the fundamental definition of the word: “of or going to the root or origin.” The essay is a clear and straightforward description of how neoliberal capitalism works, who it benefits and, to put it bluntly, who it screws. No other analytical piece between these covers quite approaches the clarity and depth of analysis like Bybee’s.

Yet, this book is not really about analysis. It is a collection of stories from those that participated in one of the most inspiring movements to erupt in the US heartland in decades. Those stories provide the observer from afar with a fairly universal and nuanced look at the daily lives of those involved in organizing, occupying, reporting and otherwise participating in those weeks of popular democracy. Interspersed between the tales of the workers, students, farmers and other protesters are a number of photographs and comics. The inclusion of these graphics truly enhances the overall effect.

One of the last two essays in It Started In Wisconsin discusses the position of the Wisconsin uprising in the global insurrections of the past eighteen months. The authors of this short essay, Ashok Kumar and Simon Hardy, briefly discuss the possibilities and take a quick look at the lessons they see to be learned. In addition, and most importantly, they broach the subject of the differences between the radical grassroots and the more conservative entrenched union and political leadership. It is here, they hint, that the real direction of this global movement will be determined. In Wisconsin that outcome has already taken one turn with the shifting of the uprising’s momentum into the recall efforts against Governor Scott Walker. The outcome of this turn to electoral politics is still being hotly debated by many of the uprising’s organizers, with some of them refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate opposing Walker because they see him as just more of the same.

Moving from the local to the global, let us consider another recently published text that takes a look at the international manifestations of this movement. This book, titled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is authored by journalist Paul Mason. Like the Buhle’s effort, Mason’s book describes the movements against neoliberal intolerance and authoritarianism that have become part of the collective imagination this past year. Likewise, Mason’s text examines the politics of the movement from what can only be termed a new left viewpoint. What this means is that he places the emphasis on the cry for freedom implicit in these protests while under-emphasizing the economic nature of the oppression the protesters are rebelling against.

Given the broader scope of Mason’s text, there is also a broader discussion. Several different manifestations of the movement — from Greece to London to Cairo to Spain and other points in between — are reported on. These reports are good journalism. One feels as if they are present at the rallies, occupations and riots that Mason describes. The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events. These are the stuff that makes one join such movements.

When it comes to analysis, Mason’s text provides some interesting possibilities. He spends a fair number of words discussing the desire for freedom this global movement represents. The Egyptian opposed to the harshness of the Mubarak authoritarian regime and the British student fearing the limitations a life without affordable education will create are examined through what Mason calls the social laboratory of the self. He emphasizes the role of social networking and the existence of a new dimension in organizing directly related to the existence of networking technology. He rightly questions the validity of the Left, but does not really examine what he means by the Left, choosing instead to adopt the mainstream media’s definition that the Left is composed of political parties like Labour in Britain, various elements of the Democratic Party in the United States, and numerous sects espousing various versions of Leninism.

By dismissing the Left, even in its current splintered formation, Mason is also dismissing a more radical analysis of the true culprit in the global economic catastrophe. It is true, as Mason makes clear, that neoliberal policies are responsible for the numerous maladies the global uprising sprang from. However, what is unexplored in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is why neoliberal capitalism is the dominant economic regime on the planet. That explanation can only come from an understanding of the economic works of Marx and his theoretical successors like Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and even Lenin. It was these thinkers and revolutionaries, after all, that studied and explained the stages of capitalism in the industrial world and how they would come about. So far, they have been pretty damn accurate.

Mason has it right when he places the search for freedom against the authoritarianism of a Mubarak or of neoliberalism in the context of Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the human spirit under capitalism. However, by not taking a similar look at the analysis Marxist economics provides regarding the trajectory of capitalism, the analysis he provides falls short. It would be useful for Mason and the protesters he writes about if they knew that a Marxist anti-imperialist analysis does not mean that a Leninist solution is the necessary result.

Yet, Mason is not much different from the movements he describes. Rightly opposed to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (which is merely another phase of monopoly capitalism as described by Luxembourg, et al), the current movement runs the risk of merely removing the worst of those excesses. If this is the result, it will only be a few decades before an even harsher manifestation of capitalist greed subordinates the world. Unless, that is, the current movement undertakes a truly radical analysis that places the existence of capitalism itself at the core of the problem.

I don’t expect that capitalism will be removed from the planet. However, without an understanding that it is capitalism that is the root of the problems of inequality and sustainability we are currently facing, there can be no substantive change in the future we face. Then, again, the very fact that many elements of the movement don’t seem too concerned about the Left’s role is a call to those on the Left to get active and make it clear that what passes for the Left in today’s world is for the most part nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is a rejection of the Left’s important and earth-changing history.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, these two publications are worthwhile and provocative reads. The authors and editors present the primary actors in the global uprising — students, workers and the marginalized — and describe their passion, joy and fears. They also begin to explain where the global movement against neoliberalism came from and where it is now. Reading them in this context will certainly help guide us through that movement’s next metamorphosis.

The unions claim that the closings are mainly a conservative move to privatize mail and package delivery. Evidently right wing political opposition to “big government” is a factor in the downsizing. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader thinks privatization advocates have exaggerated the money and other problems to create a “manufactured crisis.”

One way the USPS plans to compensate for some of the closed offices is to open about 2,500 so-called “village post offices” sometime next year. These are to be small private operations housed in local businesses — gas stations, groceries and the like — that would handle limited services such as stamp sales and flat-rate shipping and few extras. It is to be assumed other private ventures will spring up across the country to supplement the immediate and longer term shrinkage of postal services.

On February 13, Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), joined by 110 other House members, called on Donahoe to institute a moratorium on U.S. Postal Service closure plans. According to the Postal News:

In a letter signed by the bipartisan group, Hinchey cited a Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) report that points to deep flaws with the data used by the USPS to determine which postal facilities should be considered for closure.

The Mid-Hudson Valley Congressman declared:

The data the USPS used to select which post offices it would consider for closure was incomplete, inaccurate and inappropriately targeted rural post offices. I’m calling on the Postmaster General to halt all discontinuance studies. Unless they start operating with better information, they could do more harm than good.

In addition to the post offices, USPS announced February 23 it seeks to close or consolidate more than 223 mail processing plants in the next 18 months, at a cost of 35,000 jobs. “This plan makes no sense at all and should be abandoned,” argued Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is from a state where a mail processing plant is slated to close. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Donahoe “should focus on common sense solutions that improve its fiscal solvency” instead of putting eight Ohio facilities out of business.

How did this all come about? The original Post Office agency was launched by Ben Franklin and the rebellious Second Continental Congress in 1775, before the Declaration of Independence, and Franklin was the first postmaster general. Postal delivery became a cabinet-level department after national independence when George Washington was president, and New Yorker Samuel Osgood was the first postmaster to serve under the Constitution in 1789.

The USPS was reorganized in 1970 to become a semi-independent business though it remained a government entity. It no longer receives funding from Washington but raises its own monies — one of only two governments in the world that does not fund its post office system (the other is dysfunctional Somalia with practically no government services whatever). Postal rates are set by the Postal Rate Commission according to the recommendations of the 11-member Postal Board of Governors, which also selects the postmaster general. Nine of the board’s members are chosen by the President and, with Senate approval, serve for nine years each (though if selected after 2006 new members serve for seven years).

President Obama and Congress have circumscribed authority, but are far from powerless. For instance, the Board of Governors may implement certain changes without government approval, but on important matters such as moving to five-day delivery or postage rates both the White House and Congress have a big say. On the delivery question, however, Obama sides with Postmaster Donahoe, not the over half million postal workers and their many unions.

Postal unions staged concerted nationwide demonstrations a few months ago against the planned downsizing and privatizing of the USPS. Some unions have “been working to win support for amendments to the 21st Century Postal Service Act (S. 1789), which is expected to come up for a vote in the Senate soon,” says the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). On February 14, 27 Senators signed a letter asking bill sponsors “to maintain current service standards, protect rural post offices, maintain six-day delivery, and establish a blue-ribbon panel to examine how the Postal Service can earn additional revenue by offering new services.”

The APWU and the National Postal Mail Handlers have collected over 300,000 signatures so far on a petition to Congress. Several other postal unions are also actively fighting the closures, including support for bills in the House.

Among the labor organizations leading the campaign for the postal workers are the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC, representing city letter carriers), the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union.

Obama has largely stayed in the background on some but not all Donahoe’s plans. The White House budget for FY 2013, released February 13, includes authority for the USPS to end Saturday delivery next year. Of this Donahoe said: “The President continued to recognize the urgent need for postal reform.”

The unions didn’t see it that way. Responding to the budget proposal, NALC President Fredric V. Rolando declared:

Eliminating Saturday delivery is a counter-productive proposal that would degrade services to the public and to businesses, threaten the viability of the Postal Service itself, and begin to dismantle the universal network that has served the country well for 200 years….

Among those who would be most affected are residents of rural communities, the elderly, those who need medicines or other goods on weekends, not to mention small businesses, which are open weekends and need to send and receive financial documents…. Eliminating Saturday delivery would pose additional costs on all who are compelled to contract with expensive carriers. Taxpayers wouldn’t save a penny, because they don’t fund the Postal Service; USPS earns its own money by selling stamps and services.

The big postal unions point out that the 2006 postal “reform” law during the Bush Administration “requires the USPS to pre-fund 75 years’ worth of future retiree health benefits within just 10 years…. No other federal agency or private enterprise is forced to pre-fund similar benefits like this, especially on such an aggressive schedule. This postal-only mandate costs the USPS $5.5 billion per year. It accounts for 100% of the Postal Service’s $20 billion in losses over the past four or five years. It also accounts for 100% of the rise in the Postal Service’s debt in recent years.”

Donahoe, who took office 13 months ago after 35 years in the Postal Service, pledges to make the USPS into a “profitable, market-responsive organization.” He claims that USPS has accumulated an $8.3 billion budget deficit for FY 2012. He supports ending the pre-funding measure, but also insists on the closings and other cutbacks.

According to the citizen-run website SaveThePostOffice.com on February 21: “The Postal Service juggernaut keeps rolling on with its downsizing plans, and it seems prepared to crush whatever stands in its way — postal workers, post offices, communities, history.  There doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything that can stop it — not Congress, not the unions, not the Postal Regulatory Commission.  Perhaps it’s time for the people of the United States to take the U.S. Postal Service to court.”

The Washington Post reported February 18 that post office closings may increase rural isolation and economic disparity:

Nearly 80% of the 3,830 post offices under consideration are in sparsely populated rural areas where poverty rates are higher than the national average.

The great majority of the regions targeted for closing are where “UPS and FedEx charge more for delivery,” the Post continued.

Town mayors and chambers of commerce also worry about the broader economic impact of losing a post office. With small populations, remote locations and a lack of reliable Internet, many towns are already a tough sell to new businesses….

Despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the Postal Service declined to provide data on revenue for individual post offices. But it did provide expense data for all post offices. The statistics show that closing all the post offices under consideration would save about $295 million a year, about four-tenths of 1% of the Postal Service’s annual expenses of $70 billion.

Former Clinton Administration Postmaster General William told the press “that’s not even a drop in the bucket. The bucket won’t ripple.”

The Postal Service, which employs 575,000 workers at 32,000 facilities, says the growth of the Internet has cut volume way down, which is true in part, but many local people tell the Activist Newsletter that while they may e-mail most letters these days, their mail box seems as full as ever with bills, magazines, cards, packages and the like. “There are too many catalogs at Christmas, but we just recycle them,” said one local resident. “Otherwise, we count on our Monday-Saturday mail delivery.”

Dean Granholm, a USPS vice president, said in February that the personnel reductions could begin by October. At this stage, the jobs of some 3,000 postmasters, 500 station managers and up to 1,000 postal clerks are on the chopping block.

In addition to closing the post offices, Donahoe wants to (1) cut payrolls through attrition, (2) end the agency’s health plan for older employees, moving them to taxpayer-funded Medicare, and (3) eliminate Saturday mail delivery.

Ironically, one of the facilities scheduled for elimination and sale to an “appropriate retailer” is Philadelphia’s small but historically significant Ben Franklin post office on Market St. in the Independence Mall area attached next door to the U.S. Postal Service Museum. Tourist and news outlets report that it is on the location of Ben Franklin’s house and is the only post office that doesn’t fly a U.S. flag — because the colonial period facility pre-dates the existence of the national standard.

If the Franklin office closes, it might be fitting for the Postal Museum to dip its own flag in ceremonial regret — not just for the loss of a historic post office located in a pre-revolutionary three-story brick building that once housed the first postmaster general, but perhaps for the uncertain future of the USPS and its many workers as well.

Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that the bodies of the three victims remained in the apartment one month after they had starved to death.  They were only discovered when the landlord of the apartment complex called the police and went with officers to demand payment of months overdue rent.  Newspaper reports indicate that the family was several months behind on the rent and that electric and gas service to the apartment had already been shut off.  Neighbors reported that the family had asked at least one neighbor for assistance, but was turned away and told to go to the Social Welfare office.

The fact that the landlord was the only person interested in the fate of the family is a stunning, yet increasingly familiar, example of the social isolation many people experience today.  Of course, neither the landlord nor the police were driven by humanistic impulses to check on the family, their visit was motivated purely by money.  The relationship between the family and the landlord was a market relationship – the landlord using his property ownership to extract money from the family who might otherwise face homelessness.  Nothing unusual here.  Most of us are engaged in similar relationships.

What’s new about the situation that led to these deaths by starvation is that these market relations are now often the only human relationships people participate in.  A profound sense of social isolation has been growing inside of capitalist society.  As people are forced to spend more time at work, spaces for social interaction collapse and daily life is reduced to a series of market relations arbitrated by money.  This is particularly true in Japan, where decades of economic decline have undermined social bonds of solidarity by  introducing  casual labor – jobs with no guarantee of future employment, rising homelessness and a generational dislocation that has left the elderly to fend for themselves.

About 4.6 million elderly people now live alone in Japan and the number of people dying at home has increased by 61% between 2003 and 2010, from 1,364 to 2,194, according to the Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health in Tokyo.   Although there are a number of civil society initiatives underway to attempt to combat this growing isolation, social conventions such as prohibitions on helping neighbors and unattainable notions of the proper family structure have combined with cuts to welfare state budgets to undermine those efforts.

And socially isolated Japanese will find that they are part of a global trend launched in large part by the world’s largest capitalist economy – the United States.  Since the shift to neoliberal economics in the 1970’s, US residents have been at the cutting edge of trends of social isolation.   Evidence of the extent of this mass alienation came in a 2006 study which reported that one in four of those interviewed had no one with whom they could discuss personal troubles.  And, compared with 1985, nearly 50% more people in 2004 reported that the only person they can confide in was their spouse.  As the left-wing psychoanalyst Harriet Fraad has indicated, with the exception of self-help groups and fundamentalist churches, nearly all voluntary social groups, like bowling leagues, that might offer a sense social solidarity have disappeared.

Much like in Japan, the trends toward social isolation have been re-enforced by sharp reductions in welfare state spending in the US.  Many of these came in the mid-1990s during the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton who pledged to “end welfare as we know it.”  Welfare cuts backed up by a growth in casual labor have resulted in a massive increase in the number of hours spent at work.  More than 80% of males in the US and 60% of female workers spend more than 40 hours a week at work. Compare this with a Scandinavian country such as Norway where about 20% of males and 7% of females work more than 40 hours of week.   Voluntary social groups collapsed as more and more free time was consumed by wage work.  The result is the neoliberal dream, a society of individuals – slaves to their worksites, in terror of their bosses and unable to relate to one another after decades of social isolation.

This is the socio-economic recipe that can allow for people to starve to death inside of two of the richest societies in the history of the world.  We should use this gruesome example to evaluate two other situations.  The first comes from Greece where economic crisis is being translated into savage cuts to wages and social welfare.  If you wonder why popular movements in Greece are resisting this austerity so militantly, think of this family in Saitama starving to death alone in their apartment.  This is precisely the future that the people of Greece are resisting.  And it is how we might evaluate our own life possibilities.  Do we want to live in a society where it is possible to be so socially isolated that you can starve to death and the only person who will care is your landlord and the police?

Consider this as an extended description of why I am a democratic socialist and a prime cultural motivation for the recent Occupy Wall Street movement.  Occupy has created a social space where people can get back to relating with each other based on a common humanity and desire for an ethical society.  And socialism has always held up a mirror to capitalist society and said that there is more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, that people should have time enough to develop themselves fully and that every human life is precious, carrying with it the nearly unlimited possibilities to make our world a better place.   The next great radical movement in US history will be one with a unquenchable desire to reverse the damage done by neoliberal capitalism.  In other words to take on the necessary task of re-connecting humanity.