Patriotic Dissent: How a Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”
By Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”
In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.”
In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes, “endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically.”
When the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts. Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.
An Appeal to Conscience
Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics, with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)
Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same kind of punch as Howard Zinn’s classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military’s own current generation of “yes men for another war power hungry president.” His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful, and disastrous our post 9/11 wars have been.
Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls “deep-seated toxically masculine patriotism.” As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he was still a “burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer” and definitely not, he reports, any kind of “defeatist liberal, pacifist, or dissenter.”
Sjursen’s initial experience in combat—vividly described in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of The Surge (University Press of New England)—“occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife” in Iraq. “The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life,” Sjursen writes in Patriotic Dissent. When he returned, at age 24, from his “brutal, ghastly deployment” as a platoon leader, he “knew that the war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral.” This “unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East—what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).”
A Professional Soldier
By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but “no longer believed in anything we were doing.” He was, he confesses, “simply a professional soldier—a mercenary, really—on a mandatory mission I couldn’t avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return.”
Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the “People’s Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red.” During his studies at the state university, Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his “own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy.” He completed his first book, Ghost Riders, which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on active duty, but with “almost no blowback” from superior officers.
Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West Point so that body of work triggered “a grueling, stressful, and scary four-month investigation” by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the author was subjected to “a non-publication order.” At risk were his career, military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words “contemptuous of the President of the United States.” His “PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses” helped him qualify for a medical retirement last year.
Sjursen has now traded his “identity as a soldier—the only identity I’ve known in my adult life—for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader,” albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about military affairs and veterans’ issues. He’s a frequent, funny, and always well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom fellow.
In Patriotic Dissent, Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of dissent. One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that “war is just a racket” and lamented his own past role as “a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Reframing Dissent
Sjursen contrasts Butler’s anti-interventionist whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking veterans today after “nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars.” Among friends and former West Point classmates, he knows many still serving who “obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments” because they long ago “stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare state.”
Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home.US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to “reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism.” But actually taming the military-industrial complex will require “big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike,” on a much larger scale. One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the “vast majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve” in the military and the “one percent of their fellow citizens on active duty,” who then become part of “an increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community.”
Not many on the left favor a return to conscription. But Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the U.S. replacing “citizen soldiering” with “a tiny professional warrior caste,” created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes:
“Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put ‘skin in the game.’ Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless wars, an entire generation—or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality.”
At a time when the U.S. “desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave” sweeping over the country, we have instead a “civil-military” gap that, Sjursen believes, has “stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so.” That’s why his own mission is to find more “socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars” who are willing to “step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalized patriotic dissent.” Readers of Sjursen’s book,whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across the country. Let’s hope that the author’s willingness to take personal risks, re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many others, in uniform and out.
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How to Avoid Reproduction
By Molly Martin
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I had a hysterectomy in 1975 when I was 25 years old. I didn’t have cancer or uterine cysts. What I had was dysmenorrhea, or menstrual cramps.
This was an operation I had actively pursued, and I felt lucky to get it, taking advantage of the remnants of the US Public Health system before it was abolished by the Reagan administration.
Buckets of Blood
Like 80 percent of women, I suffered from menstrual pain. Like 10 percent of women, the pain was severe enough to disrupt my life. Menstruation, since the age of 13, had been a trial for me that only worsened by the time I got to high school. Huge gobs of clotted blood would gush from my body every three weeks for a week at a time. The pain was debilitating. By the time I got to college I was unable to work for two days a month when my period was at its worst, a terrible embarrassment for a young militant feminist who passionately believed that women were equal to men.
In high school I had friends who got pregnant and had to drop out of school, young women who gave up babies for adoption or had to get married. The lesson was clear to me: don’t get pregnant or you won’t get an education. Pregnancy, and marriage too, seemed like a kind of death. I was determined not to ruin my life. In high school I never had sex, but there wasn’t any boy I wanted to have sex with.
I asked my parents what they would do if I got pregnant. My mother said they would help me get an abortion. Much later, after she died, I learned that my mother had had at least two abortions. She never told me, even during the feminist campaign led by Ms. Magazine in which famous women publicly admitted to their abortions.
How I Got The Pill
By the time I got to college, I was embarrassed to be a virgin, so I set out to remedy that state of affairs. I was hanging out with a boy I met in bacteriology lab who seemed interested in me. I asked him if he wanted to have sex and he was happy to oblige. We shook on the deal. First, though, I wanted to be sure I was protected from getting pregnant and I didn’t want to leave that up to him. The Pill was newly available, and I convinced a doctor at the student health clinic to give me a prescription. This was about 1968.
The Pill wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The Pill makes your body think it’s pregnant, which meant for me morning sickness, bloating and sore breasts. And the periods were still bad. Only many years later did I learn that it’s not necessary to have a period when you’re on the Pill. That was the Catholic Church’s doing, part of a deal between the church and pill makers. The church agreed not to oppose the marketing of the Pill for birth control if certain requirements were met, one being that periods stayed. Even though I was never a Catholic, the church had an unseen hand in my reproductive life. Was I suffering for the sins of Eve? I was pissed when I learned that I could have controlled my painful periods by taking the Pill throughout the month if not for the Catholic Church. But at least by the late 60s the Pill was available to me and other unmarried women (for a time it was only prescribed to married women—another church requirement).
I’m Going to Throw Up
My menstrual periods continued to worsen, causing vomiting and diarrhea as well as pain. I developed a long-term relationship with the student health center, but they began to tell me and other female students that painful periods were not a health issue and that we would not be treated there. If I told them the reason, they would refuse to take me in, so I worked out a strategy where I would run into the clinic and say to the receptionist, “I’m going to throw up.” That got me into a room with a pan, and I was able to see a doctor. Not that they could do much for me. They gave me painkillers, usually a shot of something, and sent me home, where I would lie in bed for the rest of the day, still in pain, just duller pain. I was still useless.
This was no way to live. I resolved to do something about this devitalizing state of affairs. I began reading everything I could get on the subject of menstruation and birth control, frequenting the medical library at Washington State University. I learned about the effects of the female hormones estrogen and progesterone and how they control the menstrual cycle. I only understood about half of the medical terms but could make out the general ideas. It seemed from my reading that I might have something called endometriosis, where the lining of the uterus gets into the body cavity and responds to hormones by bleeding into your insides.
At that time in the 1960s, research was still going on to refine the Pill. I read about different types of pills I could try and I convinced the one female doctor in the student health center to let me experiment on myself. She prescribed a kind of progesterone pill, but, as with previous experiments, the side effects cancelled out the positive. One day when I lay with my feet up suffering intense cramping and pain, I popped a progesterone pill. The pain stopped within minutes! Progesterone, my savior! Why didn’t women know about this? Why don’t women still know about this? Did the medical establishment want women to suffer just as the Catholic Church did? Reading the book, The Pill, I later discovered that developers of the Pill claimed to be developing a treatment for dysmenorrhea because it sounded better than birth control to the church and the powers that be. Too bad they didn’t tell the women like me who actually suffered from dysmenorrhea.
Taking Control of Our Bodies
My relationship with the medical establishment at WSU was not just based on my own complaints. Along with my Women’s Liberation group I had been working to help women get reproductive care. We set up a counseling center in the student union and I became a volunteer counselor. The typical “client” was a student who’d had sex once and gotten pregnant. She might be a rape victim. She’d had little or no sex education in school; she had never talked to anyone about sex or reproduction. She was confused and embarrassed. One young woman was so mortified that she ran out of the room soon after she’d walked in.
We set up underground networks to help women procure abortions and we worked with doctors in the community to provide reproductive care in the town and at the university. A book written by activists in Boston, Our Bodies Ourselves, reflected feminist organizing all over the country, even in small towns in the West. We were inspired to learn about our bodies and take control of our own health care.
During this time, women in Washington State organized to overturn the law criminalizing abortion and my Women’s Liberation group worked on that ballot campaign. Abortion became legal in Washington in 1970, three years before the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion nationwide. Washington was the first state in the country to make abortion legal by referendum.
If Men Could Get Pregnant Abortion Would Be a Sacrament
My search for the perfect method of birth control continued. I never liked condoms and felt that getting men to use them was not worth the effort, although I always carried one in my wallet. Still, I thought that men should be required to take responsibility for birth control. A popular feminist poster showed a picture of a big-bellied man and the slogan “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Feminists wanted control of our own reproductive lives. We wanted the freedom to have sex without guilt and without consequences, just like men had. But we certainly didn’t want to depend on abortion as a primary method of birth control. We wanted contraception that didn’t hurt and wasn’t a big hassle.
I Got IUD’d
IUDs (intrauterine devices) were becoming a popular form of birth control. It seemed like a great alternative to the Pill. You had to have it inserted by a doctor, but then presumably you never had to think about it again. Not so with me.
There were many types of IUDs, but the most popular at that time was the Dalkon Shield. I went to a health clinic in the community to have it inserted. The doctor there was an older man whom I’d worked with to help provide women with reproductive care. He was inserting the Dalkon Shield into many women’s uteruses. That part went smoothly, but soon I was in pain, which continued to worsen. The pain was constant. The pain radiated from the core of my body out to my limbs. No part of my body was free of the pain. I thought to myself at the time that I could not imagine any pain worse than that cramping, and I have never experienced anything close to it in my life. My uterus was trying to expel the IUD and so I was in constant labor. (Needless to say, sex was the last thing on my mind). But the Dalkon Shield was made to resist. You had to have it removed by a doctor, and after a couple of weeks of agony I did. When I visited the mild mannered old doctor again, he told me of anecdotal evidence that women were having some problems with the Dalkon Shield. He emphasized anecdotal. He was a science-based guy after all, and there were no studies. Still, I could see the worried look on his face and I celebrated being IUD free.
Later, of course, we learned of the terrible problems caused by the Dalkon Shield. Women suffered from pelvic inflammatory disease. Women were made infertile. Women died. We had been experimental subjects. I joined a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer and eventually received $750, a big sum of money for me then. The manufacturer, A.H. Robins Co., went bankrupt.
Birth control never failed me. I never got pregnant. But I was pissed that it was so difficult. Later, when I sat down to chronicle my torturous, painful attempts to keep from getting pregnant I got angry all over again. Even for a relatively privileged white, college-educated woman, birth control had been arduous.
The People’s Health Care System
In 1973 I left the little college burg of Pullman for the big city of Seattle. But I had carefully laid the foundation for continuing reproductive care in my new home.
The People’s Health Care System, a grassroots response to inadequate health care, acted like a safety net, doctoring the poor and insurance-free. Led by the Black Panther Party, activists in Seattle had created the system, which later included the Women’s Clinic at the YWCA where I volunteered and community-built clinics in the city’s poorer underserved neighborhoods. Country Doctor, one of the first community clinics, is still operating.
Seattle still maintained a merchant seamen’s hospital, part of the U.S. Public Health Service, where medical care was free. Over the years, military dependents, Coast Guard personnel, American Indians and medically indigent citizens were added to the patient load. The USP hospital in Seattle by the 1970s was a center of people’s health care activism.
I arrived in Seattle at an auspicious time for public health care. I had documented well my battle with endometriosis (or whatever it was—I never got a diagnosis except the general term dysmenorrhea). My doctor at the WSU health center had given a written recommendation for a hysterectomy. And I made connections with the network of activist health care providers by volunteering at the Women’s Clinic. They put me in touch with a doctor who agreed to oversee the operation.
The US Public Health Service
The Seattle Public Health Hospital building, an imposing Art Deco edifice built in 1931, still crowns Beacon Hill in the south part of the city. I was admitted to a ward reserved for women undergoing reproductive surgery. The huge open room housed perhaps 15 or 20 beds. You could pull a curtain to separate yourself from the others, but I wanted to be part of the action. I made an effort to meet and talk to the other patients, and the atmosphere was friendly. Most of the women were wives of Navy men in for hysterectomies or removal of ovarian cysts. But one young woman told me she was a fisher and was in for a (free) abortion.
This was a teaching hospital. Young interns performed many of the surgeries and probably also did mine. I engaged one of the female interns, asking about endometriosis and hormone studies. Her answer chilled me. Few studies existed regarding the female reproductive system, she said. “We just don’t know very much.” At that time women were seldom the subjects of medical studies, which were almost all about men.
As I was being wheeled into surgery and before the drugs took effect, I thought to myself that I should have told my parents about the hysterectomy. I had been told there was a small chance that I wouldn’t wake up from the general anesthesia. What if I were to die? My poor mother! I was her only daughter, a very selfish daughter. But I’d been afraid my mother would try to dissuade me and I hadn’t wanted to have the argument with her. I felt strongly that this was my personal decision.
At that time there was unbelievable pressure on women to have children. Everyone told you you’d change your mind when the maternal instinct kicked in, “Every woman wants children! It’s in your genes. You are a freak if you don’t want children,” we were told repeatedly. Young women were not allowed to have hysterectomies because doctors thought we didn’t know our own minds. At the public health hospital, they believed me when I told them I really didn’t want children. I never changed my mind.
Only my uterus was coming out, not ovaries. The interns had explained to me that they would try to do a vaginal hysterectomy. They wouldn’t cut my abdominal muscles unless they had to. But they wouldn’t know until they got in there, so I wouldn’t know until I came out of surgery and the anesthesia wore off. Some of the women in the ward had pretty ugly incisions and of course I had to see them all. As it turned out, the hysterectomy was vaginal, so I was left with no scar.
Because I got an infection (a common thing for younger people, they said), I had to live in the ward for 12 days. In that time I got to know the staff and the patients pretty well. I wanted to know how they funded the surgeries of people like me who were not seamen, fishers or Navy. They told me money came from a fund for special or interesting cases. I thought that was funny since my case seemed pretty routine. Later I learned Hospital Director Dr. Willard P. Johnson had found an obscure regulation in the Public Health Service Act that allowed a director to allocate up to five percent of the care offered at the facility for “special studies.” The provision was intended to allow the admission of patients with rare diseases for the benefit of the medical education program. Dr. Johnson decided to interpret it differently, admitting every person referred from a community clinic as a special studies patient. This decision was the origin of the long-standing affiliation with the region’s community health centers.
The PHS hospital, because of its close relationship with the neighborhood clinics, became the center of the People’s Health Care System in Seattle. It was part of a vital community movement for control of our own health care, which had far reaching effects. Women did gain a measure of control and also won changes in the health care system. The women’s clinics in Seattle, set up to help women access abortion and reproductive care, continued to operate for many years. But our most important community partner, the PHS hospital and its federally funded public health care system, died a tortured death.
Republicans Shut It Down
The Republican assault on health care is not a new phenomenon. When politicians grouse that we can’t afford Medicare for all, they forget that the U.S. once actually had a well-run public health care system. It was destroyed by Ronald Reagan.
The Seattle PHS hospital was part of a network of public health hospitals and federally-funded free clinics all over the country. Soon after he took office Reagan shut down all the public hospitals. In Seattle he had to fight the community as well as Washington’s powerful Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson, and Seattle’s mayor, but Reagan pretty quickly won the fight.
The assault was unremitting. Between 1980 and 1991, more than 250 community health centers were closed, 309 rural hospitals and 294 urban hospitals were shuttered. Nearly one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care when eligibility was narrowed. Reagan’s budget cuts hacked at school lunches, Medicaid, the food stamp program, WIC and AFDC. He caused a two percent increase in the poverty rate, and the number of children in poverty rose nearly three percent.
Forty years later it’s clear that the Republicans’ answer to the prospect of socialized medicine is, for a growing number of Americans, no healthcare at all. And the attacks on women’s reproductive care continue with the recent Supreme Court decision allowing religious exemptions for birth control. Soon Roe v. Wade may be overturned and we’ll be back where we started. For a brief window in time American women enjoyed the right to control our bodies and reproduction. Now it looks like that window is closing.
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Socialist Strategy and the Biden Debate
By Max Elbaum
This piece originally ran on Organizing Upgrade
The COVID-19 pandemic and the uprising to defend Black lives have cast a spotlight on a level of deep-rooted inequality, ruling class degeneration, and public-health-be-damned behavior that makes the U.S. unique even among capitalist countries. My next column will examine the sources of these pathologies in a nation founded on racial slavery and genocide that has now entered the stage of its imperial decline.
But first I want to join a debate that was riveting parts of the left before COVID-19 hit and George Floyd was murdered. Partly because important lessons from the early forms it took are in danger of being lost; and partly because the discussion is still raging, and the stakes are high:
Should anti-capitalists urge a vote for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020 or not?
CENTRAL POLARIZATON SHAPING THE MOMENT
Engaging this question head-on can do more than clarify the next five months’ action priorities, important as those are. It can illuminate issues of political strategy that go deeper than the tired “same debate every four years” ritual. And focusing on strategic questions is the best antidote to the tendencies toward call-out personal attacks, sectarian point-scoring, and general hectoring that sap morale and alienate potential allies.
Cutting to the strategic heart of the Biden debate means looking at these questions:
What does living in the era of neoliberal capitalism tell us – and not tell us – about the alignment of social forces in the U.S today? What is the central polarization – the main axis of struggle – around which the biggest current battles revolve?
How does white supremacy interweave with capitalist exploitation to shape that polarization?
What is the relationship of battles for democratic rights to the fight for working class power?
How does a left that is just beginning to climb out of the margins go from weak to strong, especially given the unique U.S. winner-take-all, two-party system?
In addressing these questions, this longer-than-usual column will present arguments for the following proposition:
The central polarization in the country today is between a Trumpist bloc driving toward authoritarian rule vs. a majority opposition that, for all the vacillations and differences within it, is defending the democratic space that movements for justice, peace and radical change require to advance. Race and racism lie at the heart of this polarization.
This has been the case ever since Trump was elected. But the administration’s response to the pandemic and the uprising has made it even clearer. The 2020 election will determine which force will hold governing power: a reactionary bloc anchored in white supremacy or an administration that can be influenced by a progressive current powered by the fight for racial justice.
A crucial way to maximize chances of the latter prevailing, as well as to build the strength and influence of the left itself, is for us to become an independent yet resolute force engaging this electoral battle. Our goal should be turning out the largest possible working class and people of color vote for Biden with the message that removing white nationalism from political power is an indispensable step in the long- term battle for transformative change.
DIFFERENCES OBSCURED DURING BERNIE’S CAMPAIGN
Differences over the strategic questions posed above are longstanding on the left. But they exploded with tremendous intensity immediately after Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign.
This was mainly because key strategic differences were obscured and largely unacknowledged while Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns were in full swing.
Bernie’s was the larger and more sustained effort. Most Bernie supporters backed his candidacy because they were enthusiastic about the programs he advocated and his “not me, us” approach.
But for socialists who backed Bernie, there was an additional factor. Bernie’s effort was seen as providing a vehicle for building a durable working-class movement against capitalism. What was not faced squarely was that on the level of socialist strategy, Bernie was sending two different – in fact, contradictory – signals.
One suggested his was a campaign against the billionaire class as a whole, and that the establishments of both parties were equally beholden to the 1%. While Bernie contended for the Democratic Party nomination, he was an “independent” and self-identified democratic socialist, so this could be interpreted as a strictly tactical and temporary choice. This signal implied that the main axis of U.S. struggle was workers vs. capital, and it led some to view Bernie’s campaign as constituting a direct steppingstone to building a non-Democratic Party force that would unify workers and wage class struggle against the entire neoliberal ruling class.
But a different signal was sent by Bernie consistently calling Trump “the most dangerous President in modern American history” and stating from day one that he would support whomever won the Democratic nomination. Bernie and Bernie-connected groups like Our Revolution worked to build their independent clout, but also fought to maximize progressive strength within the structures of the Democratic Party. This approach signaled that the campaign regarded the main polarization in the country as the ultra-reactionary bloc behind Trump vs. a broad front in defense of democratic rights, within which the Bernie movement would set a working-class pole. The 2020 Democratic Party was the electoral vehicle for that anti-Trumpist front, and Bernie would maintain a unity-and-struggle relationship with all other political trends within it.
When Bernie’s campaign was growing, socialists largely ignored this important difference. Occasional conflicts did take place, for example the debate over how to relate to those radicals who believed Elizabeth Warren was more attuned to issues of racial and gender justice than Bernie, and/or that she had the best chance of uniting the anti-Trump front under a progressive banner. Bernie-backing socialists whose priority was defeating Trumpism advocated close cooperation with Warren supporters. But the other wing of socialist Bernie proponents were critical if not outright hostile. This produced a sharp debate that receded only because Warren’s campaign stalled and Bernie’s surged in February.
POST-BERNIE EXPLOSION
Then, right on the heels of Bernie’s Nevada-fueled surge, the South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and Michigan primary results knocked him out of the running. A few weeks later Bernie suspended his campaign, endorsed Biden, and announced he and the former Vice-President would set up a number of task forces to institutionalize a working relationship that would extend through the general election campaign into a Biden administration.
These steps – and then the task forces coming into being – were unmistakable signs that Bernie’s strategy was to fight for the influence of working-class-oriented programs within a cross-class anti-Trump front.
With the end of Bernie’s campaign and no more ambiguity about his stance, the suppressed strategic differences on the left rocketed to the fore.
While facing many challenges, radical supporters of Sanders, Warren or neither whose strategy was to fight for left influence within an anti-Trump front had a clear path forward. Engage urgent COVID-19 battles and start gearing up for the general. Craft the specifics of an anti-Trump message. Scale up infrastructure so that further efforts build independent organizational clout rather than getting subsumed in the official Biden campaign. Support progressive and socialist down-ballot candidates. Plunge into the host of grassroots labor, tenant, criminal justice, immigrant rights and voting rights battles that are key to expanding progressive influence inside and outside the Democratic Party. And after the uprising focused on anti-Black racism took off, go all-in behind it and the pivotal role being played by the Movement for Black Lives.
THE ‘NEVER BIDEN’ CAMP
For those who favor the Bernie movement transitioning into a purely working-class force fighting equally against both the GOP and Democratic Party establishments, the transition post-Bernie is tougher.
The course with the most logical and political consistency is to take immediate steps toward creation of a third party. But Bernie, most of the apparatus of his campaign, the Squad, and most Warren supporters – not to mention almost the entire labor movement and big majorities in communities of color – are signaling they will back Biden. It is hardly appealing to shift almost overnight from a surging movement of millions to a project weaker by several orders of magnitude.
Nevertheless, for most who believe that the central axis of struggle must remain worker-vs. capitalist and the left’s main task is to always promote a break with Democratic and Republican establishments, backing Biden, even without a formal endorsement, is a bridge too far. So the dominant voices in this camp are left with a mainly what not to do approach to the 2020 presidential contest: socialist organizations should not get behind Biden or call for collective action to defeat Trump. Instead they recommend supporting socialist candidates in down ballot races and working in non-electoral struggles that build workers’ power.
This “Never Biden” position (in the form of ‘Bernie or Bust’) was adopted by DSA at its 2019 Convention. As a result, the largest organization on the socialist left is without a positive national strategy for engaging in the 2020 contest. Rather than taking a course parallel to Bernie’s, as a national organization DSA has positioned itself on the margins of the central political fight of the year.
Given the big tent character of DSA and the wide range of views within it, what specific chapters and individual members will do varies widely. Those of us outside DSA need to respect the organization’s choice and recognize that most of what its members will do over the next five months will contribute positively to social change. But it is simply stating a fact that no revolutionary organization has ever grown into a powerful, much less dominant, force in any country without implementing a strategy that engages the main battle in nationwide politics, whether that fight is primarily electoral, mainly armed conflict, or anything in between.
WORKERS VS. NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISTS
These differences within U.S. radicalism do not stem from any difference in the depth of anyone’s commitment to social transformation. Rather they reflect opposing assessments of what constitutes the central axis of political polarization in the U.S, today and therefore the most appropriate socialist strategy.
There is consensus on the left that we are currently living under capitalism in its neoliberal form. For the “Never Biden” tendency, that translates into seeing the workers vs. neoliberal capitalist conflict as the central axis around which socialists need to draw not just ideological but immediate electoral and non-electoral action lines. Any view other than this is seen as diluting socialist principle.
For decades, most who held this view argued that it mandated staying 100% out of the Democratic Party. In the wake of the 2016 Sanders campaign, and especially in 2019-2020, a large cohort abandoned this position(to cries of betrayal by their former co-thinkers}. Those who shifted decided that because of the constraints of the two-party system, it was acceptable to contend for a place on the Democratic ballot line, but only if insurgent candidates ran as socialists. Backing non-socialists in primaries or general elections, or engagement in any structure affiliated with the Democratic Party, was still forbidden.
There is a logic to this view. And it has particular appeal to people radicalized since the 2008 financial crisis. That event and the resulting economic downturn turned a large proportion of educated youth into a debt-ridden, downwardly mobile cohort.
WHITE SUPREMACY AT THE PIVOT
Appealing as it is, however, this perspective mis-assesses the lineup of forces in the country’s current polarization.
The left might wish for (and work toward making) the central dividing line in U.S. politics between a multi-racial, intergenerational and all-round inclusive working class vs. an alignment of big capital, chunks of the middle class and a small layer of ideologically corrupted or outright bought workers. But that is not the reality today and it very rarely has been in the past.
Today’s which-side-are-you-on dividing line is between a racist authoritarian bloc led by Donald Trump vs. a larger but much more heterogeneous array of forces that, from different angles, regard Trumpism as a dire threat to their rights and interests.
Both the Trump and anti-Trump camps are multi-class alliances. Both contain advocates of neoliberal economics. The conflict between them is nonetheless quite sharp. The dividing line is the system of white supremacy. This racist material relation is not an “add-on” that piles oppression on top of exploitation for certain groups of workers. Rather, it is integral to and interwoven with relations of exploitation in ways that have decisively shaped political conflict in the U.S. since its origins in 1619.
Trumpism rose to power in the wake of a 50-year backlash against the gains made by 1960s movements, the overthrow of legal Jim Crow and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act most of all. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and then Reagan’s dog-whistle racism laid the groundwork for the openly racist “birther” campaign that transformed Trump from a reality-TV host into a formidable presidential candidate. Since 2016 Trump has gained complete control of the Republican Party. Former top GOP strategist Avik Roy put it concisely: the GOP is a party whose center of gravity is white nationalism. Anti-feminism and homophobia are incorporated into this toxic brew, and all who are not on board have been purged or cowed into acquiescence.
In a mirror image of the way the Black-led Civil Rights struggle expanded democratic rights and yielded economic gains for all workers and oppressed constituencies, racism lay at the cutting edge of the neoliberal era’s assault on the working class as a whole. It lies at Trumpism’s core, and has driven us to this moment when racial polarization, urban-rural polarization, partisan political and even basic information-source divisions now thoroughly overlap.
The differential impact of COVID-19 across the color line and the uprising to defend Black lives have both intensified this central polarization and underscored the way racism stands at its pivot. The country is now more sharply polarized than it has been since the Civil War.
This is the reason why Trumpism, which attacks the living standards and political strength of the U.S. working class, has been able to glue large numbers of white workers to its key social base in the capitalist class and middle strata. It is why the vast majority of people of color and other democratic minded people of all classes are arrayed against Trump. All workers have suffered intensified hardships since the 2008 financial crisis, but there is a deep racial chasm in the working class’ political response.
DRIVE TOWARD AUTHORITARIAN RULE
Going hand-in-hand with the Trumpism’s deployment of “strategic racism” is its drive toward authoritarian rule.
While Trump’s unhinged egomania contributes to this malady, authoritarianism’s main driver is the corporate core of Trumpism – the fossil fuel industry, military industrial complex, and a cohort of right-wing billionaires. These heavyweights calculate that they need to dispense with the previous norms of U.S. democracy to advance their agenda.
Their calculation is based mainly on two things:
The first is demographic change: the steadily rising proportion of people of color in the U.S. means expansion of the population that is most resistant to their increase-poverty-and-inequality program.
The second is the stagnation of the neoliberal model, which since 2008 has lost its capacity to even minimally share the fruits of economic growth and requires ever-harsher austerity for workers and the middle classes to keep going at all.
Faced with a rising proportion of people of color, a downwardly mobile young generation that is turning left, and increasing resistance to climate change denialism, top GOP leaders including Trump himself are on record stating they want to prevent a one person, one vote society.
The results include intensifying voter suppression, stacking the federal judiciary, purging all but Trump loyalists from all decision-making positions in the federal bureaucracy, and cultivating ties with openly fascist militias.
In response to COVID-19, heightened attacks on science and basic facts have been added to Trumpism’s racist (“China virus”) playbook. In response to the massive protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trumpists call for “dominating the battlespace” and the President tweets that Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate” and threatens mass murder (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts“).
These steps have gone past the rules-of-the-game that had been accepted by Republicans and Democrats since McCarthyism ended. Even the mild concessions to communities of color that the Democratic Party-wing of capital was willing to make are seen as a prelude “to pull down our whole culture: the American founding, western civilization and everything that sprang from it.” In the last few weeks Trump has gone all-in to defend-the-heritage-of-the-Confederacy mode, bringing to mind W.E.B. Du Bois’ observations about the parallels between the “white supremacism” of Jim Crow America and fascism.
INTRA-RULING CLASS CONFLICT
Trump’s escalations have produced a leap in intensity of intra-ruling class conflict. Previous “norms” served the U.S. ruling class well, especially facilitating their capacity to project “soft power” globally. No surprise that many in the elite see dispensing with them as a huge mistake. Similarly, important wings of capital think climate change and COVID-19 are real, science is important, and conspiracy theories are destabilizing and dangerous.
Plus being the target of “lock ’em up’ threats while Trump takes personal control of the Justice Department raises the stakes.
So, for a mix of reasons that include personal survival and partisan advantage as well as a certain conception of their class interest, a wing of the ruling class is opposed to Trump assuming “total authority.” They call for a return to a “reality based” politics where facts and science matter, and press for an end to gerrymandering and for voting rights protection.
These are not “bourgeois” issues irrelevant to socialists. Preservation and expansion of democratic space is crucial if the working class and all those damaged by capitalism are to have the most favorable conditions to organize for power.
This crucial point is obscured, and the danger of Trumpism is badly under-estimated, by a framework that minimizes the differences between the Trump and corporate Democrat camps because both can be said to espouse versions of neoliberalism.
PULLED INTO THE VORTEX
The intensity of the Trump/GOP vs. anti-Trump polarization pulls everything into its vortex. Issues from climate change to public health, where opinion once was spread across party lines, have become thoroughly partisan. Even amid a pandemic that thrusts the need for science-based government action center-stage, the GOP base is sticking with an administration that is spreading conspiracy theories, doubling down on privatization, repealing environmental regulations, and giving employers immunity to jeopardize the health of their employees,
Democratic opinion has shifted in the other direction. Polling shows a markedly leftward shift among Democratic voters on issues related to anti-Blackness and immigration, especially since the Black Lives Matter uprising. Support for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal has skyrocketed.
Even on issues where resistance to change is strongest, a shift is underway. On foreign policy (long the holy of holies for bipartisan cooperation) there is now a body of stalwart antiwar congresspeople with stable popular support. On perhaps the toughest issue of all – the Party’s lockstep support for Israel – there is progress, with Israel’s apologists expressing horror that the issue is “becoming politicized” as backing for Palestinian rightsgrows steadily in the Democratic base.
Responses to the pandemic have likewise bent to the gravitational force of the Trump-anti-Trump dynamic. Stances toward “reopening”; toward who is responsible for the staggering health and economic toll; toward mask-wearing or even whether the pandemic is a serious problem at all, fall along partisan lines.
The immense force of the country’s central polarization also explains why
Biden beat Bernie and Warren so decisively in the primaries. The left was outgunned in this fight. We did not yet have the base or infrastructure to prevail. But it was the “electability” factor that accounts for the scale of Biden’s win. Many on the left regarded “electability” as a red herring deployed by the corporate media to block the left. The anti-left “commentariat” did play it up, but it resonated deeply with many voters, including in constituencies that would benefit far more from Bernie’s program than Biden’s.
Why? Because these voters saw the central task in 2020 as getting Trump out of power. They wanted to see the broadest possible front arrayed against him in November. We may not agree that Biden, rather than Bernie or Warren, is the best candidate around which to build such a front. But voters’ who saw Biden as most likely to succeed cannot simply be dismissed by a left that aims for majority support.
IMPLICATIONS FOR LEFT STRATEGY
Grasping the centrality of the Trump anti-Trump polarization, and the fact that white supremacy is at its pivot, is the key to accurately assessing the moment and the left’s key tasks:
1. We are in a “democratic moment” that can open the door to deep-going change. In immediate practical terms, the issue facing the U.S. in this election and all the battles swirling around it is how much democratic space we will have in 2021 and after. Preserving maximum democratic space is important in itself. In addition, the pandemic and uprising have all but closed off the possibility of returning to the “old normal” and there is a new level of mass support for far-reaching change which includes a surge of support for socialism. This combination has already forced Biden to shift his mantra from “return to normalcy” to promising “sweeping economic change” and means there is a huge opportunity for social movements to take advantage of wider democratic space to press for structural change and win important victories.
2. Throwing ourselves into the anti-Trump coalition is the best route for both ousting Trump and building the strength of progressive movements and the socialist left. This course propels us to broad interaction with working class and people of color constituencies, enabling us to learn more about their thinking and to expand our ranks. It is a path to building closer alliances with the range of labor, racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ, tenant rights, public health and other organizations that will be going all out to beat Trump in November. And it gives us a chance to significantly reduce the number of Bernie supporters who do not vote for Biden (an alarming 25% in 2016).
(There are leftists who acknowledge that the central axis of battle in the country is Trump-anti-Trump, or at least that everyone would be far better off if Trump is defeated, but argue that socialists should still abstain from the electoral battle against Trump. Rather, we should focus on other battles to build up left power. That kind of orientation might be practical in the short term for a small organization. But on the level of strategy it substitutes the voluntarist notion that the left can set the agenda and timetable for mass struggle for a materialist perspective that recognizes that underlying trends and political forces far more powerful than ourselves set the conditions that we must deal with. In doing so it fosters a stronghold, “if you build it, they will come” approach to politics that would consign the left to the margins as the struggles of millions pass us by.)
3. Build the independent strength of left and socialist organizations in the course of the election campaign – Our Revolution, Working Families Party, state-based power-building organizations, organizations in the Left Inside-Outside project, sections of DSA that participate in the anti-Trump front. This task means more than persuading and turning out voters. It means being part of campaigns against voter suppression between now and the election, taking part in voter protection efforts on election day, and making specific preparations for mass action to defend the election results in case Trump loses but refuses to accept the result. It also means participating in a mix of down-ballot races and non-electoral actions essential to defending the health, rights and economic interests of workers and all who are vulnerable – an especially urgent task right now with infections soaring and the benefits that have been keeping millions afloat about to run out.
Each specific organization has limited resources and is positioned in different locations and sectors. Choices must be made about specific action priorities. Within a common strategy there will be different tactical approaches.
“BEAT TRUMP” OR “NEVER BIDEN”
I will close with a contrast between the messages the “Beat Trump” and “Never Biden” strategies each send to one of the constituencies most important for the left to be rooted in if we are to become a powerful driver of transformative change.
The majority of African Americans in the U.S. live in the South (the 11 states of the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia, and Delaware.) This is the sector of the U.S. population that has the strongest collective memory of both Jim Crow and the bitter and bloody struggle of the Civil Rights Movement to overthrow it. The shadow of that history, of lynching and racist violence by state authorities and non-state actors, hangs heavy over the region as a seemingly constant stream of murders from Trayvon Martin to Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor keeps reminding us. State governments in the South are among the most pro-military, anti-union, and anti-reproductive rights in the country.
There are notable differences in political outlook along generational and other lines in this sector: like other communities African Americans in the South are far from monolithic. But unity in defense of the gains made in the 1960s remains a powerful factor. Further, state-level campaigns like Stacy Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida in 2018, Charles Booker in Kentucky in 2020, as well as numerous local contests, have not only energized almost all sectors of the community, but positioned it as the anchor of a growing multi-racial alignment.
In the wake of Trump’s criminal and racist response to both the pandemic and uprising, it is possible that Georgia and Texas may become battleground states; prospects to beat Trump in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida have improved; and new possibilities for gains in down-ballot races have opened up in in every southern state. Southern activists, especially southern Black activists, have increased the volume on the longstanding call for both the Democratic Party and the progressive eco-system to wake up to the importance of the South and devote real resources to bolstering organizations rooted there. There is every indication that African Americans in the South will be in the forefront of the efforts to build a multi-racial electoral coalition to beat Trump in November and make sure that every vote is protected and counted.
Leaving aside for a moment how it will affect vote tallies on November 3, which of the following messages is likely to build the strength of the socialist movement in this crucial constituency?
*”We will throw our organization strength into the electoral battle to defeat Trump and prevent a return to Jim Crow, and push from there for this country to become a genuine multi-racial democracy under the leadership of the working class.”
or
*There is not enough difference between the contenders for the presidency to make it worth our while to take part in electoral fight to beat Trump. Instead, we will focus on building our own strength on our own timetable and engage in presidential politics when we decide there is a socialist candidate more deserving of our time and energy.”
Those who send the second message may build a force which defends radical ideas and contributes to important fights.
But the left forces whose strategy translates into sending the first message have much better prospects to grow their ranks and expand their influence, power and coalition relationships.
Beyond that, they will be dealing a blow to the ‘permanent opposition’ mentality that has so often stunted the vision of U.S. radicals – embracing instead the revolutionary idea that our goal is to be part of, and then ultimately lead, a coalition that governs and transforms the whole country.
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“It was imagination that I set aside”
By Michael Marcum
Ever since my prison days I have been a prison abolitionist. I quickly learned that people were not cut out to cage others or be caged; it destroyed both. I wanted, and still do, a world that did not require cages. Initially I lacked the imagination to apply the same perspective to policing, the profession with more power over a citizen’s liberty than the courts or various branches of government. To tame the word a bit, abolition simply means starting over, creating a society and social contract free of white supremacy—something we have never managed to do. Acknowledge our history, once and for all, and apologize and develop means to atone, with a clean social contract. It begins with imagination. And it was an imagination that I set aside during my 40 year professional career of correctional reform. My focus was on humane conditions of imprisonment, and opportunity for those released back into our communities.
After my violent years in prison, I worked for almost 40 years under two Sheriffs—several years for Richard Hongisto, and then for 32 years for Sheriff Mike Hennessey. We were committed to reform, and we accomplished much. However, while our budgets ballooned, prisons multiplied and police fortified, we “defunded” education, infrastructure, health care, and all manner of safety nets. Perhaps a relationship? I missed the forest for the trees. And the reform? Fragile.
“Defund the police” means to take a fresh look at why we have created policing that mirrors mass incarceration. Back in the 90’s when Clinton was sending surplus war material to police and sheriffs, departments all over the country received armored personnel carriers, riot gear, CS weapons, the works. A “warrior culture”, already incipient, grew quickly. Our guys (SF deputies) wanted to change from khaki to black uniforms. Seemed innocent enough at the time. In hindsight, the color change was not so innocent. Then the competitive olympics between departments became exercises that resembled war games. Police unions became power players in both political parties; virtually untouchable.
Abolition moved our country forward, saved our country, once before: From John Brown to Frederick Douglass to Lincoln we kept alive the forces that yearn to be free.
Defund the police is a process of reflection and accountability and redistribution of resources. Until we have national leadership—currently absent—it will play out in various cities and states. I believe much progress will be had, just not easily. It does not mean no police effective tomorrow. It means take control of our resources and apply them sensibly. And we have a lot to undo. Much of that is entwined with our treatment, since our founding, of people of color—that has to be the starting point. Germany pulled it off after Hitler; South Africa pulled it off after apartheid. Fine role models for the United States. Acknowledge, atone, repair.
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Bob Dylan thanks his audience
By Martin Colyer
Bob Dylan owes you nothing, but he loves you all the same.
“I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars,
Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars,
Been thinking it all over and I’ve thought it all through,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you…”
— Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” from Rough and Rowdy Ways
In 2000 I made my way to a slightly tired municipal hall on England’s South Coast. I had gone there to see Bob Dylan in the kind of provincial setting that he’d played on his now-legendary 1966 electric tour. He’d gone from Colston Hall in Bristol [now subject to an imminent name-change, post-BLM] to the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff, from the De Montfort Hall in Leicester to the Gaumont Theatre in Sheffield, and on to the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It was a nostalgic idea, perhaps, to choose not to see him in the yawning auditorium of Wembley Arena, but when he came on at the Guildhall in Portsmouth, it was clear that nostalgia was not on the agenda. With his killer band, Dylan tore the place up, with old songs reimagined in new settings, new songs given a turbo-charged delivery, and a setlist that wandered all over an, at that time, thirty-nine-year-old back catalogue.
At one point, having left the crowd breathless with the menacing high-energy strut of Gotta Serve Somebody – featuring an intense, preaching vocal – the band downshifted a few gears for the gentle country strum of If Not For You. This innocuous song featured an extraordinary moment: after playing his solo right at the third attempt, Bob looked down into the audience with a piercing stare, a hint of a smile at the corners of his lips, and sung the middle eight straight at them – “If not for you, my sky would fall / Rain would gather too… / Without your love I’d be nowhere at all / I’d be lost if not for you…”
It struck me as absolutely genuine. You felt that playing these songs live, night after night, gave Dylan a compelling reason to keep going around and around the world, on to another stop on the Never Ending Tour — another day, another year, another town. He once called himself a song-and-dance-man, implying that he saw himself as a working musician, in the footsteps of his early heroes. When he was 21, he talked of the tradition in which he wanted to do that work: “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people. You see, in time, with those old singers, music was a tool – a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points.”
“I’m giving myself to you, I am…
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham,
From East LA to San Antone,
I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone.”
When Love and Theft came out a year later, I was struck by a verse in the song, “Mississippi”. Aside from the intimations of mortality that had crept into Dylan’s work since 1997’s Time Out of Mind (” Every step of the way we walk the line / Your days are numbered, so are mine”), there was this, aimed at his bandmates, or his audience: “Well my ship’s been split to splinters, and it’s sinking fast / I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past / But my heart is not weary, it’s light, and it’s free / I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” On a late-autumn tour the next year, Dylan started including songs by Warren Zevon in his set. One cover was “Mutineer”, a song that some writers feel Zevon aimed at the fans who stuck by him: “I was born to rock the boat,” he sings, “Some may sink, but we will float / Grab your coat, let’s get out of here / You’re my witness; I’m your mutineer.” Dylan inhabited the song – made it sound like one of his own.
A year after that, I wrote a piece for The Guardian’s “Why I Love…” column as Bob was playing small London venues to round off a European tour. I tried to put in perspective how long he’d been doing this, and why it was still vital. “Last Saturday it was forty years ago that JFK was assassinated, yet by November 1963, Bob Dylan had already been performing in Greenwich Village for two years, since leaving his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. Think about that for a moment, as he finishes his European 2003 Fall Tour tonight at the Brixton Academy. Now in his mid-sixties, Bob’s been pretty much on the road for over forty years. As Leonard Cohen said, only Picasso has had such a career, making extraordinary art in so many creative periods.” It almost sounds like I think that career wouldn’t last much longer, but the next 17 years would bring exhibitions of paintings, drawings and welding, eight albums of new songs and covers, ten Bootleg Series Box sets, a Rolling Thunder Live box, an autobiography, a stint as a radio DJ and a touring schedule that doesn’t let up.
As Sean Wilentz has written, “People still have this idea that the record is the real thing and shows are just kind of the unreal thing, but, in fact, the shows may be the real thing.” Dylan told Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, “Songs don’t come alive in a recording studio. You try your best, but there’s always something missing. What’s missing is a live audience.” And one of the strengths of not necessarily nailing songs down in the studio is that they become malleable. They can take different guises, different tempos, different tunes, even. If Coldplay sing ”Yellow”, or Oasis “Wonderwall”, or the Stones “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” or Bowie “Five Years”, they have to sound like the record, or they just don’t work. But “Visions of Johanna” works as a soft acoustic mumble, a mariachi waltz, even as an angular rock song, when Dylan tried it out with The Hawks in the studio in 1965.
“My eye’s like a shooting star,
It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near or far,
No-one ever told me, it’s just something I knew,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”
Five years ago, as he trod the boards of the Royal Albert Hall, forty-nine years after that ’66 tour, I felt he set out a manifesto by using the words of another songwriter, Cy Coleman. It came in the middle eight of “Why Try to Change Me Now”, sung on his then newly-released album of Sinatra songs, Shadows in the Night. “Why can’t I be more conventional?/ People talk, people stare, so I try / But that’s not for me, cause I can’t see / My kind of crazy world go passing me by…” After the concert, I kept thinking back to that verse. It struck me as both the fulcrum of that night’s set and his entire career. “I don’t think you’ll hear what I do ever again,” Dylan told Douglas Brinkley in 2009. “It took a while to find this thing.”
“Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man,
Show me something that I’ll understand,
I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were,
I’ll go far away from home with her…”
Rough and Rowdy Ways is blurry like a polaroid, sharp as a sword, cool like a mint julep, creepy as a Charles Addams cartoon, and deeply strange. It’s also a record that could be made by no other performer. When it’s good, it’s really good, when it isn’t, well… who cares. It’s not a competition. All the tests have been passed. If you’re not signed up to Bob, you may not be convinced; if you are, then there’s much to enjoy. One song struck me as being particularly relevant to my theory, and its verses are scattered through this piece. “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” can be read as a song to the Deity, but I fondly think Bob’s singing it to his loyal audience. I love the gentle lapping waves of “I Contain Multitudes”, and the B-movie glide of “My Own Version of You” – I’m always game for songs that find room for St Peter and Bo Diddley’s maracas player in one line (“You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome”).
There’s Jimmy Reed, king of the slurred blues shuffle, as a touchstone. The r&b of “False Prophet”, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Crossing the Rubicon” are all poked and prodded by the guitars of Charlie Sexton, Bob Britt and Blake Mills, just off-centre enough to keep true to the source while adding a pleasing angularity. There’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, like a bizarre manifesto from a character in one of Carl Hiassen’s Florida novels. “Black Rider” starts like late Cohen and turns into a sinister and blasted song about fighting the Grim Reaper.
I initially thought there were no songs other singers would attempt, but that didn’t stop an Italian with a guitar doing “Murder Most Foul” a day after it dropped. I thought that because these songs are mostly sui generis, lyrically unapproachable, and more spoken than sung. Then I heard Emma Swift doing “I Contain Multitudes” and recognised a melodic line direct from the Oh Mercy songs “What Good Am I” and “Most of the Time.” So it’s possibly not as weird as it sounds on first hearing.
There have been long recitations before (“Highlands”,” Brownsville Girl”), songs that reference the Civil War or bloody battles (“Cross the Green Mountains”, “Pay in Blood”) – and late-night reveries (“Soon After Midnight”, “When the Deal Goes Down”). But here Dylan takes a more impressionistic tilt at all these types. Watching an arts programme the other night, our friend Susie came on, talking about JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. “Turner’s early work was all about the detail”, she said. “With late Turner, it’s all about the atmosphere and the light.” Yes, I thought, as late Dylan came into focus and out again, with Key West on the horizon line…
“Well, my heart’s like a river, a river that sings,
Just takes me a while to realise things,
I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn,
I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone…
I’ve travelled from the mountains to the sea,
I hope that the gods go easy with me,
I knew you’d say yes, I’m saying it too,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”
NOTES
There are many fascinating and thorough reviews in the media, all easily found. Two of my favourites are Anne Margaret Daniel in Hot Press or Richard Williams in Uncut. Daniels also references “Mutineer” in her piece.
Bob’s live performance of “Mutineer” can be heard on Enjoy Every Sandwich, a 2004 Zevon tribute album.
Emma Swift’s “I Contain Multitudes” can be found here
For an insight into Dylan’s working methods, listen to the “Tell Ol’ Bill” sessions. In 2005 Dylan, during a tour, stops by a studio in Pennsylvania to record a song for a movie, North Country. Dylan changes tempos, keys and even the melody, through multiple takes and the song that comes out at the end is nothing like the one at the start.
Why I love… Bob Dylan is here.
“Why Try to Change Me Now”. Will Friedwald, in Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art, says that the last Sinatra Columbia recording was the first song of note by the twenty-three-year-old composer Cy Coleman. Coleman reported that, on the date, Sinatra slightly altered the melody of the original opening interval. “I listened to the record, and it sounded so natural, the way Frank did it, that I thought to myself, He’s right! So I left it that way. So I changed the music! That’s the first and only time I’ve ever done that.”
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For more by Martin Colyer on Dylan, music and culture in general take a look at Martin’s “Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week“
WORKERS’ STRIKES ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF TODAY’S MOVEMENT
By David Bacon
There have been over 800 strikes since the coronavirus crisis began, according to Payday Report, with many especially since the murder of George Floyd. Regardless of the exact number, it is clear that something new is developing among workers.
There’s a lot of variation in these actions. Some have been protests, like those at Amazon, over the death of workers and lack of PPE. Some, like the strikes in the apple sheds in Washington, have been demands for safe work and compensation. Some have been protests over racism and in solidarity with Black Lives Matters.
These strikes don’t compare in size or number with the outpouring of rage over the murders by police, which have been enormous and ongoing. But they are very significant for a number of reasons.
They are class-based protests by workers, over the underlying conditions that have brought people into the streets in general. Overwhelmingly they have been organized by workers themselves, indicating both a deep level of anger over the conditions, and an understanding that striking is an effective form of protest and a means to change them.
In most cases unions have been slow to respond and overly cautious about action at the workplace. There are important exceptions to this, however. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the new farmworkers’ union in Washington, immediately sent organizers to support apple shed workers who struck against the virus. The achievements of those strikes was the result, not just of spontaneous action, but of FUJ’s ability to organize support for them.
The longshore union organized a one-day strike and mass demonstration on Juneteenth, using the day celebrating the official end of slavery to mobilize support for dismantling police departments. Other unions locally and elsewhere have organized labor marches supporting Black Lives Matters as well. Bus drivers in Minneapolis refused to drive busses to transport police to demonstrations, or people arrested in the protests.
These strikes and actions show an intersection between the impact of the coronavirus and the protests over the murder of George Floyd. The actions against the virus and its impact, and against police murders, are clearly responses to a deeper social and economic crisis.
All these protests focus on a growing race-based economic inequality, especially impacting Black people. In the first twelve weeks of the coronavirus crisis, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by more than $637 billion. The top 12 U.S. billionaires have a combined wealth of $921 billion. The entire value off all the homes owned by Black families, over 17 million households, is less than that.
This inequality isn’t a result of bad policies. It is historically and structurally part of American capitalism itself. The system has been built on the exploitation of all workers, but the super-exploitation of Black workers produced extra surplus value. Slavery and the exploitation that followed produced U.S. capitalism’s extraordinary growth.
That extra exploitation imposed permanent conditions of inequality on Black people – in jobs and wages, services, social benefits, and education. Today it is the basis for the racist impact of the coronavirus. The inequality imposed during slavery became the model for social inequality imposed on other racially and nationally oppressed people.
Race more than anything else determines who will live in crowded, segregated neighborhoods, who will be exposed to lead-poisoned water and toxic waste, and who will live with polluted air and suffer illness from asthma to heart disease. It is no surprise that when a new disease arrives, COVID-19, these same factors determine who will be the most affected in large numbers.
For every 100,000 African Americans, 62 die of the virus, 36 of every 100,000 native people, 28 of every 100,000 Latinos, and 26 of every 100,000 Asian Americans and every 100,000 white people.
While 70% of the people who die from COVID-19 in Louisiana are Black, Black people are only 33 percent of the population. In Alabama, 44 percent of the COVID-19 deaths are of Black people, who are 26 percent of the population.
… calling them essential means that employers can fire them if they don’t come to work. It does not require employers to pay them extra, provide health benefits, or pay them if they get sick and can’t work.
The coronavirus has created a crisis of unemployment for all workers in the U.S., but especially for Black workers, and workers of color generally. As of late May, 38 million people had lost their jobs during the pandemic, and the overall unemployment rate was 13.3%. A year earlier it was 3.6%. But Black unemployment was 16.8% (a year earlier 6.2%) and Latino unemployment was 17.6% (a year earlier 4.2%). Over 44 percent of Black households have suffered a job or wage loss due to the pandemic, and 61 percent of Latino households.
The government’s response to economic crisis has been to create the category of essential industry, and therefore, of the essential workers who labor in it. It is true that some kinds of production and economic activity are essential for survival. But the real-life result of calling people essential is that they are forced to work at a time when they are risking their lives.
Farmworkers are just one example. Their work is socially necessary, but calling them essential means that employers can fire them if they don’t come to work. It does not require employers to pay them extra, provide health benefits, or pay them if they get sick and can’t work.
Half of all farm workers are undocumented and excluded from the Federal CARES Act benefit package intended to help people survive the crisis. By denying any alternative means of buying food and paying rent the Federal legislation was an important pressure forcing them to go to work.
Trump forced Black and immigrant workers to go to work in meatpacking plants when the virus was everywhere by denying them unemployment benefits. He used the Defense Production Act to announce that nothing could get in the way of food production to ensure that meat would continue to be available in supermarkets.
The hypocrisy of this announcement was revealed when meatpacking companies admitted that in April, as the coronavirus crisis was raging, they exported 129,000 tons of pork to China, the highest amount in history.
About 37.7 percent of Black workers work in essential industries, compared to 26.9 percent of whites. They leave home to go to their jobs because they cannot stay home and work on computers. In California over half of essential workers are low wage workers, and are Latino or Black, including farmworkers, healthcare workers, custodians, building cleaners and truck drivers. Half of all immigrant workers are essential workers.
And because workers of color are concentrated in the essential categories, they are the ones exposed to the virus. At least 333 meatpacking and food processing plants, and 46 farms have confirmed cases of COVID-19. At least 32,099 workers have contracted it. At least 109 have died.
One company, JBS, has had a wave of infected workers and deaths. A black Haitian immigrant, Enock Benjamin, died in a Philadelphia plant where he was the union steward. Tin Aye, a Burmese immigrant and grandmother, died after working in a JBS plant in Colorado for ten years.
The impact of the virus is a terrain of social struggle. Meatpacking alone has seen a wave of protests and strikes. In mid-June JBS workers and supporters marched in the streets of Logan, Utah, demanding it close its Hyrum plant for cleaning and pay during the coronavirus outbreak. Some 287 workers from the plant tested positive for the virus.
In Stearns County, Minnesota, a protest outside a plant was organized by the Greater Minnesota Worker Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In Springdale, Arkansas Venceremos, a poultry workers’ rights organization, tried to deliver a workers’ petition to Tyson managers.
Meatpacking workers protested outside Quality Sausage Co. in Dallas after some died. The wife of one worker said, “The virus was the gun that killed him, but Quality Sausage was the hand that pulled the trigger.”
These worker strikes and protests are part of a broader movement led by African American organizations responding to police murder and racial inequality. One of the most important organizations leading it is the Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis. It has a program with five basic demands:
- Establish Justice and End Systemic Racism – Democracy and Equal Protection Under the Law
- The Right to Welfare and an Adequate Standard of Living
- The Right to Work with Dignity
- The Right to Health and A Healthy Environment
- Cut the military budget
The campaign’s statement of principles says, “We know that poor and dispossessed people will not wait to be saved. Instead, people are taking lifesaving action borne out of necessity to demand justice now … We are demanding voting rights, living wages, guaranteed incomes, health care, clean air and water and peace in this violent world.”
These demands help to give a framework of radical reform, on a national level, to the individual demands put forward in the strikes and protests. In particular, they reiterate the thinking of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in his speech condemning imperialism and war, when he charged that the bombs dropped on Vietnam were exploding in U.S. cities.
In the language of the Poor People’s Campaign, “if we cut military spending, implement fair taxes, cancel the debts of those who cannot pay, and invest our abundant resources in demands of the poor — we could fundamentally revive our economy and transform our society.”
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This is a presentation made to a webinar organized by the Economics Faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico on June 24
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Reparation: Confessions of a White American
By Ernest DiStefano
UPDATE: Ernie DiStefano’s interview on Sports360 with Jeff Fannell can be heard here on SoundCloud
As many of you know, in January 2020, the Forum published my essay, “The Rippling Manifesto,” which made the case for Negro League Reparations. This sparked numerous radio interviews, which created a groundswell of support for the cause. This, in turn, inspired me to create the Ripple of Hope Initiative, a movement to achieve direct monetary reparations for Negro League players and their surviving family members. As a follow-up to my January essay, I would now like to share with you my life’s path, as a white American, that steered me to becoming a passionate advocate for African-American justice.
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1968
I was in second grade. Schools were closed for the funeral of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. My understanding of Dr. King’s life and legacy at that time was restricted to the realization that because of his death, I had the day off. As my mother and I watched the televised funeral march for Dr. King, I asked her what happened.
“Honey,” she said, “some people in this world hate other people just because of the color of their skin.”
I was stunned by Mom’s answer. It made no sense to me. Yet after Dr. King’s funeral and the reopening of my school, I returned to carefree life as a white child in America.
1969
We had one African-American classmate in our entire third grade class, a little girl named Frieda May. Frieda was constantly bullied, ridiculed and isolated. One day, I was eating lunch with my white classmates in the school cafeteria. One of these classmates (let’s call him “Howard”) leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Hey Ernie,” Howard said, “Watch this.”
He looked at Frieda, who was sitting at the same table across from us.
“Hey Frieda,” he said, “Are you in the Brownies?” Frieda shook her head no.
“Well you should be!” he said.
Other children laughed; I did not. But I also did not confront my classmate or do anything to stop him.
1995
I was standing in line with my wife and daughter at a restaurant in Virginia, waiting to be seated for dinner. Also in line in front of us was an older African-American gentleman. The restaurant’s host walked passed him, stopped in front of us, and asked how many people were in our party. I turned to the gentleman.
“Are you waiting for a table, sir?” I asked.
“I thought I was,” he replied.
With that, the host reluctantly walked him to his table.
My anger was palpable as we sat down to eat. I glanced over at the gentleman. He was looking back at me. I quickly turned my face back to my plate of food, wondering what he was thinking. Was he grateful that I did not take advantage of the restaurant host’s racist behavior, or was he disappointed that we stayed and gave them our business? This question has haunted me for the past twenty-five years.
2008
We elected the first African-American president in the history of our nation. I blissfully celebrated the election of our first African-American president with my many friends and colleagues of color. My white man’s naiveté allowed me to believe that Barack Obama’s election signaled the beginning of the end of racism in America. Not even the murder of Trayvon Martin or the many incidents of police brutality against people of color during that time could awaken me to the fact that racism was alive and well in America.
2016
The Klu Klux Klan’s public endorsement of one of the presidential candidates, the winning candidate no less, finally provided my wake-up call. The 2016 election also provided the reason for the unprecedented hatred and hostility shown toward President Obama: racism is alive and well in the United States.
Benjamin Franklin said that, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged by those who are.” So why did I start the Ripple of Hope Initiative? I did it for Frieda May, the gentleman in the restaurant, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and all of my African-American brothers and sisters to whose pain and suffering I was oblivious for far too long. And what’s in it for me? Reparation.
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Bernie Is Right: Unite to Dump Trump
By Rand Wilson and Peter Olney
Since the horrible police murder of George Floyd, thousands of Americans of all races have taken to the streets in impressive displays of movement power. The recent Juneteenth actions even featured some dramatic actions by unions across the country and labor’s ideological spectrum. For example, the left-leaning International Longshore and Warehouse Union shut down the West Coast Ports and the more traditionally conservative Boston Building Trades Council organized an 8 minute, 43 second work stoppage.
Now legislative bodies, sports leagues and the U.S. military are racing to make concessions that can calm the roiling waters of mass protest and disgust. And while our November 3 election day may seem a long way off, it will be here before we know it. Between now and then, the street protests must continue and hopefully escalate. However, without a decisive political verdict at the ballot box to remove Donald Trump, our protests will not reach their potential.
LESSONS FROM THE 2018 MID-TERMS
For some of us, this poses some hard choices. Undoubtedly, millions of union members and workers who wholeheartedly supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries are now feeling disillusioned and demoralized about the prospects of former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. As organizers and volunteers for Labor for Bernie, we feel your pain. However, every political decision requires a concrete analysis of the specific conditions in that moment. This is the moment to learn lessons from our recent history.
In 2018, we argued forcefully that the political task of the moment was “Flipping the House.” We called on our sisters and brothers in the labor movement to go “all in” to recapture the House of Representatives. We believed this was of importance for two simple reasons:
- The necessity to put the brakes on Trump’s disastrous agenda;
- The opportunity to create more political space for labor and the left in the remaining years of his term.
Those of us who volunteered in the 2018 mid-term campaign often elected “corporate” Democrats whose politics were far from our progressive values. However, by electing these less than perfect candidates, we flipped the House in stunning fashion. In California alone, seven historically Republican seats flipped to Democrat.
The results were exactly as predicted. The majority Democratic House impeached Trump, exposed his misdeeds, and blocked some of his most regressive legislative measures. The fact that the Democrats controlled the House gave meaningful voice and space to the left – especially to the “Squad” led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Of course, they were often at odds with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but they were omnipresent precisely because the Democrats were in the majority. Absent that majority, they would have been obscure backbenchers in a Republican-led house.
A VEHICLE TO STOP TRUMP
We are confronted with a similar dynamic in November 2020. That’s why it is so important for Sanders’ supporters to rise to the occasion and become a powerful force in support of Joe Biden for President.
Biden is a vehicle to stop Trump, preserve our democratic rights, and give the left and labor more breathing space as Leo Panitch argued on Jacobin Radio. This will not be an easy task. The Orange Monster will continue to brilliantly play his game of divide and conquer. He will sow division by playing on racism and threatening a military crackdown because Democratic governors are too soft on anti police violence protesters.
And then there is “sleepy Joe” Biden who, completely tone deaf to the moment, suggests that cops should be trained to fire at people’s legs rather than their hearts. As much as “blundering Biden” discredits himself and makes a parody of the “lesser of two evils,” our responsibility as partisans of the working class and all those facing racial oppression remains clear: We must unite all who can be united in November to Dump Trump – and that can only be done by voting for and working for Joe Biden in every state in the union. Any razor thin margin in the popular or electoral vote could actually encourage Trump to stay on.
As historian Van Gosse recently wrote, “Given the real possibility of Trump winning again via votes suppressed and votes bought, just enough to take the Electoral College, we face a stark necessity. The majority must mass together to defeat Trump and crush Trumpism. We cannot stay where we are, we will move forward or we will move back. Democracy, all that we have fought for and not-yet achieved, is on the line.”
For labor organizers, the recent National Labor Relations Board decision that there cannot be any union discussion between workers on the clock should be a motivation enough. Talk sports, talk politics, talk family, but no union talk.
So our message must be clear: Time’s up for Donald Trump! You will get blasted in the popular vote and crushed in the Electoral College.
BEYOND NOVEMBER
A legitimate concern for many of us is that when Biden is inaugurated in January 2021 we will return to the same Obama-era neo-liberal agenda that created much of the suffering and discontent that led to Trump’s election. How do Sanders’ supporters maneuver while campaigning for Biden and entering a popular front with forces that have no interest in our agenda?
Our Revolution – the Sanders-sponsored national network of grassroots groups – has proposed three key ways that we can best function in 2020, recognizing that an historic and crushing defeat for Trump – in which we play an important part – will advance our agenda:
- Winning progressive issue fights by continuing to fight for the Sanders’ program of economic and social justice: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, good jobs for all, Black Lives Matter and (in the COVID-19 pandemic moment), defending our democracy with vote by mail. This platform needs to be our message on the doors (or barring the doors because of the pandemic), in the emails, texts and phone calls we make.
- Electing progressive, down ballot candidates who stand for our values by engaging in a coordinated campaign with allies to defeat Trump and elect progressive candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We must continue to organize locally in order to win nationally by mounting an integrated and independent campaign that focuses on key local and state elections. Swing Left has identified battleground states that offer a Tri-Fecta: 1) Flip the state from Red to Blue, 2) Flip a US Senate seat, 3) Flip a state legislature. Arizona for example, is a Tri-Fecta state and already is the focus of work for many in the Southwest.
- Transforming the Democratic party at every level by continuing to elect Bernie delegates and continue the push for major party reforms in the rules committee and a progressive platform that clearly define the party’s values, policies, and its candidates at every level. We need to push beyond the gains made in the 2016 platform and then hold candidates seeking endorsement to adhere to these standards.
BUILD CROSS=UNION SOLIDARITY
To Our Revolution’s three we would add a fourth goal:
- Expanded cross-union solidarity – by putting together electoral ground games that combine the best practices of the unions in this country. For example, Labor 2018 in Orange County organized an excellent ground operation to flip four traditionally Republican Congressional Districts. Out of that effort emerged a cadre of election workers from many unions who are ready to deploy to Arizona and other key battleground states.
Our collective work to defeat Trump will be an imperfect but necessary alliance inside the Democratic Party — with at best an imperfect program. But to quote a famous German philosopher, “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
If there ever was a real movement to unite with then it is of course Black Lives Matter and the protests sweeping the country and the world over the murder George Floyd. Much of the participation in these protests, particularly by thousands of young people of all races, has been fueled by veterans of the Sanders’ campaigns and the radicalization of youth in the United States. The protests are impacting culture, sports and politics as usual. When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologizes to Colin Kaepernick, we know there has been a major shift in public opinion.
STOP TRUMP AND TRANSFORM AMERICA
Trump has already demonstrated his disdain for the protests and has threatened the use of the U.S. military to quell the demonstrations. This could even be a dress rehearsal for the day after the election when he is declared the loser – and contemplates refusing to leave. The street protests that we are seeing now will need to be amplified by millions more people in November – erasing any doubt about attempting to use military power to remain in office.
For Bernie’s supporters, it is not too early to identify down-ballot races, particularly in “Tri-Fecta” states, and make plans for building cross-union solidarity to power a blue wave across the country. The same approach applies to “safe” blue states. Find down ballot races and find union partners across industry and craft to run up the popular vote totals for Joe Biden so that we rid the outcome from any uncertainty and end the Trump nightmare.
The Black Lives Matter mass uprisings for racial justice, the movement for workers’ rights and health care for all in the midst of the pandemic, and the urgency of providing massive public assistance in an emerging economic depression send a message to a President-elect Biden. It puts Biden and Congress on notice that the agenda of a new administration must go beyond platitudes and neo-liberal payoffs to the corporate elites. If we can stop a fascist takeover at the ballot box and in the streets, so too can we transform America.
When there are only two viable electoral choices, the decision to choose a neoliberal over a neofascist does not mean support for the neoliberal cause. Our campaign to Dump Trump is an essential next step to building working class power by combining class-based electoral work with an ongoing effort to expand and transform the labor movement.
This article is being published simultaneously on Organizing Upgrade and The Stansbury Forum.
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Cops in Our America
By Gary Phillips
“Cops” has been canceled in the wake of criticisms of the fictions this supposed reality show created in its years of heavily edited ride alongs with street cops. Several years ago the show had previously been canceled but was picked up by Spike TV, a “young adult male” oriented network at the time – which had aired such fare as a cartoon superhero called “Stripperella” and a lot of reruns of the “A-Team,” in 2013. Spike TV eventually became the Paramount Network.
It’s telling the then beleaguered Los Angeles Police Department in 1994 agreed to have the Fox originated show video their exploits. This was two years following the conflagration seen around the world post the acquittal on criminal charges of the four LAPD officers who, among other law personnel, viciously beat speeding motorist Rodney King. If surreptitious video could damn the police, then possibly edited footage could reframe them. Rebrand them. An outcome various departments sought when partnering with the program over the years.
“Cops” was always on somewhere, 15 to 20 times a day. Dan Taberski and producer Henry Molofsky and their screeners watched 846 episodes, about 86% of the shows. They collected 90,000 data points doing a deep data dive. The result was the six-part podcast “Running From Cops” that included interviews with “Cops” creator John Langley, the cops who appeared on camera and even a few of those who’d been arrested.
The most revealing though were the results of all that viewing and number crunching. Two percent of traffic stops in the real-world end in arrest. On the show, it’s 92% of the time. “Cops” portrays almost four times as much violent crime as occurs in reality, three times as much drug crime, and 10 times as much prostitution. Significantly the police on “Cops” became more effective in policing. In the second season 61% of the segments ended in arrest. By season 30, it was 95%.
“Basically, it presents a world that is much more dangerous than real life,” Taberski said, quoted in an L.A. Times article in June 11, 2020. “It presents the police as being much more successful than they really are. It misrepresents crime by people of color — the raw numbers are about the same but the show front-loads crime, and especially violent crime, by people of color.”
The flipside of the “Cops” narrative, putting you in the driver’s seat as it were, can be had in the virtual reality prototype Our America. Bryant Young is the game’s creative director and a game designer graduate from USC. He was recently interviewed by A Martinez on the “Take Two” program on KCRW. When you slip on your VR headset, Young related, you are a middle-aged, middleclass black father taking his kid Malcolm to school. There are several interactions with you and your son during this bright and sunny morning as you start the car and head out.
In talking with Malcolm, you find out the reason he’s intentionally missed the bus is because he’s getting racially name called at school. Trying to deal with that, your boss calls on the hands free and is pissed. The father is already late for work to do a presentation he’s supposed to be leading. He continues to give you as the unnamed father grief to ratchet up the pressure. As you’re driving the familiar blurt of a police siren is heard and in the rearview is the blare of the red and blue lightbar. What infraction did you commit the driver speculates.
Pulling over, Young continued, there’re always four choices you’ll be able to make at any given juncture in the game. He categorized them as some that black people will do, some that black people might think to do and two others are traps, to get you to say what you would not be able to say if you were black. Ominously he added a good outcome was being arrested as opposed to the various ways the driver could wind up being shot.
On Our America’s website, the designers note: “Virtual reality is an incredible tool for allowing people to view the world through a different perspective. We seek to use this technology to help people understand the fear, intensity, and helplessness of these situations that Black people must deal with every day.”
Here’s to a day when the norm is not fear and intensity that a black person has to feel when stopped by the police.
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Black Players matter, Black players really matter!
By Peter Olney
In the midst of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising I got together via Zoom with a bunch of aging white guys of my vintage and political profile to talk current events. This is a monthly gathering that used to feature dinner and discussion, but now because of the pandemic it features solely discussion. The topic was the BLM uprising, and we went around the Zoom panels offering each participant a chance to express their views on the moment. My turn came and I echoed the sentiments of others but added that one of the most significant signs of the times was the reaction to the BLM in pro sports. NASCAR eliminating the Confederate flag from its events would have been unthinkable a month ago.[1] Roger Goodell’s apology to NFL players for not supporting their right to protest ala Colin Kapernick was amazing, and for me it recalled the actions of Dave Meggyesy during the last major moment of massive social unrest in 1968.[2] Meggyesy, an NFL linebacker with the St Louis Cardinals, protested war, racism and imperialism during the playing of the Star Spangled banner and was promptly benched by the Cardinals.[3] At the time I was a high school footballer, and I took inspiration from his actions. The next speaker on our Zoom call said he was not impressed by the actions of “billionaire athletes”. The Zoom format does not lend itself to back and forth, so I remained silent, but what I wanted to say was: “What fucking world are you living in!!”
In the world I live in, along with most Americans, sports are huge. They are a huge industry and the actions of players on and off the field are a reflection of the times and prominent players influence the times. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber held the heavyweight boxing championship from 1937 thru 1949. Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. These athletes became icons in the black community, and their actions propelled the struggle for social justice forward. Beyond these barrier breaking moments, we find ourselves in a very different situation now in two of the top sports leagues of the world, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). In all sports the players are the game. These super skilled workers are the league. The owners provide the capital for stadiums and marketing, but nobody comes to see Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, throw or catch the pigskin. In fact, the earliest baseball teams were worker owned cooperatives led by German socialist brewers in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The revenues of the NFL in 2019 were almost 11.4 billion, the richest sports league in the world. The NBA was the third most prosperous at $6.3 billion. The power, prestige and social consciousness of the NBA players have been demonstrated in their early support and public endorsement of Black Lives Matter after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 who had murdered Treyvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and then the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The longtime owner of the LA Clippers, Donald Sterling was forced to divest his team in 2014 after his racist screed was captured on the Internet. Lebron James said, “There’s no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA-there is no room for him”[4] The players of all teams threatened a strike if Sterling stayed. Sterling is gone, and it is clear that under Commissioner Adam Silver (and to his enduring credit) the players call the shots. Over 78% of the players in the NBA are African American.
The NFL on the other hand has been slower to move despite the fact that over 70% of the players are African American. Colin Kapernick’s protests of police murders were sparsely supported in 2016 and his blackballing has not been countered by player unity. Partly this is a reflection of the uber conservative ownership of the NFL and its historically tighter identification with the military industrial complex and martial jingoism. It is also a reflection of the fact that many of the stars of the NFL, mostly quarterbacks, are white and many have been hardly progressive in their politics. Witness Tom “Terrific” Brady’s embrace of Donald Trump. But the times they are a changing even in the NFL as reflected by Goodell’s apology. Richard Sherman the outspoken star corner back from the 49ers sees change even among these white stars, “I’m impressed with the white QBs speaking up because those are voices that carry different weight than the black voices for some people,” Sherman said. “Which means the people who refuse to listen to a black athlete’s perspective will hear the same thing said from a white athlete, but receive the message much differently. So it’s awesome that more people are speaking out, because in sports, you really have a love and appreciation for your fellow man, regardless of race.”[5] I can’t wait for the first game and a massive show of force by black players and their allies: protesting, kneeling, engaging in whatever forms of struggle they choose. Players have already been marching, and I think they are feeling their power. In fact despite my discussion circle comrade’s dismissal of Billionaire players, they are in one of the most powerful positions in society as workers and black people. Their dominant presence and percentage of the workforce in the two aforementioned leagues is a potential power in industry unrivaled by any labor organization. And their influence in society particularly in the NFL, which is America’s game, and white America’s game is enormous. The American population while not 80% white as in 1968 is still majority white at about 60%. The black population is at 12 % of the country, and while this is a very solid political block and still a very reliable voting bloc, it has no where near the force and power that the huge African American population has in two of the biggest sports in the world. My union brothers and sisters would die for that kind of market power in the private sector. Private sector unions are at 7% of the US workforce.
Rather than being dismissive of millionaire athletes let’s recognize that their increased activism is a reflection of a positive and dramatic societal shift. Let’s also recognize that they have the potential to demonstrate the power of organized workers in their industries. Let’s recognize the incredible change that Black athletes can help leverage in America. Fox news host Laura Ingraham famously said, “shut up and dribble” to NBA players supporting BLM. Donald Trump said “Get those sons of bitches off the field” in response to Kapernick. How puny and weak those blustering comments look now in light of the last few weeks’ developments and the looming specter of black worker power in their sports leagues and society at large.
Black players really matter!
[1] https://www.nfl.com/news/kamara-supports-bubba-wallace-at-first-public-nascar-race-since-march
[2] https://www.nj.com/giants/2020/06/nfls-roger-goodell-finally-gets-it-right-apologizes-to-players-colin-kaeperick-who-kneeled-to-protest-police-killing-black-people.html
[3] https://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-1968-nfl-anthem-protest-20180717-story.html
[4] https://www.espn.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/story/_/id/10844906/lebron-james-no-room-donald-sterling-nba
[5] https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2894351-49ers-richard-sherman-impressed-with-the-white-qbs-speaking-up-against-racism
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