“Masterless Men” by Keri Leigh Merritt – Reviewed Mike Miller
By Mike Miller
It was a story you don’t see told in history — and an interaction of poor people that we don’t talk about. Keri Leigh Merritt
Introduction
Those seeking to break the white working class from Donald Trump’s grip would do well to read Masterless Men, the story of the white poor in the antebellum and postbellum Deep South. They are people with deep social and economic problems that could become social and economic justice issues, and that could make southern white working class people allies of positive change rather than its hard-core opponents. That is the democratic faith. I want to place it against the authoritarian solution explicit in Donald Trump’s Presidency, and his campaign to win it: “No one knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” “The one that matters is me, I’m the only one that matters.” “I am the only one who can fix this. Very sad.”
Democratic faith requires democratic education, exemplified in the experiential learning pedagogy of Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. They used experience as opportunities for education, and kept their teaching within the experience of those who were their “students”. The experience is what people gain when they are organizing. Contrary to the democratic faith is telling, really lecturing, “poor whites” about what their “real interests” are—an approach now all too common. It might be a “correct analysis” for a term paper, but in the practical world it only deepens the divide between those fighting the “isms” and those who hold them. This problem is not solved by many current “popular education” approaches that disguise their lectures with participatory methods while, in fact, the presenter does not want a process of exploration at all.
A Stunning New Treasure To Help Us
During the four+ years I was a “field secretary” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, there was an awareness among some SNCC members that organizing poor whites was essential if black liberation was to be achieved. A “Poor Whites Project” sought to accomplish that end. It never got off the ground. We lacked the experience and understanding to accomplish the result. Support for the project was tenuous. Among people who would react angrily to use of terms such as “Spik,” “Wop”, “Kike” or similar slanders, the use of “Honkie” drew a chuckle.
As black consciousness and pride rose, and the slogan “Black is beautiful” sought to overcome the internalized oppression of “if you’re black stay back; if you’re brown stick around; if you’re white you’re alright”, it occurred to me that while African-Americans could name prejudiced whites and the “white power structure” as their enemy, poor whites really had only themselves to blame for their circumstances. There was no other consensus or emerging consciousness available to them to explain their poverty. Today, of course, supported by the country’s President, they blame “The Other” who is taking their jobs, pushing them aside on the American status ladder and threatening their country.
Enter Keri Leigh Merritt! I just finished her Cambridge University Press-published Masterless Men. It is an indispensible resource for those who want to overcome racism in the South, in particular, and in the country as a whole—a result that cannot be accomplished without specifically addressing it among the white working class, often characterized as “poor white”. And, in turn, present approaches that ignore or minimize the oppression of poor and working class whites will not work to overcome racism.
Keri Leigh Merritt
Merritt is a white southerner, born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, raised in the South, and educated at southern universities. You can tell reading the book that her interest is more than academic. That led me to learn more about her in the History News Network interview with Robin Lindley, November 15, 2017:
“I started studying poor whites and the nineteenth century South as an undergraduate and realized their story was largely untold. They were nearly always left out of history simply due to the fact that they were illiterate. I knew I wanted to go on to graduate school and study this topic, because I believe it adds a lot of nuance to how race and class interact – and how racism is perpetuated in America.”
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“I come from impoverished whites myself on my mother’s side…I still remember visiting my grandmother during the summers and seeing not only the poverty of the area but how it affected both whites and blacks in her area of town. All the rest of the town – the upper middle class and upper-class sections – was segregated. But the really poor area was completely integrated. That didn’t mean that the poor whites weren’t racist, but they still lived with black people. They worked with black people. They had an underground economy. It was a story you don’t see told in history — and an interaction of poor people that we don’t talk about.”
Merritt was relentless in her search for information and documentation: oral histories with slaves who talk about poor whites, the Tennessee Civil War Veterans questionnaires, southern newspapers, coroner’s inquests, contemporary books written by defenders and critics of slavery, court testimony, census data, petitions to the powerful from poor whites, jail records, minutes of meetings, records of the sale of slaves and whatever else she could find. “I used as many different sources as possible to form a more complete picture of the lives of the Deep South’s poor whites,” she said.
In brief, here’s what she discovered. Southern white society was divided into three classes: a relatively small aristocracy of large plantation owners who had slaves numbering from 20 to the hundreds and in a few cases thousands, and who were the oligarchy that ruled the south; yeoman farmers who owned relatively small parcels and struggled to make ends meet, though some owned one-or-two slaves; and “masterless men” and women who lived in deep poverty. They hunted, fished, marginally farmed and stole to survive. They traded with slaves, providing homebrew liquor in exchange for food the slaves appropriated from their masters. The depth of their poverty sometimes exceeded that of slaves who, to be productive property, had to be fed the minimum required to work.
The exchanges between poor whites, slaves and freedmen weren’t limited to secretive trading. They gambled and socialized together; friendships developed in some cases. Throughout the antebellum period, they conspired and acted together in defeated rebellions, leading the slave-owner aristocracy to pursue carefully constructed divide-and-conquer strategies. In some cases, they had children together, including those of white women, who, because of southern law, were born free (the same wasn’t true of the children of black women who were fathered by whites).
As slave numbers increased, their owners realized they could use them to do work previously done by whites hired in the market. Poor whites became increasingly marginalized and increasingly hostile to slavery. They recognized that while legally free, they were, in fact, in bondage to the same system. In some cases, they formed associations or unions that petitioned southern state governments to disallow slave competition. In almost every case, they failed. It became increasingly clear to poor whites and their advocates that the plantation aristocracy was their oppressor as well.
The period approaching southern secession was marked by increased conflict. Laws against vagrancy, loitering and begging led to the incarceration of poor whites, typically in horrific jails. It became clear to those who ruled that they could not count on the support of poor whites in the civil war that was coming.
As the war developed, evasion of military service was widespread. Counties where there were few plantations, usually “hill country”, remained loyal to the union, as did large numbers of poor whites. To counteract this threat, Confederate leaders created myths proclaiming the horrors whites would face if slaves were freed. Illiteracy due to poor or non-existent public education left poor whites unable to read about alternatives. Unionists, and especially abolitionists, were jailed, tarred and feathered, beaten, run out of town (and the state) and sometimes killed.
Poor whites bore the brunt of Confederacy fighting. Owners of plantations with 20-or-more slaves were exempt from the draft. As the war proceeded, poor whites deserted in large numbers joining draft dodgers in swamp lands, forests and other areas where they could hide from army recruiters and local law enforcement.
Postbellum it can fairly be said the oligarchy South won the Civil War in substance if not form. Poor whites and blacks were better off, but everything is relative. It is difficult to say their lives substantially improved. Now, however, it was blacks who were at the bottom of the social, economic and political hierarchy. Whites were better able to sell their labor in the absence of slave competition. The system of white privilege was erected by the South’s militarily defeated elite. Briefly challenged later by the Populists, its structure persisted, and persists today—as the continuing public presence of symbols of the Confederacy attests.
Weaknesses
I wish Merritt had explored more deeply the Union Leagues that for a brief period created alliances between poor and poorer whites and blacks within the Republican Party. Near the conclusion of her book, she notes Eugene Genovese’s “hints of mutual sympathy and compassion in a world in which so much conspired to sow distrust and hatred suggest that the Reconstruction era was not fated to end as it did.” The outcome that prevailed was the opposite: poor whites now became the lowest class in a caste system in which they pride fully knew they were not black. Failures of the Federal Government clearly played a role. Without enforcement of emancipation, laws and practices created slavery by another name. Without land reform, freedmen and women had no economic base upon which to build. (Merritt discusses the Homestead Act and Southern Homestead Act, which provided land for tens of thousands of poor whites to “finally join the ranks of landholders”. No such opportunity was created for former slaves. Yet another failure also took place: the one that might have built organization and social movement on Genovese’s “hints of mutual sympathy”. Why were those efforts few, and why did those few fail? I wish Merritt had given these questions more attention.
Though it would have taken her on a bit of a detour, some comment could have been made on what newly emerging Reconstruction black leadership, including elected officials, might have done to engage poor whites more deeply with the Republican Party. Did their own status as more educated people, often coming from leadership backgrounds in the black church, create in them the same attitude that I saw in SNCC people who spoke of “Honkies”?
My organizer eyes found her sometimes fuzzy on what constitutes “education” for social change. She focuses on illiteracy and the absence of public schools for poor whites, but says little about the kind of education that can take place in the context of action if there is time and space for reflecting on what is being done. During the slavery era, that time and those spaces didn’t exist. Did they during Reconstruction and, especially, Radical Reconstruction?
Masterless Men would have benefited from some tighter editing, and the footnotes are sometimes difficult to follow.
All these, however, are minor points about a book that is a must read for out times.
Conclusion
In her interview Merritt describes a new generation of southern historians, white and black, who are going deeply into the gritty day-to-day lives of slaves, freedmen, poor whites and white yeoman farmers. It is a welcome development.
Her book is an essential read for anyone who cares about the future of the country.
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I Am Immigrant Twice Over and I Am Working Class
By Antonio Olmos
When I was young, I was quite an Anglophile. I listened the BBC World Service, I watched Monty Python’s films and TV shows, I watched gritty British cinema set in Thatcher’s 80’s landscape, and I listened to all the British punk and new wave bands that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Looking back the only thing I didn’t consume was contemporary British Literature. Only the classics from George Orwell and older. I never imagined that I would one day come to the UK and live in London for 25 years. Half my life now.
It is not the sort of thing that A Mexican kid from Mexicali dreams about. It was not part of any plans I had as we illegally emigrated to the United States and ended up in Fresno. I wanted to please my family, so I studied hard and had ambitions to study law, politics and history. Not once under the age of 20 did I dream of living in Europe. I also never dreamed I would end up being a Photojournalist.
And yet here I am living in the London Borough of Enfield. It seems as normal as anything and only when I reflect on my journey does it seem slightly preposterous.
My mother was a cleaner. A single mom who worked in a hospital raising me and my three younger sisters. My mother grew up about 70 miles south of Ensenada on a family farm which grew corn and watermelons. My grandfather was a refugee from the Mexican Revolution which ravaged his home state of Puebla. He worked as a farm hand both in Mexico and Southern California when the border was open. He worked almost 20 years in the fields of Orange County before saving up enough money to buy land in Baja California. His first 5 children were born in the United States and are American Citizens.
I tell you this brief incomplete backstory of myself because I wanted to illustrate one point. I am immigrant twice over and I am working class. It is something I am proud of. I look back now of the time I lived in America and I think the political culture tried to beat that consciousness out of me. The culture ingrained in me some unspoken desire that I should strive to be and identify as middle class and if I was lucky, be rich.
Living in London, the UK, Europe and one thing I know is that class matters here. Thatcher tried to import that American Dream mentality and it has in some respects succeeded. Many Brits now think that the only thing that matters is our own personal initiative. Failure and poverty is a personal fault. Don’t blame society for your ills. The Labour Party under Tony Blair came to power soon after I settled here. Under Blair, The Labour Party ditched its socialist label and co-opted a lot of Thatcherite ideology in order to become “electable”. Winning elections seem to redeem this policy direction.
To me this was part of a wider trend in Western Democracies since the end of the Cold War that pronounced Capitalism the victor and Communism (but really they mean Socialism) the loser. No longer in fear of Communism, a lot of western democracies stopped paying lip service to equality, good social services, and a generous welfare state. And since 1989 inequality has grown and grown because the Bolsheviks don’t seem to be coming and taking all of our stuff away anytime soon.
Once I became a British Citizen I voted for the Labour Party in 2001. Soon after came 9/11 and the “War on Terror” which Tony Blair happily signed up to and I stopped voting for Labour in protest. I voted Green in 2005 and in 2010 general elections. In Britain’s first past the post system, it was really a protest vote. In 2015 I voted for Labour again because the new leader Ed Milliband seemed to be stepping back from Blair’s policies and once again talking of Socialism. The Labour Party lost anyway, The Conservatives won and soon they gave us Brexit.
Ed Milliband resigned after the defeat and under a new system he created there was one man, one vote elections from Labour Party members who chose the party’s new leader. As a photojournalist I covered those Leadership elections and as a Labour Party member (I joined in 2015) I participated. I was going to vote for Yvette Cooper because I thought the party needed a female leader. But watching the campaign I listened to her and her fellow candidates Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall say the same things over and over again as though reading from a script. And what that script said was the Conservative’s austerity plans must be continued, that addressing inequality must take a back seat to fixing the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, that the neoliberal policies of Thatcher and Blair must be maintained, that basically there was nothing really wrong with how things were. The fourth candidate in this election was Jeremy Corbyn. A long time unapologetic left wing member of the Labour Party, Corbyn wasn’t given a hope in hell of winning. Corbyn himself probably didn’t think he would win so he just stated what he actually believed which was in Socialism.
I have never been this excited about politics, ever. Living in Europe I realise how right wing the Democrats in the USA have been until recently.
Corbyn espoused taking back all the public services privatised under Thatcher and Blair – like the railways and utilities. He supported higher taxes to properly fund the National Health Service, public housing and public education. He espoused higher taxes for the rich to address inequality and he wanted a completely different foreign policy that abandoned the war on terror, ditched the British Nuclear arsenal and promoted peace. And he wanted to tackle Climate Change in a meaningful way.
Corbyn won and in 2016 after being challenged again in the wake of Brexit, won again.
In the 2017 general election when every single pundit predicted that the Labour Party would be wiped out under Corbyn, they did as best as is possible without winning and deprived The Conservative Party under Theresa May a working majority in Parliament.
I have never been this excited about politics, ever. Living in Europe I realise how right wing the Democrats in the USA have been until recently. Corbyn represents real change from the neoliberal agenda that has dominated since Reagan and Thatcher.
But since his election as Leader of the Labour Party Corbyn has been vilified not only by the right wing press but also by many people who I consider myself very closely aligned to politically … or so I thought.
Corbyn was at first vilified for being an apologist for the IRA and for being a Marxist. Corbyn long espoused speaking to the Irish Republicans during the Troubles when no one dared. One of the great things Tony Blair did was talk to the IRA which led to the Good Friday Agreement. So the argument of talking to the IRA made him a terrorist sympathiser seemed ludicrous in the context of recent history. He was vilified as a Marxist for his unapologetic socialism even at the height of the cold war. He was vilified as a peacenik for being against Reagan’s Cold war policies, for being against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and countless other military interventions. But on reflection History seemed to vindicate his views over and over again.
But now the biggest and in my view the most damaging attack on him has been that he is anti Semitic.
Corbyn has long been a supporter of the Palestinian struggle. He has supported the Palestinian Liberation Organisation since he became an MP. In the 80s of course the PLO was treated as a terrorist organisation. Corbyn talked to the PLO, the ANC and the IRA in the 80s when almost all mainstream politicians didn’t in fear of being labelled apologists for terrorism. Now every mainstream politician talks to them. But Corbyn has also not been afraid to speak to Hezbollah and Hamas. The ANC, the IRA and the PLO all had left wing, socialist, anti imperialist tendencies, while Hamas and Hezbollah have their ideology in their struggle rooted in political Islam. Before Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party no one to my knowledge ever accused him of anti Semitism. Maybe this was due to the fact that as an MP on the fringes of parliament no one took much notice of him. The Labour Party under Blair and Gordon Brown had large majorities and did not need Corbyn’s support.
We have a grown comfortable with our free spending capitalist consumerist society. Probably anyone reading this is …
After he became leader the right wing press as well as many pro Blair Labour party MPs accused Corbyn of being an apologist for the IRA and of being a Marxist. Both charges didn’t really stick since the world had moved on from the politics of the 80s. They tried to unseat him for his lukewarm support for staying in Europe during the referendum campaign. Something I admit bothered me a bit because I am very much in favour of staying as part of the European Union. Corbyn won a leadership challenge decisively after the referendum even though the party is heavily pro European. Corbyn’s policies as described in the election manifesto of 2017 nearly led to victory.
So in my opinion, this is what has led us to the charges of anti Semitism. His critics have failed to dislodge him over policies and over Europe and have turned to charges of anti Semitism to get rid of him.
When Ed Milliband reformed the election rules of Labour, he basically got rid of the Union’s block vote in which unions in effect voted for their members and could deliver thousands of votes for any candidate they favoured. In its place was one member, one vote, along with an ease to joining the membership through low fees and via the internet. Corbyn’s leadership campaign as it gained momentum inspired many to join the party and vote for him. By the end of his victorious campaign the membership swelled to over half a million, making it the largest party in Europe based on active membership. There is no doubt that among those vast numbers, anti Semites, possibly who liked Corbyn’s criticism of Israeli policies, joined the party. Among those numbers it is also highly likely that campaigners and sympathisers of the Palestinian struggle also joined because they saw Corbyn as like minded. I don’t defend anybody who is anti Semitic. Any racists should be kicked out of the party once identified. Problematic too is that many pro Palestinian members don’t have the ability to articulate criticisms of Israeli policies without venturing into the language of anti Jewish rhetoric. They may not mean to be anti Semitic but they write stuff that sounds like age-old tropes of anti Semitism. The trouble with mass membership in which joining is quite easy is that no one is vetted until they do or say something stupid. And critics of Corbyn have used the undoubted stupidity of some new members to blame him personally for the views of every one of these idiots. The charge that can be laid on Corbyn’s doorstep is that he and the Labour leadership did not take it sufficiently seriously to deal with it promptly.
There is a lot of hostility to Corbyn over Israel. The political mainstream is still very sympathetic to Israel even if they always make sure to mention that they are supporters of a two state solution. But I truly believe the winds of change are coming. Decades of settlement building and the right wing nationalist policies of Likud led Israel have turned many young people and people of colour to view Israel very critically.
I don’t think Corbyn is anti Semitic. In my experience of life Racists don’t tend to be selective of who they hate. Corbyn has a long tradition of anti racist causes. He has always maintained that his inspiration in politics and activism has been the “Battle of Cable Street”. In 1936 the police were sent to protect a march by fascists led by Oswald Mosley through Cable Street, a then predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Left wing groups and the Jewish community turned out in force, 20,000, to stop the march by 2,000 fascists and 7,000 policemen. The left won. Corbyn has also famously been photographed being arrested in the early 1980s for demonstrating against Apartheid.
What Corbyn represents is real change. And that is what scares people. After 38 years of Neo Liberalism in the UK, even people who purport to be left wing are scared of real change. Neo liberalism has got us loving our mortgages, our credit cards, our far-flung holidays, and our consumerism. Climate change and growing inequality are a threat to this consumerist lifestyle. Many purported left-wingers are in fear of the value of their bubble inflated home coming down. We all say we want to tackle these problems without any costs to us. But a growing consensus, especially among the young, is that the world has to change. We have a grown comfortable with our free spending capitalist consumerist society. Probably anyone reading this is not homeless, not near bankruptcy, not in fear of their kid’s education. Everyone reading this probably recycles, tries to use public transport as much as possible, and is aware of the problems facing this planet. What we all fear is real change, even change that we know we need. The most to lose out under a Corbyn government will be the rich and the corporations. Their taxes are going to go up and they will probably start to be taxed not just on their income but on their wealth. And the means by which they accumulate wealth will probably also begin to be heavily regulated.
A lot of vested interests are afraid. The rich and the corporations have their hands on the levers of power, they have the ears of the lawmakers in a way we don’t. They own most of the media on who we depend on our information to make educated choices in our democracy. They own the wealth that has increased exponentially unchecked since 1989. I don’t think Corbyn is radical to the degree that he will actually try to end capitalism, but he will probably tackle inequality and climate change in a way that FDR tackled the Depression. I am tired of talk and I want change. I doubt the world will be fixed completely if Corbyn is elected. He will still be the leader of a reluctant moderate party wary of radical change. Change in a democracy has to be consensual by default and the very act of legislating will be slow. But my hope is that it will be in the right direction. My life path has been a strange one, but at least I have seen a lot of the world and have been witness to many amazing events. I always tell people that I was dealt a bad hand in life but I made the most of it. I am aware that a lot of luck and chance took place to be where I am at. Only recently in speaking to my mother have I truly realised how precarious we were economically. One broken leg or serious illness and my family could have been destitute. My mother never shared stress over late payments, of having to borrow money from family and friends so me and my sisters could eat. The first time I truly began to realise how poor we were was when I had a chance to do a London semester while in high school. All the kids that wanted to go went, except me. The costs were way beyond what my mother could ever manage. I was upset but I accepted the decision. So my chance to visit what became my future home was delayed by 13 years. I think I honour my mother and her struggles when I make my political choices. So I don’t buy all the scare tactics that tell me I shouldn’t vote for Corbyn. My gut feeling and life experience tell me he is someone who will steer my adopted country in the right direction.
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Freelancing: The New Road To Poverty
By Harry Brill
The issue of worker exploitation refers obviously to the unfair treatment of employees, who are underpaid and given very few or no benefits. That doesn’t only include employees on the payroll, but also refers to workers who are misclassified as independent contractors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if workers were properly classified, the various additional costs to employers, including paid sick leave, medical coverage, and unemployment insurance, would be about 40 percent more.
But in recent years there has been another unfortunate development, which involves working people who are neither on an employer’s payroll nor misclassified. I am referring to the phenomenal increase in freelance workers. Just in the last four years, the number of freelancers increased by more than 8 percent compared to only a 2.6 percent for the entire U.S. workforce. These workers, rather than being employed by a company, are instead self-employed. This has been viewed by the mass media as a tremendous gain because so many working people have decided to set up their own business.
For a long while, when our economy was expanding in ways that created new opportunities for workers, that perspective was appropriate. But no longer. Too many freelancers earn very little and receive no benefits from their clients. As the climbing number bankruptcies reveal, the chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur are very small.
“According to a study by the Freelancers Union, which represents many freelancers, the average freelancer is stiffed by businesses about $6,000 a year.”
The advantages to the business community of doing business with freelancers are immense. Instead of maintaining a staff that receives regular, uninterrupted wages and benefits, they dole out work to freelancers at a relative low cost because the freelancers usually compete with other freelancers to obtain work. The lowest bidder typically gets the business. (Editor’s note: in some sectors, for instance journalism, rates and conditions are set without bidding by the company – in either model all power rests with the client.)
The number of freelancers exceeds 57 million, which is about 35 percent of the workforce. For many it is not their only source of income. But more than 15 million are now freelancing exclusively. The percentage who earn their living only by freelancing rose substantially during the last four years from only 17 to about 25 percent of all freelancers. This trend is likely to continue.
Although many freelancers make a good living most are financially stretched. Two-thirds of freelancers have to dip into their personal savings at least once every month to pay their bills. That is three times more than non-freelancers. Except for very few freelancers, their work situation is unpredictable. They have to endure periods when they do not get any work at all. When work has not come their way, their income is zero dollars. Only their expenses remain.
To obtain contracts for a particular assignment they often bid for jobs that are posted. One commentator noticed that bids could be made as low as one dollar an hour! Since they are not employees, the minimum wage laws do not apply. Obviously the fierce competition for business between freelancers keeps the average income fairly low. In addition, many corporations don’t pay their bills for as long as 45 to 60 days. The long waiting period is a burden for many of these workers. In fact, some business customers violate their contract by not paying at all. In the last year, 40 percent of freelancers reported that at least one of their customers failed to pay them. According to a study by the Freelancers Union, which represents many freelancers, the average freelancer is stiffed by businesses about $6,000 a year.
Nevertheless, the number of freelance workers continues to increase. If present trends continue by 2027 freelancers will make up a majority of the workforce. A combination of factors including job loss, more employers converting full- time to part- time jobs, and stagnant wages are forcing many workers to strike out on their own. But in this increasingly competitive environment, finding job assignments on a regular basis is very difficult. For most freelancers, their work is intermittent. In short, what is characterized by the establishment as upward mobility is really downward mobility.
Ironically, since freelancers are self-employed, they are not counted as unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics even during those periods when despite their efforts they are not obtaining any work. This anomaly contributes to misunderstating the official unemployment rate.
There is an important lesson to learn from the experience of most freelancers. For the vast majority of working people, individualistic rather than collective solutions do not work in the current economic environment. What gave working people a tremendous advantage in the past was adopting mainly collective rather than individualistic alternatives, particularly by organizing and joining labor unions. Workers cannot generally make major achievements by just working alone. They must continue their collective efforts on behalf of ALL workers — no tribal stuff — to improve their standard of living and quality of life.
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This article originally appeared in Berkeley Daily Planet
The Play’s the Thing
By Peter Olney and Gene Bruskin
Gene Bruskin, Author and Organizer interviewed by Peter Olney, Stansbury Forum co-editor, and long time friend and colleague about his new play.
Peter O: Gene you have written a new musical play entitled “The Moment Was Now”, which takes place in 1869 in post civil war Baltimore. Can you give us a brief synopsis?
Gene: This was really a turning point in US history when America almost did the right thing. Under Reconstruction, instituted by Congress, the South was writing new state constitutions and African Americans were getting elected to local and national offices. Baltimore was a border state with a history of being half slave and half free. The play centers on the impassioned search for unity among dynamic leaders of powerful movements during this period. The conflicts and possibilities unfold at a fictional meeting convened by Frederick Douglass.
The echoes of the current moment are everywhere.
Peter O: William Sylvis, Susan B. Anthony, Isaac Myers and Frances Harper are your four protagonists, with Douglass sort of setting the stage. These are real historical characters. Can you tell us a little about each one of them? And how does Jay Gould fit in?
Gene: This is quite a remarkable group of people – all revolutionaries in their own way, but all with fatal flaws that become apparent in the course of the show. The conclusion of the civil war and the emergence of 4 million free African-Americans created a tremendous momentum for change, just as the civil rights movement of the 60’s in the US set the stage for the blossoming of the civil rights, women’s and gay liberation movements.
Of course Douglass is the legendary abolitionist and civil rights visionary, arguably the seminal figure of the 19th Century, along with Lincoln. Susan B Anthony is the most widely recognized among the others. She was an abolitionist, a suffragette and during this period, she began organizing women workers.
Isaac Myers organized a union of African American shipyard workers in 1866 in the same Baltimore shipyard where Douglass worked when he escaped. Myers went on with Douglass to found the [Colored] National Labor Union, which for a time had a national presence.
William Sylvis, an ironworker, organized the National Labor Union which represented several hundred thousand workers by 1869.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, African American Feminist, teacher, and author, who spent years in the Reconstruction south.
Jay Gould, who lurks ominously in the background, was one of the early railroad kingpins who helped usher in the industrial revolution.
Peter O: Why is such a play relevant to today’s turbulent times?
Gene: This was a “moment” filled with opportunities and pitfalls, and unfortunately they were unable to build unity. They clashed around the issues of racism, sexism and class. Jay Gould, among others of his ilk, was able to take advantage of their divisions. This was a moment when the two-party system became consolidated and the white supremacy of the Klan was decisive in the retrenchment of the southern aristocracy.
We are at a moment now, again where white supremacy is central and there are massive movements from below and enormous wealth and power consolidating at the top. The two parties are in crisis. But moments come and moments go – clearly we must, as the saying goes, “seize the time.” This play has many lessons and we hope it both inspires and teaches, as well as entertains.
Peter O: Lin Manuel Miranda has achieved fame with “Hamilton”, and he has also been a strong advocate for the Puerto Rican people in the face of Trump’s attacks on the island and its inhabitants. Did his work inspire you to use the medium of a musical play?
Gene: “Hamilton” was a remarkable piece of musical theater and I have great respect for Miranda. It used spoken word, music and choreography to teach history. But it tells the story of a man who was in no way a revolutionary – in fact not even a progressive. It’s a story of the elite of that time, all slave owners. (Hamilton wasn’t personally but his wife came from a wealthy slave owning family) Although the characters are all actors of color, a statement in itself, there is barely a word about slavery. There are 46 songs but none about slavery.
After seeing the play I thought, wow, if music and spoken word can be used so powerfully to tell this somewhat traditional history, what if I used that format to tell the story of an exciting and relevant moment in history. “The Moment Was Now” is almost entirely in spoken word and musical format. After extensive research I was able to use the characters own words throughout, with some poetic license of course. These characters all knew each other but never met as a group. We have been assembling a talented group of actors and musicians with the help of my artistic director, Darryll Moch, and my music director, Glenn Pearson and it is coming to life.
Peter O: “Hamilton” has certainly been a blockbuster but is that cultural form the best way to reach labor audiences? What was your experience with your previous musical, “Pray for the Dead”?
Gene: I wrote “Pray for the Dead – a Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny” in 2016 and it played for unions and community groups. People loved it because it talked about them, about class and power, with music and humor. At some shows the workers yelled out at the boss and behaved raucously during the show, more like they were in a union hall than at a theater. I loved it. “Moment” is also what I call “theater for the, 99%,” written for people who don’t normally go to theater. We are partnering with unions, women’s groups and others to fill the theater.
There is something about the immediacy of theater that is powerful and theater, particularly earlier in the 20th century, has a history in the US as a force for change. We intend to have audience discussions after each play -that worked very well with “Pray” – people want to talk about this stuff.
Successful movements need people’s culture – can you imagine the 60’s civil rights movement if there was no singing?
Peter O: You have a long and impressive 40 year plus career of labor and people’s justice organizing, why did you get the theater bug now?
Gene: I grew up in South Philly and my dad was a big fan of musicals – the records were always playing. I co-wrote some original plays for community theater in the 70s, But once I got involved in the labor movement I had to put it aside. After I retired, in addition to keeping one foot in the labor movement, I decided to give myself the gift of writing again and it’s been a great experience.
Peter O: Obviously producing such a musical play requires resources. How do you intend to get the funds necessary to produce such a musical?
Gene: That is a challenge. One other major difference between “Moment” and “Hamilton” is that our tickets will be very affordable – no $1,000 seats.
No big investors and in fact many foundations aren’t interested in so-called “political” plays. But we intend to pay our talented crew as fairly as possible. And there are many other costs involved. So we are scrambling.
Peter O: How can our readers help you to put on this important work?
Gene: The play will open in Baltimore on August 23rd and show for three weekends.
We have launched a Go Fund Me that makes it easy for folks to contribute.
They should go to: https://www.gofundme.com/the-moment-was-now
Also they can find us on Facebook at: “The Moment Was Now”
If someone wants to reach me directly they can email me at genebruskin@gmail.com
Baggage Reclaim: Chaos, uncertainty and …
By Robert Gumpert
A year ago I was in London. It was a year since the UK voted to leave the EU and there was a year before it was to be implemented. There were disturbing signs the whole enterprise was not as advertised.
The UK and London, in particular, are home for me as much, if not more, than the USA and San Francisco. My time as a journalist has given me a taste for going to events I thought important milestones. In relatively recent times that has meant Obama’s first inauguration for obvious reasons. And Trump’s, because it seemed/seems to me he represents America at a crossroads between the future and the past, between a pluralistic and relatively democratic society and authoritarian rule by an even smaller and more homogenous elite than have held the reins of power in my life time. So here I am, in London, for Brexit, the UK’s “divorce” from the EU.
“If you are not confused you haven’t been following things properly” BBC Brexit correspondent on 30 March 2019
I assume most reading this piece are looking for a bit clarity on what the hell is going on here in the UK. You won’t find it these words. I have followed the circus that is Brexit now for two years and the best I can tell you is no one seems to know. So I am going to write down a few of the recent low points, what seems to be their effects and a few thoughts and questions.
With time running out on the two year period since officially serving papers (Article 50) to the EU that the UK was leaving, the PM Theresa May (Tory), managed at long last to put together an exit deal with the EU, a deal that if signed essentially “divorced” the UK from the EU but would not be the final word in settlement. It would serve as a foundation to work out details over time – how much time, who knows?.
There were problems from the very beginning – meaning the moment it was decided there would be a referendum on EU membership and how it would be worded. In the end the absurdly complex idea of separating the UK from the EU was boiled down to a simple yes we stay, no we don’t. Then campaigned for by using dark money, wildly crazy promises, conspiracy theories, and fear/hated of others. On the remain side, the campaign was a mix of confused messages and indecision. The result was a surprise to both sides. The UK voted to leave – or at least voted on the idea to leave, and Brexit took its first political causality, Tory PM David Cameron resigned. In came Theresa May and events have spiralled downhill ever since.
In short: May wanting to increase her Tory majority in Parliament to insure a smooth vote on whatever final agreement she managed to hammer out with Brussels, called a “snap election”. In what seems now a pattern of failing to “read the room” the election was lost. Nor was it won by Labour. The Tories retained the most MPs but had need support of the right-wing DUP of Northern Ireland to remain in power, a feat accomplished by May arranging a billion pound “pay off”.
“like so many landowners, newspaper barons, hedge fund managers, firebrand back-bench M.P.s, ex-pat billionaires and Russian oligarchs, they thought it was high time the ordinary people of UK got a chance to send a strong message to an out-of-touch elite”. From “The Story of Berexit”, A Ladybird Book
With her government somewhat secure May entered into negotiations with Brussels. They did not go well but eventually a deal was fit for submission to Parliament. Issues remained – how to deal products such like Airbus built across many national borders and copyright litigation, amongst many. But most of all how to deal with the Irish/Northern Ireland border. When the the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 largely ended the “Troubles”, the Northern Ireland – Ireland border opened for free movement. Since Ireland remains in the EU and Northern Ireland, as part of the UK will leave, border controls will reappear and, the fear is, so will the “Troubles”. As a stop gap the EU separation agreement had the “Backstop”, a temporary solution if no agreement on trade and material movement between the EU and the UK was worked out in the near future. The DUP and other UK “hard” Brexiters see this as nothing more than betrayal and continued EU dominance over UK sovereignty and won’t vote for any agreement with such a clause.
It is at this point, starting about 2 weeks ago, that a strange, disquieting situation descended into complete chaos, and to some political watchers the worst and most dangerous British political crisis since World War Two.
In the last two weeks Parliament has voted down the May negotiated agreement three times. But as the late night ads go, there is more. After vote number one, May returned to Brussels where EU ministers had been saying for sometime that the deal was the deal and the UK was going to have to take or leave it by 29 March. However May was able to get a “legal” letter of clarification on the “backstop” – characterised by some as changed in font and character size only – to present. When the government’s own legal expert characterised it as not binding in any meaningful way, May lost the second vote and The Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow ruled that without real change the government could not present the agreement for a third vote. But a third vote did indeed happen after May, again failing to read the room, offered to resign once the agreement was approved thus leaving the post agreement negotiations to another. The MPs were not impressed, in no small part because May at this point appears to be a “dead man walking”, regardless of any developments.
About this time, many in the public wanting a second public vote begin a petition drive, it started slowly. And then, again demonstrating her blindness to conditions, May gave a speech alleging that she has her finger on the pulse of the great British public and they overwhelmingly want her agreement – that the failure to finalise Brexit is purely with the MPs. MPs reacted by taking over the process of what is to be done and the public petition drive for a new vote went from 1 million signers to 3.5 million, literally overnight. On Saturday, the 24th of March, a million people marched in London for a new vote. Not to remain, but a new vote to determine in a more informed what should happen: take the current deal, exit without a deal or remain. This would not be a general election. Hard Brexiters, lead by Nigel Farage, began their march to London in support of leaving on the 29th. There are about 150 of them.
Taking control of the process a number of MPs tabled proposals for different avenues of leaving, and even perhaps remaining. In the end Bercow choose 8, some of which had been sponsored in a bipartisan effort by MPs from a number of parties, to be voted on. All lost.
May returned to Brussels to plead for more time, to have a fourth vote on her proposal and if it fails to work out something new. The EU agreed to hear her out, taking time out from trade negotiations with China to do so. But after talking with her, hearing no hint of hope that an extended deadline will result in anything different, and May failing to have any idea of a plan B, the EU ministers, reported by The Guardian, ask her to go outside and sit-down, to wait to be called back. The ministers asked the Chinese to come back the following day and then workout a proposal to extend the Brexit deadline to 12 April May’s deal is signed and 22 May if it is not.
It’s Sunday, 31 March, two days past the original Brexit deadline, and 13 days before the new one of 12 April. This coming week May will try for a fourth time get MPs to pass her proposal. This time she is threatening them with a general election. It is hard to see how such a threat would work as Labour has been calling for just that for quite awhile now and the proposal needs Labour votes to pass. MPs plan, it is reported, to have a run off of the two (meaning the least no votes) of the eight losing proposals.
What is going to happen? Have no idea. It’s possible May will no longer be PM having lost in some sort of Tory coup. This would leave the Tories still the dominant member of a coalition government but with a new head to lead them into new general elections in the event they happen. But recent polls are mixed and Corbyn says he would welcome a general election.
Will there be another referendum type election? The petition, now almost certainly with over 5 million signatures, has been dismissed. The march of 1 million, yesterday’s news. Labour has waffled repeatedly about such an election. So again, I don’t know.
Here are a few observations:
Brexit has torn at the fabric of the two main political parties in UK. MPs have left both parties and more have threatened to follow. May was, two years ago, a remainer. Now she sees only one path, her’s and seems determined to follow it over a cliff. She appears to be as mean, blind, vindictive and anti-democratic as Trump, but without the ability to read the room or garner the loyalty that he does.
Within the Tories there are groups looking for a “hard Brexit” to those wanting to remain.
Labour, by any measure of conventional wisdom should be dominating the polls, but isn’t. At least in the ones I’ve seen. Corbyn has never shown strong support for remaining in the EU believing that it is mainly a “bosses” endeavour. Within Labour there are factions that agree with him, those strongly “leave”, a group agreeing the EU is a bosses club but believe leaving a mistake, and neo-liberals who want to remain.
Labour seems, for the most part, to support a new referendum. The stated belief among some in both the Conservative and Labour parties that a second referendum is someone anti-democratic because “the people” have spoken I find ludicrous and dishonest.
The “hard” Brexiters say the EU will have no choice but to come around, that the EU needs UK more than UK needs the EU. But I wonder how long this position can be sustained with the number of stories appearing about major sectors of the British economy taking hits – finance moving from London to Dublin, car plants closing and doubts about manufacturing .
Forgetting the irony of depending on foreigners in the guise of tourism as an economic model, in a world economy is the British economy big enough and healthy enough to successful negotiate advantages agreements with such as the United States, China or the EU? Case in point, Trump administration attempts to get the UK to buy “chlorinated” chicken from the US. While it provided a nice focus point, the issue was rooted in differences in industrial farming practices of the two countries. Alone the UK may not have the clout to dictate what kind of product practices they will accept.
It is interesting to me that the “leave” folks seem to have no issue with certain forms of cultural dictation: Starbucks and Star Wars be two examples.
Lastly, to a larger degree than in the USA Brexit has taken over the discourse. It is a truly momentous decision on multiple levels with structural and political implications for the UK and the world, but all other issues around how society is organised should not be crowded out. The effects of an austerity government on society, there just isn’t air in the room for debate. To Corbyn and Labour’s credit, they have talked about these issues, about homelessness, the decline of the NHS, the gap between rich and poor but the voices have been muted. It will be interesting to see if these issues come to the fore if Labour is successful in forcing a general election.
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Krugman’s Rural Despair Misses the Mark
By Anthony Flaccavento
I have a great deal of respect for Paul Krugman, but his March 18th New York Times piece, “Getting Real About Rural America” badly missed the mark. Like fellow Times analyst, Eduardo Porter, Krugman begins with the premise that “nobody knows how to fix rural America.” In point of fact, a consensus has begun to emerge about a range of strategies that work in rural communities, based on economic revitalization success stories from the Midwest to Central Appalachia, where I live. And we don’t just know what works; it’s also increasingly clear what doesn’t, including specific policies and strategies that are crushing the people and the economies of the countryside. Here then are four challenges to Mr Krugman and the many other analysts wondering aloud what the heck is wrong with us folks in the boonies.
Jobs are being created. Local wealth is being developed. Ecosystems are being reimagined as community assets, rather than a source from which to extract and export wealth.
First, while the economic and social problems of rural America are indeed real, they’ve become the default narrative for city-dwelling commentators and experts, overshadowing tangible progress and effective solutions. In Appalachia for instance, the poverty rate has been cut in half since the launch of Great Society programs in the early 1960’s, and the number of “distressed” counties has dropped from 295 to about 90 (Appalachian Regional Commission). This improvement, even as three out of every four coal jobs have been lost. Nationwide, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service, rural unemployment rates dropped from 10.3% in 2010 to 4.4% in 2017, during which time 650,000 net new jobs were created. And while too many young people continue to leave, 2017 actually saw a net increase in population for rural counties. Broadly speaking then, things are getting better across many parts of rural America, albeit much too slowly and sporadically.
Second, things are getting better in large part because, well, some people do know how to fix things in rural areas. Like Brandon Dennison in southern West Virginia, whose Coalfield Development Corporation is successfully putting miners and others back to work with comprehensive, hands-on training in solar installation, deconstruction and sustainable farming. Or Bren Smith, whose ecologically restorative vertical ocean farming system is being adopted by fisherman along the east coast. Or the folks at We Own It, whose work to reform and open up the leadership of Rural Electric Cooperatives has begun to redeploy some of the $3 trillion in assets REC’s hold to better serve their members and communities. Or the innovators at Windustry, who for more than a decade have been helping farmers, public schools and rural communities increase their stake in community wind power, part of the larger wind industry on course to pay nearly a billion dollars annually to rural landowners by 2030 (Presidential Climate Action Program).
Brandon, Bren and hundreds of others like them, are catalyzing new and better approaches to local economic development in rural communities across the US, usually with meager outside investment from the public or private sector. Jobs are being created. Local wealth is being developed. Ecosystems are being reimagined as community assets, rather than a source from which to extract and export wealth.
Third, as bottom up strategies emerge and mature across rural America, they frequently must confront a lack of sustained investment along with contemptibly bad federal policies that restrain or undermine them. The sense one gets from reading Krugman’s piece is that, like the former East Germany, extraordinary sums of money have been spent in rural communities with little to show in return. The reality however is very different. An analysis by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation revealed that between 1994 and 2001, the feds actually spent between two and five times more, per person, on community and economic development in urban versus rural areas, a disparity that has changed little to the present day. And it’s no better in private philanthropy, where a 2011 Economic Research Service report showed that rural communities garnered less than six percent of foundation grants, even though one fifth of the population lives there. Bottom line: There are plenty of effective initiatives in rural communities, but a paucity of capital to support them.
It’s not just a lack of direct investment in rural areas. Even more destructive are long standing trends in federal policy that promote wealth extraction, economic concentration and undermining of the local economic base. In an outstanding article in Washington Monthly, Claire Kelloway describes how extreme levels of market consolidation have resulted from the lack of anti-trust enforcement and the weakening of laws to combat monopolies. This of course is an enormous problem for the country as a whole, but in rural regions, it is destroying farmers and sucking the life out of small towns. As Kelloway points out, “Farmers are caught between monopolized sellers and buyers. They must pay ever higher prices to the giants who dominate the market for the supplies they need, like seed and fertilizer. At the same time, they must accept ever lower prices from the giant agribusiness that buy the stuff they sell, like crops and livestock.”
When three companies control well over half of the global seed market, and four enormous packers account for 85% of the meat that comes to US markets (USDA), farmers are like serfs, with falling incomes and astronomical debts. And it isn’t just food monopolies. Thousands of community banks – the engine of lending in rural communities – have closed or been bought up by regional megabanks, further eroding the base of local capital. The obeisance of elected officials and the courts to monopolists, the enormous subsidies expended to lure huge, cash-rich corporations to small towns, and the accelerating privatization of public spaces, lands and functions ensure that building strong, self-reliant rural economies is a rare and heroic task.
My fourth and last challenge is simply this: That Mr Krugman broaden his sources and stop relying on assessments from people who neither live in nor understand rural America. Talk to the folks at the Center for Rural Affairs or the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, or the practitioners at Coastal Enterprises, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development or the Federation of Rural Cooperatives. Or me. What you’ll quickly learn is that rural America is neither a monolith nor a region ‘left behind’ by the dynamic folks in the big cities. Rather, it’s the place from where most of the food, fiber and energy upon which we all depend originates. And it is home to hundreds of innovators, problem solvers and entrepreneurs who do know how to make things better. They just need real investment, and an end to wealth extraction facilitated by federal policy and an endless stream of bad advice.
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The Primary Route – Pathway for Democratic Socialists
By Tom Gallagher
In 2015 prior to the Sanders candidacy Tom Gallagher authored a political pamphlet entitled, The Primary Route: How the 99% Take on the Military Industrial Complex. This short and engaging examination of third party efforts and primary challenges was prescient in predicting the power of Bernie Sanders candidacy in the 2016 Democratic primary. Now over two years after the election of Donald Trump and heading into 2020 Gallagher once again examines the political feasibility of the primary route in building a socialist current in America.
Would active participation in the presidential primary race advance the development of a serious American electoral left? Before 2016, the jury was out on this question. The argument for involvement in the presidential process was that, while success might be more likely in House or Senate races (and certainly in state or local races), a presidential candidacy offered a breadth of opportunity that the lower level races simply did not. Only the presidential election process provides a political forum involving the entire nation – a debate and discussion about where the country is at and where it wants to go, whose importance far surpasses that of any other event in the normal American political cycle. And the argument for participation specifically in the primaries (and caucuses) – as opposed to a “third party” run – rests on the fact that the primaries offer a “safe” option, a situation where candidates of the left are less likely to see their message overshadowed by the perceived danger of their efforts ultimately making matters worse by inadvertently helping to elect a Republican – a debate that has continued for nearly twenty years since Ralph Nader’s 2000 run. After the Bernie Sanders campaign, the question of the value of taking the primary route would appear to be settled.
In the process of taking some unusually “big issues” – universal health insurance, a minimum wage that is actually a living wage, the history of U.S. overthrows of democratically elected governments, etc. – right into America’s living rooms in the debates, the Sanders campaign arguably revolutionized the entire process, and certainly offered much of the country its first taste of “democratic socialism,” that is “democratic socialism” as defined by a friend rather than a foe. The national political debate now included a perspective known throughout virtually all of the free world – but previously not here.
The question of the moment is whether this breakthrough will ultimately prove to be just a one-off historical anomaly or the beginning of a lasting sea change in American politics. Will the future include an American left consistently able to navigate the often murky challenges of real world politics? Or does it fall back to its traditional, largely non-participant critique, generally delivered from the margins?
To the extent that one needs to understand the past in order to plan the future, an accurate assessment of the Sanders campaign seems a prerequisite for any thoughtful advance planning And yet, maybe it’s because the election of Donald Trump followed so close on the heels of Sanders’s run and plunged us into a daily routine of shaking our heads and/or fists at the administration’s latest outrages and follies, but it’s not always totally clear whether the magnitude of the Sanders campaign achievement has really ever fully sunken in. (And the fact that he is again a candidate will only make dispassionate assessment of his last run all the more difficult.)
Simply put, in winning better than 13 million votes in the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses, Bernie Sanders surpassed the combined vote total of every socialist presidential candidate in the prior history of the country. And yet we still find, on the one hand, self-identified socialists who consider the campaign to have been a failure or a diversion and, on the other, activists and advocates for many of the same causes the campaign championed who appear oblivious or indifferent to its remarkable success in promoting those issues.
It’s difficult to say how many people fall into either of these groups – one suspects that the relatively unimpressed outnumber the actively opposed – but regardless of their sizes, the difficulty and urgency of actually enacting the sort of changes the Sanders campaign moved to the front burner suggest that there’s some value in trying to get all of us who are trying to get to the same place onto the same train.
One strand of thought among the Sanders campaign’s rejectionist opposition simply has it that the ultimate failure to win the nomination demonstrates the futility of the entire venture – we could and should have been doing something better with our time. Another argument faults Sanders for operating within the realm of the Democratic Party and, in doing so, validating the Wall Street types who dominate it, along with their interests and positions, positions that often run antithetical to his – and ours. Yet another viewpoint argues that the people who run the Democratic Party don’t even want us there, so why should we stay where we’re not wanted? Tying them all together is usually a belief that the situation calls for a “third party,” a party of our own, a party that unambiguously shares his/our politics, a party that we control.
“But the question is who would listen to that clear message in the midst of the realities of the system in which we actually live?”
Unfortunately, history suggests that if we wanted a roadmap for a return to the marginality in which the American Left has so long labored, this would be pretty close to being it. Perhaps the most profoundly un- or even anti-political of these arguments is the idea that we ought to leave the Democratic Party because its powers-that-be don’t like us. If we can’t handle the fact that when you try to topple people from their positions of power they don’t like it, we might want to consider devoting our energies to something other than politics. You want to contest for real power? Then expect pushback. These guys know what they’re doing. And the fact that they want us gone is precisely the reason we need to stay: The Democratic Party represents a proven route to power. Specifically, the Democratic nominee has not finished out of the top two in a presidential race since the party’s inception in 1828.
What does a third party option offer? Clarity? Yes, it is true that the creation of yet another new party on the left would enable a certain clarity of message beyond anything we’re likely to achieve in the Democratic Party in the foreseeable future. But the question is who would listen to that clear message in the midst of the realities of the system in which we actually live? A lot of people who study such things will argue the virtues of a parliamentary system, one which allows for fielding candidates running on a distinct party program, after which, absent any party achieving an outright majority – a routine outcome in many parliamentary systems – the various parties have the option of combining with the party or parties closest to them in order to form a government, in opposition to the parties with which they have the least in common. If the U.S. had such a system in 2016, we might imagine Sanders and Clinton backers combining forces against Trump supporters and other hard right elements, forming a government and choosing a prime minister from the larger group to preside over it.
But, for better or worse, we don’t live in such an “additive” system that allows the strengths of different parties to be combined after the voting is done – and we can’t just wish it so. In the American reality, a new third party of the left might very well conduct a unified convention, create a coherent platform and select an articulate presidential candidate to run on that platform. And afterwards? History unfortunately suggests that said candidate would be doing very well to get even as much as three percent of the vote. The last “third party” presidential candidate of the left to reach even that level was Eugene Debs in 1920. (Robert LaFollette also did it in 1924, but he was actually a Republican – yes, there was such a thing as a left-wing Republican in those days.) And if the past be any guide, one thing our imagined candidate would likely win a lot of is – blame. For in the “subtractive” system used in American presidential elections, any third party offering an alternative to the candidate whom its backers might consider the “lesser of two evils” runs the risk of assisting in the election of the greater of the two evils. We just have to imagine the reaction to Trump being reelected in 2020 by electoral votes from states where his edge over the Democratic nominee was smaller than the number of votes cast for a prominent third party candidate of the left, in order to realize the potential for disaster in such a candidacy. Third parties can claim their share of accomplishments, to be sure. And there are electoral arenas in which they can and do thrive – but the presidential level is not one of them.
The failure to acknowledge the significance of the 2016 Sanders campaign is not limited to die-hard third party proponents, though. At the other edge, there appear to be a significant number of people who seemed to fit the profile of Sanders backers, but actually were not – including some leftists of longstanding, many even self-identified socialists. Some of them were wrong-footed by Sanders’s entry into the race, having taken the Clinton nomination for a fait accompli, and/or assuming that Sanders had little electoral potential. For others, the prospect of electing the first female president outweighed the fact that they were otherwise closer to Sanders on the issues. Some may have had specific problems with Sanders as a candidate, a potential stumbling block with any candidate, who, unlike a bill or a ballot question, comes with a specific history and characteristics. Some may have thought, “He should be a Democrat,” or “I didn’t like that thing he did back when he was mayor of Burlington,” etc. And some may simply have gotten so used to the prospect of choosing from a list of the best available Wall Street-oriented Democrats, that they were no longer able to recognize a candidate of a genuinely different stripe when the real thing finally came along.
There’s no telling how large this group actually is, but it would appear to include a fair number of “movement types” who had dug in over the years in left-related activities in areas like fundraising, foundations, social services, advertising, public relations, legal work, journalism, and a few other professions. Whether or not they still consider going with Clinton the right thing to have done under the circumstances is, at this point, a matter of only personal significance. What does matter, however, is whether that past decision is even now blocking their recognition of the degree to which the Sanders campaign changed things – toward ends for which they had long labored. There is no real way to know either the answer to this question or the number of people involved, but the field of journalism, the most public of these professions, suggests there may be a substantial number who have yet to reassess the situation. Consider how many writers wax eloquent over the virtues of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but did no such thing in the case of Sanders in 16, and have given no indication of having reassessed their stance, seemingly ignoring, or remaining oblivious to how very unlikely it would have been for her to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, absent the Sanders campaign.
Where does this all leave us, then? Early 2019 presents a vista of American politics unimaginable at the start of 2016. The starkest reality is a White House occupied by a man routinely referred to as a liar, presiding over the further enrichment of the already rich, the devastation of environmental regulation, and the poisoning of public discourse regarding those not of his race and gender; a man whose unprecedentedly outrageous behavior has shocked millions of us – every single day of his administration. On the other hand, we see an America potentially on the verge of a paradigm shift also without precedent, an America with a growing recognition that the earth’s clock is ticking, a recognition that the people of this nation and this planet can no longer leave their destiny in the hands of profit-seeking corporations and the power-seeking military industrial complex, a recognition of the need to find the way to take that power into our own, democratic hands.
Next year’s primaries and caucuses will again undoubtedly be a time of dispute and disagreement – that’s what they’re for. But for the first time in the lives of many, if not most, of the participating voters, there seems a realistic possibility of finishing this primary season with a candidate who not only surpasses the exceedingly low hurdle of being better than the current occupant of the White House, but one who is actually up to the challenge of establishing democratic control over the forces currently leading us down the road to ruin.
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Where We are After the Strike
By Peter Haberfeld
Only a coalition of teachers, parents, students and supportive members of the community can fight successfully for public education
It has been clear for some time that public education of our youth cannot be taken for granted. Let’s put it simply. Corporate lobbyists, in recent years, have persuaded legislators, in the name of austerity, to starve the public schools that educate the children of the 99%. At the same time, in the name of privatization, they have facilitated a feeding frenzy by the 1%.
During the past two years, strikes in several states have demonstrated that teachers, parents, students and members of the community have the potential power collectively to reverse that trend. Those stakeholders have fought to protect and promote their common interests: improved terms and conditions of employment (including higher teacher salaries) and improvements in the quality of education (including class size reduction, more time for instruction and less obsessive testing).
Oakland’s history building a coalition of stakeholders to fight for public education:
The recent teachers’ strike in Oakland California was powered by a coalition of public education stakeholders. This was not the first time those partners combined forces to fight for their common interests.
In 1996, a coalition of parents and teachers formed in Oakland California to launch the “Classrooms First” campaign to fight for improvements in the City’s public schools. The Oakland Education Association (OEA), an affiliate of the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the National Education Association (NEA), represented the teachers. The Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), an affiliate of Faith In Action (formerly PICO), represented the parent leaders who attended the forty member churches that are located primarily in the lower income areas of the City.
The coalition, at that time, prepared the community for a strike by Oakland teachers to fight for the campaign’s three “Rs”: raise teacher salaries; reduce class sizes in grades K-3; and reduce administrative staff. OCO held a meeting with over 2000 parent leaders to endorse the demands of Classroom First. OEA organized 115 house parties to discuss the campaign’s demands with parents and teachers. Over 1000 of the parents who attended those meetings formed Parents for Classrooms First and convened a city-wide meeting to advocate for those demands to Oakland’s elected officials.
Some lessons learned in the process:
The results of the campaign were mixed. The initial two-day strike was supported throughout the City. However, its strength diminished as the disfunction within OEA and CTA leadership structures had their impact. The OEA leadership decided to engage in an open-ended strike. Unsolicited, CTA took over the direction of the strike. Its debutante strike manager and the OEA leadership declined to recruit and train site leaders and the lack of internal organization handicapped striking teachers as they faced a hostile School Board. The Board was determined to inflict maximum pain on them by dragging out the conflict for an additional twenty-four days.
The teachers won salary increases and, on paper, class size reductions. Regrettably, however, CTA negotiators betrayed the coalition by agreeing to contract language that promised the proposed reductions of class size but, by secret agreement with District negotiators, adopted language they intended to be unenforceable. Fortunately, OEA managed to save face with the teachers and its coalition partners because, at the same time, the State Legislature adopted and funded identical class size reductions for all California’s elementary schools. The State stopped funding the reform as soon as California faced economic hard times.
By 2019, a new the OEA leadership had been elected that was more energetic and open to advice from experienced labor and community organizers. It engaged to some degree in the labor-intensive work that is necessary to develop a leadership infrastructure capable of expanding participation internally and externally. It began to develop relationships that are committed to waging a long term, multi-phase campaign to make public education a priority at the local and state level.
The 2019 Oakland strike settlement can be the beginning of something better for Oakland’s students:
The goals of the recently settled Oakland teachers’ strike enjoyed unprecedented support by a coalition of teachers, parents, students and others in the community. Yet, the strike settlement merely promises modest improvements. Much more needs to be done to stop the deterioration of public-school education in our City.
Problem: The District has not yet changed its priorities: The District’s budget is merely the spending plan it put together to further its priorities, priorities that do not include paying teachers in line with what surrounding districts pay. In the aftermath of the strike, it has become clear from the District’s $20 million cuts to student programs that students’ educational needs are an even lower priority.
OEA identified District funds that could be allocated to meet its demands. For instance, it pointed to the amounts budgeted for books and supplies. That is a favorite category of school districts for concealing available funds and serving as a slush fund for hidden priorities.
The District has not yet chosen to eliminate costs that are not borne by other school districts: for example, the salaries of its full-time propagandist and bevy of lawyers. Nor has it decided to stop wasting funds on outside consultants instead of using the expertise of many of its full-time teachers and administrative staff.
We must suspect that the District’s cuts to the educational program are not only designed to avoid changing its priorities, they seem intended to punish parents and students for supporting the teachers’ strike. Perhaps the cuts are designed to break up a potentially even more powerful alliance.
Solution: The teacher-parent-student alliance must respond to the District’s cynical either-or posture by intensifying its organizing campaign. It can continue to fight for improvements in both teaching and learning conditions.
Problem: District is dominated by alien corporate interests: Many of the School Board members owe their positions to the corporate interests (represented in part by an organization named “GO”) that financed their campaigns. As intended, they continue to do the bidding of those contributors. Regrettably, their corporate agenda does not further the community’s values. Charter schools, for example, are not governed by a publicly elected school board. They hire employees who are not represented by public employee unions. They are not obliged to accept students who have special needs. When students depart to enroll in charter schools, their former neighborhood schools are depleted of public funds and the School Board orders them closed.
Solution: Stop GO! The coalition must replace the corporate dominated Board members. Each school site community can wage an election campaign in the precincts that surround it. Coalition partners can form a team of leaders that will take responsibility for recruiting and coordinating volunteers to communicate by telephone and at the door with all registered voters. They must discuss the issues, identify voters who support the coalition’s pro-public education candidates, and ensure that they are mobilized to go to the polls on Election Day.
The coalition has the legal right in California to remove members of the School Board before the end of their term. During the last few years, teachers and parents have recalled School Board members in neighboring school districts (Fremont, Vallejo, Santa Clara, etc.) The first step is to gather the required number of signatures and submit a recall petition to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters. (Tip: it is more productive to collect signatures in front of supermarkets and other locations of high-volume foot traffic than it is going from door to door.) The next steps are to select a replacement candidate and carry out the same procedure for contacting voters, identifying supporters and mobilizing them on Election Day as is done in a regular election.
Problem: The Mayor, City Council members, and other politicians representing Oakland have not yet made the public education of Oakland’s children the priority it must become. Although, the educational system is in crisis, elected leaders have not presented bold and creative solutions. They continue to defer to a School Board that does not serve the needs of Oakland’s diverse population.
Solution: The infrastructure developed at school sites to change the composition of the School Board can be used, as well, to elect City and State officials who will make ending Oakland’s educational crisis their priority. The educational coalition’s organizational capacity at each school site to contact, persuade and turn out voters for pro-education candidates in surrounding precincts cannot be replicated by other candidates for public office. Only the coalition has the potential to exercise that degree of electoral power.
Problem: The developers of the multitude of new apartment buildings are new sources of wealth in Oakland, but the City has not yet required them to contribute a fair share of their profits to the well-being of the City’s residents. The developers are beneficiaries of taxpayer payments to the City, but the City has not required them to sign a “community benefits agreement” that gives taxpayers a reasonable return on their investment. Nor has the City required them to provide a large quantity of rentals that are affordable for teachers and others who have been displaced by unchecked gentrification.
Solution: The education coalition’s support of a candidate for local and State office ought to be conditioned on her/his agreement to require developers to pay their fair share of the cost of public education and to provide more affordable housing. That public official’s agreement and the developer’s obligation can be enforced by a full range of well-organized pressure tactics that range from letter-writing, phone calls, office visits by delegations to, if necessary, civil disobedience.
Problem: District pays its teachers the lowest salaries in the area: The District, despite agreeing in the recent strike settlement to grant modest salary increases, continues to pay its teachers the lowest salaries in the area. Last year, one out of five teachers left the District. They can be hired by a neighboring school district that values their skills and pays, on the average, $15,000 more per year for teaching under easier conditions.
Solution: The coalition should remain organized and spring to action when the teachers’ union has its next opportunity to bargain for a salary increase. That will take place when it has a contractual right to negotiate “salary reopeners”, generally at the end of the first year after the contract takes effect. The demand can be that the District place all the “new money” on the teacher salary schedule that it receives from the State during the next few months and, further, that it restore the funding to the student programs it cut after it settled the teachers’ strike.
The powerful new community coalition can build on the infrastructure that OEA and its supporters created before and during the strike. Organizers have identified schools that need help developing local leadership, teams and outreach. A forum for city-wide communication among, and training of, school leaders would advance the effectiveness of the internal and external organizing.
Problem: The argument in favor of charter schools is based on the same fallacy that is used by the political Extreme Right to justify other privatization schemes. It is based on the unproven claim that public institutions are less efficient than private ones. Further, it plays on the dissatisfaction many low income and minority parents have had with public schools. The purpose and effect of converting these public institutions, however, is to create either more opportunities to use public resources for private profit-making or non-profits that pay high salaries to CEOs and low ones to the school’s teachers and other employees.
Many studies have demonstrated that inner-city charter schools do not, on average, have better outcomes than a truly public-school. Oakland proved it. In the late 1990s, parent and teacher leaders connected to the Oakland Community Organization (OCO) persuaded a forward-looking Superintendent and School Board to adopt the “new, autonomous small school reform” that ultimately restructured forty-nine District schools.
Site-based teams of parents, teachers and administrators designed and directed schools that were recognized nation-wide as improving the quality of instruction, broadening participant collaboration and enhancing student outcomes. The process was supported by a team of District administrators that “incubated” the new schools by recruiting, training and guiding school principals to be instructional leaders capable of creating a safe, collaborative environment for teachers and students.
Several of the new schools became highly successful scholastic communities in which parents and teachers were profoundly involved in students’ learning. The former Whittier Elementary School, for example (now called Greenleaf) located near 58th and International Blvd in East Oakland, advanced, in four years, from a State API rating in the 400s to a score in the 800s. Another example is the Melrose Leadership Academy, now at the former site of the Maxwell Park Elementary School, provides excellent bi-lingual education to its students.
Solution: School improvement must continue to be the unifying goal of the militant coalition that came together to support the strike. The new coalition’s credibility requires that its opposition to charter schools include advocacy for improved schools within the District. The pursuit of higher salaries and class size reductions must be combined now with efforts to improve each school’s capacity to guarantee the success of all students.
The coalition partners should take heed, however, from Oakland’s experience. The argument advanced to justify the creation of charter schools (namely, that parents ought to have alternative ways to educate their children), led the District and OCO to diminish their commitment to the reform effort. Both facilitated the creation of charter schools, encouraged an exodus of students and funds, and thereby caused the closing of neighborhood schools.
Oakland teachers at the newly created small schools dedicated themselves to the school reform. The OEA, their union, called for lower class size during its 1996 strike and thereby committed itself to a measure for school improvement. However, although its leadership consistently opposed the creation of charter schools, it did not support the small school reform or any other campaign to bring about district-wide school improvement.
There is a lesson here. The community coalition must apply constant pressure on the stakeholders to sustain educational reform over the long term
Problem: State refuses to forgive its loan to the District: In the late 1990s, the State imposed a trusteeship on the Oakland’s School District because, among other reasons, its expenses exceeded its revenue. Oakland continues to struggle each year to make ends meet, repay that State loan, and pay a $6 million annual interest charge.
There is another perverse feature of the State debt. Charter schools receive the full amount of ADA (average daily attendance) paid per student by the State. However, the District’s debt to the State must be paid out of the ADA Oakland receives for the students who remain in its public schools. Consequently, not only is the District forced to manage with less money because of the exodus of students to charter schools, it must manage with less because of its obligation to repay the debt and pay the annual interest payments on the loan.
The primary reason for the yearly shortfall is that the State does not recognize that students in large urban districts have greater needs and therefore are more expensive to educate. The State could change the formula it uses to fund large urban school districts. It could also increase the “cap” on the District’s special education expenditures. When that “cap” is exceeded, Oakland has no alternative other than raiding its general fund to come up with the difference, a measure that further reduces the money available to the general school population.
Solution: The coalition ought to organize delegations of community representatives to lobby State legislators. Ideally, delegations should consist of representatives from each of its constituent groups as well as allied business owners, religious leaders, elected officials, and District school administrators. The delegations should be trained to function well internally and deliver a common message: allocate more money to public education; end the funding of charter schools; adjust the funding formula to meet needs of Oakland’s children; adjust special education “cap”; and forgive the District’s debt.
The coalition must also organize letter-writing campaigns and phone calls to legislators who serve on key committees. Ask each school site’s election campaign committee to set a goal for the number of contacts it will make, monitor its progress toward the goal, and support it to guarantee success.
Problem: Historically, contract settlements with the District have not guaranteed that it complies with contract terms. The District Administration has not had a mechanism that independently ensures such compliance and that administrators uniformly treat employees fairly. Instead, it relies on employee unions to monitor administrative conduct. When the unions initiate grievances that protest administrators’ violations of the contract, the District Administration’s predictable response has been to delay and oppose the grievance. This practice has placed a heavy burden on the teachers’ union. The time, energy and member dues money expended by union representatives to defend its members against administrative non-compliance with the contract has severely restricted its ability to take affirmative steps to lead its members and the community in the area of educational reform.
Solution: It is in the interest of OEA’s coalition partners to help OEA protect its organizational resources so it can use them to promote educational improvements. The new educational coalition must persuade the School Board and District Administration to monitor administrative conduct and intervene on its own initiative to ensure compliance with contract terms.
Conclusion: The problems that persist can be addressed effectively by the powerful new coalition that has formed to improve public school education in Oakland.
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Book Review: Can the Working Class Change the World? Michael D. Yates
By Peter Olney
The book’s title poses a daunting question; Can the Working Class Change the World? Then in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we poured over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction.
I am sure that Michael Yates would not argue that his work is a substitute for a reading of the classics, but he does the new generation a service of distilling much of Marxist theory into very manageable bites. So as a starter/primer this is an excellent read. Its six chapters give us a survey of Marxist theoretical concepts and some hard-nosed numbers and analysis of the working class, both worldwide and in the USA.
Chapter I, entitled simply The Working Class, presents a quantitative portrait of different sectors of the proletariat. Yates nicely debunks any illusions that all work in the United States is performed by highly skilled technical workers and points out that: “hundreds of millions work in occupations that do not require such skills or education (as in the new tech fields, PO). If you were asked how many people in the US are automobile workers; secretaries; administrative assistants, and office support personnel; clerks; restaurant workers; security employees; custodians; and medical workers, the chances are good you would understate the numbers. In 2015, there were 65 million in these jobs, out of a total national employment of a little over 140 million. That is 45 percent.”
Yates consistently reverts to the hard numbers rather than falling prey to myths of an exaggerated precariat or inflated myths of the “Gig” economy. British academic Kevin Doogan of the University of Bristol has characterized these inflated characterizations as “Left wing harmonies in a neo-liberal chorus” as they obscure real employment relations that remain predominantly of the traditional sort–direct employment by a capitalist enterprise. As one of my mentors in the movement used to say, you have to make a “F….ing concrete analysis of f…ing concrete conditions.” Yates delivers on this score in his descriptions of the working class. He deftly manages the class and income conundrum by discussing professional athletes, who sell their labor power as workers, but are paid at extravagant levels. He anticipates the progressive role of NBA players like LeBron James by discussing their backgrounds and their sympathies with the oppressed.
Chapter 2 delves into Theoretical Considerations simply explaining the Marxist theory of the exploitation of wage labor. The chapter makes an important point of debunking education as the great leveler that somehow class conflict is alleviated by education. “Interestingly, despite ample evidence that education has little effect on the many injustices the system causes, the claim for the efficacy of schooling lives on, which is proof that education serves to reinforce capital’s power.”
On labor’s political activity, Yates advances a strictly independent political action position, a reasonable outlook with which I happen to disagree.
Chapters 3 and 4 Nothing to Lose but Chains and What hath the Working Class Wrought? explore two important themes for present day organizers and socialist activists in the United States and worldwide: the role of labor unions and political parties. Yates provides theoretical grounding on the inherent weakness of unions as revolutionary organizations, given that their function is primarily to band workers together to deal with their immediate economic needs on the job. Working class political parties evolved historically because trade unions were limited in their power over the state and in broader society to advocate for the needs and interests of all workers as a class. Yates explores the failings and shortcomings of unions and political parties.
Again in Chapter 5, The Power of Capital is Still Intact, Yates redelivers a critique of the failure of unions and working class parties to transform the world. He examines not only the United States, but various countries around the world.
In his final prescriptive chapter entitled, Can the Working Class Radically Change the World, Yates offers three important observations:
1) The need for a positive and radical working class program with demands on economics, race and the environment
2) A rank and file strategy for democratization of the unions and the replacing of old tired and collaborationist leadership with new democratic leaders
3) The creation of independent working class parties.
I can find little to disagree with on the programmatic Statement of Principles and Commitments, although as Yates knows in every real political situation the details and the rough edges have to be hashed out and rounded out. On the issue of rank and file strategy, it is important to look at the actual existing movement in labor. The recent wave of teachers’ strikes certainly is rooted in rank and file efforts at reform and in fact the victorious strikes in Chicago in 2012 and most recently in Los Angeles are the result of reform slates coming to power. However, not all successful and important battles with capital are the simple product of reform movements. The recent winning national multi-city strike against the giant corporation Marriott conducted by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) does not fit neatly into the rank and file model. A level of sophistication in analysis of the various forces in the labor movement at top and bottom is necessary to navigate those waters and build a strong trade union movement. Not all progressive initiatives in labor are the product of a rank and file upsurge. Often the existing leadership has been schooled in an honest trade union experience that leads them to do the right thing by the working class and the members they represent. They too can be part of the configurations that lead to radical social transformation.
On labor’s political activity, Yates advances a strictly independent political action position, a reasonable outlook with which I happen to disagree. Yates argues that “unions shunned Bernie Sanders [in 2016], a left liberal who actively courted those who do society’s work.” This was true of many unions, but not all. In fact, six national unions supported Sanders in the primaries along with 100 union locals and 55,000 union members who joined Labor for Bernie. 13 million votes for Sanders in the primaries and the subsequent uprising within the Democratic Party have sent shock waves through the American political terrain. Now President Trump feels obliged to denounce socialism in the State of the Union address. Who would have thunk it? I would contend that we must confront the present political dynamic, and I suggest that there is a viable inside/outside strategy for the working class and its unions in relationship to the Democratic Party. I fear that pure independent political action at this moment will be very independent of the action, particularly in the Democratic primaries in 2020. Yates mentions the wisdom of Mao and his present-day followers several times in the book. So I would therefore characterize this disagreement on labor politics as Mao did in On Contradiction, as “contradictions among the people.” This issue is certainly worthy of friendly debate and resolution within the working class.
On balance this a great read and a great introduction for young folks. I wish I had it handy back in 1974 when I was the Chief Steward at a machine shop in Roxbury, Massachusetts. At that time, when many of us were discovering the working class by “salting” or “industrializing” in factories and warehouses and hospitals, our readings of the classics outside of time, place and condition often led us to some humorous actions. One night in my Marxist cell we discussed the aforementioned work of Lenin, What is To be Done, written in 1901 before the 1906 failed Russian uprising. This political tract is about the need for the working class to go beyond economic struggles and defend the interests all classes against the Tsarist bourgeoisie. I went to work the next day, and the company fired a supervisor. The supervisor was popular with the workforce, but that was not my consideration. I had a Leninist wet dream and decided that it was important to walk the workforce to protest the firing of this man from “another class” as Lenin had instructed me. The factory was shut down and I called the union’s representative at the hall on a pay phone to tell him we were on strike. He asked why, and I said we were out defending the job of a supervisor. He said, “What the f… and get back to work!”
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Can the Working Class Change the World? Michael D. Yates. Monthly Review Press 2018
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The violence is symbolic and psychological – The film ROMA
By Myrna Santiago
“Roma” represents Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón′s loving gaze at his mixteca nanny, “Cleo” in the film, Liboria Rodríguez in real life, as played by first-time actress Yalitzia Aparicio. But the movie is also about something else: a critique of the multiple facets of patriarchal violence in Mexico. Cuarón gives us a glimpse of personal, family, intimate violence and its mirror image in the state-sponsored violence of the 1970s, personified by the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters carried out by Luis Echeverría’s government.
Following Cleo’s every move as the indigenous maid of a middle class family at the point of its dissolution, the film shows the apparent ease with which the male head of household, a doctor, leaves his family, which includes a wife, four children, a mother-in-law, Cleo, and a young mixteca cook. Cuarón shows his father as annoyed with the messiness of the house and the amount of excrement the dog leaves in the driveway—a not-so-subtle jab by the father at the women of the family: a wife who can’t manage her maids and the maids who can’t seem to do their jobs properly. Later on in the film, Cuarón shows the father coming out of a movie-theatre joyously laughing with a new girlfriend, to the point of not noticing that one of his sons has seen him. All the while the father is pretending that he is on a work trip to Canada in the few missives he sends to the children. Child support is not on his agenda. Although the father does not beat his wife or his kids, his selfishness causes them enormous pain. The violence is symbolic and psychological, but certainly no less hurtful. Even in middle class families, the patriarch’s own desires come first, and to hell with the needs of everyone else.
Cleo meets violence closer in the face, as befitting her class and ethnicity. She is at the bottom of the social pecking order in the family, and no matter how much the mother in the house, Sofia, truly cares for her, she becomes the target of the latter’s frustration with her husband. In flashes of anger because her husband has left the family, Sofia lashes out at the teenage Cleo for failing to control the dog or a precocious kid who overhears a conversation that reveals the true nature of the father’s absence. Psychologists may have scientific terms to talk about the displacement of Sofia’s anger, but her behavior also shows that under patriarchy, all the females share the duty of keeping the man at the top of the hierarchy happy. Sofia, as the female head of household, has the additional responsibility of enforcing that idea among women of lesser status. Thus women uphold patriarchal values themselves, without the men getting their hands dirty.
In a moment of recognition and “sisterhood” fueled by apparent drunkenness, Sofia does tell Cleo that women have something in common: they are always alone. Class and ethnicity might separate them, but patriarchy brings them together. Under Mexican patriarchy, women can never trust the men in their lives will remain faithful in any sense of the word. Women will end up on their own, at the mercy of the shifting desires of the patriarch.
What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence.”
Cleo finds that out soon enough. Her first boyfriend, Fermín, impregnates her and abandons her right at the movie theatre when she tells him she’s pregnant. When she seeks him out in that squalid slum of one million people that is Nezahualcoyotl–far removed from the respectability of la Roma–to remind him that she is carrying his child, Fermín promptly threatens her. He tells her he will hurt her and “her” child if she doesn’t leave him alone. Cleo knows he is not joking: he is a martial arts expert, a young man of the lower classes who has seen his share of violence and experienced it from birth. His way out of the structural violence that poverty forces upon him, in fact, is to escalate the violence. He trains his body and transforms it into a tool for further violence.
Eventually the patriarchal drama taking place in the intimacy of the family becomes reflected in the violence perpetrated by the Mexican state. Cleo and the grandmother are shopping for a crib when los halcones, a paramilitary group in civilian clothes, attacks a student demonstration going on outside the store. Fermín, Cleo’s ex-boyfriend, rushes into the store chasing a demonstrator who is trying to hide. He shoots the young man and kills him. Aiming his gun at everything that moves, Fermín turns around and his gun points at Cleo. Fermín is one of the halcones, a thug hired by the Mexican government to repress the students who would protest against poverty, injustice, and the broken promises of the Mexican revolution. The government resents the youth calling it out; they are spoiled children who need discipline. The patriarchal state is happy to oblige. It uses one poor man, Fermín, to wreak violence on middle class youngsters his own age, manipulating a type of class warfare to protect itself. Cleo looks at Fermín with eyes wide open in recognition and fear. He embodies power and violence, cocooned by the impunity guaranteed by the state he now represents. Fermín sees her and hesitates, then runs out onto the street.
Cleo has one last encounter with the family patriarch, at the hospital where she is going to give birth to her baby. He is a doctor there and rushes to reassure her she will be fine and show how much he cares. He would love to be in the birthing room with her, but he says he’s not allowed in there. His fine performance collapses when Cleo’s female ob-gyn tells him he’s welcomed to join her in attending to Cleo. The father of the family is momentarily flustered as he is caught lying, mutters some excuse and like, Fermín, turns around and leaves. The parallel leaves no doubt about the representation of patriarchy. What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence. That’s all.
The end of the film, when Cleo saves the children from drowning despite the fact that she herself can’t swim has generated a lot of commentary. I will only add that Cuarón leaves us with one more thought about patriarchy and female solidarity. In her pain, Sofia might have been correct that women always end up alone. But what she failed to realize in that moment was that women can also end up together, united because of, and in spite of, the viciousness of patriarchy. And they can raise a family together. And bring up a great filmmaker.
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