The Three Epic Lies that Put Corporate Giants on Top
By Anthony Flaccavento
There’s little doubt that the biggest corporations are on the top, with extraordinary economic and political power in the United States. Levels of corporate concentration in everything from the meat industry to the media are at unprecedented levels; corporate CEOs routinely make two hundred, three hundred times more than their rank and file employees; and the political clout they wield through lobbyists and political donations ensures, as Martin Gilens has shown, that their priorities carry far more weight with elected officials than what the majority of American citizens desire.
Though many people aren’t happy about the current level of corporate dominance, we tend to see it as just a side effect of a global economy that rewards the most innovative and efficient businesses. But it is much more than that.
The truth is that Three Epic Lies, concocted at different times over the past century and a half, have paved the way for this corporate aristocracy we are now living with. In different ways, they’ve been codified in law or risen to become the conventional wisdom, dominating how institutions, academics, politicians and the courts view the limits and responsibilities of corporations in our nation.
Three huge, Epic Lies, each one of profound importance; taken together they’ve made corporate control of our economy and politics almost inevitable. So, let’s take a look, starting with a Supreme Court Clerk more than a hundred years ago.
Number 1: “Corporate Personhood”
In 1881, Leland Stanford was ticked off. California had just passed a tax on property owned by railroad lines and Stanford wasn’t going to let his company, Southern Pacific Railway, pay any more than they had to without a fight. So, he pushed the claim that the new tax was discriminatory because his giant corporation was protected by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, enacted in 1868 to establish the personhood of African Americans. This case came to be known as Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Rail Line (UCLA law professor Adam Winkler details this history in a March 5th, 2018 piece in The Atlantic).
Stanford had friends in high places, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen J Field. In the Santa Clara decision, notes from the Justices’ deliberations show that the high court declined to rule whether or not corporations should be granted ‘personhood’, enraging Justice Field. But no matter. The Court Clerk, JC Bancroft Davis – himself a former Rail Line company president! – wrote in his summary that the Court had decided that “corporations are persons… within the 14th Amendment.” They’d done no such thing, but this was how the decision was characterized. By the court clerk.
A few years later in a separate case, Justice Field stated that corporations are persons, saying that “It was so held in Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Rail Line”. The Court’s clerk had said this, not the Justices; Field knew it, but he ‘cited’ the decision regardless. And courts have been doing so ever since then, building on the logic of “corporate personhood” all the way to the culminating case of Citizens United in 2010. A wealth of legal precedent at the highest level, all founded on a lie. That’s the first Big Lie.
Number 2: “…for the profit of the stockholders”
About four decades later, the second Big Lie was born, arising out of the Michigan Supreme Court’s settling of a dispute between Henry Ford and the Dodge brothers. The latter were shareholders in Ford Motor Company. When they decided to start their own car company, Ford attempted to withhold paying their dividends, as he didn’t want to help capitalize a competitor. Ford Motor Company, which was not publicly traded at that time, argued that they needed the money to lower prices to consumers and pay better wages to their employees (In truth, they had plenty of money for both).
The Michigan Supreme Court sided with Horace and John Dodge, ordering Ford to pay the dividends owed. The court’s official opinion – the “holding” – was quite limited in scope. But in a tangential comment they opined that “…a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end.” Tangential observations such as this – mere dicta, they’re called – are neither a necessary part of the court’s ruling, nor are they legal precedent, as Lynn Stout makes clear in her remarkable book, The Shareholder Value Myth. They are musings, a sidebar. Nowadays we might call it a rant.
But guess what? That’s exactly what this sidebar observation from 100 years ago has become: The foundation for the widely held view that publicly owned corporations have the legal duty to maximize returns to shareholders, trumping all other considerations, from employee well-being to environmental stewardship. In fact as Stout observes, “There is no solid legal support for the claim that directors and executives in US public corporations have an enforceable legal duty to maximize shareholder wealth. The idea is fable.” And it’s the second Big Lie.
Giving corporations the rights of people has helped corrupt our politics, making a mockery of “one person, one vote” and enabling similar legal absurdities, such as equating unlimited expenditure of money with unlimited free speech. Insisting that corporations are legally bound to maximize profits – short term profits, no less – above all else has further concentrated wealth and power among a tiny group of investors and CEOs. And it has helped create an economy of collateral damage, to people, communities and the land.
Number 3: “consumer welfare”
But wait, there’s more. One more Big Lie that has greased the skids for corporate dominance of our economy and politics. This one started in the 1960’s, coming to fruition in the 1980’s, the result of the relentless drive of Supreme Court wannabe, Robert Bork. This third Big Lie has pulled the rug out from under anti-trust laws and their enforcement, enabling seemingly endless merger mania and corporate concentration in nearly every sector of our economy.
The Sherman Act of 1890 was the first significant piece of federal legislation to tackle monopolies. Named for Senator John Sherman, the law sought to stem the growing power of Standard Oil Company and other huge “trusts” of that era. It took some time before the federal government began to implement the law, but by the early years of the 20th Century, enforcement led to the break-up of behemoths like Standard Oil, and the preclusion of corporate concentration through mergers and buyouts. This was the norm for the ensuing 70 years, where a consensus held that monopolies were bad for the economy and dangerous for our democracy.
As Tim Wu describes in The Curse of Bigness, Bork set out to re-write history, beginning with his 1966 article, “Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act”. In this piece, and his arguments over the next two decades, Bork declared that the original intent of the Sherman Act was simply to protect “consumer welfare” and nothing more. In other words, mergers could be stopped only when it was determined that prices to consumers would likely rise. Bork made the case that this is what Senator Sherman and Congress had intended. But as Wu makes clear, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Sherman had spoken of the “inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity” that arose from monopolies, stating further they created “a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government”.
Undaunted by history and truth, Bork pushed on, moving his simplistic argument from the margins of the debate to the Supreme Court, which cited Bork in a 1979 decision declaring that “consumer welfare” was to be the standard by which corporate concentration should be judged. Over time, this new – and false – understanding of Congress’ original intent became the accepted measure by which mergers and monopolies would be judged. Stop them if they will likely raise prices, otherwise there’s nothing the government can do. The third, very Big Lie had prevailed.
The corporate takeover of the US economy and, to a large degree, American politics was not inevitable. Neither was the notion that corporations, which are granted a public charter, after all, are legally obligated to maximize shareholder wealth, subordinating any and all responsibility to the public. We are where we are, rather, because of Three Big Lies that have enabled the extreme concentration of economic and political power that is our status quo. Let’s name those lies – that corporations are people, that their sole purpose is to enrich their shareholders, and that we can’t stop them from getting bigger unless they’ll raise prices – for what they are: false, absurd and un-American. Let’s unravel the misleading claims that gave rise to them, and then let’s fight like hell to take them down and begin to restore our economy and our democracy.
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The Hidden History of the Arnautoff Mural
By David Bacon
I respect the feelings of the students who testified at the San Francisco Board of Education meeting about the mural at George Washington High School, and their desire to have their communities and histories treated in a respectful way. They deserve, not just respect, but solidarity in fighting the pervasive racism and exploitation in our society. The mural was painted in solidarity with that fight. I think it is a mistake, therefore, to interpret it as a symbol of colonialism, white supremacy and oppression.
The mural was created in 1936 by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian immigrant and a Communist, who painted it as a critique of the racist boosterism that was the way high school history was taught in that era (even when I was in high school in the early 60s). The 1930s were the years when the left and the Communist movement were strong in San Francisco. These were the years of the General Strike of 1934, which broke the color line on the docks – the reason the longshore union created in that strike, Local 10 of the ILWU, is a majority-African American union today. These were the years of the organization of the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association in San Francisco, many of whose members belonged to the Communist Party.
Arnautoff
belonged to the Communist Party as well. In
that party African American and white longshore and Chinese laundry and garment
workers and red painters like Arnautoff would have undoubtedly known each other
and talked about the politics they shared. Fighting racism and class
exploitation, and supporting revolutionary movements against imperialism, was
the common ground among those radicals – the basis of their politics. For
an artist like Arnautoff, painting was therefore a political act, a
responsibility to oppose racism and class exploitation in the art he produced.
The mural he painted in the high school was a critique of earlier murals
produced for the Pan American Exposition, an imperialist celebration and
world’s fair on Treasure Island, paid for by San Francisco’s wealthy
elite. That “official” artwork showed California history as the
advance of “civilization” triumphing over “savagery.”
The Admiral Dewey statue in Union Square, celebrating the colonization of the
Philippines, was the same kind of art produced in that earlier era. An
even uglier example is the art shown in the Forbidden Book, a book and
exhibition of racist and imperialist cartoons collected by Abraham Ignacio and
published a few years ago. This is what Arnautoff was reacting
against. When the WPA, that is, the New Deal, began paying unemployed
artists, it meant that artwork could be created that didn’t have to please the
Crockers and other elite San Francisco families, and could therefore tell the
truth about U.S. history. Arnautoff’s murals were a product of that
short-lived political space.
“… when artists believed that art had to take sides with workers and oppressed people, and tell social truth.”
When the mural shows the grey hordes of settlers advancing past the body of a dead Native American, it was a powerful truth for that time, especially because these settlers are being urged onward by George Washington. The school was named for Washington, so Arnautoff’s message to students was to take a hard look at who he was. Showing that the wealth is being produced by Black slaves, for the rich white colonial merchants who owned them, is telling the truth again. It doesn’t glorify slavery – it attacks it, and even more important, it shows who got rich from it. Washington was a plantation slave-owner.
The mural shows Native Americans with arms, which is also a historical truth – that many Native people fought against the American Revolution because they had suffered massacres by the settlers. In this depiction, Arnautoff goes beyond the radical murals of Anton Refregier in the Rincon Annex post office. Refregier shows native people doing the work for a California mission, with the Spanish padre who enslaved them in the background. That in itself contradicted the stereotype of the missions as happy places that brought European religion and culture to native people (for which Father Junipero Serra was recently beatified, when he should have been condemned).
But Arnautoff goes further. He shows native people as active resisters to colonization, in their war-dress, ready to battle the settlers. Such resistance was the key to survival. Indigenous historian Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, speaking of this resistance in California, says, “Without this resistance, there would be no descendants of the California Native peoples of the area colonized by the Spanish.”
Exposing
the resistance by both slaves and native people to the rebelling colonists in
the American Revolutionary War is not just correcting history, but helps
understand the present. Marxist historian Gerald Horne, in “The
Counter Revolution of 1776”, charges, “Despite
the alleged revolutionary and progressive impulse of 1776, the victors went on
from there to crush indigenous polities, then moved overseas to do something
similar in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, then unleashed its
counter-revolutionary force in 20th-century Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Angola, South Africa, Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua, and other tortured
sites too numerous to mention.”
Arnautoff painted a critique of George Washington because of that history of
slavery and genocide, so you can imagine how much opposition there was to
it. It was the art of social realism, the same approach to art by artists
in China and the Soviet Union after those revolutions, when artists believed
that art had to take sides with workers and oppressed people, and tell social
truth. Many artists who created socially committed art in the U.S. were
later blacklisted in the 1950s for what was then called “subversive”
art. That kind of art was suppressed – you won’t find it in the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Arnautoff
belonged to the American Artists Congress, which was put on the Attorney
General’s list of banned Communist/subversive organizations, and the San Francisco
Artists and Writers Union. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s he
was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was not
long after the Committee sent ten screenwriters to prison for their radical
politics, and the Hollywood blacklist denied work to many more. Arnautoff
had a job teaching art at Stanford University and rightwing politicians tried
to get him fired, which Stanford refused to do. At the end of his life
Arnautoff returned to the Soviet Union, where he continued his work as an
artist, and died in Leningrad.
The school district, which is responsible for the mural, should have taught
students about its politics – who it was defending and who it was
attacking. If the students weren’t aware of this history, it’s in part
because the school district didn’t do its job. Maybe it was afraid of the
work’s radicalism, or simply didn’t know or understand the mural itself. The
left in the Bay Area should also be self-critical for not having talked more
about the mural and its message, helping to make students and their communities
feel like they were being defended, rather than being alienated by the work, as
so many said in their comments to the school board.
But painting over the mural doesn’t redress the historical crime that the mural shows – if anything, it covers up the critique of it, a goal the McCarthyites and their committees were never able to achieve. Painting it over robs the students themselves – of the chance to discover and evaluate for themselves this history of struggle in the arts, of the chance to appreciate progressive art that tells the truth about our history, and of the chance to respond by making art and critiques of their own. If students are critical of Arnautoff himself, and point out blind spots he had, I’m sure he would have liked the idea. He certainly didn’t consider his work some untouchable sacred object, but a tool to move forward the fight against racism and class exploitation, a fight in which he stood up for justice.
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Company Union 2.0: Is Organized Labor Helping to Unmake the New Deal?
By Dr. Brian Dolber
The passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 not only gave workers the federally protected right to form unions and collectively bargain, it also banned employers from supporting “company unions.”
Company unions had emerged during the reactionary 1920s as part of the so-called “American Plan” to break the power of organized labor. By providing workers with some small benefits that resembled those of trade unions, while not exercising any real power, and promoting loyalty to the employer, these sham organizations would help control and contain militant, democratic movements.
Today, the need for, and potential success of such movements has never been more clear.
When rideshare giant Uber announced it would cut driver pay rates by 25 percent in Los Angeles, its second largest US market, in March 2019, members of the fledgling Rideshare Drivers United – Los Angeles, knew they had no choice but to take action. Having built a membership of 2,500 drivers over the course of one-and-half years, RDU-LA called a strike for March 25. Members picketed in front of the Uber “Greenlight Hub” office for most of the day, effectively shutting it down. Garnering favorable media coverage and the support of presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, their membership nearly doubled to 5,000 in the next six weeks.
So when the RDU-LA Organizing Committee voted to call a second strike on May 8, they had the ear of the media and more importantly, independent driver-organizations across the country. The strike was soon billed as a National Day of Action, and ultimately went global with protests on every continent. Two days in advance of Uber’s much-hyped IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, the strike was credited with tanking the so-called “unicorn,” and transforming the conversation around the gig economy.
But while such efforts might provide much needed momentum for revitalizing the labor movement, companies like Uber and Lyft are using legal loopholes– classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees– to constrain worker democracy and revitalize the company union.
While the company union had been a feature of labor’s nadir, the tragedy that the historian David Montgomery termed “the fall of the House of Labor,” it re-emerges today as a farce– Company Union 2.0– developed in partnership with legitimate trade unions.
“That is a legacy no union should want.”
The Uber-funded company union “Independent Drivers Guild” (affiliated with the Machinists) in NYC is the prevailing model. Under this model, labor bureaucrats start by making backroom deals with gig company executives. Companies make minor concessions (like the ability to message drivers and deduct dues through the company app). In exchange, bureaucrats give up the right to strike, the right to collectively bargain, the right to just-cause termination, the right to fight for reclassification– the rights that workers have largely enjoyed, for 80 years.
In the California context, the Dynamex court case and the bill AB5 (Here and Here), which recently passed the Assembly, would grant gig workers all rights guaranteed to employees. This has spurred a handful of business unionists to seek exemptions for Uber/Lyft while giving established labor the right to collect dues and leaving workers with little.
Rideshare Drivers United- Los Angeles and affiliated organizations around the country, are offering an alternative to the IDG model. They have refused to take any resources from Uber and Lyft, or any labor organization that receives such support, and they are allied with the independent, militant NY Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA, @NYTWA). The campaign to regulate Uber & Lyft in NYC that NYTWA spearheaded, with the powerful and progressive SEIU 32BJ selflessly playing a supporting role, exemplifies the labor solidarity needed to stare down the gig Goliaths.
RDU-LA has developed a Drivers’ Bill of Rights, democratically voted on by thousands of workers through regular surveys. They want open, worker-led negotiations with the boss, not backroom deals between gig companies and labor bureaucrats. They want bargaining for the common good, helping drivers and the larger communities they service, not just for membership dues. And as they have shown, they can grow their organization by flexing a union’s most powerful muscle– the strike– rather than agreeing to contracts with no-strike clauses without a membership vote.
The demands are clear, but to meet them, gig companies will have to fundamentally alter their business models to make them more fair to workers. And the gig companies know this. That’s why they’re so eager to find willing partners in labor who will sell out drivers to the lowest bidder.
But now is not the time for workers to lower our expectations. If Uber drivers were properly classified, the company would be the largest private employer in the world, just behind the U.S. and Chinese militaries. And the need and potential for organizing rideshare drivers will only increase, as Uber’s IPO prospectus predicts drivers will experience growing dissatisfaction.
To cede this sector to capital’s business unionist partners would not only be a grave missed opportunity for those who are committed to reviving the labor movement; it would set a precedent for other sectors to reclassify workers, effectively voiding some of the most important achievements of the New Deal.
That is a legacy no union should want.
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Under Guise of “Choice”: Trump Launches D-Day Assault on Veterans’ Care
By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early
On June 6th, the Trump Administration launched what it calls a “revolution” in veterans’ health care.
If that date rings a bell, it’s because, on June 6, 1944, American soldiers and their allies stormed ashore in Normandy, establishing a critical beach-head in the campaign to defeat Adolph Hitler and Nazism.
In the aftermath of that and other World War II battles, tens of thousands of injured veterans were treated, back home, in a nationwide network of hospitals and clinics run by the federal government. Most patients of what’s now called the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) appreciated the specialized, high-quality care they received from our nation’s best working model of socialized medicine.
But, on this D-Day anniversary, Donald Trump is rolling out a program, favored by his right-wing backers, that directly attacks public provision of veterans’ healthcare. On June 6, the VHA’s salaried care-givers will be required, by law, to refer many more of their nine million patients to private doctors and for-profit hospitals, even when the VHA could serve them better and at lower cost.
This expanded out-sourcing creates a beach-head for the health care industry, which hopes to expand its market share to 40 percent or more of all VHA patients. Trump’s “counter-revolution” in veterans’ care will divert billions of dollars from a national healthcare system uniquely equipped to serve the poor and working-class veterans who qualify for VHA coverage.
Empowered Patients?
In typical Trump fashion, this scheme is being deceptively marketed. On Fox News and other media outlets, White House appointees, like Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, claim that giving veterans greater “choice” will “empower” them as patients. (For more on Wilkie see here.)
“… few realize that, every dollar spent on private sector care will be taken from federal budget allocations for direct care in veterans’ hospitals and community clinics.”
In Wilkie’s rosy scenario, veterans can stick with VHA care, if they want it—but also get the same access to private sector providers that other Americans have through their private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid coverage.
In reality, the list of “community care” providers hastily assembled since passage of the VA Mission Act last year, includes many with little or no experience treating the complex service-related problems of many veterans. Wait times for appointments outside the VHA will, in many cases, be no shorter than inside—and sometimes longer. Plus, few hospital systems outside the VHA treat mental and physical problems in a systematic, coordinated way—a necessity for veterans whose substance abuse or suicidal thoughts are a product of traumatic brain injuries and chronic pain.
Veterans are not being warned that, if they enroll in private practices for primary care or mental health treatment, they may be dropped from the VHA rolls and find it difficult to get back into the system. And few realize that, every dollar spent on private sector care will be taken from federal budget allocations for direct care in veterans’ hospitals and community clinics.
First starved of resources and then patients as well, more VHA facilities will become targets for down-sizing or closure by the Trump Administration. Where this occurs, it will eliminate the first choice of most veterans and force others to remain outside the VHA system, whether they want to or not. Already, the VHA has more than 40,000 vacancies, which the White House refuses to fill, creating stressful conditions for remaining care-givers, many of whom are paid less than their private sector counterparts.
Anti-Privatization Protests
On June 5, members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union of VHA employees, National Nurses United, and Veterans for Peace did their best to blow the whistle on what Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) now warns may be a public policy “train wreck.” Their “National Day to Save The VA” included protest rallies, press conferences or informational picketing in San Francisco, Portland, San Diego, Long Beach, Milwaukee, Boston, Albuquerque, Tucson, Minneapolis, Rochester, St. Louis, and Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, Tester and almost every other Senate Democrat voted in favor of the VA MISSION Act, which mandates the far wider out-sourcing that begins this month. Only Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, former chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, two Democrats and two Republicans voted “No.” In the House, 70 Democrats including Nancy Pelosi opposed MISSION.
But that leaves many other Congressional Democrats who should not be allowed to get away with vague claims that they’re against VA “privatization” when, in fact, most of them went along with Trump’s “bi-partisan” plan to implement it.
As Vietnam veteran and VHA patient Skip Delano points out, “the private sector healthcare system does not have the capability or the capacity to meet the needs of veterans. They will be sent to providers who may know little or nothing about their special problems and may fail to diagnose critical conditions like PTSD, Agent Orange, or burn-pit exposure, or military sexual trauma, to name only a few.”
A former postal worker, coal miner, and New York City teacher, Delano has decades of experience with good, union-negotiated, job-based medical coverage. Nevertheless, he believes that, for many patients pushed out of the VHA, “private sector care will be less veteran-centric, of lower quality, require longer wait times, and end up with many veterans getting lost in the system because of poor care coordination and lack of accountability.”
A key organizer of this week’s Veterans for Peace “Save Our VA” protest in Manhattan, Delano also spends a lot of time reminding his fellow veterans about the need to be labor allies. The Trump Administration is currently seeking major contract concessions from VHA workers, one third of whom are veterans themselves.
According to Delano, if this effort succeeds, VHA staff will be stripped of the union protections needed to be effective patient advocates and more active foes of privatization. “Without that collective voice, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professional will have far less ability to speak out on behalf of veterans,” he warns.
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The Challenges of Organizing Precarious “Gig” Workers
By Wade Rathke
When we think about organizing precarious “gig” workers, the task may be biblical. The workers may be ready, or not, but the spirit and the flesh are weak. We all bemoan the rise of gig workers. Low pay, few hours, no benefits are some of them, worsened by the uncertainty of a position where you can only work to deliver something being demanded by consumers at a premium you are powerless to control. App companies misclassify workers as independent contractors rather than employees in order to pass on all of the maintenance and capital costs, aside from web work and marketing, to the workers, avoiding the personnel benefit and equipment costs that are routine and inescapable for regular employers. Worker conditions seem to cry out for a union, but unions have to be wary at answering the call no matter how loud.
A recent “strike” by Uber drivers in Los Angeles illustrates the problem. The company had triggered the strike by increasing its percentage of the fare, thereby decreasing drivers’ pay. In response, the drivers turned off the Uber application on their phone and by doing so did not respond to any calls or inducements to drive. Stated more plainly, they went on strike.
Did it work? Who knows? How would any of us, whether organizers, curious observers, or company officials, know how to measure the number of drivers protesting in this way versus those who just decided not to drive on any given day or got ticked off and responded to Lyft instead or whatever? ACORN tried a similar approach in the early 1970s when we were fighting increases by the Arkla Gas Company in central Arkansas. Our “Turn Off Arkla Day!” action got a bit of press, as the Uber drivers did in Los Angeles. But in both cases, the company yawned since there was no way to measure whether the strike affected their cash flow at all.
Organizing gig workers can be challenging, but there’s some good work going on for bicycle deliver drivers in Europe, where companies like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and others have become ubiquitous. Last fall one of ACORN’s affiliates organized a meeting in Brussels that brought together union activists interested in organizing European bicycle delivery drivers with fledgling groups of drivers from a dozen countries from the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and others. That meeting highlighted several active organizing projects:
– Bike Workers Advocacy Project (BWAP), a new group seeking to organize cycling workers and, eventually, lead to some kind of unionization or union-style representation. Drivers at Postmates and Caviar in New York City and some bicycle shops seemed to be stirring the pot in 2018, but nothing seems to have emerged formally to date.
– Bike delivery workers at Foodora and Dilveroo in Germany have raised issues about low wages and their independent contractor situation while advocating for a union.
– In 2016, London gig workers for delivery services Deliveroo and Uber Eats organized protests and strikes for higher wages. There was also an outcry in Philadelphia when a rider for Caviar was killed while working.
– Legal action has managed to win back employment rights, such as a recent ruling in Spain that declared that a Deliveroo rider was in fact an employee and not an independent contractor, as the company claimed. Caviar is in mandatory arbitration in California on the same issue. As importantly, riders in London struck for three days in 2018, and joined with striking McDonalds’s workers to demand higher wages, largely organized by a chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
While these examples seem promising, unions clearly lack any real commitment to organize these workers, and the workers have limited leverage. David Chu, who directs the European Organizing Center, a joint project between European unions and the US-based Change to Win federation, told me recently that he hears a lot of talk about organizing gig workers but sees little action in that direction, but perhaps the spirit – and many workers – are willing to organize, but the flesh-and-bones unions are not?
Serious organizing efforts in the United States have been contradictory and embryonic. Uber in New York City and San Francisco reacted to organizing efforts by attempting to coopt the organizations into agreeing that the workers were not employees in exchange for consultation rights on rule changes and other issues like receiving tips. More concerted efforts to create a mini-National Labor Relations Board representation mechanism were launched at the municipal level in Seattle, but the organizing effort is currently mired in litigation over preemption by the National Labor Relations Act and the question of employee status.
Local efforts reflect the way companies keep changing their practices, as Marielle Benchehboune, coordinator of ACORN’s affiliate, ReAct, noted recently in Forbes. “What will make the difference,” she suggested, is workers organizing “on the transnational scale.” Perhaps her analysis is correct. Perhaps a rare global organizing plan could create enough pressure and leverage among these competing companies that could weld a workers’ movement together from the disparate pieces of independent worker mobilizations that are cropping up around the world.
Given the challenges, how much should we invest in organizing gig workers? Labor economists in the US caution that despite all of the hype from Silicon Valley and even some labor officials about the emerging gig economy, it involves a very small percentage of the workforce. Others, like Louis Heyman in the recent book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary, argue that gig workers are just the pimple on the elephant’s ass of contingent and temporary labor that has been hollowing out the American workforce for decades, just as consultants have chipped away at management jobs as well.
I heard something similar fifteen years ago, when I asked a leader of the Indian National Trade Union Congress if they were doing anything to organize call center workers in India. He answered that they estimated that there were 30,000 such workers, but there were 450 million workers in India at the time and hardly 9% were organized. He then shrugged. That’s all he said, but we got the message. There’s much to be done in organizing the unorganized, and resources and capacity are always restrained, whether in India or Europe or North America.
Is that a reason for not finding ways to organize workers who are attempting on their own to find justice on their jobs? Or is it just another rationale for doing little or nothing? The one thing that seems clear is that if unions are going to be relevant to the modern workforce and the irregular and precarious forms of work that are being created by technology married to avarice, we must debate and address these challenges. It may be difficult, but unions and organizers need to devise practicable strategies that allow workers to organize, win, and build enough power to force companies to adapt and change.
I wish we had the answer now, because the workers seem ready, but one way or another, we need to figure this out quickly!
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This article orginally appeared on the blog Working-Class Perspectives
The Immigration Issue & The Politics of Deceit
By Harry Brill
It is certainly a challenging problem for progressives on how to address the gap between themselves and conservatives. The difficulty is not just due to the immense ideological differences. Progressives have to confront the considerable deception employed by many conservatives.
Apparently conservatives have persuaded a substantial number of Americans that illegal immigration is bad for Americans. According to the polls not only Republicans accept this rhetoric, so do a majority of independent and Democratic Party voters. In fact about two-thirds of the public believes that the U.S. military should defend the southern border from the “invasion” of immigrants. Not only Caucasians but also a majority of Blacks and non-white Hispanics share the same perspective. Generally speaking a CBS poll found that 72 percent of those who watched President Trump’s State of the Union address agrees with his ideas on immigration.
President Trump’s interest in building a wall on the southern border of the U.S. is wrong. It is a deceptive effort to convince working people that he wants to protect their interests.
Yet according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 60 percent of the country’s farm workers are undocumented. The Trump administration has not made any serious effort to crack down on the Agricultural industry’s employment of illegal immigrants. In California there are about 2 1/2 million undocumented immigrants, man work on the fields as well as construction and manufacturing.
The Trump administration has engaged in raids of enterprises that employ undocumented workers – always touted in his tweets and Fox News – to convey the impression that the government is seriously attempting to curtail the employment of undocumented workers. However the real intent is not to discourage use of undocumented workers, these raids are intended to discourage efforts to engage in labor action that workers might use to improve their conditions and protect their rights.
In reality while Trump urged that a wall be built to discourage illegal immigration he has employed undocumented workers at his golf course and his private clubs.
What elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican parties have failed to acknowledge is the important role government has played in encouraging illegal immigration. For example, soon after the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was adopted, the federal government subsidized American corn growers so they could sell corn in Mexico at an artificially low price. As a result, Mexican corn growers could not compete and went out of business. So not as a matter of choice but to survive, they attempted to cross the border to find jobs. In the case people from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to migrate to the U.S., it is in large part a result of their dictatorial regimes that were installed or supported by the United States. Yet the Trump administration claims that their decision to flee from many of these countries has been entirely voluntary.
Progressives must continue to find opportunities to reach out to the public. The country deserves nothing less.
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The Classic Organizer – Bob Moses
By Mike Miller
Bob Moses was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) “field secretary”(organizer) who in 1962 began the voter registration and community organizing work that broke the wall of Mississippi segregation. Moses became a legend, but he refused to become a public spokesman for “The Movement”, insisting on the classic organizer role of developing and projecting others. An initial dozen African-American young people, many themselves local Mississippians, began the patient work of encouraging local people to go to the county courthouse to register to vote. By 1964, almost 1,000, mostly northern white, students, and legal, health and other workers, had joined them in the Mississippi Summer Project that was directed by Moses. One result was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenge at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention to the seating of the State’s racist “regulars”. The rejection of that challenge, led by President Johnson and the leadership of the Party, was a key event in the radicalization of the student movement.
Moses refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. He left the country, quietly returning after a sojourn working in Africa. More recently, he has developed a pedagogy for teaching algebra to lowest quartile students. That work led to a McArthur “genius” award and The Algebra Project.
Mike Miller
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Bob Moses on “Earned Insurgency”. (From YouTube, 2007)
“My point about insurgency is that we need to have insurgencies to have democracy. In the ‘60s, the sit-ins were insurgencies; the sit-inners were insurgents; they earned their insurgency by people beating up on them, by dressing up in suits and ties so that they could present themselves to the country so that the country could see them.
“Like it or not, if we’re going to have an insurgency that’s going to be effective we have to figure out how we earn our insurgency. We earned the insurgency of the right to vote in Mississippi by adopting nonviolence as a way to go on the offensive. That’s actually what I think happened.”
“You have to earn the right [to speak]. You have to figure out how to mount such a movement… You have to pull together the numbers of people, and the way in which you pull it [together], so that the people in power can’t ignore you; they have to go along with you.
“In Mississippi, we earned our insurgency with local people: we’d get knocked down, and we’d get back up; we didn’t run; we didn’t abandon the local people. We earned our insurgency with the country: the children of the country came to Mississippi for the Summer Project of 1964. And we earned our insurgency with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by carefully developing the case for their intervention. That intervention was based on a provision of the 1957 Civil Rights Act that said the Justice Department could act if local authorities were denying people the right to vote. That provision was the “crawl space” that gave us a way into the Justice Department. Without their intervention, we would have been rotting in jail.”
“I think, basically, we ran what I think of now as an earned insurgency. And we had to earn it at three different levels. One was the actual farmers and sharecroppers that we were working with. We had to earn the right to ask them to join us in this work, ’cause they were threatened, they were murdered.
“The way we earned their respect was every time—we, as organizers, had to get knocked down enough times and stand back up.
‘We were asking people to risk their lives, so we had to show them that we were actually also willing to do that ourselves. So we did that just by getting knocked down and standing back up. So every time we got knocked down, we stood back up. So you do that enough, then people think you’re real, it’s not just talk.
“[We also had to earn the respect of] the Justice Department, they didn’t have to, they weren’t required to turn the jailhouse key. …They were permitted to do it, but they weren’t required…And so we had to be disciplined ourselves to work on the voter registration, so that every time we got arrested, there was the presumption that that’s what we were arrested for. They were not going to interfere around something other than voter registration, this little legal crawlspace of the ’57 Civil Rights Act.
“And then we had to earn the right to call on the whole country to come take a look at itself in Mississippi, ’cause, yes, we were asking white students to come down into this danger, but we had earned the right by risking that danger ourselves and thinking this is an American issue, this is a constitutional issue, this is not just black people’s problems.”
On responsibility
“You’ve got to take responsibility for your government. In the end, you are the government. If you are not involved in this government, it will take you places where you do not want to go.
“The government can take us where we don’t want to go only because we don’t see ourselves as the government.
“We have to develop a culture in which we can have conversations about what we want to do about our condition.”
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You should also read Mike Miller’s review of Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men.
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The importance of Fostering Community and Social Support
By Kelley Cutler
As of this writing, there are 1,212 people on the single adult shelter waitlist waiting for a temporary bed.
We went on outreach to the encampments yesterday. The City had come through and done sweeps earlier in the day so we didn’t see many tents, but we checked in with quite a few people sitting on the street with the remainder of their belongings. We asked if they were offered a bed in the Navigation Center, but no one we spoke to had.
I took this picture of the barricades that line the streets in the City where encampments used to be. These barricades are ridiculous. This is the location where a sweep destroyed the belongings of a 70-year old disabled Veteran named Neil Taylor. Neil was in the emergency room when they hit and trashed all of his belongings — including his walker. This is the same location where Neil died on two years ago on April 1.
Last week, I received information that a block the City had “resolved” in the past now had a pretty large encampment on it. In other words, it’s the latest area folks went to seek a little relief from the relentless sweeps by the City. I’m told they got hit by sweeps over the weekend. The block was empty except for two tents that were put up a couple hours before we arrived.
We’ve been having to spend so much time in hearings at City Hall, at the Port Commission and at a seemingly endless series of meetings lately so it was a relief to be back on the street talking with rad folks. The drama over the Embarcadero “SAFE Navigation Center” — SAFE standing for “Shelter Access for Everyone — has been emotionally taxing.
The narrative regarding the Embarcadero drama has been framed as having two sides: the good vs. the bad; the wealthy condo owners who hate poor people vs. a social justice mayor fighting for homeless folks — although she didn’t support Prop. C — and a belief that Navigation Centers are the be-all, end-all cure for homelessness. This isn’t the reality.
The handful of folks running that “Safe Embarcadero” campaign against the Nav Center opening there are a real piece of work! They seem to get pleasure from pulling fake data and fake research out of their asses to strike fear in the residents and to pressure the City. It’s been a very hateful and gross campaign. I think the majority of folks are reacting out of fear — and I believe their fear is mostly unwarranted, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are afraid.
The reality is that no matter the neighborhood, the housed residents will pitch a fit if the City suggests opening a homeless services facility in their hood and will fight to keep them out. It happens all the time. If you don’t believe me, look into how the rad organization Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight has gotten screwed over and their program has been homeless for years. Go donate money to them because they are badass and do amazing work!
We usually stay out of the drama when it comes to Navigation Centers. It’s complicated. We want and need more resources so we support that, but the devil is in the details. Details such as the plan for the “Outreach and Safety Zones” Commander David Lazar presented at the Port Commission hearing. “Outreach and Safety Zones” is code for enforcement zone — areas that will get hit by sweeps relentlessly — areas that the City will deem “resolved” and the presence of people experiencing homelessness will be criminalized. The same thing happened after they opened Navigation Centers in the Mission. If the SAFE Nav Center has a limited stay, where do you think people will go when they end up back on the street? This “safety zone” will be off limits.
“It was such a great addition, a great tool for spending quality time and bonding with others.”
What is a SAFE Navigation Center anyway? We are still working on figuring that out. We keep hearing it will serve more people than other shelter, but that it will be more cost effective. Hmm … that’s something to keep an eye on. We have an idea of the model based on other shelters and Nav Centers, but again the devil is in the details, and that’s still getting sorted out.
We’ve started doing surveys with folks on outreach: we ask about their experience staying at the Navigation Centers and what they would include in a shelter if they were to design it.
We hear different feedback about Navigation Centers based on which organization is running the particular site. Certain Nav Centers have a really bad reputation for treating people poorly. We hear a lot about the seven-day beds SFPD give out. Folks tell us seven days isn’t enough time to get anything accomplished — can’t even get your ID in that amount of time.
The answers to the question of what things folks would include if they designed their own Nav Center was fascinating to me. Great stuff! Very thoughtful and compassionate as well. Everyone I did a survey with felt it was very important for the City to set aside beds for special populations, such as seniors, people with disabilities and pregnant women.
Folks spoke about the importance of creating an environment that fosters community and social support. There was a lot of focus on the program providing support, such as benefits assistance, vocation training, counseling, drug counseling/safe use site and medical support. Something that came up a lot was the need to have adequate food and the option for folks to store and cook their own food as well.
Folks said they want the programs to listen to what the clients have to say about what they want and need — folks want to be asked. And frankly, their input is extremely important. For example, if folks are asked what they think about the seven-day beds the management will discover that folks think it sucks, that it’s just being used as a tool for enforcement for SFPD to do sweeps.
I have kind of an obsession with something I believe Navigation Centers can benefit from — a fire pit! I’m totally serious! Many years ago I worked at a rehab and I bought a fire pit for the program. It was such a great addition, a great tool for spending quality time and bonding with others. Yeah, totally random, but I’m obsessed with the idea. Others think it would be a great addition, too. City officials don’t seem to think it’s a good idea, but I wasn’t asking their opinion.
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Reprinted by permission of the author, this piece first ran on Medium, 1 May 2019
“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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