The AFL-CIO and Change to Win get behind the health care bill. This is a generational moment in US politics, a moment when a progressive infrastructure built over decades permanently loses what remains of its credibility. Unions, pro-choice groups, liberal advocacy organizations, desperately throwing overboard firmly held convictions developed over a quarter century or longer to retain a seat at the table, although I have to concede, MoveON.org has never conducted itself according to any principle other that expediency.

The decision of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to support the bill is especially disheartening as they are among the only groups with sufficient membership and financial clout to chart a course independent of the White House. But no need to worry, they are going to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed, and ignite a new era of successful unionization in the workplace . . . you know, whenever they get around to actually putting resources into it instead of fighting with one another.

The sad fact is that the interests of unionized workers were better represented by tea party crazies than by their own unions, because the efforts of the tea party activists would have prevented an excise tax of employer based plans from going into effect, a tax that will, with the passage of time, either degrade the quality of their health coverage or cause them to pay substantially more for it. Having foregone salary increases for years in return for decent health care plans, the implementation of the health care bill will now take this away from them. It is all part of the new austerity, whereby workers are being forced by the government and transnational corporations to finance the reconstruction of the shattered financial system through a lower standard of living for years, and, possibly, decades. Marxists would probably call it a means by which the appropriation of surplus labor is increased.

It calls into the question the historic left commitment to trade unionism, as I observed in September 2009:

For those schooled in the traditions of the left, whether it be Social Democracy, Communism or anarchism, the reinvigoration of trade unionism is an essential precondition to any prospect of a progressive, not to mention revolutionary, social transformation. While there has been many points of disagreement between these leftist variations, there has been one constant. All three have emphasized the necessity of participating in unions as a means of educating and organizing workers in support of a radical, class based politics. None of them, with the exception of anarchists in the 1890s, believed that we could bring about a more just, more egalitarian society independent of the trade union movement. Furthermore, the unions served an essential purpose by providing a means whereby workers could learn how to manage their workplaces for themselves.

If the moribund trade union movement cannot be resuscitated, the consequences for the left are profound. An entirely new doctrinal approach will be required, one that reinterprets class and capitalism in such a way as to present the prospect of social change despite an immobilized union movement. It would require transcending nearly 200 years of modernist left thought that sanctifies the worker as given expression through trade unionism. It is hard to imagine, but it may be unavoidable.

For those of us who are not quite ready to fully confront this challenge, we must take hope in small victories.

Labels: Activism, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

The born again Dennis Kucinich, team player par excellence:

A few hours after Rep. Dennis Kucinich switched his support to become a critical vote for the health care bill, he took to the House floor to ask wavering colleagues to join him. Astonished colleagues pointed to Kucinich (D-OH) darting from member to member on the House floor yesterday, saying privately they'd never seen him get so involved in whipping a vote.

It's not just progressives he's targeting to keep in the fold, it's everyone, a top Democratic aide told me. Members know that Kucinich - a staunch antiwar liberal long in favor of a single-payer system and often going out on a limb with his own agenda - is setting aside deep ideology to help get something passed. It's a totally new dynamic. People are realizing he's doing it for history, the aide said.

People with long memories know that this movie is a remake of a March 2007 release:

The supplemental funding bill has cleared the House with exactly the number of votes required for passage:

The House of Representatives voted today, by the narrowest possible margin and after an unusually emotional debate, to set a timetable for bringing American troops home from Iraq.

The bill received 218 votes in favor, the minimum needed for passage in the 435-seat chamber. There were 212 votes opposed. The Democratic leadership held the voting open for two additional minutes past the originally scheduled 15 to lock up the majority. Vote-counters had predicted beforehand that the outcome would be very close.

Who made this victory for the proponents of perpetual war in the Middle East possible? It's shocking, and should never be forgotten:

With Democrats holding 233 seats and Republicans with 201, Democrats were able to afford only 15 "no" votes. Accordingly, Pelosi, and her leadership team spent days trying to convince members that the bill was Congress' best chance of forcing Bush to change course—an argument that was aided when they added more than $20 billion in domestic spending in an effort to lure votes.

They got a breakthrough Thursday when four of the bill's most consistent critics said they would not stand in its way. California Democrats Lynn Woolsey, Diane Watson, Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters said they would help round up support for the bill despite their intention to personally vote against it because it would not end the war immediately. "Despite my steadfast opposition, I have told the speaker that I will work with her to obtain the needed votes to pass the supplemental, but that in the end I must vote my conscience," said Rep. Diane Watson, D- Calif.

Woolsey, Watson, Lee and Waters, the Gang of Four that rescued funding for the President's wars in the Middle East, while keeping their own voting records scrupulously clean.

Careful readers have no doubt identified the one significant change in the narrative for the current sequel. In 2007, Woolsey, Watson, Lee and Waters were permitted to personally vote against supplemental war funding as long as they could round up enough support from others to get it passed. One suspects that one or more of them would have voted for it as required to get it passed if necessary. Here, there is no such margin, every last vote must be turned to assure victory, and, as emphasized yesterday, the President's socioeconomic vision generates so much public hostility that liberals must be compelled to support it to the greatest extent possible.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

I've never thought much of Dennis Kucinich. Nice enough person who says, and often does, the right thing, or, at least, tries to push the political dialogue in the right direction. But I've never thought he was serious when he ran for President. He wasn't particularly effective at creating a grassroots organization, either for himself or the social issues that he espouses. In Congress, he has a safe seat, and therefore has the latitude to do what he does, as long as he doesn't cause discomfort for the leadership. He primarily serves the purpose of providing a a safety valve that keeps liberals and some leftists in the Democratic Party, perpetuating the illusion that the party remains a plausible vehicle for social change.

Until today. After loudly condemning the Senate health care bill, criticizing it for its lack of a public option and the constraints that it places upon states that might be inclined to implement a single payer system, he crumbled like a cardboard box when Obama flew into his district and criticized him for refusing to vote for the bill. And, he did this after accepting thousands and thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from people who want a public option. To his credit, he, unlike many other purported progressives, has agreed to return the money, although, given that the filing deadline for a primary challenge has already passed, that's not nearly as much of a sacrifice as it appears.

Overnight, Dennis the Menace became Dennis Who?, just another congressional cipher who does what Pelosi and Obama tell him to do. He may not have had a huge following, but his supporters were committed. They appreciated the hearings that he called on a myriad of progressive issues that no one else would touch. They exhalted him as a truth teller in Congress, alone in a sea of corruption. So much for that. His press releases and e-mail announcements are now going to promptly find their way into garbage cans, both real and virtual.

But why was it so essential to destroy the public reputation of Dennis Kucinich? He did, after all, serve a very useful function, as noted at the beginning of this post. Radicalized liberals and progressives now understand that the Obama administration and its elite allies brook no dissent from the left, and that the political process in DC has no place for them, in marked contrast to the hospitality shown the right. Of course, the simple answer is that Democratic congressional leadership needed his vote to get the Senate health care bill onto Obama's desk. That's true. But I believe that there is more to it.

Obama and the congressional Democrats know that the bill is unpopular. They understand that many people will be forever outraged over the mandate they purchase insurance, the excise tax and the lack of any cost containment. Or, to put it more bluntly, they will remain angry about being forced to buy insurance provided on terms designed to preserve the maximum profitability of health insurance companies, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies. In such a situation, it is essential to not only get the bill passed, but eliminate any credible liberal opponents around whom people could coalesce. Hence, the hardball tactics used by the White House to coerce the AFL-CIO, MoveON and specific Democratic representatives into supporting the bill in the most embarrassing way that exposes their powerlessness. Now, the way is open for Obama, consistent with his Chicago School of Economics perspective, to even more aggressively restructure the US economy for the benefit of capital.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

From the London Times:

The two helicopters swooped low over a cluster of mud homes, whirling in the cold night sky before landing in a wheat field on the edge of the small Afghan village.

From his home nearby, 23-year-old Najibullah Omar strained his eyes in the darkness as he made out the faint shapes of armed men pouring from the helicopters’ bellies.

A third helicopter circled menacingly in the moonless sky above the village of Karakhil in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.

Then a loud explosion shook the ground and a plume of smoke rose from his cousin Hamidullah’s house 20 yards away. Its guest room caught fire. Omar heard a burst of gunfire before all went quiet.

The body of his cousin, a 32-year-old construction engineer who had taken a break from his job in a far-off province to visit his family, lay sprawled next to those of his wife and their seven-year-old son. Blood ran in dark pools on the mud floor of the terrace outside their door.

The wife and son had been shot in the head, each with a single bullet. The engineer had died from a shot to the chest. The precision of the killings, coupled with his failure to find any bullet casings after the raid, led Omar to believe that his cousin was murdered either by US special forces or by an intelligence agency.

The sole survivor was the couple’s younger son, aged six, whose upper torso was riddled with puncture wounds from grenade shrapnel.

For years, we have been subjected to statements all across the political spectrum that, regardless of what we think about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Pakistan, that we should all respect the bravery of our troops, and the sacrifices that they make on our behalf.

It's nonsense, propaganda on the level of the old USSR or Nazi Germany, as this article demonstrates. Our troops come from one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. They are transported around combat zones by planes and helicopters, guided by satellite communications and provided with information as to what is transpiring on the ground from surveillance drones. They are equipped with the most modern weapons and protective gear, and able to call in air strikes within minutes if they should come under attack. If wounded, they are rescued by helicopter and evacuated half way across the world to Germany for treatment within hours.

Conversely, the people subjected to their violence are among the poorest in the world. They live in villages and practice subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. Some grow poppies for the global heroin trade, and partake of little of the outsized profits generated from this illicitl activity. Most children must forego their education to assist their parents, with a few fortunate enough to become educated as professionals, like one of the victims in this attack. Even so, such a professional still lives a difficult life, with a degree of deprivation unimaginable for similarly situated people in the US and Europe. Needless to say, life spans are short and child mortality rates high. Such are the people for whom our troops must act with such bravery, such ferocity of purpose, in order to prevail.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sadomasochism, US Military

Yesterday morning, I put my young son in the car seat, and traveled down to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to go to the 15h Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, purportedly one of the largest, if not the largest, in the United States. Fortunately, we missed the cayenne pepper pie assault upon an anti-vegan speaker on Saturday. My son decided that he didn't like the 2:00 p.m. Cafe panel discussion on Prospects for Winning in an Age of Crisis, and he eventually hit upon the successful strategy of playfully screaming to force me to take him out of the building and out into the adjacent arboretum. Perhaps, the panelists would have benefitted from contact with him, as he seems to be quite skilled at both winning and taking advantage of crises, many of which that he creates.

You have to give the anarchists credit for their commitment to the importance of propagandizing and education through book publishing and distribution at a time when both have been overwhelmed by television and the Internet. Anarchism has always been firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and its proponents act upon their belief that people are capable of ruling themselves without hierarchy by ceaselessly seeking to persuade them of it. Given that anarchists are smaller in number than Marxist-Leninists and liberals, and that they, unlike the others, lack access to the resources of academia, their achievements in disseminating works of radical history and theory is all the more remarkable. Having always been outside the system, so to speak, they appear to have adapted to the current neoliberal environment more easily than Marxist-Leninists who indirectly relied upon substantial state support through universities and public media to reach the public.

But I digress. My son grew tired, and I was able to attend a 4:00 p.m. Cafe panel on the organizing efforts of the National Union of Healthcare Workers ("NUHW") while he slept. Having followed this effort closely, I was interested in hearing what the people involved had to say about it. The moderator of the panel was Cal Winslow, the author of a small, but compelling, book about the struggle of California health care workers to escape the Service Employees International Union ("SEIU") through the creation of their own union, Labor's Civil War in California: The NUHW Healthcare Workers' Rebellion (you may have to scroll the down the page for the description of it). The panelists were Angela Glasper, founder NUHW, Kaiser, Antioch, Maya Morris, NUHW, St. Francis Hospital and Peter Tappeiner, volunteer organizer, NUHW.

All three of them, but especially Glasper and Morris, related their frustration and the frustration of their co-workers as it became evident that SEIU no longer represented them, and collaborated with their employers to take away hard won rights in the workplace. For example, according to Glasper, seniority is no longer respected in regard to assignments, as SEIU and Kaiser allow managers to play favorites among their employees. Kaiser is also laying off workers despite having recently made substantial profits. SEIU undermines the collective bargaining agreements of members by perpetually entering into precedential side agreements without their knowledge, or, if the the issue does become known, despite member opposition. It is not uncommon for managers to disregard the concerns of employees by responding, All I need to do is take it to SEIU. Such actions, over the course of time, water down contract protections which can then be memorialized in the next collective bargaining agreement.

As the conflict erupted, SEIU and health care employers engaged in surveillance and intimidation of workers associated with the attempt to replace SEIU with NUHW. Glasper described how she is followed around her workplace daily by numerous people, some managers, some co-workers, as they search for any reason to write her up. She has also received threatening phone calls: You're dead. Morris was denied work for 16 months. All three panelists, Tappeiner, Glasper and Morris, emphasized that California health care workers want a union that operates democratically from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

Unfortunately, the panel was not as well attended as it should have been, becauise the Book Fair scheduled it against an appearance by Ward Churchill in the adjacent auditorium. But one of the more interesting moments came when someone inquired about the potential for NUHW to lead the fight for single payer health care as well as more generally challenging the current neoliberal climate. He received a sincere, polite response, although I thought the question was unfair in its scope. After all, he seemed to implicitly suggest that it was responsibility of the workers within NUHW to lead this fight. Why?

Now, I understand the centrality of trade unionism within Marxism and anarchism, but to place such a burden upon workers stuggling to obtain their own union representation struck me as a little extreme. NUHW workers and organizers are fighting against SEIU and their employers to gain a voice in their workplace. That's a pretty tall order. Furthermore, if they succeed, they will have to build a union from the ground up by creating democratic structures that induce participation on the shop floor. They will have to negotiate new contracts, protect the rights obtained through them and defend their memberfs against grievances. Of course, many in the NUHW have a lot of experience doing this, but it still requires a great effort. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that a movement towards the socialization of the US economy will require, as a precondition, the empowerment of workers within the workplace, and experience in making collective decisions. Assuming, of course, that external events don't force it upon us more rapidly.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Marxism, NUHW, Postmodernism, SEIU, Unions

Have the novels of B. Traven been relegated to the literary periphery? His Jungle Novel series is difficult to find on the shelf, even at chain stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. I recalled, perhaps mistakenly, that smaller, lefty stores used to carry them, but I was surprised a few weeks ago when there were none available at Modern Times in San Francisco. I do remember, however, purchasing the first novel in the series, Government, at the anarchist bookstore in the Haight, Bound Together, several years ago.

Perhaps, this is because the man believed to have written under the pseudonym "B. Traven", Ret Marut, was an anarchist of the Stirnerite kind. Throughout the novels in the series, one encounters commentary that hints at Stirner's individualistic rejection of communal constraints. To the extent that it grounds Traven's hostility towards the role of the Mexican government and the Catholic Church in subjugating the indigenous people of southern Mexico, it enriches his work, although some may find it didactic. To the extent that it maligns the historical agency of these people, it doesn't, although, to be fair, the overall thrust of the series is the development of a social consciousness among the native peoples that lead them to rebel against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Upon first engagement, it is easy to dismiss the Jungle Novels as an anachronism. Traven calls the peoples of Chiapas Indians. He can't fully shake relating to them at times as noble savages, although his cynical practicality acts as a brake upon such sentimentality. He falls within a tradition of Europeans that emigrated to Mexico in the early 20th Century, and, like many of them, displayed a peculiar form of what Edward Said described as orientalism in the Middle Eastern context, a tendency to swing between romanticization and condescension of the culture as pre-modern.

But all of this is overcome by one thing: Traven's elevation of the experiences of his native protagonists to epic status. Despite their inability to read, write and perform basic mathematical calculations, he does not accept their relegation to a subordinate to non-existent one. He explains, with great empathy, how they are exploited by those who have these skills and, even more, how their communities often serve their needs quite well despite the lack of them.

More specifically, Traven profiles their dehumanization by Mexicans through debt peonage, a transaction whereby jefes lend out money at usurious rates to uncomprehending natives to buy goods at exponentially marked up prices resulting in debts that can never be repaid. Moreover, the debts are passed down through the generations because they are not discharged upon the death of the person who incurred them. Furthermore, he also recognized that it was the emergence of an embryonic consumer society in manufactured goods, however rudimentary, that expanded opportunities for debt peonage as a form of expropriation and social control. His Marxist recognition of debt peonage as a residue of a feudal society enables him to transcend romanticized notions of native peoples in the Americas.

Instead, the natives find themselves navigating their way through a semi-feudal society in which foreign capital is reorganizing Mexican production on a massive scale, with large logging operations as one of the most immediate manifestations of this process. Constraints of cost and transport in the global economy of this era require that local ruling elites squeeze every last dollar out of their native peons. It is to Traven's credit that he resists the demonization of his Mexican characters because of his awareness that they are acting in a manner consistent with their social conditioning as they seek to satisfy the demands of international capital.

Sounds pretty contemporary, doesn't it? In The Carreta, the second novel in the series, Traven interweaves these broader social themes through the story of Andres, a young boy who is sent away from his family to pay the debt of his father to the local jefe. Traven's description of his departure is one of the high points of the novel, as Traven relates his father's grief despite his outwardly stolid appearance. In other words, Traven does not mistake a failure to speak and display intense emotion as indicative of an absence of parental despair. Andres is fortunate enough to be sent to work for a family where he becomes educated, and then, after the merchant for whom he works loses him playing cards, he ends up as a carretero, a cart driver who transports goods for his new boss across the mountainous dirt roads of southern Mexico.

It is difficult, but rewarding work, marked by a degree of independence lacking for those who work on fincas, ranches, or monterias, logging camps where the survival rate compares, perhaps unfavorably, to the gulag. Traven was supposedly a former journalist, and his eye for what anthropologists call ethnographical detail is acute. For a typical example of his ability to utilize his eye for detail as part of a broader social analysis, see this quote within one of my posts a few weeks ago. His description of the work and lives of Andres and the other carreteros is rich yet precise, although one must remain wary for periodic trangressions of romanticization. He humanizes what he perceives as an emerging working class in the jungle, one that is developing a class consciousness day by day as they work. But, in this instance, Traven doesn't say it explicitly, he leaves it to the reader to recognize it through the accumulation of seemingly mundane detail that he provides.

In the concluding passages, Andres goes to a festival after making a delivery and finds a wife, a young native women who has been subjected to sexual abuse by previous employers while working as a domestic. While the middle and upper class men engage in their yearly Dionysian bacchanalia of gambling and sexual excess in honor of their patron saint, he encounters her cold and hungry against the wall of a home near the city square. Traven describes the courtship between two such vulnerable people in a matter of fact way that is all the more moving because of it. Andres takes her back to the carreta train soon to depart, and gives her the name Estrellita. Unlike many women, she adapts quite readily to the demanding life on the road required of carreteros, and travels with Andres around southern Mexico for four years, until, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, a chance encounter disrupts their rough, idyllic life together.

Labels: Anarchism, Book Reviews, Marxism, Mexico

A good piece from studentactivism.net placing the protests of March 4th in a social and historical context. Liberal confrontational protest anxiety disorder appears to be untreatable. Yusef, in a comment to my post on Tuesday, asserts that the actions of the Obama administration mean that reformism is off the agenda. If so, liberal discomfort is going to get markedly worse, as protests, fueled by the proletarianization of the middle class and the sub-proletarianization of the working class, become more and more intense.

Even mildly reformist economic measures like reducing the costs of student loans and the creation of a public health insurance option to make such insurance marginally more affordable are difficult, if not impossible, to implement. It appears that the crisis currently engulfing global capitalism is such that not a dime can be spared for anything other than capital accumulation. So, past measures, such as those associated with the New Deal and Great Society, are off the table. Greece, here we come?

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Europe, Global Recession, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

As I live in Sacramento, and co-host a public affairs program on KDVS 90.3 FM, the UC Davis campus radio station, I am in a fairly good position to comment upon the eruption of student protest after the UC and CSU systems substantially increased fees and reduced class offerings. After the protests in the immediate aftermath of the fee increases in late November, and the subsequent ones that took place last week, I had the opportunity to interview students who participated in them.

My impression is that the protesters are disproportionately women and people of color, and that they have taken prominent roles in the movement, contributing significantly to its radicalization. This makes sense. Many of them have entered the UC and CSU system through admission preferences that favor people from lower middle class and lower class backgrounds, preferences put in place after Proposition 209 eliminated any consideration of race in admissions. They have a strong awareness of the consequences resulting from the evisceration of health, education and welfare programs in the communities from whence they came.

Many of them are also students in the liberal arts and social sciences, parts of the university that are no longer in favor because of their perceived lack of economic utility. Such students have developed the capability of placing their experience within a theoretical context, one that draws upon ethnic studies, women's studies and sociology. Beyond, this, one hears echoes of Guy Debord and Naomi Klein in their comments, especially in relation to the colonization of the university as part of a broader colonization of of everyday life and the urgency of challenging the depoliticalization and depersonalization associated with the capitalist spectacle.

Marx is therefore a feature of the movement more in terms of their experience than in theory and practice. The students are acutely aware of what Marxists would describe as the proletarianization of the middle class. They recognize that they are being required to pay huge sums of money for an education that will qualify them for jobs that pay less and less. Upon leaving school, they will be shackled by student loan debt for years. Some, as noted in a comment to one of my earlier posts on this subject, are being forced to choose between having enough food to eat and paying for the cost of their education. They are, in effect, in the forefront of this proletarianization process, and they are just beginning to resist it.

Of course, this is not true of all students. Protesters on March 4 encountered a class divide between themselves and students from wealthier backgrounds who objected to the disruption of school. There is a class conflict emerging in the university that mirrors the larger struggle occurring outside of it. Protesters have already established connections with unions and educators in the K-12 system. Not surprisingly, neither the faculty nor the administration within UC have been very helpful, although it may be different in CSU. Both are so bound to the university as an institution, and the neoliberal assumptions upon which it operates, that they are incapable of providing meaningful assistance.

If forced to characterize the movement, I would say that it is an ideologically liberal one increasingly relying upon anarchist practice. It is liberal, because the emphasis is upon increasing social mobility through the restoration of financial support for existing educational institutions, although the activists themselves have extensive backgrounds in past efforts in furtherance of women's rights, gay rights, immigration rights and anti-imperialism. They recognize the interrelationship of these issues with what is transpiring within the university and state government. Racial incidents at UC San Diego and UCLA confirmed their perspective and provided an unanticipated synergy for their efforts by interweaving themes of economic exclusion and racial intimidation. But it appears that most students participating in the protests are motivated primarily by the recognition of their proletarianization arising from the fee increases.

The movement finds itself compelled to adopt anarchist practice because of the inflexibility of decisionmakers that could, if they wanted, address their concerns. Anarchism has been the predominant organizational approach on the left on West Coast for nearly 20 years, as demonstrated through the direct action associated with radical environmentalists, the global justice movement that took over the streets of Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of the financial district in San Francisco upon the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Student activists, well versed in this tradition, are utilizing horizontal methods of decisionmaking when undertaking actions and engaging in outreach. It is consistent with their belief that it is essential to provide a voice for people that have historically been denied an opportunity to shape their lives and the world around them.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Racism