What are the Lessons of the Republic Factory Occupation?
Written by Josh Lucker
Thursday, 03 December 2009
This December marks the one year anniversary of the occupation of Republic Windows and Doors, a struggle that captured the attention of working people across the country and the world, as it symbolized the hardships faced by millions due to the economic crisis and a willingness to fight back. However, even as the economy improves on paper, this “improvement” is not being felt by most workers and the growing ranks of the unemployed. We should, therefore, use this opportunity to look at the situation of the former Republic workers today and to try to draw the lessons from this occupation for future struggles that are sure to arise in the coming period.
Republic Windows and Doors was a Chicago-based company that produced vinyl replacement windows. In mid-2008, the company began removing machinery from the plant, which drew the attention of the workers, represented by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110. When confronted, the bosses claimed that they were simply making room for modern replacements. The workers weren’t buying it and began following the semi-trucks that were shipping the machinery out of Chicago. They found that the trucks were going to a newer, non-union plant in Red Oak, IA. As will be discussed later, this independent action of the workers would prove crucial in the case against Richard Gillman, former CEO of Republic.
On December 3rd, seemingly out of nowhere to the outside observer, but not at all unexpected to the workers, Republic announced that they would be halting operations immediately. What was unexpected was their revelation that they would not be paying the workers their severance pay or vacation benefits, which was in direct violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which requires at least 60 days notice for plant shutdown and 60 days of severance pay. The bosses claimed that they could not possibly come through on this demand, because Bank of America had recently cut off their line of credit.
Had the workers not acted at this point, the bosses most likely would have gotten away with this gross violation of the law, which shows the limitations of relying on the niceties of the bosses’ legal system. Instead, the workers chose to “violate” the law in their own way, and immediately occupied the plant, demanding their severance pay and pointing out that Bank of America had recently been bailed out and now the workers were getting sold out!
The decision to occupy the plant has been presented in the media as an entirely spontaneous action, which is not entirely true. As Kari Lydersen, author of a recent book on the occupation, Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover, and What it Says About the Economic Crisis, points out, the UE Local 1110 workers had expected that a plant closing was imminent for some time and had actually studied successful occupations of automotive plants in Canada in recent years. Also, workers and organizers from the plant had previously visited workers involved in the occupied factories movement in Venezuela. These tactics had all been discussed prior to the announcement of the closing, so that when the time came, the local leadership could propose a strategy for victory that was bold, militant, and tested through the collective experience of the international working class.
The tactic worked, and relatively quickly, on the 10th of December, Bank of America and JP Morgan-Chase agreed to pay the severance pay of the workers. We explained at the time that this was a partial victory, because while the demands for severance pay were met, the plant was still scheduled to be closed and the workers were still going to lose their jobs.
The plant was purchased in February of 2009 by Serious Materials for $1.45 million. The “socially-conscious” CEO of Serious, Kevin Surace, claimed his goal was to rehire all of the workers that had lost their jobs, but now, one year on, only 17 of the original 250 workers have been rehired. Serious Materials claims that this is due to their having received a far lower amount of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds than they had expected. Whether this is true or not, it shows the degeneracy of the market and its inability to put people to work, as well as the limitations of relying upon “business angels” to come and rescue workers facing job losses.
While the winning of their severance pay was clearly a victory and a fighting example to the rest of the working class, at the same time, the demands of the UE workers lagged behind their tactics. While their tactics correctly showed a disregard for the farce of bourgeois legality, their demands remained within the framework of the very market that the existing legal system defends. That is, they assumed that the factory would simply have to be closed because Republic went bankrupt. However, as more workers face cuts in wages and benefits and factory closings in the coming years, not only must we be willing to fight, we must put forward demands that can ensure production continues and our jobs are not cut: nationalization under workers’ democratic control. Only in this way can we defend existing and create new jobs, improve our standard of living, and continue to produce the goods and services we all need.
And what became of the bosses at Republic? Charges have been filed against Richard Gillman, who along with two other former Republic executives, is charged with fraud and money laundering through shell corporations in an attempt to relocate Republic to a non-union factory in Red Oak, IA. He has been released on $5 million bail, which had been reduced from $10 million.
The Cook County prosecutors actually credit the workers of UE Local 1110 with creating the conditions that allowed for the collection of most of the evidence against Gillman and co. Not only did they follow the semi-trucks, but it was their occupation, i.e. a formal violation of the law, that prevented Gillman from destroying the remainder of the evidence, which was held in the offices at the plant. This included a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the bosses’ plans to move machinery to Iowa under the noses of their own board of directors.
This is all the more important, because not only did Gillman conspire to destroy the lives of 250 workers in Chicago, but less than two months after Gillman began operations in Red Oak, that plant, which had been operating since 1985, also closed, laying off 120 workers and devastating yet another community.
It was only the actions of the workers that provided even the possibility that Gillman will see his day in court, albeit in a justice system stacked in his favor. How many similar situations are there around the country? In the current economic situation, we must demand that all business open up their books. If the business is genuinely failing, prove it. The bosses must be held accountable! We should not have to pay for their crisis!
One thing is clear: the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation marked a turning point in the struggle of the working class in the United States. It will serve as an inspiration for the struggles that lay ahead. Already, numerous articles and books have been written about the struggle.
The workers of UE 1110 are also featured in Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. No wonder! The tactics they used in their struggle are the basis for dealing with the real cause of the problems we face and outlined in the film: the capitalist system itself. These workers will also be featured in a new documentary titled Workers’ Republic, released by Insurgent Productions, and featuring the tag line “When the economy fell… they stood up.” The key, however, will be to synthesize and absorb the lessons from this struggle, not as an academic exercise, but in order to apply them in the future struggles of our class.
Mu
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Duh Bye
Just as hopes were being raised that the worst of the recession might be over, the lunacy of the market strikes again.
Dubai’s rich borrowed to finance a speculative construction boom—building palaces in the desert and islands in the sea.
Across the globe, the rich invested in luxury apartments and visited a glitzy new world of luxury hotels and casinos.
Rather than “once bitten twice shy”, banks and corporations rushed back to the casino table at the first opportunity and wagered billions of pounds.
British construction firms, banks and businesses came to the fore to lend money, invest in property and bid for alluring contracts. Dubai World has said it cannot pay its £35.7 billion debts. British banks are thought have sunk up to £20 billion into the United Arab Emirates.
At the head of the pack were Lloyds and RBS—despite the fact they have been bailed out at vast expense to us.
No-one knows what the impact of the Dubai crash will be, but whatever the outcome, the bill for this collapse will be footed by working people who will lose their jobs, suffer extra taxes and cuts in public spending.
The crisis in Dubai shows that this is a system addicted to making a profit with no concern for the waste and destruction it sows.
Capitalism doesn’t work. It needs replacing urgently.
'Dubai dream' is over as the bubble bursts
by Simon Assaf
Dubai, the once-gleaming playground of the rich, has become the latest victim of the global financial chaos. Its powerful investment arm, Dubai World, is close to bankruptcy, and its fate dependent on the largess of other Arab governments.
The emirate of Dubai is part of a federation of seven small monarchies that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These grew rich on oil and gas dollars.
But unlike its neighbours, Dubai’s oil soon ran out. So its “visionary” ruler set out to turn the desert kingdom into the financial hub of the Middle East and a global financial player—with investments that include the giant Thames Gateway port in Britain.
Dubai World invested in huge building projects that transformed the kingdom into a shimmering capital for the global rich, with “seven-star” hotels and artificial island complexes.
It became the ultimate “gated community”, with a tax-free lifestyle and luxuries on demand.
But now the state-owned Dubai World can no longer pay its bills. This has brought a grim end to a long boom that many thought would never finish.
Global banks including HSBC, Barclays and RBS could lose over £30 billion. Billions more could be lost by global funds and small investors.
The latest crisis was triggered when Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, declared that the company would be suspending debt repayments worth some £35.8 billion.
Dubai owes its growth to the ever-present threat of war in the region.
In the late 1970s the emirate established a free trade port and set up
tax-free manufacturing zones. Factories and companies from Arab cities such as Cairo and Beirut decanted to Dubai.
A second wave of growth was driven by the flight of companies from Kuwait and Beirut—the traditional financial capitals of the Arab world—after the Gulf wars and Israeli invasions.
Dubai could stand aloof from these conflicts. It became a clearing house for Arab and global capital.
The boom, and high salaries, drew in skilled workers and professionals from across the region, including many women. Their remittances kept many of the smaller economies, such as Lebanon and Jordan, afloat.
But Dubai is built in the desert. It has no hinterland. The buildings were for the global rich, not locals.
They were constructed using cheap labour drawn mainly from across south Asia. These workers slaved in searing heat to complete the towers, hotels and luxury islands.
Meltdown
At first Dubai seemed to buck the global financial meltdown. But last year the banking crisis sucked out much of the new money that was driving its hike in property prices.
Many who bought property on credit now found their investments were worth a fraction of the original price.
On average property prices have dropped 50 percent since their peak last year, with forecasts of a further 20 percent drop.
The debts began to pile up. This in turn cut the flow of cash to the building firms, which began to default on payments to contractors.
Mortgage companies and insurance underwriters were swept up in the crisis. Global corporations followed suit. Many Western companies that promoted the “Dubai dream” sank.
The emirate began the arduous bailout process with the ruler pouring in some £20 billion in an emergency rescue plan. That injection of liquidity fuelled a slight recovery this year. But it was not enough to overcome the deep structural problems.
With his options running out, Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammad turned cap in hand to oil and cash rich Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s historic rival.
Sheik Mohammed seemed to have pulled off an escape. Fear of a domino effect reassured investors that however deep the debt, the whole project would nor be allowed to sink into the sea. Abu Dhabi would ride to the rescue.
But then Abu Dhabi pulled the plug. As many of the wealthier Arab regimes had already been burnt by the banking crisis, it seemed prepared to allow Dubai World to take the pain.
It was a “Lehman Brothers moment”, when the ruling class gambled on allowing one part of the system to crash in order to shield others.
It is difficult to predict the course of this latest crisis. But the promise of the free market, which much of the region claimed was the only model of economic development, now stands as empty as the luxury towers that litter Dubai’s coast.
A morbid system
Morbid Symptoms: Health under Capitalism
Book Review by Kambiz Boomla, December 2009
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Merlin Press, £15.95
The editors of this year's Socialist Register describe their goal as seeking to develop a historical materialist analysis of health under capitalism. They aim to focus on what has happened in the current neoliberal period, looking at healthcare as an object of struggle between commercial forces seeking to make it a profitable commodity and popular forces trying to keep it a public service.
One could not fail to be impressed by the breadth of articles in this collection, covering both health and healthcare, both developed and Third World countries.
The earlier articles concentrate on the developed world. Colin Leys sets the tone for the book in his first article, looking at the fall in mortality that has occurred under capitalism. He argues that improvements have come as part of the struggle against capitalism, rather than because of it, pointing to the sanitation movement and the struggle for public health. He contrasts the principle of solidarity born out of the labour movement with the increasing re-commodification of healthcare taking place, a theme taken up and developed by Hans-Ulrich Deppe.
Christopher Hermann describes in detail how healthcare is becoming increasingly marketised across Europe in a whole series of reactionary reforms: public hospitals being sold to the private sector, the expansion of private insurance, the introduction of internal markets and the outsourcing of labour. Marie Gottschalk describes the tragic watering down of all Democrat proposals for US healthcare reform, including what is happening now with the originally weak Obama proposals.
Moving on to the Third World, there is a series of articles describing the shifts occurring as neoliberal health policies were rammed through in the 1990s. In 1978 the World Health Organisation introduced its "Health for All" strategy at Alma Ata, promising fundamental improvements in health and healthcare based on a strategy of investing in primary care to reduce health inequalities. Meri Koivusalo and other contributors describe how in the 1990s the World Bank sank that strategy to introduce a new world health policy driven by structural adjustment programmes, the promotion of the private sector and disinvestment in public services.
Case studies are given of how this played out in Africa, China and India. Julie Feinsilver describes what has happened in Cuba in response to the "special period" and how Cuba uses the export of doctors to promote Cuban diplomacy. But health is not just influenced by healthcare. Robert Albritton describes how capitalism is responsible both for obesity causing death in developed countries and starvation occurring in the Third World.
Does this year's Register succeed in meeting the editors' goals? My verdict is yes. But its weakness is that it gives little feel for what forces are out there challenging neoliberalism, or, where there is little challenge, where those forces could be found.
Book Review by Kambiz Boomla, December 2009
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Merlin Press, £15.95
The editors of this year's Socialist Register describe their goal as seeking to develop a historical materialist analysis of health under capitalism. They aim to focus on what has happened in the current neoliberal period, looking at healthcare as an object of struggle between commercial forces seeking to make it a profitable commodity and popular forces trying to keep it a public service.
One could not fail to be impressed by the breadth of articles in this collection, covering both health and healthcare, both developed and Third World countries.
The earlier articles concentrate on the developed world. Colin Leys sets the tone for the book in his first article, looking at the fall in mortality that has occurred under capitalism. He argues that improvements have come as part of the struggle against capitalism, rather than because of it, pointing to the sanitation movement and the struggle for public health. He contrasts the principle of solidarity born out of the labour movement with the increasing re-commodification of healthcare taking place, a theme taken up and developed by Hans-Ulrich Deppe.
Christopher Hermann describes in detail how healthcare is becoming increasingly marketised across Europe in a whole series of reactionary reforms: public hospitals being sold to the private sector, the expansion of private insurance, the introduction of internal markets and the outsourcing of labour. Marie Gottschalk describes the tragic watering down of all Democrat proposals for US healthcare reform, including what is happening now with the originally weak Obama proposals.
Moving on to the Third World, there is a series of articles describing the shifts occurring as neoliberal health policies were rammed through in the 1990s. In 1978 the World Health Organisation introduced its "Health for All" strategy at Alma Ata, promising fundamental improvements in health and healthcare based on a strategy of investing in primary care to reduce health inequalities. Meri Koivusalo and other contributors describe how in the 1990s the World Bank sank that strategy to introduce a new world health policy driven by structural adjustment programmes, the promotion of the private sector and disinvestment in public services.
Case studies are given of how this played out in Africa, China and India. Julie Feinsilver describes what has happened in Cuba in response to the "special period" and how Cuba uses the export of doctors to promote Cuban diplomacy. But health is not just influenced by healthcare. Robert Albritton describes how capitalism is responsible both for obesity causing death in developed countries and starvation occurring in the Third World.
Does this year's Register succeed in meeting the editors' goals? My verdict is yes. But its weakness is that it gives little feel for what forces are out there challenging neoliberalism, or, where there is little challenge, where those forces could be found.
Immigrant struggles in France
Letter from France
Letter from... by Vanina Giudicelli, December 2009
Undocumented workers in Paris are waging an extraordinary battle to win their rights, reports Vanina Giudicelli
On 12 October 1,500 sans papiers - immigrant workers denied residence papers - began a wave of strikes and workplace occupations around Paris. Every day a hundred more joined them, until by the end of November the movement was 5,000 strong.
The media has paid very little attention, but every report that does appear exposes the racist attitude of both the government and employers.
The undocumented workers are generally employed in sectors of the economy where work cannot be relocated abroad, such as catering, construction, cleaning and security services. Their bosses have no qualms about infringing workplace legislation, imposing longer hours, failing to pay wages, or redundancies.
These strikes have highlighted an obvious fact: sans papiers are workers like any other but their exploitation is worse because they are without residence rights.
As striker Gary Diabate explains, "Our struggle concerns all workers. The rights of French workers are also being undermined by the downward pressure on wages exerted by the employment of sans papiers. We don't have a minimum wage. That helps the bosses lower the wages of all workers."
Immigration is a major ideological issue for the government. In the current crisis it needs scapegoats. This task is being made easier by the lack of response from the leadership of the Socialist opposition and obstacles being put in the way of struggle by sections of the trade union bureaucracy.
Last year 29,000 sans papiers were deported and there was a notable rise in police identity checks on blacks and Arabs. One minister declared that, when it came to Muslims, "It's when there are too many of them that problems occur."
The government spends a million euros a day on the occupation of Afghanistan but had no hesitation in deporting three Afghan sans papiers seeking asylum. Immigration minister Eric Besson (a former Socialist) launched a high profile debate on what it means to be "proud to be French", explaining that "the republican heritage contains a certain number of values that we should never have abandoned to the [fascist] Front National."
Politically, then, there is a lot at stake. Strikes by sans papiers last year marked an important turning point in the struggle against the Sarkozy government's racist policies. This year the strikes involve more workers as they link up with others in the same situation to occupy their temping agencies' offices. The mobilisations are backed up by networks uniting various associations and trade unions, and support groups have been set up across Paris.
The strikers demand revision of the criteria governing the regularisation of all sans papiers. Seventy workers are on strike in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in central Paris, 26 of whom are French, participating out of solidarity. Elsewhere occupiers are being forcibly ejected by security or face police intervention.
One group of sans papiers have occupied the site of a tramway being built by Paris city hall. The local mayor, a Socialist, told them to return to work because they were "holding public transport passengers to ransom".
But the determination is unrelenting, as one of the tramway occupiers, Sadio Dianka, explains: "I'm not afraid, I'm fighting for my rights and for my future. The involvement of the unions and support groups has lifted our spirits. The bosses need us. One of them has called five temping agencies and hasn't found a single worker to employ. But we, the strikers, are refusing to accept insecure working conditions like before. We've had enough now. We want to be regularised."
Each victory is giving confidence to all workers.
In one cleaning firm in Montreuil, Paris, 23 sans papiers were regularised after a year on strike. Their spokesperson summed up the mood: "Be brave and determined. We work here, we pay their taxes and their national insurance but we have no rights. It's wrong. We have the right to be regularised. We have to fight to win this. Let's build this struggle and fight it to the end!"
Letter from... by Vanina Giudicelli, December 2009
Undocumented workers in Paris are waging an extraordinary battle to win their rights, reports Vanina Giudicelli
On 12 October 1,500 sans papiers - immigrant workers denied residence papers - began a wave of strikes and workplace occupations around Paris. Every day a hundred more joined them, until by the end of November the movement was 5,000 strong.
The media has paid very little attention, but every report that does appear exposes the racist attitude of both the government and employers.
The undocumented workers are generally employed in sectors of the economy where work cannot be relocated abroad, such as catering, construction, cleaning and security services. Their bosses have no qualms about infringing workplace legislation, imposing longer hours, failing to pay wages, or redundancies.
These strikes have highlighted an obvious fact: sans papiers are workers like any other but their exploitation is worse because they are without residence rights.
As striker Gary Diabate explains, "Our struggle concerns all workers. The rights of French workers are also being undermined by the downward pressure on wages exerted by the employment of sans papiers. We don't have a minimum wage. That helps the bosses lower the wages of all workers."
Immigration is a major ideological issue for the government. In the current crisis it needs scapegoats. This task is being made easier by the lack of response from the leadership of the Socialist opposition and obstacles being put in the way of struggle by sections of the trade union bureaucracy.
Last year 29,000 sans papiers were deported and there was a notable rise in police identity checks on blacks and Arabs. One minister declared that, when it came to Muslims, "It's when there are too many of them that problems occur."
The government spends a million euros a day on the occupation of Afghanistan but had no hesitation in deporting three Afghan sans papiers seeking asylum. Immigration minister Eric Besson (a former Socialist) launched a high profile debate on what it means to be "proud to be French", explaining that "the republican heritage contains a certain number of values that we should never have abandoned to the [fascist] Front National."
Politically, then, there is a lot at stake. Strikes by sans papiers last year marked an important turning point in the struggle against the Sarkozy government's racist policies. This year the strikes involve more workers as they link up with others in the same situation to occupy their temping agencies' offices. The mobilisations are backed up by networks uniting various associations and trade unions, and support groups have been set up across Paris.
The strikers demand revision of the criteria governing the regularisation of all sans papiers. Seventy workers are on strike in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in central Paris, 26 of whom are French, participating out of solidarity. Elsewhere occupiers are being forcibly ejected by security or face police intervention.
One group of sans papiers have occupied the site of a tramway being built by Paris city hall. The local mayor, a Socialist, told them to return to work because they were "holding public transport passengers to ransom".
But the determination is unrelenting, as one of the tramway occupiers, Sadio Dianka, explains: "I'm not afraid, I'm fighting for my rights and for my future. The involvement of the unions and support groups has lifted our spirits. The bosses need us. One of them has called five temping agencies and hasn't found a single worker to employ. But we, the strikers, are refusing to accept insecure working conditions like before. We've had enough now. We want to be regularised."
Each victory is giving confidence to all workers.
In one cleaning firm in Montreuil, Paris, 23 sans papiers were regularised after a year on strike. Their spokesperson summed up the mood: "Be brave and determined. We work here, we pay their taxes and their national insurance but we have no rights. It's wrong. We have the right to be regularised. We have to fight to win this. Let's build this struggle and fight it to the end!"
Kim Moody on labor & the crisis
Where is the American working class? posted by lenin
One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.
Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.
This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).
The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.
The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.
The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.
Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.
(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)
One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.
Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.
This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).
The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.
The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.
The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.
Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.
(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)
John Riddell on Latin American Marxism
excerpts
From Marx to Morales: Indigenous Socialism and the Latin Americanization of Marxism
by John Riddell
Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous peoples are in the lead.
Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.
Eurocentrism
A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a “Eurocentric” bias. They understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.1
Marx’s celebrated statement that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”2 is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period, are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa quotes Kautsky’s view that “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development”3 — that is, not yet in Latin America.
The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called “Latin American Marxism.” Argentine theorist Néstor Kohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohan says, “opposed Eurocentric schemas and populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie” and “set about recapturing ‘Inca communism’ as a precursor of socialist struggles.”4
(clip)
Ethnological Notebooks
These drafts drew on Marx’s extensive studies of Indigenous societies during that period, a record of which is available in his little-known Ethnological Notebooks.17 We find his conclusions summarized in a draft of his letter to Zasulich: “The vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies.”18
In her study of these notebooks, Christine Ward Gaily states that where such archaic forms persist, Marx depicts them fundamentally “as evidence of resistance to the penetration of state-associated institutions,” which he views as intrinsically oppressive.19 The clear implication is that such archaic survivals should be defended and developed.
The Marxists of Lenin’s time were not aware of this evolution in Marx’s thinking. Thus Antonio Gramsci could write, a few weeks after the Russian October uprising, “This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat.”20 Yet despite their limited knowledge of Marx’s views, the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, and Lukács reasserted Marx’s revolutionary stance in combat with the “Eurocentrist” view associated with Karl Kautsky and the pre-war Socialist International that socialist revolution must await capitalism’s fullest maturity and collapse.
Shanin generalizes from Marx’s approach to Russia in 1881 in a way that links to a second characteristic of Latin American revolution. “The purest forms of ’scientific socialism’ . . . invariably proved politically impotent,” he argues. “It has been the integration of Marxism with the indigenous [i.e. home-grown] political traditions which has underlain all known cases of internally generated and politically effective revolutionary transformation of society by socialists.”21
Here we have a second field of correlation with the Latin American revolutionary experience, with its strong emphasis on associating the movement for socialism with the tradition of anti-colonial struggle associated with the figures of the great aboriginal leaders and of BolÃvar, MartÃ, and Sandino. This fusion of traditions emerges as a unique strength of Latin American Marxism.
Mariátegui captured this thought in a well-known passage:
“We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and imitation. It must be a heroic creation. We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”22
Following the October revolution of 1917, Marx’s vision of the mir’s potential was realized in practice. The mir had been in decline for decades, and by 1917 half the peasants’ land was privately owned. But in the great agrarian reform of 1917-18, the peasants revived the mir and adopted it as the basic unit of peasant agriculture. During the next decade, peasant communes co-existed constructively with the beginnings of a socialist economy. By 1927, before the onset of Stalinist forced collectivization, 95% of peasant land was already communally owned.23
There is a double parallel here with present Latin American experience. First, the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry is relevant in Latin American countries where the working class, in the strict sense of those who sell their labour power to employers, is often a minority in broad coalitions of exploited producers. Second, survivals of primitive communism, including communal landholding, are a significant factor in Indigenous struggles across this region.
National Emancipation
A third correspondence can be found in the Bolsheviks’ practice toward minority peoples of the East victimized and dispossessed by Tsarist Russian settler colonialism. Too often, discussions of the Bolsheviks’ policy on the national question stop short with Stalin and Lenin’s writings of 1913-1916, ignoring the evolution of Bolshevik policy during and after the 1917 revolution. Specifically:
The later Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to the criteria of nationhood set out by Stalin in 1913.24 They advocated and implemented self-determination for oppressed peoples who were not, at the time of the 1917 revolution, crystallized nations or nationalities.
They went beyond the concept that self-determination could be expressed only through separation. Instead, they accepted the realization of self-determination through various forms of federation.
They implemented self-determination in a fashion that was not always territorial.
Their attitude toward the national cultures of minority peoples was not neutral. Instead, they committed substantial political and state resources to planning and encouraging the development of these cultures.25
On all these points, the Bolshevik experience closely matches the revolutionary policies toward Indigenous peoples now being implemented in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.
Ecology and Materialism
Finally, a word on ecology. The boldest governmental statements on the world’s ecological crisis are coming from Cuba, Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist governments in Latin America.26 The influence of Indigenous struggles is felt here. Bolivian President Evo Morales points to the leading role of Indigenous peoples, “called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”27
This claim rests on an approach by many Indigenous movements to ecology that is inherently revolutionary. Most First-World ecological discussion focuses on technical and market devices, such as carbon trading, taxation, and offsets, that aim to preserve as much as possible of a capitalist economic system that is inherently destructive to the natural world. Indigenous movements, by contrast, begin with the demand for a new relationship of humankind to our natural environment, sometimes expressed in the slogan, “Liberate Mother Earth.”28
These movements often express their demand using an unfamiliar terminology of ancestral spiritual wisdom — but behind those words lies a worldview that can be viewed as a form of materialism.
In pre-conquest Andean society, says Peruvian Indigenous leader RosalÃa Paiva, “Each was a part of all, and all were of the soil. The soil could never belong to us because we are its sons and daughters, and we belong to the soil.”29
Bolivian Indigenous writer Marcelo Saavedra Vargas holds that “It is capitalist society that rejects materialism. It makes war on the material world and destroys it. We, on the other hand, embrace the material world, consider ourselves part of it, and care for it.”30
This approach is reminiscent of Marx’s thinking, as presented by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology. It is entirely appropriate to interpret “Liberate Mother Earth” as equivalent to “close the metabolic rift.”31
Hugo Chávez says that in Venezuela, 21st Century Socialism will be based not only on Marxism but also on Bolivarianism, Indigenous socialism, and Christian revolutionary traditions.32 Latin American Marxism’s capacity to link up in this way with what Shanin calls vernacular revolutionary traditions is a sign of its vitality and promise.
I will conclude with a story told by the Peruvian Marxist and Indigenous leader Hugo Blanco. A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the Indigenous community, one of the tourists commented, “This is like communism.”
“No,” responded their guide, “Communism is like this.”33
Read the full article here.
From Marx to Morales: Indigenous Socialism and the Latin Americanization of Marxism
by John Riddell
Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous peoples are in the lead.
Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.
Eurocentrism
A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a “Eurocentric” bias. They understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.1
Marx’s celebrated statement that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”2 is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period, are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa quotes Kautsky’s view that “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development”3 — that is, not yet in Latin America.
The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called “Latin American Marxism.” Argentine theorist Néstor Kohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohan says, “opposed Eurocentric schemas and populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie” and “set about recapturing ‘Inca communism’ as a precursor of socialist struggles.”4
(clip)
Ethnological Notebooks
These drafts drew on Marx’s extensive studies of Indigenous societies during that period, a record of which is available in his little-known Ethnological Notebooks.17 We find his conclusions summarized in a draft of his letter to Zasulich: “The vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies.”18
In her study of these notebooks, Christine Ward Gaily states that where such archaic forms persist, Marx depicts them fundamentally “as evidence of resistance to the penetration of state-associated institutions,” which he views as intrinsically oppressive.19 The clear implication is that such archaic survivals should be defended and developed.
The Marxists of Lenin’s time were not aware of this evolution in Marx’s thinking. Thus Antonio Gramsci could write, a few weeks after the Russian October uprising, “This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat.”20 Yet despite their limited knowledge of Marx’s views, the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, and Lukács reasserted Marx’s revolutionary stance in combat with the “Eurocentrist” view associated with Karl Kautsky and the pre-war Socialist International that socialist revolution must await capitalism’s fullest maturity and collapse.
Shanin generalizes from Marx’s approach to Russia in 1881 in a way that links to a second characteristic of Latin American revolution. “The purest forms of ’scientific socialism’ . . . invariably proved politically impotent,” he argues. “It has been the integration of Marxism with the indigenous [i.e. home-grown] political traditions which has underlain all known cases of internally generated and politically effective revolutionary transformation of society by socialists.”21
Here we have a second field of correlation with the Latin American revolutionary experience, with its strong emphasis on associating the movement for socialism with the tradition of anti-colonial struggle associated with the figures of the great aboriginal leaders and of BolÃvar, MartÃ, and Sandino. This fusion of traditions emerges as a unique strength of Latin American Marxism.
Mariátegui captured this thought in a well-known passage:
“We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and imitation. It must be a heroic creation. We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”22
Following the October revolution of 1917, Marx’s vision of the mir’s potential was realized in practice. The mir had been in decline for decades, and by 1917 half the peasants’ land was privately owned. But in the great agrarian reform of 1917-18, the peasants revived the mir and adopted it as the basic unit of peasant agriculture. During the next decade, peasant communes co-existed constructively with the beginnings of a socialist economy. By 1927, before the onset of Stalinist forced collectivization, 95% of peasant land was already communally owned.23
There is a double parallel here with present Latin American experience. First, the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry is relevant in Latin American countries where the working class, in the strict sense of those who sell their labour power to employers, is often a minority in broad coalitions of exploited producers. Second, survivals of primitive communism, including communal landholding, are a significant factor in Indigenous struggles across this region.
National Emancipation
A third correspondence can be found in the Bolsheviks’ practice toward minority peoples of the East victimized and dispossessed by Tsarist Russian settler colonialism. Too often, discussions of the Bolsheviks’ policy on the national question stop short with Stalin and Lenin’s writings of 1913-1916, ignoring the evolution of Bolshevik policy during and after the 1917 revolution. Specifically:
The later Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to the criteria of nationhood set out by Stalin in 1913.24 They advocated and implemented self-determination for oppressed peoples who were not, at the time of the 1917 revolution, crystallized nations or nationalities.
They went beyond the concept that self-determination could be expressed only through separation. Instead, they accepted the realization of self-determination through various forms of federation.
They implemented self-determination in a fashion that was not always territorial.
Their attitude toward the national cultures of minority peoples was not neutral. Instead, they committed substantial political and state resources to planning and encouraging the development of these cultures.25
On all these points, the Bolshevik experience closely matches the revolutionary policies toward Indigenous peoples now being implemented in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.
Ecology and Materialism
Finally, a word on ecology. The boldest governmental statements on the world’s ecological crisis are coming from Cuba, Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist governments in Latin America.26 The influence of Indigenous struggles is felt here. Bolivian President Evo Morales points to the leading role of Indigenous peoples, “called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”27
This claim rests on an approach by many Indigenous movements to ecology that is inherently revolutionary. Most First-World ecological discussion focuses on technical and market devices, such as carbon trading, taxation, and offsets, that aim to preserve as much as possible of a capitalist economic system that is inherently destructive to the natural world. Indigenous movements, by contrast, begin with the demand for a new relationship of humankind to our natural environment, sometimes expressed in the slogan, “Liberate Mother Earth.”28
These movements often express their demand using an unfamiliar terminology of ancestral spiritual wisdom — but behind those words lies a worldview that can be viewed as a form of materialism.
In pre-conquest Andean society, says Peruvian Indigenous leader RosalÃa Paiva, “Each was a part of all, and all were of the soil. The soil could never belong to us because we are its sons and daughters, and we belong to the soil.”29
Bolivian Indigenous writer Marcelo Saavedra Vargas holds that “It is capitalist society that rejects materialism. It makes war on the material world and destroys it. We, on the other hand, embrace the material world, consider ourselves part of it, and care for it.”30
This approach is reminiscent of Marx’s thinking, as presented by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology. It is entirely appropriate to interpret “Liberate Mother Earth” as equivalent to “close the metabolic rift.”31
Hugo Chávez says that in Venezuela, 21st Century Socialism will be based not only on Marxism but also on Bolivarianism, Indigenous socialism, and Christian revolutionary traditions.32 Latin American Marxism’s capacity to link up in this way with what Shanin calls vernacular revolutionary traditions is a sign of its vitality and promise.
I will conclude with a story told by the Peruvian Marxist and Indigenous leader Hugo Blanco. A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the Indigenous community, one of the tourists commented, “This is like communism.”
“No,” responded their guide, “Communism is like this.”33
Read the full article here.
U.S. rulers know Cuba's example still a threat
Supreme Court upholds ban on book about Cuba
by Nancy Cole
MIAMI—In a November 16 decision supporting censorship, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the banning of a children’s book on Cuba.
The court let stand a 2-1 federal appeals court ruling sanctioning the removal of Vamos a Cuba (titled A Visit to Cuba in the English edition) from Miami-Dade public school libraries.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought the appeal before the Supreme Court. “These books were removed under the guise of ‘inaccuracies,’” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, “but the real reason they were removed was because the books ran afoul of the political orthodoxy of a majority of the school board members.”
The primary objection to the book is that it portrays happy Cuban children and explains in simple text aimed at children five to eight years old that “the people of Cuba eat, work and study like you.”
Juan Amador Rodriguez objected to the book after his daughter brought it home in 2006. Rodriguez claimed at the time that in Cuba “you can read, but you can only read what they tell you to.” He urged the Miami-Dade school board to ensure that no students here be allowed to read Vamos a Cuba.
Although the administration of the school district and two academic advisory committees disagreed, the school board voted that year to pull the books off library shelves, along with the rest of the series of books from publisher Heinemann Library. The company publishes books aimed at introducing young readers to the geography, customs, and daily life of various countries.
The ACLU sued, arguing that banning the books violated the First Amendment. The federal district court agreed and ordered the book put back on the shelves. But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed the federal district court in February 2009 and upheld the school board’s action in banning the book. The court ruled that the board’s action was simply a matter of setting educational standards in Miami-Dade.
“This is a great victory for the School Board and for Cuban Americans,” board member Perla Tabares Hantman told the Miami Herald after the Supreme Court decision. The Associated Press reported that former school board chair Frank Bolaños, who championed efforts to ban the book from school libraries, “said the case sets precedent for districts to back parents’ rights in future cases.”
The ACLU’s Howard Simon said if this case “is to become the new standard for censoring books from public library shelves, the ACLU may be immersed in censorship battles for years to come.”
by Nancy Cole
MIAMI—In a November 16 decision supporting censorship, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the banning of a children’s book on Cuba.
The court let stand a 2-1 federal appeals court ruling sanctioning the removal of Vamos a Cuba (titled A Visit to Cuba in the English edition) from Miami-Dade public school libraries.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought the appeal before the Supreme Court. “These books were removed under the guise of ‘inaccuracies,’” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, “but the real reason they were removed was because the books ran afoul of the political orthodoxy of a majority of the school board members.”
The primary objection to the book is that it portrays happy Cuban children and explains in simple text aimed at children five to eight years old that “the people of Cuba eat, work and study like you.”
Juan Amador Rodriguez objected to the book after his daughter brought it home in 2006. Rodriguez claimed at the time that in Cuba “you can read, but you can only read what they tell you to.” He urged the Miami-Dade school board to ensure that no students here be allowed to read Vamos a Cuba.
Although the administration of the school district and two academic advisory committees disagreed, the school board voted that year to pull the books off library shelves, along with the rest of the series of books from publisher Heinemann Library. The company publishes books aimed at introducing young readers to the geography, customs, and daily life of various countries.
The ACLU sued, arguing that banning the books violated the First Amendment. The federal district court agreed and ordered the book put back on the shelves. But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed the federal district court in February 2009 and upheld the school board’s action in banning the book. The court ruled that the board’s action was simply a matter of setting educational standards in Miami-Dade.
“This is a great victory for the School Board and for Cuban Americans,” board member Perla Tabares Hantman told the Miami Herald after the Supreme Court decision. The Associated Press reported that former school board chair Frank Bolaños, who championed efforts to ban the book from school libraries, “said the case sets precedent for districts to back parents’ rights in future cases.”
The ACLU’s Howard Simon said if this case “is to become the new standard for censoring books from public library shelves, the ACLU may be immersed in censorship battles for years to come.”
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