Mu
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Neuroscience: a Marxist view
Manipulating the human mind?
Award winning scientist Steven Rose looked at the uses and abuses of brain science in talk given at the recent Marxism festival – we print an edited version here
Brain science—neuroscience—is big business, big science and big research. Neuroscientists are offering to explain, mend and manipulate the mind. Many see no problems with this.
For example, Eric Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on memory, said, “You are your brain.”
This is an extraordinary, arid reductionism. This is the idea that you can collapse the complex phenomenon that goes on in the human mind into being simply the working of cells or molecules.
Anyone with a Marxist perspective understands that you cannot ignore the social—brains are embedded in bodies and bodies are embedded in the social order in which we grow up and live.
When you say, “My brain made me do it” you are acting as many neuroscientists do—in a reductionist way.
We don’t say, “My legs walk,” we say, “We walk”. It is not our brains doing the thinking, it is us, as integrated human individuals.
That is an insight that comes out of a much richer understanding of the world than neuroscience can provide by itself. There are claims that we are going to see huge medical advances through the work of neuroscience.
This will mean things like genetic tests for Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, stem cells to cure neurological disease, specially tailored drugs to solve the problems of depression, drugs to enhance performance and zap up intelligence and memory and so on.
What is being offered is happiness for all—at least to all those who aren’t in the poorest parts of the world.
There is another, more sinister, promise.
Psychocivilised
Jose Delgado wrote a book about creating a “psychocivilised society”—where each of us would be tailor-made in order to adjust us to the world around us.
That offers a range of possibilities: drugs to manipulate human behaviour, brain imaging (so called “brain fingerprinting”) so you can identify criminals, genetic predestination (the assertion that your future intelligence and role in society is locked into your genes), electro-magnetic thought control and new military technologies.
So on the one hand we have the claims that new science is going to emerge and that we are going to be able to understand who we are as people.
And on the other hand we’ve got the promise to control the population through a whole range of new techniques that are being developed.
The problem is that very little is known about the ones that concern most of us—depression and schizophrenia. The pharmacological industry is pulling out of this research. None of the new drugs that have been produced are better than those of 30 years ago.
George Brown and Tirril Harris made an observation when they were working on a south London housing estate decades ago.
They said that the best predictor of depression is being a working class woman with an unstable income and a child, living in a high-rise block. No drug is going to treat that particular problem, is it?
Many of the issues that are so enormously important to us—whether bringing up children or growing old—remain completely hidden in the biological levels.
Neuroscience is very data rich but it is extremely theory-poor.
We need to be concerned with where brain science is going.
Human-machine interfaces are certainly on the cards. These involve implanting a microchip in a person, in the hope that it might solve the problem of paraplegia or help you communicate with the outside world if you have had a stroke.
Of course, if we could repair the spinal cord or brain lesions, that is wholly desirable. But despite the great hype, many problems remain unsolved.
For instance there is transcranial magnetic stimulation. There are minute magnetic fields around the surface of the brain.
It is possible to manipulate these fields and the magnetic processes in the brain by shooting intense currents of magnetic or microwave radiation across the brain, manipulating particular regions of the brain.
This has been used with Parkinson’s Disease, but it is also under intensive investigation by the US military.
The military is resourcing a number of new techniques—including brain imaging surveillance, new psychoactive chemical weapons, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to enhance the military effectiveness of troops by using thought control.
When it comes to treating neurological disease, we are going to get better drugs. But we need to understand the causes of most of these diseases.
The pharmacological industry is not interested—it never wants to ask—why twice as many working class people as middle class people are diagnosed with schizophrenia?
They are interested in a magic molecule that can solve the problem, not in poverty or social factors.
Then there is the increase in drugs to enhance memory. These raise ethical and legal problems—should we take these drugs when preparing for examinations, for example?
Ethical
What is the moral difference between buying “smart drugs” on the web, or getting your parents to pay for private coaching, or the postcode lottery in education that favours the rich? Both are ethical problems—one is chemical and one is social.
Most of the genetic information that is thought to produce clear-cut answers to questions has not done so.
Rather it has created a situation to redefine what is mad and what is bad.
There is a craze about whether you can detect whether someone is a psychopath and likely to commit violent crime. There are scientists comparing the brains of “normal” people and murderers, to look at the difference in brain structure.
But what they don’t tell you is that the murderers being studied are people who have been in prison for several years on god-knows-what regime of drugs and under what brutality. And they are being compared with people taken off the street.
I think the diagnosis is troublesome—we don’t need to study Tony Blair or George Bush’s brains to understand the causes of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Aldous Huxley wrote a book in the 1930s called Brave New World, which envisaged a society in which there was a universal drug called Soma that you could take any time to make you happy and better.
We aren’t moving into a universal world of Soma, but into a world in which there is a huge range of psycho-chemicals and psychoactive techniques that are focused on producing a psychocivilised society.
Back in the 1960s in Oxford there was a slogan painted on a college wall. It said: “Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.”
The following should be read alongside this article:
© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.
Current stage of the polarization
Tariq Ali: Islamophobia exposed
Author and activist Tariq Ali spoke on ‘The Perils of Islamophobia’ last week at the annual Marxism festival in London [10 July 2010]
‘We live in dangerous and unpredictable times. If anyone had suggested 30 or 40 years ago that one of the central issues we would be discussing was Islam or religion, we would have laughed.
One reason for that was that throughout the Cold War period of the last century, the imperialist countries – the US and its allies – essentially used political Islam as a bulwark against their enemies all over the world.
The US would use organisations which called themselves Islamic to hammer the enemy. They used them against secular nationalism in the Middle East, against communism in Indonesia, against waves of radicalism in South Asia – particularly, but not exclusively, in Pakistan.
We have to see things in that context. Islamophobia is something that has been artificially engendered, especially in the Western world, against what is regarded as the new enemy.
It has been engendered from the top by some who should know better and others, like the extreme right, who use it as a weapon against migrants.
There are different aspects to this Islamophobia and it has to be confronted on many different levels.
Let us start with the so-called “popular” agitation against Muslims. This is very different in my opinion to opposition to fundamentalism or “Islamic terrorism” but has everything to do with hostility to peoples of different cultures, and in particular to the new migrants who came to Europe after the Second World War.
The arguments that have been used against them are very similar to those that were used against the Jews in the first half of the last century – they were not like us, they came from a different culture, they had a different religion, they observed the Sabbath on a different day, they didn’t eat pork, they wore funny clothes.
Very similar arguments are used against Muslims today – they’re not like us, they’re the “other”.
Terrorism
The issue that comes up time and time again is terrorism. I was astonished to see how deep this had gone in this country in an opinion poll recently. This said 51 percent of people questioned said when they heard the word “Muslim” the first thought that came into their mind was “terrorist”. These polls are never reliable but not completely wrong either.
If such a poll had been done in the 1920s or 1930s people probably would have said that when they heard the word “Jew” the first word that came into their mind was “Bolshevik”. Today it’s not “Jewish Bolsheviks”, it’s “Muslim terrorists”.
There were no ordinary Jews at all, apparently – they were either Bolsheviks or multimillionaires.
Often you hear that same kind of argument against Muslims. They’re either rich Arab sheikhs gambling their country’s wealth away in the casinos of Mayfair – which, by the way, is not totally untrue – or they are “Muslim terrorists”.
In between – like every other community in the world – there’s a huge gap of ordinary people, some believers, some non-believers, who are of Muslim origin. But they’re being targeted. And this targeting produces a cultural response.
I’ve spoken to many young women who wear the hijab and aren’t even religious – they do it because they’re told they can’t do it. In France particularly this is the case.
Think of all the education that modern western Europeans have received on what happened to the Jews during the Second World War.
So deep does it go that some idiot politicians, Tony Blair for one, have actually said that the Second World War was a war fought to “save the Jews”. The level of ignorance and cynicism that goes into that remark is quite horrific. If that’s the case, we lost the war.
They didn’t succeed in saving them. They didn’t send their bombers in to bomb even one of the concentration camps, despite Jews’ requests, because bombers couldn’t be diverted from the main task, which was the destruction of Germany.
What is taught is so superficial that the roots of antisemitism aren’t discussed. That would educate people about treating any minority in the same way – and those lessons clearly haven’t been learned.
It’s not that Islam is a religion and culture without a history in Europe. The novels I’ve written called the Islam quintet are historical novels set in the period where Islam was a normal, major part of European culture, and in fact a very advanced one intellectually.
The expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews from the Iberian peninsula [now Spain and Portugal] in the 15th and 16th centuries created the new European identity. That identity is now being challenged, ironically, by a new influx of migrant Muslims who come to find work, largely from countries that were colonised by the Western powers.
There’s a whole group of people who traduce Islam non-stop, and this has to be resisted. Some of them who were once on the left are criticising Amnesty Internatonal’s defence of political prisoners from Guantanamo, saying they have a bad attitude to feminism. Even if they do, so what? You argue with them. But to say that they shouldn’t be given a platform to explain what happened to them in Guantanamo is unacceptable.
Many German Greens, for example, said that the war in Afghanistan was justifiable because we were going in to liberate women.
But now it’s starting to trickle through: this wasn’t a war to liberate the women of Afghanistan any more than the Second World War was a war to liberate the Jews from Hitler. These things aren’t carried out to liberate people, they’re carried out to preserve and defend Western interests.
Attitudes are different in different countries.
But we know the situation in Europe. The Germans call their migrants “guest workers”. The name was not thoughtless – if you’re a guest you can always be asked to leave.
In France you’re told you’re a citizen, with all the rights of a French citizen. Yet you suffer discrimination when it comes to getting jobs.
Attack
And when the police attack them and in some cases kill them, these young French kids are so well integrated that they do what the French normally do when they’re repressed. They attack property, they build barricades and they defend themselves. And what would the history of France be without that?
The US is a country of migrants. And there are two sets of new migrants – Hispanic and Muslims. But Islamophobia in the US grew very strong after 9/11.
You had communities infiltrated by the FBI, permanently under watch, young kids picked up off the streets – all creating an atmosphere of fear. The same things happened here.
In Britain you have Muslim members of parliament and Muslims in the groups of the left. That’s normal – that’s as it should be. The notion that any one people are a huge undifferentiated blob is never the case – never was and never will be.
Islam
After the July 2005 bombings in London we heard “Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam”. The New Labour neocon apologists argued that violence is inherent in Islam. I publicly argued the day after that the reasons for it, unacceptable though it was, had to be understood.
Unless you understood the causes you couldn’t do anything – and the causes were Blair’s foreign policy and his decision to back the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that’s what every British and American intelligence report now says.
Islamophobia is useful for the authorities because it helps to keep their own populations worried. It helps to justify some of the atrocities that have been carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guantanamo, as some of its inmates tell you, is horrible but nothing compared to the atrocities that have been carried out in Bagram prison outside Kabul in Afghanistan.
Islamophobia says: this is terrible, but you know we have to do it really, because you know what these Muslims are. That’s why it’s taken up and used quite openly in the mainstream media: to justify American wars and occupations and the support Europe has given them.
Barack Obama continues to follow the policies of Bush all over the world.
Will Islamophobia last forever? I don’t think so. It is something that was switched on from above and can be switched off again when the time comes.
Its political basis is that the US now occupies large tracts of the Middle East, and in order to occupy these countries they need Islamophobia. They need the idea that the “war on terror” is a war against “evil”.
In attacking Islamophobia, we mustn’t forget that those of us who consider ourselves socialists can’t just do that. We have another task – to win people over to the idea that the capitalist system is irrational, benefits a minority, and is prone to crisis.
We must say that the capitulation of social democracy to neoliberal capitalism has been a disaster, and in the vacuum that exists many things sprout. We need to make sure that the plants we plant today grow and are nurtured.
We believe in a society where there is genuine popular sovereignty on every level – factory and farm, locality, region, country. This is the socialism we believe in. And it is only through a system like this that many of the old cobwebs can be swept aside.”
Lessons of 1910 for today
The Tonypandy miners' strike 1910: Inspiring unrest
The 1910 strike by South Wales miners helped change the face of British trade unionism and is an inspiration for workers fighting the cuts today, writes Tom Walker
On 7 November 1910, thousands of striking miners marched across the Rhondda valley in South Wales. At the front were two scabs they were driving out of the town. The crowd had dressed them in white shirts with notices pinned on, “Take a warning”.
This was the seventh strike day for 12,000 miners working for the Cambrian Combine in Rhondda. They had walked out at the start of the month over mining magnate DA Thomas’s decision to sack the whole workforce at the Ely Pit in Penygraig.
Their fight was part of a huge shift in the working class movement in Britain, as rank and file workers organised not only against the bosses but also against the conservatism of their own union leaders.
It laid the basis for some of the strongest fighting traditions of the British working class. And it was the Cambrian miners’ battle that fired the opening shot in the four-year strike wave by rail workers, dockers and others that became known as the Great Unrest.
Miners working on a new coal seam were asking for a higher wage to reflect the difficulty of their work—a vital issue as they were being paid by ton of coal produced, not by the hour.
The miners’ union leaders negotiated a slight increase and recommended the workers accept it.
Disasters
But the rank and file were in no mood to do harder labour for lower pay.
After all, the South Wales coalfields had the worst record for mining disasters in the country—on average a miner was killed at work every two weeks.
Thomas issued lockout notices—to the 80 miners on the new seam and all 800 on the site—and tried to bring in non-union workers to replace them.
The Cambrian miners met him with huge resistance, sparking an unofficial strike wave that took in much of South Wales. At its peak it involved more than 30,000 workers.
The strikers shut down all the local pits—with one exception: Glamorgan Colliery in Llwynypia was still running using around 60 scab workers.
The strikers decided to “prevent any officials from [mine boss] Mr Llewellyn downward from entering the colliery yards” and launched a mass picket.
Police Captain Lindsay reported that the scabbing operation was “savagely attacked by large crowds of strikers”, and that, “The strike is totally different to any one I have previously experienced.”
But the real savagery came from the police who repeatedly baton-charged the strikers, driving them back towards the nearby town centre of Tonypandy.
Jesse Clark, a miner, later said of the police, “They were there to beat us and they were government men… Money people come first, you after.”
The police’s violence was the real cause of the events now known as the Tonypandy Riots. The following evening, the miners came out onto the streets, taking out their anger on local shops and businesses.
This wasn’t mindless destruction. The first shop to be smashed up belonged to the local chief magistrate, while workers’ homes were left alone.
There was a carnival atmosphere. A haberdasher recalls: “People were seen inside... handing goods out… afterwards walking on the Square wearing various articles of clothing which had been stolen and asking each other how they looked. They were not a bit ashamed.”
The police attacked the crowds and injured more than 500. One of the miners, Samuel Rhys, later died from his injuries.
The then home secretary Winston Churchill sent in troops against the strikers. Tonypandy and the surrounding areas were effectively put under military occupation.
“We were living like the inhabitants of a besieged city,” said leading miner AJ Cook.
The leaders of the national Miners Federation of Great Britain and the South Wales Miners Federation who came to the area showed little sympathy with strikers. A huge demonstration of thousands demanded a national strike—the leaders wouldn’t budge.
Miners’ Federation vice president WE Harvey said afterwards: “The men are out of hand entirely. The position of affairs has been stigmatised as a reign of terror, and that description is not far from the truth.”
The miners were fighting on three fronts: against the bosses, against the state in the form of the police and
military, and also against their own union leaders.
William “Mabon” Abraham—president of the strikers’ South Wales Miners Federation and Liberal-Labour MP for Rhondda—got involved.
He was known for his approach of resolving disputes by appealing to the bosses’ “reason”.
His first concern was for fellow Liberal MP and mine owner Thomas: “My friend DA Thomas has been suffering from poor health. He will not benefit in health if he were to hear of such a strike.”
Striker Will Mainwaring replied, “Mr DA Thomas may be your friend… He is not our friend.”
“Half a loaf is better than none,” Mabon would often tell them.
Noah Rees of the Cambrian Combine strike committee replied aptly, “We are demanding the bakehouse.”
On 22 November another round of rioting was sparked by the news of scabs being brought in from Cardiff.
In Penygraig, bricks, crockery and chamber-pots rained down from windows onto police and in Tonypandy workers fought the police with tools, iron and flints. One local newspaper reported, “Women joined with the men in the unequal combat.” The police had to be rescued by the troops.
In December, 13 miners stood trial for their part in the rioting. For each of the six days of the trial, up to 10,000 miners marched the five miles to the court to support them.
And they continued to battle the scabs. During one miners’ meeting, a boy suddenly ran in, shouting, “They’re in the dust cart; blacklegs in the dust cart.” A crowd set off surrounded the cart and overturned it, leaving the men lying in the street.
The strike continued for another eight months—but in the end the union leaders managed to force the miners back to work, and to accept the original offer they had negotiated.
The lesson of the strike is not that they fought and lost, but that they laid the ground for a new way of fighting.
Instead of breaking the union, the defeat turned the miners’ attention to dealing with leadership betrayals in the future (see box right).
As it turned out, with the Cambrian miners’ brave battle the Great Unrest had begun.
The Miners’ Next Step: ‘Fight rather than negotiate’
The struggle didn’t end when the strikes did. Transformed by their experiences, the miners went on to set out a strategy for their union’s future in the influential pamphlet The Miners’ Next Step, published in 1912.
South Wales miners and leading syndicalists AJ Cook, Noah Ablett and WH Mainwaring had formed an Unofficial Reform Committee.
Syndicalists believed trade unions, as workers’ organisations, should take over and manage industry.
The pamphlet was their manifesto: a call for one, industry-wide, rank and file controlled miners’ union, powerful enough to pose a challenge to the mine owners’ control over production—“constructed to fight rather than to negotiate”.
It condemned the South Wales Miners Federation’s policy of conciliation and negotiation, calling for a new “policy of open hostility”.
It called for the union to launch a national campaign for a minimum wage of eight shillings, and a seven-hour day.
The draft constitution set up an executive council made up of rank and file workers—no officials were allowed.
Militant
Their militant arguments found an echo across the coal industry—but it had flaws. It concludes from union leaders’ betrayals that all leadership is bad, even rank and file leaders. “All leaders become corrupt, in spite of their own good intentions,” it says.
It also does not spell out how it will achieve its aim “to build up an organisation, that will ultimately take over the mining industry, and carry it on in the interests of the workers”.
“The elimination of the employer,” it says, “can only be obtained gradually… If by the force of a more perfect organisation and more militant policy, we reduce profits, we shall at the same time tend to eliminate the shareholders who own the coalfield.”
But it still inspired a generation of miners and other workers. And it remains an inspiration today.
“Missionaries” distributing the pamphlet to coalfields across Britain were a key factor behind the national miners’ strike later that year.
"We need to build a new movement in the streets"
 | ||
| Sep 3, 2010 Tony Wilsdon | ||
| ||
As the 2010 elections approach, millions of working people and young people who are looking to fight against the right-wing corporate agenda will be confronted with the question: Should I give my vote to the Democrats? In the 2006 and 2008 elections they were confronted by a similar choice. Tens of millions decided to vote Democrat based on that party’s promises to end the wars, stand up to the power of corporate America, and put Americans back to work. Yet, by 2010, none of these promises have been fulfilled. The ten million jobs lost during the Great Recession have not been replaced. Wall Street has had a further bailout, yet tens of millions of workers and their families suffering from the blows of unemployment and foreclosures have been neglected. Despite Obama’s recently announced “withdrawal” from Iraq, 50,000 U.S. combat troops will remain in Iraq, and the casualty rate in Afghanistan is growing. Obama Administration On the campaign trail, Obama promised to take on the insurance companies and corporate health care interests and to provide “universal health care.” Instead, he delivered health care “reform” constructed around the private drug companies, hospitals and insurance companies that are responsible for all the inequities in the health care “system” in the U.S. Instead of health care becoming a right, it will become a duty backed up with fines. Insurance companies have become further entrenched into the system, and so-called Cadillac plans - that is, quality health plans enjoyed by some workers - will be taxed. No wonder popular support quickly slipped away. On education, the Obama administration is leading the charge to push through a right-wing agenda. Under his Race to the Top initiative, $4.39 billion has been used as a bribe for states to drastically restructure their education policies toward the development of charter schools, to weaken teacher seniority, and to pay teachers based on the test scores of their students. If enacted, these policies will create a more unequal two-tier education system in the U.S. Obama Losing Support Obama is losing support because he failed to deliver on his promises, not because he’s “too left.” The corporate nature of his health care bill and his big bank bailout shattered the enthusiasm of his supporters. His failure to provide jobs in this recession-plagued economy has allowed the Tea Party people, and even the hated Republicans, to tap into popular anger and re-emerge as supposed “defenders” of the interests of the people! There are no excuses for the failure of the Democrats to deliver. They had control of the presidency, the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (60 seats). They could have passed any legislation they wanted. In the face of Republican obstructionism, all Obama had to do was expose the Republican right-wing agenda, and he would have won the public debate. By mobilizing the public he could have pushed back Republicans and conservative Democrats, as well as the threat of filibusters. What is the Democratic Party? The leadership of the Democrats is rooted in corporate America. Under Clinton they passed NAFTA, founded the WTO, effectively abolished welfare, laid off millions of federal workers, militarized the Mexican border and instituted sanctions on Iraq that killed millions of its citizens. Despite their record, many progressive people close to the Democrats will point to the need to vote Democrat as the “lesser of two evils.” But this is falling into the trap set by big business and its two-party system. Both Democrats and Republicans are integral parts of this two-party system; when one of the corporate parties is discredited, big business has their alternative party ready to step in. Democrats rope in support from the leaders of labor and social movements by dangling unfulfilled promises. In the health care debate, Obama and the Democrats used the carrot of the “public option” to allow leaders of the labor movement and progressive movements to sell the Democratic Party to their members, only to yank the “option” away at the last moment. The same pattern occurred during the first two years of the Clinton administration when they had a similar majority. They could have passed any legislation they wanted, including their promised sweeping health care reform and legislation to ban permanent replacement of workers during strikes. Instead, they corralled enough Democrats to support NAFTA and the WTO, leaning on Republican votes to bypass more progressive Democrats. Role of Struggles Rather than being allies in these struggles, we have usually found the Democrats on the other side of the line. This was true in the struggle against the WTO, the Vietnam War, and in countless labor struggles. Supporting Democrats also weakens our ability to organize powerful struggles. Most leaders of labor and other social movements shut these movements down near election time in order not to “embarrass” Democrats with demands unacceptable to corporate America. There is a myth put out by many liberal left-wingers that it is the “mean-spirited” agenda of the Republicans causing our problems. This completely misses the fact that capitalism is in decline and serious crisis. The ability of Democrats and Republicans to offer reforms in the 1960s and 1970s was due not only to the level of struggle but also to the huge upswing of capitalism after World War II. That period of boom is over. We are now in a period of prolonged and deep structural capitalist crisis, in the U.S. and internationally. Just like the Republicans, the Democrats have adopted a policy of cutting social programs and propping up big business. Therefore, it is not a question of opposing the “mean” Republicans and electing “better” Democrats. There is a bipartisan agenda for budget cuts and corporate profits. Both parties support slashing social spending. The debate is only over how fast and how deep the cuts will be. Anger at Both Parties We need to tap into this anger and build an independent movement in the interests of working-class people and the poor. Because the labor movement and the left have muted their voices by clinging to the coattails of the failing Democrats, this anger has partially found a home in the Tea Party phenomenon. While the Tea Partiers are a diverse grouping, their right-wing politics - especially their attacks on immigrants - are a warning of the danger of allowing the right wing to profit from anger that needs to be channeled into a movement of working-class people. The Democrats cannot be the vehicle for a new movement that demands jobs, services and an end to wars. Democratic politicians point at Republicans to distract us from Democratic crimes of inaction, corporate compliance, pro-war policies and hundreds of billions in bailouts. In order to stop budget cuts and the right-wing agenda we need to build a new movement in the streets. We need to build powerful coalitions of all affected community, labor and activist groups to coordinate these struggles. At the same time, we need to put forward a clear political voice, placing blame on big business and capitalism as the cause of the crisis. What we need is a new political party that refuses to take corporate money, is controlled through the democratic vote of its members, and fights determinedly for the interests of the working-class majority on the issues of jobs, wages, benefits, health care, housing, war, discrimination and the environment. Conferences need to be held locally and nationally to organize struggles and political action. These conferences should have a focus on mass action, involving as many people as possible while maintaining a clear program to improve the lives of working people that does not bow down to the interests of corporations or their two parties. In 2010, candidates like Dan La Botz in Ohio, Jill Stein in Massachusetts and Howie Hawkins in New York deserve our support. Also, there is increased anger growing among sections of the labor movement at Obama’s anti-worker policies. We need to open up a discussion in the labor movement about the abusive relationship that the Democratic Party has with working people. Although these are small first steps, they show what needs to be done on a much wider scale in the coming period of capitalist crisis if we are to defeat the right-wing corporate agenda. The task is to build a powerful working-class movement that can break open the straightjacket of the two-party system and bring together the hundreds of millions of workers and young people to challenge capitalism and build a new, socialist society. | ||