Socialist World Issue 1 - June 2019

Read more from Socialist Alternative.

If you like what you read in Socialist World check out our more developed material on a range of topics including the fight for black liberation, the emerging women’s movement, the privatization of education, and much more.

Find these and more on www.socialistalternative.org PUBLISHED BY: Socialist Alternative EDITOR: Tom Crean EDITORIAL BOARD: George Brown, Eljeer Hawkins,

Joshua Koritz, Keely Mullen, Kailyn Nicholson, Calvin Priest, Tony Wilsdon

/SocialistAlternativeUSA

www.socialistalternative.org

editors@socialistalternative.org

@SocialistAlt

@socialist_alternative

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Contents

p. 15

feature

4

What do Trump’s Trade and Tech Wars Mean for Global Capitalism?

inside

2 10

Introduction to the Journal

15 21 27

Winning Bernie’s Platform

Lessons of the Teachers Strikes p. 10

Reparations: A Socialist Perspective Kautsky and the Parliamentary Road to Socialism

review

33

p. 27

Feminism for the 99%

p. 21

Socialist Alternative Launches New Political Journal

The Fight for a Socialist World Tom Crean

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he massive interest in socialist ideas has radically changed the political landscape in the U.S. As part of the growth of the left, Socialist Alternative also grew significantly in recent years and achieved national prominence with the election of Kshama Sawant as the first openly socialist councilmember in Seattle in 2013. Our organization prides itself on the clarity of our analysis and program. But we also feel the need to step up our game. For this reason we are launching a political journal Socialist World, initially coming out three times a year.

How We Got Here

The economic crisis of 2008-9 opened up a new era in the U.S. and internationally. Capitalism was exposed as an increasingly parasitic system without any vision for the future. There was fury at the status quo which has not ended. Political institutions lost authority and mainstream parties in many countries have either disintegrated or come under intense pressure from the left and the right.

Beginning in 2011, the revolutionary “Arab Spring” developments occurred in North Africa and the Middle East. Workers in Southern Europe fought back ferociously against austerity policies that sought to put the cost of the crisis on the shoulders of ordinary people. But the crisis also demonstrated the inadequacy of the existing left and the leadership of the trade unions. Social democratic parties which had adopted neo-liberal policies were particularly exposed.

In the U.S., millions lost their jobs and homes. But initially there was no fightback as trade union leaders refused to do anything that would embarrass the Obama administration. The fightback began in January 2011 in Wisconsin with the revolt of public sector workers against the attacks of Governor Scott Walker. Then came Occupy, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ struggles and the emergence of a new women's movement. We are now seeing the beginnings of a new environmental movement internationally.

In recent years, polls have shown a massive increase in support

for “socialism” especially among young people. This was especially reflected in Bernie Sanders historic 2016 campaign when he called for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.”

But Trump's victory also showed the price we will pay for failing to build a political party based on the interests of working people and all the oppressed.

Now we are facing a new situation with a looming international economic downturn, new revolutionary upheavals in North Africa, the biggest strike wave in the U.S. in a generation and another Sanders presidential run. Millions want to fight back but to win requires leadership, a clear strategy, and learning the lessons of past victories and defeats. This is the political task that Socialist Alternative has set for itself.

The Battle of Ideas

What does building a Marxist political force mean in practice?

It means engaging in the living struggle as we have done in the teachers revolt and the recent Stop and Shop strike in New England. Since the historic strike by education workers in West Virginia that began in February 2018, we have seen a resurgence of strike activity and labor activism on a scale not seen in many years. But the redevelopment of a fighting labor movement is still in its early stages. On page 10, Erin Brightwell draws out the key lessons from the teachers’ revolt that can be used to spread the struggle into other sections of the working class.

Building a Marxist political force also means being prepared to seriously engage in the electoral field. As Rob Rooke explains in his response to Eric Blanc on Kautsky (page 27), we do not believe in the “parliamentary road to socialism” and the gradual reform of capitalism. But nor do we believe that every elected representative of working people will be immediately corrupted.

The key is to be accountable to a working-class party with a clear program.

Elected twice as an open, independent socialist taking only the average wage, Kshama Sawant has shown what working-class leadership in looks like Seattle on issue after issue. Due to her and Socialist Alternative’s hard campaigning, Seattle was the first major city to win a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2014. In

Editorial 2019, big business, led by Amazon, is prepared to spend millions to elect anybody but Kshama. For the working class nationally it is vital to defend this position. Visit KshamaSawant.org to see a more detailed platform and to get involved.

Building a Marxist political force means engaging in the developing battle of ideas on how to win serious, far reaching change.

There is a hunger among hundreds of thousands of working people, young people especially, for a strategy to end massive inequality and the corporate domination of politics, address the developing climate catastrophe and root out racism and sexism in our society. On page 21, Eljeer Hawkins discusses the socialist view of the demand for reparations for slavery which is receiving a great deal of media attention and is being raised in the 2020 presidential race. Dana White also reviews the book Feminism for the 99% which attempts to counterpose a left alternative to pro-corporate feminism.

A huge space has opened up on the left with the growing popularity of socialism. This has been partially filled by Bernie Sand-

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ers and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as the Democratic Socialists of America. AOC and Sanders have put forward a bold program that can be the basis for serious social struggle but they also accept the framework of capitalism and the Democratic Party. Many understandably look to Bernie Sanders’ “democratic socialism.� We want Sanders to win in 2020 and we want to win the key pro-working-class demands he has championed. But to do this, as Ty Moore explains on p. 15, will require turning the campaign into the outlines of a new left party.

As Marxists, fighting for a socialist world, our starting point is perspectives for the international economy, politics and workers struggles around the world. A major component of the world situation is the increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, analyzed by Vincent Kolo of our Chinese sister organization in the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) on page 4.

Workers Movement

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Trump square off in ongoing trade conflict.

Rising U.S.-China Tensions: A New Era of Conflict

What do Trump’s Trade and Tech Wars Mean for Global Capitalism?

The following article is written by Vincent Kolo of ChinaWorker.info, the website of the Chinese section of the Committee for a Workers International, with which Socialist Alternative in the U.S. is in political solidarity. ChinaWorker.info and SocialistAlternative.org are covering the explosive developments in Hong Kong where our co-thinkers have participated in the mass demonstrations against repressive legislation which have rocked the pro-Beijing government. They have called for a one-day Hong Kong-wide political strike to force the Carrie Lam government out.

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he escalating U.S.-China conflict is nothing short of a major crisis for global capitalism. With negotiations having all but collapsed there seems to be no “exit ramp” from the trade war that began in July 2018. This crisis points to a prolonged and increasingly rancorous struggle with potentially serious global effects economically, politically, and even militarily.

The month of May saw a dramatic escalation with President Trump initiating a new round of tariff increases on Chinese goods and then broadening the conflict into a tech war, the costs of which could dwarf those flowing from his trade measures.

Xi Jinping’s regime responded with retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., but its reaction has been cautious and measured, showing that for the time being it still hopes to avoid further escalation.

The executive order signed by Trump that bans U.S. companies from supplying Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies is nothing less than a state-led campaign by the U.S. to drive the company out of business and prevent Huawei, which has close links to the Chinese state, from achieving global dominance over 5G (fifth generation) wireless technology, the roll out of which is imminent. Trump’s decision puts Huawei on what is informally called a “kill list.” Currently Huawei, the global leader in 5G networks, sources half its microchips from U.S. companies.

This opens a new and potentially much more serious front in the superpower conflict. If the planned meeting between presidents Trump and Xi goes ahead on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan in late June it could still possibly produce some form of truce or cosmetic trade agreement. But with the gap between the two sides widening such an outcome looks increasingly unlikely.

These events confirm our assessment that the start of this conflict last year marked a key turning point in world relations. It is the beginning of a new era of sharpening imperialist conflict between the U.S. and China, which are “contesting every domain” as the Economist recently put it. In a different historical epoch these processes would probably lead to war, but in the age of nuclear weapons and mutual assured annihilation, with governments’ and the ruling classes’ lack of stable support and fear of mass unrest, thankfully this scenario is not posed.

Global Economy It is vital, however, that the workers’ movement in both countries and globally develops an independent political position towards the Trump administration’s measures based on working class internationalism, opposing in equal measure the protectionism of nationalist politicians like Trump and Xi Jinping, but also the capitalist alternative of neo-liberal globalization. Under capitalism, both trade wars and trade deals are pursued in the interests of big companies and the financial elite, based on a never-ending race to the bottom in terms of workers’ livelihoods, democratic rights and the environment.

The escalation of the conflict has unsurprisingly sent shockwaves through global financial markets, which had “priced in” a U.S.-China trade deal. This false optimism was based mainly on the propaganda of Trump officials and the president himself. Like global capitalism as a whole, the Chinese “Communist” Party (CCP) dictatorship has once again been thrown off balance by Trump’s abrupt shifts. With the latest increases, almost half of China’s imports to the U.S. (worth $250 billion) are covered by 25% tariffs. In addition, Trump is threatening to extend the tariffs to all Chinese goods unless a deal acceptable to his government is reached.

New Cold War?

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ments and “control” the market, could become more common globally, coexisting with more deregulation and privatizations.

What after all are Trump’s latest $16 billion worth of farm subsidies (to compensate for China’s tariff retaliation) and the multitude of “national security” measures being introduced to block investments and exports especially in the tech sector. This shift to more intrusive state regulation of trade, financial flows, mergers and acquisitions, and academic exchanges, along with increasingly anti-democratic measures, is deeply ironic. “Rather than China becoming more Western, America is becoming more Chinese”, the Economist recently noted. A shift to selective use of state capitalist measures doesn’t mean the capitalists will abandon vicious neoliberalism, they’ll use both depending on the needs of the situation, much as the Chinese regime does.

The U.S., supported on this issue

by Germany, France, and most European Union governments, is also pushing back vociferously against Xi Jinping’s signature Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) global infrastructure programme, attempting to profit from growing resistance in countries with BRI contracts to China’s “debt trap diplomacy”. The 70-nation BRI is an example of imperialism “with Chinese characteristics,” launched by Xi’s regime as a way to soak up China’s chronic industrial overcapacity and provide new profitable outlets for its banking system when much of the Chinese economy is gorged on debt.

The U.S. is also stepping up its military presence in the Western Pacific and the contested South China Sea to counter Beijing’s rapid naval build-up and its construction of militarized manmade islands. The escalation of maritime disputes involving China and several of its neighbors is partly about energy and fishing resources, but is mostly a “land grab” to enable China’s PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) to control these waters and deny the U.S., with its slightly smaller but much more powerful navy, the ability to impose its writ across the region. Between 2014-18, China expanded its naval fleet by more than the French, German, Indian, South Korean, Spanish, and Taiwanese navies combined.

Both the U.S. and Chinese governments are engaged in intensifying diplomatic manoeuvers over Taiwan, which could become a dangerous flashpoint in the next period, especially as the island’s political system becomes more unstable and polarized.

For the CCP dictatorship Taiwan is a core element in its nationalistic crusade to build a strong and “reunited” China, while for U.S. imperialism it is used to legitimise a continuing police role in Asia as well as being a lever to exert pressure on Beijing.

Rather than a one-off dispute, we have entered the first phase of an “economic cold war” encompassing not just trade and investments, but also science and technology, visas and academic exchanges, geopolitics and accelerating military competition.

Rather than a one-off dispute, we have entered the first phase of an “economic cold war” encompassing not just trade and investments, but also science and technology, visas, academic exchanges, geopolitics, and accelerating military competition. This will especially be the case in the “Indo-Pacific” region as it has been renamed by the U.S. government, which now accounts for 28% of global arms spending, up from 9% two decades ago.

To be clear this is not just Trump’s policy. The Democratic Party, while remaining relatively quiet on this issue at the moment, also favors a “get tough” policy on China. In fact, historically they are the more protectionist party while the Republican Party espoused a hard line “free trade” doctrine which Trump has unceremoniously thrown out.

Unlike the standoff between U.S. imperialism and Russia’s Stalinist state-owned economy in the last century, this is not a conflict between incompatible socio-economic systems. It is rather primarily about deciding which ruling class will dominate and dictate the rules for the global economy in the future. There is a corollary in which China’s state capitalist economic model is pitted against America’s “free market” variant, but this is not the root of the conflict, despite the attempts of capitalist politicians in the U.S. to portray this as a struggle over “values”, as if suddenly discovering that China has an authoritarian system.

The root of the conflict is a clash of imperial powers on a quest for global hegemony.

In fact, the current struggle suggests that state capitalist policies, with governments intervening to steer economic develop-

The End of “Engagement”

The new stage of U.S.-China rivalry ends more than 40 years of relatively stable and consistent “engagement,” which began with the Nixon administration in the 1970s and went on to become

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Socialist World Issue 1, 2019

hugely profitable for U.S. capitalism. “We have truly crossed the Rubicon,” comments Chris Krueger of the Cowen Washington Research Group. “The Kissinger consensus is dead and China is a strategic rival. Full stop.”

This refers to Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger, whose secret visit to China in 1971 forged a new era of closer ties. At the same time, a full-blown ‘cold war’, if this develops, would pose unprecedented problems for capitalism in an era of generalized crisis, economic and political instability. “Today’s tensions make the original cold war look simple,” says the Economist’s “Special Report on China and America” (May 18, 2019). This is because China is the world’s biggest manufacturer, biggest exporter, second biggest importer, and a major force in global finance. By contrast, the Soviet Union, while a military superpower, had only a small presence in world markets, with two-thirds of its foreign trade conducted within the Stalinist bloc.

Economic Losses

for jobs, an average of 32 applicants per vacancy. This year has seen a growing revolt against the industry’s “996” culture (working nine to nine, six days per week), with Huawei being one of the worst offenders. The Chinese “996” protests online have received solidarity messages and support from U.S. tech workers for example at Microsoft, which shows the way forward to international action to defend jobs and conditions. The Chinese regime’s unemployment figures are unreliable and only cover the “urban” workforce, which excludes 280 million migrant workers in precarious temporary jobs in construction, manufacturing and services. But even the official unemployment data shows a rise to 5.2% in March, compared to just under 4% in April 2017. It is clear unemployment has now become a major concern for the government as its conflict with Trump deepens.

The Trump era means that average U.S. tariffs are not far below the levels under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Trump of course has also imposed global tariffs on steel and aluminum and has threatened wider tariffs on the EU as well as Mexico.

While the ruling class supports Trump’s stand against China’s rise, there are serious misgivings about using tariffs as a key weapon of foreign policy and about the increase in protectionism generally. Recently, Walmart, Target and more than 600 other companies sent Trump a letter urging him “to resolve the trade dispute with China, saying tariffs hurt American businesses and consumers.” (Reuters, 6/13/19) There is a growing realisation that, rather than a temporary bargaining chip, today’s high tariffs could become a permanent reality. This is not least because the U.S. demands inserted into the 150-page draft agreement parlayed between China and the U.S. amounted to “economic regime change” in China. This is of course unacceptable to the Chinese dictatorship, especially a

The U.S. ruling class has become increasingly alarmed by China’s growing economic and geopolitical challenge to America’s number one spot, with Trump telling Fox News this is “not going to happen” on his watch. But the maintenance of U.S. global dominance will require policies that instead of spurring economic growth throw up barriers, bring chaos to complex global supply chains and reduce growth.

The OECD predicts that the intensification of the U.S.-China trade war will slice as much as 0.7 percent from global GDP by 2021-22. The impact on the U.S. and China would be bigger, by about 0.9 percent and 1.1 percent lower, respectively. Chinese officials have given similar estimates. Potentially the effects of the U.S.-China standoff could trigger a global recession and even unleash a new financial crisis.

Trump has insisted against all logic that China pays for his tariffs, when in fact it is U.S. companies that import from China and, increasingly, U.S. consumers that will foot the bill. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York calculates that the trade war will cost every U.S. household $831 a year.

Especially with the conflict morphing into a tech war with the attack on Huawei, tens of thousands and even millions of jobs in the U.S. and China could potentially be at stake.

A shut down of Huawei would result in job losses for its workforce of 180,000 (including around 1,200 U.S. workers) and therefore is something Beijing would clearly never allow. But China’s tech sector is already facing a “winter” with a rise in layoffs and tighter competition President Nixon meets Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, the beginning of U.S.

“engagement” with China.

Global Economy

ruler so dependent on nationalist rhetoric as Xi Jinping.

As Stephen Bannon, the former Trump advisor and white nationalist guru, spelt out, “if the CCP agrees to the United States’ demands in an enforceable manner, it would amount to a legal and regulatory dismantling of Chinese state capitalism.”

State Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Emerging from the process of capitalist restoration that began in the late 1970s, the current Chinese regime and state has evolved unique features that mark it apart from other ex-Stalinist (or Maoist) states. Already at the time of the barbaric Beijing massacre thirty years ago, the regime of Deng Xiaoping and his successors decisively rejected the idea of experimenting with bourgeois democracy, which they feared would bring political “chaos” as well as the collapse of top CCP officials’ secret business activities, which have grown into vast but still secretive empires today.

Instead of acquiescing to a Western-led process of economic liberalization as occurred in much of Eastern Europe, China’s former bureaucratic elite maintained a totalitarian political system to hold the country’s centrifugal forces in check and insure that the growth of capitalism was politically shackled to serve the survival of the regime.

In this way, the dominant group within the Chinese capitalist class became the “princeling” families with direct connections to the top CCP hierarchy. Xi Jinping, whose family has overseas assets worth $1 trillion according to a recently leaked report in the Hong Kong media, represents the rule of the princelings over the state (it’s noticeable that no princelings have been targeted in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign which has brought down a record one million CCP officials in the past six years).

To maintain its rule, this peculiar capitalist regime eschews even limited “democratic” concessions such as a relaxation of press censorship or allowing more leeway in the NGO sector.

Similarly, it jealously protects strategic economic spheres, using its control of a number of key state companies, because the prof-

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its and spectacular wealth of the princeling families and “red” capitalists is based on controlling these sectors.Xi and his trade negotiators have been prepared to offer concessions to Trump in order to de-escalate the trade war, and also because they see a symmetry of interests with the U.S. capitalists in allowing accelerated liberal reforms in some economic sectors. However, the issue of the regime’s overall control through state capitalist interventions has alThe port of Los Angeles. ways been non-negotiable.

In the absence of a deal that would in reality require the CCP dictatorship’s capitulation, the aim of the Trump government seems to be to bring about a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies, leading to what former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned would be an “Economic Iron Curtain” between U.S.-led and Chinese-led spheres.

Decoupling

While there are certain obvious limits to how far an economic decoupling of the two economies can go, given the high degree of interdependence and the complexity of global manufacturing supply chains, what is clear is that a growing section of the U.S. capitalist class now favor this line, believing that if they don’t curb China’s economic and technological rise now it could soon be too late. They have swung behind Trump’s aggressive trade tactics in the hope this will either force the Chinese regime to open up its state-protected market to U.S. capital or force U.S. companies and Western allies alike to cut their ties with China’s economy.

But as the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, noted in a recent report on the U.S.-China conflict: “The problem with this approach is that our allies and partners are not going to follow us down this road. For almost all of them, China is a bigger trading partner than the United States is, and a faster growing one. There would be huge economic costs to decoupling, and it would lead to an unstable world of competing economic institutions and blocs.”

The U.S. government’s campaign against Huawei, pressuring other governments to boycott the Chinese company’s 5G technology is an example of this. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand have lined up with the U.S. to exclude Huawei, as have some Eastern European governments, but Germany, France, and even Britain look likely to break ranks with the U.S. on this issue.

This is mainly because of the huge costs and delays involved if Huawei is excluded from 5G rollouts.

The closure and relocation of many low tech and low val-

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Socialist World Issue 1, 2019

Workers assembling technology at a Huawei factory ue-added industries in China, as higher wages, land and pollution costs drive companies to Southeast Asia and beyond, is yet another imperative forcing the CCP regime to promote a technological upgrade towards high-end manufacturing, as outlined in its Made in China 2025 (MIC2025) plan. Yet this is a path that increasingly sets it on a collision course not only with U.S. capitalism, but also with the EU, Japan, and other industrialized powers who fear becoming economic and technical laggards as their own capitalists refuse to invest on the scale needed to keep pace.

At the same time these governments can be forced to turn to state capitalist solutions to bridge the investment gap in crucial technologies. Business lobby groups including tech giants Intel and Qualcomm have called on Trump’s administration to provide billions of dollars for research to stay ahead of China. And as Axios reported in 2018, top national security officials called on the Trump government to consider nationalizing the nation’s mobile network in order to build a centralized nationwide 5G network that would exclude Chinese technology.

Tech War and “Splinternet”

If it follows through, the Trump administration’s offensive against Huawei, by blocking its access to components and software including Google’s Android operating system, would effectively cut off its “oxygen supply” as one commentator noted.

Predictably, this has drawn the sternest responses so far from Beijing, which has threatened to retaliate by choking off the supply of rare earth minerals to the U.S. These minerals are crucial in a whole range of new technologies including advanced weaponry. China accounts for 95% of global rare earth output.

Beijing has also threatened to create its own list of “unreliable companies” that could face retaliation by China if they refuse to do business with Huawei or other Chinese companies on “unfair” grounds.

The Huawei ban represents the most significant dent so far in the process of capitalist globalization, which has suffered a partial reversal since the global crisis of 2008. While a deal, a possible relaxation of the ban, could also be struck as Trump has hinted, this would most likely only mark a temporary suspension of hostilities, with further escalation at a later stage.

Huawei is not an isolated case but merely the tip of a very big iceberg in terms of the number of “national security” measures being prepared by various departments and agencies of the U.S. government to block Chinese investments and acquisitions in the U.S. and shut Chinese companies out of the U.S. tech sector.

Already, Hikvision and Dahua, Chinese companies making surveillance systems and facial recognition technology, have been named as the next possible targets. The terms of Trump’s Huawei ban do not just apply to U.S. companies but also foreign companies, if they source at least 25% of their components from the U.S. This raises the possibility of a technological divorce between the two economies and a digital divide or “splinternet”, involving mutually exclusive systems and technological standards. A key focus for this struggle is the battle over 5G. If fully realised, 5G theoreticqally should accelerate the development of a vast range of revolutionary new technologies, from driverless cars to artificial intelligence (AI) and the “Internet of Things (IoT). However this will demand trillions of dollars in investments worldwide.

The tech war flows not least from the military implications of 5G, with the U.S. ruling class and the Pentagon fearful this will enable China to rapidly close the still wide gap that separates the two militaries. But it is also rooted in commercial considerations. Huawei, as the global leader in 5G technology (the company owns one-third of all 5G patents), is potentially positioned to dominate global communications systems. “Huawei could set the tech landscape for the next 10-15 years if it got that foot-

Global Economy 9 hold,” argues China expert Christopher Balding.

“The Huawei case clearly shows that global economic networks have entered the realm of geo-strategy,” said Georgetown University professor Abraham Newman. “The hyper-globalisation of the last twenty years is unsustainable given the real geopolitical constraints. We are entering a new phase,” he told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post.

For the workers’ movement internationally this technology and its implications for jobs and living standards are monumental.

Likewise the issue of cyber security and the merits or dangers of Chinese versus Western technology raises crucial questions about privacy and the rights of the individual, but also about democracy and the threat from uncontrolled security agencies with mass surveillance programs. There is a complete lack of democratic controls and accountability not only in authoritarian China but also in the “democratic” West. These issues and others at the core of the current U.S.-China conflict raise the need for public ownership of major companies, democratic planning of the tech sector, infrastructure investments, and democratic control by workers and the general public over all aspects of the economy.

Conclusion

Trade conflicts, which are becoming the “new normal” for capitalism, can enormously exacerbate already strained relations between the different imperialist powers and regional configurations. This is the case not only with the U.S. and China, but to differing degrees also between the U.S. and the EU with Germany at its helm, Japan, Russia, and India. All of these powers have their own grievances and brewing conflicts with the U.S. under

Trump, while also hoping to exploit Trump’s anti-China policies to secure advantages for themselves.

While the perspectives for the U.S.-China conflict are shrouded in uncertainty, and a trade deal or rather an “armistice” is not excluded, the current situation is full of dangers for capitalism worldwide and for both the U.S. and Chinese governments.

Rather than the “easy win” that Trump boasted about one year ago, the conflict could exhaust and weaken both regimes with a similar effect globally. Economic stagnation, greater instability, and the risk of revolutionary upheavals are all processes that could be accelerated by this conflict.

For socialists the task is to prepare seriously, to follow events closely, and to campaign energetically around a program to build international working class solidarity and a socialist alternative to capitalist mayhem. J

West Virginia teachers occupied the Capitol in Charleston in March 2018.

Rebuilding A Fighting Labor Movement

The Lessons of the Teachers’ Revolt Erin Brightwell

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n what will go down as an historic moment for the American labor movement, the education workers of West Virginia walked out in February 2018, setting in motion a national educators’ revolt. This reflected the pent-up anger against years of cuts in education alongside tax cuts to corporations and the rich, as well as a broad attack by both Republican and Democratic political establishments on public schools, public school teachers, and their unions. The teachers were sick and tired of low pay, disrespect, and the theft of resources from their students.

After decades of decline in the power of unions, the teachers and school support workers of West Virginia boldly staged a statewide, illegal strike, shutting down the entire public K-12 education system for eight days and winning a wage increase for themselves and all public sector workers as well as defeating various threatened attacks. The educators’ rebellion that began in West Virginia then led to eruptions in a number of other states, both “red” and “blue”, including Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, and California. It has also had an impact on how workers in other industries view going on strike.

While teachers have been at the forefront in the return of the strike, workers from a variety of other sectors, including hotel, tech, and grocery workers, have also taken action. Squeezed between outrageously high housing costs and low wages, workers are not feeling the benefits of the supposedly strong economy.

Developments in social struggle such as the #MeToo campaign are also being expressed through workplace action. We are living through a pivotal moment, when working people, both unionized and not, are beginning the process of relearning the lessons of earlier labor battles, and a new generation of activists is emerging and starting to rebuild union power.

It must, however, be acknowledged that there are real obstacles that could cut across a broader revitalization of the labor movement at least temporarily. Low unemployment gives workers confidence to take risks, and a recession, which is looming, could reduce strikes, at least in the short term. The Supreme Court’s Janus decision, while it hasn’t resulted in the kind of decimation to public sector unionism that its right-wing sponsors envisioned, has created new difficulties for unions. With a rightwing administration and court, further legal attacks on unions are likely.

There have been important victories but also defeats such as

Workers Movement 11 the United Auto Workers losing a recognition vote in the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee for the second time in five years. Last year UPS workers voted down a sellout contract, but the Teamster leadership refused to follow through with strike action and forced the contract through on a technicality.

In looking at the still challenging terrain facing the U.S. labor movement, socialists and union activists need to take stock of how the teachers and the other workers who went into struggle won what they did in 2018 and 2019, how they might have won more, and how these lessons can be applied in other sectors.

The year 2018 saw an about-face in strike statistics. A total of 485,000 workers went on strike, more than in any year since 1986. This compares with 2017, when a mere 25,000 went out on strike, lower than any year on record other than 2009, when the Great Recession was ravaging the economy. Of course, this labor revolt remains heavily concentrated in the education sector. 2019 is already keeping pace with 2018 with a series of teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver as well as a major strike by grocery workers in the Northeast.

Lessons of the Revolt

and, to one extent or another, cooperating with the “militant minority” of leading activists to run the strikes. In West Virginia and Arizona, the radical minority created their own structures.

Arizona Educators United went furthest and began to take on the character of a union, organizing two thousand “site liaisons” in schools across the state. It was through this organized challenge to the existing union leadership that the massive rank and file support was galvanized which forced the union leaders to respond to teachers’ demands for action or risk being completely sidelined.

Before the strikes, teachers’ unions in the red states were seen by most of their members as somewhat peripheral to their day to day reality. With their members’ economic conditions deteriorating over the past decade, union leaders at the state and national level weren’t putting forward the combative strategies that would have been necessary to begin to turn things around.

Instead, the union tops in Republican dominated states tended to focus on lobbying Democratic politicians at the state level for increased education funding, a largely futile strategy.

But where the Democrats have control, have they really been the allies of public-school teachers and students? In California, virtually every elected official in major cities is a Democrat. The school boards in Los Angeles and Oakland have enthusiastically collaborated with the privatizers to defund public education, close public schools, and pave the way for new, privately-administered charter schools. Replacing school board members who are part of the Democratic Party establishment with independent representatives of working people who will stand up to the agenda of public-school privatization is a key task of the movement in public education following the teacher strikes in Oakland and Los Angeles.

The Democratic establishment in general has been a proponent of “school choice” programs that send public education dollars to charters and private schools. It’s in no small part due to the teachers strike wave that establishment Democratic politicians, including those running for president, are now more cautious about openly expressing their support for privatization measures.

Blanc makes many criticisms of the union leadership in his book and correctly underlines the role of the “militant minority”. But he winds up understating the problem posed by the conservative leadership of unions like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) who have focused for decades on a “political strategy” of supporting the Democrats rather than basing themselves on the collective power of their members.

The idea of teachers going on strike was initially pushed by rank and file activists, and union leaders in all three states actively discouraged strike action.

Drawing inspiration from the 2012 Chicago teachers strike as well as the Mountain State, the teachers’ strikes have featured enthusiastic picket lines and mass demonstrations with a high level of participation by workers and significant community support. This is because the teacher activists politicized their struggle in a way that challenges the pro-corporate, anti-working-class priorities of the political establishment.

In Los Angeles and Oakland especially, not only have teachers fought for better wages and school funding, they’ve also led an ideological counteroffensive against the privatization of the public education system. This has had a profound impact on the consciousness of teachers, parents, and students. West Virginia teachers have also challenged privatization, going on a one-day strike this year against a bill that would have brought charter schools and private school vouchers to the state. The bill was quickly scuttled.

The story of the teachers’ revolt of 2018 has been chronicled in Eric Blanc’s book, Red State Revolt. Blanc, as a correspondent for Jacobin magazine, was on the ground during several of the teachers’ strikes. He had unparalleled access to strike activists and union leaders in the three strikes detailed in the book: West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Red State Revolt combines play-by-play accounts of some of the most pivotal episodes, along with insider details that were not previously available, and analyses the key factors that made the strikes unfold as they did.

It is essential reading.

The idea of teachers going on strike was initially pushed by rank and file activists, and union leaders in all three states actively discouraged strike action. Blanc explains how the very weakness of teachers’ unions in these states contributed to the official leaders eventually relenting to pressure from the rank and file

Missed Opportunities In 2011, public sector workers in Wisconsin fought back against the anti-union attacks of Tea Party governor Scott Walker. Thousands of workers occupied the state capitol for weeks

12 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 on end and there was mass support for a one-day general strike.

This was an opportunity to strike a decisive blow against the right and the anti-labor offensive nationally. The refusal of the labor leadership locally and nationally, including the leadership of the teachers’ unions, to call a strike spelled a major defeat for the working class. Instead the union leaders diverted the energy of the movement into the Democrats’ recall campaign against Walker which failed.

If the working class had defeated Walker in 2011, it would have been electrifying and could have been the rebirth of a fighting labor movement. Instead a heavy price was paid, and we had to wait another seven years for an opportunity of equal magnitude in a state where the national labor leaders were not able to exert the kind of negative pressure that they did in Wisconsin.

As Blanc correctly points out, during the 2018 West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona strikes, the AFL-CIO, NEA, and AFT “unfortunately failed to organize any systematic national support campaign.” This is in itself an indictment. He goes on to quote a leading West Virginia teacher activist, Emily Comer: “‘More than anything, the strike changed people’s ideas of what is possible. I now have co-workers asking me about when we’re going to have a nationwide teachers’ strike, which I could have never imagined being uttered even a few months ago.’”

Socialist Alternative at the time was pointing in the same direction, calling on the unions to organize a national day of action to defend public education. A one-day national teachers’ strike would have received enormous support. It could have been a key moment to galvanize the energy of the teachers’ revolt into a national challenge to the right and to the corporate education “reformers”. So while we should in no way understate what has been achieved in the teachers’ strikes to date, which built on years of hard fought campaigns across the country challenging

school closings, charterization, and high stakes testing, we also need to say a major opportunity was missed due to the role of the labor leaders.

The key question now is how do we turn the flame that was lit in West Virginia into a roaring fire that mobilizes broader sections of the working class to fight back against the decades of attacks on our living standards and working conditions?

Beginnings of a Wider Revolt

When Trump made good on his threats to shut down the federal government over funding for his racist wall on the southern border on December 22 of last year, he probably didn’t spend much energy considering the potential response of federal workers and organized labor. And yet, despite the posturing of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic political establishment, it was a sick-out by air traffic controllers and the threat of more widespread strike action by workers in the airports that ultimately ended the longest shutdown in history and put federal government employees back to work.

There was nothing conventional about the struggle to end the shutdown. On January 25, what was to become the last day of the 35-day shutdown, air traffic controllers called in sick in enough numbers to force an interruption in arrivals at La Guardia Airport in New York City and delays throughout east coast air travel.

Days earlier, Sara Nelson, president of the 50,000 strong flight attendant union, AFA-CWA, called for a general strike to end the shutdown. As news outlets were reporting on the air travel delays, Nelson urged AFA members to protest the shutdown by immediately heading to the offices of members of Congress. When asked if she was advocating flight attendants skip work, Nelson responded: “’Showing up to work for what? If air traffic controllers can’t do their jobs, we can’t do ours.’” Within hours, the shutdown ended without Trump getting the money he demanded for a border wall.

Teachers in Los Angeles rally during their strike in January 2019.

#Metoo and the massive explosion of anger around sexual harassment and sexual assault was brought into the workplace by McDonald’s workers who organized women’s committees and went on a one-day strike in 10 cities on September 18, 2018. Weeks later, on November 1, Google workers walked off the job internationally to protest sexual harassment. Google workers rapidly won one of their demands, an end to forced arbitration in sexual harassment cases. That the developing women’s movement has begun to be expressed in strike action is extremely positive. As the right wing takes aim at Roe v. Wade,

Workers Movement 13 U.S. women may need to follow the Polish women’s movement example from 2016 and organize walkouts and strikes to protect abortion rights.

A hotel-workers strike at Marriott in 2018 involved hotels in eight cities and nearly 8,000 workers at its peak. Its slogan, “One Job Should Be Enough,” pointed to the economic problems that millions of low wage workers in this economy face. Workers had to stay out for weeks and months in many cases to win their demands, which included management-provided panic buttons and stronger contract language on sexual harassment by hotel guests.

University campuses have also increasingly become sites of labor struggle as neoliberal measures like contracting out jobs and signing adjuncts to short term contract to teach A picket line during the New England Stop and Shop strike in April 2019. classes rather than creating permanent positions has become the norm in pubsocialists in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo, Ohio. lic and private universities. Graduate student and post-doctoral We are not yet at our own “1934 moment” when major sections workers have been organizing new unions especially at private of the working class begin to go on the offensive, but this is imuniversities. A series of major strikes has been waged at the Uniplicit in the situation. The biggest fear of the ruling class today is versity of California where tens of thousands of workers statethat the revolt which began in West Virginia could spread to the wide have fought for improved wages and benefits and to stop core sections of the industrial working class. As has been docucontracting out of jobs. mented by Kim Moody in his book On New Terrain, the working Finally, in April of this year, 31,000 grocery-store workers at class retains enormous potential social power in the U.S. despite Stop and Shop, a major grocery chain in New England, went on all the changes caused by globalization. While “lean methods” strike against threatened cuts to wages and benefits. The leaderof production require fewer workers in manufacturing, Moody ship of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers points to new choke points particularly in logistics. “Just in (UFCW), had become known as “the union that cries strike”; in time” distribution networks used by big companies such as Ampast contract battles the threat of a strike was often weakly inazon and Walmart rely on thousands of workers in warehouses, voked, with little to no preparation or mobilization of the memshipping, delivery, and transportation. bership. This time, a strike was called, but the UFCW officials Massive sprawling distribution centers have been concentrated offered virtually no leadership on the picket lines. Most Stop in “nodes” or “clusters” in and around major cities. Moody estiand Shop workers had never been on strike before, and many mates there are over 50 such hubs in the U.S., with Chicago, Los were not even aware they were members of a union. Socialist Angeles, the New York/New Jersey port, and Memphis having Alternative members actively participated alongside the strikconcentrations of over 100,000 workers each – up to four million ing workers in several stores. Our primary aim was to aid and workers nationally. The locations are based on their proximity give confidence to the most militant workers as they came to to major urban centers (markets), docks, and airports. These are learn, through their own experience, what a strike means and also areas with a high concentration of low-paid workers lookwhat must be done in order to win it. Through the determined ing for employment who are predominantly black, Latino, and efforts of the rank and file, some of the worst threatened attacks Asian. This also points to the growing racial and ethnic diversity on wages and benefits were defeated. of the U.S. working-class.

As other developments described above show, there is clearly Building a Fighting Labor Movement also enormous potential to unionize in the strategic airports and A key question on the mind of many activists is: how can we the tech sector. But all of this brings us back to the question of now move forward to transform the labor movement as a whole? the existing labor movement. While we have seen unions like In 1935, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which includNational Nurses United and the Amalgamated Transit Union ed autoworkers, steelworkers, mineworkers, and dock workers, take a more militant, fighting approach in recent years, the domsplit with the conservative craft unionist American Federation of inant approach within the American union leadership remains to Labor. This decisive step forward was only possible due to the try to get along with management, try to mitigate the worst attransformative role of three local general strikes in 1934 led by tacks on workers, and, above all, try to avoid any serious conflict

14 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 with the bosses. Overall union density is now at 11%, compared to 20% in 1983 and 35% in 1954.

Key unions like SEIU continue to give the Democratic Party massive resources despite the party’s complete failure or refusal under Obama to deliver pro-union reforms. If anything, Obama led the charge against the teacher unions and for privatization.

The teachers’ revolt has key lessons with enormous relevance for widening the struggle and rebuilding the labor movement.

These include the vital role of the “militant minority,” including socialists, the emergence of a new, wider activist layer, the politicization of the struggle, the mobilization the wider working class, and the preparedness to go around, through, or over the existing leadership.

An alternative leadership needs to be built. A key step in that direction is building caucuses that directly challenge the failed policies of business unionism and developing a strategy to mobilize the membership to fight the bosses. The victory of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators in the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010 was key to laying the basis for the historic teachers strike in 2012 which in turn inspired many key activists in the most recent teachers revolt.

Activists with a class struggle orientation have been winning union elections and moving into formal leadership positions in some urban teacher unions like Los Angeles and Oakland. The Los Angeles teachers strike was launched after a period of detailed preparation. The United Teachers of Los Angeles leadership had a plan to develop teacher leaders in every school building and they hired two union staff to focus on organizing parent support.

Similarly, but in a less developed form, a union of University of California workers, UPTE-CWA, used two-day workshops around labor history and organizing skills to train a new activist corps. The investment in member education rapidly paid off as strike participation grew to record levels and rank and file activ-

ists developed their own initiatives to bring more workers into activity.

Most of all the “militant minority” needs to link a fighting strategy in the workplace to a wider political challenge to corporate power as the teachers did. Blanc reports in Red State Revolt, that the single event that most shaped the thinking of key teacher activists in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona was Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and his call for a “political revolution against the billionaire class”. A number now describe themselves as socialists, some of whom have joined the DSA. As we explain in the accompanying article on the Sanders 2020 campaign, to win the key demands in his platform requires building a mass movement and a new political party based on the interests of working people. Class struggle oriented activists should seek to use the 2020 campaign to build the outline of fighting caucuses in key unions based on “Labor for Bernie” groups. These groups can then play a dual role in our 1934 moment and in laying the basis for a new political party, the key task that was not achieved in the 1930s.

Without a reforged labor movement, aligned with a new party that reclaims the fighting traditions of the past, there is no way for working people to begin to redress the balance of power in the workplaces and in society that has tilted dangerously to the corporate elite in the past several decades. The labor movement here also needs to link up with workers engaged in struggle internationally, including in Mexico and Quebec.

We can win better wages, better working conditions, Medicare for All and much more. However, any such victories will never be secure under this system. That is why we need to go further. The mobilized working class leading all the oppressed can and must create a new society based on solidarity, a socialist society. J

Workers Movement

Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. in 2017.

To Win Bernie’s Platform and Defeat the Right

We Need a New Party Ty Moore

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new generation is rising, politically awakened by the horrific social and environmental future capitalism has on offer. Behind the mass anger at Trump’s bigoted billionaire agenda, most people sense that his election was more symptom than cause.

The global surge in right-populism is fueled by rising inequality, grinding austerity, and deeply corrupted political systems shaped by decades of capitalist neoliberalism. Unless the left can build a credible working-class political alternative, right-wing forces will continue to grow.

This is the historic significance of the movement beginning to gather behind Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Learning from the failure of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street-backed 2016 campaign, millions now recognize that Bernie’s appeals to working-class unity and his bold anti-corporate platform offer a far stronger strategy to challenge right-populism.

Many of the bold reforms popularized by Sanders in 2016, once considered fringe, now have undeniable mass support.

Medicare for All, free college, taxing the rich, and moving to a 100% renewable energy economy are supported by large majorities. Building on this, Sanders’ 2020 campaign has gone further, calling for a Green New Deal, voting rights for prisoners, and an extensive plan to reinvest in K-12 public education and improve teachers compensation.

Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns emerge from a profound

crisis for the U.S. two-party system. His campaign’s challenge to the corporate stranglehold over American politics is creating the conditions for an historic political realignment along class lines including splits in the Democratic Party’s big tent coalition.

In every other advanced capitalist country, working people succeeded in establishing political parties that won major gains like the National Health Service in Britain. The American labor movement at its strongest won major gains like health benefits and pensions for sections of the working class but with the retreat of unions, these gains were largely lost. Only in the U.S. was a viable mass workers party never established. This flowed from the historic strength of U.S. capitalism, which was able until the last couple decades - to deliver higher living standards to each generation. From the Civil War up to the present, the American two-party system has been the most stable political system in the world.

The promise of the “American Dream” was always more of a reality for some sections of the population than for others. Yet despite the bitter legacy of racism, rising living standards for most workers helped to cohere a social base of support for the ruling class.

Despite the strength of American capitalism, there have been missed opportunities to build a viable mass workers party. When the Great Depression exposed the rottenness of capitalism, resulting in a mass labor revolt, or when the mass movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s came up against the end of the postwar eco-

16 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 nomic boom, the possibility opened up for the labor movement to pose a more decisive challenge to corporate domination.

In these two examples and others, labor and left leaders have repeatedly placed false hopes in transforming the Democrats into a real peoples party. But we now face a situation of decisive decline for American capitalism where its ability to maintain support has been undermined.

End of the “American Dream”

In the center of world imperialism, where capitalism was long treated like a state religion, millions are now exploring socialist ideas. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, three decades of bipartisan neo-liberalism had driven down living standards, shredded the social safety net, and created levels of inequality not seen since the robber baron era. For the first time in U.S history young people face a distinctly bleaker future than their parents.

Since 2008, mass protests and struggles of working people, oppressed communities, and the youth have profoundly reshaped American politics, though against the background of deepening political polarization and the growth of right-populism. Trump’s election sparked a historic wave of revolt, with his first day in office was marked by the largest protest in U.S. history, with millions demanding an end to sexism and bigotry. From the mass airport occupations against the “Muslim ban” to waves of mass protest against gun violence, family separation at the border, and climate change, millions have shown their preparedness to fight back.

Nearly 60,000 have joined the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016. This alongside the rapid rise of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez into a national icon, capable of shaping the national debate, demonstrates the dramatic shifts in popular consciousness now unfolding.

Now the powerful strike wave of teachers is re-awakening the American labor movement. What began as a “red state revolt” has now spread to urban centers. Many of the young teacher activists who emerged at the forefront, especially in places like West Virginia, were radicalized and activated around Sanders’ 2016 campaign, underscoring how the political movement against the billionaire class will spur working-class struggles and vice versa.

This growing popular revolt against the conditions resulting from capitalism’s decay has, over the last decade, created fertile soil for Sanders second fight for the presidency. This is why, for the first time in American history, a self-described socialist has a serious shot at winning the White House.

The movement gathering around Bernie’s campaign will face ferocious opposition from big business, and overcoming this will require organizing a mass political uprising on a larger scale than even Bernie is projecting. This means turning Bernie’s campaign into the outlines of a new party based on the interests of working people.

Most serious capitalist commentators are warning that a new recession is on the horizon, possibly before the 2020 elections.

Under these conditions, even if Sanders wins the presidency, his ability to deliver his promised reforms within the framework of capitalism will be extremely limited.

This reality is fueling a welcome debate over the meaning of socialism. Among a growing minority, it is becoming clearer that a more fundamental transformation of society will be needed to tackle climate change, inequality, racist oppression and imperialism exploitation.

At the same, the hope that a Sanders presidency could deliver sweeping reforms is raising the expectations of millions.

Combined with the beginnings of a resurgent labor movement, Bernie’s presidential campaign represents the best opportunity in decades to build a powerful challenge to corporate political domination.

The “Stop Sanders” Campaign Begins

Powerful oligarchs from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the major energy companies are debating how to stop Sanders, and for good reason. Health care stocks topped all others on the S&P 500 for five of the last six years, but amid growing support for Medicare for All this spring, a big selloff turned health care into the worst performing sector.

Bloomberg ran an article, “Bernie Sanders, 1; Health Insurers, -$30 Billion” which explained “The catalyst for the rout was health-insurance giant UnitedHealth Group Inc., which used its earnings call to engage with the biggest threat to the status-quo out there: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to eliminate private insurance in favor of government-run universal coverage” (4/17/19). The industry spent $563 million lobbying last year, and this effort to influence top Democrats has intensified in recent months to block Sanders’ policy proposals which “would effectively legislate many of the companies out of existence.”

From Wall Street to the energy industry, corporate America is bitterly opposed to Sanders. Most would strongly prefer four more years of Trump rather than allowing Bernie to take the White House.

In April, the New York Times ran expose titled “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Agonizing Over His Momentum,” which revealed a series of secret dinners of the leading congressional Democrats, top party operatives, and big donors to plan out how to block Bernie in the primaries. Among other things, the idea of using the party’s unelected “superdelegates” to deny Bernie the nomination - even if he gets a higher primary vote than other candidates - is being openly discussed.

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, a superdelegate, made their calculation clear: “If we have a role, so be it, but I’d much prefer that it be decided in the first round, just from a unity standpoint.” Democratic Party leaders strongly prefer to avoid a repeat of 2016, when their primary rigging threatened to split the party. “Is America Becoming a 4-Party State?” was the title of a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, where he blasts Ocasio-Cortez and the new left and warns that “political parties

Labor and left leaders have repeatedly placed false hopes in transforming the Democrats into a real peoples party.

Politics 17 across the democratic world are blowing up” (2/19/19).

The best outcome for big business is to be seen as defeating Sanders “fair and square” in the Democratic primaries, and many are attempting to anoint Joe Biden for this role. He is held up as a trusted “centrist” who can rise above the partisan bickering and the “extremism” of both Trump and Sanders.

However, already Biden’s early lead in the polls is sagging as his long record as a shill for Wall Street comes under greater scrutiny. Big business has several backup options in the race, including Buttegieg, Beto, and Harris.

Fear-mongering around Bernie’s “electability” remains the central line of attack. Yet as James Downey, the Washington Post opinions editor, points out, “while there’s little polling evidence to suggest Democratic voters would abandon the party if Sanders were the nominee… there’s plenty of reason to think that Democratic donors may do so… So establishment Democrats are right that Sanders would face certain obstacles that most other potential nominees wouldn’t — namely, that more big paid-for megaphones will be turned against him” (4/17/19).

In reality, the bigger danger is that the Democrats fail to learn the right lessons from 2016 and again nominate a corporate tool like Biden to face off against Trump, offering most workers another no-choice election.

Lessons from 2016

Bernie’s historic 2016 campaign called for a “political revolution against the billionaire class” and pointed towards creating a new political force in U.S. politics. However, learning the lessons from Bernie’s bitter primary defeat, which paved the way for Trump’s victory over Clinton, remains vital if we are to avoid a similar outcome in 2020.

Those on the left who argue for working within the Democratic Party emphasize how the U.S. electoral system rules are rigged

against third parties. The actual experience of 2016, however, proved to millions just how undemocratic the system is for anti-corporate candidates running within the two-party system.

Most states restrict primary participation to registered Democrats and Republicans, despite 42% of voters identifying as independent while only 31% identify as Democrats and 24% as Republicans. In New York, for example, the Democratic legislature requires voters to register as Democrats seven months before the primary to participate!

So even if party leaders play by their own rules, the primaries are an unfavorable terrain for building a working-class political movement. But 2016 again revealed that the Democratic establishment not only stacks the rules in their favor, but are prepared to break those rules if needed.

Even before the first primary vote in 2016, the Executive Director of the National Nurses United, RoseAnne DeMoro, bitterly complained: “If the process in the Democratic Party is this rigged, how can [Bernie] be loyal?… This campaign has been so biased from the beginning. It’s sabotage. It’s continuous. They make the Republicans look democratic,” she said. “We are at a rupture here in democracy and the Democratic party” (The Guardian, 12/18/15).

Or as Michelle Alexander, renowned legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow, explained several months later in The Nation: “The biggest problem with Bernie, in the end, is that he’s running as a Democrat - as a member of a political party that not only capitulated to right-wing demagoguery but is now owned and controlled by a relatively small number of millionaires and billionaires… I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.”

None of this is to dismiss the colossal challenges that exist in the way of establishing a viable new mass party uniting working and oppressed people in America. In the same article, Alexander highlights one of the central challenges: “Of course, the idea of building a new political party terrifies most progressives, who understandably fear that it would open the door for a right-wing extremist to get elected. So we play the game of lesser evils.”

Yet despite playing the lesser-evil game, a right-wing extremist still got elected in 2016. Clinton’s corporate campaign deeply alienated a

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debate during the 2016 primary campaign.

18 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 section of the Democratic Party base while Trump’s right-populist appeals to “drain the swamp” in Washington put him over the top.

Despite polls throughout the 2016 primary fight showing Sanders as the strongest candidate against Trump, the corporate media endlessly downplayed this, whipping up fear that Bernie was “too far left” to win. This myth combined with fear of Trump was a decisive factor helping the Democratic leadership to whip up the party faithful and provided a certain cover for them to lie, cheat, and bully their way to Clinton’s primary victory over Bernie.

However, as Clinton and Trump faced off in the 2016 general election, Bernie emerged from his primary defeat as the most popular politician in America in every poll. In reality, Clinton and Trump were both widely despised. Most people voted against whichever candidate they disliked more. Any serious analysis of Sanders’ 2016 primary successes, alongside the corporate Democrats’ long record of devastating losses at the state and federal level between 2009 and 2016, paint a clear picture: the best strategy to undermine support for the populist right is by

Marching for Bernie, Labor Day in New York City in 2015.

building a powerful working class movement, completely independent of big business and the political establishment.

Don’t Accept a Rigged Primary

Defeating Trump and his agenda is among the central reasons Socialist Alternative argues that Sanders should use his 2020 campaign to lay the basis for building a new party for working people. While we don’t agree with his decision to run in the Democratic primaries, we are firmly committed to helping Bernie win. A Sanders victory would expose the contradictions in U.S. politics even further and enormously assist the building of a real movement against the right.

However, if Sanders is again undemocratically blocked in the primaries, he should move immediately to launch a new party as a vehicle to continue building a working-class fightback against both Trump and the billionaire class.

In 2016, Socialist Alternative energetically supported Bernie’s campaign from the beginning. But when anger at the rotten, undemocratic actions against Bernie by the Democratic leadership reached a boiling point in April 2016, Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative launched an online petition calling on Sanders to launch a new party. Within weeks 130,000 signed onto the petition, offering a small taste of the scale of support for a new party if Sanders himself had led the way, alongside his supporters in the labor movement and the wider left. In her article motivating the petition, Kshama warned: “Unfortunately, alongside Clinton’s supporters, Sanders himself has argued that an independent run risks splitting the progressive vote and allowing a Republican victory. Especially with Trump as the GOP frontrunner, this fear is understandable... “[But] there is another danger if Bernie drops out to back Hillary. It would leave Trump... a free hand to monopolize the growing anti-establishment anger, while most of the left is trapped behind Clinton, the crowning symbol of establishment, dynastic, Wall Street politics. Could the far-right even dream up a better scenario to build their forces?”

This warning unfortunately turned out to be all too true. However, if Sanders had run as an independent in 2016, using his campaign to establish a new mass party for working people, it is by no means ruled out that he could have bested both Clinton and Trump. Some on the left dismiss this idea, pointing to Ralph Nader’s lim-

Politics 19 ited electoral success running as an independent in the 2000s.

But this misses the colossal changes in U.S. society following the Great Recession. Since 2013, polls consistently show around 60% of Americans want a third party, and by 2018 this included 54% of Democrats and 72% of independents (but only 38% of Republicans).

If Sanders’ 2020 campaign is again blocked in the primaries, a mass conference of his supporters should be organized to democratically discuss the next steps, including the question of running all the way through November.

It is clear that in 2020, as in 2016, many people will see beating Trump as the overriding priority. This is completely understandable, and from day one, socialists were at the forefront of fighting Trump. At the same time, we need to warn that limiting the fight against the right to electoral challenges, especially by corporate candidates, will continue to backfire. Without the construction of a new party of the left linked to fighting movements of working people capable of answering the deep problems we face, the right and far right will continue to find openings to develop further.

One scenario where they could certainly find openings is if another corporate Democrat is elected president in the context of an economic downturn and, like Obama, bails out Wall Street and big business. We should not forget that it was the bailout of the banks and the inaction of the unions during the first two years of the Obama administration that opened the door to the Tea Party, a precursor to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

Against this background, failing once again to bring Bernie’s working-class message into the mass audience of the general election in 2020 would leave working people with another nochoice election, demoralizing and disorienting millions.

New Party Needed to Win

Of course, it can’t be ruled out that Sanders could win the Democratic primary, given the rottenness of the Party leadership. But we should be clear: overcoming the sabotage from the leadership and corporate media will require a civil war within the Democratic Party is only possible through the power of a mass movement of working people.

Crucially, Bernie’s campaign should take further steps to unite, at the local and national level, with striking teachers and other workers moving into action. The campaign should help organize coordinated national protests for abortion rights, immigrant rights, and link up with the international youth climate strike movement.

Pointing in the right direction, on April 27 over 60,000 Bernie supporters attended 4,700 “Organizing Kickoff” house parties across the country. To build the necessary power to win, however, these kinds of meet-ups would need to coalesce into ongoing grassroots campaign structures. Campaign supporters should be empowered to democratically organize themselves at the local, city, and state level for the huge struggle ahead. “Bernie for labor” groups should also be formed in all unions, linked to the struggle to rebuild a fighting labor movement – an issue we address in the accompanying article in this issue on the lessons of the teachers’ revolt.

If the Sanders campaign adopted this approach it would signify,

in reality, the outline of a new political party, organized in direct opposition to all the traditional centers of power in the Democratic Party.

If, against the odds, Sanders were to win the White House in 2020, the need for a new party and mass movements of working people would only grow. Business-backed politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties would still dominate Congress, state legislatures, and city governments. Sanders would face huge pressure to moderate his demands and betray the expectations for deep-going social change his campaigns have inspired. Failing this, all the resources of the capitalists, including the corporate media, the courts, and elements of the entrenched government bureaucracies would be set in motion to block Sanders from carrying out his program of reforms.

Sanders has correctly emphasized that, even if he is elected, winning Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, taxes on big business, and the rest will require real movements from below.

But how will these movements be organized? If Bernie won the White House, a broad left party would be vital to coordinate mass working-class action against corporate sabotage. In the end, major victories will require the social power of working people being brought to bear against the power of the ruling class, from escalating mass mobilizations up to and including national general strikes.

Rather than being paralyzed in an ongoing civil war with the still dominant corporate-backed Democratic establishment, our movement would be far stronger if we got organized completely independent of corporate influence, linking together labor struggles and social movements around a common program.

Can Sanders’ Socialism Succeed?

Bernie Sanders and most the U.S. left profoundly underestimate the obstacles to winning his package of reforms within the framework of capitalism. Their main strategy rests on the mistaken idea that it is possible to recreate, in effect, the post-World War II era of high taxation on big business and an expansive social welfare state. However, far from this period of expanding social programs and rights representing a “normal” state of affairs for capitalism, which can be re-created by electing left governments, the postwar global political economy was only possible due to a very unique historical conjuncture that will not be replicated today.

The colossal economic destruction of two world wars and the Great Depression created the conditions for capitalism’s greatest expansion ever between the 1950s and ‘70s. At the same time, The Soviet Union emerged after World War II as a global superpower. Capitalism was replaced with planned economies in Eastern Europe and China. Colonial revolutions swept away pro-imperialist regimes across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The planned economies of Eastern Europe and the USSR allowed for unprecedented economic growth and improvements in workers’ living standards. In this context, the capitalist class of Western Europe and the United States felt enormous pressure to keep living standards higher than in the East or face a revolutionary challenge.

The serious strategists of capitalism understood that, faced with powerful labor movements at home and threat of posed by

20 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 planned economies in the east, accepting an expansive social welfare system was necessary to prevent revolution. Even then, the working class had to fight for each and every gain made.

All that changed with the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s, and especially following the collapse of the Stalinist planned economies in the early ‘90s. These world-historic events led to the neoliberal capitalist offensive against unions, slashing corporate taxes and regulations, and gutting social welfare programs as global capitalism moved into a long cyclical decline.

Especially since the Great Recession of 2008, a vicious race to the bottom has thrown millions more into poverty while a few at the top saw their fortunes soar. With a new recession on the horizon, capitalism today simply cannot sustain the kind of expansive social welfare systems of the past. Even in the Scandinavian countries that Sanders points to as a model of “socialism” there has been a massive scaling back of the welfare state.

None of this is to suggest that important reforms like Medicare for All or tuition-free college couldn’t be achieved within the framework of capitalism today. But even these reforms would require a huge movement from below, and the capitalist class would look to reverse these victories at their first opportunity.

Even if many of the specific reforms Sanders calls for could be won through struggle, his broader goals of ending corporate domination of politics and ending inequality, poverty, and racism are not achievable under capitalism. Sanders’ underlying view is that capitalism can be reformed into a system that works for ordinary people - a dangerous illusion that will come crashing up against reality in the next period.

The goal of transitioning the U.S. and the global economy away from fossil fuels over the next decade as embodied in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ proposal for a Green New Deal, for example, would be viciously opposed by the powerful energy industries. Wall Street has major investments staked on burning all the remaining fossil fuel reserves. Breaking their power and mobilizing the huge resources needed to tackle climate change will require taking the big energy industries and financial institutions into public ownership under the democratic control of working people.

In this context, a Sanders presidency would be rapidly faced

with two choices: either capitulation on central pillars of his platform, or using the presidential podium to help build a mass movement from below prepared to challenge the ruling class in a more serious way. Unfortunately, while Bernie’s reformist “democratic socialism” represents a huge step forward compared to the neoliberal ideas long dominant in U.S. politics, it is not adequate to meet the expectations for serious social change developing among millions of his supporters.

For the scale of social change and investment needed to tackle income inequality and the legacy of racism, to ensure quality housing, health care, and education to all, to end predatory imperialist adventures once and for all, a socialist transformation of society is needed. This would mean taking the top 500 companies and financial institutions into public ownership and reorganizing our economy according to a democratic plan.

This kind of revolutionary change is often dismissed as utopian, including from many self-described democratic socialists.

Yet from Syriza’s capitulation in Greece to the neoliberal takeover of the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) in Brazil, recent history has repeatedly confirmed the warnings of Marxists: governments pursuing a gradual, reformist challenge to capitalist austerity will fail to deliver.

The new generation moving into struggle remains at an early stage of its political awakening. Despite passing through numerous radicalizing experiences since the 2008 capitalist crisis, today’s working class has not yet engaged in major tests of strength with the capitalist class, much less serious attempts at taking political power. These kinds of experiences, in the U.S. and internationally, were vital for past generations to develop a more rounded-out class and socialist consciousness, and will again be necessary in the years ahead.

How to overcome these obstacles - both the opposition from the ruling class and the weaknesses of our movement - is the central question facing the forces gathering behind Sanders. While energetically supporting Bernie’s campaign, we in Socialist Alternative will engage in the growing debates within the movement to educate, inspire, and prepare the ground for a new party for working people equipped with a socialist program. J

The 54th Massachusetts, one of the first black regiments in the Union army. 200,000 black soldiers and sailors played a decisive role in the defeat of the Confederacy.

Reparations: A Socialist Perspective Eljeer Hawkins

T

he 2020 presidential elections are in full swing, and all of the Democratic Party presidential nominees have been asked the question, “Do you support reparations?” Several candidates immediately declared their support for reparations, like Marianne Williamson, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro. Even New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks supports reparations. Bernie Sanders, who has also raised legitimate questions earlier about the demand, has also endorsed the demand recently.

Institutional racism is unfortunately alive and well in the U.S., a country that has discrimination built into its DNA. The black community faces disproportionate police harassment, state brutality, mass incarceration, unemployment, low wages, substandard housing and lack of education opportunities. In this context, a debate on the demands and strategy necessary to win black liberation is urgently necessary.

The recent clamor around reparations is linked to a revival of former Congressman John Conyer’s thirty year old House bill H.R. 40 that would set up a commission to study the lasting effects of slavery and possible reparations for the black community.

House representative Sheila Jackson Lee recently re-introduced

H.R. 40; the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties will discuss reparations on June 19; and Senator Corey Booker will present a proposal in the Senate to establish a commission to study possible reparations. The corporate media, liberal and conservatives pundits, and activists have now elevated the reparations demand into a national debate.

To make sense of today’s discussion it is worth exploring how reparations emerged in the historical struggle of black people fighting racial oppression before turning to the question of how reparations connects to the struggle to dismantle capitalism and institutional racism today.

Reparations after the Civil War

The demand to provide financial restitution – outside of public apologies, monuments, and memorials – to redress the damage of slavery on the lives of black people began following the end of the Civil War in 1865 with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “forty acres and a mule” field order #15 which was approved by President Lincoln. The aim was to divide plantations among 40,000 former enslaved Africans, providing them the possibility of living a dignified life with economic security post-slavery.

WIth the defeat of the Confederacy, a period of “Radical Re-

22 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 construction” developed in the South, cheered on by the international workers movement, including Karl Marx himself, who wrote that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” Freed slaves led the struggle for land reform, and many poor whites were involved as well. A higher proportion of black people were elected to office in the few years after the Civil War than at any time in U.S. history, including today! The period of radical reconstruction also saw the growth of labor organizations like the International Workingmen’s Association (often referred to as the First International) and the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. However, many capitalists in the north worried about this “populist” unrest and united with former slave-owners, stoking and mobilizing racist violence against the forces of progress. A struggle took place between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution in the 1860s.

President Andrew Johnson (1865-1868), who completed Lincoln’s second term, reversed any attempts to enfranchise black ex-slaves through his opposition to the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill. Johnson placated the former slave masters’ interest, compensating them for the loss of their “property” by the federal government. The “radical Republicans” in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens, reversed Johnson’s agenda. The radical Republicans defended the rights of black ex-slaves while the Freedmen’s Bureau provided black ex-slaves and landless poor whites the opportunity of political, economic, and social equality in the former slave states.

The presidential election of 1876-1877 led to a constitutional crisis and a counter-revolutionary development in the South. The Democratic Party presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, and Republican Party candidate Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral college with twenty disputed electoral votes. Both parties agreed to a resolution that would give Hayes the presidency while the Democratic Party, the party of the former slave masters, regained control of the South as the federal troops were pulled out and the Freedmen’s Bureau was dismantled. The rotten deal between the planter aristocracy and the industrial ruling class of the North was a betrayal of the black population that had fought in support of the Union cause. It meant a new phase of subjugation leading to Jim/Jane Crow southern apartheid, the disenfranchising of black men, and waves of state terror and vigilante violence.

In the wake of this historic defeat, individual figures like Republican Walter R. Vaughn, as well as organizations like the National Ex-Slave Mutual, Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the USA, raised the demand of financial restitution through pensions for former slaves. The organization grew to 34,000 members under the leadership of Isaiah Dickerson and Callie House. The Association and its leadership came under government attack for its work on pension rights. The Post Office De-

partment filed mail service fraud charges against Dickerson and House for receiving donations, resulting in the demise of the organization and prison time for its leaders, just one more example in the long list of black activist victims of US state repression.

Reparations in the 20th Century

With the turn of the century, there were several lawsuits against the federal government and the Treasury Department demanding reparations. During World War I (1914-1918) the demand for reparations subsided as the racist Woodrow Wilson administration prepared the country to enter the war in Europe. The Wilson administration began a coordinated attack on socialist, anarchist, and black nationalist leaders like Marcus Garvey. The Palmer Raids would criminalize dissent and political activity. However, in 1916, Reverend S. P. Drew organized the only convention of former slaves to demand reparations. Reverend Drew would share the same fate as Dickerson and House. He was sentenced to prison for his political and organizational work among former slaves in 1930. Between World Wars I and II, the demand for reparations was essentially dormant.

The demand for reparations and acknowledgment of the long term impact of the slave trade, chattel slavery, and segregation re-emerged during the Civil Rights movement and Black Power era of the 1950s and ‘60s. However, the Civil Rights movement did not include the demand for reparations into its overall struggle to dismantle southern apartheid.

Campaigns like the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations organized by socialists Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William L. Patterson linked Jim Crow racism to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II and highlighted the historical crisis black workers faced under capitalism. Queen Mother Moore, a prominent former black nationalist and Communist Party member in Harlem, also raised the question of reparations.

The Nation of Islam, which grew in the 1950s and ‘60s, demanded land redistribution to the descendants of slaves.

In the late 1960s, the black nationalist Republic of New Afrika (RNA) called for financial reparations and the acquisition of five southern states to build a separate black nation. The RNA demands mirrored the Stalinized Communist Party’s “Black Belt” theory of 1928 that viewed black Americans as a nation concentrated in the South.

The Black Belt theory did not take into account the two great migrations by southern black sharecroppers after both world wars to the industrialized urban centers of the North to escape poverty, endemic racism, and systemic violence. We develop these points in our pamphlet Marxism and the Fight for Black Freedom: From The Civil War To Black Lives Matter, Volume 1. In it we quote American Trotskyist Dick Fraser, who pointed out in 1955 that African Americans are “not victims of national oppression but of racial discrimination. The right of self-determination is not the question which is at stake in their struggle.”

To win reparations, it would have to be linked to wider demands benefiting the whole working class. This is absolutely not what the Democratic Party leadership has in mind.

Fighting Racism 23 Rather, “The goals which history has dictated to them are to achieve complete equality through the elimination of racial segregation, discrimination, and prejudice. That is the overthrow of the race system” (p.10-11).

Fraser also pointed out that - while the main direction of the struggle for black freedom was to fight for the overthrow of institutional racism and therefore for integration and equality rather than for separation - black nationalism could gain a base of support during periods of retreat and despair. The most dramatic example of this was the Garvey movement in the 1920s. While the demand for reparations cannot be seen as a straightforward nationalist demand, it has tended to become more pronounced during periods of retreat. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, the struggle for civil rights hit serious obstacles because of the failure to follow up the defeat of Jim Crow with a successful struggle against institutional racism and segregation in the North. This led to massive frustration among radicalized black youth and a certain growth in nationalist sentiment. The development of a mass workers’ party and a mass multiracial revolutionary current were real possibilities in this period of enormous social and political crisis, but the failure of a fragmented left to rise to the challenge led to a more serious defeat, symbolized by the victory of the racist reactionary Ronald Reagan as president in 1980.

In the past decades, there have been examples of reparations for other historic crimes that lend weight to the demand for reparations for slavery. In the 1980s and 90s, individual Japanese American families received financial reparations for being placed in internment camps during Word War II. The founding by former RNA members of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations (N’COBRA) would work to advance the call for reparations. There were several lawsuits against corporations like Aetna, Fleet, and CSX that benefitted enormously from slavery. In 1994, Florida agreed to pay reparations to the black

Protest demanding reparations in New York City in 2002.

survivors of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, and there have been limited reparations to certain indigenous tribes for stolen land by the U.S. government. Those who advocate reparations for the descendants of slaves also cite Germany’s payment of $70 billion to the victims of the Holocaust since 1952.

Reparations in the 21st Century

At the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 168 nations declared that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were crimes against humanity. The United States and Israel, however, walked out of the conference, ostensibly over language on Zionism.

In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations” article in the The Atlantic played a key role in re-igniting the issue of reparations as a significant demand. The publication of the article took place during the highwater mark of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and the exposure of the scale of law enforcement violence in communities of color and the second term of the first black president, Barack Obama. As the 2016 presidential elections began, the reparations question was posed to the Democratic presidential candidates with a particular focus on Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who was raising radical demands like a $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All and calling for a “political revolution against the billionaire class”.

At the beginning of his 2016 campaign, Sanders made a serious mistake by not directly addressing racial oppression. Sanders later developed a strong program for racial justice, after raising the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail after a traffic stop. However, his initial weakness allowed Coates, corporate media pundits, the Democratic political establishment, and more nationalist elements within BLM to attack Sanders with a “race first” approach which focused on reparations as a central demand.

It also opened up an important debate on the left with essays

by Chicago University Professor Cedric Johnson and activist Brian Jones in the pages of Jacobin magazine, challenging Coates’ politics and the mainstream framing of reparations. Johnson asked whether reparations is a demand that can be used to build a working class movement for economic and racial justice like the demand for a $15 minimum wage and how the movement should respond to the crisis black workers and youth face under capitalism and endemic racism. Jones stated, “Socialists should favor reparations for black people as part of a broader movement to redistribute wealth and power to all people who are oppressed and

24 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 exploited under capitalism” (Jacobin, 3/1/2016).

But the call for reparations during the 2016 presidential elections was concretely used by forces opposed to “a broader movement to redistribute wealth and power,” who sought to undermine the broad working-class approach of Bernie Sanders as well as the genuine socialist left.

As Professor Touré F. Reed correctly states in his essay, “Between Obama and Coates”: “Coates rejects solutions based on broad economic redistribution. He advocates, instead, for policies targeting blacks exclusively – such as reparations – as the only feasible means of closing the material divide between African Americans and whites … But because reparations is a political dead end, Coates is offering white liberals – and even a stratum of conservatives – who are either self-consciously or reflexively committed to neoliberal orthodoxies, absolution via public testimony to their privilege and their so-called racial sins.” (Catalyst, 3/12/18).

Socialist Alternative fully supports the genuine sentiments of black workers and youth who want this society to reckon with its history and atone for slavery and its effects on the lives of black people over generations. We also agree with Professor Reed’s point that reparations, in the way it is presented by establishment figures, is a “political dead-end” or a non-starter in combating institutional racism in this period of capitalist crisis.

While the demand for reparations has over 65% approval among black people, that has not translated into daily organizing and mobilization of black workers and youth for reparations.

In order to win any demand under capitalism, the building of a solid active base and grassroots movement of support among the widest layers of the working class and poor - specifically, in this case, black workers and youth - is crucial. The struggle for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s or, in a smaller way, the $15 minimum wage in 2013 captured the imagination and political will of workers and youth across race, ethnicity and gender in the country.

Reparations in 2019

Reparations has emerged again during the beginning of this Democratic Party presidential race – but not as a byproduct of a grassroots movement by black workers and youth. Once again, it is primarily an attempt to cut across Sanders, whose program and working class appeal represents a profound challenge to the political establishment in both corporate parties and the agenda

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “The Case for Reparations.” of Wall Street. Contrary to the endless media claims that Sanders doesn’t “connect” with black people, his message in 2019 has dramatically resonated with workers of color. The support of corporate politicians for reparations in this context is a feeble attempt and naked pandering to win the black vote, as if reparations is the key issue on the hearts, minds, and lips of ordinary black workers. The “black vote” in any case is not a homogeneous phenomenon; it has multiple levels of consciousness and interest. In truth, to the extent that reparations is a demand “from below,” it is coming more from a layer of middle class black and white activists.

The absence, in the wake of the pushing back of BLM, of a genuine multi-racial grassroots movement of workers and youth as well as the absence of a militant black leadership to confront capitalism and racial oppression has allowed forces like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the American Descendants of Slaves (#ADOS) to partially step into that vacuum. #ADOS, for example, uses anti-immigrant racism, nativist American exceptionalism, and patriotism to advocate reparations for black American-born workers.

The work of Duke University Professor William Darity, a leading scholar with a forthcoming book on financial reparations, is also an example of the problems with current proposals. Darity proposes a “ten year rule” for qualification namely, “having at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States, and having identified oneself as African-American on a legal document for at least a decade before the approval of any reparations.” The genealogy approach would eliminate millions of black people who are immigrants to the U.S. from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America and potentially cause unnecessary divisions among black workers who want justice.

Fighting Racism 25

What Would Reparations Mean?

On April 11, the demand for reparations hit the national news as students at Georgetown University voted in a non-binding referendum to increase their tuition with a $27.20 fee to assist the descendants of the 272 enslaved Africans that the Jesuits who ran the school sold two centuries ago to stabilize the university financially. The students who voted yes in the referendum showed their sense of solidarity for the 4,000 descendants of slaves of Georgetown that live in Louisiana and Maryland. However, the debt owed to the descendants of Georgetown’s slaves should be paid by the university and not by the students. Georgetown University has a $1.6 billion endowment built in part off of slavery that would settle this debt.

The most prominent proponents of reparations, particularly the Democratic Party presidential candidates, are unsurprisingly non-committal on how reparations will be implemented by the federal government. In fact there are many existing approaches to financial reparations, including calculating slaves’ role in creating profits in cotton and tobacco, what ex-slaves would have earned in wages or the value of black wealth lost or destroyed after Reconstruction with the rise of Jim Crow.

An exception to the lack of specificity on reparations from Democrats is the lesser-known presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, author and friend of Oprah Winfrey. She has outlined a program that would cost $200 to $500 billion and would be administered by a council with a board of trustees that would allocate funds to the descendants of former ex-slaves.

But even this more ambitious proposal highlights the underlying problem. The estimated cost of reparations proposals is anywhere between $5 billion and $12.5 trillion. For sake of comparison, the U.S. federal budget this year is $4.7 trillion. So

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.

either reparations would be a token program or if it were more serious it would run into the determined opposition of the ruling class, who have no intention of agreeing to wealth redistribution on this scale. Again, change of this type can only be achieved by mass struggle by workers and youth. To win reparations, it would have to be linked to wider demands benefiting the whole working class. This is absolutely not what the Democratic Party leadership has in mind.

Some activists tie the demand for reparations to the need for “black capitalism.” In a recent article about Killer Mike’s Trigger Warning, Eric Jenkins takes up this argument: “even in a world where black capitalist enterprises join the ranks of those such as AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon, the fact still remains that just because a CEO of the same skin color has the dollar doesn’t mean he is a part of the working-class community or will use his wealth to confront the issues that plague black workers and youth. The small black millionaire and billionaire class aim to expand their wealth across the nation and internationally – this is the logic of capitalism. The black elite class that is integrated into the system will defend and uphold the agenda of corporate America.”

“A prime example is Don Thompson, a black man who was the CEO of McDonald’s from 2012-2015 who forced his workers, many poor black working people, to subsist on poverty wages and deplorable working conditions. For the black or white capitalist it is about maximizing profits at all cost, expanding their power and prestige in society.”

Does this mean that the reparations demand is completely off the table in the short term? The example of Georgetown University shows how specific demands can be placed on institutions or corporations with a known history of profiting off of slavery. But

26 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 to even begin to redress the crimes of capitalism against black workers and youth, a fundamental system change is needed that dismantles the edifice of capitalism that thrives on institutional racism. Token amounts of money given to black workers and poor will not fundamentally change the racist and unequal conditions we live in, and we can’t let politicians pretend that racism is over just because of some money and kind words.

A Socialist Alternative Is Needed

This August marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first 20 enslaved Africans classified as indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The birth of American capitalism is rooted in the extermination of the indigenous population, stolen land, chattel slavery, and daily exploitation of workers. The question of reparations is a meaningful conversation that allows us to talk about the bedrock of American capitalism that seeks to maximize profits for the 0.1%.

The struggle to end institutional racism and capitalism requires building a militant, multi-racial, working-class movement with black workers and youth playing a central role in the battle. The history of the militant black freedom movement and the labor movement has compelling examples of social struggle, collective organizing, and militant action that won concrete victories that challenged racism and capitalism head on, like the building of the industrial unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the National Negro Congress in the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s.

The reparations question, as framed by corporate Democratic politicians, is based on a liberal moral argument that does not address the systemic crisis black workers and youth face under capitalism. It’s a shell game that would not concretely confront our lack of good union jobs, decent public education, universal healthcare, nor the environmental racism and law enforcement

violence we face. But again almost none of the prominent proponents of reparations clearly explain what the program would look like and who would administer it. This system will make no serious concession without a demand that resonates with the mass of ordinary people and uncompromising organizing and social struggle.

Calls for reparations should be linked to working-class demands that can positively affect our daily lives and mobilize black workers and youth into action. Policies that could lay the basis for black liberation would include guaranteed living-wage union jobs, quality public social housing, a massive investment in education in black communities, and free child care and health care for all. A fighting program would also need to include democratic rights, including reversing restrictions that affect black voters, winning community control of the police with elected civilians from neighborhood groups given the right to hire and fire officers, and an end to racist mass incarceration. To win these reforms, we would need a mass grassroots movement capable of defeating the big business interests that benefit from institutional racism.

The building of working-class unity is paramount for winning these demands and more. That unity would not rest upon ignoring racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, but on linking the fight against all forms of oppression to our common struggle against our common enemy. This system has a hell of a debt to pay to the global working class, poor, and most oppressed. The only way to cement any gains we make under this system of violence, oppression, and war is a global system change. We fight for a socialist economy that would put the world’s resources in the hands of the working class and poor so they could build a society based on democracy, solidarity, justice, and liberation. J

Karl Kautsky, a leading socialist theoretician in the late 19th century.

A Reply to Eric Blanc

Kautsky and the Parliamentary Road to Socialism Rob Rooke

W

e are living through a dramatic period in U.S. history.

While the Trump presidency has emboldened the right, we have also witnessed the re-emergence of strikes, the growth of a new left with DSA, Alexandria Occasio Cortez’s stunning rise to the center of American politics, and now the possibility of a Bernie Sanders presidency. Eric Blanc’s recent article in Jacobin on “Why Kautsky was Right” (4/2/19) is clearly aiming to help newer activists grapple with how socialists’ electoral successes can add up to system change and ending capitalism. The article argues for going beyond running candidates to the importance of building movements and for the need for a Marxist current to be built within DSA. All of this is enormously positive.

The recent experience of the left coalition Syriza government in Greece and the possible election of a Corbyn government in Britain makes a discussion about the road to socialism, and the role of a left party in parliament, a vital one for activists. That is

why Socialist Alternative welcomes this discussion.

For much of the last century almost half of the world lived in societies that had overthrown capitalism. This process began with the working class taking power in Russia in 1917. Despite the USSR’s political degeneration, the crisis of capitalism during the 20th century continuously drove working people towards revolution. It is critically important for those fighting for a democratic, socialist society today to be familiar with those revolutionary processes to help us understand how the working class tests its own organizations based on its victories and defeats, and the role a Marxist current and party can play.

Blanc rightly criticizes those ultra left groups who oppose participation in parliaments “on principle” and reduce revolutionary strategy to the question of “taking power”. However by counterpoising Lenin to Kautsky, and the Russian to the Finnish Revolutions, Blanc asks the reader to choose between two wrongly polarized conceptions. Missing the most important lessons of each revolution, the article’s conclusions are unbalanced and

28 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 will miseducate young socialist activists.

Is Kautsky Now Relevant?

Karl Kautsky was a leading socialist theoretician during the rise of German capitalism in the late 19th century, when the idea that socialism could replace capitalism by incremental legislative reforms first developed among trade union leaders and in a wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Kautsky opposed this reformism primarily because of the conclusions Marx had drawn from the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, where the working class held power for three months.

Kautsky and Lenin both agreed with Marx that the old capitalist state apparatus could not be taken over one brick at a time, but needed to be dismantled and replaced with a democratic workers state.

Kautsky, as Blanc himself points out, eventually fell prey to reformism. As World War I broke out, Kautsky, along with the leadership of the SPD, rejected socialist internationalism and supported the German ruling class’ war mobilization. This historic betrayal, repeated by almost all the leaders of the mass workers’ parties in Europe, led 16 million working people to their deaths. In the war’s wake revolutions spread across Europe.

dissolved and new elections were held almost every year. When the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP) won a majority in the 1916 elections, the Tsar once again closed parliament. Thus Finland did not experience prolonged political stability, unlike Kautsky’s Germany or Finland’s neighbor Sweden, where the ideas of reformism were stronger and the socialist parties became more bureaucratic as they were increasingly dominated by the trade union officials and parliamentary representatives.

Blanc attributes the Finnish SDP’s electoral victory to “patient class conscious organization and education” which is true but omits the dramatic change of consciousness brought about by events, especially the war. Finland did not experience steady, gradual economic progress, but was highly volatile during this period, in many ways more akin to the Russian experience.

Russian and Finnish socialists were also in constant dialogue and the Bolsheviks’ correct approach to national oppression and support for Finland’s right to self-determination strengthened relations. At the June 1917 Finnish SDP Congress the Russian Bolshevik leader, Alexandra Kollontai won thunderous applause when she called for socialist revolution and for Finland’s right to independence.

The Bolsheviks were deeply internationalist, reflected in the many Jews, Georgians, Ukrainians and other national minorities in their leadership.

The suggestion that Finnish socialists “fell under the guidance of a cadre of young ‘Kautskyists’ led by Otto Kuussinen” is a very one-sided snapshot of the process. By late 1918 Kuussinen, having fled Finland with the victory of the Whites in May, 1918, had joined the Bolsheviks and founded the Finnish Communist Party in exile. Unfortunately he later sided with Stalin against Trotsky. Kautsky’s writings were widely read by Finnish socialists, but only until more useful theoretical ideas came along based on the rich experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

By counterposing Lenin and Kautsky, and the Russian and Finnish Revolutions, Blanc asks the reader to choose between two wrongly polarized conceptions.

Finland’s Parliament and Party

At the heart of Blanc’s article is the idea that the Russian Revolution is not relevant for working people in advanced capitalist countries and that, within the Finnish Revolution of 1917-8, we will find a new model for a “parliamentary road to socialism” that Kautsky had conceived.

At the time of these revolutions, Finland and Russia were ruled by the Tzar with an iron fist and had limited electoral freedoms.

Russia’s political system favored large landowners and the nascent capitalists, and prevented workers and poor peasants, the vast majority of the population, from having any political power.

The Duma which was created by the Tsar was in no sense a true bourgeois parliament. It had very limited power, and could be dismissed at any time by the Tsar. In fact a real parliamentary democracy was a significant demand of the anti-Tsarist opposition.

Nonetheless the Bolsheviks, the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, participated in most elections and were able to get representatives elected to the Duma. According to the book, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma by Aleksei Badayev, the Bolsheviks won the support of 88% of the one million industrial workers who voted in the 1912 election.

In Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, the Tsar conceded a limited parliament in 1907 following the 1905 Revolution. Between 1908 and 1916 the power of the Finnish Parliament was almost completely neutralized by the Russian Tsar Nicholas II with a government formed by Imperial Russian Army officers during the second period of “Russification”. The Parliament was

How the Finnish Revolution Unfolded

The Finnish revolution broke out in late 1917 after the SDP’s electoral defeat that year. Tensions rose with rising strikes and demonstrations. The Finnish capitalist class organized anti-socialist armed militias to prepare to behead the socialist movement and the threat of a Bolshevik Finland.

The leaders of the SDP, the LO (the union federation), and the Red Guard (the workers’ armed self-defense militias) organized into a new formation, the Revolutionary Central Council. The Council initiated a general strike as a show of strength against the capitalist class. The strike paralyzed all of Finland and workers were poised to take power. However the workers’ leadership was split on the way forward and the general strike was called off. This was a crucial mistake that allowed the ruling class to remobilize.

The Finnish capitalists, backed by Germany, then launched a civil war in which 20,000 people died. Blanc makes no reference

Theory 29 to this. After the bosses’ victory, a further 10,000 activists were executed, and some 5% of the entire Finnish population placed in political concentration camps. This is a not a secondary detail to overlook if you are proposing the Finnish revolution as your model of the “democratic road to socialism.” This terrible defeat allowed Finland to become a launching pad for the imperialist nations’ invasion of the young USSR by 21 armies, including the U.S., aimed at restoring capitalism in Russia. By 1921 the Bolsheviks had repelled this invasion, but at a tremendous cost to the socialist democracy they were attempting to establish.

Why the Russian Revolution Still Matters

Capitalism, through an army of hired academics, has produced scores of books aimed at distorting and vilifying the Bolshevik revolution. Students are taught that a genuine people’s revolution was flourishing in 1917 which was hijacked by an insurrection led by a conspiratorial grouping, the Bolsheviks, who established a dictatorship. All bourgeois histories of 1917 are variations on this basic theme. They cannot accept that working people could choose and successfully begin to construct a democratic workers government. Unfortunately Blanc dances around this untrue but commonly held view.

When the revolution broke out in Russia in February 1917, the Tsar was imprisoned, but a coalition Provisional Government came to power that refused to challenge the power of the capitalists and landlords and continued the imperialist war. Over the following eight months the Bolsheviks (Russian for “majority”), whose representative in the Duma had been exiled for opposing the war, increasingly regained popularity with almost a quarter million people joining the party.

Workers Councils

In the rapid pace of a revolutionary situation, the working class

A demonstration in Turku, Finland in March 1917

will use whatever structures they see as viable to advance progress. In strikes, for instance, workers will throw up all sorts of structures that allow them room to go beyond the slow, sometimes over-centralized formal union bodies. This happened for example in West Virginia last year in the up to the historic teachers’ strike. These organs can complement or clash with the existing union structures. In the 1905 Russian Revolution a body of 30-40 workers from a number of workplaces in Saint Petersburg, the capital, came together to organize a political general strike.

This strike committee filled out, with delegates directly elected in workplaces and subject to immediate recall. This became the first Soviet (Russian for council). This method of organization enabled workers to be fully involved in determining the direction of the revolution. The example was replicated nationwide because it met the needs of the movement.

After the February 1917 Revolution, while most Bolshevik leaders were still in exile, the working class rebuilt the Soviets. Soldiers and sailors, primarily drawn from the peasantry, also built these revolutionary delegate organizations that held frequent elections and represented the moods and opinions of ordinary people at a given moment. They affiliated together into city-wide councils of delegates of workers, soldiers, sailors, and were the most fluid, democratic and transparent forms of democracy yet devised.

Despite not yet having a majority in the Soviets, the Bolsheviks called for “all power to the Soviets,” as the clearest road to workers power. They campaigned for a fuller democracy with no representation for the employers. With the threat of a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, the capitalist class, under General Kornilov organized an attempted military coup in September 1917 that was defeated by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd. When the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets met in October, with a Bolshevik and Left Social Revolutionary Party (a key peasant party) majority, they replaced the defunct Provisional Government and took concrete steps to take power away from the landlords and capitalists. They sent soldiers and workers out to take over all government functions and arrested the tops of the army and the old capitalist state.

These “harsh” measures were a critical part of overthrowing capitalism, but were carried out in Russia with a huge mandate. This insurrectionary element of the revolution resulted in a relatively bloodless revolution.

Within days of the Soviets taking power in

30 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 Russia, they declared the war over; all land was given to the peasants; all rents abolished; Russia’s former colonies were free to declare independence; discrimination and inequality for women was banned; the right to speedy divorce passed; banks were nationalized and homosexuality was decriminalized. For the first time, the construction of a world free of exploitation and oppression had become a realistic prospect if the revolution could be spread, especially to the advanced capitalist countries, as was the Bolsheviks’ strategy. News of October spread globally, and every boss wondered when the pitchforks were coming for them.

While the initial revolution was relatively bloodless, serious violence came to Russia when the landlords and capitalists linked up with foreign imperialist powers and launched a civil war, which engulfed Finland as well. Many of the left workers leaders in the Finnish Social Democratic Party taking part in the Finnish Revolution believed a general strike would force bosses into accepting a parliamentary transition to socialism. Engels had long before warned of the dangers of making half a revolution. Both the Bolsheviks and the Finnish SDP were rooted in the working class but the crucial difference was that the Bolsheviks had a clear perspective on the class forces at work in the revolutionary process and an organizational model suited to be able to lead a decisive struggle to its conclusion.

state.

We think socialists should challenge the state by uncovering its capitalist bias. We also fight for every possible democratic reform including reforms of the state forces, like the police. But we do so in order to expose the limits of reforming the state, and the need for systemic change. For example, through building strong mass movements opposed to police violence, policing can be made less brutal, and important reforms can be won which will positively impact the communities affected by police violence. But at the end of the day the police will defend the interests of the capitalists by keeping workers and the oppressed “in their place”. The only way this can end is through revolutionary change.

While many U.S. workers see the capitalist state as impartial, other workers often see the role of the state more clearly because of their experience. African Americans often do not see the U.S. capitalist state as democratic at all, or neutral, but as part of a system of oppression. For Marxists, the role of even the most “democratic” parliament under capitalism is to maintain class rule. If it stops working for them they will seek to undermine it. Lenin in State and Revolution argued that a “democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism” and that “it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake this.” This is why so many working class people, while defending democracy, feel that the government is also a puppet for the billionaires.

As we fight for socialism with eyes wide open, our movements must also be fluent in the pitfalls and opportunities that will shape the path forward.

Parliament, the State and Insurrection

Marx campaigned against “insurrectionism” led by small conspiratorial groups, arguing for mass action. Lenin and the early Kautsky concurred. October was a mass democratic action. The seizure of political power from the capitalists was carried out as a defensive measure against the imminent threat of a military coup by General Kornilov. But the Bolsheviks were not in fear of “illegally” taking decisive action at the critical point because they understood that not do so would open the road to counter-revolution and the smashing of the workers’ gains. Parliamentary legislation would not have ended landlordism and capitalism in Russia, nor anywhere else. In the U.S., when the slave owners had their property rights threatened by legislation they responded by initiating the Civil War, the bloodiest war fought on U.S. soil.

The state under capitalism comprises all institutions that protect the economic system: the police, the courts, the prison system.

Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels studied the history of the state in class societies and determined that the state is an instrument of class rule. This apparatus enables capitalism to function without constant class conflict. He added that in the final analysis the state under capitalism “could be reduced to armed bodies of men” whose job it is to protect the status quo. It is in this light that we see parliament as a part of the maintenance of the power of the capitalist class. But Blanc argues, on the contrary, that we should “focus on fighting to democratize the political regime” which implies that legal reforms can change the nature of the

Socialists in Parliaments

During a period of social upheaval, socialists in parliament can lend critical weight to mass movements. In Britain in the 1980s, the Militant tendency of the Labour Party, Socialist Alternative’s sister organization, initiated and led the Anti-Poll Tax campaign which became a mass movement of millions refusing to pay the British government’s new flat tax. Over ten million people joined the non-payment movement forcing Margaret Thatcher, then the Prime Minister, to resign. All of Militant’s city councilors and MPs were threatened with prison for non-payment. However this movement to break the law got little support among the majority of Labour’s Parliamentary group, with MP Jeremy Corbyn being one of the few exceptions.

City councils, legislatures, and parliaments are inherently conservative and hostile environments for the working class. Once a workers’ representative enters these institutions, the ruling class uses its full historic, cultural, and economic weight to convince them that big reforms are simply unrealistic. It is no coincidence that since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party the biggest support for his left policies is from the party’s base and the biggest resistance comes from the majority of the party’s elected MPs. Despite the obstacles, running and winning seats in bourgeois

Theory 31

Chilean military overthrows democratically elected socialist government in 1973. institutions is a necessary and important part of building mass support for socialist change. Socialist Alternative sees the election of socialists as an opportunity to amplify and build mass movements, and win victories that encourage the working class to self-organize. SA member and Seattle City Councillor Kshama Sawant uses her seat to fight for reforms, like the $15/hr. minimum wage victory, not as an end in itself, but as a means to raise the confidence and willingness of the working class to fight.

When socialists enter these bodies of the capitalist state, to ensure they remain faithful to the movement we need a healthy, functioning mass, independent political party of the working class. Through its democratic mechanisms it can ensure accountability. Such representatives must not only refuse to accept corporate money in their election campaigns, but also accept a workers’ wage and donate the rest back to the movement.

Marxists have an even higher standard. The policy of the Bolsheviks and the Communist International established in 1919 was very specific. The day to day work of our representatives in bourgeois parliaments must be accountable directly to the party, with their work integrated into the wider political work of the party. Much of the thinking for this approach flowed from the disastrous breach with Marxism of the SPD Members of Parliament who voted overwhelmingly for World War I.

Revolution workers organized their own Shoras (councils) that mushroomed all over the country, before the counter revolution of the mullahs led by the Shiite clerical caste succeeded.

The Chilean revolution 1970-73, in contrast, did appear to take the parliamentary road as events were accelerated by the election of a Socialist government. Here too the workers began building alternative structures to defend against the capitalist state. The Cordones (revolutionary councils) helped coordinate factory occupations and food distribution. But when the working class demanded their government arm them against a potential U.S.backed military coup, the socialist parliamentary leaders hesitated, hoping for a compromise with the Chilean ruling class.

The moment was lost and General Pinochet, with the backing of the CIA, drowned the revolution in blood, executing more than 4,000 socialist and union activists.

All these revolutions unfolded in a period where Stalinist parties played a major and very negative role in the workers’ movement, constantly seeking an accommodation with capitalism as the social democrats did in the period after 1917. Missing in all these revolutionary periods was a leadership inside the workers movements with a clear understanding of the capitalist state which could develop the strategy necessary to lead the movement to victory and create a democratic workers republic.

Will Revolutionary Movements Use Parliament?

Perspectives for a Left Government

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during most extensive revolutionary wave since 1917-23, most working class upheavals did not take “the parliamentary road”. The 1968 French general strike assumed revolutionary dimensions. In the Portuguese Revolution of 1975, workers nationalized their industries from below by occupations and direct mass action. In the 1979 Iranian

Resorting to military dictatorship to stop radical change is an approach associated with the ruling classes of “third world” countries, not the “advanced” capitalist countries. But in reality all ruling classes are prepared to go to extreme lengths to defend their rule. The German, Italian and Spanish ruling classes resorted to fascism. Right wing dictatorships continued in Spain,

32 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 Greece and Portugal into the 1970s.

In 1975 a left Labour government in Australia was dismissed by a constitutional coup carried through by the British monarch.

The 1982 best seller by British politician Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup, explored the prospect of similar developments if a left Labour government was elected in Britain. All the legal and illegal mechanisms of the state will be used to undermine any serious attempt by the working class to use parliament or Congress to implement socialist policies. The working class movement needs to be as prepared for such moments as the capitalist class are. To be successful in winning Medicare for All and other key demands a Sanders White House would need to be backed by a mass movement in the streets and workplaces. It would also need the support of an independent left party based on the interests of working people and the oppressed with a fighting program. Such a party should seek full majorities in Congress, state legislatures and city councils. However, in taking the most powerful ruling class in world history, a leadership with a clear understanding of the role of the capitalist state will be decisive.

In the U.S., the ruling class in the past accused revolutionary socialists of engaging in a conspiracy to “overthrow the government”. Unfortunately Blanc echoes this argument. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marxists seek to win the majority of the working class and indeed the population as a whole to the necessity for socialist change.

But we also believe that the ruling class will not accept the democratic will of society if that points to them losing their power and privilege. If democracy doesn’t work for them they will try to shut it down. In the 1930s Congress investigated a military coup plot against President Franklin Roosevelt organized by a wing of the U.S. ruling class because they couldn’t abide even the limited reforms of the “New Deal”.

Revolutionary Organization

Blanc’s article, in not fully recognizing the nature of the state, ignores the limits of capitalist democracy and then goes on to argue that socialism can be won within a bourgeois parliamentary framework. His goal is to refute the Russian Revolution as being in any sense a model for today. Along with his strawman criticism of insurrectionism, he essentially argues against the idea that the working class needs its own revolutionary organization

rooted in the working class. However a mass revolutionary party that understands the limits of bourgeois democracy is critical for the success of the transition for humanity to socialism. Such a party would have to be based on a clear understanding of perspectives and the tasks ahead for the working class. It would seek to build a common organization nationally and internationally. It would have to be fluent in the lessons of the past in order to fight for its ideas in the unions, broader political formations and in all the struggles of working and oppressed peoples.

We are now entering a new, more politically convulsive period In the U.S. Gone is the time when capitalism used the “threat of communism” to create fear. Gone is the market euphoria that accompanied the collapse of Stalinism. Kshama Sawant’s surprise 96,000 votes as a Socialist Alternative candidate in the Seattle City Council in 2013 signaled the re-emergence of socialism to a new generation. This victory was part of the current that, paved the way for Bernie Sanders running in 2016, which in turn triggered the explosion of membership of the DSA. As we fight for socialism with eyes wide open, our movements must also be fluent in the pitfalls and opportunities that will shape the path forward. Eric Blanc’s article does not paint the economic background to his lineal, orderly road to socialism. We are not about to enter a similar economic period to the one that accompanied the rise of social democratic parties in the 1890s or the 1950s when the “welfare state” was at its height in the West. We are in a period where the capitalist class has no way forward to develop the economy, where crisis and instability are permanent features. This will provoke huge social upheavals and will radically change working class consciousness. It will be a period where socialists will be challenged with the complexities both of rising right and left populism, as well as new versions of reformism.

Parliaments must be used by socialists, but we need to understand what those institutions represent and the dangers inherent in them for socialists.

The capitalists have attempted to bury Karl Marx many times, yet his ideas keep coming back. With a Marxist understanding of the coming changes to our world, and our history as a class, the working class will find the road forward to replace all the rotten and corrupt institutions of capitalism and build a global socialist democracy for all humanity. J

McDonald’s workers in Chicago march to the corporate office as part of the nationwide movement against sexual harassment.

Review: Feminism for the 99% Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

By Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, & Nancy Fraser Verso Books, $12.95

Dana White

P

ublished in a time of rising women’s movements around the globe, the recently released book Feminism for the 99% will draw the attention of many who are eager to fight back against increased attacks on women’s rights and seek to win genuine liberation. In this brief manifesto, the three authors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser present eleven theses for a class-based feminism for the 99%, focused on the needs of working-class women and not the wealthy few.

Just a few years ago, Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” rose to the top ranks of the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year, selling millions of copies. “Lean In” urged women to overcome all obstacles to climb their way up the corporate ladder with hopes of achieving more equitable rosters of CEOs and corporate boards. However, for the vast majority of women, this socalled corporate ladder isn’t even reachable from the basement of economic precarity, low-wage jobs, and lack of public social supports including healthcare, housing, and childcare.

In Feminism for the 99%, Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser set out to present a working-class women’s alternative to Sandberg’s corporate feminism and “equal opportunity domination” for a select few women in power. The authors write, “We aim to explain why feminists should choose the road of feminist strikes,

why we must unite with other anticapitalist and antisystemic movements, and why our movement must become a feminism for the 99%.” Woven throughout the book, the authors outline their vision for a movement based on the understanding that true equality for women cannot be achieved under our current exploitative capitalist system.

Gender Oppression and the Crisis of Capitalism

The authors especially focus on the fundamental role of capitalism in maintaining gender oppression. They argue that capitalism is “the real source of crisis and misery” which constantly pursues unlimited profit while free-riding on nature, public goods, and the unwaged work primary shouldered by women that is necessary to tend to children and communities. To fight back against capitalism, the authors argue we must build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, internationalist feminist movement.

In discussing the central role of capitalism, the book draws out the persistent connection between violence against women and the growing capitalist crisis with its imposed austerity and cuts to public services. Since the 2008 economic crisis, the extreme magnitude of cuts to public programs, prevalence of low-wage jobs, and dismantling of the welfare state have disproportionately impacted women and, in some countries, led to a genuine throwing back of gender equality. An ever-increasing number of women workers in low-paid and part-time positions find themselves even more susceptible to harassment on the job, and a lack of labor protections further exacerbates the workplace violence

34 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 ing the Steubenville rape trial, the La Manada rape trial in the Spanish state, and the recent Belfast rape trial. As the authors point out, there is also a racial disparity in prosecution in which wealthy white men often are let go but working-class black men face convictions and harsher sentences. Similarly, many young women in universities have few protections against sexual violence and campus perpetrators rarely receive sanctions.

“Fixing” the sexist justice system will not put an end to violence against International Women’s Day protest in Madrid, Spain in March 2019. women, but it is still positive for working-class women to fight for experienced by women. stop-gap measures, including protection orders, that can provide In response to this growing precarity for workers and increased a measure of safety for women who have experienced sexual right-wing attacks on women’s rights, women across the globe and domestic violence. Along with these measures, many womin a number of countries have started to rise up against these en also seek to fight for justice to be served in the many horrifattacks. This International Women’s Day, over six million womic high profile rape cases in recent years, like those mentioned en in the Spanish State once again went on strike to demand an above. These fights for justice through the legal system are comend to sexual violence and inclusive sex education, among other pletely understandable and justifiable, but many women unfortudemands. We have also witnessed the immense international renately quickly come up against the insufficiency of the capitalist sponse to #metoo, massive green bandana protests in Argentina justice system. to fight for abortion rights, and the historic victory of the Repeal This starkly reveals the need to connect the fight against genreferendum in Ireland to legalize abortion. der violence to the need for a break from the sexist capitalist It seems an unfortunate oversight that the book only brings up system. Ultimately, justice for women will not be won in courtthe #metoo movement once in passing, given that the phenomerooms; it will be won by launching an all out fight that goes non has the potential to be channeled into larger actions, includbeyond reforming the legal system to fight for the “economic” ing in the workplace. So far, the #metoo movement has led to measures that will need to be implemented to fight back against significantly more women speaking out against harassment on gender-based violence. Winning affordable housing, decent paythe job, including a 13.6% rise in sexual harassment filings with ing jobs, universal healthcare, and tuition-free higher education the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission this past year. would of course be victories for working people generally, but We have also seen important examples of collective action in the they would also provide women with the economic freedom to workplace against sexual violence, including Google and Mcbe able to decide what they do with their bodies and their lives.

Donald’s workers who organized one-day strikes for harassment protections and 7,700 UNITE HERE union hospitality workers Social-Reproduction Theory across seven cities who successfully fought for and won harassThe book puts special attention on social-reproduction theory, ment protections. which they describe as the “people-making” needs of capitalism The book also brings up important questions related to the use in contrast to the “profit-making” needs. of the justice system in the fight against sexual violence. In their Social-reproduction encompasses those unpaid activities which thesis on fighting gender violence, they point toward a need to fall disproportionately to women and help sustain life outside of move away from what they name “carceral feminism” which the workplace, including raising children, caring for the family, seeks to fight back against gender-based violence through the and maintaining the community. Capitalism overwhelmingly restate justice system. It is true that we cannot depend on the capilies on outsourcing the burden of social-reproduction primarily talist justice system which has severe limitations in its ability to onto women through millions of unpaid hours of domestic labor. address the epidemic of violence against women. Few cases of This has led to a double or triple shift for many working-class sexual violence are ever brought to justice, and we commonly women who have to take care of their families while also workwitness “innocent” verdicts in high-profile rape cases, includ-

Book Review 35 ing one or two jobs. In contrast, as the authors point out, many wealthier women can cast the burden onto low-paid domestic workers.

While emphasizing the pivotal role that strikes should play in the movement, the book argues that strikes from this kind of unpaid labor can “make visible the indispensable role played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society.” Capitalism consistently undervalues and takes for granted the enormous amounts of social-reproductive domestic work often primarily done by women. However, withdrawing unpaid work, including care work within families, can only have a limited impact on those in power who offload this burden of care work onto women. Often, it is not even possible for women to halt the unpaid work they do within the family.

Strikes and the Role of Labor

These kinds of strikes where women withdraw housework would undoubtedly bring much-needed attention on a personal level to the work women do in families and communities, but the capitalist powers that benefit from women’s unpaid labor wouldn’t bat an eyelid. A struggle for demands like healthcare,

universal childcare, and a living wage - all demands that would have a meaningful impact on the social-reproductive work women do - will require tactics that can have substantial consequences for the bottom lines of the billionaire class.

We must mobilize the largest possible mass marches, demonstrations, and boycotts, but strikes from paid work can much more powerfully halt capitalism’s ability to function and concretely demonstrate the tremendous force of a united working class. While women-dominated fields like education, health care, retail, and hospitality should play a powerful role in building for strikes, the movement will also need to mobilize strikes amongst broader working class forces, including among working class men who would benefit tremendously from paid parental leave and universal childcare. The widest possible strike action as well as the full-participation of unpaid caretakers, mothers, and retirees, would apply the force needed to win impactful changes for working-class women and their families.

Just one example of the power of strike action to win the things that working class women need took place just a few years ago in Poland. In 2016, the Polish government attempted to push through a reactionary complete abortion ban, but the proposal was rejected after 140,000 women took to the streets in just a one-day strike action.

Strikes are clearly featured prominently in the book, but interestingly there is little discussion of the vital importance that labor unions can and should play in the fight for women’s and workers’ rights, including the fight for abortion rights. For years, a conservative labor leadership has focused on trying to minimize losses rather than being prepared to mobilize workers’ social power including through strikes to fight for bold demands. The development of the recent strike movements in the U.S., centered on the teachers’ revolt, has once again highlighted the central role these organizations should play in our struggles. Hundreds of thousands of teachers around the country have used walkouts and strike action to fight not only for higher wages but also for better teaching and learning conditions for students. Women council workers in Glasgow, Scotland also recently went on strike to win pay equality and were supported by male sanitation workers.

This strike wave has also extended to unions of healthcare workers, hospitality workers, and retail workers and has the potential to draw unorganized sectors of the economy into fighting labor unions. Workers who took part in the recent Google sit-in at the New York office reported talks of getting organized into a union.

Strategies for the Movement

Armed with an understanding of the fundamental role of capitalism in perpetuating gender oppression and violence, the central question is how to best fight back against this sexist system. The answer the authors give to this question is a call to unite all radical movements to build a “common anti-capitalist insurgency”. Our struggle must undeniably link struggles for the environment, for labor rights, against war and imperialism, and against all forms of oppression into a united working class movement to take on the menace of capitalism.

36 Socialist World Issue 1, 2019 The book, unfortunately, fails to adequately explain what kind of world this movement should fight for and who will fight for this world. While correctly rejecting corporate feminism and capitalism, there is no clear appeal to fight for a socialist society where the economy is taken into democratic public ownership by the working class. The authors ask, “Who will guide the process of societal transformation, in whose interest and to what end?” In response to this question, the authors seem to point toward “feminism of the 99%”, while united alongside other forces, being the central guiding force in fighting capitalism. The women’s movement should and will undoubtedly play a significant role in the wider working class struggles to come, but it is the entire force of the united working class of all genders which must join together to fight against the system that oppresses us. To win a socialist world, we must harness the full weight of the working class as the most powerful force to change society through its enormous ability to bring the wheels of the economy to a complete halt.

The broader working class movement, which absolutely needs

to encompass the demands of oppressed sections of the working class, needs to form democratic organizations of working people independent of the big business interests of establishment political parties. The manifesto unfortunately doesn’t point out the fundamental need to build an independent working-class party based on the support of the trade unions and other organizations of the working class. We need to be absolutely clear that the Democratic Party cannot be an effective vehicle to fight for our demands because it is tied by a million threads to big business and the corporate establishment .

Despite its limitations, Feminism for the 99% is a welcome alternative to the corporate feminism espoused by Sandberg’s Lean In. While it does not draw out the kind of socialist alternative needed to defeat sexism and capitalism, its call to build a united working class struggle against capitalism will help introduce a class-based socialist feminism to many of its readers. J

Join Socialist Alternative Socialist Alternative is a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15 an hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

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