People Before Profit blog

More Socialism, Less War

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:19:00 +0000

With gasoline prices edging towards $4 per gallon and a new military excursion underway in Libya, President Obama took time last week to outline his administration's goal to radically reduce U.S. dependence on oil and fossil fuels.

In a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, March 30th, President Obama said, "I’m setting a new goal: one that is reasonable, achievable, and necessary. When I was elected to this office, America imported 11 million barrels of oil a day. By a little more than a decade from now, we will have cut that by one-third."

In a move that will likely irk environmentalist sections of his coalition, the president called for increased production of oil, including offshore exploration "as long as it's safe and responsible." The president's plan emphasizes the need to implement safety features to prevent recurrence of the BP oil spill.

He pointed out, however, that the U.S. can neither depend on foreign sources of oil nor will it ever produce enough on its own to cover its needs. Therefore, renewable alternatives are an absolute necessity.

He urged rapid development of sources of natural gas, renewable biofuels (including cellulosic ethanol), as well as the infrastructure to ensure that consumers can access these fuel alternatives.

He urged higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and buses, investments in high-speed rail and mass transit, making breakthroughs in the production of electric vehicles.

In addition to transportation needs, the president called for incentives for building upgrades to reduce home-heating costs.

The president wants to increase the development of clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy. He said that within 25 years he wants to see 80 percent of U.S. electricity come from clean energy sources, including wind, solar, "clean coal," and nuclear power.

This latter point will likely be least convincing for most Americans since earthquakes in Japan exposed that country and the world to radiation, but the resident emphasized the need to ensure that nuclear energy is safe and secure, promising a comprehensive review of the country's nuclear energy facilities which create some 20 percent of the electricity used here.

In short, the president called basically for extending the unprecedented new investments implemented under the recovery act.

In support of President Obama's speech, senior administration officials joined with several mayors from across the country on a press conference call Wednesday, March 30, to express support for his stated goals.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told reporters that the administration understands how high gas prices are hurting working families. The solution to high gas prices lies in the U.S. becoming less dependent on oil, which seems to be tied to fluctuations in foreign policy concerns in the parts of the world where most of the oil is produced, he said.

But LaHood sugar-coated the issue. "The President wanted to talk about the future rather than the past," he said, preferring to ignore the the U.S. role in destabilizing the Middle East in the past decade (at least) which result in the present upward pressure on gas prices. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the national average for a gallon of gasoline stood at about $1.30 per gallon.

Ironically, the Bush administration had erroneously justified the invasion by claiming it would reduce gasoline prices by expanding the supply of petroleum products.

LaHood emphasized the unprecedented efforts on the part of the administration to invest in, research, promote, and develop alternatives to oil. "We're not just going to talk about the problems," he said. "The administration has a plan; it's all hands on deck."

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa optimistically added, "For forty years, presidents have talked about moving away from a reliance on foreign oil. President Obama actually put a plan forward to get us away from an addiction to that foreign oil."

A Public Option in Energy?

One feature of President Obama's plan, depending on joint action by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, calls for increased subsidies to oil companies for exploration, drilling, and production.

The problem, however, is that oil companies are among the most profitable, least taxed industries in our country. They have a special interest in keeping a tight lid on the oil supply in order to drive up prices and maximize profits, the essential logic of private corporate-think.

Indeed, they thrive on the carefully managed political instability promoted by U.S. interventions (both official and corporate) in oil-rich Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. If in fact the airstrikes on Libya are not about acquiring control over that country's oil reserves (foreign companies control huge concessions already), then record oil and gas prices in the push for record profits certainly are a boon to Big Oil.

On the whole, however, the president's multifaceted plan makes logical sense. Energy needs are growing, and, because of that, gasoline and other fossil fuels won't be going away soon. A complete transition to clean energy alternatives is still years in the making – though political and corporate roadblocks to that transition put in place by oil companies and the right-wing politicians they control helped ensure it would be delayed both to the detriment of the environment and to economic diversity and job creation in the U.S.

(This reality is part of "the past" Sec. LaHood says the administration is unwilling to continue to litigate.)

An essential element left undiscussed by the president in his speech or by his supporters is how to pay for new oil company subsidies and new investments in clean energy alternatives, mass transit, and energy efficient infrastructure.

In a joint response to the president's speech, the Sierra Club, the Center for American Progress, and the League of Conservation Voters offered their solutions to the financial problem. They urged elimination of tax loopholes and handouts to oil companies in order to pay for needed investments in clean energy alternatives and mass transit.

For its part, when the Obama administration entered the White House with a significant majority of congressional allies, it favored a plan to pay for investments in clean energy alternatives by creating an EPA-administered marketplace for carbon emissions. Essentially, the goal was to create a kind of public option in the energy sector. Remember that?

According to various estimates, the plan would have generated tens of billions of dollars annually both for new technology to control and eventually eliminate carbon emissions and to shift the balance of economic forces away from oil and dirty coal.

While similar plans had held bipartisan support that included Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., right-wing, racially motivated bitterness at Obama's victory saw the Republican's unanimous decision to oppose any and every legislative initiative offered by the president. Consequently, the plan failed to achieve the 60-vote majority in the Senate needed to satisfy that body's undemocratic and arcane rules.

Today, due to this balance of forces, we can expect little if any action on this agenda.

Conservative-inspired political gridlock – aimed at protecting oil company profits and hegemony in the energy sector – isn't going away any time soon and will require an extra effort by the labor and people's upsurge begun in Wisconsin to end Republican control of the House and rebuild the Democratic majority in the Senate. The focus in the next two years will have to be on strengthening the coalition that supported Obama in 2008. This includes electing Democrats whose loyalties are more closely tied to the labor and environmental movements – the "blue-green" coalition. Indeed, pressure from this core of voters and activists will be important to transform U.S. foreign policy from one that spends U.S. treasury and lives to prop up major oil companies to one that focuses primarily on the needs of working families.

Unfortunately, the president's decision to escalate U.S. intervention in Libya, while conducting a war in Afghanistan and an ongoing military operation in Iraq, will likely dampen enthusiasm among his most ardent supporters.

It is apparent that the administration is under the sway of the usually mistaken notion that U.S. military power is so great that intervention will be swift, easy and cheap – not to mention just. In reality, military intervention is a slippery slope – recall Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It will be so as long as major multinational oil companies are more loyal to profits and dollars than to the American people. Already U.S. involvement appears to have no end in sight.

A public option in energy, like in the health insurance market, is needed to control spiraling costs of gas and oil, to rein in the disastrous logic of profit maximization, and to de-link military intervention from the strictly private concerns of major oil companies. The intensified broad unity of the peace majority and the labor movement in action to stop Republican Party's antics domestically, its control of the House of Representatives, and its disastrous influence in the media will turn this tide.

Photo by brownpau/cc by 2.0/Flickr

From Crisis to Socialism

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:18:00 +0000

Editor's note: The following is a slightly edited version of a speech delivered at the Salt of the Earth Labor College in Tucson, Arizona, March 12, 2011.

We live in trying and changing times. No one is sure what tomorrow will bring. The U.S. is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Everywhere we look we run into crises.

There is a jobs crisis; despite some improvement in the official unemployment rate, nearly 25 million workers are unemployed or underemployed. And in the communities of color the impact is especially severe.

Then there is the crisis in public education. The efforts to undermine this democratic treasure that is admittedly in crisis, are as they are as insidious as they are massive.

Housing is in crisis too. Millions have lost their home thanks to Wall Street Bankers, or should I say gangsters, and many more are sitting in homes that are underwater. Meanwhile public housing is being defunded and cooperative housing privatized.

Then there is the equality crisis. No one with any sense would argue that we are in a post civil rights, post gender era. A quick glance at the impact of a stagnating economy gives plenty of evidence to the lie of that claim. And all this takes place in the context of a fierce counteroffensive in ideological and practical terms against people of color and women.

There is also a food crisis. In the South Bronx, for example, more than one in three residents could not afford enough food, while in Central Brooklyn, 30.8 percent faced food hardship. Moreover, every congressional district in the city faced significant food hardships. Similar data could be cited for other urban areas.

To this we can add the energy crisis that is sending the cost of fuel skyrocketing, thereby leaving working families with less for other essentials.

Then there is the poverty crisis. Nearly 50 million people live below the poverty line in the wealthiest country in the world. Nothing but scandalous, and the trend line is upward.

And let’s not forget the environmental crisis that worsens with each passing day and, unless checked, could cause a civilizational crisis.

Then there is the infrastructure crisis that is further aggravated by the refusal of congressional Republicans to support a modest bill to repair our crumbling country.

Finally, democracy is in crisis. Coursing through the veins of our democracy is a flood of corporate money, all of which is designed to fatten the pockets of the wealthiest families and corporations and frustrate the people’s will.

At the same time – and it’s the other side of this undemocratic coin – the corporate class is attempting to not simply weaken, but destroy the labor movement which has been the most consistent force against right wing domination and corporate policies.

On a world scale the crises signs are even of a more pronounced character. To cite a few statistics:

    * 2.5 billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, survive on less than two dollars a day.
    * Over 850 million people are chronically undernourished and three times that many frequently go hungry.
    * Every hour of every day, 180 children die of hunger and 1200 die of preventable diseases.
    * Over half a million women die every year from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. 99% of them are in the global south.
    * Over a billion people live in vast urban slums, without sanitation, sufficient living space, or durable housing.
    * 1.3 billion people have no safe water. 3 million die of water-related diseases every year.

To make matters worse, climate change will lock the world’s poorest countries and their poorest citizens in a downward spiral.

UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervi’s writes:

… climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs.

The UN Human Development Report cites some immediate consequences of climate change in the global south:

    * The breakdown of agricultural systems as a result of increased exposure to drought, rising temperatures, and more erratic rainfall, leaving up to 600 million more people facing malnutrition.
    * An additional 1.8 billion people facing water stress by 2080, with large areas of South Asia and northern China facing a grave ecological crisis as a result of glacial retreat and changed rainfall patterns.
    * Displacement through flooding and tropical storm activity of up to 332 million people in coastal and low-lying areas. Over 70 million Bangladeshis, 22 million Vietnamese, and six million Egyptians could be affected by global warming-related flooding.
    * Expanding health risks, including up to 400 million more people facing the risk of malaria.

To these we can add that at least 100 million people will join the permanently hungry this year as food prices spike.

What can we conclude from all this?

One conclusion is that capitalism isn’t working for working people; its get up and go has got up and went; it’s exhausted its potential; it’s a threat to human civilization, as we know it.

The other is that socialism has acquired a new urgency. A socialist future is not simply a good idea, but rather a necessary requirement for humankind’s future.

Since its earliest days, capitalism has inflicted incalculable harm (more than any other social system) on the inhabitants of the earth. Primitive accumulation, world wars, slavery, various forms of labor servitude, ruthless wage exploitation, territorial annexation, colonialism, racist, gender, and other forms of oppression – all this and more occupy prominent places in the historical mapping of U.S. and world capitalism since its emergence roughly four centuries ago.

And yet as ghastly a history as this is, the future could be even worse for a simple reason: capitalism’s destructive power, driven by its inner logic to pump surplus value out of its primary producers and dominate global space, has grown exponentially. Unless restrained and eventually dismantled, this power is capable of doing irreversible damage (nuclear war, global warming, ecological collapse) to life in all its forms.

But – and this is a big “but” – the replacement of capitalism by a society that no longer is the slave of the logic of profit making (or should I say taking) isn’t inevitable within the time frame necessary to avert the global dangers facing humankind.

Recently, Hugo Chavez had this to say:

I believe it is time that we take up with courage and clarity a political, social, collective and ideological offensive across the world – a real offensive that permits us to move progressively, over the next years, the next decades, leaving behind the perverse, destructive, destroyer, capitalist model and go forward in constructing the socialist model to avoid barbarism and beyond that the annihilation of life on this planet.

I believe this idea has a strong connection with reality. I don’t think we have much time. Fidel Castro said in one of his speeches I read not so long ago, “tomorrow could be too late, let’s do now what we need to do.” I don’t believe that this is an exaggeration. The environment is suffering damage that could be irreversible — global warming, the greenhouse effect, the melting of the polar ice caps, the rising sea level, hurricanes — with terrible social occurrences that will shake life on this planet.

So the situation is dire, but what do we so about it? What will it take to leave capitalism behind, to consign it to the history books?

It will take many things, but the main thing is a broad, united people’s movement possessing a fighting spirit, hope, and vision, much like we see in Wisconsin today, but nationwide and on a far bigger scale.

The journey to socialism – and it is a journey – will also take a laser like focus on issues that are agitating tens of millions, and none loom larger than the economic rights and livelihood of our multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class.

It is hard to imagine how the necessary forces can be assembled and unified at each stage of struggle including the socialist stage if the working class and peoples movements are not fully engaged in such struggles.

It will take a big tent strategy as well. Such a strategy will welcome allies, combine radical and gradual change, avoid unnecessary fights, and operate on the assumption that “only a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority” has the power capacity to turn socialism from a dream to a reality.

It will also attach special importance to the struggle for racial and gender equality. Both are of strategic importance insofar as working class and people’s unity is concerned. No advance in radical and socialist terms is possible without a sustained struggle against racism and sexism.

Anyone who devalues the struggle for racial and gender equality limits the sweep of any victory at best; at worst, it provides an opening to the most backward sections of our ruling class and their constituency to gain ascendancy ideologically and politically.

A movement for socialism will place a high priority on independent political action and the formation of a party independent of corporate capital too. Currently, the main social forces and organizations of political independence work within the Democratic Party.

No less importantly, any transition to socialism will require a far bigger left and Communist Party. We don’t yet cause a “big wave in the big pond.” But for socialism to become a reality, our ripple has to turn into a wave that has the strength to lead the people to a better future.

Finally, it will take a modern vision of socialism that is at once deeply democratic, economically just, egalitarian, ecological, and peaceful as well as organically embedded in the American experience.

Top photo: Workers rallied for the 30th day in Indianapolis to protest attacks on their right to collectively bargain. (Wilson E. Allen)

You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Believe in From Each According to Their Abilities, to Each According to Their Needs

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:17:00 +0000

Most people, even capitalists, believe in a fair distribution of wealth, but you have probably noticed that capitalists and workers understand fairness in different and often contradictory ways. This is not surprising to Marxists because they use class analysis as their basic method for understanding society. On the basis of that method Marxists recognize that what people mean by fairness has a lot to do with their class position in society and the degree to which they are influenced by the class-based theories, intellectual fashions, and prejudices that dominate the societies in which they live. For example, slave owners in societies with slavery-based economies often try to justify the status quo by claiming that slave laborers are incapable of personal autonomy and self-government and therefore slavery is fair and beneficial both to slaves and society as a whole. Likewise, capitalists promote ideas about the absolute necessity of private property, the profit motive, and wage labor for building a modern civilization, ideas which in their minds justify the existence of the capitalist class, capitalist domination of the working class, and a lopsided distribution of wealth that creates a fabulously rich minority and an impoverished working-class majority.

What do Marxists mean by a fair distribution of wealth? In a letter written by Karl Marx in 1875, a letter that is known today as the Critique of the Gotha Program, he formulated a famous principle about how wealth would be produced and distributed in the highest phase of communist society. That principle is:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. [1]

The first part of the principle—from each according to their ability—means that all members of society will have the right and the actual opportunity to develop their talents and abilities to the utmost and to use their talents to produce goods and services for the benefit of society. In other words, everyone will have an education that allows them to realize their highest potential and a job in which they will have the opportunity to give their best efforts back to society. There will be no uneducated or poorly educated people, no unemployment, and no one will be forced by economic necessity to work in fields unsuited to their abilities. The second part of the principle—to each according to their needs—explains what citizens will receive from society in return for their labor, and that will be nothing less than complete satisfaction of their material and cultural needs.

Marx also said something very interesting about the implications of a fair distribution of wealth in a communist society. He said that the principle “to each according to their needs” actually entails that under communism any given individual will have the right to receive a quantity of goods and services that is unequal rather than equal to the quantity received by others. This will sound counterintuitive, or even wrong, to many readers, because most of us have been taught to believe that equal rights are the highest form of fairness, but Marx shows that this is not the case with regard to the distribution of wealth.

Here’s why: Imagine two women living in a communist society. One woman is a bus driver with five children and the other is a bus driver with one child. Let’s ask ourselves a question: According to the principle “to each according to their needs” which woman should have the right to receive more goods and services (food, housing, clothing, medical and childcare services, etc.) in compensation for her labor?

You might be tempted to answer that both women should receive the same quantity because both are bus drivers, and it’s only fair that everyone be treated equally. That would be the correct answer if this society was being run on the principle “to each according to their work,” which would mean that all bus drivers would receive the same pay. But that is not what Marx had in mind for the highest stage of communism. The problem is that if each woman were treated equally, the driver with one child would receive more relative to her needs than the driver with five children—the former would be objectively richer and the latter poorer. This shows that an equal distribution of wealth can actually result in a highly undesirable kind of inequality—a division between rich and poor. This happens because principles such as “to each according to their work” or “equal pay for equal work” fail to take individual needs into account.

The communist principle “to each according to their needs” overcomes this defect by treating individuals differently, but in a positive way that considers and meets their differing needs, rather than a negative way that ignores individual needs. Under communism the unique needs of every individual would be respected. Thus the correct answer is that the woman with five children should receive more because her needs are greater.

This should put to rest the common misconception that communism means everyone will be treated exactly the same, as in the oppressive uniformity of the anthill or the barracks. Communism actually means the opposite: out of respect for the individual, everyone will be treated differently, but in a way that satisfies the individual’s needs. This does not mean that communism has no place for equality. Communism has the deepest respect for equality, but it must be equality of the right kind. The right to an unequal share in the consumption of goods and services actually results in a higher form of equality—all people will be equal in the sense that the needs of all will be met.

The communist principle holds true even if we compare our bus driver with her five children to a neurosurgeon with two children. Shouldn’t a neurosurgeon be entitled to more than a mere bus driver? Not at all, since the prejudice against “lower” forms of labor is one that communist society will have overcome. Under communism it won’t matter what kind of work you do. What will matter is that you contribute to the best of your ability. In return, society will meet your needs. If the needs of an individual who happens to be a bus driver are greater than those of a neurosurgeon, then the bus driver will receive more. But the needs of both will be completely and ungrudgingly fulfilled. Who would have a problem with that except for people who want more than they need? And there’s a name for that condition; it’s called greed.

There’s something else we must keep in mind in order to understand the Critique of the Gotha Program correctly. Marx did not believe that society could advance directly from the overthrow of capitalism to the highest stage of communism. In the following quotation, he outlines the conditions that must be met before that stage can be achieved.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour ... has vanished ... after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx held that between capitalism and the higher phase of communism, there was a transitional or lower phase of communism “which is still stamped with the birth marks of the old [capitalist] society from which it emerges.” [2] In this phase, society has to work hard to develop the economic, intellectual, and cultural forces necessary to make the transition to the higher phase of communism. Society in this lower phase will be classless in the sense that there will be no private property in the means of production, no class division between capitalists and workers, and no capitalists to steal surplus value from workers. But due to the relatively underdeveloped state of the productive forces and the corresponding limits on productive capacity, distribution will be made according to work performed rather than according to need. There will also be a division of labor in which more highly skilled workers like neurosurgeons receive more than lower skilled workers such as bus drivers. And there will be deductions from workers’ individual right to consume in order to cover depreciation on existing means of production, maintain funds for developing new means of production, and to provide various forms of social insurance.

Despite all its advances over capitalism, compensation according to work rather than need will foster divisions between those who receive more than they need and those who receive less. This limitation cannot be overcome until society has ripened to such an advanced stage of material prosperity as well as moral and intellectual enlightenment that it is ready to bloom into full communism.

The lower phase of communism sounds backward and uninspiring compared to the higher phase, but we must not forget that the lower phase will have many positive characteristics. There will be a working-class government that labors constantly to develop the productive forces, improve living standards, and defend society’s gains from capitalist restoration. The means of production will be owned in common, and workers will be paid for the real value of the work they do. There will be equal pay for equal work, and no capitalists to steal social wealth from workers. Any deductions from the pool of social wealth will be returned to the workers in the form of social services like health care, education, and recreational and cultural facilities. Although inferior to the principle “to each according to their needs,” the lower stage principle “to each according to their work” is far superior to the capitalist principle of “fairness,” the real content of which is:

From each according to the capitalists’ needs, to each according to the capitalists’ greed.

And if there is any doubt that capitalism has failed miserably at meeting human needs, let’s take a moment to consider to the state of humankind in this capitalist world. Out of a world population of about 6.9 billion, there are currently 2.6 billion people who must try to live on less than $2 per day [3]; the average adult has only about six years of formal schooling [4]; at least 621 million are unemployed [5]; and about 925 million people suffer from hunger. [6] Is this a world that is developing people’s abilities and meeting human needs?

We can do better. You might be a Marxist if you seek a world in which the principle

“From each according to the capitalist’s need, to each according to the capitalist’s greed” has been abolished, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their work” is what we are fighting for, and “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” is our inspiration and ultimate destination.

Notes:

1 Marx was not one to use gender inclusive language, a practice that was virtually unknown in the nineteenth century when Marx was writing. Despite Marx’s use of the masculine pronoun “his” it is clear that he intended the principle to apply to both women and men.

2 In State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin called the lower phase “socialism” and the higher phase “communism.”

3 UN Human Development Report 2010

4 http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_ave_yea_of_sch_of_adu-education-average-years-schooling-adults

5 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html

6 http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

Photo by Mohd Nor Azmil Abdul Rahman/cc by 2.0/Flickr

What Do Our Hemisphere's “Masses in Motion” Really Want?

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:15:00 +0000

In his recent Latin American tour, President Barack Obama made a speech in Santiago, Chile. Standing next to Chile's right-wing President, Sebastian Piñera, the U.S. president congratulated the Chilean people on having escaped from their long period under the Pinochet dictatorship, hailing former presidents Alwyn, Frei and Lagos for their role in democratizing Chile, but inexplicably omitting Piñera's immediate predecessor, Socialist Michelle Bachelet, while tactfully refraining from mentioning the fact that Piñera had been a Pinochet supporter earlier on.

Obama harked back to John F. Kennedy's “Alliance for Progress,” perhaps intending to suggest it a possible model for future cooperation between the United States and Latin American countries. He pooh-poohed the idea that the United States is responsible for “all Latin America's problems” (which nobody asserts) but at the same time praised the right-wing regimes of Chile, Colombia and Mexico for their democratic credentials, while chiding Cuba in the time-honored fashion of all U.S. presidents. More problematically he praised, and took credit for, the “return to the rule of law” in Honduras after the June 28, 2009 coup (just as Honduran police were violently repressing a demonstration by teachers), and the just finished run-off elections in Haiti (in which the most popular party in Haiti, former President Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas was, at US insistence, not allowed to run).

In all of these situations, there are millions of people in the countries involved who would not characterize U.S. intervention as being constructive and in the interests of democracy. In the case of Chile, the oppression of the Mapuche indigenous people, which was lifted under the government of Socialist President Salvador Allende and then sharply increased under the Pinochet dictatorship, continues under Piñera, in spite of Obama's statement that Chile's example proves that “Chile shows that we need not be divided by race or religion or ethnic conflict”! He also said that there are no more border conflicts, ignoring Bolivia's long claim to access to the Pacific Ocean of which it was deprived in the War of the Pacific in the 19th Century.

Latin America, like the Middle East, is an area of “masses in motion.” Since the election of leftist Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in 1999, left or left-center governments have come to power in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, and Honduras (later overthrown by a right-wing coup). Except for Cuba, which has had a revolutionary socialist government since 1959, these governments have been of heterogeneous political composition, including nationalists, populists, social democrats and others, in almost all cases supported by the local communist and left-socialist parties where such exist. They have their own difficulties, internal conflicts and problems.

But the list of leftists in power tells only part of the story. In almost every major nation in the hemisphere, including US controlled Puerto Rico, there are large scale movements of workers, peasants or small farmers, youth and students and others who are challenging, simultaneously, their own ruling classes, international monopoly capital, and imperialism. And while it is hyperbole to claim that all these unsatisfied people blame the United States for all their problems, it is also true that U.S. foreign and especially international trade policy generally stands in the way of their aspirations.

What do these “masses in motion” from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego want? The following set of goals characterize the aspirations of the broad left, including left and left center governments in power, in Latin America and the Caribbean:

First, they want to be able to determine their own destinies free of foreign interference and domination. Since virtually the only foreign power that has been promoting such domination in recent years is the United States, this means that they want freedom from U.S. interference. However, there are also struggles against interference from other wealthy, developed countries. In Haiti, French and Canadian interference is very visible and problematic. Canadian and European mining corporations are the foci of militant campaigns by indigenous farmers, workers and environmentalists in some Central American countries.
They want to be “out from under” U.S. economic, political and military hegemony. They are angered and embarrassed by situations in which their economies are far more tightly linked to the U.S. economy than to each other, as for instance is the case of Mexico 80.2 percent of whose exports go to the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
They want to be rid of the Washington Consensus, neo-liberal policies imposed by the wealthy countries and by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They do not want to be forced to sell their drinking water systems to rapacious outside corporations as a condition of getting development loans. They do not want their peoples' labor and their natural resources to be subjected to the control of abusive foreign corporations. They do not want international lenders to tell them that to get trade and aid; they must charge tuition for their children to attend elementary school.
They want to become modern, industrial countries but on their own terms, combining outside investment with state enterprises and national capital to get the optimal mix for a humane form of development. They want to cooperate with each other, and with other large states such as the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, China), in development and trade projects, without US interference. They want to develop regional cooperative blocs such as ALBA, UNASUR and MERCOSUR as alternatives to domination by the US under schemes like the moribund Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and by the IMF and World Bank, and do not think that the United States has the right to interfere with this.
They want development without the trashing of their environment, without driving their small farmers off the land and without crushing their indigenous populations. They do not want their people abused by Canadian, U.S. and other mining, oil and other extractive corporations.
They want fair trade, not foreign aid. They do not want handouts; they want to be able to sell their products on international markets for a fair price, which does not mean the lowest price as dictated by the World Trade Organization. They want an end to dumping, in the name of free trade, on the part of the United States and other wealthy capitalist countries, such as happens with US grains in Mexico and U.S. rice in Haiti.
They do not want to be threatened by U.S. military forces such as the Southern Command, the Fourth Fleet, U.S. bases in Colombia and proposed bases in Panama, and other sources of possible military interference.
They want the United States to stop harassing Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, and especially for the U.S. blockade of Cuba to end.
They want to be treated as equals, with respect and not as “the lesser breeds without the law” or “banana republics.” This extends to their citizens sojourning in the United States, who are often victims of racist and repressive treatment. To the extent that emigration, mostly to the United States, continues, they want it to be on the basis of mutual agreements, not Uncle Sam's “my way or the highway”: either you come as an undocumented immigrant with no rights, or as a “guest worker” with practically none. They want the United States to recognize the contribution that Latin American and Caribbean immigrants make to the U.S. economy, and for these people to be given legal status here.

These are the goals that one finds among the left political parties, among the labor unions, the peasant or farmers' associations, associations representing indigenous people and people of African origin, women's associations, progressive clergy and laity, gay-lesbian associations and youth and student groups, in all of Latin America and the Caribbean – including, by the way, Puerto Rico. These goals have very broad support, in spite of differences in emphasis and other internal debates. The annual Sao Paolo Forums, this year to be held in Managua, Nicaragua, are one of the many places in which these ideas are presented and means of their achievement are thrashed out.

There are strong right-wing tendencies also. These are fomented by the military officer caste, the landowners, the upper bourgeoisie, the reactionary elements of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, some Evangelical Protestants, and corporate owned media. Also sometimes aligning with the right are those whose livelihood depends on foreign corporations, the tourist industry and other sectors which see a weakening of foreign influence as a threat rather than a patriotic triumph or a victory for national sovereignty. So everywhere except in Cuba the effort to “get out from under” U.S. hegemony is challenged by groups which often shade off into out and out fascism. Right wing violence is promoted as a solution to high crime rates which stem from poverty and unemployment, and also from the international narcotics trade. Many such right wing groups see the local U.S. embassy as the natural place to go when they need political support or financing. This has been amply revealed by the recent wave of Wikileaks revelations. Unfortunately, the doors of U.S. embassies are all too often open to various kinds of reactionary schemers.

If the peoples of Latin America can overcome both their own local reactionaries and U.S. and other outside pressure, they hope to be able to sharply raise their living standards. This would be good for workers in the United States because it would strike a blow at the “divide and conquer” game whereby workers' wages in the U.S. are depressed by the threat and reality of outsourcing to lower-wage countries. It would also reduce the need for large numbers of pull up stakes and head north to find work.

Can these goals be achieved? I think yes, though not without struggle, difficulties and setbacks. One of the biggest difficulties will be to reconcile the need of poor farmers for better prices for their crops with the need of the urban poor for affordable food. Another will be to square the need for overall development with the demands of indigenous people to control their own forest and mountain natural resources. Great creativity and flexibility will be needed to deal with such issues. Outside interference, based on agendas alien to the interests of the great majority of the region's peoples, is not helpful.

Although the workers and masses of the Latin American and Caribbean countries have to be the main actors in this struggle, progressives in the United States can help by opposing U.S. policies of interference with the choices our neighbors make. The worst conspiracies against the Latin American “masses in motion” come out of the nexus of the Republican Party with various right and ultra-right groups from other countries in the hemisphere. This became evident at the beginning of the Honduras crisis, starting with the June 2009 coup d'état. It became clear that the leadership of the congressional Republican Party was in daily communication with the coup plotters, and even managed to get the US Air Force to fly them down to Tegucigalpa for meetings with Roberto Micheletti and his co-conspirators. The same thing happened with last year's attempt to overthrow President Rafael Correa of Ecuador. These interactions are now supercharged by the Republican control of the House of Representatives and especially the fact that the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fl., a fanatical anti-communist with an obsessive focus on overturning all progress in Cuba and other Latin American countries. Should the Republicans capture the Senate and/or the White House in 2012, the situation is likely to get much worse.

However, experience shows that we obviously can not assume that constructive policies will come from the present administration either, especially without pressure from progressives in this country. There is a strong anti-Cuba lobby within the Democratic Party as well, and it makes its influence felt whenever the Cuba issue arises. We have to stay mobilized and keep the pressure on.

Photo: This mural celebrates the struggles of Bolivia's indigenous people for liberation. (obbino/cc by 2.0/Flickr)

How Stalin Distorted Marxism

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:45:00 +0000

On May Day 1932, the Communist Party USA released "Toward Soviet America," penned by William Z. Foster who was at that time the Communist candidate for president of the U.S.

This book presented the program and policies of the CPUSA and was in line with the political perspective of the world communist movement under the leadership of Stalin, who had unseated Bukharin from the leadership of the Communist International not long before this period. Foster's book contained the policy and perspective that the late Gus Hall, former chair of the Communist Party USA, would later refer to as "the greatest mistake we ever made."

In "Toward Soviet America," Foster asserts, "The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism…. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism…. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism." Foster goes on, "Developing Fascism in the United States has a main foundation in the leadership of the American Federation of Labor." Later, Foster quotes Stalin, "Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy" (177-178, 191).

This equation of social democracy with fascism helped bring about the horrible defeat of the working class in Germany and only after this defeat was Bukharin's policy of the peoples front against fascism adopted and presented by Dimitrov in the form we recognize today as the center-left alliance against the ultra right. (This I Cannot Forget, Larina pp. 11-37)

Stalin deviated from Lenin's policies in two clear ways that Bukharin had defended. One way was the "market socialist" approach of the "New Economic Policy" and the other way was the path of broad peoples unity against imperialism, fascism and finance capital that can be found in Lenin's "Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder."

Stalin's approach was one of extreme economic centralization and political sectarianism as he and Trotsky carried out a "race" to prove who was the "most revolutionary." So much attention has been paid to the Trotsky-Stalin conflict that Bukharin and his contemporary Gramsci have often been ignored when they, from the historical record, are the real "inheritors" of Lenin's Marxism. (Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, Fiori, Giuseppe pp.144-145.)

Foster (and Stalin, who approved of Foster's book at that time) completely misjudged the upcoming New Deal era. He writes, "the policies of the Progressives, although dressed up in radical phraseology, are in practice indistinguishable from those of the ultra reactionaries: sufficient proof of this being the enthusiastic support given to the candidacy of … Roosevelt, Progressive Mogul, in the most Bourbon sections of the South. Progressivism is a grave danger to the working class."

The only "justification" for this viewpoint is "competition with the Trotskyists" to show who was the "most" revolutionary. (The Trotskyists were saying almost identical things at the same time.)

For his part, Bukharin described what really happening. When Bukharin was falsely tried and executed by Stalin and his government a few years from this date it had become clear that he was probably killed because he was a serious and popular rival to Stalin for leadership especially because he was so obviously right about so many of the issues that Stalin had been so clearly wrong about. There stood a clear alternative voice to Stalin and Trotsky and that is the man Lenin called, "the favorite of the Party" – Bukharin. He was the real author of the winning political perspective of World War 2, "the peoples front against fascism," was falsely accused of treason and killed. ("THIS I CANNOT FORGET" Larina, Anna pp.11-33.)

Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin all had one error in common. They each, after Lenin's death, contributed to what Lenin had expressly asked they not do and that was build a cult of personality around Lenin. Lenin, who called himself a "consistent marxist," was entombed against his last wishes and was made the "co-founder" with the new term "marxist-leninist." This became the beginning of the process of "sanctifying" communist leadership and robbing communist's of the brilliant example of Lenin who used the foundation and tools discovered by Marx to deeply and painstakingly examine actual current reality by gathering "truth from facts" rather than truth by the leaders' pronouncements. "We do not regard Marx's theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. We think that an independent elaboration of Marx's theory is especially essential…; for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in particular, … are applied differently." (Lenin CW VOL. 4, PP.210-214.)

War and crimes

From the siege of Moscow to the end of World War Two, Stalin was one of the greatest military leaders in history. Being a master of the art of war does not make someone a great Marxist. Stalin's Marxism was filled with disastrous judgments. His errors rise far past the level of "mistakes." Some of his political acts rise to the level of crimes against humanity. Marxism demands ruthless honesty about all of this. Only on this foundation can 21st century Communism be built.

One of the great achievements of Marxism is reality-based dialectics, understanding contradictory phenomena in real events, people and processes. Stalin, the military leader who emerged as the Nazi horde entered the outskirts of Moscow, did more than any other single person to destroy the Fascist war machine and bring about the total defeat of Hitler. One of Stalin's Trotskyist opponents, Issac Deutscher, wrote, "(Stalin) encouraged the non-political general, devoted to his job.... He brushed aside all sterile pretensions of seniority and paid attention only to performance in battle…. The regeneration of the army, of its morale, and of its commanding staff was one of Russia's most remarkable achievements for which credit was due to Stalin" (Stalin, A Political Biography, Deutscher pp.494-497).

This same leader who did so much to defeat Hitler, pushed a political line on the communist movement, especially the German Communist Party, the largest Communist Party in the world at that time outside the Soviet Union, that directly led to the Nazi conquest of power. There is no plausible excuse that can exonerate Stalin from the utterly disastrous line he ruthlessly enforced on the Communist International that the Social Democrats were as dangerous or even more dangerous than the fascists. On page 174 of the CPUSA's platform for the 1932 election, William Z. Foster explained Stalin's basic idea that was so disastrous to the workers movement in Germany, "One of the basic features of this trend of world capitalism towards Fascism is the gradual fascisization of the conservative trade unions and Socialist parties" (Toward Soviet America, Foster pp. 174). This sectarian concept made it impossible for the German communists to lead the working class of Germany to a united front against Hitler.

The Social Democratic Party and the German communists together outnumbered the Nazi's for a long time. In the last election free of mass Nazi terror, the July 1932 election, their votes combined almost directly equaled the Nazi vote. The combined "Working Class Left" polled 36.2 percent of the vote and the Nazi vote was 37.4 percent. "Virtually all serious analysts agree that the overwhelming majority of Nazi electoral support came from Protestant lower middle class people who previously had voted for the bourgeois parties, or had not voted at all… the bourgeois parties net loss was 31.2 percentage points ... the Marxist parties picked up voters" (German Social Democracy 1918-1933, Richard Hunt pp. 117-119). United, the German working class would have had a real fighting chance to beat the Nazis with strikes, mass protest, and armed struggle if necessary. Divided, there was no chance at all.

Some supporters of Stalin down through the decades since this horrible moment in world history want to blame the Social Democrats alone for the lack of unity of the German working class but this is just "spin" when the self-proclaimed vanguard party of the German workers, following the line of the Communist International, directly controlled by Stalin, proclaimed the Social Democrats an equal enemy to fascism. How would any united front, much less an all peoples front be possible? Some supporters of Stalin also have argued that German workers were terrorized into submission. This is true only because unity in the crucial final moment was impossible in the face of such sectarianism. After all, this was the same workers movement that had overthrown the Kaiser in November, 1918 and ended World War 1 with a mass armed rebellion. The largest responsibility for the greatest defeat of the workers movement in the 20th century, Hitler's rise to power, lies with Stalin.

Inner conflict and cynicism

Lenin's leadership team was amazingly diverse. After all, Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin all worked together under Lenin. Lenin fought for unity, but did not murder those in the leadership team who disagreed with him. He debated with them, fiercely demanding high standards of evidence and principle in his opponents arguments, always calling people to task for unclear, illogical, factually weak positions. He brought the best out in people, who on their own were fatally flawed. He even threatened to resign several times in order to make his points. Lenin was a master of Marxism at the global level, European wide level, national, regional and city by city level. One of Lenin's most powerful accomplishments was his ability to translate Marxism to the individual and personal level and then return to broad general points, not just "What is to Be Done" but what is to be done by you and I right now.

Stalin was famously weak in his Marxism on a personal and interpersonal level. He eventually put on trial and had executed almost every single member of Lenin's entire leadership team in a "witchhunt" that makes " Salem" look like a tupperware party. Toward the end of Lenin's politically active life, in 1922, Lenin could feel the hand of death and began to act from his sick bed to deal with the political problem of his own passing. Stalin's power and position combined with his fatal flaws was one such problem.

Lenin said, "Stalin is too rude and this defect ... becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest ... removing Stalin from that post ... and appointing another ... more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious ... it is a detail which can assume decisive importance" (CW Lenin vol.36 pp.596, 1/4/1923).

Lenin's final two letters before he was forever silenced by a stroke concerned this very issue, "Dear Comrade Stalin: You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language…. I have no intention of forgetting so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me ... make your apologies, or ... relations between us should be broken off" (CW Lenin V 45 pp.608 3/5/1923). Lenin's use of the term "rude" more closely resembles the 21st century usage of the term "abusive." In a situation of true collective leadership a problem such as this is more manageable but in a situation of one man rule and the "cult of the personality" which grew up around Stalin this problem became, as Lenin himself said, "a detail which can assume decisive importance." A careful analysis of Stalin's worst deviations from Marxism show that some of them flow directly from his abusive, intolerant, inconsiderate and capricious characteristics.

Stalin was extremely cynical about people and their potential and this is common with very abusive individuals. Under Lenin's guidance and in collective leadership he provided a kind of balance to Trotsky's "excessive self assurance" and Bukharin's weakness with dialectical thinking (seeing all sides of a complex issue) (CW Lenin V 36 pp.594-595 12/24/1922).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin, in leadership by himself, with his cynical tendency unchecked, then gutted Marxism's emphasis on carefully considered revolutionary action. Stalin's disastrous political line equating the Social Democrats as an equal danger to the fascists was a prejudiced course of action reflecting his cynicism about the Social Democrats rather than a careful examination of them. Stalin did not abandon this ill-conceived perspective until after it was too late to stop Hitler. As Lenin might have put it, the "What is to Be Done?" was replaced by "Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder."

Stalin replaced Marxian dialectics with a mechanistic version that emphasized the "inevitability" of socialism in place of Karl Marx's stark choice for revolutionaries in "The Communist Manifesto," "a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes" (CW Marx Engels V 6 pp.482). For Marx the possibility of terrible defeat was so real that all prejudice and intellectual short cuts had to be abandoned because each serious choice in a crisis that revolutionaries make on the "ground they have been given" can lead to advance or "the common ruin of the contending classes." Stalin's disastrous line equating Social Democracy as an equal enemy to the workers movement as Fascism was so clearly prejudiced and filled with intellectual short cuts that it can only be explained, at least in part, by the same character flaws that Lenin wanted Stalin removed as Secretary General of the Communist Party for in 1922. All revolutionaries have to accept "the ground they have been given" such as the militarized imperialism and ferocious racism in Germany in 1932, but Marxists have no excuse to abandon careful analysis for cynical prejudice. We have no excuse now nor should we excuse Stalin.

African American Migration in the South, an Interview

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:58:00 +0000

Editor's note: Luther Adams teaches history at the University of Washington -Tacoma and is the author of Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970. Listen to the audio version of this interview here.

PA: What inspired you to undertake this project on the city of Louisville and its African American community?

LUTHER ADAMS: Well, my inspiration was both personal and professional. Professionally, as a student and scholar of African American migration, I was struck by how little attention the South or southern culture has been given outside of a few studies that primarily looked at the impact of southern culture in northern cities like Chicago, Cleveland or Oakland County, Michigan, and also how little attention was given to the role of the South and southern culture in terms of African American migration within the South itself.

Then personally, my family has been in Kentucky for generations and generations, and I grew up in part in Kentucky in Louisville, and at the same time I had a portion of my family that left Louisville during the period that I study and moved to Dayton, Ohio. So I was always curious not about the people that left but out the people that stayed, and why they chose to stay at a time when so many Black people were moving to the North seeking better jobs and seeking political and economic freedom, social freedoms – but these people had chosen to stay. I was also struck by the way in which, whether they had stayed or left, people in my family and people in my community commonly described the South, commonly described Kentucky, as home. So that was really the motivation that led me to this topic, really hoping to direct attention to an important topic that many historians have seemed to just overlook.

PA: Has that created a kind of gap in our thinking about the impact African Americans had, say between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century, when we start to think about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South? Has the failure to treat this topic left us with a gap about the political struggles as well?

LUTHER ADAMS: I think so. I think the public often neglects the consistent and ongoing struggles within the South, and in that I think sometimes they are also aided and abetted by historians. At the same time, increasingly scholars are devoting more attention to the ongoing struggles within the South, the work of people like Tera Hunter, who has looked at the Black washerwomen strikes in southern cities like Atlanta or Jacksonville and across the South, or the work of Leslie Brown, who has looked at the Black middle class in Durham, North Carolina, or Robin Kelley’s classic study, Hammer and Hoe, that looks at African American Communists in Alabama.

Yet at the same time, I think, despite those scholars who are looking at this topic, the myth of Black inactivity has died hard. So for most people, both publicly and also professionally in terms of the historiography written about the South, there is not as much attention to this subject during that time period, which I think is a grave injustice. It obscures the complexity of Black life in the South, and also perpetuates the idea that Blacks as a whole were passive, fearful, accommodating, or, at worst, accepting of the inequalities. For instance, recently one scholar, Laurie Green, has described this ethos as a “plantation mentality” that kept African Americans from fighting for freedom, and at the same time kept whites in Memphis and Tennessee expecting deference and submission from African Americans.

I think that while you cannot discount the fear and physical violence, or the economic and political systems that upheld white supremacy, Black people did act, and they consistently acted, in their own interests, whether in terms of migrating to the North and West in the hope of creating better lives for themselves and their children, or through what some scholars have called everyday forms of resistance, that is by quitting jobs, with jokes, music and dissemblance. Whether people went to church or politically organized, African Americans consistently acted throughout the South to gain equality. They established clubs, they established women’s clubs, they established branches of the NAACP, and their concerns were specific. They had specific demands for equality around housing, around jobs, around police brutality, to secure a voice in politics, to get better education, for respect.

I think the failure to address those histories prior to the Civil Rights era really paints a false picture of Blacks in the South and really of America as a whole. I often fear that behind this is an idea that if Blacks didn’t protest, then either things were not truly that bad, or that they didn’t have anyone else to blame for their poor condition except themselves. Whereas I think even a cursory view of the history of the South shows that African Americans consistently acted, and I think the failure to really direct attention to that popularly or historiographally obscures the complexity of Black life in the South.

PA: I wanted to ask you about the concept of "home" which you introduce at the beginning of the book as a sort of guide for the reader’s thinking about African American responses to white supremacy. It seems to be much more than just a response to white supremacy, in explaining why so many millions of people stayed in such a bad system. Could you talk about that?

LUTHER ADAMS: I think you’re absolutely right when you say that it’s not simply a response to white supremacy, and for me that’s one of the most important aspects of this notion of home, that it is, of course, a response to white supremacy and oppression in the sense that Black people are resisting, and that many come to see the South as home, as a site of resistance, as a place where historically African Americans have challenged the idea and the praxis of white supremacy.

But, as you say, it’s also more than that. It’s also about how they think of themselves, how they identify themselves in their connection to a place – that they think of themselves also as Southerners. When we think of a Southerner it’s often a shorthand for white, but these are people who are also Southern and see themselves as very much tied to the land through history and through their labor, both in the era of slavery and in the era of emancipation. These are people who literally see their blood as tied to the land in terms of their families, their communities, their culture, and their identity, and this becomes for many of them, of course, a paradoxical issue. On the one hand, they are tied intimately to a place that is also horrific in terms of the treatment of African Americans, that is tied to lynching and Jim Crow and disenfranchisement, and yet at the same time they are attempting to claim it as their own.

For many of them, that contradiction becomes resolved through their activism, their attempts to make the South a better place. For instance, there is one migrant I talk about in the book, Lyman Johnson, who was from Tennessee. He had moved around quite a bit actually before he decided to settle in Louisville. He often talked about his other relatives who had gone to places like Detroit and New York, and he would say that he was “glad that he didn’t tuck tail and run” like most of his kinpeople, and said to them that they ran away from the problem. So for many this idea of home really led them to stay in the South, to fight for equality, and this idea was something that was not just present in Louisville but was shared by African Americans elsewhere.

For instance, Medgar Evers in 1958 had a wonderful interview in Ebony Magazine called “Why I Still Live in Mississippi,” and in it he says, on the one hand, that Mississippi is part of the United States and he wants to stay there and try to change the things that he doesn’t like, but he also said in the interview that “It may sound funny but I love the South,” and he said “This is home.” I think that’s an ideal that many African Americans shared. On the one hand, it’s about challenging white supremacy, but it is also about how they saw themselves, how they saw their families, how they saw their own history, and really how they saw their identity as rooted in this place, and felt that they had a right to equality in the South, that they didn’t have to leave, they didn’t have to flee, and they didn’t have to go somewhere else to have the kinds of freedoms that they believed were rightfully theirs.

Again, this is an idea that I think is generations old, although not much attention has been given to it historiographically. For instance, Frederick Douglass wrote an essay entitled “We Have Decided to Stay.” This was in the era of the great exodus of 1879 where many African Americans in the era of lynching and the emergence of Jim Crow and disenfranchisement left the South attempting to move to Kansas of all places, and were called the Exodusters. Frederick Douglass challenged that idea, saying that we should stay, African Americans should stay in the South, that they should attempt to gain protection by right rather than by flight. So I think this idea of home is a powerful idea, an idea that few historians have looked at. And many of those migrants, who have been studied by historians, who ended up in Cleveland, Chicago, Oakland or Detroit, still often refer to the South as home, no matter how many years they may have been away from that place.

PA: How did urban development impact the African American community in Louisville, and how did they attempt to influence its direction?

LUTHER ADAMS: Limited economic opportunity has been a constant in the African American struggle for freedom and equality. However, I think this period represented a radical change in the way in which urban development was intertwined with economic issues, in the sense that many African Americans during this period saw and understood the era of the 1940s and 1950s as what some scholars describe as the “making of the second ghetto” or the origin of the urban crisis.

African Americans at that time described it as the creation of a ghetto. They saw that Black business was being decimated by urban renewal. They saw that Black populations were increasingly becoming spatially isolated, and they believed, on one hand, that this was something that would have an incredibly detrimental impact on almost all facets of African American life. Economically, they saw that it was destroying Black business. They saw that residentially Black people in Louisville were increasingly becoming more segregated in the era of the civil rights movement than less segregated. They saw that the schools had rising rates of segregation, and deindustrialization for many was clearly exacerbating the limited economic opportunities that African Americans had.

On the other hand, they didn’t believe that these changes were inevitable. They believed that they could make a radically different America, that they could make cities completely different, and they really acted during that period on this ideal – on the idea that cities could be a radically different place than they were. For instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Louisville during the Open Housing Campaigns to secure Black access to housing wherever they wished in the city, wherever essentially they could afford it (and ironically African Americans in this growing ghetto paid more for rent than elsewhere in the city, than the rents on average in the city). But when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the city to speak on this issue, he was in fact invited by his brother, Alfred Daniels Williams King, who was a minister and a central figure in the open housing campaigns. Martin Luther King gave a speech entitled “Upon This Rock,” and here he used a biblical metaphor that you would build on a rock, and the winds and the rains would not prevail against it. There was the idea that you could build a new foundation for urban America, a foundation that had equality at its root, that meant African Americans could gain equal access to housing, to jobs, and to education, and so when they saw this period of dramatic change underway, they also saw it as an opportunity.

Now obviously when we look at it historically, it didn’t turn out that way, but I think it’s important that we not read history backwards – that we see that at that moment for African American they believed that through their activism – through their actions – they could really make a city in their own image, an image that would not just benefit them, but which they believed would benefit urban America as a whole. For me, today, I think that’s an important lesson – that rather than looking at things and saying, as people popularly do today, “It is what it is,” they looked at it and said “This is what it is, but what could it be?,” what could we make this city, what kind of vision could we make real about the world that we live in? They didn’t just simply accept the status quo, even as they recognized the challenges they faced, but really had the idea that they could make things better and that they could radically transform the urban landscape.

PA: Related to that is this photo of an aerial representation of the city of Louisville that uses census data to give a color-coded image of where the population is in the city based on race. It seems like there is a large concentration of African Americans in West Louisville, but all this other area is white. What are your thoughts about the historical development of this as an expert on Louisville? Is this map an accurate depiction?

LUTHER ADAMS: You know, I hadn’t seen that specific image until you sent it to me. However when I did see it, it wasn’t surprising and in fact that photographic image, taken, I think, in September 2009, ties in closely with both the Index of Dissimilarity, which is a measure of residential segregation I am familiar with, and it is also really similar to the material I present in the book which shows, through a series of maps from 1950-1970, how the Black population came to be concentrated primarily in the West End, with another smaller pocket in Newburg, and that this process was that very process of ghettoization, the making of a ghetto, that African Americans recognized as underway in the 1940s and in the 1950s and 1960s, some of it due to urban renewal and city planning and some of it due to “white flight,” as whites left the city of Louisville proper, often moving to the surrounding counties of Jefferson and Oldham and Bullitt throughout the 70s and into the 80s.

So the map is an important map, because it signals something that I think is often overlooked, which is that residential segregation has actually been increasing in the United States since the era of the civil rights movement. Cities have by and large become more segregated – certainly Louisville has become more segregated since the era of civil rights movement. In fact, if you look at it nationally, ironically the most segregated cities are not in the South but in the North. Many of the cities that African Americans migrated to, attempting to find better lives during the second Great Migration, cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York, are by far the most segregated cities.

I think this map of Louisville really represents that kind of shift, the way in which urban renewal, white flight, and limited economic opportunities created, in the city of Louisville at least, a ghetto, and by ghetto here I mean not culturally or in terms of people’s behavior or characteristics, but really in a classical sense, in the sense that people are spatially isolated with very little choice about where they live in a city. Here I think the map really reflects some of the real limits to the success that occurred during that period.

I wouldn’t say the period was unsuccessful or that there was no change, but I think that just as there was progress, there was also retrogression. There were people actively fighting for equality and freedom, but there were also people actively fighting to maintain the status quo of white supremacy, of unequal economic opportunity, of disparate education and housing. I think in many ways this map reflects that. It also, I think, reflects, for the city of Louisville particularly, that when the city proper and the larger county merged in 2003 it really signaled a kind of dilution of political power for African Americans, because as they became a larger portion of Louisville’s population, they obviously had more political power, but when the city and county merged, they became a lesser percentage of the population of Metro Louisville.

This is an issue that points to problems in education and problems in housing. Louisville, of course, was lauded during the period of the 1950s for being one of the largest Southern cities to peacefully integrate. Yet as late as the 1960s, African Americans were lamenting a lack of integration, and in the 1970s Louisville was perhaps only rivaled by Boston for the violence busing and equal education engendered in Louisville, which later labored under a consent decree until 2000. And when that consent decree finally lapsed, then Louisville along with Seattle became the two cities that were engaged in the Supreme Court suit that was largely seen as undoing the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. For many cities, although I guess luckily not Louisville, this decision has meant a return to neighborhood schools, and neighborhood schools which, as this map indicates, are largely residentially segregated – which then has the effect of segregating the schools that those kids attend. So these problems, as the map demonstrates, are ongoing, and the very struggles that the people in Louisville were engaged in for better jobs, better housing, and political participation, are still underway. It’s not a movement that had its end.

PA: As you are talking, it reminded me of my home town of Tacoma, Washington, where you teach and where I grew up. Segregation loomed large in our imagination: white people lived in certain areas and Black people lived in others, and you don’t go in those neighborhoods and you don’t cross those lines. Do you have an experience of Tacoma that’s like that?

LUTHER ADAMS: Well yes – but I think it’s interesting that if you look at most West Coast cities, particularly if you look at Tacoma and Seattle, they tend to have lower rates of segregation than either Southern cities or Northeastern cities, and yet even in either of those places, the location of the Black community is pretty clear. In Tacoma it’s the Hilltop; in Seattle it’s the Central District and the south part of the city, although there is also, I think, transformation occurring in many cities today, primarily through gentrification, and what I think quietly is another form of urban renewal, in the building of light rail, or in the building of, really, the university where I teach, the University of Washington, Tacoma, which has a footprint, a blueprint, that would take it through the Hilltop district where most African Americans live in Tacoma.

So there is a way, I think, that you can see similar patterns of political power, of access, still underway. At the same time I think there is a kind of irony occurring. As people begin moving back towards the cities, and here I specifically mean white people begin to move back to cities, particularly affluent white people, in the short period there seems to be a “snapshot” where neighborhoods seem much more integrated than they have been in generations. But I think in the long period you really begin to see a shift backward, so that cities are in some cases whiter, whereas the suburbs around them are becoming increasingly places where the poor and people of color come to be housed. And I think that transition is very much underway here in Tacoma and cities like Seattle, where Black populations are increasingly living outside of the city in places like Federal Way or Kent, and those neighborhoods that historically had been centers of Black community, Black businesses, and Black culture, are coming to increasingly house fewer and fewer Black people themselves.

PA: What was the role of the labor movement in your history of Louisville?

LUTHER ADAMS: I think that’s a great question, and it’s a question I think that many African Americans in Louisville themselves asked during the time period that my book covers, between the 1930s and the 1970s. There was, on the one hand, a small set of unions that were popularly called the 7th Street Unions that were active in civil rights struggles. They attempted to desegregate some hotels and public parks, and there were figures, really important figures such as Carl Braden and Anne Braden, who had some association with those unions, who I think as individuals – not so much part of the labor movement, but as part of the broader Left, had an important role in the civil rights struggles in Louisville.

By and large, however, the role of unions was small, and African Americans questioned that in Louisville. In part, they questioned it, I think, recognizing that African American themselves had only a limited membership in unions. In the city very few African Americans worked outside of the service and domestic industries, and were because of that largely overlooked by unions in the city. Even the more progressive CIO unions had very little union membership among African Americans.

Outside of that, I think the unions themselves seemed to have very little interest themselves in challenging for equality, challenging for freedom in that broad sense, and in fact in some cases you find the opposite. In the struggles around busing and education in the 1970s, you actually find unions being more reactionary. For instance, at the Ford Motor Company the plant was actually shut down when 38 percent of its workforce walked out in opposition to busing, and at the General Electric plant union members threatened to shut down the factory in the same fashion.

So ironically I think, many African Americans who looked at unions as a potential source of strength, as a potential ally, often themselves wondered why the role of unions was so small in the city, particularly when historians have increasingly begun to look at this period as a period that was marked by what they call civil rights unionism or Black protest politics, where New Deal sorts of labor coalitions were forged to help deal both with economic problems and also becoming huge advocates for civil rights.

But in Louisville, it seems that the impact of the unions was really hampered by the issue of race, an issue in which many, or at least some, union members in Louisville, particularly white members in Louisville, put their racial identity before economic solidarity, really. They often saw, I think, African Americans as antithetical to their economic interests. They believed that African Americans might take jobs from them and that African Americans would devalue the homes that they had brought, which for many were their primary source of investment and wealth. They believed that African Americans would come to their schools. They also had the fear of miscegenation.

But by and large, I think, when you look at unions, the role was small, although there were important exceptions in leftist figures like Anne and Carl Braden whose role was really nothing less than heroic. They helped to deal with the issue of housing. They were some of the founding members of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). Anne Braden later was a founding member of the West End Community Council, which was one of three major organizations that advocated open housing. But unions per se did not seem to have that same role, and in fact, in the 1940s, one of the ironies was that the Progressive Party, which had one of the strongest civil rights planks, was said in the Black community to “cut no ice.” That was not because they didn’t believe in the planks of the Progressive Party, but simply they didn’t believe the Progressive Party could win, and so to some degree for African Americans, there was also a bit of pragmatism when they looked at the Progressive Party, recognizing that its plank was something laudable. But when they looked at the political landscape in the city of Louisville, which had pretty evenly divided Republican and Democratic parties, African Americans recognized that politically their strength came from swinging elections through block voting, and so they often looked at the Progressive Party as something that would hinder that ability to sway elections.

Matthew Jones, Freedom Singer, Civil Rights Activist, 1936-2011

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 07:17:00 +0000

Original source: The Cultural Worker

Somehow the reports were too slow to come in; a quick note on the internet, a bare posting on a folksong blog, but no details, no sense of the powerful life and legacy left behind. The social fabric that Matt Jones helped to re-shape hadn’t bothered to note his passing. Sitting at my keyboard in cool early Spring, in the hours after just reading these sparse notices, I type with care, vexing over the disturbing lack of news. It simply wouldn’t do to leave it at that. We cannot accept silence in memory of a man who made a joyful, intense, indeed agitated noise throughout his life….

Matthew Jones was already a schooled, experienced musician when he became active in the fight for civil rights by joining the Nashville Student Movement in 1960. He also became an outspoken participant in the struggle in Danville, Va., for which he organized a vocal group, the Danville Freedom Voices, in 1963. Shortly thereafter, Matt relocated to Atlanta, Ga., with his brother Marshall and the two became affiliated with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and their powerful music ensemble, the Freedom Singers. This legendary group was actually born via a series of meetings held between Cordell Reagon, SNCC Executive Secretary Jim Foreman and Pete Seeger, already viewed as an elder of the protest song. In 1964, Matt, a SNCC field secretary, became a Freedom Singers member and then the group’s director.

That year, the Freedom Singers toured the country as part of the wide organizing drive to build the Friends of SNCC, initially focusing on northern states to build the movement’s momentum. Of the Freedom Singers, Matt has said, “We were organizers first, singers second.”

During such tumultuous times, the fight for equality in the Jim Crow South could often be terrifying. Matt faced down the Klan on many occasions and endured 29 arrests. His experiences developed him into a “freedom singer” in the most visceral manner.

“I don’t think of myself as a cultural worker,” Matt said. “I am a freedom singer; a freedom fighter. I’ve always been a freedom fighter; I’ll probably go down that way, too. Freedom songs are different than other protest songs because they are really a mantra. The use of repetition allows for the message to be understood. If we sing a powerful statement enough times in a song, like ‘This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,’ then we can internalize it”.

Matt maintained his role as an artist-activist even as SNCC broke apart, performing his radical repertoire around the world, including alongside freedom fighters in Northern Ireland.

During the struggle against the Vietnam War, he recorded a 45 that has become quite legendary, “Hell No, We Ain’t Gonna Go” backed with “Super Sam.” For this occasion, Matt worked in collaboration with lyricist Elaine Laron to produce two powerful selections accompanied by a muscular rock band complete with a horn section. It stands out as an exciting moment and its antiwar message is still relevant today.

Matt’s experiences included performances alongside such luminaries as Seeger and the Reverend F.D. Kirkpatrick. He worked with Barbara Dane and performed at the legendary Vietnam Songbook concert. He sang at the Highlander Folks School. He became a frequent contributor to Broadside during that magazine’s far-too-brief run, working closely with its founder, legendary protest singer Sis Cunningham, a dear comrade. He’d been a participant in the annual Phil Ochs Song Nights from the start and his music has been heard in such lasting films as ‘The Ghosts of Mississippi’. And in Harlem he organized an annual tribute to Dr. King which was never without the body of song that Matt had always marched to.

Over the decades he continued to perform for numerous rallies throughout New York and beyond including several of this writer’s May Day concerts and the 1998 ‘Hanns Eisler Centenary Festival’, tributes to Woody Guthrie and of course Sis, when that icon was lost to us. But Matt could be found at any number of events where people gather for an important cause. Starting with 1986 he led a weekly song circle at the Advent Lutheran Church on 93rd Street and Broadway. This series, dubbed the Open House Coffeehouse, was not just any vehicle for folksingers and poets, but a venue that encouraged original music with a strong message. To Matt, there was little space between the song and the activism. In this sense he was sure to reach out to younger generations of singer-songwriters, shepherding in as he taught; his respect for new songs of struggle was only matched by his need to preserve older forms including spirituals and ballads. In the latter decades he’d returned to his prized nylon-string acoustic guitar, that which he seemed to barely tickle most of the time, the softest accompaniment to a hushed, thickened voice--but the notes played where always the necessary ones, those which would touch us deepest. Matt called out to the muses with open hands, conjuring up just what was needed to be heard. And the audience always left feeling terribly, wonderfully moved.

Matt never ended a gig without “The Freedom Chant,” an affirmation he based on a famous quote by Fannie Lou Hamer and his own many years of direct action. It, more than anything else, speaks volumes about this musician of the people who refused to tire:

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I will not allow anybody at any time

To violate my mind or my body

In any shape, form or fashion.

If they do they’ll have to deal with ME immediately!

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

---Surely Matt ‘went down’ as a freedom fighter and it is certain that he’d like to always be recalled as such. Let’s not forget. Let’s not ever forget.

Podcast: African Americans and the Globalization of White Supremacy, Part 1

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:34:00 +0000

African Americans and the Globalization of White Supremacy, Part 1

On this episode we play the first of our two-part interview with historian and author Andrew Zimmerman on his new book, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South.

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Book Review: Liberation Theology Along the Potomac

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:11:00 +0000

Liberation Theology Along the Potomac: Labor's Golden Rule in Early American Catholicism
by Edward Toby Terrar
Silver Spring, Maryland: CWPublishers (Downloadable pdf copy here)

This book is a history about the theology of the European settlers in Maryland and especially about the Catholics in the first half of the 17th century during the period of the English Civil War (1640-1660). It chronicles how the working people there formed Basic Christian Communities and subdued some of the same devils plaguing their present-day descendants along the Potomac. The “liberation theology” terminology used in the book is a recent development but the author argues that this term and the themes which this body of thought embraces, such as class struggle, aptly applies to early Maryland. Terrar divides his theological analysis into six chapters that cover the European background, the Catholics’ labor theory of value (distributive justice), their agrarian reform and subsistence farming, and their legislative and judiciary antinomianism in church and state.

Each chapter in the book was published earlier as a stand-alone article in periodicals such as Journal of Church and State, Science and Society, Mission Studies, Journal of Peace and Justice Studies and History of European Ideas. These articles provoked re-thinking by academics such Christopher Hill, Gary Nash, Herbert Aptheker and Arthur Marotti, which is incorporated into the book. The present book-length format is designed for a wider audience.

The analysis expands upon Terrar’s UCLA dissertation in early American economic, intellectual, legal and social history. It argues that the working people along the Potomac, and Catholics in particular, established a labor-based society and a resulting theology centered on the evangelical councils of perfection (poverty, chastity and obedience), as interpreted from their perspective, which brought about the abolition of the class system. Through revolutionary conflict their agrarian, labor and nationality programs triumphed at the grass roots and at the provincial level over both local capitalism and foreign imperialism.

Terrar notes that while generations of historians have traced the origins of America’s democratic traditions to institutions such as the New England town meetings, recent scholarship has found that the inhabitants of towns such as Cambridge, Ipswich and Watertown came from the east of England, where government was top down. They followed a similar pattern in the new world. In contrast the Maryland settlers, like their counterparts in the north and west of England, as local English county studies have documented since the 1960s, had an egalitarian tradition based on open field, communal farming. The antinomian working people were hounded out of Massachusetts, but in Maryland they dominated more completely than Gerrard Winstanley and the English levelers were able to achieve even during the period of their greatest influence under Cromwell. Among the Catholic achievements were an annual parliament, a wide franchise, equal constituencies, taxes that were small and non-existent on food and other necessities, a simplified legal system, no imprisonment for debt, no enclosures and no tithes or bishops.

The Marylanders’ landholding system is illustrative of the Potomac’s golden rule for working people. Unlike in New England, where the General Court enacted a land recording statue soon after settlement, the Catholics refused to do so. As a result land disputes in New England were settled with priority going to the recorded holder. In Maryland the priority went to the squatter, to the one working the land, to the usufruct holder, not to the landlord, proprietor or rent collector. Maryland had similar anti-capitalist measures against engrossing, forestalling, hoarding, luxury goods and usury.

Along with his account of its ramifications in the market place, Terrar takes up the history of liberation theology in the Maryland church. Like present-day Basic Christian Communities, the Potomac community, which included some Indians and Protestants was characterized by singing, liturgy, spirituality, cosmology, scripture, patron saints and, when possible, an educated clergy. At the same time there was class struggle within the church. It should be noted that those accustomed to the traditional interpretation of post-Reformation English Catholicism with its themes of martyrology, apology and debates on the hierarchy, have been disappointed with the more recent local studies of the English counties. This scholarship has found the class system, not the penal laws, to have been the main concern of the English Catholics. The Catholic magnates monopolized the clergy, just as they did real estate, educational services, political power and the court. A majority of the clergy served as the domestic chaplains and tutors to the small percent of the Catholics that were gentry, rather than in the congregational ministry to the laboring people.

In Maryland the Basic Christian Communities turned the English pattern up-side-down. Their Jesuit missionaries were educated in the snobbish, capitalist beliefs of their founder, Ignatius Loyola. As in other mission territories, their interest was in converting the Indians, in serving as domestic chaplains and tutors to the magnates, and in the administration of their own farms, not in congregational ministry. But as Terrar illustrates, from the settlement’s earliest days, the Maryland assembly enacted measures that required the clergy to serve as "pastors." This meant officiating at the baptisms, marriages, burials, and liturgy of the Basic Christian Communities. The Jesuits protested against the pastoral law, calling it "inconvenient." They expected that secular priests, that is, non-Jesuits, would come out for the congregational ministry. The Jesuits' counterparts in other parts of the colonial world hired secular clergy to attend to the needs of the laboring people who worked on their estates.

In converting the high-flying Jesuit missionaries to their theology of liberation, the farmers also used mortmain, praemunire and other measures to curb the excesses of church courts, canon law, bishops, tithes, papal bulls. Terrar documents that judicial cases in Maryland dealing with matrimony, blasphemy, sorcery, idolatry, tithes, and sacrilege were rare. Argues the author, had there been ecclesiastical courts, as in the Hapsburg empire, this would not have been the case. He points out that in Mexico in the same period, church courts were an appendage to the Hapsburg (Spanish) imperialism. Blasphemy prosecutions were frequent. Landlords used corporal punishment to coerce obedience. When workers rebelled during such punishment by blaspheming, they were turned over to church courts. The church courts applied torture, which was legal, to gain an admission of guilt concerning the blasphemy. They were further punished by the church courts to gain obedience. In the present day such Hapsburgism is used along the Potomac to keep down the Muslim working class.

The Maryland Catholics have traditionally been celebrated for their 1649 law on religious toleration, which broadened the separation between church and state. In the context of their liberation theology, however, the pastoral and other measures that narrowed the separation between church and state was their real achievement. For laboring Catholics, the obstacle to their freedom was the Catholic magnates and clergy, not the intolerance of Protestants. It was not an accident that the pastoral legislation preceded the toleration law by a decade.

Terrar aptly quotes A.I. Morton comment about the levelers in summing up the liberation theology of the Maryland Catholics: “A party that held the center of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation’s history, voiced the aspiration of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten.”

Why "It's About Freedom!" and Why We Must Not Relent

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:51:00 +0000

The labor protests spreading throughout the Great Lakes states have energized the left. Not only have hundreds of thousands come together to protect the dignity of working people, but they have realized an important truth about their organizing. Those rallying have realized that their pay, benefits and work itself are a result of their having the freedom to exercise self-determination through their unions.

When public employees organized by AFSCME hold high their signs that exclaim "It's About Freedom!" this is what they are expressing. The refrain among the multitude of people and groups demonstrating is that unions give workers a say, a voice that matches the volume of that of the corporate board. Many speakers in Wisconsin's Capitol rotunda have repeatedly stated that the ability of workers to stand in solidarity with one another and collectively bargain is one of the hallmarks of democracy.

This is an important development in the way the left in the United States frames justice, and it is has the ability to change the way others think about freedom.

Rather than pointing to a specific theory of Rights to justify their fight, workers marching for the freedom to form unions have emphasized unions' power to increase their liberty in their fight-back.

The type of freedom being fought for in the recent demonstrations is not often acknowledged in the U.S. The left has long emphasized equality primarily for the reason that it alleviates unjust poverty, while the right is often seen as champions of freedom. This is because most people think of freedom as having "freedom from" something, which is what political theorists call "negative liberty".

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution represents negative liberty. It legally guarantees freedom from censorship and is meant to prevent the government from favoring one religion over another.

What today's labor movement is fighting for is the "freedom to" join a union and the "freedom to" make decisions about what one's work entails. This is "positive liberty".

Positive liberty exists in many other places in the U.S., with little recognition.

Pell grants represent the idea of positive liberty because they provide low-income college applicants with resources which allow them to pursue degrees they would not be able to if the grants were not available.

The feminist movement often stands for positive liberty. For example, their promotion of comprehensive daycare programs recognizes that jobs can often be inflexible and a parent gains more economic freedom if they can be sure their children will get the care they need when they need it.

This definition of two freedoms is often credited with the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. However, if we look beyond the official historical narrative promoted by the dominant ideology, which credits Berlin, we find that the distinction is more accurately traced back to a book titled Escape From Freedom, which was published in 1941 by Marxist philosopher Erich Fromm.

What Fromm observes in his work is incredibly important in the contemporary struggle of the progressive movement.

What Escape From Freedom seeks to explain is the dialectical nature of the expansion of freedom. It praises the expansion of negative freedom, which lead to modern society, but also points to the fact that real increases in inequality have subordinated many people to the power of wealthy capitalists and their corporations in ways that begin to contradict the ability for many to fully enjoy negative freedom. The individual person increasingly loses his or her power to be self-determining as they become more and more dependent on late-stage capitalism's large, privately controlled corporations for work, goods, information, and even recreation.

Suddenly, many find that negative freedom alone isolates and weakens them. While a few individuals remain quite free and become very powerful commanding others about in large economic organizations, the worker feels subject to gigantic forces beyond his or her control.

"....Freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside himself, alienated from himself and others...." wrote Fromm.

The only way society can preserve freedom in general is by recognizing the need for positive freedom. The problem of the modern person being rooted in the complexity of social and economic forces, Fromm wrote that increasing freedom requires society "replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent cooperation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political sphere to the economic sphere."

This position is based on a critical observation of the organization of the capitalist economy. In late-stage capitalism, capital accumulates quite densely in the coffers of very small a percentage of the population. In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owned 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.

This wealth of resources is used by the individuals who have it to employ others in their exercise of negative freedoms matching their goals. Media apparatuses are bought or created. Political foundations are formed to manipulate public opinion and lobby government. People are barraged by constant advertisement. And this manipulation is all regarded as business as usual.

Consider who has the most ability to actually use the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We may all have the theoretical ability to enjoy this negative liberty, yet it is global news corporations, radio conglomerates, corporate advertisers, and the recording industry, acting on the behalf of their wealthy investors, which are most able to make real use of it. The result is that most people experience freedom of speech passively, and those who do not become frustrated when they have to constantly engage a deceptively "common" message which does not reflect their lived experience.

Those standing for worker's rights in Wisconsin know this experience quite well. They are constantly disparaged by Fox News as thugs while their pro-capitalist Tea Party counterparts are championed by the news network. Recently, the most prominant Sunday news shows had to be pushed to include representatives from the organizations who supported the demonstrators after it was revealed three anti-union members of the GOP were invited to comment. In fact, very little on the issue which resulted in the workers' demonstrations considered newsworthy at all until tens of thousands of people rallied and a spectacle was created which could attract viewers (and result in profit).

The left has long used rules and regulations to stymie this trend, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for these policies to bring about equity. In fact, many of these regulations are being repealed. With the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United ruling, the capitalist class used the concept of negative freedom to flood the electoral process with money and sway the 2010 election. MoveOn's petition to build interest in repealing the ruling that corporations have the same rights as individuals is a right-minded response to the Court's decision, but it takes little foresight to see that corporate board members themselves would simply have to seek a repeal on individual political contributions and pour their own money into the political process if this proposal manages to survive the battle to implement it.

Further, regulations themselves are antithetical to freedom. They may be justified by necessity when inequality is so prominent and the state of self-determination is so precarious that their implementation would create an overall increase in total freedom. However, the level of control the government would need to solve the issues found in an economy as complex as that found in the U.S. is not only unlikely to develop out of the situation present in U.S. politics, but it is also quite likely to create precedents dangerous to freedom in general.

The ability of the right-wing to frame debate concerning this issue by contrasting regulations with freedom further complicates this matter.

The progressive movement can solve this problem by concerning itself with promoting the idea of positive freedom and the self-determination it entails. Until progressives create grassroots, organic institutions based on democratic principles in the place of the top-down corporate model, it will be in constant struggle corporate interests.

This is where we stand now. The protests in the mid-west United States are incredible, but we must remember we are attempting to defend what little amount of positive freedom we have in our workplaces. We must advance, because the fight promises to never end unless we do. In another year, work to elect progressive candidates in what should be free elections will again be undermined by corporate news, ads and funding for right-wing grassroots organizations. Considering the trend, we may even see another war in a decade's time.

We must take the initiative. It is imperative we build structures of positive liberty where self-determination has stagnated and private ownership is characterized by the tyranny we sought to end by recognizing negative liberties. The will of the people could then cease to be a euphemism spouted by opportunists and instead be directly demonstrated through debate and vote. Democratic methods of economic organization would assist all progressive groups struggling against the dominant class and those whom it represents. The unions have the experience necessary to pursue such a goal.

It should be done, in the name of freedom.

Photo: Thousands rally in Indianapolis against Republican anti-worker bills. (by Wilson E. Allen)