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Articles posted by Radical Socialist on various issues.

Spin Doctors, Propagandists and the Modi Make-ove

Details: Published on Friday, 19 April 2013 16:49

Spin Doctors, Propagandists and the Modi Make-over

APRIL 18, 2013

tags: Gujarat, Hindutva, Madhu Kishwar, Narendra Modi,secularism, Zahir Janmohamad

Elsewhere on Kafila, we have published a 7000 word long response by Madhu Kishwar to Zahir Janmohamad’s open letter to her which appeared on 15 January, followed by Zahir Janmohamad’s response. Perhaps a few things need to be stated here clearly with respect to her ‘response’. It seems to me to violate every tenet of reasoned debate and argument and is replete with name calling and stereo-typing of not just the secularist ‘other’ [who is her real other, not the Muslim] but even of the adversary she is arguing with. So if Zahir is a Muslim, he has to be X, Y, Z and has to be believing in A, B, C. Everything starts and ends in bad faith. But then that is what distinguishes Madhu Kishwar from others. She is in her element especially in relation to those whom she disagrees with. With her there can be no disagreement – you have to be sneered and jeered at, irrespective of whether you are a Medha Patkar or an Aruna Roy. I suppose these are matters of personal style and I shall not dwell on them further.

Let me rather, turn to some of the more substantive issues raised in Madhu’s response. Zahir has answered most of them but it seems to me that a couple of vital questions still remain. Even here, though, a caveat is necessary. I have great admiration for Madhu Kishwar’s battle in defense of the rikshaw pullers in Delhi and have often said so openly to her as well as others. However, I do know that it is possible to talk to her when only we agree, which is very rare. On matters that we disagree about, I have decided that I do not want to enter into any kind of an argument with her. In any case, large parts of her ‘response’ are like Modi’s PR handouts, served to us without any sense of critical examination. Therefore, what follows below is not my reply to her but my reactions to a set of allegations she has raised about whosoever is opposed to Narendra Modi – all lumped together in a breathtaking move of reductio ad absurdum, first as secularists , who are reduced to Leftists/ NGO activists and finally to Congress-supporters (because, she says in her Modinama1, the Congress has been equally responsible for all the riots till date). I therefore, lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am an inveterate Modi-hater (and a Congress-hater as well, if that makes sense to anyone in her dichotomized universe) and Kafila is a forum with a certain, if very broad, politics that, at the minimum rules out being pro-Modi.

Do Facts Speak for Themselves?

Madhu has a line at the bottom of ‘Modinama1′ which says: “Please challenge me on facts instead of countering me with ideological attacks”. My apologies, for I do not have any faith in ‘facts’ – either statistical or otherwise. I am interested rather, in the discourse (call it ideology, if you will). Consider this: We all believe that precolonial India displayed some kind of a confluence of cultures, especially the Hindu and the Islamic, and that this produced some of the great achievements of our culture. It was this ‘fact’ of living together through an osmosis of cultures that led Nehru and secular-nationalism at large to insist on the heritage of syncretism, and in some versions, even ‘secularism’. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the run-up to the demolition of Babri Masjid, the terrifying vision of Hindutva was articulated by Sadhvi Ritambhara by issuing the following threat drawing precisely on the same tradition that Nehru and secularists of different shades extolled: “Babar ki auladon, agar Bharat mein rehna hai to Rahim aur Raskhan ti ki tarah raho jinhone is desh ki maati mein Ram to talasha tha...” The same ‘fact’ of composite culture assumes another valence here. The demolition of Babari Masjid (Act I) was meant to tell the ‘descendants of Babar’ that the only way they can live in India was by being devotees of Ram, and perhaps in Gujarat you can say, by being devotees of Narendra Modi. For Modi enacted Act II of the same drama in 2002, presiding over the massacre of Muslims, in order to show them their place in Gujarat, but also, by extension, in India.

I am afraid, I do not see any straightforward meaning emanating from ‘facts’ like Madhu does. Her world is really very simple with very clear cut villains and heroes and transparent meanings. So for instance, she can produce photographs of people enjoying night life in Ahmedabad and pronounce how safe women are in that state. Perhaps they are, but the photographs certainly do not prove this. I was recently in Palestine – constantly bombarded and living under a full-blown occupation. So, have people stopped enjoying and having fun? Do they always move about wearing a grim expression on their faces? Do they not love, have sex, marry, celebrate? Innumerable photographs of such fun and frolic can be produced – as from Palestine, so from any other besieged part of the world. But when Madhu Kishwar sees some ostensibly happy Muslims in Gujarat, she can only draw one conclusion: That they validate and vindicate Modi. Do celebrations and joyfulness in Palestine then also vindicate Israeli occupation?

Strange logic at the very least. I do not deny that there are happy Muslims in Gujarat and even that there are Muslims who are happy being with the BJP and even with Modi. Madhu has produced many instances of such Muslims and we also know from the recent municipal bodies’ elections that many more Muslims have made peace with the BJP and even contested and won the elections on that party’s ticket. So, what does this ‘fact’ prove? That Modi is not a fascist? That Gujarat is a paradise of sorts? Madhu ties this ‘fact’ with another: Modi has ‘not allowed’ a single riot to take place since 2002 – which is also apparently a proof of the fact that he is not anti-Muslim. According to her Muslims living in Gujarat recognize this ‘fact’ and therefore want to move on, forgetting 2002. But damn these secularists! They don’t understand, nor want the Muslims to move on.

I think there are many many other possible ways in which the ‘fact’ of Muslims’ new found ‘love towards Modi’ can be read. We know for example that a majority of the poor have always voted for the Congress. Does that mean that Congress was any less pro-corporate and actually pro-poor? Does it mean that the poor are happy under the Congress regime? That they are feel enfranchised and empowered? Till the other day, we could say the same of the dalits as well, for it is well known that for decades they voted for the Congress, along with the brahmans. These are puzzles with which any serious political science teachers confronts her first year BA students in order to explain the complex mechanisms through which consent is produced/ manufactured – which is one of the ways in which this phenomenon is understood. There are some who might want to see this as an attempt to hammer out a new ‘social contract’ of some kind. If you are a marxist, you will often explain it through notions like ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’ or ‘false consciousness’. In more recent times, we have had recourse to more sophisticated ways of understanding processes like these, say the idea of ‘subjectivation’ – that is to say, the idea that the ‘subject’ is a product of power relations, relations that are not ever only about domination but which always involve the production of pleasure. In such a notion, with which I am more comfortable, subjectivity is a matter of self-fashioning within a complex web of relationships. An understanding such as this could argue for example that many Muslims are now reassessing and rethinking their place in the new Gujarat and given the fact that in the foreseeable future, they must deal with this government and the larger common sense that sustains it in society at large. This reappraisal entails a different comportment, a rearranging of different elements of one’s affects,emotions and beliefs in a way that is conducive to living in this present rather than perennially deferring gratification to some unforeseen future. This kind of refashioning of the self is not always opportunistic but it does stack away certain concerns for future reference. Stockholm syndrome is another form in which the aggressor in a relationship of power, domination, even abuse and violence comes to be endowed with positive affects. Often, in extreme cases, the perpetrator also becomes an object of desire. What is a matter of serious theoretical reflection and endless examination/ re-examination among social scientists, philosophers and psychologists, becomes a mere ideological reflex in the hands of propagandists, as if the figures and ‘data’ simply speak, on and of their own.

As for the point that Modi has not ‘allowed’ any riot to take place since 2002, we might want to ask two different questions. If it is the case that his mere decision to not allow riots in the state will ensure peace, then does this not establish his culpability with regard to 2002 even more clearly? It wasn’t a riot that took place and was over in a couple of days. The killings actually continued for days on end and it was as if there was no government in the state. Secondly, does it occur to Madhu that this may not be such an innocent matter, given that there was international condemnation and people were already contemplating hauling Modi in the International Criminal Court for his crimes against humanity? It would have been foolish for Modi to continue openly on the path he had embarked upon in 2002. He had to demonstrate to the world that 2002 was an aberration.

An Innocent Demonized by Secularists?

Since Madhu expends a lot of energy in attacking ‘secularists’ for their ‘demonization’ of Modi, let me cite Ashis Nandy, a self professed anti-secularist, who has seriously been working for a very long time on issues of violence and communal violence in particular, starting with the violence of partition. Madhu too claims she has studied all important riots but there is a qualitative difference between Nandy’s sustained studies and thought and her superficial observations that are hugely coloured by her political proclivities of the moment. In the early 1990s, Nandy had interviewed Narendra Modi just as he has been interviewing people involved in riots and violence and people involved in Hindutva mobilizations. Here is Nandy’s account of Modi, in his own words:

More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him along with Achyut Yagnik, whom Modi could not fortunately recognise. (Fortunately because he knew Yagnik by name and was to later make some snide comments about his activities and columns.) It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.

Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.

Ashis Nandy recounted this in his comment Obituary of a Culture, written in the wake of the 2002 massacre in Seminar. This is an essay to be read, for it is written by a scholar who is a declared anti-secularist and has studied and deeply reflected on violence in India and the world at large. That is why, Nandy (and people like Achyut Yagnik), who are not people whom Madhu can accuse of being Gujarat-haters (a la a certain Muslim called Zahir Janmohamad) concluded right then:

Gujarat disowned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi long ago. The state’s political soul has been won over by his killers. This time they have not only assassinated him again, they have danced on his dead body, howling with delight and mouthing obscenities.

People like Nandy and Yagnik, who are deeply in love with Gujarat, know that the political Gujarat that exists today is not what ‘Gujarat’ really is; that there is no single ‘spirit of Gujarat’ that has now found expression in the fascist figure of Narendra Modi. Gujarat is far bigger than Modi or BJP or even the BJP and Congress put together. But there is something else, far more scary that is at issue today. For as our friend Tridip Suhrud, now Director of Sabarmati Ashram, often tells us, it was at from least a decade before Modi’s rise that a certain political consensus was generated and solidified – and the Congress is as much a part of this – the centrepiece of which was the new Gujarati middle class. This consensus, which brooked no dissent, took shape around a certain notion of consumption and ‘development’, as perhaps, the final act of exorcism of the ghost of Gandhi. In Tridip’s account, this is of a piece with the aversion of this middle class to any kind of thinking – let alone critical thinking. Narendra Modi really came to embody the aspirations of this middle class – inflected through the paranoid hate-politics of Hindutva.

If what we cited above was Nandy’s verdict in 2002, here is what he wrote in January 2008, in the Times of India, following Modi’s electoral victory:

The Hindus and the Muslims of the state — once bonded so conspicuously by language, culture and commerce — have met the demands of both V D Savarkar and M A Jinnah. They now face each other as two hostile nations. The handful of Gujarati social and political activists who resist the trend are seen not as dissenters but as treacherous troublemakers who should be silenced by any means, including surveillance, censorship and direct violence. As a result, Gujarati cities, particularly its educational institutions are turning cultural deserts.

And almost as if to prove him right, this time ‘they’ sought to silence this dissenter outside their territory, by slapping a court case against Nandy. Intolerance of dissent even hundreds of miles away in Delhi, characterizes the political culture that Modi has shaped and presides upon. In a recent conversation with me, DL Sheth (by no means a secularist from Secularistan!) , who spends long spells in Gujarat these days and has also been looking at the CSDS survey data for the last decade very closely, said two things that are striking. First, he said, the development card (wrt to Modi) is being overplayed. The issue, according to him, is not that of development versusHindutva (as Madhu suggests, taking the cue directly from Modi and his entourage), but that Hindutva has been effectively made common sense in the state – at least amongst its very large middle class and the development question is framed within that common sense. The two are closely linked – almost exactly in the sense that Ashis Nandy suggests, for in Sheth’s words Modi has already established Hindu Rashtra in Gujarat. Second, and this might suggest the change that has taken place in the state since 2002, there are many more people among the respondents to the survey in 2012, who justify the 2002 violence on Mulsims than there were in 2002. Was there some remorse, immediately after the violence? Or was it because the glare of media and a certain global condemnation of that violence had made it difficult to ‘own’ it up? And now that all that seems to be in some remote past, we can come out with what we always felt? We will perhaps have to wait for more detailed analyses of this phenomenon to appear before we can finally pronounce on it.

The Development Story

Development in Gujarat is a story in itself and we have commented upon it in Kafila earlier this year where a recent study by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) had been cited. This report challenged the hype about Gujarat’s claims made about the Vibrant Gujarat Summits. Sample this:

In VG held in January 2009, government claims that 3,574 Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) were signed for investments worth Rs 12 trillion. But CMIE could capture information and details of only 220 projects worth Rs 3,947 billion (Rs 3,94,700 crore). “The number of projects captured…were drastically low when compared with the official numbers displayed on the event’s website because of poor disclosure of basic information about the projects proposed. In most cases the website does not provide the details of a valid company name, location, product, and capacity,’’ says the CMIE report….

The same is the story for VG 2011. The grand claim was of 8,380 MoUs worth Rs 20 trillion being signed. But research by CMIE did not get any details of these MoUs and projects. “Like in the earlier fair, details of either company name, or location or product etc were not clearly available for us to identify individual projects in these,” says CMIE

In terms of the Human Development Index, the state in fact fell from the 5th rank in 1996 to the 9th rank in 2006. In fact between 2006-7 and 2010-11, even states like Orissa, Bihar, Maharashtra, Haryana and Chhattisgarh registered a higher rate of growth. Gujarat’s growth was not unimpressive at 9.3 percent but the point is that there was nothing spectacular about it. Nothing at least that would make Modi’s regime look anything like what Madhu Kishwar’s handout makes it out to be.

But that is really not the point here. The point that scholars like Nandy are making is that ‘development’ here is not a neutral terms as it is in other states. Rather, ‘development’ is inextricably tied, in this state, to ‘Gujarati asmita’ and ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ that is already defined in exclusively Hindutva terms. And it is this that makes possible the authoritarian figure of Modi, riding roughshod over all dissent, as the man who delivers. Much of this reputation about Gujarat being the preferred destination for investors has of course been gained with a high level of public relations work for which no price is too much for Modi to pay. Thus for example, when Tata Motors was forced to pull out its Nano project from Singur in West Bengal, Modi executed a perfect PR coup. What most people did not know for quite some time to come was that this had been done through the offer of a series of unprecedented concessions to the Tatas. It was a deal that the Gujarat government did not want to make public, reported IBNlive. Despite several RTI applications, the government had claimed that it was classified information, as it contained trade secrets of Tata Motors. Then the information leaked. Here is the bonanza that the Tatas got:

The biggest incentive was a Rs 9,570 crore soft loan over 20 years — close to 25 per cent of Gujarat’s annual budget. Tata Motors will repay the loan in 20 years, at 0.1 per cent interest rate and will repay the land price in eight equal annual installments. The government will also provide a four-lane road connectivity and also exempt Tatas from electricity duty, registration and transfer charges of land. It will also put up a waste disposal plant, supply natural gas through a pipeline and provide 100 acres near Ahmedabad for a township.

But such exercises are really not enough to either transform Modi’s image from a fascist who presided over the mass murder of over 2000 Muslims to a benign proponent of development, a darling of the international community to whom US Congress delegations are paying visits and on whom global powers are showering encomiums. This required something more.

Enter the Spin Doctors

It is here that that the spin doctors and global PR agencies enter the scene. A publicity and power obsessed fascist is now ready to be served up to us as a benign developmentalist. According to a report by DP Bhattacharya in Mail Today, the Modi government had hired APCO Worldwide in 2009, as the official ‘relationship partner’ for its Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summit 2011. “APCO boasts an International Advisory Council which comprises more than 40 recognized global leaders, including former elected US politicians, leaders of business and industry, academics at leading universities, world-class journalists, NGOs and non-profit pioneers, diplomats as well as policy experts.” The report further says that APCO worked with Gujarat government, CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) and the London headquartered global professional services firm Pricewaterhhouse Coopers (PwC) for the event that culminated in the pledges worth a staggering USD 463 billion for the state.” These are the pledges that the CMIE report cited above found misleading and, may we add, fudged.

We do not know what exactly was the agreement that the Modi government signed with APCO but it certainly paid off. APCO, incidentally not only has pro Zionist links, but one can see the kind of agreement they signed with the government of Malaysia in the scanned copies provided here, where it charged USD 420, 000 for doing its job – ‘Washington Representation’ being a key task it undertook.

There are other dimensions of operations of the PR-spin-doctoring machinery and I can do no better here than cite from the following report by Srinivasan Jain:

The Modi PR machine never sleeps, but in election time, goes into overdrive.

There are his surreal, and much publicised 3D speeches, 29 Vikas Raths equipped with projectors, and 10 LED Raths, each with a 110″ screen, which roam interior villages.

His personal website has been given a spanking new election upgrade. As has his other social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook page and Youtube channel.

The frequency of advertisements on TV, print and online have multiplied. And he also has his own TV channel: NaMo Gujarat, which was launched just before the [2012] elections.

But who runs this for Mr Modi, and who pays for it? As with most things related to Mr Modi, the answers are not easy to come by. The Modi spin machine appears to use a mix of official, quasi-official and private players, with fragmented responsibilities, a structure that allows for grey areas of accounting and accountability.

And while we are at it, the link in the blog by Prashant Panday, might be useful to give a larger background of APCO and its worldwide activities.

And so it happened that suddenly one fine day, the Indian corporate sector too decided that it will throw its lot behind Narendra Modi – tired as it was of what it calls ‘policy paralysis’ in the UPA government. As my friend Vipul Mudgal never dails to underline, the term ‘policy paralysis’ does not refer to the delays in say, passing the Food Security Bill or the Lokpal Bill; they always and only refer to decisions regarding investments and the so-called slowing down of reforms. And so, here at last was a strong man who would take strong decisions. And lo and behold! journalists, academics, representatives of capital – all started suddenly marching in tandem, singing praises for this new hero. Newsrooms of the corporate media have already begun to feel the pressure. The grapevine tells us that in one leading newspaper the editor/owner even gave specific instructions that Modi would be their man for 2014. So, Madhu Kishwar is not really the lone crusaders she wants us to believe she is. She is part of a regular army that has been drafted for the cause, whether she realizes it or not is another matter.

Anti-Secularisms of Different Hues

A final point. Secularism bashing has gone on quite long now and while there are serious problems with our secular discourse, the time may have come to think more seriously about what it is about secularism that we are criticizing. ‘Anti-secularism’ has now become like a mantra that some people like to repeat. However, there is a world of a difference between the anti-secularism of Ashis Nandy and the anti-secularism of Madhu Kishwar. To Ashis, secularism is to be criticized because it is of a piece with Development and the logic of the Nation-State. Secularism, in Nandy’s understanding, is imbricated in the founding violence of the modern as such – which is why to him the dream of a strong security state represented by the BJP and people like Modi in particular are anathema. For the Hindutva ideology (and its imagined state), he does not fail to remind us, is simply modeled on the modern state as it emerged in the West. That is why, Nandy never fails to remind us that ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities as the exist today are but creations of the modern state which want to do away with the inchoateness of popular religious beliefs and institute in its place a homogeneous community that speaks in one authoritative voice. Madhu Kishwar’s anti-secularism is the direct opposite of Nandy’s, deeply imbricated and invested in the idea of Development and the Nation-State. It is an ‘unthought’ that stands in for everything ‘Western’ that she wants to disavow (while celebrating the nation-state, nationalism, development and neo-liberalism). Her anti-secularism can as easily be deployed in defense of khap panchayats as it can in defense of Narendra Modi.

While one must hold on to the important insights that the critique of secularism in the last few decades has yielded, there is no denying that even that secularism was motivated by a strong ethical desire to redefine the Indian self in a way that was inclusive. As such it was always critical of its own tradition – sometimes aggressively so, which is what the critique of secularism highlights. The anti-secularism of the Madhu Kishwar kind is nothing but a kind of xenophobic ‘narcissism of the self’ – once again defined in ‘Indic’/ Hindu terms, where the Muslim is always destined to remain the other.

From http://kafila.org/2013/04/18/spin-doctors-propagandists-and-the-modi-make-over/

Detroit: The Olympics of Restructuring

Details: Published on Tuesday, 09 April 2013 16:51

Detroit: The Olympics of Restructuring

by Dianne Feeley

March 17, 2013

On March 14, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder announced the appointment of Kevyn Orr, named last year as one of Washington DC’s top bankruptcy attorneys by Washingtonian Magazine, as an Emergency Financial Manager for Detroit under Public Act 72. Essentially this puts Detroit in receivership.

Detroiters marching against Lansing's imposition of an Emergency Manager.

This position, created under a Michigan law that many Michiganders believe is a figment of the state government’s imagination, will be converted into an Emergency Manager once Public Act 436, passed during the lame-duck session after an earlier EM law was voted down in the November 2012 election. The EM law that was passed in March 2012 was suspended once the referendum signatures were submitted last summer but the Governor and legislature claimed this revived Public Act 72. However, that was a hotly disputed interpretation!

Nonetheless six Michigan communities—Allen Park, Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Highland Park, Pontiac, all formerly industrialized working-class towns, and except for Allen Park with heavy majority African-American populations—and three school districts—Detroit, Highland Park and Muskegon Heights—operated under Emergency Managers who then became EFMs and will once again be converted into Emergency Managers when Public Act 436 takes effect March 28. With the addition of Detroit, nearly two-thirds of the state’s African Americans will be under state oversight.

Orr is an African American with an unflappable personality. Appointed by a Republican Governor, he is a Democrat who will be paid $275,000 a year by the state under an open-ended contract. His “incidental costs” in order to relocate to Detroit and perform his duties will be privately raised, according to State Treasurer Andy Dillon (a career politician and also, incidentally, a Democrat).

Orr has resigned his partnership in the prestigious Jones Day law firm. As an expert in restructuring and bankruptcy, he represented Chrysler in its 2009 bankruptcy and pointed out how successful Chrysler has now come roaring back.

At the press conference where Orr was introduced to the city by Snyder, he exhibited confidence in being able to turn around Detroit. He called his job being in “the Olympics of restructuring,” but stated that with cooperation he could accomplish his task in as little as three to six months. This is an amazing boast given the structural problems of Detroit. Flint, for example, has been in state receivership since 2002!

Given Detroit’s long-term liabilities of approximately $15 billion — with $600 million a year in debt service to banks and $5.7 billion in city retirees’ health care benefit -- the press asked if Orr was going to take the city through bankruptcy. He said he didn’t want “to pull out that cudgel unless I have to.” To avoid that process, Orr proposes negotiating with the city labor unions, vendors and bondholders.

Once Orr’s powers are extended when Public Act 436 takes effect, he can be the sole negotiator with unions over collective bargaining. He can reject or change existing contracts, consolidate or eliminate city departments, hire consultants, contract out services and even sell off city assets with the approval of state government. However many of these have already taken place under city government and the consent agreement city government signed with the state last year.

Here are a few examples:

Management of the Detroit Department of Transportation was contracted out by Mayor Dave Bing in 2011 and has since been subcontracted.
The Public Lighting Department is undergoing a seven-year transition to turn its customer base over to DTE Energy. The department is already buying all of its energy — instead of upgrading its own facilities. Part of the transition includes reducing 88,000 street lights (58,000 operational) to 46,000. According to the plan, the more “distressed” areas of the city will retain only 30-40% of their current number.
The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, built over 150-year period, operates a fresh water and discharge system to the city and suburbs. A report commissioned by the department last summer called for outsourcing billing, maintenance and other functions and reducing its work force by over 80%. Yet no-bid contracts are rewarded while there is has been little to no worker/community review. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Commission, which has been turned into a regional body, just issued a “Final Compliance Report” in order to end the federal oversight that has existed over the last 35 years. The report recommends turning the department into an independent public authority supervised by regional commissioners.
The Department of Human Services has been turned over to Wayne (county) Metro Community Action Agency, whose board members mainly reside in wealthy suburbs.
The Planning and Development Department is being run by the quasi-private Detroit Economic Development Corporation.

Federal and state tax collection returns fewer dollars to cities these days. At the federal level the military budget and the war on terrorism absorbs more than half of the annual budget. At the state level, Michigan is mandated to share its tax collection with municipalities and counties. One stream of revenue sharing is constitutionally guaranteed but the other portion is statutory. Since 2001 state tax collection has declined about four percent but the fiscal decline has been used to cheat municipalities out of their fair share of revenue. Between 2001 and 2010 Detroit lost about $450 million. While state tax revenue declined four percent during that period, the Michigan Municipal League pointed out that payments to Detroit dropped 28%.

Detroit’s Problems Suggest Solutions

Detroit’s main problem is the lack of jobs. For every 100 residents, 27 have jobs. (By comparison, in Philadelphia it is 35, in Atlanta it is 73.)

Forty percent live and work within the city (71,000), the majority work in the suburbs (111,000). More than 160,000 commute to work from the suburbs. Forty percent of the Detroiters who work in the suburbs earn less than $15,000 a year. Meanwhile many companies located in Detroit don’t bother to deduct the non-resident city income tax for their commuting suburbanite workers – resulting in enormous losses for the city. (DTE Energy alone, which cuts off gas and electricity for thousands of Detroiters behind on their bills, is said to have cheated the city of $15 million.)

Beginning in the early 1950s corporations moved plant operations to the suburbs and beyond, and many Detroiters followed. We are now a city of less than 700,000 with 40% of the 140-square miles vacant. More than 70 sites are toxic waste dumps. Since 1999, with the first state takeover of the public schools, the city has only had control over the school district for two years. Schools have been shut down; charters have mushroomed along with the school debt.

Services have declined while taxes on home properties have not been decreased nor mortgages brought into line with their market value. For example, last summer the Occupy Detroit Eviction Defense Committee organized a four-week vigil to prevent the sheriff for evicting a family whose mortgage was valued at $140,000 while it was assessed for market value of $20,000. Unless a family is willing to carry out a public campaign against the banks and Fannie Mae, the government agency that backs them, they usually end up abandoning the house and creating one emptier house in the neighborhood. It then gets stripped by professional thieves.

While Governor Snyder and newly appointed EMF Kevyn Orr claim they will move to generate community cooperation by getting buses running on time and fixing the broken street lights and by having quicker response time from police, fire and emergency service, the reality is that they will not develop a jobs program — in fact, they will continue the policy of laying off public sector workers.

Just as in other countries facing austerity, Detroiters will be expected to have fewer services and more low-wage jobs. More than a third of city residents live in households with an income below the poverty line. What will cutting retiree benefits do for the 11.5% of Detroiters already retired? It will decrease their ability to access health care and reduce their quality of life.

What Governor Snyder and EMF Orr could do in addition to developing a jobs program -- cleaning up toxic waste dumps, renovating and weatherizing buildings and converting closed plants into developing non-fossil energy sources — is to call public meetings so that residents can review the budget and understand the nature of the deficit. Let there be a people’s audit, where one of the obvious demands requires banks take a haircut.

One example: according to a 2011 public filing, Detroit had $3.8 billion in outstanding variable interest-rate swaps. These were sold to the city in a series of transactions beginning in 1997, supposedly to hedge interest-rate risk. Clearly Wall Street sold public officials a bill of goods and now we are expected to pay for this robbery. Such an odious debt should be repudiated, not paid back with interest to boot!

Although the Detroit City Council fussed over the imposition of the Emergency Manager, the majority—along with Mayor Dave Bing—have now decided to join the Orr “team.” Orr will try to sweet-talk residents; the foundations that support the Emergency Manager (and charter schools) and have roots in neighborhood associations and urban gardens will do their part to back him up.

Clearly resistance must come from below. The National Action Network has taken a lead by calling an action the day Orr was appointed. A union-sponsored action will confront the Governor when he returns to Detroit March 18. But much more is needed than symbolic actions. Many union members were very angry that the day right-to-work-for-less passed in Lansing, Jimmy Hoffa and Bob King only called for turning the scoundrels out of office in 2014. Why not use workplaces as organizing centers and move toward collective action?

Occupy Detroit Eviction Defense Committee will be demonstrating at noon Wednesday, March 20 in front of the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office, 400 Monroe, in Detroit’s Greektown. The following day the action will be at the Michigan State Housing Authority Office, State of Michigan Building, 3028 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit. These demonstrations will link the Detroit debt to tax foreclosures. The reality is that the State of Michigan holds $204 million in federal Hardest Hit Homeowner funds for homeowners to pay off delinquent property tax bills so there is no excuse why any homeowner should lose his/her home to a tax foreclosure—but 42,000 are scheduled for tax foreclosure in 2013.

After a home is foreclosed, Wayne County sells it at an auction for a fraction of the amount owned however the full amount is charged to the city. This year alone Detroit will pay out over $80 million in these charges. So stopping tax foreclosures will aid homeowners, stabilize communities and save Detroit millions of dollars.

The solutions to Detroit’s problems are in front of us.

Dianne Feeley is a retired autoworker and editor of Against the Current. She lives in Detroit.

From http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3831

Book Review of Beyond Capitalism? by Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy

Details: Published on Saturday, 30 March 2013 13:32

Future Left

March 29, 2013 11:02 pm

Left debates, Marxism, Reviews

no comments

Phil Hearse reviews Beyond Capitalism? by Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy (Zero Books 2012)

There could hardly be a more timely book for the socialist left, facing in most countries a dual crisis. On the one hand since 2008 the working class has faced a brutal austerity offensive which has not been thrown back. On the other, partially as a result of the austerity offensive and working class defeats, the socialist left has suffered a series of political defeats which have seen organisations in several countries decay, split or go into crisis. Closely connected with the far left crisis is the fate of the global justice, ‘anti-capitalist’, movement which announced itself spectacularly at the November 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle.

When I heard about the Seattle demonstrations I rashly predicted “Now the American left is going to grow spectacularly”. At a big London conference the next year a speaker from Global Exchange in the US said to huge enthusiasm from the audience “We’re winning”. In July 2001 the huge demonstrations at the Genoa G8 summit were politically dominated by Italian Communist Refoundation with a significant input from the Fourth International – Fausto Bertinotti and Olivier Besancenot were the key speakers at the main rally. The global justice movement was on the offensive and the militant left seemed to have a significant role in it.

Twelve years on the situation seems very different, despite the Occupy movement and despite the Arab Spring. Obviously the main objective factors that changed were the post-9/11 situation which enabled the huge new military-political offensive of American imperialism and its allies; and the financial collapse of 2008 and the utterly ruthless offensive against working class living standards that followed.

For Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy, two young militants of the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, the thing to be explained is this:

“The capitalist crisis poses profound questions about the future of left wing politics because of its sheer depth and severity…After all, in these conditions radical political ideas should be striking a major chord amongst millions of workers. If they are not we have to look hard at ourselves.” (1)

Part of the problem, obviously is the relative weakness of anti-capitalist ideas in most parts of the world:

“In most countries in the world not only is acceptance of capitalism fundamental to the assumptions of the major political parties, but a specific variant of neoliberal ideology has come to be seen as the exclusive road down which politics must travel.” (2)

Contemporary mass movement

This reflects itself in the weakness of anti-capitalist mass consciousness. But more than this, there seems like a perennial problem in the existing revolutionary left linking up with major movements of resistance and in particular with the young rebels who emerged in the global justice movement, going through the anti-war movement, the various Social Forums and into such contemporary mass movement as the Indignados and Occupy!

That doesn’t mean, they point out, that militant leftists don’t play leading roles in the movements and protests, indeed they do especially in labour movement based campaigns, but their leading roles are often quite separate from their identity as political militants. This problem seems particularly obvious during the anti-war movement of 2002-3, when in Britain the Socialist Workers Party led a coalition which mobilised two million on the streets but failed to grow at all. By contrast the Vietnam movement in the late 1960s, much smaller in numbers, saw every left organisation grow.

Luke and Simon explain that thy were themselves radicalised during the upsurge of the anti-capitalist movement, and the failure to effect a junction between the existing revolutionary left and the anti-capitalist movement is a theme to which they continually return. Their argument on this is quite nuanced but it is the pivot on which much of their basic position relies. Briefly summed up it goes like this:

Resistance movements are themselves pressured by ‘capitalist realism’ and “still largely remain within the assumptions of liberal democratic ideology” (3).
The way that this is expressed among many youthful protestors is a disastrous rejection of ‘politics’.
BUT the strength of these movements has been their democratic and participatory ethos and practice, their rejection of rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic procedures and their capacity for rapid initiative from below – in other words the things that precisely differentiate them from much of the existing revolutionary left.
By contrast, the existing revolutionary left is dogmatic, wedded to routinist, uninspiring and non-participatory events, and above all cleaves to a form of ‘democratic centralism’ that is top heavy and (at the very least) outdated.

They say:

“The positive side of the current political conjuncture is that it exposes the limitations in the political practices and philosophy of the organised left and the libertarian activist milieu simultaneously. A growing number of activists, who might be labeled ‘libertarians’ or ‘Trots’, depending which side of the divide you are on, are starting to question the limitations of their preferred form of organisation. If activists from the libertarian left are starting to see the social power of organised working class action is crucial to the resistance to austerity, then new organisational forms can also start to overcome other differences. For the ‘old left’ far less dogmatism in their organisational and ideological assumptions coupled with genuine attempts to build organic unity among socialists would go a long way to reach a situation where we no longer ‘old and ‘new’ as dichotomies.” (4)

The authors then temper this with an insistence that this does not mean an attempt at eclectically muddling irreconcilable positions and quite rightly they take aim at people who dodge the question of government and political power with the pipe dream “that we can create a prefigurative space within capital that has a liberating function somehow outside the power relations of the system”(5).

Zinoviev’s legacy

Now we come to the $64,000 question, or rather series of $64,000 questions for the existing far left. Is it really true that the style, practices and hierarchies of the existing ‘Leninist’ organisations repel young rebels and indeed militants in the workers and other movements? Of course not all these organisations are the same, but in Britain the major far left organisations (the SWP and SP) have a hierarchical conception of Leninism that has been pressurised by Stalinism and is at least ‘Zinovievist’ – having features of the top-down version of Leninism imposed on the Comintern by Zinoviev in the early 1920s. The trade union movement and campaign organisations are littered with ex-members of the different far left organisations whose basic politics hasn’t changed but whose ability to cope with this version of ‘the party’ has. Typically these organisations express extreme factional hostility to members of other organisations, have a highly manipulative attitude to the movements in which they participate, severely limit rights of internal discussion not minutely led from above, operate a more-or-less complete ban on public discussion of differences and have leaderships that preserve enormous privileges of private discussion and self-renewal by proposing themselves on the leadership slate.

In the Zinovievist sects there is a tremendous pressure towards conformity and obedience, and a huge price to be paid for dissidence, even on quite secondary questions. For Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy this cuts against the spirit of the times, which is towards greater personal freedom.

I think there’s a good deal of truth in that and young people naturally bristle against artificially imposed authority. On the other hand the zeitgeist of the times is not just the desire for individual freedom but a spirit of individualism promoted by neoliberalism. Rejection of all forms of collectivism, majority votes and disciplined action will disable any form of politics. And of course there are still plenty of radical intellectuals who don’t want to be beholden to anyone or anything, least of all a political organisation.

One other caveat here is that all the organisations that referred to the tradition of Trotsky and the Left Opposition cannot be tarred with the same brush. In particular there are many sections of the Fourth International (FI) who wouldn’t recognise this picture at all and the FI’s tradition is generally one of valuing differences and debate – and often expressing these in public. But it has to be said that some of the more restrictive ‘norms’ of ersatz Leninism have their origin in the US Socialist Workers Party, a long-time key component of the Fourth International, under James P. Cannon, codified in a document published in 1965 but stretching way back before that (6).

Rebels, socialists, revolutionaries are bound to make plenty of enemies. It is not to the discredit of the existing far left organisations that right-wingers hate them; on the other hand the snarling factionalism of the ‘combat party’ automatically creates disabling and usually pointless disunity. ‘Everybody hates us, we don’t care!’ may suffice for Millwall football fans, but should not be a guiding principle for a revolutionary organisation.

Now what?

So what is to be done? The authors have a wide-ranging discussion of the experience of the left, particularly in Europe, in the last decade which ranges over the question of politics and the movements, as well as the experience of trying to form new left parties – experiences that have been extremely diverse. In making proposals for the future inevitably there are as many questions as precise answers. The framework however is perhaps contained in their assessment of the experience of the ‘Social Forum’ movement, perhaps the main institutional expression of the global justice movement:

“The post-1999 social movements have shown that potentially millions can be thrown into struggle and resistance to capitalism and for a fundamental social change. But for all the ideological impetus that drove many of these movements, they also paradoxically gave expression to the post-political logic that engulfed the world after 1989, because the social forums were consciously limited to the task of aggregating together diverse campaigns in a manner that retained their social movement as opposed to political movement character. It was not that the forums weren’t highly political – they were. These events bore witness to a vast outpouring of discussion on an array of themes. But they ultimately lacked a strategic perspective for social transformation; a strategy to move from protest to a real challenge for power. And it is the latter that would have necessitated a discussion around new political formations as part of a process of attempting to cohere together what Marxists have traditionally referred to as an ‘international – ie a global political party that seeks to overcome national antagonisms and move towards the transcendence of capital. ” (7)

In the section ‘Drawing Conclusions’ the authors note that the situation is becoming more conducive to overcoming ‘capitalist realism’ – the idea that there is no alternative. While expressing caution towards Paul Mason’s idea that “the age of capitalist realism is over” (8) they argue that the common idea of a decade ago that the market, democracy and modernity go together is taking a severe battering. Rampant corruption and declining living standards are going hand in hand swingeing attacks on democracy. How can the left take advantage of this situation? Simply summed up, Luke and Simon suggest:

The crisis of the left is still the crisis of the sect
This fuels a drive towards new political formations
New programmatic definitions will gradually over time through practice
A pluralistic Marxism is needed
The left needs to reclaim the idea of democracy
Electoral and trade activity needs to be linked with grassroots activity ‘from below’ and community struggles.

This of course is a huge agenda to be worked out in detail and practice. Of course it is impossible for anyone to suck the solutions to the problems of the left out of their thumbs. These will only emerge over time through struggle. But it is essential to know “where to begin”. The authors identify key problems with eloquence and go a long way to establishing a practical agenda for a refounded Marxist left. I will just stress two final points.

The book is evidently weak on the issues of feminism and the environment but these will be vital in establishing the parameters of a future left.
The whole argument about unity points in the direction of the creation of a new anti-capitalist party – and this has to be out front and upfront. There will be those who will want to interpret the critique of sect functioning as being a rejection of the party form tout court, in favour of the endless circular networking of campaigns and initiatives, with no overall political coherence or direction. A long term war of position that can go ‘beyond capitalism’ requires the building of a party that can strike the political blows to the left of Labour that UKIP does to the right of the Tories. Simultaneously it is inevitable that there will be a pressure towards the co-ordination in a more coherent and structured way of a refounded centre of pluralistic Marxism.

It is through these processes that we can build a Future Left in the true spirit of the founder of Marxism:

“Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.” (Marx to Ruge, September 1843).

Notes:

Beyond Capitalism p2
Beyond Capitalism p3
Ibid p11, see also p99ff
Ibid p96
Ibid p97
See for example James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
Op Cit pp140-141
Op Cit p153

Major setbacks for the Irish socialist movement

Details: Published on Thursday, 21 March 2013 17:16

Major setbacks for the Irish socialist movement

Where do we go from here?

Socialist Democracy -- Ireland

The programme of the coalition government - a plea for European help with the promissory note, has collapsed. They implemented a second bailout, with no choice but to try to escape the humiliation by pretending that it isn't happening - that really we are being helped by a mortgage. By 2054 the €64 billion will seem like nothing! There are serious divisions in the Labour party, with many members suspecting that they have committed electoral suicide. The leading sections of the trade union bureaucracy have been flushed from cover, standing beside the government and bosses in a plan to slash another billion from public service pay and having signed off on mass privatization and the decay of public services.

Opportunity

This should represent a major opportunity for the socialist movement in Ireland. In fact it is unable to take advantage of the possibilities for advance because of major setbacks which in turn reflect big policy weaknesses.

The ULA has fragmented and largely collapsed as a movement. CAHWT - the campaign against household changes, was easily the most active opposition movement. But it also has fragmented. A strategy based solely on non-payment proved unviable. No-one has looked back at this failure and the movement has now switched to a strategy of civil disobedience that, on its own, is also unviable.

Electoralism

The fact is that the Socialist movement, faced by an all-out offensive and with labour and trade union leaders supporting austerity, did not advance a socialist programme. Instead they concentrated on electoral politics and stood as a loyal oppo-sition to ICTU and its policy of Keynesian reform while ICTU itself used platitudes about investing for jobs as cover for its support for austerity and alliance with the coalition government.

The February 9th demonstration was a classical example of this. The Union opposition to the budget was really a lobbying call for minor elements of a wealth tax. They openly supported the €3.1 billion cuts that could only be borne by the working class. They followed with a “lift the burden” demonstration that was all too clearly making a common cause with government and bosses for mercy from Europe. The socialists ignore reality, convincing themselves that any demonstration will do, whatever its leadership or aims. Even when Croke Park II is unveiled a routine no vote campaign is organised, in the face of statements that a no vote will be overridden and a much wider movement is needed.

Yet there is still a burning desire to fight back in sections of the working class. Not only did many stand up to the state in refusing to pay the household charge, they had a very clear understanding of the extent to which they had been solid out by Labour and ICTU bosses. So clearly did they express popular opinion that the union bosses collaborated with the Garda to kettle them on the last Dublin demonstration. There was however no need to kettle the socialist groups!

Basic demands

We urgently need a new movement that can popularise basic demands of resistance and build a renewed action campaign.

A mass campaign to force Labour out of government would open up existing divisions among our opponents and has the potential to pull the plug on the government.

Mobilising against Social Partnership and Croke Park II must not be restricted to voting or to public service workers. Implementation of the new deal will drive wages down across the board and eat away the social wage we expect in the form of public services. A broad campaign would open the possibility of independent workers organization and action and weaken the grip of the union bureaucracy.

Struggle

It is possible that the new United Left group could provide the beginnings of resistance. It would have to make a sharp turn away from the Dail and electoralism in favour of organisation on the streets and a political break from a call for a gentler capitalism towards implementing the left’s initial policy of repudiating the debt and intransigent opposition to all aspects of austerity. The regional anti-austerity campaigns associated with the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes are much more militant, but lack a developed political position and have been set back by the concentration on a single non-payment tactic that has clearly failed.

The basic problem is that it is much easier to organise on a community basis rather than inside ossified union structures, but any community movement, to succeed, has to turn to the working class and organise on a class basis.

It will be a struggle to slow or stop the offensive. The starting point is a movement that starts with the needs of the workers, rather than electoral concerns and organises in action to bring together union activists and community activists in new structures that assert the class independence of the workers.

We should be organising an national convention now to remobilise the movement.

The right to choose. Socialism and women's rights in Ireland

Details: Published on Thursday, 21 March 2013 17:15

The right to choose. Socialism and women's rights in Ireland

Socialist Democracy, Ireland

The death of Sativa Halappanavar after having been refused an abortion sparked a storm of protest and a renewed discussion of woman's rights, occurring mainly within the ranks of United Left Alliance. The debate centred around a reformist perspective calling for legislation to rationalize and codify medical responsibility where a woman's life is at risk, opposed by the demand that we call for a women's right to choose.

The reformist perspective was that politicians were under pressure and there was broad public support for limited reform. By joining in this call socialists could help win this reform and produce an environment conducive of further advances.

The alternative view was that socialists were in principle in support of the right to choose and, that by striking when the iron is hot, they could swing popular opinion behind them.

A sign of the coming demise of the ULA and its endemic electoralism and reformism came in a dishonest and mealy-mouthed ULA statement of December 16th. Listing a number of health issues it went on to say:

“Many think that it should be up to a woman, in consultation with her doctor, to decide if she should continue with a pregnancy. We support all of these arguments – which give women the choice”.

Health issues and consultations with doctors do not add up to the right to choose. The perspective that the ULA took was the reformist one. Events since then have shown how inadequate that perspective was. It fails to distinguish between public sentiment, mobilizations and the creation of a full-blown movement. It sees any reform as a permanent step forward, refusing to acknowledge that any rights under capitalism are subject to abolition as the needs of capital change.

The initial mobilizations died away. The church, the virulent Catholic right-wing and forces within the governing Fine Gael party have all mobilized. Legislation will be brought forward but, rather than providing an environment for further advance, the discussion is about whether or not women should be allowed a "suicide clause" - that is whether the risk of suicide can be included as a threat to the life of the woman.

The call for the right to choose has the advantage of bringing together the genuinely democratic forces in Irish society and giving them a programme around which they can unite. However this is not sufficient if it is linked to the idea that, if we strike while the iron is hot, we can win over public opinion.

The feminist movement in Ireland has faced a strategic crisis for many years. In the '60s and '70s many feminists saw their movement as linked to the Republican and socialist movements. Their gradual decline saw a growth in belief in the modernisng influence of imperialism - especially that of Britain in the North and of Europe south of the border. That belief has been eaten away as a modernizing facade has been replaced by an all-out assault designed to push workers' rights to the levels of the 19th Century.

The decay of capitalism means that levels of democracy and of individual rights will constantly be eaten away and that democratic movements that operate only within the con-fines of capitalism are bound to be disappointed.

The members of Socialist Democracy believe that socialists should stand foursquare behind the call for a woman's right to choose. We do not oppose partial reform, will gladly work with anyone fighting for this and will welcome any gains.

For ourselves however, we consistently call for the right of women to choose and call for feminists to join in the fight for a socialist republic. We do this, not because it is a short cut to victory, but because without these principles the journey has not yet begun.

Resist predatory Capitalism, Oppose the ADB

Details: Published on Sunday, 17 March 2013 06:46

The recently formed "PEOPLES FRONT against IFIs", an alliance of movements and struggle groups in India is organising the "PEOPLES FORUM against IFIs" during the forthcoming ADB-AGM in India.

A draft call and forum-programme is appended below for endorsements by organisations. If you want to endorse, please e-mail Wilfred at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Our planet is not for sale!

ADB Quit India! Quit Asia!

We, peoples’ movements, mass organisations, struggle groups, trade unions, community organisations and many others from India and the Asia-Pacific region, call for a protest against the 46th Annual Board of Governors’ Meeting (AGM) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Greater Noida, Delhi during May 2-5, 2013. The AGM will make decisions on key development issues for the Asia-Pacific region, that will affect all of us now and in the future. India, which is touted as ‘the emerging power in the region’ and in the ADB, is hosting the AGM for the third time to showcase and endorse a ‘development through empowerment’ model put forth by the ADB. In fact, over the years, the Indian ruling class has been working hand in glove with the ADB in a mutually beneficial complicity at the expense of hundreds of millions of poor, marginalised and other toiling sections of the society.

The ADB has earned the notorious title of actually being an “Anti-human Destructive Bank,” whose devastating acts are not limited to India, but are evident across the Asia-Pacific region and also at the global level in collusion with the World Bank, Internanational Monetary Fund (IMF) and other institutions of global capitalism. Likewise, our protest and resistance is not limited to the ADB but extends to all International Financial Institutions (IFIs) whose primary missions are to appropriate and commodify the natural, human and social wealth of the planet, and force nations into indebtedness and political subordination.

A self-acclaimed "development" financial institution, the ADB claims to combat poverty in the region. But its poverty reduction strategy is merely a masquerade for prescribing a doomed model of rapid economic growth powered by the privatisation, commodification and financialisation of natural resources and basic needs like water, power, education, etc. Under the guise of “good governance,” the ADB supports profit-mongering, un-accountable and non-transparent private sectors. The Long-Term Strategy Framework (Strategy 2020) of the Bank is a recipe for the transfer of wealth, means and capacities from the poor and middle classes to the wealthy, upper classes. Using grand slogans such as ‘inclusive growth’, ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘regional integration’, the Strategy 2020 focuses on private sector development and explicitly advocates private sector participation in ADB and borrower operations. In 2011, the Bank spent nearly $6 billion as private sector finance. Not surprisingly, in India the number of billionaires rose from 2 with a combined worth of $2 billion in the mid-1990s, to 46 in 2012 with a total net worth of $176 billion!

With nearly $22 billion in annual financial investment for nearly 350 projects (loans, grants, equity investments and Technical Assistance) in Asia-Pacific, governments have given the ADB a mandate to direct the development path for the region. Under the pretext of addressing environmental and climate crises and alleviating poverty, the ADB continues to displace and alienate large numbers of people from their lands, homes, water sources and forests, and violates their rights to livelihood, ctizenship and participation in decision making.

Join hands against the ADB AGM

While it is our governments who borrow, the onus of debt repayment falls on the public exchequer and the people of the country, and is transferred to subsequent generations and the environment. Debt repayment depletes scarce foreign exchange reserves, and redirects national revenues away from spending on essential public goods such as education, health, housing, water, sanitation, electricity and job-creation towards servicing an upward spiralling illegitimate debt.

The struggles, movements and campaigns against ADB funded projects in West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, J&K, Himachal Pradesh, and the North Eastern States take this opportunity to expose the ADB’ collusion with the Indian Government to enable the concentration of wealth, resources and capacities in the hands of the economic-political elites. People led by vibrant struggles in these states to halt nuclear power, land and water grabbing, forced evictions, anti-people laws, farmers suicides and environmental destruction send out this appeal to challenge the asymmetrical, ill-designed and anti-people development prescriptions of the ADB.

The 2013 ADB AGM in Delhi offers a much-needed opportunity for us to come together to expose the destructive developmental model promoted by the ADB and our governments. We invite all of you to join us in voicing our opposition to institutions like the ADB, which mutilate our democratic institutions, perpetrate untold violence on our societies and foster continuing marginalization and pauperization of our peoples.

ADB QUIT INDIA! QUIT ASIA!

PEOPLESFRONTagainst IFIs

ENDORSED BY:

India:

Adivasi Moolvasi Astitva Raksha Manch (Jharkhand), All India Forum of Forest Movements (AIFFM), All India Union of Forest Working people ( AIUFWP/NFFPFW), Andhra Pradesh Muslim Organization, Citizens Forum for Mangalore Development, Himalaya Niti Abhiyan, Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), Kabani - the other direction, Mines, minerals & People (MmP), Nadi Ghati Morcha, National Fishworkers Forum (KSMTF), National Hawkers Federation, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS), Radical Socialist & others

Asia:

FOCUS on the Global South, Asia-Pacific Movement on Debt & Development (Jubilee South)

Asian Countries:

****************************DRAFT PROGRAMME******************************************
PEOPLESFORUMagainst IFIs -May2013,NewDelhi

organisedby: PeoplesFrontagainstIFI's

Venue:Auditorium-YMCA,GreaterNoida(http://newdelhiymca.in/gnpc.php)

2May2013(Thursday)-"ADB:QuitIndia&Asia!"

08.30am:Demonstrations&protestmeetingsoutsideADB-AGMvenue(GreaterNoida)

Protestdemonstrations,publicmeetingsetc.indifferentpartsofIndia

OPENFORUM: 01.30am-05600pm:UnderstandingthePoliticalEconomyofIFIs

3May2013(Friday)

08.30am-09.30am:DemonstrationsoutsideADB-AGMvenue

11.00am-01.30pm:Panelon"ADBvision&mission-Alienatingpeopleandurbanpoor,encouragingprivatecapital"

02.30pm-05.30pm:Panelon"ContributingtoClimateChange-ADB'sClimateHypocricy"

4May2013(Saturday)

08.30am-09.30am:DemonstrationsoutsideADB-AGMvenue

11.00am-01.30pm:Panelon"ADB&naturalresources:ResistingADB'sprivatisationagenda"

02.30pm-05.30pm:Panelon"AreIFI'saccountabletocitizen's&democraticinstitutions?TradeUnionsandpoliticalpartiesdemandingpublicoversightandsocialauditofIFIprojects&programs"

5May2013(Sunday)

08.30am-09.30am:DemonstrationsoutsideADB-AGMvenue

11.00am-02-00pm:ConcludingOpenSession:"WaysforwardinresistingIFIs-thestrugglecontinues"

VIBGYOR-minifilmfestival:"CelebratingResistances against IFIs & Globalisation"curated by film-maker K P Sasi: 2May-4May:2.00pmto08.00pmin"MeetingRoom - P4"

Secretariat:

Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF)

New Delhi, India

www.insafindia.net

The US SWP in Decline -- Review of Barry Sheppard

Details: Published on Saturday, 16 March 2013 12:49

Barry Sheppard, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988, A Political Memoir (London: Resistance Books, n.d. [2012]), 349pp., $18.

by Joe Auciello

Today’s generation of young revolutionary activists, whatever their current political allegiance, can hardly be faulted if they are largely indifferent to and ignorant of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the USA. In the lifetime of this generation, the SWP has made itself irrelevant – and worse – to current social struggles by adopting positions that are sectarian, foolish, or even bizarre. Overall, the SWP has succeeded in creating a special and unenviable niche for itself: They are an isolated group on the sidelines of politics who self-righteously condemn today’s radical movements as insufficiently “communist.”

It was not always this way and never had to be. In previous decades the SWP participated in, was shaped by, and to some extent led political movements as they arose and developed. The SWP was one of the strongest sections of the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938. It remained an important force despite two major blows, one in 1940 when a debate over the nature of the USSR and the attitude to be taken when it entered a war led to a major split, and the second in 1953 when a tendency led by Bert Cochran and George Clark split, urging the dissolution of Trotskyist parties. The SWP majority were a major force of orthodox Trotskyism, playing an important role in defending the view that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state, and opposing Michel Pablo’s line, though after some hesitations.[1] During the Cold War and the anti-communist witchhunt, there was limited prospect for growth. The organization was somewhat isolated. Recruitment was reduced to a handful and the generation of members from the 1930s and 1940s aged. Also, the federal government and local police agencies recruited informers, infiltrated, and disrupted the SWP and other left organizations. What changed it was the Cuban Revolution, which was viewed by a large part of the Trotskyist movement as something different from the Stalinist revolutions from above. The SWP played an important role in defence of the revolution, setting up Fair Play for Cuba Committees.

The SWP also seriously supported the Civil RIghts movement and participated in it. Also, the SWP defended and promoted the ideas of Malcolm X and Black nationalism. The latter point is especially significant. Unfortunately, the SWP had most of its members in the North, while much of the civil rights struggle was concentrated in the South. Between 1959 and 1963, the SWP also played an important role in fighting for the reunification of the Fourth International, leading to the Unification Congress of 1963.

As a result, in the 1960s and the first years of the 1970s SWP membership grew again. In 1960 the Young Socialist Alliance was set up with about 130 members. By the early 1970s the SWP and the YSA together had over 2000 members. In the decades of the 1960s and into the 1970s alone, the party accomplished important work in the antiwar movement, and in the struggles for women’s liberation, Black rights, including the 1970s desegregation battle in Boston, and the gay rights movement. The SWP took the initiative to sue the federal government for violation of the party’s democratic rights and ultimately won an important victory for the entire left. The SWPwas an internationalist organization that supported revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, and did its best to limit the ability of Democratic and Republican presidents alike to crush these revolutionary movements who were bold enough to think they could determine their own fate, without the permission of Washington.

How this vital and growing socialist organization, in Sheppard’s words,“degenerated to the point where it is now considered irrelevant, even a joke” is the central question that Barry Sheppard, who was one of the core leaders during the SWP’s rise and fall, attempts to answer here, in this second volume of a two volume book.

Barry Sheppard was an important member, a leader of the SWP for a long time, and a friend and a close ally of National Secretary Jack Barnes before he too was forced to leave the SWP. His memoirs therefore present a detailed, graphic insider’s account. In this review, we will be looking at his account of the organizational malfunctioning and the split.

Sheppard accurately notes the limitations of his effort; his work does not “purport to be a comprehensive history of the SWP from 1960 through 1988…” Sheppard was a member of the SWP’s Political Committee and National Committee, so it is not surprising that a good deal of his emphasis centers on these leading bodies. What receives much less attention is the day-to-day life of hundreds of members in the party branches throughout the country.

Though this work will be eagerly read by veterans of the SWP debacle, the emerging generation of new, anti-capitalist fighters is reallythe book’s primary audience. Unlike other prominent SWP leaders who have written of their experiences, Sheppard still counts himself a revolutionary socialist in the best tradition of the SWP. He explains that tradition, chapter by chapter, highlighting the big social issues of the day, and shows how the party’s programmatic heritage was transformed into its opposite.

At the outset, Sheppard writes: “One theme of this volume is that the collapse of the SWP was not inevitable. As the radicalization of ‘The Sixties’ receded, the objective situation made it increasingly difficult for a small Marxist organization to grow. But with a more correct orientation the SWP could have survived and remained an important force on the left.” He further defines his outlook when he states, “The rebuilding of a revolutionary socialist party is an urgent necessity…” Overall, despite errors and debatable points, Sheppard has succeeded in writing a work that contributes to understanding the SWP, its strengths and failures. Through such an understanding this generation will be better able to build the kind of organization that can succeed in creating a more humane and just world.

Summing up the lessons of the SWP debacle, Sheppard rightly concludes that, “… the organizational question was paramount.” Every single error of the party leadership could have been recognized, evaluated, and corrected if the established norms and procedures of party democracy had been allowed to function. Instead, over time, they were uprooted and destroyed. The Barnes clique initiated one mistake after another including sectarian methods in the unions, abstentionist practices, miseducation of the membership, and abandoning the party’s programmatic heritage. Though none of these were fruitful, even in the short-term, none were necessarily fatal. A self-active membership, using the mechanism of discussion and dissent, would have been able to collaborate collectively, even in tendencies and factions, and could have re-set the party on the right path. A healthy leadership that respected its members could have learned from them, supporters and critics alike, and used their collective experience to make proper readjustments in strategy and tactics.

Instead, in the name of democracy, the Barnes gang cynically silenced the membership and created a fearful climate of unquestioning acceptance and obedience. Internal life in the SWP became a Catch-22 world.Tendencies and factions were allowed to exist as long as they did not function, but if they did not function, they did not exist. Members were forbidden to express opinions contrary to the party line except in ever narrowing areas. Members were forbidden to write to each other, speak to each other, or telephone each other. SWP members within the Young Socialist Alliance were forbidden to raise dissenting opinions and were required to speak in favor of policies they opposed. Even disagreements within the National Committee could not be expressed to the party as a whole.The 1983 convention was canceled, so, of course, the written and oral discussion preceding conventions was forbidden. When the minority members of the National Committee announced the formation of a common bloc, they were suspended for being a secret faction. Overall, members dropped out in droves, and trials and expulsions became routine.

The trial of Clevinger in Catch-22 captured the surreal experience of the SWP at this time: “Yossarian had done his best to warn [Clevinger] the night before. ‘You haven’t got a chance, kid,’ he told him glumly. ‘They hate Jews.’

‘But I’m not Jewish,’ answered Clevinger.

‘It will make no difference, Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. “They’re after everybody.’”

The strangling of party democracy, which continued even after the minority groups were expelled in the 1980s, was the fatal flaw, the one which has taken the life out of the SWP and left it a shell of its former self.

An increasingly undemocratic and intolerant climate in the organization as a whole and in the branches was not objectionable solely on moral grounds. Factionalism and the hunt for internal “enemies” became, as it was intended, a prohibition on thinking. When problems arose in applying the majority line, those problems could not be recognized and examined – much less solved – for fear of giving ammunition to the “opponents” in the opposition groups.

So, “loyal” members had to deny and distort reality to fit the officially approved positions and to prevent troublesome questions. This was a method akin to madness that crippled the branches in two ways: (1) many members simply dropped out rather than risk personal attack for speaking sensibly, (2) errors were reinforced, and the defense of mistakes and nonsense became a test of loyalty and a prerequisite for branch leadership. Thus, factionalism killed functioning. The culture of fear and conformity which the Barnes clique artificially created and whipped up succeeded in maintaining control.

Consider one example. In 1980 the Boston branch of the SWP participated in a congressional election in a district north of the city that included a General Electric plant where the party had chosen to concentrate its members. The entire branch was mobilized for some weeks to build a kick-off campaign rally. On the day of the event, no one showed up: not one worker, not one supporter, not one contact. Only SWP members attended.

At the branch meeting the next day, this fiasco was presented as a victory, albeit a modest one. After all, “we were able to hand out thousands of leaflets,” (“Why A Machinist Is Running For Congress”); “we made lots of contacts and got to talk with many co-workers.” Also, “several contacts said they wanted to attend but were unable to make it that day.” No one disagreed with this fanciful presentation. No one suggested that the supposed contacts were expressing politeness rather than interest. More importantly, no one suggested something might be wrong with the party position regarding the pace and depth of the working-class radicalization. To do so would put a member at some risk and would call into question that person’s loyalty to the party. Opening up a line of questioning would be giving aid and comfort to the minority groups who might raise even more pointed questions or even raise criticisms. Thus, silence.

This is the kind of functioning that took place week after week in branches all across the country. It destroyed the confidence of the membership and made them passive and accepting when a revolutionary organization needs members who are active and reflective.

Again, this destructive situation was well understood at the time. One example can be cited: As a member of the Twin Cities branch, David Riehle, wrote to the SWP Political Committee in response to his expulsion, “A cadre organization of revolutionary workers that can meet the tests of struggle that will be posed in the course of the American revolution can be composed only of self-reliant, independent-minded, contentious, and combative individuals… These are not the kinds of people you are going to keep or attract. By pursuing the methods you are currently using, you will end up with an illusory and complacent ‘homogeneity." How well this phrase describes the SWP of today!

Instead of encouraging members to discuss their experiences in the class struggle with candor and thoughtfulness, the screws were turned even tighter. In responding to the party’s minority groupings, the Barnes clique borrowed pages from “The Richard M. Nixon Handbook of Dirty Tricks.” Secret government, deception, an ‘Enemies List,‘ and abuse of power, all became the new norm.In fairness, SWP hatchet-men and women did not break in to apartments, but, then, they did not need to. Lack of cooperation was grounds for expulsion.

So, throughout the country, Barnes’ agents used their secret list of loyal and long-time members who held or who were suspected of holding an unauthorized thought, and, one by one, they knocked on the doors of their victims (who were compelled to allow them entrance). Thus, they carried out their investigations and taped interrogations.It is refreshing to read that party veteran George Weissman “was different – when he saw us at his door he told us to ‘go to hell’ and slammed it shut.”

The triumph was short-lived. For refusing to condemn a minority reporter’s comments at the December 1983 California SWP convention, a conference Weissman had obviously not attended, a month later he and some one hundred minority supporters, sympathizers, or personal friends were expelled en masse. No trial was held, so no defense could be offered. The names of these undemocratically expelled members were laterpublished in an internal bulletin as the “List of Splitters.”

It made no difference that Weissman had not, due to illness, participated in or voted the “wrong way” at the 1981 convention. It was enough that he might have done so or might do so in the future. Suspicion alone was sufficient grounds to throw out one of the founders of the SWP.

A small but not untypical error does appear in Sheppard’s overall account of this particularly vicious chain of events. He incorrectly summarizes the minority reporter’s remarks at the California SWP convention and attributes to him a position he did not hold. Shepparddoes accuratelypoint out that in August 1983 the leaders of the two minority tendencies formed a bloc at a National Committee meeting (a document in defense of democratic rights within the SWP was a central point). “For this, these four comrades were suspended for forming an “unauthorized faction,” a prelude to their expulsion.

Sheppard goes on to say that some minority supporters “had decided that they had to leave the SWP, a completely understandable position. One of their supporters in the San Francisco branch expressed as much.” Supposedly then, Barnes’ hatchet-wielding agents were challenging the minority supporters “to repudiate the alleged split sentiment…” If true, a least a fig-leaf of legitimacy would have justified and thus covered the indecent act – but it was not true. The minority reporter had not called for a split but had called for unity. He urged the SWP members to work collaboratively with the newly formed Socialist Action in several important and immediate political projects.

Thus, the Barnes clique violated the democratic rights of the membership even more severely than Sheppard recalls. At the time, of course, in an increasingly bizarre and brutish internal atmosphere - what Sheppard correctly refers to as “the introduction of an atmosphere of terrorization of the membership” - the Barnes gang accused the minorities of carrying out the very crimes the majority leaders themselves were eagerly committing.

This clarification only underscores the overall correct conclusions that Sheppard presents: “The majority had broken with democratic centralism.”He could have added, “And, to deliberately confuse and mislead the membership, we leaders lied about it.”

In this context, Sheppard’s further conclusion is the decisive one: “… I should have fought against the organizational degeneration. I ought to have made a bloc with the minorities in defense of party democracy while holding my own political positions.”

This is the vital lesson which is essential and enduring. To repeat, the life-and-death question for the party was proletarian democracy. Sheppard (and some other majority leaders and supporters) eventually came to understand this fact, but they recognized it too late.

This, too, is part of the tragedy of the degeneration of the SWP. Sheppard’s overall purpose – to preserve the positive lessons of the SWP and analyze the negative ones – is commendable, but it is not new. The minority tendencies that emerged in the party had the exact same purpose. Even more to the point, most of these important lessons were the very ones put into practice by generations of SWP leaders and inherited by the Barnes team.

For all that party democracy has been the central topic here, Sheppard’s book itself is more focused on the major political issues, party campaigns, and analysis of revolutionary victories and defeats in South and Central America, Europe, Iran, and Afghanistan. A good deal of what is valuable in this volume can be found in his recounting and explanation of these world-altering events. Sheppard is not wrong to bring to bear the benefits of hindsight.

Still, objection can be made to some of Sheppard’s assertions. He writes, “The 1979 revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada broke the isolation of the Cuban revolution, with the establishment of workers’ and peasants’ governments.” These revolutions “could be seen broadly speaking as an emerging ‘Castroist’ current.

“I think we were correct to orient toward this current. The potential existed for a qualitative step forward in rebuilding a revolutionary socialist international. We thought that the SWP and the Fourth International should embrace this perspective, and seek to build ties to this breakthrough.”

One minority group, Sheppard says, “rejected this orientation” while the other “didn’t see the potential” for revolutionary advance. “Both tendencies were not enthusiastic about the opportunities these developments opened for the SWP and the Fourth International.”

This statement does not accurately reflect what the opposition groups believed. In one of its defining documents (“Resolving the International Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership Today”), the Opposition Bloc explained, “The most important task we have in relationship to the Castroist current, and the revolutions it is leading, is to throw ourselves fully into the effort for solidarity and against imperialist intervention… Through these kinds of activities, as well as through the successes our forces can score in leading the struggles of working people, we will put ourselves in the best position to learn from and emulate the strong side of the Castroists, as well as engaging these comrades in the necessary political discussion on the important points of programmatic difference which remain between us. In this way we can pursue our perspective of convergence with these forces in a constructive and principled way.”

And, further, in a sharp rejection of the Barnes perspective: “But those in our ranks who today reject building the Fourth International as a correct organizational perspective present no serious or practical alternative. They demand that we orient ourselves toward an as yet nonexistent ‘new mass Leninist International’ as if the only thing that was keeping this from coming into existence was our failure to embrace it. Even more significantly, they insist that this requires renouncing our programmatic perspectives on permanent revolution and on the political revolution, along with a rejection of our current approach to the three sectors of the world revolution.”

During the preconvention discussion period, Sheppard chastised the minority groups for making these kinds of criticisms that, at the time,he said were “untrue,” including the criticism that the SWP was moving away from the Fourth International. But the SWP remained within the Fourth International only long enough to damage it as much as possible. Before the decade was out, the SWP initiated a series of splits in different sections throughout the world.

Moreover, what Sheppardand other Political Committee members thought and said was of no importance. Sheppard reveals now what he would not say at the time: “…all political initiative had become the sole prerogative of Jack Barnes.”

Throughout this book, though, it is clear that Sheppard has come to accept the validity of much of what he had criticized in the past, as he sums up his overall assessment in the concluding chapter.

Readers might be struck by a certain kind of reticence in this work. The narrative is curiously lacking in flesh and blood human beings; other than Barnes, Sheppard and their companions, there are few people here. Typically, in Sheppard’s explanation of a particular political issue, an interchangeable name of a Militant journalist is cited, followed by a quotation from that author’s article. A justifiable focus on politics would not be inconsistent with a few sentences given to describe the people whose work is cited in different chapters – though it is also noteworthy that Militant writers did tend to sound alike, with any traces of personality expunged.

In these accounts two exceptions stand out. The three pages given to Peter Camejo, the party leader best known to the public through the 1976 SWP presidential campaign, plus an account of an African American friend from the Pittsburgh branch of the SWP are revealing and both help to round out Sheppard’s more general and abstract analysis. Even though the book “is not a personal memoir,” such observations as those cited here could have furthered the author’s political purpose.

The criticisms expressed above do not diminish the overall importance of this work. The judgment expressed in a Socialist Action review (August 1986) for the first volumeof Sheppard’s memoir is even more true for the concluding one: It is “an insightful and instructive book that should be required reading for any young revolutionist who wants to learn from the successes and failures of the ‘Sixties Generation.’”

Sheppard’s account concretely illustrates the general point explained decades ago by SWP founder James P. Cannon: “The party itself needs leadership. It is impossible for a revolutionary party to provide correct leadership without the right sort of leaders” who “are selected and sifted out by tests and trials in the mass movement, and in the internal controversies and sharp conflicts over the critical policy questions raised at every turn in the class struggle.”

Taken together, Barry Sheppard’s two-volume history of the Socialist Workers Party outlines and clarifies the history that a new generation of militant fighters will need to carry forward if humanity is to succeed in creating a socialist future.

[1] This is not the place to discuss the vast debate over Pablo and “Pabloism”. But it is to be noted that the early aspects of what came to be called Pabloism were accepted by all the “Orthodox” – entry work, and the argument that war was likely and would radicalize the Stalinist CPs. The attempt to insist that deep entryism must be practiced even against the wishes of the national majority was a serious error and was responsible for the eventual reactions, though the SWP had hesitated before supporting the French majority. This resistance was to have some effect when the Fourth World Congress of the International drew back from the extreme logic of Pablo’s line, which in turn led to Clarke in USA, Mestre in France, Lawrence in UK and Dowson in Canada leaving the International altogether.

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