African Americans revive alliance with Palestinians
‘When I see them, I see us’


A short video from 2015 linked African Americans and Palestinians from the occupied territories, reviving an empathy dormant for decades, which began when Palestine became part of the struggle against colonial dominance and land rights.

by Sylvie Laurent
FEBRUARY 2019


Before the fall: President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter congratulate Andrew Young on becoming UN Ambassador in 1977. Credit Bettmann · Getty Images

‘When I see them, I see us’ is a short video that shows in quick succession faces of people united by the messages they hold up to the camera: ‘We are not collateral damage, we have names and faces’. There is footage from Ferguson, Missouri, and shots of Palestinians in the occupied territories with placards reading ‘Black Lives Matter’ while African Americans protest against the racist oppression of Palestinians. There is a single target, the US firm Combined Systems Inc, which supplies products such as tear gas both to the Ferguson police and to the Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

The three-minute video, produced in 2015, was immediately picked up by social networks. Besides unknown protestors, black activist Angela Davis, who recently published a collection of essays (1), philosopher Cornel West, actor Danny Glover (who once played Nelson Mandela), singer Lauryn Hill and writer Alice Walker all appear. Noura Erakat, the human rights lawyer who came up with the idea, was well aware of their impact. The film is a declaration of solidarity between African American activists and Palestinians (2), who were both suffering from state violence at the time although their relationship goes much further back.

The year 1967, with the Six Day war and Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, was also crucial for the American civil rights movement, marking the turning point from the non-violent stance of its Christian base to radical demands for justice. The Black Power movement reverted to the third world internationalism and anticolonialism of earlier black activists, whether communist, like Paul Robeson, or nationalist, like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, who visited Jerusalem in 1957 and Gaza in 1964, ahead of a transnational and cosmopolitan liberation struggle. In his 1964 essay Zionist Logic, he denounced the ‘camouflage’ of Israeli ‘colonialism’, disguising violence as benevolence with the strategic support of the US. He called it ‘dollarism’.
Right to land and freedom

The most important radical groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers, also condemned Israel and the US. Young Black Liberation activists moved away from African American sympathy for Israel as the Holy Land and a refuge for a people once enslaved and persecuted. African Americans had cherished the biblical metaphors of Exodus since the 17th century, and the establishment of a Jewish state had seemed providential. James Baldwin wrote in 1948: ‘The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for Moses to lead him out of Egypt’ (3). No one could better understand the Jews’ search for a land of freedom than an African American. Equally, when in exile he visited Palestine in 1961, Baldwin expressed empathy for any people seeking a homeland, and understood the meaning of dispossession and forced displacement.

We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe the leaders of Israel have a right to this land H Rap Brown

Israel’s 1967 occupation of more Palestinian land ended Zionist feelings among activist African Americans. Having once identified themselves with the Jews in their servitude, they now felt closer to the Arabs. While Martin Luther King had spontaneously hailed the founding of Israel, his mentors, Mahatma Gandhi and Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s revolutionary leader, had publicly condemned Zionism in the name of their anticolonial struggles. In 1977 SNCC activists, King’s rebellious heirs, published a call for solidarity with the Palestinians.

The anti-imperialism of the new black activists expressed solidarity with non-whites in the third world. This generation saw themselves as prisoners in a domestic colony, and the more nationalistic demanded a bi-national solution within the US. This produced what the historian Alex Lubin called ‘an Afro-Arab political imaginary’. The Black Panthers contacted the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which saw the link between Palestine and the anticolonial, antiracist and anticapitalist struggle, as legitimate.

Both the Black Panthers and the SNCC were immediately accused of antisemitism. Spokespeople for both organisations, aware of some antisemitic trends among activists, clarified their position; SNCC chairman H Rap Brown declared in 1967, ‘We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe that the leaders of Israel have a right to this land’ (4). In 1970 the Black Panther leader Huey Newton also denounced extremist remarks by activists and defended revolutionary internationalism, hostile to white supremacy, but not to Jews. He reasserted the right to self-determination of all peoples oppressed by militarism and Israeli-American ‘reactionary nationalism’ (5).
‘Thinking our emancipation for us’

The coalition between African Americans and Jews, which had played a determining role during the civil rights period (1954-68), was endangered. This was an important turning point. From the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King, the progressive Jewish elite had played a major role in the Black Liberation struggle. The majority of students who took part in the Freedom Summer of 1964, a voter registration drive in Mississippi to encourage African Americans to sign up to vote, were Jewish.

That relationship had been strained, notably by accusations of paternalism by educated Jews. But the Palestinian issue marked the break in relations. In 1967 the African American writer Harold Cruse challenged the premise of an alliance between the equally oppressed. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Cruse argued that Jews held power and used it, including for ‘thinking our emancipation for us’. Where was that empathy when it came to denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine? What was the Jewish position on Zionism in the rightwing review Commentary? Cruse said African Americans in search of justice should think about the wisdom of their partnership with American Jews.

The mention of Commentary highlights the gradual shift in views of leftwing American Jewish intellectuals, including Norman Podhoretz, from the end of the 1960s. They ended all national support for African Americans, and unconditionally supported Israel internationally. Trying to reconcile this, they claimed that the US social, liberal and universalist model, which had enabled Jews to become Americanised, was threatened by those who wanted to destroy racism and domination in both countries.

This made UN General Assembly resolution 3379, adopted in 1975 and condemning Zionism as ‘racism and racial discrimination’, controversial in the US. The US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was outraged, although he was aware of the mechanisms of state discrimination. In 1965, as an academic close to Lyndon Johnson, he had produced the Moynihan Report calling for ambitious social policies favouring African Americans excluded from social structures. He eventually became a neoconservative and an ardent defender of Israel.

To understand why the Palestinian question resonates with African Americans, we need to look at the balance of power within the US after the civil rights movement, when the protagonists reviewed issues rooted in history: foremost were the imperial nature of the American republic and the exclusion of minorities of colour from citizenship. Declaring support for Palestine proclaimed the right to dissent from US power, which, after confiscating land and rights from African Americans, Mexicans and Native Americans, replicated that domination in the Middle East. From 1968 American Jews and Arabs, aware of that similarity with US history, committed to their own movements for political assertion inspired by the American civil rights movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League in 1968 and future leader of Israel’s far right, raised the idea of ‘Jewish power’.
‘Israeli apartheid’

The apartheid regime in South Africa led to mobilisation on US campuses and in black working-class neighbourhoods. South Africa, already a symbol of colonial domination, bought weapons from the US and Israel, pushing Israel further towards the oppressors. There was talk of ‘Israeli apartheid’ (6), and Palestinians became members of a diaspora of the dispossessed. As in South Africa, Palestinian activists demanded boycotts, condemnation and an end to investment by all US institutions, from local universities to the State Department.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter forced civil rights activist Andrew Young to stand down as US ambassador to the UN for having met PLO leaders. Irritated by Young’s hostility to his pro-Israel policies, Carter made African American leaders angry. James Baldwin wrote in The Nation on 29 September 1979: ‘The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests ... The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of divide and rule and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.’ Since this was more a domestic matter than geopolitical, many African Americans — including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, another civil rights veteran and a rising figure in the Democratic Party — brought up the role of American Jews in Young’s forced resignation. Accusations of antisemitism resurfaced, and Jackson’s comments about New York’s Jews (as Israel-fixated and dominant in ‘Hymietown’) did nothing to help. Jackson, a strong advocate of a broad pan-minority coalition, struggled to heal this divide, and failed. When Louis Farrakhan, the black leader of the Nation of Islam, whose antisemitism had been well known since the 1970s, lent his support, African Americans’ anti-Zionist stance was fatally discredited.

In the 1990s the radical African American movement lost power, and its relationship with the Palestinians ran out of steam. The leaders’ focus on democratic self-restraint, the breakup of the remaining Black Panthers, and hopes for peace in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords ended the criticisms of imperialism that had marked the US liberation movement.

Solidarity with Palestinians only resurfaced after the 2015-16 Ferguson riots, when there was anger over police crimes against unarmed young black men. The Black Lives Matter movement took up the SNCC’s torch and linked racial issues with the logic of world domination. Social media helped revive solidarity: one Facebook group is called Blacks for Palestine (B4P). In 2017 the anti-racism group Dream Defenders organised a trip for black artists to the occupied territories. There have been conferences on US university campuses, where calls to boycott Israel have triggered controversy (7).

Such actions involve only a few, but a new generation links both groups’ struggles. Vic Mensa, a rapper from Chicago, travelled to the occupied territories in 2017 and wrote about it in Time (8). He described the mirror effect of seeing a young Palestinian frisked by an Israeli soldier; his relief at not being the suspect was followed by the realisation that ‘for once in my life I didn’t feel like the nigger.’


Sylvie Laurent
Sylvie Laurent is a research associate at Harvard and Stanford, a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and the author of King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality, University of California Press, Oakland, 2019.
Translated by Krystyna Horko


Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016.


(2) ‘When I see them, I see us’, Black Palestinian Solidarity.


(3) James Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, V Commentary 165, 169 (1948).


(4) Quoted in Douglas Robinson, ‘New Carmichael Trip’, The New York Times, 19 August 1967.


(5) Huey P Newton, ‘On the Middle East’, in To Die for the People, Random House, New York, 1972.


(6) See Alain Gresh, ‘Palestine: the view from South Africa’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2009.


(7) See Alain Gresh, ‘The truths that won’t be heard’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2018.


(8) Vic Mensa, ‘What Palestine taught me about American racism’, Time, New York, 12 January 2018

A superpower undermined by social decay
The cultural sources of black radicalism


by Achille Mbembe

June 1992, online exclusive


‘Malcolm X’ by Spike Lee.
cc.VDO Vault

America is acting surprised at the violence of the recent riots in Los Angeles and at the immense anger that has been expressed, not only by African Americans but by other minorities (Latinos, Asians), too. Unable to look beyond the mostly reassuring image provided by Martin Luther King (a man whom it once had no qualms murdering), over the past twenty years America has chosen not to interest itself in the cultural work unfolding in the ghettos, whose political impact now flows well beyond the confines of black spaces. Indeed, here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts. It thus manages to exercise an influence that is disproportionate to its economic and material means, and to its objective political weight.

Here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts

To understand the deep roots of the new cultural radicalism in people’s minds, it is important to note what distinguishes it from other cultural currents within black communities and the way in which it defines itself with regard to great contemporary societal and political struggles. It especially sets itself apart from the ‘buppie’ (black upwardly mobile professional) wave — that ambitious group which, over the course of the years after desegregation (1965), proved itself determined to reap the fruits of integration by any means necessary. Big names of the black media elite (Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Prince, Oprah Winfrey, Eddie Murphy) fit within this trend, as well as those of sports (Michael Jordan, ‘Magic’ Johnson, Carl Lewis). Such artists and cultural figures have been co-opted into the dominant system and wield almost complete financial control over their product, even if the channels of its distribution still evade them.

The logic of co-option has spread to other domains. On a political level, thanks to multiracial coalitions, black mayors have been elected to head up several important cities (David Dinkins in New York, Coleman Young in Detroit, Andrew Young then Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia). The same holds true in academic and intellectual fields: a black university elite has increasingly taken its place within institutions once exclusively controlled by whites, notably in law and social theory in general, as in the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Orlando Patterson at Harvard, Stephen Carter at Yale and the African American intellectuals gathered around the journal Reconstruction (1).

Although it is itself subject to subtle forms of racism and discrimination, this co-opted elite ultimately conceives of its future as being within the system and tries to escape traditional definitions of blackness, while insisting on the multicultural foundations of the American nation. Politically, its debates are closely related to the issue of civil rights and the advantages and pitfalls of affirmative action (2). It is also in these settings that most black neocons can be found, of which Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, is the prototype.

The principal troops of the new black radicalism are recruited elsewhere, of course, in a trend known as b-boy. Its two primary supports are music and film, the visual language of images and oral language. A pure product of the ghetto, this trend marvellously combines the most explosive elements of urban poverty, street knowledge and the immense potential for anger, which, up until now, has neither been annexed nor politically exploited by any traditional institutional force. Its best-known musical form is rap (to rap literally means to cut, to strike, to bump, to put back in one’s place). It was around 1979 that the mainstream media discovered this art form, made of rapid street dialogue that is chanted and strongly rhythmical. This was back in an era when graffiti covered the walls of major cities and breakdance still took pride of place on the sidewalks. It was not until 1982, and the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s single ‘The Message’, that explicitly political rappers appeared.

From then on, the nebula of rap never stopped gathering power. It was able to take advantage of parallel events in the political sphere and shifts that occurred in ghetto culture. For example, Jesse Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1989 spurred on the political awakening of a rap generation. The 1983 election campaign, with its overtones of the crusades, was the same, and saw the arrival of Harold Washington in Chicago’s mayor’s office; then, in 1984, there were the great campaigns for Boycott and Sanctions of South African goods.

Many incidents tinged with racism – and the system’s inability to sanction it – contributed to the radicalisation of this generation and to the emergence of new leaders (usually at neighbourhood level) who had more or less broken with the traditional black political establishment, which was accused of colluding with a system in which the right to vote does not appear to guarantee change, and whose racist structures have not fundamentally altered despite formal desegregation. That was the case in New York when, in 1986, a young black man was killed following a full-on manhunt by a gang of white thugs at Howard Beach, or later when, during the summer of 1989, Yusef Hawkins was shot down in the Italian neighbourhood of Bensonhurst. The names of Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox belong to this period.

The link to the legacy of the 1960s was no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers)

The power of rap’s appeal can also be explained by the fact that over the last ten years, influential intellectual currents have developed. They were, for the most part, facilitated by new cultural intermediaries, keen not so much to articulate the anxiety rising from the ghettos as to participate in academic debates from non-Western perspectives. This current, called ‘Afrocentrism’ (3), reigned supreme in Black Studies departments and aims to reclaim the question of African identity and the contribution of black people to universal history separate from Eurocentric views that have long obfuscated it. Such critical revisiting rests on the theory of the African origins of Egyptian civilisation, among others, and on the fact that Greek civilisation also borrowed the majority of the elements that made it great from Egypt (4). It is hard to comprehend the political impact of these debates without taking into account the fact they have a direct influence on the very definition of the American nation and of the respective places of its cultural components.

At the beginning of the ’80s, the nebula of rap also benefited from renewed creativity in the production of urban symbols and symbols of identity. In this respect, we note, for example, the proliferation of jeeps and other cars driving at high speed, music blaring out of boom boxes from 1987 on. T-shirts splattered with slogans such as ‘Black by popular demand’, or ‘It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’ spread out of black universities. The famous slogan ‘No justice, no peace’ that was ‘discovered’ by the mainstream media after the LA riots also dates back to this period.

In parallel, we witnessed the growing rediscovery of Malcolm X. As early as 1986, you could see kids reading his autobiography in the New York subway and in public places. The writings of Elijah Muhammad, notably his Message to the Blackman, also enjoyed increased favour, while Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan was more and more often invited to speak on campuses by black student groups. The link to the legacy of the 1960s was now no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers). Most of their ideas concerning self-defense, economic emancipation and the rediscovery of the self and of one’s cultural identity echo the feeling that the black race has been subjected to a genocide and that it should, in the words of Malcolm X, defend itself, ‘by all means necessary.’

These themes were taken up and popularised in music, with most records selling millions of copies. So, when the band Public Enemy released ‘Bring the Noise’ in 1986, the song opened with Malcolm X’s voice declaring, ‘Too black, too strong’. The same band later stood out with two more hits: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and ‘Welcome to the Terror Dome’. KRS-One directly attacked the criminal justice system in 1987’s By All Means Necessary. As for the band Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), it denounced the deterioration of towns and police violence in ‘Fuck tha Police’. Family structures didn’t escape criticism either. Most black young people in the ghetto had simply never experienced the family as represented in reassuring Bill Cosby series. This is the point the band MAAD drove home in ‘Fuck My Daddy’, in which life in prison is an important subject, as is daily life on the streets, in the underground worlds of drugs and cocaine. The band Mad Mutherfuckin’ Congatas also describes with candour and brutal honesty how ‘living hard and dying hard’ is the fate of young people in the ghetto. As for Niggaz4Life, he affirms, ‘Niggas know how to die/Niggas don’t know nothin’ else, but dyin’/Niggas dream ’bout dyin’’ (5).
It is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery

Conventional and puritanical language is done away with around issues of sex and drugs. Creative freedom is expressed through the use of graphics, excessive profanity, tales of blood, violence, and crime. This is the case for example with Puff the Buddah or NWA hits such as ‘I’d Rather Fuck You’ or ‘Findum, Fuckum and Flee’, ‘She Swallowed It’, ‘Just Don’t Bite It’, or ‘One Less Bitch’. Why this return to the word ‘nigga’? ‘Because police always wanna harass me/ Every time that I’m rollin’/ They swear up and down that the car was stolen/Make me get face down in the street/And throw the shit out my car on the concrete/In front of a residence/A million white motherfuckers on my back like I shot the President,’ replies one of the members of NWA.

This same reality feeds the cinematic work of artists like Spike Lee, Van Peebles, John Singleton and Matty Rich (6). The accounts listed above coexist with more about the violence of the ghetto, self-destructive behaviour, sexuality, new forms of phallocratic mentality and, above all, the police brutality and exclusion built into the American system. The project of rap and of the new black cinema is to create heroes for the ghetto and of the ghetto. But, in truth, the influence of hip-hop now extends to almost all components of black American culture. This is especially the case in the sphere of everyday speech, and it is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery, with its own turns of phrase and expressions, grammatical constructions, intonations, curses and ways of naming people, objects and things. This language is largely not understood by Americans of European descent and absent from the dominant modes of communication. It is this language that is taken up by rap and enriched, in order to set down — in a new context — the old problem of black emancipation in a society whose power and wealth structures have remained, for the most part, racist. That is also the case in the realms of style, hairstyle, painting, dance and theatre.

The new ‘intellectuals’ who articulate these discourses define themselves as ‘real niggaz’. Mixing anger and sarcasm, they are not immune to a form of neomaterialist nihilism and consumerism that the capitalist system can, in any event, accommodate.


Achille Mbembe
Translated by Lucie Elven.

The best of times, the worst of times
US in the spring of the pandemic

Covid-19 brought economic chaos to the US, and with that a possibility for huge political policy changes. But if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, he’s promised nothing will change.

by Thomas Frank   June 2020

Musical diversion: Jodi Beder helps neighbours cope with lockdown in Mount Rainer, Maryland, March 2020 Andrew Caballero-Reynolds · AFP · Getty

It is the worst of times in America. The pandemic that disaster-preparation types have been warning about for decades is finally here, and of course we haven’t prepared very well. Our leviathan government, the subject of so much feigned rightwing terror in ordinary times, turned out to be unable to rise from its easy chair when the crisis came. Our president, the former TV star Donald Trump, has proved himself incompetent if not positively injurious to public health with his stupid rambling remarks, which, until recently, he addressed daily to the cameras. And now, almost the entire country is in quarantine lockdown. New York City, where the virus has had its deadliest run, was a few weeks ago burying stacks of coffins in mass graves dug by bulldozers.

Quarantine has meant deliberately smothering the economy, which just a few months ago was running at maximum capacity. In America we have no mechanism for putting the economy on hold — people just lose their jobs or close their doors — and overnight we went from one of the fastest-running economies of my lifetime to Great Depression II, skipping all the intermediate steps and going straight to massive unemployment and a vast extinction of businesses large and small.

Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse. Beloved family members are dying alone in some hospital; yesterday’s trendy restaurants are shuttered and forgotten, their ambitious young chefs filling out unemployment forms along with millions of others.
Here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately

All this is happening during what might well be the best of times for America. Here in my little corner of the country we have been enjoying the most spectacularly beautiful springtime I have ever seen. For the comfortable, white-collar people around me, this pandemic has played out in a landscape that looks like a Fragonard painting: as the first fears came, the daffodils were blooming and then the tulips; the magnolia trees and the cherry blossoms; the azaleas and the rhododendrons; and now the dogwood blossoms arch pale overhead as I jog the peaceful, traffic-free roads of Bethesda, Maryland. That ironic contrast holds true everywhere you look.

Their beliefs confirmed

Just about everyone with a voice in America claims these days that the pandemic confirms their prior beliefs in some resounding way. Say the media types, this reinforces what we have been telling you all along about President Trump’s ignorance and folly. Say the conservatives, this proves what we have been telling you all along about soft-hearted liberals and their suicidal desire to let anyone into the country. For them the pandemic has been a carnival of smugness.

It is growing clear, however, that instead of reinforcing the cherished beliefs of the American consensus this episode has shattered them. For decades this country has offshored our manufacturing capacity because duh, that’s what everyone agreed the info-age called for. We were going to be a white-collar nation that made innovative things like prescription drugs and legal textbooks; things of the mind that weighed so very little. And now here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our plummy punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately. Death laughs in our stupid neoliberal faces.

The American system of healthcare-for-profit, constructed over the decades with the enthusiastic input of both political parties, has shown itself incapable of rising to the pandemic challenge. For a simple reason: it wasn’t built for purposes of public health. In my lifetime, the underlying assumption of that system has always been that healthcare is a privilege; you get access to it by being a successful and prosperous person. It is a meritocratic system in the way it rewards high-achieving doctors and innovative pharma scientists, and in the way it parcels out care. Poor people with lousy or no insurance who want their broken bones and organ failure healed are routinely bankrupted by astonishing medical bills (1). The suggestion that we should stop bankrupting such people and instead give them free tests or treatment for Covid-19 is so contrary to the consensus view of healthcare in this country that it is difficult to see how this necessary step is to be taken. The psychological breach with how we have always thought about healthcare will be wrenching.

Perhaps Covid-19’s most healthful effect is what it has done to our understanding of social class. A short while ago, all right-thinking Americans agreed that work that didn’t require a college degree was second-class work, heavy and blundering and polluting; the people who did it were often Trump voters whose way of life was crumbling because it deserved to. Only a few years back, billionaire Democratic politician Michael Bloomberg thrilled students at Oxford University with heady theories of how the information age prioritises ‘how to think and analyse’ over the simplistic skills of farmers and industrial workers (2).
Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse

Today only those farmers and industrial workers stand between us and the abyss. Many of them are out there risking their lives in the virus-sphere every day. Others are being ordered back to work at their low-wage jobs regardless of their vulnerability to Covid-related death. They are falling ill in the grocery stores and the meat-packing plants while the white-collar, information-age types who order them to work sit safely at home, working by email and Internet conference, and enjoy a miraculously rising stock market, courtesy of Congress and the Federal Reserve.

If you guessed that this is a situation in which working people might decide they’ve had enough, you are correct. Although it’s hard to know for sure since local labour reporting is virtually dead in America, there are signs that worker militance might have revived itself. One of America’s most famous anti-union lobbyists recently warned his clients of the possibility of a ‘partial workforce rebellion’ (3), and there appear to be unauthorised wildcat strikes here and there (4).
Anything could happen

Each of these items points to the same thing: the sudden, vivid extinction of the comfortable worldview that American leaders adopted and forced on the world in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The situation in America is pregnant with possibility. Anything could happen.

Here, however, we come to the dark, pathological irony of American liberalism. The institution that ought to be moving us past the deathly old mode of thought is the Democratic party — indeed, it is just about the only institution that might conceivably do such a thing nowadays — and yet just a few weeks before the coronavirus exploded in America, that same Democratic party succeeded, with joyful public celebration, in stamping out any possibility that American political thinking would in fact change. Its leaders are determined that this crisis will go to waste.

Let me explain. For much of the last year, the Democratic party held debates among would-be candidates for the presidency. At first, in an accurate reflection of the thinking of the left, many of the Democrats on the national stage appeared to have broken decisively and even creatively with the shibboleths of the past.

But after the institutional favourite, former vice-president Joe Biden, won the South Carolina primary at the end of February, most of the remaining candidates abruptly quit and endorsed him. The one candidate who persisted, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leading reformer of our era and a beloved figure of the young, held on a little longer but also eventually bowed to the overwhelming odds.

The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again.

Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crushing trade agreements, the Iraq war, cruel bankruptcy legislation, mass incarceration, the infamous attack on civil liberties known as the Patriot Act. The man even boasts of having been chummy with segregationists back in the day.

There’s a good chance he will win. Despite his views, Biden is a familiar and well-liked politician in the classical tradition, while Donald Trump, in his pathological narcissism, oozes resentment and always finds new ways to make himself despicable. Plus, it’s hard to see how someone can bungle an economic and public health crisis as badly as Trump has with Covid-19 and be asked by voters to repeat the performance.

‘Nothing would fundamentally change’ if Biden becomes president, he told his wealthy donors (5). It’s a hell of a slogan for a moment like this.

My leftwing friends all tell me they are depressed. With their hero Bernie Sanders, who looked so strong in January, beaten, they find themselves locked indoors, watching people be rude to each other on Twitter.

I share the mood, but I think there’s more to it. The prospect of no positive reforms in the wake of this catastrophe is bad enough, but each day’s news informs us that the old order is not sitting still. Every day there is some new scheme for bailing out corporations, or a power-grab by Silicon Valley. The Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is taking the opportunity of quarantine to bring in tech billionaires to re-engineer the future (6).

The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.


Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Original text in English

(1) See Kaiser Health News’s ‘Bill of the month’.

(2) ‘Bloomberg attacks farmers and industrial workers’, talk at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 17 November 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aATHavwhosY/.

(3) Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, ‘Anti-union operative warns business of historic rise in labor activism’, The Intercept, 1 May 2020.

(4) ‘Covid-19 strike wave interactive map’.

(5) Jennifer Epstein, ‘Biden tells elite donors he doesn’t want to “demonize” the rich’, Bloomberg, 19 June 2019.

(6) Naomi Klein, ‘Screen New Deal: under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia’, The Intercept, 8 May 2020.

Trump and Netanyahu’s Palestine sell-out

Trump’s Palestine plan: enshrining occupation

Cécile Marin, February 2020 

Sources: www.peacenow.org; ‘Peace to prosperity’, January 2020

https://mondediplo.com/maps/trump-peace-plan

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PALESTINIANS

The impact of the slave trade on Africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. 

Elikia M'bokolo, April 1998

https://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. Colston was a member of the Royal African Company, which between 1672 and 1689 transported roughly 100,000 men, women and children from west Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, where they were sold as slaves. As Elikia M'Bokolo wrote back in 1998, 'The figures, even where hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean

• 

• Bolivia's coup

  Renaud Lambert
  
  Wednesday 10 June 2020. The New York Times has finally refuted the hypothesis that Evo Morales committed electoral fraud, which served to justify Bolivia's coup d'état last November. This was a theory that the NYT itself was happy to propagate only months ago. Few media outlets have continued to follow the developments in Bolivia, as Latin America only exists for the Western press when it can be used as a weapon of domestic policy. Earlier this year, a study from the Massachusett s Institute of Technology found that Bolivia's right-wing coup was based on faulty data from the Organisation of American States (OAS). As Renaud Lambert wrote in our December issue, when Morales was declared the winner of October's election the OAS, 'the US's strong arm in the region, entered the frame and soon became a key actor in a crisis it claimed to be just observing.'
• https://mondediplo.com/2019/12/02bolivia

Political Cynicism and the Polish Presidential Elections

THE POLES WENT TO THE POLLS THIS WEEKEND 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/andrzej-duda-polish-president-loyal-to.html

HERE IS A BACKGROUNDER

Following surprising increases in voter turnout in 2019, sociologists Przemysław Sadura and Sławomir Sierakowski conducted research on the attitudes of the rural and semi-rural voters in Poland. Their findings reveal that voters remain rational actors with a good grasp of politics but that cynicism permeates their choices and perspectives. Ahead of the now postponed presidential elections, that were controversially set to go ahead this May despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Przemysław Sadura asks where next for the opposition.

Politics has always been a dirty business. Even the most idealistic and well-briefed ministers and MPs lied, cheated, took bribes, or stole. When caught, they committed suicide, retired, went into temporary hiding, or solemnly repented for their sins. They may have been seen as hypocrites, but their stances never put the meta-rules of the democratic system into question. The voters would simply put their faith in different politicians at the next elections. But what happens when the situation repeats itself again and again? What happens when even the elites give up on meeting the expectations of citizens?

According to critical philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek, democratic ideology turns into political cynicism in such a scenario. The cynical subject is aware of the distance between the ideological mask and social reality, but, nonetheless, insists upon the mask. It is well expressed by Sloterdijk’s formula: “They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it”. Cynical reason is no longer naïve or hypocritical but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.

It can be neatly summed up by an anecdote on political honesty that I heard years ago from a former minister from the post-Solidarity camp:

“First, you have people that are personally honest and do not take anything for themselves or their party. The second level of honesty is when a person is completely honest but says that a “big haul” is necessary to pay for political work, and that everything will be done honestly afterwards. The third level consists of people who take part of the money for themselves. The fourth level… well, these are crooks that go into politics just to make money.”

My interlocutor declared himself as a proponent of the second option and argued that the worst people for any party are the total crooks and the radical idealists (sic!). Of course, he was so candid under the condition of anonymity. Today, cynicism among mainstream politicians is common. It is not at all shocking for large parts of the electorate. Trump, Johnson, Salvini, Kaczyński, Orbán, and Bolsanaro – each of them could credibly rebut the accusation of lying with the claim: “I never promised to be honest, just effective.” Their brazenness resembles that of the janitor in the often referenced 1980 cult film Miś (Teddy Bear). When challenged by a client whose coat has gone missing, the janitor stares right into his eyes and replies: “I don’t have your coat – whatcha gonna do about it?”
Cynical voters?

What is the source of such a stance and how does the electorate respond? Years of research on Polish voters have revealed a certain paradox. The less favourable opinion Poles have about politics, the more politically engaged they become. It is most easily observed in the rise of the turnout during elections. Turnout in Poland has climbed from one of the lowest in Europe to a more average level compared to elsewhere in the EU. Turnouts between 20-24 per cent in European elections in the first decade of the 2000s rose to 45 per cent in 2019. Turnouts in national parliamentary elections rose from between 40-50 per cent in earlier years to almost 62 per cent in 2019.


Politics is a reality show. Updates on new swindles do not influence their views but are part of the spectacle like boxers insulting each other before a fight.

Focus group participants tend to explode when asked about their associations with politics. But, at the same time, year after year their language regarding politics became less engaged. They see politics akin mud wrestling, something to be actively observed but not to get drawn into. They have their favourite candidates and, as if watching football, they identify with their team. However, when asked if they ever would join a political party, they treat it as a personal insult. Politics is a reality show. Updates on new swindles do not influence their views but are part of the spectacle like boxers insulting each other before a fight. Someone offered a bribe? Great, the show will be even better!

A long, long time ago, when the Earth was still inhabited by neoliberal dinosaurs, there was a theory called “trickle-down economics”. It argued that economic and fiscal policies that help the richest in society make poorer people better off too. The welfare of the rich would trickle down to the poor. The metaphor did not turn out well in economics, but it may still have some potential in describing political processes. Cynicism that was first limited to politicians has spilled over to voters. Some voters became disenchanted and began to treat politics in a similar way to the politicians, thinking, unapologetically, about ways to “play” and win.

Sławomir Sierakowski and I encountered such voters in focus groups organised in the run-up to the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections. Our report, Political Cynicism: The Case of Poland, was widely discussed by Polish media ahead of the election that saw the Law and Justice Party (PiS) retain its majority in the Sejm lower house but lose its majority in the Senate. Ahead of the presidential election now postponed from May to some point in the summer, it is time to reconsider those election results from the point of view of our findings.
The case of Poland

Our conversations with voters showed that growing part of the electorate has a cynical view of politicians. Their vices and pathological behaviour are plain to see but are deemed acceptable as long as the supported party is working for their interests. The PiS voters are willing to turn a blind eye towards corruption and political scandals. Before the 2019 election, the head of the audit office nominated by PiS was found to have links to organised crime. But PiS voters overlook such matters in exchange for social transfers and official disdain towards an urban elite seen as hostile to “the people”. Sympathisers of the opposition, led by the Civic Platform (PO), are also able to ignore cases of individual corruption and unethical behaviour in exchange for dynamic economic growth and private freedoms. Casting a vote is less a proof of trust towards politicians from the preferred side and more a reflection of hostility towards the other side’s party machinery and voters. Such polarisation drives the paradox mentioned above: the worse the opinion of Poles regarding politics, the higher the turnout come election day.

What is interesting is that PiS voters did not want a constitutional majority for the party. They see a strong opposition as a positive force that guarantees that PiS will not shed its social policy credentials. They are not passive victims of state media propaganda – almost half of them consider Polish public radio and television to be biased. They are, in fact, more likely to state that they watch news from different broadcasters than PO voters, who tend to be more faithful to the private station TVN.


Casting a vote is less a proof of trust towards politicians from the preferred side and more a reflection of hostility towards the other side’s party machinery and voters.

Our research also shows that the voting blocs of different parties are by no means monolithic. PiS, along with its dominant group of loyal, conservative voters, now has a smaller (but still significant) group of new voters drawn to the party thanks to social transfers. In July 2019, more than a third of all voters declared that they would definitely vote for Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS. A further 20 per cent stated that they would consider doing so. The numbers of potential voters observed were even larger in the case of the opposition blocs: Civic Coalition and the Left bloc. The main problem for the opposition was that the large overlap between their electorates meant fighting for the same votes. Such a phenomenon was noticed by the opposition voters themselves. They portrayed PO (the dominant force in the Civic Coalition [KO]) as an unlikeable yet strong “anti-PiS” party. When asked to draw a person that could represent the Left, focus group participants drew liberal PO’s younger brother.
Who won the 2019 elections?

Confronting our findings with election results prompts different conclusions than those of other analysts. 43.6 per cent for PiS was not a surprising or low result. The party gained both in terms of vote share (in 2015, it was 37 per cent) and the total number of votes (up by 2 million). Our July surveys showed the ceiling for PiS support was 55 per cent, of which 35 per cent was solid and a further 20 per cent that could be swayed.[1] PiS therefore mobilised almost half of its potential voters – much more than its competitors. The Left (with 8 per cent solid support and a ceiling of 20 per cent) managed 12.5 per cent, so just 4.5 percentage points out of a possible 12. KO only managed to convince a tenth of its potential voters.

The reactions of party leaders betray quite a different view of the elections. KO that, together with the rest of the opposition, barely won the elections in the Senate and yet was cheering as if it won the entire election. Similar euphoria could be spotted in the Left camp. The centre-right Polish Coalition (PSL) and far-right Confederacy, which had even smaller shares of the votes, were even more ecstatic. The only politicians that looked displeased were on the side of the ruling party. Why was not PiS satisfied with the election result? Was it because they had fallen for their own propaganda and were expecting a constitutional majority? Or maybe they were thinking that luck would come to their side once more? In 2015, a few parties did not pass the electoral threshold and Kaczyński obtained an outright majority in the Sejm with a 37.6 per cent score. This time, PiS needed 43.6 per cent to win basically the same number of seats.
Who lives by the sword…

Is the depression of the winners and the enthusiasm of the losers justified? Both seem premature. PiS gained a lower score than expected and lost control of the upper house in part due to the calculations of its electorate. Its voters, asked about a two-thirds constitutional majority for Jarosław Kaczyński, impulsively replied that they do not want such a scenario to occur. They said that they would feel better in a country in which the opposition can keep the government on its toes. In our research conducted just after the election, PiS voters confirmed that a check on PiS power was no bad thing.

PiS voters that turned to the party the past four years – less ideological and more oriented towards social transfers – had a key role in determining the final result. They may have their doubts over whether or not PiS will keep its long list of promises – especially if it dominates parliament. Poles want PiS rule, but do not want Orbán’s Budapest in Warsaw and did not want to give the party full control over events in Poland.
The future of the opposition and the opposition of the future

The opposition has two problems. The first one is finding an answer to the question of how to beat the incumbent in the upcoming presidential election. The second one is about using the four years until the next parliamentary election to regain PiS voters.

In terms of the first issue, there are few reasons for optimism. In our post-election interviews on possible presidential candidates, the verdict was clear. PiS voters are convinced that the re-election of Andrzej Duda will be swift – and most of the opposition seems to concur. Duda is seen by the media and engaged participants of anti-government demonstrations as subordinate to the will of Jarosław Kaczyński. But he is more commonly perceived as an independent statesman. The presidency confers a “halo effect”, in which the features of the presidency as an institution are transferred onto the person holding the office.


The Left needs to propose a social programme that can attract voters beyond urban elites. The liberal PO needs generational change at its helm to regain an energetic and efficient face.

For the opposition to reclaim parts of the PiS electorate, it should start by trying. Up until now PO and the Left have struggled over liberal voters. Only two parties pose a threat to PiS: PSL, very active in rural areas, and the far-right Confederacy. The Left is good at winning liberal voters in large cities but has no sway over the working classes in the countryside and smaller towns. Almost half of its electorate consists of people with a university degree, while the share of people with vocational education is three times larger in PiS than in the Left (25 compared to 8 per cent). This is a worse result even than the liberal PO. The Left is currently the most elitist formation in the Polish parliament. On a brighter note, it is also the freshest. If the Civic Platform continues to be largely inactive, the Left will be able to rise in the opinion polls, and – further down the road – also in parliamentary representation. But, without changes, the democratic bloc will not grow as a whole.

When, and provided, the presidential elections take place, it is likely that the opposition will lose and Poland will have three years without elections. If the opposition does not want to squander this time, three requirements need to be fulfilled. The Left needs to propose a social programme that can attract voters beyond urban elites. The liberal PO needs generational change at its helm to regain an energetic and efficient face. Both of these forces should play the cards PiS finds difficult to respond to. Decarbonisation may be one such topic. Poland under PiS rule seems to be at loggerheads with EU policy, stronger pressure from the European Union on this matter may also help the opposition.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Based on our survey, we estimated the current and potential size of the electorates of the three largest political camps in Poland. The core electorate of a given party consists of those who declare their intention to vote for that party in the upcoming elections. The potential electorate consists of those people who have not declared an intention to vote for the given party but have supported it in the past, or designate it as their second choice, while also expressing full or partial confidence in that party.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/political-cynicism-and-the-polish-presidential-elections/

The Greens in a New Ireland

THE ELECTION IN IRELAND WAS THIS WEEKEND AND IT SAW THE GREEN PARTY ALIGN WITH TWO RIGHT WING PARTIES AGAINST THE POSSIBILITY OF A SINN FEIN GOVERNMENT OF THE LEFT 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-enemy-of-my-enemy.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/sinn-fein-irish-election-surge-leaves.html


The 2019 European elections saw Green parties achieve their best ever result. Their new weight in a fractured European Parliament is an opportunity for progress on climate, democracy and the rule of law, and social justice. Green parties often perform better at European elections but this time the success is sustained elsewhere. Local elections in the UK, national elections in Portugal, government coalitions in Finland, Sweden, and Luxembourg – the Greens are advancing at all levels. The major caveat is that the “green wave” is absent from much of southern and eastern Europe. Part of our latest edition looks at where political ecology made electoral gains, bringing together analyses of five Green parties to see where they are and to assess their prospects for the years to come. In Ireland, major advances at the European elections in 2019 were carried through to a strong general election result in early 2020. With government negotiations still up in the air, Dan Boyle explains how the Irish Greens bounced back.

After the elections in February 2020, three parties are near identical in their parliamentary numbers. Comhaontas Glas (the Green Party) is now the fourth largest party. The biggest winners were left-wing Sinn Féin. The most likely scenario is a government with a Fianna Fáil (most seats) — Sinn Féin (most votes) nexus. Though it could depend on independents, a third party would give the coalition greater stability and the Greens will be first approached. At the time of writing, the outcome is uncertain.

Today seems a long way from March 2011 when, as a member of the Seanad (the upper house), I witnessed a new government elected in the Dáil (the lower house). Some weeks earlier the Greens had left government, precipitating a general election in which the party lost all of its seats. The Greens’ first experience of government coincided with the global downturn of 2008. There would be no Green participation in the following parliament. We had been told that government participation had thrown back environmental politics in Ireland by a generation.


Eamon Ryan made himself available to lead the party back from the wilderness. The party returned to its volunteer roots to reorganise. The commitment of these volunteers, especially a newer, younger cohort, proved crucial to the party’s revitalisation.

The first electoral tests were local and European elections in 2014. The party won an additional 10 seats in local councils, steady if not spectacular. Green parliamentary representation was restored in the general election of 2016, giving the party access to state funding again. With this support, the party began to professionalise in many areas, including the better management of membership databases, improving social media messaging, and engaging in greater outreach, especially outside of Dublin.

Ireland, whose politics had never been that ideological, was becoming more liberal. Public votes on same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion rights in 2018 saw a new Ireland emerge. This liberalism helped the electorate see the Green Party in a positive light. In the local and European elections of 2019, the party quadrupled local government representation and elected two MEPs.

What the recent successes will mean for the Green political agenda remains to be seen. The main issues on which the election was fought, housing and health, can easily be accommodated between the parties. It is on environmental policy where agreement will be difficult. While Sinn Féin talks approvingly about sustainability, it is committed to infrastructure spending biased towards roads and against public transport and even talks of reducing Ireland’s small carbon tax. A 7 per cent yearly reduction in emissions will be Comhaontas Glas’s priority for any programme for government.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-greens-in-a-new-ireland/

This article is part of our latest edition, “A World Alive: Green Politics in Europe and Beyond”.

From the Street Up: Founding a New Politics in Spain

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/from-the-street-up-founding-a-new-politics-in-spain/

Spain is a country with an elevated awareness of environmental issues and its youth has mobilised en masse to save the planet. However, Green political parties enjoy little electoral support. Esteban Hernández discussed the contradictions in Spain with Green politician and activist Florent Marcellesi and University of Zaragoza sociologist Cristina Monge. With a political space for ecology opening up for contestation, whether or not a green hegemony can be built will depend on political ecology’s ability to push for real transformation and to offer a convincing narrative that transcends class lines.

Esteban Hernández: According to studies by the Centre for Sociological Research of Spanish people’s main concerns, the environment is not a chief worry. It has risen up the list, moving from 0.7 to 3.2 per cent in a year,1 but it’s still far from being a real priority. Why is that?

Florent Marcellesi: We’re at the start of a new historical cycle. We mustn’t only look at the evolution of survey figures from one month to the next but also the long term, starting with Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, which left ecology in a secondary position compared to France or Germany since the dictatorial regime did not permit Green (or any other independent) parties. The difficulties continued with the rise of the anti-austerity 15-M and Indignados street movements in 2011 in the wake of the economic crisis, which also don’t see the environment as a priority.

But now we are living through a period of profound evolution, the birth of a green hegemony. The 15-M Movement began in 2011 but had been a long time coming, and the same is true of ecology, which, through new movements like Juventud por el clima (Youth for climate), is laying the cultural foundations for a green hegemony. Europe also has great influence and the groundswell taking place in the EU has reached Spain. What is yet to happen is for this cultural hegemony to transform into political hegemony.

Cristina Monge: 15-M doesn’t influence the “what” so much as the “how”. It massively and categorically marks the beginning of a new model of mobilisation that first rejects and then transcends classical forms of organisation such as trade unions or political parties. 15-M goes beyond traditional structures and generates a wave with a discourse that is perhaps disorganised but still very powerful. Youth for climate takes on these characteristics, as do the 8M (International Women’s Day) mass mobilisations. It’s spontaneous, there’s no political positioning, but it is possible for the movement to evolve into a meta-narrative.

Florent Marcellesi: This is why I say that we are in a moment of hegemonic construction, that there’s a groundswell that perhaps doesn’t have a clear theoretical corpus, but it will come. This moment, as a real inflection point, is completely unpredictable. Even if ecology in Spain has been relegated to the macro level, and especially since the Catalan bid for independence since 2012 has taken on so much weight in the Spanish community, it has been very present in recent years in municipalism. Cities like Barcelona or Madrid have been pioneers on ecological issues at the European level. The question with this “climate 15-M” is how to unite the micro and the macro levels. That is the challenge for the coming years.


The problem that we face isn’t denialism, but climate hypocrisy – the use of climate change so that nothing changes.

The green vote in Spain is split between the centre-left PSOE, left-wing populist Podemos, green-left Más País, and animal rights party PACMA. To what extent do left-wing and centre-left parties complicate the existence of a Green party in Spain?

Cristina Monge: I’m not sure that there will ever be a strong Green party in Spain, similar to the ones in Germany or France, under current conditions, but there is definitely a political space. The problem is already recognised, including amongst conservatives, and the battle is going to be around what to do about it. Everyone knows that there will be a green transition but there are different discourses about how to tackle it, some more neoliberal, others more social democratic or communist. It’s here that there will be an ideological fight, and a political space that is distinctly green will be important for pushing the debate in one direction or another.

Florent Marcellesi: We Greens are an instrument, so the ideological absorption of our ideas by all parties is welcome if that’s how we achieve change. But there is still a long way to go – we’ve seen that in COP25. The problem that we face isn’t denialism, but climate hypocrisy – the use of climate change so that nothing changes. We need clear voices that remind us that change must be profound, not cosmetic. Second, we must accept that an economic system based on growth cannot work, and need to think about justice from the perspective of post-growth, beyond the dominant economic models.

In Spain, the government has created a vice presidency of ecological transition, but at the same time it tells us that we should keep on growing. That’s why we need a Green party, even if it’s not like those in other European countries given the history and situation in Spain. A sufficiently strong Green party would push others to follow through and not fall into climate hypocrisy, as well as raising structural questions that get to the root of the problem.

The conversation on the green transition always seems to come back to who will foot the bill. In Spain, even solutions like the Green New Deal haven’t managed to frame environmentalism as a solution.

Cristina Monge : We’re very much in an initial stage. Proposals like the Green New Deal are only really understood by those who dedicate themselves to this area. To gain wider acceptance, it’s important to ground these ideas with examples. We see this for instance in the mining communities of Teruel, León, and Asturias that have been dependent on coal and need to generate a different economic model. It’s in these places that we are going to see what the Green New Deal really is and what a just transition means. The move from coal to renewables will need investment, there will be workers who need retraining. When this happens and it becomes clear that at the end of the road jobs are created, the fear will disappear. The green pact isn’t about renewables, which are already here, but something different.


Political ecology in Spain has to bring together two different electorates if it wants to be hegemonic.

Florent Marcellesi : In the collective imaginary, ecology is perceived as the enemy of employment. We’ve got to turn this around so that ecology is seen as the friend of employment and the future. It’s a response to unemployment and to the pension problem, and it will bring security and stability. It has to be seen as something appealing.

Cristina Monge : Let me add that when we say ecology should be appealing, that it ought to be sexy and cool, we have to be very careful because it could become something associated with quality, health, bicycles, and clothes made from recycled plastics aimed at the medium-to-high end of the market. That can be attractive, but it doesn’t have transformational capability and generates social inequality.

Florent Marcellesi: I agree. Political ecology in Spain has to bring together two different electorates if it wants to be hegemonic: the Greens’ classic voter base, the educated urban classes with a medium-to-high income level (who have clearly been reached with the message of political ecology), and the popular classes who have different needs. With the latter, it should be inclusive and insist that the fight will be fair or it won’t happen. If the Greens in Germany can create a hegemony and overcome the Social Democrats, it will be because they have become a party that is popular beyond the middle classes.

This nuance is important, not because environmentalism can be considered fashionable among urban middle-to-upper classes, but because the Spanish right is underlining this aspect as a way to gain followers.

Cristina Monge : This is a difficult time for green politics. In the post-election surveys following the May 2019 elections in Madrid, we saw that the Madrid Central low-emission zone had been a decisive factor in former mayor Manuela Carmena losing votes in neighbourhoods on the outskirts where she had enjoyed strong support before.2 Madrid Central became a discourse similar to that of the gilets jaunes; while the rich could drive around the centre with their electric cars, those on the outskirts lacked adequate public transport and were forced to use older cars. These debates underline how, if the ecological transition is not done in an equitable way, its appeal will be limited to the middle and upper classes of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville. Ultimately, this is what has happened to Más País, which has suffered as a result of this contradiction.3

Florent Marcellesi: The denialism of the far-right Vox party isn’t the main problem. Other right-wing movements, like in France, have incorporated environmentalism into their platform. But in Spain, as we see in Madrid, the Right has lost the battle because it will have to apply Madrid Central anyway.4 The Right has lost the battle for public opinion when it comes to environmentalism.

Cristina Monge With the Right, yes, but with the far-right I disagree with you there. So long as the transition isn’t just, the far right will have a hunting ground. Whenever taxes on petrol and diesel have been brought up, they have immediately responded asking why those with the least should have to pay. With this obrerismo (workerism) they can gain ground as it enables them to reach a sector of the population by opposing policies that address the climate emergency.

Territorial dynamics are important. In Europe, Green parties are more successful in the north than in the south, and something similar has happened in Spain. What’s more, in Spain there is also a territorial identity element because nationalisms, with the Catalan process, have kept environmentalism low on the political agenda.

Cristina Monge: The pattern within Spain is similar to that in Europe overall. The Basque Country in the north is leading the way with a transition plan that has received millions in investment with both public and private funds. This is related to their economic development but also to their political, social, and business culture. In the south, there is a sense of being less dependent on the environment than in the north. In regions like the Basque Country, the post-industrial transition is still fresh in people’s minds. Since it went well, they see the green transition as an opportunity and not a threat. In Castile and Andalusia, things played out differently, which is why in these regions it’s so important to emphasise the idea of a just transition.


Spain has been a pio­neer in its capacity for mobilisation and institutional presence on issues like feminism, in which Spain and Sweden are leaders.

Florent Marcellesi: The Catalan process has had a negative impact on both the social and ecological agenda. Political ecology should be brave and put the ideas of interdependence and co-dependence at the fore. But beyond this issue, there are two factors that will be important in developing a strong Green party. The government has confirmed that there will be an ecological transition and has a vice presidency for this area as well as a vice presidency for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. If citizens’ demands are met in this regard, it will be difficult for a strong party to develop. If, on the other hand, the people are disappointed, the space will open up again. This already happened to PSOE when it failed to deliver on its promises, leading to EQUO’s establishment in 2011. The second factor is what is happening on a social level. If youth movements continue to develop and political identity is created beyond what the government does, then we will cement this cultural hegemony.

What can Europe learn from the Spanish experience? Is there something that could prove useful? Perhaps the 15-M?

Cristina Monge: While they’re not the same, 15-M was part of the same cycle as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Nuit debout in France. They gave rise to this new wave of social mobilisation that brought with it Greta Thunberg and created a movement that is in its prime today. This isn’t something limited to Spain, and it has been very influential.

Spain provides various positive examples that demonstrate the importance of a just transition. Not just in the Basque Country, but in other regions too. What’s more, we have to cite experiences like those in Madrid with the subsidised retrofitting of rental housing for energy efficiency.

Florent Marcellesi: Spain has been a pio­neer in its capacity for mobilisation and institutional presence on issues like feminism, in which Spain and Sweden are leaders. The only country in the world that held a mass feminist strike for International Women’s Day 2019 was Spain. If we link this with ecology – and this can be done because the ecofeminist current is gaining traction – then it will have an impact in Europe, which in this respect is looking to Spain. The second important issue is municipalism, given how regions and cities are very relevant in the fight against climate change. Many cities have as much, if not more, weight than states and they will have an extremely important role to play in the future.

NOTES

1. The figure of 3.2 per cent dates from December 2019. See full results.

2. The 2019 Madrid local and city council elections saw Manuela Carmena of the left-wing Más Madrid replaced as mayor by centre-right Partido Popular’s José Luis Martínez-Almeida with the backing of a centre-right coalition. Carmena’s flagship Madrid Central project, which the Right actively campaigned against, sought to reduce air pollution by making the centre off-limits to non-residential cars.

3. The green-left Más País platform was formed by Íñigo Errejón around Más Madrid to contest the November 2019 general election. In some provinces, the party fielded candidates in coalition with the Green party EQUO. It won three seats, two of which with Más País–EQUO. The election saw the governing PSOE party win the most seats while the far-right Vox more than doubled in size to become the country’s third most powerful party.

4. Courts have blocked the right-wing bloc’s efforts to roll back the Madrid Central low-emissions area on grounds of the negative effects even a temporary suspension would have on health and the environment.


This interview is part of our latest edition, “A World Alive: Green Politics in Europe and Beyond”.