Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Battle of Ideas: Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution in Theory and in Practice


August 21, 2020
Length:4770 words


Summary: Report to the July 2020 Interim Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, slightly updated — Editors


INTRODUCTION


Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognize that this is the task history has ‘assigned’, to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.

-Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973 in Philosophy & Revolution Chapter 9, “New Passions and New Forces The Black Dimension, The Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women’s Liberation”.


Over the past 10 years, we have seen the rise of authoritarianism, state repression and white supremacy across the globe. As always, Black, Indigenous people of color, youth, women, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities will often bear the brunt of these dehumanizing structures. Some of the structural issues Black and Brown populations are experiencing in the United States at this time, include over-policing, police brutality, gentrification of already under-resourced communities, depressed wages, lowered health outcomes, housing insecurity, mass incarceration to name a few.

Marxist-Humanism is a philosophy that engages with the totality of Marx’s work, posits that alienation is at the center of dehumanizing structures humans face under capital and embraces Marx’s philosophy of liberation. To analyze the current uprisings we must try to understand the dialectical relationship between the objective and subjective forces in these movements. This report will examine issues of race and gender from a United States based context. Because we are living through an unprecedented time, of a Black-led multi-racial movement, this report will primarily focus on United States-based Black and feminist movements.


THE MOVEMENTS OF BLACK MASSES


Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

-Ruth Wilson Gilmore


Black Lives Matter and Related Movements

Each generation of revolutionaries must theorize, and act based on current conditions. Movements like Black Lives Matter have been at the forefront of not only fighting police violence, the incarceration of Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and an unjust immigration system, but have also taken on issues such as mental health, LGBTQ rights, and reproductive justice for folks of color. Moreover, the current Covid-19 pandemic has not revealed a “we’re in this together” moment as many in the bourgeoisie were claiming it would. In fact, this particular crisis has laid bare all of the inequities in our society as Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) find themselves disproportionately affected by this catastrophe. Indeed, the social and economic impacts of this crisis coupled with recent racist murders of Black folks is fueling the revolts we see as BIPOC, women, youth, the working class, immigrants and sexual minorities rise up against the domination of racialized and gendered capitalism.

Throughout this decade, the United States public has been forcefully confronted with what many communities of color have long understood, i.e. their bodies are considered disposable in this society. A 2015 study by the Harvard Public Health Review confirms this, revealing that Black men are three times more likely to have a fatal encounter with the police compared to white men. The same study also shows there’s been a sharp rise in these fatal incidents since the 1980s. The 2014 brutal murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police mobilized the Black masses to say, “I can’t breathe,” a reference to Garner’s last words as police manhandled him cutting off his circulation and “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” a phrase found in the Communist Manifesto but popularized by Assata Shakur in the 1970s. Today we repeat the same harrowing last words of George Floyd as he pleaded for his life and called out for his mother, while a police officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. “I can’t breathe” is now the cry of the streets as masses everywhere protest Mr. Floyd’s murder, racialized capitalism and state violence worldwide.

Public perception of the movement for Black lives and of systemic racism have shifted over the past 7 years. A July 2020 poll by Langer Research Associates reveals that 63% of U.S. Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement and 69% of the same group acknowledge that Black people and other racialized minorities face institutional racism within the criminal justice system. The response to the question of systemic racism has jumped 15 percentage points since 2014, the year the Black Lives Matter movement was born. This shift in consciousness for the masses does not necessarily translate into widespread desire for revolutionary change. At a time when confidence in law enforcement institutions is at a 30 year low (48% across the general population, 56% among whites and 19% among Blacks), the U.S. masses favor widespread police reforms over defunding or abolishing the police (Brennan, 2020). White U.S. citizens are less likely to support the defunding of the police department budgets and shifting resources to social programs (41% compared to 49% of the Hispanic and 70% of the Black population). And while the U.S. general population does not support the complete abolishment of policing as we know it (15% support from the general population BUT 33% for persons under 35 years old), the public is now having important conversations about the carceral state (Crabtree, 2020).

Taylor (2020) carefully examines the superficial display of solidarity we are witnessing from our public and private institutions. “At one level, the rapid, reflexive default to offering symbolic recognition of racism was quite typical. No other country engages in the cavernous nothingness of the fake apology as frequently as the United States.”. At the same time she acknowledges what other radical scholars have that the uprisings are a response to prolonged systemic inequities minorities suffer under racialized capital and that the emerging social movements are forcing everyone, including the left to engage seriously with issues around class, race, anti-blackness, crime, and state-sanctioned violence.

An important task for those in these movements is to offer a critical analysis of the role of looting and vandalism during protests. As Vicky Osterweil (2014) and others have noted, the media attempts to distinguish “good” protesters from “bad” ones and by doing so “reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies, deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that ‘outside agitators’ engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise ‘non-violent’ demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep thosedemonstrators safe.” In this current revolt, the “good” protesters can be seen marching during the day, chanting and expressing anger in a way that is only slightly unacceptable in civil society. The “bad” protesters are characterized by actions like looting, ignoring curfews, vandalism, mocking police officers, allowing their anger to spill over onto freeways by occupying them, and displaying generally antisocial behavior. Embracing the “good vs. bad” protester logic risks dividing movements and undermining the solidarity protesters might otherwise have. This logic also implies that those engaged in these acts don’t have agency and are not involved in conscious and tactical resistance. Furthermore, undermining the more violent aspects of a revolt underestimates the very visceral rage many are experiencing at this time. Organizers and activists should continuously push their demands forward and not fall into this logic, particularly at a time when we see the state making concessions and wide public condemnations of systemic racism. Conversations about non-community invaders should center on police and National Guard troops who are the true outside agitators as they’ve been deployed from other cities to repress communities. Moreover protesters can and have been using this moment to push forward a counter-narrative, using the language of looting, stealing and violence to confront the white supremacist settler-colonial project that is the United States, and making the case that exploitation under capitalism is actually the ultimate form of looting.

The current Black Lives Matter movement has been viewed as a form of race-based identity politics by some on the Marxist left who remain only interested in class-first solutions to the problems we experience under capitalism. These critics claim that these forms of identity politics undermine class solidarity for neoliberal reforms or for bourgeois individualisms. Understanding that the politics of recognition do not develop in a vacuum, Raya Dunayevskaya (1982) did not reject these politics wholesale, in fact she evokes Hegelian concepts in support saying, “it is clear that for the Black masses, Black consciousness, awareness of themselves as African-Americans with their dual history and special pride, is a drive toward wholeness. Far from being a separation from the objective, it means an end to the separation between objective and subjective. Not even the most elitist Black has quite the same arrogant attitude as the White intellectual toward the worker, not to mention the prisoner.” (1982:281)

Dunayevskaya recognizes something that scholars like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) point to, that even the Black elites in the United States society cannot escape racialization. This is an important observation that the class-reductionists are usually not able to make. Their fear of being derailed from struggling against a global class war prevents them from understanding how comparatively little power Black and Brown elites hold in a racist society. They also fail to realize that even the bourgeois Black and Brown classes are willing to fight against racialized oppression and have historically done so. Indeed, almost all United States mainstream politicians of color at our present time are willing to proclaim, “Black Lives Matter.”

Concerning the issue of identity-first or race-based movements, Dunayevskaya (1982) also rejects the idea that Black self-development of subjectivity is bourgeois. Over the span of her career, she remains committed to the struggle against structural racism and its relationship to capital. She also follows the activities and self-development of people of color, particularly in relation to the Black dimension in the United States. Determined to always get to the root of racial domination, she was consistently willing to take the class-reductionist left as well as the Black bourgeois leadership to task. Dunayevskaya (1963) does more than champion the rights of racialized minorities or simply explain how their oppression is connected to a larger class war. Through her dialectical exploration of history, she is able to demonstrate that not only are the United States Black populations always on the forefront of liberation movements but that no system of domination can snuff out the human desire to be free. In American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, she writes, “[the Black dimension] at each turning point in history, anticipates the next stage of development of labor in its relationship with capital. Because of his dual oppression, it could not be otherwise” (1963:81). To make this claim she analyzes the creativity of abolitionists through the slave revolts, Black anti-imperial resistances during the turn of the 20th century, Black labor battles of the reconstruction era, the courageous actions of the Little Rock Nine in their quest to desegregate schools and the Black wildcat Detroit strikes — notice that many of the struggles she highlights have no obvious or immediate class character. Dunayevskaya takes a special interest in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott asserting that this struggle was as relevant and radical as the Hungarian revolution that occurred the year after. She writes extensively on not only the relatedness of these movements but on the underlying humanism that propels them. Throughout her scholarship, Dunayevskaya observes that the Black masses at this time remain revolutionary, “contrary to the reports in the white press, Black America’s actual rejection of white capitalistic-imperialistic exploitation, with or without Black lackeys, is, all one and the same time, a time-bomb that is sure to explode, and a time for thinking and readying for action.” ([1978] 1986:12)


Black Pain for White Witnesses

In a provocative essay Zoe Samudzi (2020) explores the question of why we watch videos of Black people being murdered or brutalized by state actors or white vigilantes. She asserts, “it serves usually, as a reinscription of white supremacy: a reification of the boundary between the white self and the black ‘others’ through a passive bystander witnessing and the enforcement of race through public violence.” In other words, it is possible to view these heinous acts over and over again, express concern, and share the videos for the purpose of awareness-raising without actually engaging in anti-racist praxis. If state violence is a mainstay of Black life, what awareness is there to raise? Why have the masses at this point not come to understand how violence functions under racial capitalism?

Samudzi also claims that “the killings, in a way, become a macabre method of marking social and political time” and an opportunity for white progressives and leftists to claim moral superiority over other white people because they experience sympathy by watching the horror and subsequently sharing them in a quest for justice (that as we’ve seen is rarely achieved). One other reason for the sharing of these videos is to convince the masses of the innocence of the victims. If Black people in this society by default are guilty, then there must be evidence of the opposite before the masses can demand justice for their murders. The families of state murder victims understand this and also often urge us not to look away from the dehumanization of their Black family members. What remains clear is that we will continue to witness violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, non-male, queer and disabled folks until we fundamentally change social relations in our societies. We will continue to share and be horrified by the videos that capture this violence. One question we should ask is how to move mass passive white viewership from this place of witnessing to one of struggling for justice. Perhaps we are on the way there as the witnessing of George Floyd’s murder has become the impetus for the current uprising against state violence.


Women’s Movements and Abolition Feminisms


Let this (moment) radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.

-Mariame Kaba



We’ve seen tremendous activism and organizing of women (many of color) and queer folks over the past several years. In 2019, we witnessed Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants union call for a general strike after a government shutdown left TSA screeners, air traffic controllers, and customs agents unpaid for 35 days. This tactic has not been attempted in the United States for over 70 years! Although flight attendants are paid by the private airlines they work for, Nelson made a rousing speech calling for worker solidarity across all sectors, “Some would say the answer is for them to walk off the job. I say, ‘What are you willing to do?’ Their destiny is tied up with our destiny — and they don’t even have time to ask us for help. Don’t wait for an invitation. Get engaged, join or plan a rally, get on a picket line, organize sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices.” Perhaps Nelson like many have recognized, the current political and economic conditions have opened the door for these radical ideas to be broached and the masses are hungry for changes. She would go on to say, “I think what we’re seeing, with the teachers strikes, the hotel workers who took on Marriott and won, is that people are not willing to put up with it anymore. People are willing to do more to fight for their families because they have been pushed so far, and there has been so much productivity put on the backs of the American worker without any increases in wages.” When asked about her call for a general strike, she wondered, “What is the labor movement waiting for?”

While we have yet to observe a general strike, we cannot discount the strikes and other labor-related activities that have occurred over the past few years. Indeed, we’ve witnessed widespread teacher strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, California and Colorado. These teacher strikes can be understood as both labor and feminist issues, considering that 77 % of all K-12 educators in the United States are female, and that the demands educators have been making address matters of social reproduction. As teachers during these strikes have demanded better pay and/or work conditions, they’ve also called for changes that socialist feminists everywhere have considered important for life-making. These include a demand to invest in counselors, librarians and mental health support for students, re-investment in after-school and early education programs for public education, access to quality education for working-class students, access to quality food in schools, and demands for the safety of children, and specifically, a halt to random searches and the policing of students.

One framework socialist feminists of color are rallying around particularly when it comes to issues of social reproduction, is that of abolitionist feminism (Lorber, 2018). Abolitionist feminism is an anti-capitalist framework with Marxist roots which seeks to not only dismantle the carceral state but project a new world. According to Maureen Mansfield (2018), “abolitionist feminism invites us to consider the world we want, and how to organize to build it. Seeking a world beyond cages, policing and surveillance, Abolitionist Feminism focuses our attention on developing stronger communities and bringing about gender, race and economic justice. It encourages us to consider our approach systemically and collectively rather than individually… Abolitionist Feminism asks us to consider the violence and harm caused by the state, as well as inter-personally, and seek alternative strategies for addressing these harms.”

While abolitionist frameworks are not new, we find new generations of feminists of color adopting these ideas. The abolitionist frameworks are indeed informing activists and theorists in this moment of civil unrest. When the Black Lives Matter movement launched in 2014, most calls for justice from even the leaders of the organization were reformist in nature. In this second wave of BLM activism, we are witnessing these demands change to have a more abolitionist character. The present-day abolitionist movements comprise of grassroots organizers, feminist collectives and scholars and is a very decentralized movement. Beyond the abolitionist frameworks that unite their work, the organizing principles are carried out in context-specific ways. By eschewing big party politics, vanguardism or hierarchical organizations, abolitionists have managed to be nimble and propose an abolitionist platform that meets current Black Lives Matter uprising. For example, the calls to #defundpolice and for #carenotcops were crafted quite thoughtfully. When abolitionists proposed these demands, they looked at actionable ways of approaching police abolition that had the potential to shrink the scope of policing, the size of the prison-industrial complex and to undermine the surveillance state. Defunding the police and investing public monies in services for communities that are most affected by the carceral system, creates the potential for new communities of care where societal ills are no longer addressed through either interpersonal or state violence.

By contrast, liberal reformers are calling for a police reform program known as #8cantwait. This platform proposes measures to combat police brutality that many states have tried with little success (e.g. banning chokeholds on arrest victims) to ones that are almost unenforceable (e.g. mandating police officers to use de-escalation techniques in their arresting practices). These proposals seek to make tweaks to a system that can not be accountable to itself and offers no generative community-based to address peoples’ material needs. But for the ongoing radical organizing of contemporary abolitionists, this framework would be accepted as the most progressive solution to the problems of state violence and police terror we face. So strong was the opposition to the #8cantwait program that its original framers have almost abandoned it and a collective of revolutionary abolitionists have released their own plan titled #8toabolition.

Abolitionist frameworks have the potential of upending all systems of domination and projecting new humanist alternatives. As famed abolitionist feminist Mariame Kaba says, “a big part of the abolitionist project… is unleashing people’s imaginations while getting concrete — so that we have to imagine while we build, always both.” Abolishing the carceral state would necessitate the abolishment of capitalism. The current abolitionist feminisms we are witnessing are advocating for a politic that goes beyond the redistribution of resources and instead proposes new human social relations that are not based on commodification and exploitation. This framework refuses to explore the “woman question,” “the race question” or the “prison/policing/surveillance abolition question” after the revolution but demands that it be theoretically worked on now. Time will tell if these and related movements can potentially uproot the capitalist mode of production and overcome the mental and manual division of labor that creates alienated human relations.


CONCLUSION


Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

-Arundhati Roy




We therefore now need to initiate the exploration of the new reconceptualized form of knowledge that would be called for by Fanon’s redefinition of being humanas that of skins (phylogeny/ontogeny) and masks (sociogeny). Therefore bios and mythoi. And notice! One major implication here: humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.

-Sylvia Wynter



At the current moment, we are facing a global pandemic and multiple historic political uprisings. How are we to identify and be in solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day? What kinds of organizations do we need at this time and what role can Marxist-Humanists play in articulating a theory of organization that meets this moment? It is abundantly clear that the masses are eschewing vanguardism and hierarchical organizations for smaller, more horizontal democratic female and queer-led models. As we theorize about organization, we should consider Dunayevskaya’s insights when asked to address the question of decentralization within the Womens’ liberation movement. She writes, “ the demand for small informal groups is not to be disregarded as if it were a question of not understanding the difference between small and large, and that large is better. Nor can this demand be answered in our bureaucratic age by attributing to Women’s liberation a deep-down belief in private property, petty home industry, and “of course” Mother Earth. Nothing of the kind. The demand for decentralization involves the two pivotal questions of the day; and, I might add, questions of tomorrow, because we are not going to have a successful revolution unless we do answer them. They are, first, the totality and the depth of the necessary uprooting of this exploitative, sexist, racist society. Second, the dual rhythm of revolution: not just the overthrow of the old, but the creation of the new: not just the reorganization of objective, material foundations but the release of subjective personal freedom, creativity, and talents. In a word, there must be such appreciation of the movement from below, from practice, that we can never again let theory and practice get separated. That is the cornerstone” (Dunayevskaya [1982] 1991:108)

Over the past two years we’ve explored matters of identity, intersectionality, and other politics of recognition in our theorizing around this issue. In the past I have suggested, “instead of becoming frustrated with the consciousness-raising and empowerment projects some identity-based movements have turned to, we should position ourselves to do the theoretical and practical labor required to be in critical solidarity with Black and Brown movements.” I have also proposed that these projects be taken on by theorizing around the psychic components of racialized and gendered oppression while seeking out ways to move incomplete articulations of intersectionality and emerging movements to a place of radical criticality. In addition, my fellow IMHO colleague Lilia Monzó (2019) asks us to move Dunayevskaya’s concept of Black masses as vanguard to what she calls women of color as vanguard, making a case that women of color subjects are currently the force and reason for revolution. Others in our organization like Peter Hudis (2019) propose developing an intersectional historical materialist framework that can theorize not only around Marxist concepts but also take on the issues of dehumanization produced by racialized and gendered domination under capitalism. These are important additions to Marxist-Humanist thought as much of the revolutionary movement work we see today is being led by Black, Brown and Indigenous women and queer folks in the United States who are wrestling with similar questions.

Dunayevskaya always had a long and dialectical view of history and would systematically relate capital’s latest crisis to mass movements and issues concerning people of color. She did so by developing Marxist-Humanism, a philosophy that reanimates the totality of Marx’s Marxism and that posits alienation at the heart of the dehumanization we suffer under capital. She remained situated in the struggles of the day, paying special attention to the activities of the Black dimension which she identified as historically being an important force for liberatory movement. Always working from Marx’s concept of revolution in permanence, she also posed the question “what comes next,” taking care to articulate the potential to produce new humanisms during each revolutionary struggle. As the Marxist left continues to struggle when it comes to issues of race and gender and as identity-based intersectional theories continue to be relevant we are also noticing a liberatory politics emerge from below as people try to make sense of their everyday experiences. Our task as revolutionaries is to project better alternatives that take the everyday material conditions of folks seriously, to be in critical solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day and to “recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it.” (Dunayevskaya [1965] 2012:73)

Several excerpts of this report can be found in an upcoming book chapter titled, Raya Dunayevskaya on Race, Resistance and Revolutionary Humanism


REFERENCES

8 Can’t Wait Platform: https://8cantwait.org/

8 to Abolition Platform: https://www.8toabolition.com/

Brenan, Megan. “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges”. Gallup, August, 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/317135/amid-pandemic-confidence-key-institutions-surges.aspx

Crabtree, Steve. “Most Americans Say Policing Needs ‘Major Changes”. Gallup, July 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-changes.aspx

Duda, John. Towards the horizon of abolition: A conversation with Mariam. The Next System Project. 2017: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1963] 2003. American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard. Chicago: News and Letters Publications.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. [1965] 2012. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, K. B. Anderson and R. Rockwell (Eds.). Maryland: Lexington.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1973] 2003. Philosophy and Revolution. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1982] 1991. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s

Philosophy of Revolution. 2nd ed. Foreword by Adrienne Rich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. “A Post-World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843-83; Marxist-Humanism, 1950s-1980s,” News and Letters, 1986.

Grabar, Henry. What Workers Can Learn From “the Largest Lockout in U.S. History”

An interview with Sara Nelson, the flight attendant union head who called this week for a general strike. Slate, 2019.

Hudis, Peter. “How is an Intersectional Historical Materialism Possible?: The Dialectic of Race and Class Reconsidered”. Paper presented at. Toronto, April, 2019.

Krieger, Nancy et.al. “Trends in US deaths due to legal intervention among black and white men, age 15- 34 years, by county income level: 1960-2010”, Harvard Public Health Review, Vol. 3 Jan 2015.

Langer Research Associates. “63 Percent Support Black Lives Matter as Recognition of Discrimination Jumps”. July 21, 2020: https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1214a3RaceandRights.pdf

Loewus, Liana. The Nation’s Teaching Force Is Still Mostly White and Female. Eduweek, 2017.

Lober, Brooke. “(re)Thinking Sex Positivity, Abolition Feminism, and the #MeToo Movement: Opportunity for a New Synthesis”. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, January 2018.

Mansfield, Maureen. “What is Abolitionist Feminism, and Why Does it Matter?”, The Progressive Policy Think Tank,2018. https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/what-is-abolitionist-feminism-and-why-does-it-matter

McKittrick, Katherine. ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Monzó, Lilia D. 2019. A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity. New York: Peter Lang.

Osterweil, Vicky 2014. In Defense of Looting. The New Inquiry: https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-looting/

Samudzi, Zoe. White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching, 2020: https://newrepublic.com/article/157734/white-witness-contemporary-lynching

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “We should still defund the police”. The New Yorker, August 14, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/defund-the-police.

Erich Fromm and the Revolution of Hope





August 18, 2020
Length:3140 words


Summary: Marks the fortieth anniversary of the socialist humanist Erich Fromm’s death. First appeared in Jacobin, here https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/erich-fromm-frankfurt-school-marxism-weimar-germany — Editors



The German socialist thinker Erich Fromm is an unjustly neglected figure, certainly when compared with his erstwhile Frankfurt School colleagues, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Fromm’s analysis of authoritarian culture offers what is in many ways a more grounded alternative to the influential theories of Horkheimer and Adorno, and reveals a distinctly more optimistic and hopeful engagement with the question of radical social change.

Scholarship on the Frankfurt School and critical theory has minimized Fromm’s contribution, continuing a trend that Max Horkheimer himself inaugurated after Fromm’s departure from the Frankfurt Institute in 1939. This has left us with a picture of Frankfurt School critical theory that is rather one-sided, lacking a serious account of Fromm’s thought and his influential critique of authoritarianism.

Fromm’s story shows us that a critique of authoritarian culture – that points out the strong tendencies toward passivity and reaction in the general populace – can retain its central thrust while also maintaining some of the optimism of the original Marxian critique of capitalism, and its orientation towards political action in the here and now.


Early Years

Fromm was born in 1900, into a middle-class, orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. His initial plan on leaving school was to become a Talmud scholar; instead, his father persuaded him to study Law at Frankfurt University, where he lasted less than a year before transferring to Heidelberg’s Ruprecht-Karls-University to study “Nationalökonomie” (National Economics).

In Heidelberg, under the tutelage of Alfred Weber (brother of Max), Karl Jaspers, Hans Driesch, and Heinz Rickert, Fromm attended classes on the history of philosophy and psychology, social and political movements, and the theory of Marxism. During this period, Fromm continued his Talmud studies side-by-side with his academic work. The Romantic socialism of his Talmud teacher, Salman Rabinkov, was particularly influential.

Like Max Horkheimer, Fromm refrained from direct involvement in socialist politics during these early years. He was a member of neither the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) nor the German Communist Party (KPD). Fromm’s strongest engagement at this time remained his Jewish studies. He helped set up an influential Jewish Teaching Institute (Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus), at which he lectured along with figures such as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Leo Baeck, and Siegfried Kracauer. He also set up a sanatorium in Heidelberg with his future wife, Freida Fromm-Reichmann, for the specific psychoanalytic treatment of Jewish patients.

Fromm’s interest in Marxism grew from the mid-1920s – in the period that Karl Korsch dubbed the “crisis of Marxism” – during which he studied at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Fromm, who had by this point renounced Judaism, was part of a group of young dissident socialist thinkers, including Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, who were concerned with applying the ideas of psychoanalysis to social issues.

This group, like many others in Germany at the time, wanted to understand why socialism had thus far failed to materialize in Germany, despite the fact that it had a large working class and a highly organized labor movement. Influenced by the critique of “mechanical Marxism” that Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch had inaugurated, they tried to identify what might be called the “subjective” barriers to socialism and believed that psychoanalysis could play a particularly important role in illuminating those barriers.


Joining the Frankfurt School

During this period, Fromm made the acquaintance of Max Horkheimer, who was also interested in the potential for psychoanalysis to make sense of the failures of socialism. Horkheimer at this time was affiliated with the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, set up in 1923 by Felix Weil, son of a wealthy businessman father and former student of Karl Korsch. Although the institute was initially modelled along the lines of an orthodox Marxist institute of labour studies, when Horkheimer became director in 1930 its focus shifted toward the interdisciplinary mixing of social philosophy with the empirical social sciences, and particularly the mixing of sociological and psychoanalytical concerns. At Horkheimer’s instigation, Fromm received an invitation to join the Institute, where he and Horkheimer were to be the central intellectual force in these early years, pioneering the fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism long before Theodor Adorno entered the picture.

At the Institute, Fromm took charge of an innovative empirical study of manual and white-collar German workers. Making use of a detailed questionnaire distributed to some 3,300 workers, the study sought to analyse the relationship between the psychological make-up of the workers and their political opinions. The questionnaire revealed that the majority of respondents associated themselves with the left-wing slogans of their party, but that their radicalism was considerably weaker when it came to more subtle and seemingly unpolitical questions.

Fromm concluded that roughly 10 percent of the participants were “authoritarian,” roughly 15 percent were “democratic/humanistic,” and the remaining 75 percent were somewhere between the two. The authoritarians, he predicted, would support a future fascist political movement, while the democrats/humanists would stand up and oppose them. The problem was that the democratic/humanistic segment might not be strong enough to defeat the authoritarian 10 percent if those in the middle were psychologically unprepared to resist the authoritarians.

Although the study itself wasn’t published until the 1980s, under the title The Working Class in Weimar Germany — partly because of the subsequent breakdown in Fromm’s relationship with Horkheimer — it clearly shone considerable light on what was to transpire under the Nazi regime. It was also a rare example of empirical research into the lives and attitudes of the working class from within the Frankfurt School tradition.

Fromm remained an important part of the Institute’s work for much of the 1930s. He was largely responsible for the relocation of the Institute to the US in response to the Nazi takeover, making personal contact with scholars at Columbia University, where the Institute eventually settled. He was also pivotal to the Institute’s continuing research on authoritarianism, and played a central role in the 1936 Studien über Autorität und Familie (Studies on Authority and the Family) – a 1,000-page preliminary report which helped pave the way for the Institute’s more famous work on The Authoritarian Personality.

However, Fromm’s revision of Freud during this period began to alienate him from Horkheimer. Fromm argued that the key problem of psychology was how individuals relate to one another and to the society around them and not a matter of predetermined libidinal stages (anal, oral, genital, etc.) as was the case in Freud. The burgeoning intellectual relationship between Horkheimer and Adorno contributed further to this sense of alienation. Fromm left the Institute towards the end of 1939.


Fear of freedom

Not long after his departure from the Institute, Fromm broke onto the US intellectual scene with his work Escape from Freedom (1941). The book’s central theme was that Europe had sacrificed its progress over the course of centuries towards ever greater forms of political freedom — and even towards socialism — through its capitulation to fascism. Fromm wanted to explain how Nazism had taken hold in Germany, and why so many individuals had come to support Hitler.

He put forward the notion of a “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character, which combines strivings for submission and for domination to provide the human basis for authoritarian rule. Fromm wanted to transcend simplistic explanations of Nazism that depicted it as an exclusively political or economic phenomenon, without falling back on purely psychological theories (suggesting that Hitler was mad, and his followers equally so). He sought to understand Nazism as both a psychological and a socio-economic problem.

Like most Marxist analyses at the time, Fromm focused on the role of the lower middle classes. He argued that certainsocioeconomic and political changes had left a deep psychological mark, removing traditional supports and mechanisms of self-esteem. Those changes included the declining status of this class in the face of monopoly capitalism and hyperinflation, as well as the defeat Germany had suffered in the First World War.

Fromm identified deep feelings of anxiety and powerlessness upon which Hitler had been able to capitalize. His sadomasochistic message of love for the strong and hatred for the weak — not to mention a racial program that raised “true-born” Germans to the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder — provided a means of escape from intolerable psychological burdens experienced on a mass basis.

Escape Fromm Freedom was not merely an analysis of Nazism. At the heart of its thesis was the notion that capitalism — particularly in its monopolistic phase — fostered “the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure,” and which is therefore tempted to surrender its freedom to strong-man leaders.

Fromm’s analysis explicitly spoke of the conditions for fascism which existed in the US: the effects of the Great Depression, the existence of increasingly mechanized forms of factory work, the prevalence of political propaganda and hypnoid forms of advertising, interacting with a purported psychological tendency toward “automaton conformity” on the part of a significant percentage of the population.


The marketing orientation

Fromm returned to the theme of social conformity fourteen years later in The Sane Society (1955), which identified a widespread, socially patterned “pathology of normalcy” governing advanced capitalist societies. The Sane Societyengaged in an extended critique of mid-twentieth-century US society, which for Fromm was essentially a bureaucratic form of mass-consumer capitalism.

As part of this critique, Fromm utilized the notion of the “marketing orientation” to describe what he saw as the newly dominant personality type in US society. This notion was clearly a social-psychological refraction of the Marxian notion of alienation, with the idea that humans were alienated from themselves and their own powers and capacities. For Fromm, the “marketing orientation” denoted a mode of existence in which people experienced themselves and others as commodities — literally as something to be marketed.

The Sane Society did show a certain affinity with the emphasis of the other Frankfurt School theorists on the integration of the working class into capitalist society. But there was a greater sense in Fromm’s work of the possibilities for change, even if he did not identify a particular social agent that would be responsible for such change. Fromm devoted considerable space to practical alternatives, including an extended analysis of communitarian work practices, such as Marcel Barbu’s watch-case factory at Boimandau.

The Sane Society was also notable for its criticism of aspects of the Marxist project, especially concerning the traditional concept of revolution. Fromm believed that there was a profound psychological error in the famous statement that concludes The Communist Manifesto, suggesting that the workers had “nothing to lose but their chains.” As well as their chains, the workers also had something else to lose: all the irrational needs and satisfactions which had originated while they were wearing those chains.

Fromm argued that we need an expanded concept of revolution: in terms not only of external barriers, but of internal, subjective barriers as well. Such a concept would address the roots of sadomasochistic passions, such as sexism, racism, nationalism, and other deformities of individual and social character that aren’t necessarily going to disappear rapidly in the context of a new society.


Capitalism and love

Fromm continued his analysis of the subjective barriers to a true humanistic socialism in The Art of Loving (1956), perhaps his best-known work. He was adamant that there was a deep incompatibility between “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love.” The criticism of love — which, for Fromm, is not a phenomenon restricted to its romantic manifestations — was therefore also a criticism of capitalism, and of the ways in which it obstructed genuine forms of love that would be realized in a more human society. Fromm demanded that we analyse the conditions for the possibility of realizing love and integrity in the present society and seek to strengthen them.

During the 1950s, Fromm joined the American Socialist Party–Social Democratic Federation (SP–SDF) and sought to influence its program. The resulting document, published as Let Man Prevail (1958), set out Fromm’s distinctive form of Marxism, which he called “radical humanism.” The text was full of criticism of the USSR as a form of “vulgarized, distorted socialism.”

What Fromm offered in its place was a democratic, humanist form of socialism that placed the human being at the center. He finished with a set of short- and medium-term goals, including proposals to increase grassroots participation in the economic, social, educational, and political spheres.

At the very time when Horkheimer and Adorno were moving further away from organized politics, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Fromm, the most Jewish of all the Frankfurt School thinkers, was moving towards it. He continued on this path in the 1960s. May Man Prevail? (1960) was an analysis of Soviet Communism intended to influence a move to unilateral disarmament during the Cold War.

Fromm’s extended critique of Stalinism and post-Stalinist Khrushchevism also stressed the managerial and bureaucratic similarities between the Soviet and American systems. His text referred approvingly to the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and there were some sharp words directed at Western hypocrisy.


A return to Marx

In Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), Fromm turned back towards Marx. The book contained the first full English translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which became a key reference point for Marxist humanism, prefaced by a few short essays on Marx and his philosophy. Fromm sought to restore Marxism to its original form as “a new humanism,” cleansed of the distortions of Soviet and Chinese Communism.

Marx’s Concept of Man helped popularize Marx in the US and challenged some misunderstood views of his thought that predominated in the English-speaking world at the time. The book was not without its problems. In a letter to the Russian-American Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya, Fromm himself admitted that his account of Marx was “too abstract.” All the same, it is notable that Fromm’s engagement focused on the whole of Marx’s work. Fromm rejected the idea of a sharp break between the “early Marx” and the “late Marx,” promoted by figures such as the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Fromm’s renewed engagement with Marx continued with the publication of Beyond the Chains of Illusion in 1962. In this work, Fromm further developed his Freudian-Marxist social-psychological theory of social character. This included an attempt to bolster the Marxian theory of ideology that praised the unacknowledged psychological insights in Marx’s work. Fromm also explicitly praised Marx as a thinker of “much greater depth and scope than Freud,” underlining the centrality of Marx to his own project.

Fromm also played a leading role in the publication of Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (1965). In this volume, he assembled a global collection of humanist Marxists and socialists, drawn largely from Eastern Europe (with many from the Yugoslav Praxis school), but also from Africa and India. Contributors included Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, Karel Kosík, Gajo Petrović, Mihailo Marković, Léopold Senghor, Ernst Bloch, and Maximilien Rubel.


Dealing with politics

Fromm remained a prominent figure on the US Left over the years that followed, despite living mostly in Mexico. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, who refused to criticize the Vietnam War, Fromm was vocal in his anti-war stance. He gave many speeches on college campuses and even wrote speeches for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1967–68 anti-war challenge to Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries.

In this capacity, Fromm drafted a long “Memo on Political Alternatives” that identified a series of democratic, grassroots movements, essentially similar to those outlined in The Sane Society, that could form the basis for a mass movement of people. The memo appeared in print as The Revolution of Hope (1968) after McCarthy’s failed presidential bid.

Fromm steadfastly defended himself against critics who accused him of social-democratic reformism, including his old friend Herbert Marcuse. Referring to the apparent hopelessness of Marcuse’s account of critical theory in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, Fromm suggested that “if one is not concerned with the steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise.”

From the late 1960s, after a series of heart attacks, Fromm’s political engagement slackened, and his energies turned more towards academic concerns. Even so, Fromm did not sever his connections with left-wing causes. His 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness engaged with contemporary academic discussions of human nature, challenging the view of that nature as innately aggressive and avaricious that would provide intellectual ballast for the neoliberal era.

The last of Fromm’s social and political writings, To Have or To Be? (1976), appeared after he had returned to Europe from Mexico. He took up again the discussion of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, integrating them with a critique of capitalism’s ecological destructiveness that helped inspire the European Green movement. Once again, Fromm worked the text around his call for practical economic, social, and political reforms, this time moving even closer to Marx in proclaiming what he saw as “the beginning — and rapidly increasing — decline of capitalism.”


A thinker for our age

In one of his few comments on Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, written toward the end of his life, Fromm gave a sense of what he considered to be the nature of “critical theory”:


As far as I know, the whole thing is a hoax, because Horkheimer was frightened . . . of speaking about Marx’s theory. He used general Aesopian language and spoke of critical theory in order not to say Marx’s theory. I believe that that is all behind this discovery of critical theory by Horkheimer and Adorno.

While Fromm’s writings did pay insufficient attention to the waves of labor unrest in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, unlike Horkheimer, he did not view the rise of fascism as having marked the final defeat of the socialist project. Instead, the experience of fascism spurred Fromm deeper into forms of left-wing political engagement, characterized by a spirit of radical hope and optimism, and a return to Marx that was intended to help revive the Left on a mass basis.

In many ways, Fromm is the Frankfurt School thinker most suited to the current age. His vision was attentive to the interrelations between economics, culture, and human emotions, and avoided the pitfalls of either melancholic resignation or schematic determinism. He placed the regressive and reactionary tendencies of the present firmly at the forefront of his analysis, yet also sought to identify tangible avenues for progress.

In a political context that is rapidly moving into dangerous territory, with a recession that threatens to be as deep as the Great Depression, a socialist account that pays no heed to the danger of authoritarianism would be as irresponsible as one that presented it as our inevitable fate. This, along with the engagement with the humanism of Marx, is where Fromm still has many valuable lessons to offer us.

 

New World University: Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s Son

Come on, that resemblance is uncanny!

Ali Golub
Ali Golub
Feb 23, 2018 · 2 min read
Via The American Mirror, unfortunately.

Each week Local will present New World University, a column that breaks down and discusses popular conspiracy theories.

Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s Son

Theory: Rumor has it that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not the son of former PM Pierre Trudeau, but is instead the illegitimate son of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro instead. Apparently, Margaret Trudeau visited Cuba about nine months before Justin was born, had a tryst with Castro, and went back to Canada to give birth to Justin.

Supposedly the Castros knew, with one of Castro’s sons allegedly referring to Justin as his brother in his suicide note saying that Fidel was “always comparing me unfavorably with Justin…dismissing my achievements in comparison to his success in Canada…But what was I to do? I am Cuban. My brother is Canadian. If he was born and raised in Cuba, he would have lived in our father’s shadow forever just like me.”

And to top it off Trudeau did praise Castro after his death in an eyebrow raising speech, and the two definitely share a strong resemblance.

How it Started: I believe it started very recently when this article was published on YourNewsWire.com on February 10.

Real or fake: It’s fake, but I wish it were real. After the above mentioned article was published, news sites were very quick to respond, all of them disproving the theory. Fact-checkers pointed out that Justin was born nine months after his parents’ (Pierre & Margaret that is) honeymoon and that Margaret didn’t visit Cuba for the first time until four years after Justin was born. Cuban media also has yet to mention a suicide note in the case of Castro’s (Cuban) son.

Okay, so it’s not real, but I mean that resemblance is just downright eerie. Also wouldn’t it be kind of funny if it was real? No, just me? Okay.






THE BABY IS TRUDEAU'S FIRST SON, MICHAEL 
WHO DROWNED IN LAKE KOKANEE BC

NYU Local

The independent blog of New York University.

 melting


A satellite image shows the Spalte glacier, in Northeast Greenland, August 30, 2017. EU Copernicus and GEUS/Handout via REUTERS NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT (via REUTERS)

Massive chunk of Greenland's largest glacier crashes into sea, signals rapid melting


Updated: 15 Sep 2020, 

The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reported on Monday that the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream has lost more than 19 square miles for the second year in a row\


As the summer melt season reaches its peak, the largest Arctic ice shelf has jettisoned a piece of ice twice the size of Manhattan.

The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reported on Monday that the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream has lost more than 19 square miles (50 square kilometers) for the second year in a row. The giant glacier has now been reduced by 60 square miles in the past two decades. 

Ice shelves are a barrier that prevent land-based glaciers from sliding into the ocean, where they go on to melt and contributed to rising sea levels. When those structures weaken and disintegrate, as the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream has now done, glacier movement picks up.

“Using almost 30 years of satellite data, we see speed up in the glacier flow over the past decade," said Anne Solgaard, a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in a statement. The current disintegration is only part of the problem, she noted, with acceleration measured upstream also “indicating a large-scale change to this huge glacier."

Northeastern Greenland has warmed by about 3°C since 1980, and both this year and last have brought record-breaking heat. The Arctic has long faced the onslaught of rising temperatures, and the effects are only intensifying. As nations court new shipping and fossil-fuel exploration opportunities, scientists warn that summertime Arctic sea ice may only have years left. 

In another sign of the dramatic shift happening as the Arctic rapidly warms, a study published in journal Nature Climate Change on Monday found that the region’s ice has departed its prior climate period and is entering a new one, a process that might have kicked off as far back as 2000. The findings suggest that Arctic temperatures have entered a new normal, with rain and snow patterns expected to break with the past. 

A major break in an ice stream that drains 16% of Greenland’s inland ice is only the newest symptom of the Arctic’s new climate. “We should be very concerned," said Jason Box, another research professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

  • Climate Data: It’s a Race Against Heat, and We’re Losing

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.





Emails Show the Meatpacking Industry Drafted an Executive Order to Keep Plants Open

Hundreds of emails offer a rare look at the meat industry’s influence and access to the highest levels of government. The draft was submitted a week before Trump’s executive order, which bore striking similarities.



by Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung Sept. 14


ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In late April, as COVID-19 raced through meatpacking plants sickening and killing workers, President Donald Trump issued a controversial executive order aimed at keeping the plants open to supply food to American consumers.

It was a relief for the nation’s meatpackers who were being urged, or ordered, to suspend production by local health officials worried about the spread of the coronavirus.

But emails obtained by ProPublica show that the meat industry may have had a hand in its own White House rescue: Just a week before the order was issued, the meat industry’s trade group drafted an executive order that bears striking similarities to the one the president signed.

The draft that Julie Anna Potts, the president of the North American Meat Institute, sent to top officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture was written using the framework of an official executive order and stressed the importance of the food supply chain and how outbreaks had reduced production — themes later addressed in the president’s order.

It invoked the president’s powers under a Korean War-era law known as the Defense Production Act and proposed that the president make a simple and straightforward proclamation: “I hereby order that critical infrastructure food companies continue their operations to the fullest extent possible.”



Highlights added by ProPublica

What happened next within the USDA and White House isn’t clear from the records. The USDA declined to answer questions, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. But while the final wording wasn’t verbatim, Trump’s order emphasized the points the industry had proposed and furthered the same goal, directing the agriculture secretary to take action “to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations.”

The order provided a lifeline for meatpacking companies stressed by dozens of plant closures, severe staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions that would cause fast food restaurants to run out of hamburgers and grocery stores to ration meat purchases.

But it has also generated significant criticism from labor unions and Democratic senators who said it prioritized the bottom line of the nation’s meatpackers over the health of their workers.

The executive order effectively provided a justification, sanctioned by the White House, for meat companies to continue operations even as tens of thousands of the industry’s workers contracted the disease.

“It certainly gives rise to at least the appearance of favoritism that the executive order was done not because the White House thought it was the right thing to do but because they were getting pressure from outside groups that wanted it done,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Highlights added by ProPublica

In a statement, Potts said that the meat institute had been working as a liaison between the government and industry on many issues related to COVID-19. “Trade associations of all types routinely suggest legislative language, comment on proposed rules, and other provisions that are shared with the government,” she said.

The documents obtained by ProPublica offer a rare look at the process of drafting an executive order and a glimpse into the meat industry’s influence and access to the highest levels of government. Such political support has been crucial for the industry, which had dismissed years of warnings from the federal government to plan for a pandemic, sowing chaos in rural communities as they battled local health departments over outbreaks in their plants.

The draft executive order was one of hundreds of emails between the companies, industry groups and top officials at the USDA since March. Together, they show that throughout the coronavirus crisis, the meatpacking industry has repeatedly turned to the agency for help beating back local public health orders and loosening regulations to keep processing lines running.

While special interest groups often submit draft legislation and regulations to policymakers, legal experts said executive orders are less common and aren’t subject to the same public scrutiny.

In interviews, former White House lawyers from Democratic and Republican administrations said that there is great latitude in how executive orders are generated and it wasn’t unusual for private interest groups of all types to promote their causes by pushing for an executive order. It is also reasonable for the White House to seek input from outside entities during the process. But there would typically be an effort to consult a range of parties who might be affected by it before the order received legal scrutiny, they said. The quick seven-day turnaround, even amid an emergency like COVID-19, is notable, some said.

“All policy is shaped by people who have a stake in it,” said Rakesh Kilaru, associate counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama from 2015 to 2017. “But I can’t think of something that was so direct between the stakeholder asking for action and getting it.”

Highlights added by ProPublica

Jonathan Adler, a constitutional and administrative law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said there’s nothing “inherently inappropriate” about the industry helping to draft the order. “The concern is that, in a case like this, if the executive order is slanted to a particular interest rather than the public at large,” he said.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents workers responsible for the majority of U.S. beef and pork production, said no one from the White House or the USDA sought its input before the executive order was issued.

Mark Lauritsen, the UFCW’s director of food processing, packing and manufacturing, said he believes the Meat Institute “along with some of the other bigger players in the industry pulled every lever they could.”

The order has been effective as a political tool because it is widely perceived to have far more legal force than it actually does. From a legal standpoint, the executive order gave Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue additional power to issue his own orders related to the food supply — something he hasn’t done.

But many state and local health officials view the order as superseding their authority or decided to back off in the face of political pressure from the Trump administration. Within a week of the executive order, the USDA was working with companies and local health authorities to reopen shuttered plants. With workers back on the line, operations ramped up again. Pork production, for example, had fallen by more than half by the end of April, causing steep financial losses. But by early June, meatpacking plants were nearly back to capacity.

Since the order, however, COVID-19 infections among meatpacking workers have multiplied. To date, there have been more than 43,000 cases and at least 195 deaths among meatpacking employees, according to data compiled by ProPublica from public health agencies and news reports.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that almost from the start of the crisis, the meatpacking industry and the USDA were largely focused on how to keep workers on the line.

Highlights added by ProPublica

In March, governors across the country tried to stem the spread of COVID-19 with shelter-in-place orders, coming up with their own varied lists of essential industries. Companies were sometimes faced with unclear and conflicting directives. This was especially true in meatpacking, a highly consolidated industry where a handful of companies run multiple operations across the country with hundreds of employees working side by side.

To seek clarity, 60 food and agricultural trade groups sent a letter on March 18 to federal, state and local officials asking for exemptions from curfews and public gathering bans so they could keep their businesses running. Copies of the letter were sent to the White House and members of Congress, and Tyson Foods circulated it among several governors.

The next day, the Department of Homeland Security issued guidance and noted Trump’s previous comments that “if you work in a critical infrastructure industry, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, such as healthcare services and pharmaceutical and food supply, you have a special responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule.”

But the meatpacking companies soon found themselves facing another hurdle. By April, waves of workers who debone chickens or carve up pork elbow-to-elbow with their co-workers were falling ill from the virus. Some feared coming to work while others walked out of plants to protest the lack of infection control measures.

With plant slowdowns came a backlog of pigs, cows and chickens waiting for slaughter. Millions of animals had to be euthanized.

As some plants partially suspended operations or contemplated closing because of staffing shortages, Potts of the Meat Institute arranged an April 3 call between Perdue and top executives of major meatpacking firms Tyson, Smithfield Foods, Hormel, JBS, Seaboard and Cargill. Before the call, Potts emailed the USDA’s undersecretary for food safety, Mindy Brashears, with a list of discussion topics, including clear messaging that employees who failed to show up for work because they were scared would not qualify for unemployment benefits.

“I want to re-emphasize that the slowdowns and shutdowns you heard described today are significant and getting worse each day,” Potts wrote in a follow-up email. “Hearing a strong and consistent message from the President or Vice President like that delivered by the Governor of Nebraska yesterday is vital: being afraid of COVID-19 is not a reason to quit your job and you are not eligible for unemployment compensation if you do.”

Highlights added by ProPublica

Two days later, the Labor Department, which had been hearing similar complaints from across the business community, issued guidance clarifying that workers who quit to avoid contracting the disease wouldn’t receive jobless benefits.

As outbreaks overwhelmed hospitals in April, pressure from local public officials grew, leading to the rapid-fire closures of some of the nation’s largest slaughterhouses.

The threat of closure led the meatpacking industry to ramp up its efforts to seek intervention not only from the USDA but from other government officials as well. Emails obtained by ProPublica show that as state and local health officials sought to order JBS to shut down its Greeley, Colorado, plant, the company appealed to Gov. Jared Polis and then to Vice President Mike Pence.

State health director Jill Hunsaker Ryan told the head of the county Health Department that she had received a call from Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“JBS was in touch with the VP who had Director Redfield call me,” she wrote in an email, first reported by The Denver Post. “They want us to use CDC’s critical infrastructure guidance, (sending asymptomatic people back to work even if we suspect exposure but they have no symptoms) even with the outbreak at present level.”

JBS said that it reached out to Pence because it was “receiving guidance from local authorities that conflicted with federal CDC guidance,” but that it ultimately agreed to shut down the plant to “stop any potential chain of infection.”

Tyson and National Beef made similar appeals to the Kansas Department of Agriculture when the state Health Department wanted workers to stay off the line for two weeks if they had come in contact with a positive COVID-19 case, public records first reported by The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle show. The state’s secretary of agriculture coordinated with meat companies and the director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, who then agreed to follow the less-strict CDC guidance.

Despite these varied efforts to keep plants open, absenteeism and public health orders continued to cripple production lines. Government experts had long predicted a pandemic would cause food shortages. And those worst-case scenarios were now playing out.

The major meat and agriculture trade groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Meat Institute, wanted the White House to get directly involved in preventing plant closures.

In an April 17 letter to Trump, they detailed the disruptions caused by plant closures and the inconsistency of health and safety actions from state to state — a point later echoed in the executive order.

“To ensure livestock producers, poultry growers, and all food processors and their workers can continue to feed the nation,” they wrote, “we respectfully request you emphasize the importance of allowing critical infrastructure food companies to responsibly and safely continue their operations to the fullest extent possible without undue disruption.”

For emphasis, Potts of the Meat Institute followed up with an email to Stephen Censky, the USDA’s deputy secretary, who led the American Soybean Association before joining the Trump administration. She attached the letter to Trump and added, “The situation is continuing to get worse and worse at the local level (it’s hard to overstate how dire it is) and I want to explore with you what might be possible as a tool to help.”

Early the next morning, Potts had a call with top officials from the USDA, and shortly after 9 a.m., she sent them an email, writing: “Attached is a draft EO for consideration.”

Highlights added by ProPublica

The records don’t include a reply, and White House and internal deliberative agency conversations are exempt from public records laws, making it difficult to verify how much or little influence the meat industry’s draft had on the final executive order.

But over the next week, the drumbeat for action on behalf of the food and agriculture sector continued. Governors from the poultry producing states of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia wrote to Trump asking for the designation of one federal agency to lead on COVID-19 and poultry workers, access to protective equipment and financial relief for farmers and companies. Industry representatives convened a call with the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration and DHS about the impending disaster facing farmers, who would need to mass euthanize their animals if plants remained shuttered. In that conversation, utilizing the Defense Production Act was discussed, according to an industry representative on the call. Tyson took out a full-page ad in major newspapers to warn that the food supply chain was breaking.

Even on the day the executive order was issued, there was still a flurry of activity to get the White House to help the meat industry. That afternoon, records show, the director of the Washington office for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper forwarded a letter from pork producers to his counterparts in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado and Pennsylvania to ask their opinion on it and whether their governors were going to sign on.

The draft letter, addressed to Pence, asks for his help in invoking the Defense Production Act to assist in “the humane euthanasia of animals,” to indemnify farmers and pork producers and to “utilize every authority available to keep plants open.”

A representative from Michigan said her state would pass, noting the lack of worker protection language in the letter, while an aide to Pennsylvania’s governor cited the need for “advocacy on behalf of all sectors.”

On April 28, a week after Potts sent the suggested language for an executive order, Trump issued the “Executive Order on Delegating Authority Under the DPA with Respect to Food Supply Chain Resources During the National Emergency Caused by the Outbreak of COVID-19.”

Trump’s final order reflects what the meat industry had been requesting for weeks as the pandemic had unfolded: “It is important that processors of beef, pork, and poultry (‘meat and poultry’) in the food supply chain continue operating and fulfilling orders to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans.”

It also notes that “recent actions in some States have led to the complete closure of some large processing facilities” and that such closures “threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency.”


Read More


Meatpacking Companies Dismissed Years of Warnings but Now Say Nobody Could Have Prepared for COVID-19

Government officials predicted a pandemic would threaten critical businesses and warned them to prepare. Meatpacking companies largely ignored them.

The order invokes the Defense Production Act and orders the agriculture secretary to “take all appropriate action under that section to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations consistent with the guidance for their operations jointly issued by the CDC” and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

It had immediate effect.

In June, the Bear River Health Department in northern Utah, where nearly 400 JBS workers have tested positive for COVID-19, told the press it couldn’t shut the plant down because of the executive order.

In Virginia, state health officials had initially recommended that poultry companies close their plants for two weeks, “allowing deep cleaning and allowing symptomatic and asymptomatic infected workers to run their course of disease and recover,” records obtained under a separate public records request show. But the state backed off “to maintain the critical food production infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, meat companies and their trade groups continued to seek help from the USDA when public health officials tried to take action.

The day after the executive order was announced, the National Chicken Council wrote to the USDA with complaints that the county Health Department in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was requiring testing of all employees at poultry plants in the area. This would have the effect of closing down the plants, the trade group warned, because they were already short-staffed and testing could cause fear among the remaining workers.

Weeks later, the Chicken Council wrote that local officials were threatening plant closures and issuing public notices because they believed the plants were “operating with an imminent health hazard.”

“We want to push back on 100% testing and would like your assistance,” the trade group wrote.

The Chicken Council didn’t return calls or emails seeking comment.

Smithfield also went to the USDA for help dealing with a local public Health Department in Kane County, Illinois, which had closed the plant days before Trump’s executive order was issued. “The Kane County Illinois health department continues to be a challenge regarding our St. Charles processing facility,” Michael Skahill, Smithfield’s vice president of government affairs, wrote to Brashears, the USDA’s undersecretary for food safety. “I really did not want to have to get you involved but it has now come to the point where we need you to referee.”

Asked why it had gone to the USDA to intervene, Keira Lombardo, Smithfield’s executive vice president for corporate affairs, said: “We are a leading American agriculture company. Considering that fact, why wouldn’t we engage with the United States Department of Agriculture amid an unprecedented pandemic?”

Two days after Skahill’s plea for help, Smithfield continued to press the issue. Amy McClure, Smithfield’s associate general counsel, wrote to Brashears again, this time citing a central tenet of the executive order. “To reiterate our conversation, our St. Charles plant in Kane County, Illinois is in an urgent situation,” McClure wrote. “We need to reopen to prevent further disruption in the nation’s food supply.”

Six hours later, Brashears and her chief of staff received a grateful email from Skahill. “Thank you for your support today with the Smithfield St. Charles Kane County issue,” he wrote. “I think we have a resolution that will allow us to process next week and put protein on America’s table.”

Do you have access to information about COVID-19’s spread in the meatpacking industry or the government’s response that should be public? Email michael.grabell@propublica.org or bernice.yeung@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

Mollie Simon and Claire Perlman contributed reporting. Graphics by Moiz Syed.