PASSAGES

La Chinoise
Jean-Luc Godard | Letterboxd | 1967

Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary film director that helped usher in the French New Wave, died earlier this week through assisted suicide.

Here’s the description of the film from Kanopy: “Paris, 1967. Disillusioned by their suburban lifestyles, a group of middle-class students, led by Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), form a small Maoist cell and plan to change the world by any means necessary. After studying the growth of communism in China, the students decide they must use terrorism and violence to ignite their own revolution. Director Jean-Luc Godard, whose advocacy of Maoism bordered on intoxication, infuriated many traditionalist critics with this swiftly paced satire.” (96 minute watch)

Establishing Shot Revolutions of an Art(ist): La Chinoise, Changing Politics, Changing Film, and a Changing Godard Posted on February 14, 2018 by Nathaniel Sexton By the time Godard began making La Chinoise in 1967, the radicalism of his previous cinematic experiments, constituting a front-line of the popular thrust of the French New Wave, had begun to lag behind the leftism of the elite French intelligentsia and its growing student army. Godard, fearful of being out of step at the young age of thirty-six, requested that his then-girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife, actress Anne Wiazesmky, a student at the new Paris Nanteere University, introduce him to her Marxist-Leninist friends. Through Wiazemsky’s acquaintances Godard met future artistic collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin. Wiazemsky knew students who studied Marx but Gorin was friends with self-described Maoists. La Chinoise has been called prescient for the ways in which it anticipates the political upheavals of Mai 1968. This is no mistake as Godard was making the film following the inspiration of meeting young, politically zealous, and theoretically sophisticated students, a section of the student population that would eventually help unify workers and young people against the de Gaulle government, U.S. imperialism and the war in Vietnam. These changing politics were resonant with Godard, not just as an explanation or response to the political problems facing France and the world, but also as an embodiment of a more radical approach to art-making and art appreciation. As much as the French New Wave set itself against conventional modes of filmmaking, Godard and many of his Cahiers du Cinéma compatriots celebrated the films of Hollywood masters like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. At the very least, these Hollywood films were not the staunch prestige films of old France, the tradition the New Wave most importantly opposed. And where Hollywood’s inspiration was powerful—it can especially be seen in the plays on the crime and detective stories throughout Godard’s 1960s work—it had its limitations. The narrow conventional modes and form of Hollywood filmmaking came to stand in for or mimic the draconian foreign policies of the Cold War that became ever more politically unpalatable for the young leaders of the New Wave. In 1963 the editorship of Cahiers du Cinéma, the leading film journal of France, changed from Eric Rohmer to Jacques Rivette, and so the magazine changed to a more politically radical voice and began focusing less on Hollywood films and more on formalistically adventurous European and Asian cinemas. In the mid-1970s, following the upheaval of Mai 1968—its promise of revolution and its subsequent failure to upend French liberalism and capitalism—the Cahiers magazine would become managed by a Maoist collective, and its political interests and aesthetic values would be increasingly radical. These political changes took hold of much of the intellectual and art circles throughout France after the collapse of 1968. Godard, amidst it all, as a working popular filmmaker, a public intellectual, political activist, and writer for Cahiers, experienced these changes personally. In the middle of La Chinoise, the character Henri (Michel Semeniako) gives a revisionist defense of the Soviet socialist project. During his defense, Henri uses the 1954 Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar to illustrate his point. His adherence to Hollywood filmmaking and his outmoded politics are a point of critique and humiliation for his radical comrades. His character is eventually expelled from the collective for having abandoned radicalism. It’s important to note that Ray and Johnny Guitar were hugely important to the aesthetic of Cahiers du Cinéma and each were personal favorites of Godard. Here we see not a total rejection of Godard’s old associations, old inspirations, and old politics, but a process of change, a demand for a new way of thinking about politics and as such thinking about the cinema. Godard believed that the New Wave must produce an opposition to itself or it must perish, and along with it, Godard saw these various revolutions as a process of personal change, to re-imagine the self, its politics, its relationships, and its art, a total project of revolution that begins with Godard’s singular obsession, the cinema. Although La Chinoise has often been figured as a less personal project than Godard’s previous ’60s work, and as the starting point of a so-called political or revolutionary period (1968-79), it is no doubt that Godard’s earlier films are more political than is remembered, and his middle career more personal than is afforded. Les Carabiniers (1963) is an unapologetic anti-war film. Le Petit Soldat (1960), banned by the French government and not seen until 1963, supports Algerian independence. Vivre sa vie (1962) is a social-problem film with deeply felt sympathies for its working class characters. After 1968, the modes of filmmaking for Godard become different and there is a perceptual change in the content and form of the work. The films become more didactic, more theoretically dense, more formally avant-garde, and seemingly less interested in melodrama. The filmmaking becomes highly collaborative and for a period in the 1970s it becomes collectivist, Godard and Gorin forming the core of the Maoist filmmaking group Dziga-Vertov. However, just like La Chinoise, these political films are no less personal to Godard, many of them assuming the role of a self-critique and moral self-introspection, and many still reflecting back on the autobiographical content that constituted much of his 1960s work, his failed marriages with Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, his stubbornness and anger, his isolating intellectualism and a need to connect to the people for whom the political problems of the world are most felt. At the Cannes International Film Festival in 1968, following the beginning of the mass protests and riots that had besieged France, Godard, François Truffaut, and countless other filmmakers called for the closing of the festival. In a series of episodes, filmmakers stormed the stages of  screenings and jumped onto and hung from the curtains to prevent films from playing. The French government had fired legendary French film archivist Henri Langlois from his position as director of the Cinémathèque Française. Langios was a hero and a sort of mentor to Godard and the rest of the New Wave. They had been educated in his movie theater, sitting in the front row, falling in love with the movies. The festival was halted and eventually Langlois would be reinstated, but the fissures in French politics and culture were irreparable, and for Godard they could not be ignored. Godard went on to change his whole notion of cinema; Truffaut would dedicate his next film, Stolen Kisses, to Langlois. Godard (bottom left) loses his glasses and Truffaut (bottom right) tumbles over in an attempt to rush the stage and prevent the screening of Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé at the Cannes Film Festival, 1968 The successes of the French New Wave were apparent but its popularity and its complacency, against the new radicalism of a French intellectual class, became suspect or, at least, no longer interesting. The New Wave had kind of become a new traditionalism; it had emerged originally as an opposition to the French tradition of quality, but had been too triumphant and had instituted a new regime, unable under its own parameters to keep pace with the rapid political changes amassing around it. The New Wave needed its own negation, its own project of opposition. Godard makes La Chinoise in order to not just make sense of the political convictions and ferocity of a new intellectualism in France, but also to interrogate his own politics, his own modes of art making, and to begin again, anew, from some sort of original position, a revolutionary cinema project to overturn, but not without love and complexity, the New Wave he himself helped institute. Although La Chinoise has already played as part of the ongoing Wounded Galaxies Festival and Conference and critic J. Hoberman’s visit to Indiana University Cinema, the new film by Michel Hazanavicius, Godard, mon amour (AKA Le redoubtable), which dramatizes Godard and Wiazemsky’s relationship during the late 1960s and the tumult of 1968, plays at IU Cinema on Monday, April 30th and Wednesday, May 2nd. Many of Godard’s early, middle, and late work can be found streaming on Kanopy through IU Libraries. Nathaniel Sexton enjoys the films of Andrzej Żuławski, Alex Ross Perry, and Jerry Lewis. He reads comic books, plays pinball, prefers his movies sad or slow, and volunteers at a video rental store. He likes to travel west by car but always misses movies when living out of a tent.

U$A

Corporate Media Is Trying to Convince People Student Debt Forgiveness Is Bad

By trying to convince voters that debt relief will cost them, and that a more egalitarian society is impossible, corporate media are defending America's ruling class from an educated working class.


Activists call on President Joe Biden to not resume student loan payments

 in February and to cancel student debt on December 15, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

 (Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images for We, The 45 Million)

LUCA GOLDMANSOUR

September 16, 2022

 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

President Joe Biden's student debt cancellation plan may not be full forgiveness, but it can still have a life-changing impact on millions of people. Almost 20 million may see their debts wiped clean, and more than 40 million are directly affected. The plan is a step forward for debtors and activists who have spent decades struggling to abolish student debt and make higher education, long promised as the path out of poverty, affordable for everyone.

That corporate media would boost bad-faith arguments against a policy that represents such a sea change in people's lives, as well as in the government's role of helping working people, demonstrates a deep adherence to frameworks of austerity and neoliberalism.

It represents an opportunity for America's poor to imagine futures without instrumentalized and alienated labor. Without diseases of despair. Unpunished by debt. A future America's ruling class has worked hard to prevent.

So, naturally, corporate media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (8/23/22), Financial Times (8/25/22), CNBC (8/24/22), Vox (8/25/22), CNN (8/24/22, 8/25/22), CBS (8/25/22) and Bloomberg (8/22/22) have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it, trying to convince their audience there's not enough to go around. Their primary weapon: the inflation bogeyman.

Regurgitating the views of conservative economists and politicians, corporate media are warning debt relief is inflationary, and even that it will transfer wealth upwards. These arguments are another example of how news media use the specter of inflation as a rationale for disciplining workers: Sorry, that's it. There's nothing left. No surplus. So how much are you willing to share? Don't look over here at my huge pile of cash. The arguments trafficked by much of the corporate media in the aftermath of Biden's debt relief announcement expose a reflexive hostility to social progress, and the use of government to improve the lives of ordinary people instead of benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals.

'Inflation Expansion Act'

From headlines decrying Biden's debt relief plans as pouring gas on an "inflationary fire" (Financial Times, 8/25/22) and dubbing the policy an "Inflation Expansion Act" (Wall Street Journal, 8/23/22), to citing manipulative studies by pro-austerity think tanks, the corporate media response to debt relief has stoked fears that providing much-needed relief to student debtors would increase demand, thereby exacerbating inflation.

If gains for working people will necessarily be nullified by corporate price hikes, maybe media should be questioning whether an economy where that's the case should be reshaped. But media's claims haven't even been consistent on their own terms. Debt relief is not nearly as inflationary as media rhetoric suggests, even by the estimations of their most hawkish sources.

For example, the Financial Times, CNBC, Vox, CNN, CBS and The Hill (8/24/22) all cited "America's foremost pro-austerity think tank" (American Prospect, 8/26/22), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which estimates Biden's cancellation could cost the federal government $360 billion over ten years, driving spending and increasing inflation. Marc Goldwien, senior policy director at CRFB and "America's foremost spending scold" (American Prospect, 8/26/22), made the rounds across the corporate news media to share this estimate.

Biden's student debt relief plan "is going to worsen inflation and it is going to eat up all the deflationary impact of the Inflation Reduction Act," Goldwien claimed in the Financial Times (8/25/22). Vox (8/25/22) quoted Goldwien saying Biden's plan will "raise prices on everything from clothing to gasoline to furniture to housing." Assuming that CRFB's estimate is accurate—even though there is much reason not to think so—what the estimate actually says is a far cry from Goldwien's claim that prices will increase.

Economists like Paul Krugman, far from a hero of the left, as well as Mike Konczal and Alí Bustamante of the Roosevelt Institute, pointed out how even CRFB's estimate shows at most a 0.3% increase in inflation, which wouldn't "reverse" or even "dent" larger deflationary trends like the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, or even restarting student debt payments, as Biden intends to do at the start of the new year. Krugman explains that given the "fire-and-brimstone" inflation fearmongering, like the talk of "throwing gasoline on the fire" in the Financial Times (8/25/22), the reader might assume debt relief could cause another "major bout of inflation." Even according to their own sources, this is far from true.

On top of this, the central argument in Goldwien's case and across corporate media—that debt relief will spur demand—rests on the assumption that canceling people's debt will incentivize them to buy things for which there is not enough supply to keep prices stable. Heidi Shierholtz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, took to Twitter (5/12/22) to shut this argument down:

The latest version of the claim "we can't have nice things because inflation" is the idea that we can't cancel federal student debt.… But folks, there is currently a pause on federal student loan repayments, which means that people with this debt don't currently have debt payments. So even if somebody's debt is entirely canceled under a new policy, their monthly costs won't decrease relative to what they currently are. This will dramatically limit any impact on new spending and hence provide no upward inflation pressure relative to the status quo.

That corporate media would boost bad-faith arguments against a policy that represents such a sea change in people's lives, as well as in the government's role of helping working people, demonstrates a deep adherence to frameworks of austerity and neoliberalism. As Krugman pointed out in a separate Twitter thread (8/29/22), "what we're seeing looks more like a visceral response looking for a rationale than a reasoned critique."

Moreover, these arguments ignore evidence that current inflation is not a result of too much demand, but rather of corporate greed. As FAIR (4/21/22) has previously documented, corporate media have a penchant for putting "far more emphasis" on the contributions to inflation by policies that improve working people's lives than on "the role of corporate profit-taking." Despite troves of evidence that corporate monopolies are purposely exacerbating inflation by using the pandemic-related supply chain crisis as cover to needlessly raise costs on consumers—and make record profits doing it—corporate media have once again elected to opine on the inflationary effect of social spending.

'Take from working class'

That student debt relief is inflationary is not the only argument corporate news outlets have peddled since Biden announced his plan. Critics of student debt relief have also framed the plan as a regressive giveaway to the wealthy, as well as unfair to those who have already paid off their debts.

Partial debt relief makes self-determination for America's most oppressed and exploited groups that much more possible.

The same Financial Times article (8/25/22) reported, "Canceling debt is not wholly progressive, given the poorest members of society are less likely to have gone to university." CBS (8/25/22) noted Sen. Ted Cruz's view that "what President Biden has in effect decided to do is to take from working-class people." The New York Times' morning newsletter (8/25/22) claimed student debt relief "resembles a tax cut that flows mostly to the affluent."

Never mind that if forgiving student loan debt were truly regressive, Cruz would be all for it. The reality is that student debt disproportionately impacts Black and brown and low-income borrowers (Roosevelt Institute, 9/29/21). Cancelation would go a long way towards addressing the racial wealth gap and addressing wealth inequality.

A Newsweek headline (8/24/22) reported that "Borrowers With Paid-Off Debt Feel Punished for Doing 'Right Thing.'" The Wall Street Journal (8/23/22) claimed debt relief "insults the millions who paid their loans back."

Astra Taylor, an organizer with the Debt Collective, told Democracy Now! (8/25/22) that this criticism was "so cynical":


First off, I am one of the millions of people who did have to pay their debts. I paid it in full. I do not want anyone else to have to suffer just because I did. Social progress means that other people do not have to suffer through something that previous generations did. And the fact is, polling shows that most people have that attitude.

Student debt was designed as a barrier to keep Black, brown and low-income people from attaining a college education (Intercept, 8/25/22; Boston Review, 9/1/17). Partial debt relief makes self-determination for America's most oppressed and exploited groups that much more possible. By trying to convince voters that debt relief will cost them, and that a more egalitarian society is impossible, corporate media are defending America's ruling class from an educated working class.

© 2021 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)


Luca GoldMansour is a FAIR editorial intern and a senior at the City College of New York with a major in political science and minor in journalism.

Racist Governors Abott and DeSantis Deserve Jail Time

Abbott and DeSantis should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport.


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, speaks at a press conference at LifeScience Logistics in Lakeland on May 28, 2021.

(Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)


THOM HARTMANN

September 17, 2022

They came off the buses and planes hoping for a promised new life, a home, and paying work. They brought their children, on their best behavior, excited to meet American kids and enroll in school. Hungry from the long trip, they were wondering what their first meal would be like in their new homes in their new country.

The racist governors are apparently coordinating their activities with Fox "News," whose "reporters" typically show up to greet the arriving visitors with cameras and microphones, scaring the hell out of them.

Instead, they faced Fox "News" cameras and hack "reporters" shouting questions at them in a language they didn't understand. Blinking back tears, they asked in Spanish what they'd done wrong.

It turns out what was "wrong" was their skin color and national origin, at least in the minds of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.

Racists understand how to get the attention of other racists. And, really, that's all they want, no matter how many people are hurt in the process.

This is an old, old story.

In the fall of 1962, Deputy US Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach supervised a group of US Marshals providing protection to James Meredith as he became the first Black person to ever enroll in the University of Mississippi.

Meredith, a top student in high school, had just completed a 9-year stint in the US Air Force (including 3 years in Japan) and had taken his application for enrollment at UM all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor on September 10, 1962.

Three weeks later, as Meredith was preparing to enter the University on September 30th, a mob of white people attacked Katzenbach's US Marshals with bricks and fired upon them with pistols and rifles.

Two people died, 206 US Marshals and National Guardsmen were wounded, and there were over 200 arrests.

Meredith finally registered for his classes on October 1st, producing an explosion of activity across the South by the various White Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, the predecessor to today's MAGA movement. (Meredith would complete his courses and graduate, then get his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1968.)

Five months after Meredith enrolled at UM, in the last week of February, 1963, Charles Bennett, president of the White Citizens' Council of Shreveport, Louisiana, approached a Black father of eight children, Alan Gilmore, telling him he knew of an employment opportunity in Trenton, New Jersey and would help him get there.

Gilmore had previously driven a cab and worked in a grocery store and bakery, but had lost his job during the slight economic downturn of 1963.

Bennett provided Gilmore with bus tickets for himself, his wife, and their eight children as well as $75 in spending money and "a dozen cans of sardines to snack upon" during their 2-day journey to Trenton.

He also gave Gilmore the address of what he thought was the home of Nicholas Katzenbach, telling him that Katzenbach was the employer in need of and awaiting Gilmore's services.

"I can't find any work here [in Shreveport]," Gilmore told Bennett according to news reports. "I hope I can find something there. I appreciate your sending me on this trip. Thank you very much."

As soon as the Gilmore family was on the bus, the White Citizens' Council called a press conference and President Bennett announced that the next day the Gilmore family would show up at Katzenbach's home.

It was to be, Bennett said, "a reverse freedom ride," a reference to the Freedom Riders of that era who traveled the South by bus to integrate public transportation.

White Citizens' Councils and their allies in the Klan put several such Black families on buses for the north; the organized campaign operating out of several states was called the "Freedom Ride North."

"Katzenbach has shown himself to be a friend of the Negro and a great civil rights leader," the newspapers quoted Ned Touchstone, chairman of Shreveport's Freedom Ride North Committee. He added that Katzenbach should "take a personal interest in getting the Gilmore family settled."

And, sure enough, the newspapers thought the twist was enough of an unusual story that they gave it wide coverage. One clipping from the JFK Library is at the bottom of this article; there were others across the nation that week.

In response, multiple mayors and governors of northern states targeted by the Freedom Ride North campaign wrote outraged letters to the Kennedy White House, demanding action.

For example, John M. Arruda, mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts wrote to President Kennedy:

"Efforts by segregationists to relocate certain citizens of southern cities is a cruel merciless hoax. Massachusetts has always been a haven for the oppressed, but conditions are such that employment opportunities are limited.

"I suggest Executive Order or legislation whereby the federal government would assume costs, if these unfortunate people become public charges, and then empower the Attorney General to bring an action to make the person or persons responsible for this cruelty personally liable for the costs incurred by the government.

"If they pay the costs of their traffic in human lives and misery, their attitude will no doubt change."

Mark Twain, it is said (probably apocryphally), told us that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Today the role of the White Citizens' Councils and the Klan has been picked up by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The two governors have been sending refugees and undocumented immigrants on buses and chartered planes in those states to cities in the north, including, most recently, dropping people off at Martha's Vineyard and in front of Vice President Harris' home in Washington, DC.

The racist governors are apparently coordinating their activities with Fox "News," whose "reporters" typically show up to greet the arriving visitors with cameras and microphones, scaring the hell out of them.

The immigrants themselves have told people they were approached by friendly Spanish-speaking people, typically women, representing the Governors' offices, who told them that jobs or "expedited work permits" were awaiting them if they'd only get on the bus or the plane.

The Washington Post noted yesterday, in a bizarre echo of the 1963 White Citizens' Council of Shreveport's Ned Touchstone:


"DeSantis aide, Jeremy Redfern, tweeted a photo of former President Barack Obama's Martha's Vineyard home with a pointed message: '7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.'"

Recognizing an old racist trick from his parents' generation, California Governor Gavin Newsom sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding action:

"Like millions of Americans, I have been horrified at the images of migrants being shipped on buses and planes across the country to be used as political props. Clearly, transporting families, including children, across state lines under false pretenses is morally reprehensible, but it may also be illegal.

"Several of the individuals who were transported to Martha's Vineyard have alleged that a recruiter induced them to accept the offer of travel based on false representations that they would … receive expedited access to work authorization. The interstate travel at issue provides a basis for federal jurisdiction over this matter.

Newsome goes on to "strongly urge" the DOJ to investigate "possible criminal or civil violations of federal law based on this fraudulent scheme." He suggests kidnapping statues, as well as Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) laws be brought to bear against Abbott, DeSantis and their co-conspirators.

Newsome also points out that the migrants and refugees wouldn't have been targeted this way if it wasn't for their national origin "and the intent appears to have been to humiliate and dehumanize them," putting the two governors in violation of federal civil rights laws.

Congressman Joaquin Castro agreed:

As Adam Serwer noted in 2018, writing for The Atlantic about the Trump policy of tearing apart migrant families and vanishing their children into out-of-state foster care or adoption, "the cruelty is the point." Brutality has always been a key element of fascist and, to quote President Biden, "semi-fascist" politics and policy, whether in 1930s Europe, 1970s Chile, or 21st century Texas and Florida.

We've come a long way since 1963, and federal and state laws protect civil rights in ways that were only imagined during the early years of that era. Hopefully Garland will take Newsome's request seriously.

As President Joe Biden would say, America is better than this.

Exploitative and cruel stunts from the racist 60s have no place in this century, and Fox and CNN (apparently this is part of their new Swing to the Right)—which both gave major coverage to the migrants' arrivals—should apologize both to the migrants and the American people.

And Abbott and DeSantis should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport.

UPDATE: We just learned from NBC News that 100% of the people they interviewed at Martha's Vineyard are not "undocumented" but are actually people who have applied for and been accepted for refugee status. They have upcoming court dates in Texas that, if they miss, will cause them to lose their status. This just gets worse and worse.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.



Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

THIRD WORLD U$A

Is Progress Obsolete? The United States Is Now an 'Un-Developing' Country

The rankings include the absence of poverty and hunger, good health and education, gender equality, clean air and water, and reduced inequality.


An American flag in front of a Tornado damaged school area in Dayton, Ohio

 on May 28, 2019. (Photo: Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images)

RICHARD ESKOW

September 17, 2022

The United Nations' latest annual ranking of nations by "sustainable development goals" will come as a shock for many Americans. Not only aren't we "Number One," we're not even close. The top four countries are Scandinavian democracies. The United States ranks forty-first, just below Cuba (that's right, below our Communist neighbor). Countries that outrank us include Estonia, Croatia, the Slovak Republic, Romania, and Serbia.

The goal of the report is to measure countries' progress, or development, toward a civilized and sustainable future.

Every ranking contains some element of subjectivity. But the seventeen "sustainable development goals" (SDGs) developed by economist Jeffrey Sachs and his team are well chosen. They include the absence of poverty and hunger, good health and education, gender equality, clean air and water, and reduced inequality.

The goal of the report is to measure countries' progress, or development, toward a civilized and sustainable future. As historian Kathleen Frydl points out, "Under this methodology ... the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries." Frydl's essay was widely circulated under the headline, "US is becoming a 'developing country' on global rankings that measure democracy, inequality."

To Frydl's point, the US picture does look like that of a developing country. But how, exactly, does a country that was once "developed" become "developing"? The phrase "developing country" implies that there are countries that have achieved development, and countries that are on their way. It leaves no room for the possibility that a nation, once it developed, can "un-develop" itself. It's like saying that a "growing child" can become "un-grown." And yet, that's exactly what is happening to the United States.

The language of "developed" and "developing" countries carries with it the idea that Western European and North American countries reached an endpoint in the 20th century, one that other nations naturally aspire to and are on the road to achieving. It is the language of post-colonialism (which suggests the United States is now colonizing itself). The words are heavily freighted with assumptions about globalism, capitalism, and liberal democracy. Among them is the idea that these forces bring with them a stability, the kind of benign stasis that Francis Fukuyama once called "the end of history."

Fukuyama has since renounced that idea, and understandably so. The declining status of the United States undermines the historical assumptions about progress that have guided political and financial elites for many decades. Countries like the United States and United Kingdom look less and less like the end-state of history and more and more like declining world powers, like so many that have gone before them.

Perhaps for this reason, the public debate has moved away from the quasi-Utopian ideals of Westernized development and back toward the idea that history is a cyclical process in which empires rise and fall. Anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber find positive qualities in 'primitive' societies. Journalists like Chris Hedges adopt the decline of the American empire as a major theme. In To Govern the Globe, historian Alfred McCoy forecasts the decline of American power and speculates that imperial nation-states may soon cease to exist altogether.

The historian Marc Bloch, quoted in Harvey Kaye's book on the British Marxist historians, sounds prophetic when he writes that history is "the science of eternal change."

Where does that leave the people of the United States? Other measurements and reports may not place the US below Cuba or Serbia, but most major measurements seem to point one way: down. Life expectancy is declining. Economic inequality is rising. Other measurements are flat at best.

Progress isn't like rain. It does not, as the Bible says of rainfall, "fall on the just and unjust alike." Progress, real progress, is made by people working together for the common good. If they don't work together it slows down, or stops, or reverses itself. The language of "development" is obsolete. We need a new language of cooperation, democracy, and justice. And we need it now, before it's too late, before the forces of climate change carry us away on the tides of eternal change.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Richard (RJ) Eskow is a freelance writer. Much of his work can be found on eskow.substack.com. His weekly program, The Zero Hour, can be found on cable television, radio, Spotify, and podcast media. He is a senior advisor with Social Security Works.

AMERICAN FASCISM IS NORMAL
Trump's Latest Threat Is a Doozy and Requires Four Responses

We are dealing with a sociopathic narcissist who wants nothing more than to divide the nation over himself.

ROBERT REICH

September 16, 2022 

by robertreich.substack.com

Yesterday, Donald Trump threatened that if he is indicted on a charge of mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House, there would be "problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before," adding "I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it."

Trump's rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets.

These words followed on last month's threat by Senator Lindsey Graham that if Trump is prosecuted, there would be "riots in the street." Trump appeared to endorse Graham's threat, sharing a video link on his Truth Social platform.

Trump's latest threat requires four responses:

1. Trump is daring the Justice Department to prosecute him, in effect asserting he is above the law. He is not above the law. The Justice Department is methodically and carefully sifting through evidence and presenting it to a grand jury.

Neither the Department nor the grand jury should be intimidated by Trump's latest threat.

2. Trump's rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets. Five people died on January 6, 2021. Many more—including members of Congress and the former Vice President—could have been killed on that day. Since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's incendiary words have fueled death threats to numerous federal officials, judges, and lawmakers.

All Americans should condemn Trump's latest threat and incitement to violence.

3. We are dealing with a sociopathic narcissist who wants nothing more than to divide the nation over himself. This is not a matter of left versus right, liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican. It is a question of the Constitution and the rule of law versus authoritarianism and tyranny. If Trump prevails—if he intimidates law-enforcement officials from doing their jobs over his attempted coup or his theft from the White House of secret documents—we lose our democracy.

The media must stop covering this as if there are two sides to this story. There are not.

4. The time has come for Republican lawmakers, candidates, and rightwing media owners and personalities to show some backbone and vigorously repudiate Trump. Their failure to do so before now has created a monster that threatens to consume this country. It is up to them to tell their constituents, followers, readers and viewers that there is no place in America for Trump's threats to law enforcement and his incitements to violence.

Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch, and others must say it loudly and clearly: We repudiate Trump and his threats. No person is above the law.

© 2021 robertreich.substack.com



Robert Reich, is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. His book include: "Aftershock" (2011), "The Work of Nations" (1992), "Beyond Outrage" (2012) and, "Saving Capitalism" (2016). He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, former chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good" (2019). He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

It's Time to Call It What It Is—A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis

Capitalism as an economic system requires constant growth, constant profit, and endless extraction in order to achieve profit.


Demonstrators participate in an anti-capitalist protest in London on March 26, 2011. 

(Photo: Charles Hutchins/Flickr/cc

ERIN MCCARLEY

September 16, 2022

One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.

We're in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.

It's time to tell the truth. We can't afford to wait any longer. We can't afford to pretend that the same political-economic system that has caused the most historic levels of ecological destruction in human history is the same system that is going to fix it. Here, in the United States— the country most responsible for the highest levels of carbon emissions in Earth's atmosphere— we have a very difficult task in front of us. We have to tell the truth about the Earth's thresholds, about the laws of physics, and about what's causing our ecosystems to collapse, if we are to have any chance of a habitable future for ourselves, our children and grandchildren. We have to tell the truth, if we have any hope of human civilization at all.

But in telling this truth, we are faced with a terrible political reality that few are willing to admit. Many of us understand the science. We know that Earth's ability to host humans depends on a very delicate balance of physical and ecological conditions that have only been present for a short time during the Earth's lifespan. The Earth has been around for billions of years, but modern humans, as we know them, have only been here for some 200,000. Humanity is just a blip in our planet's lifetime. The ecosystems that support human life are now in free-fall in terms of planetary time. We're in the middle of the Sixth Mass Extinction, but this time, it's because of human activity, fossil fuel extraction, and the unsustainable abuse of land, air and water. We're in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.

And despite decades of scientific awareness and dire warnings, the world's most polluting and ecologically-destructive governments have done little to nothing, as they continue to build pipelines and wage global wars that enrich the one-percent, destroy the lives of millions, and drive up carbon emissions exponentially.

The same industries that benefit from ecological destruction- Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Tech Giants, the Military Industrial Complex– have for years tried to sell us a "greener capitalism" as a solution to the crisis. And they have been lying to us. Suggesting that individual consumption habits– light bulbs, electric cars, or the purchasing of carbon offsets– will somehow save us from disaster is a fairytale. It won't. These attempts at tinkering around the edges of capitalism ignore the very nature of capitalism.

Capitalism as an economic system requires constant growth, constant profit, and endless extraction in order to achieve profit. If capitalism stops growing, stops profiting, it collapses. It is not a system that can ever achieve stasis or balance with other interdependent systems around it. Capitalism is not a stable system. It has to expand, consume everything, create bigger and bigger profits, until it devours its host. Capitalism is like a cancer. Or as Karl Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I, Ch. 15: "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer."

Capitalism can grow externally in terms of wars, foreign interventions and militarized accumulation. In fact, as UC Santa Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson describes, global capitalism has become dependent on war-making to sustain itself. Or it can grow internally by intensifying privatization, destroying labor rights, human rights and environmental protections within existing capitalist markets in order to open up more avenues for profit. In this interview, Robinson describes it:

For 530 years now, since 1492, we've had outward expansion- constant waves of colonialism and imperialism, bringing more and more countries, more and more people into the system. Now every country- every community on the planet- is integrated directly or indirectly into global capitalism. There's no more room for what I call extensive enlargement or outward expansion. The other mechanism that capitalism has to expand is what I call intensive expansion, meaning that you turn more and more sectors and spheres of society into opportunities for accumulation. That's been privatization- you privatize education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and nature. You're not opening up new territories but opening up new areas.

In either case, capitalist growth is the growth of poverty, the growth of social and political inequality, of human suffering, and the destruction of the Earth's ecosystems. We can see it on a global scale— everywhere capitalism has gone, the ecological commons have been destroyed. Indigenous people have been killed or displaced. Workers are enslaved or become alienated from their labor and exploited. And poverty has been created for masses of people where there was none before, while the commons and the public wealth have been privatized and consolidated by the top tier of the economy.

Just look at global wealth inequality. Oxfam's 2022 Summary gives us a snapshot: "Since 1995, the top one percent [of humanity] has captured nearly 20 times more of global wealth than the bottom 50 percent of humanity. Over the last 30 years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top one percent have grown 300 percent. Between 2020 and 2021, the wealth of the world's ten richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. And 20 of the richest billionaires are estimated, on average, to be emitting as much as 8,000 times more carbon than the billion poorest people."

These obscene levels of wealth, this vast sea of poverty, and all of the political repression, genocide, and endless wars that maintain it… All of this was born from capitalism— a system that privatized the commons, killing and displacing indigenous people from their homelands and forcing enslaved people to labor under conditions of torture, death and imprisonment. These are the origins of this political and economic system on this continent– a system that has metastasized all over the globe. It has become clearer and clearer that maintaining a habitable planet for humans, as well as meeting the material needs of the masses, is a global project that is incompatible with an extractive economy that requires constant economic growth.

There is no logical end to capitalism except the destruction of the earth itself. That is the nature of the beast. And no amount of tinkering around the edges of capitalism will change this fundamental truth. We can buy carbon offsets. We can put solar panels on our houses. We can plant more trees. We can bury carbon in the ground. But none of these strategies can match the scale of the destruction that has already taken place within every layer of the ecosystem. Constant economic growth requires constant extraction– This is not compatible with a living planet whose ecological thresholds are fixed and whose millions of interdependent ecosystems require balance. To understand this basic incompatibility is to understand that capitalism, itself, is at the root of our ecological crisis.




Here in the United States, these simple truths about capitalism are completely obfuscated and denied by the corporate media, the fossil fuel industry, and pretty much everyone in the government because if the truth were known widely, it would upend our political systems. It would pose an existential threat to global capitalists who are profiting from our ecosystem's destruction. It is no coincidence that the same governments in the world who refuse to do anything serious to halt climate collapse are full of politicians whose pockets are being lined by the same industries responsible for the destruction. The political-economic system causing ecological collapse is the exact same system preventing us from solving this crisis.

And viciously colluding with government and industry failure is a popular culture that has been discouraged from understanding what capitalism is and how it actually works. In truth, it is challenging and perplexing to try to describe a political, economic and cultural system that pervades every aspect of our lives. It is the air we breathe. It is not easy to step outside of capitalism in order to see it objectively, its logic, or the laws that govern it. To see clearly how capitalism works is akin to stepping outside of the matrix.

To make matters worse, ours is a country that has spent its entire history demonizing capitalism's alternatives— especially communism and socialism. This demonization began with the first US capitalists and colonialists in their attempt to destroy the communism of indigenous nations. The genocide of Native peoples across the Americas wasn't only motivated by the desire to capture their land base. It wasn't just about 15th-Century papal bulls that gave Christian nations the right to conquer non-Christian nations. It was also deeply rooted in destroying the idea of the commons, the model of communal landholdings, of communal governance and culture. So indigenous nations were seen by the US government as a threat to capitalism from the beginning. In the eyes of our settler-colonial empire, these nations had to be eradicated—not just for the seizure of their lands, but to eliminate the ideological, political and cultural alternative that they represented. These advanced societies had lived connected to and in ecological balance with the earth for thousands of years.

The US government labeled indigenous nations as "backward" and "savage" not only to justify state violence against them, but also as a way of reinforcing the colonial ideology of Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and capitalism to the US public. To allow indigenous cultures to live in peace and sovereignty was fundamentally incompatible with the expansive colonial project that was, and still is, the United States. As indigenous peoples are still laying their bodies on the line to stop pipelines like Keystone XL, DAPL, Line 3, and MVP (just to name a few), we can see how indigenous stewardship of ancestral and treaty-protected homelands, the respect for the common good of all living things, and the desire to protect future generations constitute a cohesive ideology of balance and sustainability— an ideology that is still posing a threat to capitalism today.

Is it any wonder that the United States— a country founded on genocide and built by slave labor— is still killing, caging and oppressing the same peoples on whose land and by whose forced labor all of this wealth was originally constructed? Today, under our system of racial capitalism, the United States imprisons more people (especially black and brown people) than any other country on earth. And by 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its original size.

The "discoverers," the slave masters, the robber barons, and the oil tycoons of the last few centuries are still with us. Their power has expanded exponentially, and they wear different clothes now. They are the US military and all its private contractors around the globe, police and arms manufacturers, global weapons manufacturers, digital technology CEO's, the world's largest bank and oil company executives, and a small handful of multibillionaires whose stockholdings pull the puppet strings of most national governments and dictate the direction of growth in the global economy. And they don't just dictate the direction of growth, they also dictate the social and political revolutions that must be crushed in order to achieve that growth.

In 1994, after the passage of NAFTA, Mexico's President Zedillo ordered the army to attack the EZLN (Zapatista)-controlled villages and tried to capture their leaders. Up to that point, Zedillo had been trying to find a peaceful solution to the Zapatista rebellion, but this sudden policy change came after he received an internal memo from Chase Manhattan Bank, which insisted that the Mexican government eliminate the Zapatistas. This is just one of hundreds of examples where Wall Street has dictated what social and political movements around the world must be crushed in order to open up capitalist markets.

In addition, any country or group that has tried to live freely and with any degree of sovereignty outside of capitalism's ever-expanding chokehold has faced CIA-backed coups, massive military invasions, political interventions, economic blockades and assassinations of its leaders. From the USSR, Libya, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia (just to name a few) to the tiniest and poorest countries like Grenada and Laos, any attempt at an anti-capitalist government or political revolution on the smallest scale has been relentlessly attacked and subverted by US imperial forces working in tandem with global capitalists. These revolutions, these social and political experiments, constitute what Noam Chomsky once called, "the threat of a good example."

And inside the United States, any social movement that has attempted to organize movements or political parties advancing alternatives to capitalism/colonialism have been viciously attacked—starting in 1492 with the genocide of the indigenous peoples to the repression of slave rebellions from the 1600s onward. And beginning in the late 1800s, US socialist/communist political parties and labor movements were violently repressed. A few examples throughout US History: the Haymarket Massacre (1886), the Pullman Strike (1894), the Ludlow Massacre (1914), the Palmer Raids against the IWW (1917), the multiple imprisonments of Eugene Debs and attacks on the Socialist Party, the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), the black lists under McCarthyism (1950s), the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1951), the relentless attacks against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement from the FBI's COINTELPRO in collaboration with state police; the imprisonment of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, the Chicago 7, the Panther 21, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and MLK.

So here we are, friends and comrades, inside the "Belly of the Beast," as Che Guevara once described the United States. And we are surrounded by layer upon layer of capitalist indoctrination, myths of US exceptionalism, white supremacist and colonial histories, and constant propaganda to prevent us from recognizing and questioning the basic idea that this this political-economic system might be the cause of so much global suffering, even as it has grown so big and powerful as to threaten our own species survival.

This is about building a revolution—an international solidarity movement big enough to take on and replace global capitalism.

As a young university student many years ago, I had the privilege of studying sociology under John Bellamy Foster- one of the most renowned Marxist sociologists in the United States, who has spent a lifetime documenting capitalism's relationship to ecological destruction. In his classes, I was often surrounded by other sociology students who, when discussing the ecological crisis, echoed the refrain of the dominant culture— "If humans weren't so greedy, we wouldn't be in this situation!"

While I understand the frustration that leads to this statement, human history does not back it up in any way. I can't count the times over the years that I have heard the "humanity equals greed" argument. I have many indigenous friends who would not take kindly to the white-supremacist idea that their resilient and time-tested cultures, which have lived in relative harmony with the Earth for thousands of years, are still not recognized under the popular definition of "humanity." For someone to describe the whole of humanity as greedy, without ever having researched or experienced any of capitalism's alternatives, represents a kind of self-reinforcing myopia that can only lead us deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole— into a tunnel that is rapidly narrowing and coming to an end.

Furthermore, this humanity-equals-greed myth is a mask designed to cover up the fact that capitalism rewards and reproduces only the worst qualities of human nature, while it starves and deprives our best qualities— our natural instincts toward caretaking each other, toward solidarity, mutual aid, and building community. Most of us, humans, possess these good qualities as well, but these cooperative human qualities are not financially or politically rewarded under capitalism. The volunteer work, the acts of kindness toward strangers— these activities can exist as hobbies inside of capitalism. They are socially approved, as long as they take place outside the hours of our wage labor, and as long as they don't threaten the power structures that maintain the system. Or in the words of Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist."

We must broaden our minds and our movements if we are to survive. Against all odds, against all indoctrination, we have to imagine a different future in order to create it. Even within this society that refuses to see beyond its own economic walls, its own self-constructed, capitalist paradigms, we must be brave enough and honest enough to seek the truth— to understand that capitalism is not inevitable. It is but one type of economy with distinct features and characteristics, and it can be replaced, just as it was instituted. It will not be easy. It will require nothing short of a global political, social and economic revolution. But if we cannot summon the courage and the international solidarity to embark on this journey together, then capitalism will devour us—all of us. If we cannot collectively envision and design a future beyond capitalism, then there will not be a future that includes us.

It starts by understanding the system we are living under and what the laws are that govern it. It starts with studying capitalism's alternatives (socialism, communism, and anarchism) in order to have the theory and the understanding of alternative political economies. We know why the "S" word and the "C" word have been so uniformly demonized throughout US History, why red-scare tactics are always a tool of the ruling class, and why these tools are resurging again at this moment, as more and more youth turn toward capitalism's alternatives. The ruling classes don't want us to see beyond the walls of our own cages.

Capitalism is not just an economic system, but a political system that has locked us into profit-driven political parties and political cycles that never allow us to structurally evolve out of our deepest and most existential crises. Let's be clear—this isn't about voting. This is about building a revolution—an international solidarity movement big enough to take on and replace global capitalism. We have to learn how previous anti-capitalist movements have been destroyed, neutralized and subverted and begin learning from that history before it's too late.

We must work together. We cannot stay in our silos. Silos are based on individual identity, and we must build collective, class-based, and international solidarity if we are to survive the chaos that is coming. No matter who we are, our struggles and our liberation are connected. Societies based on individualism cannot survive species-level extinction events. This is going to require all hands on deck— all of us working together.

We must make ourselves useful to the movements around us that are already taking the biggest risks and doing the hardest work— from indigenous movements like the Red Nation, who have already created revolutionary programs to address these overlapping crises, to land and water protectors, to labor unions, to abolition movements, to racial and economic justice movements, to anti-war and peace movements. We have the teachers and the leaders that we need.

We must build massive networks of support and care at local and community levels, while at the same time, build international political movements that can replace the most corrupt capitalist states. It's a long, hard road ahead and a multi-generational project, and it's not for the weak of heart. It's going to take all of our courage, all of our resilience, and all of our love for our children and grandchildren. And it starts with telling the truth about capitalism.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.



Erin McCarley is an independent photojournalist and writer based in Denver, Colorado. With a master’s degree in photojournalism from UT Austin, her still photography, videos and writing have been published by the Westword, teleSUR English, Free Speech TV in Boulder, CO, KLRU TV in Austin, TX, CounterPunch, Yes! Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, the MIT Press, the Ford Foundation, Science Daily, The Daily Texan, and others.

Review of From Layton to Singh: the 20-Year struggle for the NDP’s soul

Matt Fodor analyzes the evolution the NDP has undergone through the course of three leaders, and one generation.

From Layton to Singh: The 20-year conflict behind the NDP's deal with the Trudeau Liberals
By Matt Fodor
James Lorimer & Co., October 1, 2022, 24.95

by Paul Weinberg
September 16, 2022

Jagmeet Singh in a surprise move emailed a public letter that placed the treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories at the level of an international crisis. It is the clearest statement on this issue from the federal NDP.

There is no chance that the minority Liberals government governing with the support of the NDP in Parliament will bend to any concerns about Israeli impunity.

And while I don’t have an insight into how the NDP leader made his decision it can be credited to the grassroots lobbying within the party membership and activist groups at large such as Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (full disclosure, I am a member of IJV).

Does this signify a switch from top-down decision making on policy that expanded when Jack Layton served as NDP leader from 2003 to 2011?Time will tell. Writer, political strategist and PhD candidate in political science at York University, Matt Fodor delves into the weeds of leadership philosophy and styles in a new book, From Layton to Singh: The 20-year Struggle for the NDP’s Soul.

Layton emerged as an innovative and inspiring city councillor on the Toronto municipal scene. (As a writer for various local alt. weeklies I knew the man personally). At the NDP leadership convention in 2003, he won on the first ballot. Support came from across the spectrum. They included members of the party left, Libby Davies and Svend Robinson, as well as former leader Ed Broadbent, former Ontario NDP party president Janet Solberg and the United Steelworkers.

Layton’s decision to professionalize and expand the federal party bureaucracy in Ottawa with strategists and communications specialists (doing continuous polling and focus groups) made sense in the competitive partisan context. By 2015 the NDP party headquarters on Laurier Ave. employed 250 people on staff, a jump from 40 one year earlier.

The problem, says Fodor, is that the federal NDP became more highly centralized around the leader and the party operatives, the latter working on devising the political messaging and policy.

It was already the case that the primary function of the membership in the federal NDP riding associations was not to discuss policy at the grassroots or educate members on policy, but primarily to raise money and volunteers for political campaigns at election time.

Layton became the leader of the federal NDP in 2003 at a propitious time when Paul Martin, the business friendly and right leaning Liberal prime minster was heading the country and there was a perceived opening on the centre left.

As finance minister in the previous Jean Chretien Liberal government Martin gained high marks among elite circles for eviscerating the Canadian welfare state in areas like housing and unemployment insurance, the consequences of which we are experiencing today in 2022 in a more unequal Canada.

Fodor says the federal NDP, which had never held power was positioned within the party as a social democratic oasis true to its roots. This was in contrast to the provincial NDP counterparts governing Ontario, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Manitoba starting in the 1990s which emphasized market friendly Third Way policies.

Layton led the NDP through four federal elections, relying on advisors from the provincial wings.

In the high mark 2011 election Jack Layton sought to remove the so-called political stigma of a tax and spend party. No mention was made in the platform for new social programs. Indeed, the focus was on rewarding job creators through tax cuts for small business, the maintenance of Canadian corporate rates as “competitive,” and a more modest childcare plan (25,000 spaces annually) than what had been advocated in previous NDP platforms. There was also no call for pharmacare, criticism of international trade agreements was muted and unions were noticeably absent from the platform.

“Altogether, the NDP increasingly accepted the parameters of neoliberal capitalism,” writes Matt Fodor.

A rearrangement in national partisan fortunes seemed to be in the cards as the federal Liberals were mired in third place in the House of Commons under weak leadership following the 2011 election when Stephen Harper and the Conservatives were ushered in with their first majority government.

In the same election, the NDP had surged to second place under Layton after gaining seats in his native Quebec at the expense of the Bloc Quebecois which looked tired and a spent force (temporarily it turned out). The NDP had successfully pitched itself as a social democratic party in line with Quebec values.

Things still looked promising even after Layton’s untimely death from cancer following the 2011 election. His number one recruit in Quebec Tom Mulcair took charge of the federal NDP during a contentious 2012 leadership convention where he won after four ballots (his major opponent was Layton policy strategist Brian Topp.)

Previously a minister in the Quebec Liberal provincial government Mulcair had primarily left that allegiance because of differences over environmental policy, not as a dissident on the left.

Mulcair fitted well into a reconfigured neo-liberal federal party in the 2000s under Jack Layton who supported a balanced budget.

You know what happened next. Justin Trudeau and the Liberals came sailing into power after languishing in third place in the previous Parliament by running to the left of the Mulcair led NDP in support of increased government spending. The Conservatives followed in second place.

What struck some NDP activists as especially galling was that Mulcair in the 2015 campaign was calling for a balanced budget throughout the entire mandate of a first national NDP government, making it hard to imagine anything socially significant being enacted.

For all of the brain tissue supposedly resident at the federal party headquarters, the Liberals had a better understanding of the Canadian public mood.

The 2015 election also witnessed a resurgence of an intolerant white ethnic nationalism (Islamophobia disguised as secularism) in Quebec which helped spell the rapid decline of the NDP in the province. The Bloc Quebecois experienced a comeback after running ads mocking Mulcair’s opposition to the banning of niqab by the Conservative government at citizenship ceremonies. The Liberals also opposed the ban but managed to see its seats increase in the province

Is the Jagmeet Singh led NDP continuing the legacy of Jack Layton?

The decision on Israel and Palestine was a matter of the right thing to do policy-wise. I doubt the party here relied on focus groups.

And a Singh led NDP is less apologetic about its social democratic values in, for instance, supporting taxes on the wealthy and corporations – including specifically the oil sector.

Fodor still detects a certain level of caution in the federal NDP that can be hobbling.

It is back in its traditional national role as a smaller party trying to find space as the two big parties the centrist Liberals and Freedom Convoy loving Conservatives dominate the political conversation and duke it out.

Following the 2021 federal election a confidence and supply agreement was signed where the NDP promises to ensure the survival of the current minority government headed by the Liberals under Trudeau until 2025 in exchange for specific items such as a means tested public dental care plan for low-income people.

This is no formal coalition. Singh and the NDP can still criticize the Liberals in power.

What Fodor finds inspiring are the never-ending insurgent challenges to the party establishment within the NDP. Recent ones have focused on the environment and the climate emergency.

He includes Avi Lewis and the other authors of the Leap Manifesto or more currently, the longshot candidacy of Anjali Appadurai, up against the front runner, David Eby, in the BC NDP leadership contest.

Because of the volatile nature of politics in the post pandemic world nothing is absolutely certain and so From Layton to Singh offers important lessons for Canada’s major party on the left for when it’s time might arise again.

From Layton to Singh will be published this fall on October 18 by James Lorimer & Company.