It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
The Demise of US Power, De-Dollarisation & the BRICS
As I write, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is preparing a ground offensive on Rafah, Palestine . PM Netanyahu has warned for months that such an offensive was imminent. The consensus view was that US pressure was all that held the IDF back from another slaughter of innocents; a battle that would not lead to the release of hostages, and would ultimately strengthen Hamas.
The consensus view was wrong. Israel, against the apparent advice of the United States president, proceeded defiantly with an attack bound to kill and maim many thousands more innocent civilians, including children and hostages – and to threaten the security of the wider region.
So far, so fairly predictable. Except this – from a professor of American history:
Over the last 130 years there was, and is no situation anywhere in the world where the mighty US of A has not used its leverage “to shape the behaviour of others.”
Israel is ranked way down the global economy in terms of size, population and GDP, and is dependent on the US for military aid. “Shaping its behaviour” should, theoretically, be easier. The country has a population of just 10 million people (not much bigger than the population of London); spends $26bn on the military and has an economy of just half a trillion dollars ($525bn) – according to the World Bank. Contrast that with the US with an annual GDP of $25 trillion and with the world’s highest military expenditure of $916 billion; and a population of 330 million. And to crown its power the US is issuer of the world’s reserve currency: the US dollar.
Yet the Israeli state has succeeded in subordinating the mighty United States of America to its murderous will.
The result is that at a time when the war on Palestine poses a grave threat not only to Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank; not only to the security of the Israeli people, but also to the region as a whole
the US has no plans to use its vast leverage ..to deliver even an ounce of peace and justice.
America’s Waning Power – Is It Real?
Given these developments, the United States appears weak, even impotent. This has excited talk of American imperial decline, and of the inevitable demise of the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar.
I am frankly, sceptical of such speculation. The US economy and its currency are mighty powerful – and not easily displaced.
Nevertheless it is important to pay attention to these matters, because we are all affected – albeit differentially – by the power of the US economy, and by the strength or weakness of the US dollar and its use in currency and commodity trading.
Poor countries suffer the most. They are victims (and beneficiaries) of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy (interest rates and Quantitative Easing (QE)) and on the strengthening or weakening of the US dollar; a currency in which they are obliged to borrow, and to buy and sell essential commodities (like food, medicines and energy).
Many low and middle-income countries are debating whether the US dollar, and therefore US power over the global economy, can be displaced? And if so, would that mean turning to, and relying on another reserve currency, like the Chinese yuan, or the Russian ruble?
That debate will soon hit the brick wall of realpolitik. Choosing an alternative national currency as the world’s reserve currency would simply mean choosing an alternative hegemon to that of the United States.
Instead of an alternative currency; or even multiple currencies, countries should argue for a change to the international system – and an end to dependence on a single hegemonic currency – and to the chaotic trading arrangements that hurt all countries – including the United States.
Instead countries of the majorityworld should argue for the establishment of a far more neutral and independent International Clearing Union – as a way of settling international payments – along the lines proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944.
Because there is so little knowledge or understanding of Keynes’s proposal for a clearing union, what follows will briefly outline the current context of the de-dollarisation debate, and then the principles of Keynes’s Clearing Union and the implications for BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa).
This will be followed, a day later, with a post on the special, but urgent case: the need for an African Payments Union.
A gentle warning: its fascinating, but a little bit nerdy.
The context: the market-driven global economy in 2024
Today’s economy can be characterised as one almighty, and badly entangled mess.
Comparable perhaps to the mess that is the world’s dirty, carbonised atmosphere.
This mess is due to a) the absence of effective state management of the international financial (and eco) system; b) the mobility and volatility of speculative capital; c) leading to obscene levels of inequality – both within and between countries; and d) by trade and capital account imbalances – a consequence of financial and trade deregulation, over-production and under consumption – all leading to trade wars.
Since early in the 1960s when Wall St financiers began to dismantle the Bretton Woods architecture in earnest, management of trade, currency, commodity and money markets was gradually wrenched away from states.
That transfer from public (democratic) authority to private authority over the world economy, has immense implications for states wishing to tackle e.g. inequality; unemployment; public services, but also climate and ecosystem breakdown.
The de-dollarisation debate
This is the chaotic market-driven context in which a range of alternatives to dollar dominance are currently debated by countries of the global majority.
Two years later at a special sitting on Saturday, 20 April, 2024, the US Congress passed a foreign aid package that would permit the Biden administration to confiscate $6 billion of Russian assets in US banks and transfer the proceeds to Ukraine.
The law contains policy provisions under which (i) the statute of limitations for US sanctions violations would be doubled; (ii) frozen Russian state-owned assets could be seized and used to support Ukraine, (iii) additional sanctions would be imposed on Russia, Iran, and Hamas; and (iv) data brokers would be prohibited from transferring personally identifiable sensitive data of US individuals to foreign adversaries.
The confiscation of state assets is an extraordinary development for a capitalist economy that regards property rights as almost sacred; and that promotes a ‘rules-based international order.’
The majority world’s angry response
Angry Chinese, African and Latin American leaders responded quickly. If the United States can seize Russia’s assets held in their trust at e.g. the Federal Reserve or the ECB, they asked, what stops the US from seizing the assets of any other state they disapproved of?
As Robert Greene of the Carnegie Endowment Fund reports, South Africa’s President Ramaphosa expressed concern that
global financial and payment systems are increasingly being used as instruments of geopolitical contestation.
At the April 2023 BRICS summit, where Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were invited to join the bloc, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked (to thunderous applause):
“Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies? Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the disappearance of the gold standard?”
BRICS finance ministers and central bankers were tasked by the 2023 BRICs summit to report back the following year on the question of local currencies’ use and payments infrastructure, according to Reuters. Later, in November 2023, a Leading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political journal stated that recent U.S. monetary policy choices created a “dollar tide” that
As a result of these concerns China’s renminbi is increasingly used for cross-border payments – even while such payments are limited relative to the U.S. dollar. It’s use in China’s cross-border transactions grew from around 20 per cent to approximately 50 percent between 2016 and 2022, according to Bloomberg. Russia’s finance minister explained to the TASS news agency on 19 September, 2023 that 70 percent of China-Russia trade was settled in renminbi during the first three quarters of 2023. In May 2023, Russian authorities were reportedly considering using the renminbi to facilitate trade with Iran. In the meantime, it is reported that the Russian central bank is encouraging countries in the use of its alternative to SWIFT for transmitting financial messages: SPFS.
The alternative: An International Clearing Union: what is it?
An International Clearing Union (ICU) would end dependence on any one currency; and would manage the payments part of the world’s trading system.
Here’s how to think about it.
A Clearing Union system is comparable to the domestic, commercial banking system which, with the help of the central bank, manages payments between buyers and sellers undertaking business transactions and borrowing or paying for those via a bank. The difference is that the buyers and sellers in the ICU would be nations, channelling the cross-border transactions of their citizens – individuals and corporations.
To understand the management of a clearing union, think of the central bank’s role within a commercial banking system. As we borrow, deposit, or withdraw money from banks, bankers are required to ‘balance their books’. on a daily basis. (Managing stocks and flows of money in and out of banks, is hard, and often not profitable.)
Central bank reserves can’t be used outside of the banking system. The central bank dispenses or absorbs these reserves to keep the whole commercial, licensed banking system stable as it manages thousands of transactions every day.
Of course its much more complicated than that – time and interest rates play a big part – but you get the big picture.
In just the same way an international institution – say the Bank for International Settlements (BIS, the Big Daddy of central banks) – based in Basel, Switzerland, could play the role of ‘central banker’ or supervising authority to nations trading with each other. Trade will be undertaken in their own currencies and the foreign exchange arrangements settled by the supervising authority, if it is the BIS.The authority’s actions would be transparent; and would keep tabs on surpluses and deficits within the trading system. It would do so in the neutral way a central bank treats the commercial banks within its domain. Keynes envisioned that such a neutral institution would have an apolitical structure – which is what central banks are supposed to have. Unlike the IMF – which has a highly politicised board of management – central banks do not discriminate against debtor banks within its system; or force only debtor banks to restore balance and make the necessary adjustment. It treats both debtor and creditor banks the same. After all, imbalances are inevitable, and central to the very nature of the banking business. Nor do central banks consciously set economic terms and conditions that would harm the economic stability of the banks within its care, as the IMF does.
…..an importer in country A would pay for machinery from country B by writing a check on his bank account in his own currency. The seller in country B would deposit the check in his bank and receive credit in his own currency at the current rate of exchange between the two currencies. This would be possible because of the existence of an international clearing process that would route the check from the commercial bank to the central bank in country B and from there to the international clearing agency (ICA).
At the end of the day, the ICA would net all checks exchanged between two countries and pay the difference by debiting or crediting their reserve accounts.
The process is simple but it does imply certain rules. It would require that all commercial banks receiving foreign payments exchange them for domestic currency deposits with their central banks. The central banks, in turn, would be required to deposit all foreign payments with the ICA. The result would be that all international reserves would be held by the ICA and that the process of debiting and crediting payments against countries’ reserve accounts would provide the means for determining changes in exchange rates. As in national systems where the level of required reserves is determined at weekly or bi-weekly intervals, such a structure would greatly reduce the exchange rate volatility that currently plagues the system.
An ICUwould not need a common currency to function, or if it did, that currency would only be used within and between members of the clearing union itself.
The importance of balancing the international trading system
By keeping accounts of payments in and out of the ICU and clearing transactions between trading nations, the ICU could help ensure member nations don’t build up deficits (overdrafts) but also surpluses – and that they always pay their dues.
Both trading debtors and creditors would be penalised – with higher rates of interest on outstanding payments, or on surpluses. That is because, in macroeconomic terms, one country’s trade surplus is another’s trade deficit. It may seem counter-intuitive, but trade surpluses are as harmful to international trade stability as deficits.
The policies that help build up trade surpluses are known as ‘beggar thy neighbour’ policies – where one country solves its domestic economic problems by dumping (sic) on another. And so, within a clearing union, both debtor (deficit) and creditor (surplus) countries would have to adjust, to restore balance to the world’s trading system. Trade surplus countries (like China, Kuwait or Germany) would do this by buying more from trade deficit countries (like the US, the United Kingdom or South Africa) to help restore stability to the international system as a whole.
Today the international trading system is neither supervised nor managed. Instead there are vast imbalances between surplus and deficit countries, and these in turn are the result of a) imbalances in the domestic economy and b) a cause of trade wars. (That is why Klein and Pettis’s book title: Trade Wars are Class Wars – is so pertinent.)
Surely such ‘system change’ is pie-in-the-sky?
Now many have argued that to replace the US dollar’s reserve status with an international clearing union would be nigh impossible. But we disagree. The ‘we’ referred to here includes two brilliant Italian economists, Massimo Amato and Luca Fantacci and myself. Back in 2019 we wrote in Open Democracy about an important precedent: an inter-national clearing union that had worked most successfully in recent history: the European Payments Union (EPU) of the 1950s. Amato and Fantacci explain how – in contrast to the Marshall Plan – the EPA had been successful in restoring economic health to a devastated, post-war Europe.
The European Payments Union (EPU) was established between 1950 and 1958.
The EPU made it possible for each country to finance its current account deficits without relying on the vagaries of capital liquidity provided by international financial markets, by providing a ‘clearing centre’. The country’s position was recorded as a net position in relation to the clearing centre itself, and thus as a multilateral position in relation to all the other countries.
A quota was set for each country corresponding to 15% of its trade with the other countries in the Union. Credit and debit balances could not exceed the respective quotas. The system therefore set a limit on the accumulation of debts or deficits with the clearing centre, and provided debtors with an incentive to converge towards equilibrium with their trading partners. The EPU also exerted strong pressure on creditor countries which, like Germany and Holland today, failed to raise imports and cut their surpluses.
The result was an extraordinary, export-driven expansion in production, in Germany and Italy in particular, and the liberalisation of trade not only within the EU, but also well beyond.
But what was most extraordinary was that this expansion of trade came along with rising employment and welfare in each partner country: the EPU was a part of a superstructure that provided countries with more autonomy to foster an economy led by domestic demand.
In other words: the Marshall Plan merely provided liquidity – i.e. cash – which at a time of European economic devastation was largely used by Europeans to buy American goods. That suited Americans very well, and allowed the country to maintain high levels of wartime production. However, it did not help Europe recover production, employment and income at home. The EPA by contrast, provided European countries with the kind of ‘overdrafts’ that permitted them to begin investing, producing and trading their own goods and services – which in turn generated employment and income – at home.
Unfortunately the system was dismantled by the ideology of ‘free markets’ and untrammelled capital flows…the very system that has bestowed today’s chaotic, divisive and unbalanced global economy on us all.
Which way forward?
Given all of the above, how could interim changes to the monetary system, along the lines proposed by Keynes, be made to ease global trade tensions? And how could such changes strengthen the position of today’s BRICs and other low-income countries vis a vis the rest of the world?
The answer I would contend could lie in by making a start to changes in regional trading arrangements on continents like that of Africa and Latin America: arrangements modelled on the European Payments Union of 1950 and discussed by Amato and Fantacci in their book: The End of Finance.
I propose that change could begin with an African Payments Union
In recent weeks, there has been talks of a return of trade unions in Germany and this is not just because of May Day – the 1st of May – but also because it has been seventy years that the right to strike was enshrined in Germany’s constitution.
Historically, it has been the trade union movement that was one of the strongest defenders of democracy and human rights. This highlights the importance of the right to strike and of trade unions to protect democracy.
In the wake of recent discussions about the 4-day-workweek, trade unions are again calling for a reduction of working hours. They have placed the reduction of working time at the center of social struggles for a more humane work time and a better work-life balance.
Meanwhile, the times at which corporate bosses told people that they are too old and we don’t want you anymore are coming to an end as acute labor shortages is biting Germany’s labor market. Today, the 4-day-workweek is popular because it attracts new employees.
The days, when workers were no longer “worth anything”, when people were no longer considered fit to work as they got older, and when illnesses set in are gone – for the time being, at least. Those were the days when Germany’s labor courts were busy.
Today, Germany’s federal labor court has turned 70 years old. During those seven decades, Germany’s labor law remained important for Germany’s “social cohesion” – it stabilized capitalism.
Yet, on the issue of industrial action and strikes, German labor law ensures the existence of trade unions and their function to preserve and promote working and economic conditions. And not much more.
Germans call the system that integrates trade unions into the apparatus of capitalism: “social partnership”. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, trade unions and employers agreed on a common policy on, for example, “working from home” (WFH) and on the temporary reduction of working hours. For this, Germany’s system relied on strong organizational ties between trade unions and employers.
These strong bonds between labor and capital were put into force in Germany’s constitution, called “The Basic Law” (1949), after the liberation from Nazism.
Nevertheless, German Nazism was generously financed by German companies. The Nazis delivered what capital had paid for, i.e. the physical elimination of trade unions. During the 1930s, the Nazis destroyed trade unions, torturing and murdering trade unionists.
After that, Germany’s post-Nazi labor relations system became known as the so-called Rhenish Capitalism. But then, something interesting and largely unknown happened.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps some elements of Nazi ideology have sieved into Germany’s post-war labor relations and its labor courts. For example, Germany’s rather paternalistic idea of a so-called “company community” may well carry traces of a Nazi’s ideology of a national and corporate “unit of interest”.
Under this ideology, the previously Betriebsführer [company leader] demanded the subordination of the entire workforce to so-called “company or corporate leader”. This in turn, was based on the Nazi’s Führer-Principle with the corporate Führer as the absolute leader with Züchtigungsrecht [corporal punishment].
The “corporate leader” ideology was originally introduced by the Nazis. The term Betriebsfüher marks the language of the Nazi’s Law on the Order of National Labor (1934). Yet, the idea can probably be traced back to well before Nazism – but with different (non-Nazi) connotations.
All of this did not – magically – disappear at the 8th of May 1945 with the liberation of Germany from Nazism. Instead, not just the ideology of Nazism but its people also carried on in post-Nazi Germany. What carried on – often rather undeterred – were plenty of Nazi apparatchiks.
This also included so-called “professional”(!) judges working in Germany’s labor court. No less than fifteen Nazi party (NSDAP) memberships have been found in Germany’s “new” labor court, after the war.
Today, Germany’s labor court is housed in the former East-German state of Thuringia – home of the neofascist Björn Höcke who is a member of Thuringia’s state parliament. Björn Höcke works hard to re-instate the “unspeakable language of Nazism” and to make Nazi terminology “sayable again”.
Meanwhile, the German term “social partnership” might also carry connotations to the Nazi’s Volksgemeinschaft. It is not surprising to find that – based on the ideological leftovers from Nazism – Germany’s labor court was, seemingly, reluctant to deal with the structural imbalance of power between employees and companies.
This remains a key characteristic of what might be termed “Nazi- capitalism” and today’s neoliberal capitalism.
With Nazis, the SS, and the Betriesfüher removed, the ruling elite of post-Nazi Germany, that still included many ex-Nazis, had to find another way to keep workers and trade unions away from the centers of corporate power.
After 1945, they could no longer simply be beaten, tortured, killed, or put into prison and concentration camps.
To enhance this asymmetry between labor and capital further, post-Nazi employers were – and still are – able to spend significant funds on scientific institutes (read: corporate thinktanks), legal, labor relations, and anti-union consultancy, business-legitimizing and semi-academic journals, so-called “independent” expert, often employed by business schools, as well as the vast network of well-paid opinion writers of the corporate press.
Worse, the trade union’s side can hardly match the economic, propaganda, and funding power of German employers. In other words, the so-called “social partners” were never on an equal footing.
The much acclaimed “level playing field” quickly vanishes into thin air. The “social partnership” idea is merely a useful ideology that supports capitalism.
Until today, the “IG Metall” – Germany’s metal workers union – could never match the implicit or explicit power of “Gesamtmetall” – Germany’s employer federation.
The power of Gesamtmetall comes in addition to the corporate power of large metal industry companies like Siemens, the Thyssenkrupp AG, Rheinmetall, Airbus, Bosch, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, and so on.
Given the structural disadvantage of trade unions vis-à-vis employers, the right to strike and collective bargaining always needs some sort of state support.
Once backed up by the state, a kind of level playing field is established and trade unions are able to put pressure on company bosses. Regardless of all this, the right to strike has done a reasonably good job. It has stabilized German capitalism since WWII.
Most recently, Germany has experienced the train-drivers’ GDL strikes or the strikes of the airport safety workers. There were also strikes in the health care and childcare sector. In all of this, the right of industrial action serves to develop working and economic conditions.
For some reason, a labor relations system is often presented as having “worked well in the history of Germany”.
Yet, there has been a very long period of wage stagnation, virtually no improvements on working time since 1984, and there have been very few strikes in comparison to other European countries for decades. Evil heretics might ask, are more strikes a sign that the system is working?
Unlike Germany, other EU member states are also familiar with something Germany’s capitalism and its supporting institutions fear like the plague: general strikes.
Cunningly, German labor law see a general strike as a “political strike”, i.e. as not directly related to collective bargaining. Perhaps this is a sign of the prevalence of the authoritarian personality that does exist inside Germany’s working class.
if German revolutionaries were to storm a railway station,
they would first queue up for a platform ticket.
By comparison in France, there has been a strike in the recent past for the maintenance of the pension system. Yet, in neighboring Germany, the rules of industrial action are way narrower. The simple but effective “Golden Rule” – those with the “gold” rule – of the elite are:strikes for collective agreements are “possible” (read: we, in our generosity, grant you that, always limited, right),
Of course, there have been very legitimate criticisms of the artificially invented separation between political and collective bargaining strikes. A political strike should be allowed, particularly when aimed at a legitimate political goal like:preventing the Nazis from taking over (1933); the Reichsbürger (neo-Nazis) trying to take over in 2023, and, against the neofascist AfD from installing an ethnically cleansed Germany (2024).
During post-Nazi Germany, this debate dates back to the disagreement between pro-democracy, resistance fighter, and lawyer Wolfgang Abendroth and Nazi-lawyer and author of a pro-Hitler pamphlet called “Total State” – Ernst Forsthoff.
The debate between Abendroth and one of the most influential men on German labor law – Nazi Forsthoff (Nazi party membership number: 5.285.360, joining Hitler’s party on 1st of May 1937) – dates back to the 1950s. Mind-bogglingly, top-Nazi Forsthoff argued that a political strike would be a violation of the principle of democracy.
A few years earlier, Forsthoff worked so hard to destroy democracy and to put democrats into concentration camps. There is no democracy in Forsthoff’s Total State. In post-Nazi Germany, nobody seemed to mind.
With a Nazi heritage as well as post-Nazi heritage (1950s) like that, Germany’s labor court reached two decisions decades later but shaped by Nazi-ideology – 2002 and 2007 – on banning political strikes. Despite all this, the legal decision on political strikes did not result in a meaningful outcome. The court stonewalled.
Worse, the “conservative spirit” (read: neofascist) lives on through the formation of Germanic legalities about the right to strike in the aftermath of Nazism. In other words, Germany’s right to strike was “decisively” shaped during the 1950s.
The artificial and rather senseless separation between political and collective bargaining strikes – which is still valid today – can be traced back to a so-called “conservative” understanding of labor law (read: a post-Nazi understanding).
Worse, Germany’s non-right to have a political strike is simply “a judge’s decision”. It was carried forward by labor court judges living and breathing the traditions of Nazism. The “tradition” of Nazi ideology shaping labor law was also aided by the removal of anti-Nazi legal scholars.
As Germany’s democratic tradition was destroyed by Hitler, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Forsthoff, etc. and the SS, many democratic labor lawyers – including Hugo Sinzheimer, Franz L. Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel as well as the labor judge Otto Kahn-Freund were persecuted by the Nazis. They were arrested, murdered or forced into exile, from which they rarely returned to Germany.
By contrast, the post-Nazi judges at Germany’s labor court – appointed “after” 1945 – had “no” or “no serious” experience of persecution after the victory over Nazism. Rather, the opposite was the case. By the mid-1960s, a whopping 80% of all government posts had been filled by lawyers who had worked for and with the Nazi.
As for Germany’s labor court, 14 of the first 25 judges at the court, had worked as Nazi lawyers. In the early years of post-Nazi Germany, they were classified as having so-called “Nazi-related” charges (read: a mild slap on the wrist).
Many had been members of Hitler’s Nazi party, were active in the SA, and worse in the SS. Plenty had passed death sentences and published anti-Semitic texts.
For example, Germany’s post-war president of the labor court and Führer-Principle supporter – Hans Carl Nipperdey, continued a long career in labor law being simply classified “an insignificant burden”. He, too, was furnished with a sanitizing “Persilschein” – a government document that whitewashed ex-Nazis.
Yet, top-Nazi Nipperday was a member of Hitler’s Academy of German Law actively participating in the Nazification of Germany’s labor law.
After Nipperday’s Gleichschaltung during the 1930s, German labor law reflected Nazi ideology. Interestingly, all the other judges of Germany’s post-Nazi labor court had started as Nazi lawyers during the Nazi era.
During the period of Nazi rule, the Nazis operated in a system in which there were simply no trade unions (a clear sign of fascism), let alone a right to strike.
Nevertheless, Nipperdey continued to interpret the right to strike “after” the end of his beloved Nazis. Henceforth, German labor law resumed to reflect the ideology of the Nazis.
Later, the officially called “ex”-Nazi Nipperdey was pursuing the “elimination of the class struggle” – an overarching goal of fascism. Like Forsthoff, he too remained in line with Nazi ideology.
Whether capitalism run by the Nazis or capitalism run during post-war liberal-democracy, German labor law continued with a so-called unity of leaders and followers in a company.
This so-called “company community” was no more than a remodeled and adjusted version of Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft (society) and Betriebsgemeinschaft (company).
With or without the Führer, capitalism continued undisturbed by trade unions. Ex-Nazi judges and ex-Nazi labor lawyers made sure of that. But there was a problem: without Nipperday’s beloved Führer, Nazi thugs, and the SS, capitalism and its supporting institutions(i.e. labor courts) needed to be modernized during the 1950s.
Since strikes could not be made totally illegal, as they could under the Nazis, ex-Nazi Nipperdey deemed strikes as “an undesirable event”. At the same time, ex-Nazi Nipperdey did not even want to mention the word “strike”.
Yet, strikes are the only means for workers to effectively implement their goals and counteract the structural imbalance between them and an employer.
During a newspaper strike in 1952, it was the leading Nazi-labor-law proponent Nipperdey who dictated the basic features of Germany’s right to strike.
For the ex-Nazi, a strike – which is highly undesirable for Nazi-capitalism as for post-Nazi capitalism – can only be justified if it relates to collective bargaining. In other words, political strikes are forbidden.
As a consequence of the transfer of Nazi ideology (Law of a Nazi Order of Labor) into post-Nazi labor law, the labor court has never dealt with the function of the strike in a democracy. Ex-Nazi Nipperdey carried the anti-democratic ideology of Nazism forward.
Things changed somewhat during the 1980s when Germany’s labor court ruled on the abhorrent idea of a so-called “political strike”. Yet, the restriction on a “political strike”, that came from ex-Nazis like Hans Carl Nipperdey, lives on in Germany’s labor relations to this day.
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Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).
Union Power Can Change Campus Protests Forever
A strike authorization vote at the University of California hints at labor’s political potential.
Strikes are different from protests. Though protesters frequently say that they are making “demands,” it is more accurate to say they are making requests. Protests rely on persuasion. Their persuasion may be gentle, or it may be aggressive; it may rely on moral shaming to get its point across, or it may rely on the elevation of awareness, or it may rely on the pure intimidation of numbers. But protests, for all of their righteous fury and necessity, lack the legal ability to shut things down until change is achieved.
Strikes, on the other hand, can truly make demands. Their proposition is simple: No work will get done until a change is made. Obstinate institutions can resist protests, and call out the police to disperse them, but that resistance is less effective against strikes, for the simple reason that the strikers are also the workers who make the very same institutions run. This intrinsic power of strikes is the reason why they are so strictly regulated, why entire categories of strikes have been deemed illegal ever since the Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947. It is also why it is always wise, when we challenge power, to ask ourselves: Could this protest also be a strike?
The wave of protests against the war on Gaza that has swept America’s campuses in recent weeks is an inspiring example of young people refusing to acquiesce to an atrocity that most of their elders have already rationalized away. The protests have succeeded in forcing institutions of all types to take a side on an issue that many would have preferred to pretend does not involve them. Many college presidents, torn between the demands of wealthy conservative donors and the irksome desire to live up to their own hollow declarations of progressive values, have exposed themselves as both pathetic and hysterical. Riot police have proven to be a more favored method of control than reasoned discussion. The images of militarized cops descending on kids in tents asking to stop a genocide have made the protesters’ point as effectively as anything they could have hoped for.
Universities are hoping to wipe out the budding movement with a combination of police and time. They are, I’m quite sure, hoping that the protesters do not start thinking deeply about the fact that colleges and universities have been the site of the largest union organizing campaigns in this country for the past several years. Higher ed is in the midst of the most sweeping union wave of any industry in America. Unions of tenured professors, adjunct professors, grad student workers, and other campus employees, organized in the tens of thousands, fill the same campuses that the protest encampments do. Many of the people who have joined the encampments – and been arrested therein – are union members. The universe has teed up a beautiful opportunity to demonstrate the way that organized labor power can be used to accomplish broader political goals.
This week, the eyes of the union world are focused on the United Auto Workers vote at a Mercedes factory in Alabama, where the union is prepared to secure a landmark win in the hostile South. But there is another UAW vote this week that is exciting for its own reasons: the strike authorization vote of UAW Local 4811, which represents about 48,000 academic workers in the University of California system. That vote will be the most substantial act so far of a union formally inserting itself into the heart of the Gaza protests, in the way that schools fear the most.
America’s employer-friendly labor laws strictly box in where and when most unions are allowed to legally strike. For the most part, union contracts include “no strike” clauses that restrict striking for the life of the contracts. An exception, though, is that employees can strike to protest unfair labor practices – including things an employer does that put the health and safety of union members at risk. Can you think of anything that universities have done recently to put the health and safety of their campus employees, such as professors and grad student workers, at risk? Ah, yes: Calling in the damn riot police on peaceful encampments! The very same high-handed exercise of violent power that schools have used to try to silence the protests have opened the door to a strike – an even more formidable action than the encampments themselves.
Tanzil Chowdhury, a UAW 4811 executive board member and the union’s statewide Academic Student Employee chair, told me that the seeds for the strike vote were planted when the protest encampments at UCLA were met first with violent counterprotests, and then with an aggressive attack by police wielding rubber bullets and tear gas. Present at that protest were some members of the union’s executive board. “It was at that point that it became clear that the university was committing major overreach,” Chowdhury said. Other UC campuses experience similar harsh tactics, including at UC San Diego, where dozens of student protesters were arrested and found their housing and health insurance coverage at risk.
The union’s leaders recognized that these actions from school administrators were not just objectionable – they were contract violations. Specifically, the union says that the schools’ police interventions and subsequent retaliation against protesting union members violate those members’ legally protected rights to engage in concerted activity to demand change in their own working conditions. They also say that the schools’ reactionary changes to campus speech policies, without giving the union the chance to bargain over them, are unfair labor practices as well. “These ULPs cut to the core of what it means to be a union,” Chowdhury said. “If workers don’t feel safe in their workplace, if they feel the campus can unilaterally change all of its policies… can we really even have a union that can stand up for anything we care about?”
Hence the strike authorization vote. If successful, it would give the union’s leadership the ability to call strikes where and when they deem necessary – and would therefore force university leaders to think much more carefully about their future repressive tactics. It is easier for a panicky college president to call out the cops when they don’t have to worry about the possibility that they could prompt a strike that would shut down all of the school’s academic operations. UAW 4811 is attempting to alter the entire balance of power surrounding the campus protests, in a way that the universities will not be able to ignore.
Notably, Chowdhury said that the academic union would model any strikes on the “Stand Up” model that the UAW used with great success against the Big Three auto companies last year. Rather than calling on everyone to walk out at once, the union could choose to call specific campuses out as needed, with no prior warning. The tactic gives the union flexibility, lessens the burden on striking members, and puts the onus on employers to police their own conduct. For anyone who has ever asked, “Why does the auto workers union have a bunch of grad student members?”, here is an answer. We are on the cusp of seeing the tactics of an auto strike spread to a statewide university system in real time.
This is how the labor movement is supposed to work. Workers use their collective labor power to protect their ability to freely exercise their political rights in the workplace. Wisdom earned in one industry spreads to others, as workers recognize that they have more in common than they thought. The willingness of a strong union to use its latent strike power inspires more of its members to explore how they can do the same thing. If UAW 4811’s strike authorization vote passes, it will instantly become a proof of concept for hundreds of thousands of other union members on protest-wracked campuses from coast to coast. It will place the union right where it should be: Not standing idly apart from broad political fights, but right at their center.
From auto workers, to campus workers, to Gaza protesters. This is how it spreads. This is how unions grow into the full potential of their own power. This is how the labor movement becomes one with social movements. This is how the unthinking willingness to use riot cops to beat down political disagreements gets put to an end.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
“Displacement Has Been Weaponized”: Gaza Reporter Akram al-Satarri on Israeli Attack & Fleeing Rafah
Over 450,000 Palestinians, many already internally displaced, have fled Rafah in the past week alone since Israel launched an offensive on the city. Another 100,000 have been forced to flee homes in the north of Gaza amid escalated bombing and ground attacks. Among the recently redisplaced is our guest, the Gaza-based journalist Akram al-Satarri, who joins us from a crowded shelter outside the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. “Displacement has been weaponized,” al-Satarri says, citing the experiences of families who have been displaced as many as eight times since the start of Israel’s assault. “People are suffering. They are deprived of everything,” al-Satarri adds, due to Israel’s seizure and closure of the Rafah border crossing, preventing food, water, supplies or aid from reaching the famine-stricken population. “They are trying to prepare the Palestinians for full subjugation,” he continues. Life in Gaza is “unimaginable; however, Gazans are living it.”
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Never Ended
The State of Israel was founded with the Nakba, a series of atrocities that ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their homeland. Today we are witnessing Israel engage in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza on an even larger, more violent scale.
In 1948, at Israel’s founding, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed and destroyed over 530 Palestinian villages and towns, killing more than ten thousand Palestinians in a series of civilian massacres. As Zionists seized over 78 percent of historic Palestine, nearly one million Palestinians, out of a population of 1.9 million, were expelled from their homes and made lifetime refugees. Many of those uprooted flooded to Gaza, tripling its population overnight and rendering the tiny strip a colossal concentration camp for refugees.
Palestinians refer to those tragic events as the Nakba, an Arabic term meaning catastrophe, which has become a synonym for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The Nakba did not unfold overnight. It was carried out in different phases — or “plans,” as the Zionists called them. Plans A, B, and C aimed to prepare Zionist forces in Mandate Palestine for military and offensive campaigns against Palestinian targets, with the purpose of terrorizing the native population out of Palestine.
Plan C spelled out clearly punitive actions against Palestinians, which included killing the Palestinian political leadership and senior military and government officials; destroying Palestinian transportation, infrastructure, and sources of livelihoods, such as water wells and mills; and destroying Palestinian social life by attacking clubs, coffee houses, and meeting places. Having mined village files for “lists of leaders, activists, potential human targets, the precise layout of villages, and so on,” Plan C provided Zionist commanders with all the data they needed to carry out those atrocities.
Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), the final plan, aimed for the systematic and total expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. In the words of Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, “It was this plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State.” The Terror of the Nakba
The Nakba was a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, characterized by widespread and brutal atrocities. On April 9, 1948, for instance, about 130 fighters from the Zionist terrorist groups of Irgun and Lehi stormed into Deir Yassin, a village of roughly six hundred people near Jerusalem, and massacred over two hundred Palestinians — men, women, and children. An Israeli soldier later described the Zionist tactics bluntly: “We’re putting in explosives and running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there anymore.”
Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old when the massacre unfolded, recalled how Zionist fighters murdered his family before his eyes: “They took us out one after the other; they shot an old man, and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him — carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her — they shot her too.”
On May 23, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s Alexandroni Brigade rounded up over two hundred Palestinian villagers in Tantura near Haifa, a village of roughly fifteen hundred residents and massacred them in cold blood. A Jewish eyewitness later recalled, “It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . . They did not leave anyone alive.” Some of those atrocities are narrated in Tantura, a film by director Alon Schwarz, which draws on 140 hours of oral testimonies by former Israeli soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade and local Palestinian residents to recount the horrific war crimes committed by Zionist forces there.
On July 11, in what became known as the Lydda Death March, Israeli forces stormed into the Arab town of Lydda, where they massacred hundreds of residents and expelled some seventy thousand Palestinians. During Operation Danny, as Israel called it, the 89th Israeli Battalion, mounted on armored cars and jeeps, raided the city “spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved,” Israeli historian Benny Morris writes. When he was asked what is to be done with the population of Lydda, Israeli leader (and future first prime minister) David Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said, “Drive them out!”
On October 29, the IDF’s 89th Commando Battalion, which was composed of former Irgun and Lehi paramilitary forces and commanded by Moshe Dayan, invaded the Palestinian village of al-Dawayima, where they killed hundreds of civilians and raped dozens of women. “There was no battle and no resistance,” an Israeli soldier eyewitness later said. “The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs, including women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There was not a house without dead.”
Pappé writes, “The events that unfolded in al-Dawaymeh are probably the worst in the annals of Nakba atrocities.” The Zionist atrocities in al-Dawayima were so appalling that Palestinian leaders tried to prevent news of the massacre from reaching other Palestinian towns, fearing it would terrorize more people out of Palestine, as had happened in the wake of Deir Yassin massacre.
On October 30, the IDF’S 7th Brigade stormed into the northern Palestinian village of Saliha and butchered one hundred Palestinians. The next day, Zionist forces executed more than eighty villagers in the nearby village of Hula.
Zionist leaders proudly spread the news of their massacres as a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them should they refuse to abandon their homes and take flight. As Ben-Gurion declared in October 1948: “The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left — to run away.”
The atrocities sent terror waves across Palestinian towns and villages, forcing thousands to make a rapid exodus, leaving behind warm beds and brewed coffee, damp laundry still hanging from their windows, millstones running at their doorsteps — never to return. By the time of Israel’s founding, whole Palestinian communities in cities like Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Safed, and Tiberias, had been either expelled or forced to flee in terror. In my hometown of Jaffa, the largest Palestinian city in Mandate Palestine, only about three thousand of seventy-five thousand Palestinians who lived there remained after the ethnic cleansing. In more than seventy massacres committed by Israel, hardly a Palestinian village or town was spared. As Zionist commander Moshe Dayan would later confess:
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Those collective executions and mass expulsions meant the wholesale destruction of Palestinian society and the near-erasure of its thriving culture. The massacres have “left an indelible mark of horror in Palestinian memory.” Each Nakba Day, Palestinians mark those events with symbolic marches of return to their vanished towns and villages. The Second Nakba
While Palestinians have always feared the prospect of a second Nakba, which several Israeli officials have threatened over the years, most never imagined that it would unfold before their eyes in broad daylight, believing that ethnic cleansing belonged in the past century.
They were wrong. For eight months since last October, Israel has massacred and displaced more than three times as many Palestinians in Gaza as it did in all of Palestine during the Nakba. The toll on civilians in the besieged strip has now exceeded thirty-five thousand Palestinians, including over fifteen thousand children, while thousands remain buried under rubble. About two million Palestinians have been displaced, most of whom are sheltering in Rafah, which has been under constant Israeli bombardment and is now facing ground assaults. Since Israeli forces invaded the small refugee town, over three hundred thousand terrified Palestinians have fled Rafah into the unknown — with some thirty thousand fleeing daily — evoking tragic scenes from the Nakba of 1948.
Once again, Palestinians are being forced to choose between death and ethnic cleansing. The same forces whose commanders screamed “erase it” at Tantura seventy-six years ago are now screaming for the total erasure of Gaza. In a horrifying irony, Israel is now bombing and displacing the same Palestinians who it forced into Gaza as refugees more than seven decades ago. Israel is likely the only state in living memory that has twice ethnically cleansed its native population.
This is a second Nakba unfolding before our eyes: the mass displacement and exodus trails of refugees marching on foot, under constant bombardment and intensifying siege, leaving behind destroyed homes and lives. The civilian massacres, unfolding daily and hourly. The total annihilation of Palestinian life, culture, and society. The razed streets of Gaza, filled with rubble and reeking of blood and trampled by heartbroken survivors. The bodies of dead children strewn in the streets and under the rubble.
Yet the Gaza genocide is only the latest chapter in Israel’s decades-long oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, which is why for nearly fifteen million Palestinians, the Nakba never truly ended. For them — whether they are living in permanent exile, under apartheid in the West Bank, under siege in Gaza, in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as an involuntary minority in Israel, the Nakba is an ongoing event.
For decades, Israel has demanded the unquestioning surrender of the Palestinian people. It has denied Palestinians the right to resist nonviolently, even as Israel’s own “right to defense” has become a euphemism for the systematic killing of civilians. Western leaders have watched the ethno-state balloon in size. They have sat idly by while Israeli settlers devoured Palestinian lands bit by bit and violently enforced Palestinians’ subordination. They have winked at the injustices meted out against Palestinians: the brutal occupation, the separate-and-unequal system of apartheid, the merciless siege of Gaza. By backstopping Israel, they have allowed it to become normal to imagine Palestinians as a stateless people deprived of basic human rights and freedoms; and indeed, to imagine Palestinians as less than humans.
For over seven decades, Israel has carried out its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians while escaping justice and acting with impunity, emboldened by Western support and international apathy. Today Palestinians and their descendants demand justice, now more urgently than ever.
Reflections on Student Activism And the Struggle for a Better World
Most of what I’ve done in my career is firmly rooted in my college experience. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University, class of 1978, and my time there prepared me for my current work — just not in the way one might expect. I took some relevant courses like Seymour Melman’s class on America’s permanent war economy and Marcia Wright’s on the history of the colonization of South Africa. But my most important training came outside the classroom, as a student activist.
Student Activism: Columbia in the 1970s
As I look at the surge of student organizing aimed at stopping the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I’m reminded that participation in such movements can have a long-term impact, personally as well as politically, one that reaches far beyond the struggle of the moment. In my case, the values and skills I learned in movements like the divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s formed the foundation of virtually everything I’ve done since.
I was not an obvious candidate to become a student radical. I grew up in Lake View, New York, a rock-ribbed Republican suburb of Buffalo. My dad was a Goldwater Republican, so committed that we even had that Republican senator’s “merch” prominently displayed in our house. (The funniest of those artifacts: a can of “Gold Water,” a sickly sweet variation on ginger ale.)
Although I fit in well enough for a while, by the time I was a teenager my goal had become all too straightforward: get out of my hometown as soon as possible. My escape route: Columbia University, where I expected to join a vibrant, progressive student movement.
Unfortunately, when I got there in 1973, the activist surge of the anti-Vietnam War era had almost totally subsided. By my sophomore year, though, things started to pick up. The September 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chile’s Salvador Allende and the ongoing repression of the Black population in apartheid South Africa had sparked a new round of student activism.
My first foray into politics in college was joining the Columbia University Committee for Human Rights in Chile. It started out as a strictly student organization, but our activities took on greater meaning and our commitment intensified when we befriended a group of Chilean exiles who had moved into our neighborhood on New York’s Upper West Side.
In 1974, I also took time off to work in the New York branch of the United Farm Workers‘ boycott of non-union grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine. I ran a picket line in front of the Daitch Shopwell supermarket at 110th and Broadway in Manhattan. One of my regulars on that picket line was an older gentleman named Jim Peck. It took a while before I learned that he had been a central figure in the Freedom Rides in the South during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had first been arrested for civil rights organizing in 1947 in Durham, North Carolina, alongside the legendary Bayard Rustin. He and his fellow activists, black and white, went on to ride buses together across the South to press the case for the integration of interstate transportation. On a number of occasions, they would be brutally beaten by white mobs. In my own brief career as a student activist, I faced no such risks, but Jim’s history of commitment and courage inspired me.
When I got back from my stint with the United Farm Workers, the main political activity on the Columbia campus was a campaign to get the university to divest from companies involved in apartheid South Africa. We didn’t win then, but we did help put that issue on the map. Ten years later, a student divestment movement finally succeeded, and Columbia became the first major university to commit to fully divesting from South Africa. That modest victory, part of sustained anti-apartheid efforts on college campuses and beyond, would be followed nationwide by Congress’s passage of comprehensive sanctions on the apartheid regime, despite a veto attempt by then-President Ronald Reagan.
Many of us kept working on the anti-apartheid issue after graduation. I remained a member of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa and, for a while, was also a member of the collective that put out Southern Africa Magazine in support of the anti-apartheid struggle and liberation movements in southern Africa. In New York, our mentors and inspirations in the anti-apartheid movement were people like Prexy Nesbitt, a charismatic organizer from Chicago, and Jennifer Davis, a South African exile who edited our magazine and went on to run the American Committee on Africa. For that magazine, I helped track companies breaking the arms embargo on South Africa as well as multinational corporations propping up the regime, an experience that served me well when I went on to become a researcher in the world of think tanks.
From Student Activist to Think-Tank Expert
By that time, I was fully engaged politically. As I approached the end of my four years at Columbia, however, it slowly dawned on me that I was going to have to get a real job. The good news was that, in my brief career as a student activist, I had learned some basic skills, including how to craft an article, give a speech, and run a meeting.
The bad news was that I had absolutely no idea how to find gainful employment. So, I went home to Lake View for a while and my mom, who was a member of the International Typographical Union, gave me a crash course in proofreading and how to use official proofreading symbols. On the strength of those lessons, I got a job at a New York print shop, where I spent a miserable year proofreading magazines like Psychology Today, Modern Bride, Skiing, Boating, and pretty much any other publication ending in -ing.
Then I got lucky. A friend had just turned down a job, mostly because the pay was so lousy, at the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), a think tank founded to promote corporate social responsibility. But my expenses at the time were, to say the least, minimal, so I took the job.
The focus of my first CEP project was economic conversion, a process designed to help communities reduce their dependency on Pentagon spending. It had been launched by Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross), then finishing The Iron Triangle, his immensely useful analysis of the military-industrial complex. While at CEP, I wrote about the top 100 Pentagon contractors, the top 25 arms exporting firms, and the economic benefits of a nuclear weapons freeze. My goal: produce research that would help activists and advocates make their case.
And so it went. Other than a stint in New York State government from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, I’ve been a think-tank analyst ever since. At the moment, most of the issues I’ve advocated for, from reducing the Pentagon budget to cutting nuclear arsenals, are heading in exactly the wrong direction. By contrast, though, the issues I worked on as a student did indeed make progress, though only after years of organizing. South Africa’s apartheid regime actually fell in 1992. In 1975, California Governor Jerry Brown pushed through a state law guaranteeing the right of farmworkers to organize. In Chile, Pinochet was ousted thanks to a 1988 national referendum and lived his last years as an international pariah, even spending 503 days under house arrest in the United Kingdom on charges of “genocide and terrorism that include murder.”
The main difference between the successful solidarity movements I participated in and the other political movements in which I’ve played some small part was that both the South Africa divestment campaign and the United Farm Workers (UFW) boycott took their leads from people and organizations on the front lines of the struggle. Solidarity movements contributed in a significant fashion to those victories, but the central players were those front-line organizations, from the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa to UFW organizers working in the fields of California.
The Student Movement for Gaza
Which brings me back to the state of current student activism. I live 10 blocks from the main gates of Columbia University, the site of one of the more active student organizations pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to government and institutional support for Israel’s brutal military campaign there, which has already killed nearly 35,000 people and left many others without medical care, adequate food, or clean water. The International Court of Justice has already suggested that a plausible case can be made for the Netanyahu government being guilty of genocide. Whether you use that term or simply call Israeli actions “war crimes,” the killing has to stop, which makes me proud of those Columbia student activists and deeply ashamed of the way the leadership of my former university has responded to them.
This April, when the president of Columbia called in the riot police to arrest students engaged in a peaceful protest, she inadvertently brought a whole new level of attention to activism about Gaza. Students at scores of campuses across the country started similar tent cities in solidarity with the Columbia students and protests that had largely been ignored in the mainstream media are now drawing TV cameras from outlets large and small.
Opponents of the student demonstrators, whose real goal is to get them to stop criticizing Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, have hurled claims of antisemitism at them that largely haven’t distinguished between actual acts of discrimination and cases of students feeling “uncomfortable” due to harsh — and wholly justified — criticisms of the Israeli government. As Judd Legum underscored at his substack Popular Information, there was no evidence of antisemitic acts by the students running the pro-ceasefire encampment at Columbia. Individuals and organizations outside the student movement seem to have been responsible for whatever hate rhetoric and related incidents have occurred.
Genuine antisemitism should be roundly condemned but confusing it with criticism of Israeli policies in Gaza will only make that job harder. And keep in mind that the Republican politicians hurling charges of antisemitism at students protesting repression in Gaza are, ironically enough, closely linked to actual antisemites.
To cite just one example, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited the Columbia campus last month in a purported effort to express his concern about antisemitism, has long promoted the racist “great replacement theory,” which holds that welcoming non-white immigrants is part of a plot to undermine the culture and power of white Americans. That theory has been cited by numerous perpetrators of racial and antisemitic violence, including the attacker who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Despite attempts to slander those student activists and divert attention from the devastation being visited on the people of Gaza, activists associated with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine continue to bravely build a vibrant movement that refuses to back down in the face of attacks by both college leaders and prominent donors. Such leaders have, in fact, interfered with student rights of assembly and free speech, suspended them for making statements critical of Israel, and used the police to break up protests. As the repression accelerates, with a surge of campus expulsions of protesters and the arrest of more than 2,500 students at more than 40 universities nationwide, the student activists continue to show courage under fire of a kind I was never called on to exhibit in my days in college. In the process, they have echoed the even larger protests of the anti-Vietnam War era.
If you were to look at a list of what the administrations at Columbia and other colleges and universities have done to student protesters in these weeks, without identifying the institutions doing it, you might reasonably assume that theirs was the work of autocratic regimes, not places purportedly dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of speech.
A number of universities — including Brown, Evergreen State, Middlebury, Rutgers, and Northwestern – have agreed to meet various student demands, from making formal statements in support of a ceasefire in Gaza to providing more transparency on university investments and agreeing to vote on divestment. Meanwhile, President Biden has pledged to impose a partial pause on arms transfers to Israel if it launches a major attack on the residents of the vulnerable enclave of Rafah. But far more needs to be done to end the killing and begin to provide reparations for the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, including a cutoff of the supply and maintenance of all the American weaponry that has been used to support the Israeli military effort. Student organizing will continue, even in the face of ongoing efforts to smear the student rebels and divert attention from the mass killing of Palestinians. Those students remain remarkably (and bravely) determined to end this country’s shameful policy of enabling Israel’s devastating assault and they are clearly not about to give up.
Today’s Campaigns and Tomorrow’s
One thing is guaranteed: the commitment of this generation of student activists will reverberate through the progressive movement for years to come, setting high standards for steadfast activism in the face of the power of repression. Many of the activists from my own years on campus have remained in progressive politics as union organizers, immigration reform advocates, peace and racial justice activists, or even, like me, think-tank researchers. And don’t be surprised if the ceasefire movement has a similar impact on our future, possibly on an even larger scale.
Face it, we’re living through difficult times when fundamental tenets of our admittedly flawed democracy are under attack, and openly racist, misogynist, anti-gay, and anti-trans rhetoric and actions are regarded as acceptable conduct by all too many in our country. But the surge of student activism over Gaza is just one of many signs that a different, better world is still possible.
To get there, however, it’s important to understand that, even as we rally against the crises of the moment, suffering both victories and setbacks along the way, we need to prepare ourselves to stay in the struggle for the long haul. Hopefully, the current wave of student activism over the nightmare in Gaza will prove to be a catalyst in creating a larger, stronger movement that can overcome the most daunting challenges we face both as a country and a world.
Columbia-Affiliated Union Theological Seminary Votes to Divest from Israel’s War on Gaza
As student protests around the world call for their educational institutions to divest from companies with ties to Israel, we speak to the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, an ecumenical seminary affiliated with Columbia University that is one of the first schools to begin divesting from companies that “profit from war in Palestine/Israel.” Jones says divestment is an extension of Union’s “long policy of trying our best to bring our values, our core mission and our conscience to bear on how we invest our money,” and credits student activists with pushing the administration to action. Jones criticizes Columbia’s decision to arrest student protesters with a “police takeover” and “violent decampment,” in contrast to Union’s approach to student political expression. “We support students learning what it means to find their voice and speak out for justice and freedom,” she says.
Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Among the leading demands of students protesting the war in Gaza across the United States for the past month have been calls for universities to disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel. While many universities have sought to break the Gaza solidarity encampments by force, calling in police, suspending, expelling students — over, it’s believed, about 3,000 students and faculty and allies have been arrested across the country — other institutions have responded to calls for divestment.
Among them is the Union Theological Seminary here in New York, an ecumenical seminary affiliated with Columbia University. Last week, the Union announced its Board of Trustees had endorsed a divestment plan from, quote, “companies profiting from war in Palestine/Israel.” In a statement, they wrote they have, quote, “taken steps to identify all investments, both domestic and global, that support and profit from the present killing of innocent civilians in Palestine, whose numbers are now over 34,000 — and a humanitarian crisis of ever-growing magnitude. Union’s president, faculty, and students have repeatedly made strong public calls for an immediate ceasefire and will continue to do so until this continually escalating war has stopped. These calls are supported by today’s decision by Union’s Investment Committees to withdraw support from companies profiting from the war,” end-quote.
For more, we’re joined by the president of Union Theological Seminary, the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones. Her recent piece for Religion News is headlined “What we have to learn from students leading the charge for justice.” She’s joining us in our New York studio.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Dr. Jones. It’s great to have you with us.
REV. SERENE JONES: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: I was just at Union Theological Seminary for the two-day retirement conference of the Colombia University Edward Said professor, Rashid Khalidi. It was supposed to be at Columbia, but it had to be moved. The Columbian — the president of Columbia had called in the New York police twice. Well over a hundred people were arrested. The encampment was destroyed. Union has taken a very different approach, though you are affiliated with Columbia University. Can you talk about the decision you’ve made? And for presidents of universities and colleges and seminaries around the country, explain how your Board of Trustees came to this decision.
REV. SERENE JONES: Well, thank you.
And in terms of the decisions that we’ve made since the beginning of the war, but also increasingly since the beginning of the encampments and the student protests, is we have a long-standing policy of not allowing the police on our campus except in the case of a serious crime. And our campus, we consider it a sanctuary, a place of safety. And so, rather than responding with arrests, with penalizing students, we support protesters. We support students learning what it means to find their voice and speak out for justice and freedom.
So, that meant, in this situation, opening up our campus to all of the surrounding campuses, where people were being expelled, where events weren’t allowed to happen, and opening our doors. So, we had Columbia classrooms meeting on our campus. We had events. Yesterday we had the Columbia Law School do their graduation in our chapel. So, it’s been very active. And among those things are a Passover Seder, that the students who were Jewish in the encampment asked if they could come do a seder on our campus. We’ve had Muslim prayers on Friday on the campus. We’ve just — our doors are wide open, which is what a school, a university should be in times like this, places for voices and places where community happens. Not a hard decision on our part.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Jones, I wanted to ask you: How does your school now plan to work with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which handles, I understand, some $4 trillion in managed assets for over 300 institutions?
REV. SERENE JONES: Yes, working with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility is one piece of a multipronged strategy. Our decision to work with them has to do with our look at our own investments, which are very small because of preexisting screens we have against armaments and guns. This ups that to defense industries and to any body profiting from the war. And we’re going to extend from there forward. But what ICCR does is allow multiple faith traditions and faith communities to pool their resources in order to bring pressures to bear against particularly intractable companies who have been previously nonresponsive to divestment, pressures of divestment. So, it’s the place where we both teach our students what it means to participate in socially responsible investing, and it’s a collective strategy for bringing pressure to bear.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Union has also said that — in its announcement, that it is, quote, “exploring investments that proactively support humanitarian and entrepreneurial companies doing positive work in the region.” What would that look like?
REV. SERENE JONES: So, we’re still looking into all of this to see what the specifics of it are. We have various lists — I haven’t even seen the lists — of the companies that we are targeting to divest from. And we are exploring also through ICCR and others how we might make positive investments in the region. So, I don’t have any specifics on that, but that is the intention. Just to be clear, when we made the decision to divest and to invest in humanitarian support, it was a decision that was very firm and clear and directed, but it is just the beginning of the process of actually implementing it, which we take very seriously.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can explain socially responsible investments, SRI, the kind of screen that you use? And have you spoken to the presidents of Columbia and Barnard in the actions that they took, arresting so many, well over a hundred, of their students?
REV. SERENE JONES: So, socially responsible investing screens, Union has long had them with respect to our endowment. Our first major divestment was from South Africa, U.S. companies doing business in South Africa. And that socially responsible screens mean you tell the company that manages your investments, “Do not put money here. And if we have it, withdraw it and move it somewhere else.” We have screens for armaments. We have screens for guns. We most recently have a screen for for-profit prisons. We were the first school to divest from fossil fuels, way back in 2014. And so, this is just a continuation of what has been a long policy of trying our best to bring our values, our core mission and our conscience to bear on how we invest our money. So, those screens go in place, and it stops investments going forward and begins to work on divesting going backwards.
AMY GOODMAN: And have you spoken to the Columbia and Barnard presidents? I believe both staffs have had no-confidence votes in their presidents.
REV. SERENE JONES: Yes. So, I know both of them. I have —
AMY GOODMAN: Because you’re affiliated, right? What is your relationship?
REV. SERENE JONES: So, we’re affiliated in that we have a long-standing friendly relationship with Columbia, but we’re actually a completely separate entity. We have our own board, our own endowment. So we’re different from, for instance, Barnard and Teachers College.
Most of my communications have been directly to the Union community, but I’ve been very clear in expressing alarm. And in the most recent case of the police, basically, takeover of Morningside Heights and the violent decampment and breaking into the admissions building, I was there to witness that. And I publicly, adamantly condemned those actions. So, that is writing to the Union community about my position on them. Many Union students have been part of the encampment and part of those actions, and we have refused to take action against them for their actions.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Jones, even before the encampments, not only Columbia and Barnard, but many universities around the country had been clamping down on student protests, overnight changing their rules and regulations, requiring permission beforehand to even have a rally, suspending student organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. What is your sense of the message that these university authorities sent to the students in the months before the encampment?
REV. SERENE JONES: Yes, those policies suddenly sprung to life. Initially, they were presented as if they had been long-standing, but they weren’t. And very early, the message got out that this is not a place where your voice can be heard. And don’t even try telling students they have to give two weeks’ notice for a protest. As an activist my whole life, I can’t remember when we ever knew two weeks in advance when we were going to have a protest. So, it was a setup from the beginning to create the foundation for taking the kinds of actions that they have.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us, the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary here in New York. Before that, she was a professor of religion and head of women’s studies at Yale University. Her recent piece for Religion News is headlined “What we have to learn from students leading the charge for justice.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
Dr. Jones mentioned for-profit prisons. That’s what we’re going to take on next. When we come back, immigration is a top issue for voters this year. We’ll speak with the author of the new book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Stay with us.
