“Girls” Interrupted: On the Breathtaking Leadership of Generation Z
Carry on, Students Interrupted: in precisely the way Vermeer’s painted girl averts her gaze and in so doing shuts down the imperious authority that looms—not in a leisurely way but steadfastly, as committed choice.
By Maureen E. Ruprecht FademJune 2, 2024
Source: Common Dreams
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Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter who made profound narrative images, pictures set in the stoniness of dry paint that nevertheless contain movement. They have trajectories, like stories do. One of his best-known is “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” (1658-61). This one, permanently installed at The Frick Collection in upper Manhattan, pictures a girl of perhaps 16 or 17 years who is being schooled presumably on the cittern, a Renaissance era guitar. She is educated by a man many years her senior, a man who noticeably presides over her. He presides, that is, rather too much, is both too encroached on her personal space and too wrapped around and curtaining her. As to the girl, Vermeer’s subject, she looks the other way. For all her tutor’s efforts to crowd and dominate, to train her focus on matters he brings to hand, this girl is occupied by some other matter, indeed some other urgency. Whatever crisis that may be, it is perceptible in her facial expression and in the intense, almost painful craning of her neck, her gaze demonstratively turned toward her viewer.
That Girl is Vermeer’s subject; and she is not being schooled; rather she has refused the education imposed upon her; rather, she is saying something, but what? That she looks away is not subtle. No—this girl’s rejection of the authority swathing her, blocking her light, is sharp and jarring. It is as if she is interrupted by something truly ghastly, something that calls to her in the voice of Antigone, something like a genocide. Whatever that “something” is, the Dutch painter has taken pains to show that she considers it vastly more critical than whatever her too-invasive education concerns on this day.
That is to say, Vermeer’s “Girl Interrupted” is a metonym for Generation Z. Her posture in relation to her education matches their posture in relation to theirs. She, a simulacrum of today’s encamped student. Her male instructor, stand-in for the authoritarian institutions comprising today’s university system and its failed leadership. Certainly Vermeer was thinking about power, about sexual and institutional politics, in applying his brush strokes to this canvas. Certainly nearly every U.S. college where encampments have been installed has not seen fit to tolerate their students’ insistent focus on Palestine, their unbroken, virulent concern for the genocide in progress, a genocide that now advances into and ups its own appalling ante in Rafah.
Girls interrupted, gazes averted, necks craned, in your strength, your lionhearted giftedness, your principled politics, be undaunted as you herald the righteous call to justice, humanity, life, and, most importantly, to love.
And now they are stopped—by Harvard’s refusal to let 13 graduates graduate. Harmed, physically and viscerally, by an extremist attack at UCLA that was allowed to carry on for hours; the next day, adding more insult to more injury, the police came back to brutalize the students once again. Harmed, by the felony charges unleashed on them by the combined force of the administration of the City University of New York and the state—the deceitful, violent lawlessness of the Eric Adams administration. Harmed for life in being given criminal records unlawfully. The lives of those students have been cruelly interrupted because they interrupted the power the institution holds over and drapes around them, as in the painting. But those punishing disciplinary interruptions lose all legitimacy because their purpose is to continue a genocide. No criminal at all, today’s student is criminalized because they protest mass slaughter and manufactured hunger. Meanwhile, their college leaders remain too gutless themselves to speak out about that which they know to be wrong. Wrong unequivocally, wrong under the rule of law, wrong under Antigone’s natural law.
One encampment sign reads, “They’re afraid of how strongly we love.” Indeed, they are. What Vermeer represents in a visual narrative, the encampments represent: a cessation of the ordinary, they take participants out of entrenched societal and political structures, outside the schema of daily life. The individuals external to them experience a similar effect, if in reverse. As occurred in the time of Occupy Wall Street, outsiders, neighbors complained of interruption, disturbance, and aggravation inexplicable even to themselves. They do not know why they feel annoyed and call the police and file that complaint, but they do. Perhaps it is precisely because, like Occupy, the encampments constitute a substantial and sustained interruption of the everyday, perhaps it is because they are liminal spaces, uncharted and unscripted but also constructive, energized, hopeful, bastions for the flourishing of art as well as alternate forms of co-mutuality and education. Not just today but throughout the history of protest, encampment participants “look away” like the painted girl, their spontaneous consent undone for a time, the authority others hold over them interrupted, by them, if only momentarily.
As Judith Butler wrote, “There are other passages.” Other ways to live, other social formations, other ordinaries, futurities, visions, dreams, worlds that are possible. That is a critical resonance emanating from these encamped, these “squatter” protests; those who experienced them are speaking and writing about just that—the magic, the novel kinship, the distinct mutualities of those spaces. Clearly today’s protester-student has a vision for the future that is vastly unlike those projected and hoped for and molded by today’s politicians and corporate CEOs. It keeps being said, though never proved and never documented, that today’s college students “don’t know what they’re doing.” (The coward’s response to courageousness.) That they are brainwashed, duped, led around by the nose by we-don’t-know-who, that they’ve been intentionally “radicalized” by their faculties or by we-don’t-know-who.
Hillary Clinton, and many of her generation and her political ilk, fail to understand this, fail again by denigrating these student leaders, by declaring that they “don’t know very much.” What a shock it was to hear those words given so much evidence to the contrary, given the intellectual acuity and articulacy of so many college students that is visible and audible literally everywhere right now. They don’t know very much, she insisted, about history and not just U.S. history but that of “many areas of the world,” quote, unquote. So, “history” is lost on these “alarmingly” “radicalized” students, so says Clinton, students who’ve shown, who keep showing that they know a great deal about that subject especially.
Those comments stand as some of the most embarrassingly ironic of the moment, for it is Clinton herself who misrepresents history, shows herself to be the ignorant person in the room by admonishing Palestine for not having accepted the “come-ons” of her husband and boiling down a complex political quagmire to the simple “failure” to swallow the political suggestions of a place called the United States which has colluded in Israel’s oppression of Palestine ever since LBJ. Everything would be fine in Palestine, she protests, if only they’d done as Bill told them to do. In this, Clinton appears not just politically tone deaf but also unethical in giving herself “time” to lambast protesting students who risk everything in the fight for justice but in finding no time, not one half of one minute, to comment on the genocide itself. No—bringing only condescension, condemnation, and a grotesque display of supremacism, Clinton makes no space in her discourse to call for a cease-fire, for the resumption of peace talks, to advocate for anything humane or anything at all. A woman who considered herself fit to run this country, who once held the post of secretary of state, does not see fit to call out war crimes committed with relentless abandon against the people of occupied Palestine.
So much for ethical, effective leadership that might have come from my generation. But that genocide is, as we know, the entire point. My generation, my Union, the PSC CUNY—one more exemplar of the matter at hand. Last Thursday a public meeting of the delegate assembly was held for which one agenda item was the resolution calling for a number of important actions, including divestiture. It was said by self-identified “progressive” delegates that the resolution then before the union “went too far.” Why—because, in solidarity with students the world over who risk it all in encamped protests that likewise make this demand, it calls for the union to call for City University to divest from Israel. (The union isn’t listening to our students, the constituency the entire university edifice was built to serve, probably because, like Hillary, they believe the students “do not know very much” despite being those students’ teachers.) Demonstrated last Thursday was clear evidence of a concerning deafness, like Clinton’s, to what is happening in the world today and why. That the union leadership suffers deafnesses and blindnesses, further illustrated in the president’s choice to speak first and against the resolution. But how, pray tell, could the resolution have had any chance of succeeding then? That generational deaf, blind gap was demonstrated finally in a 114-40 “no” vote last Thursday.
The union that is supposed to protect and defend the major share of the labor pool at the largest public university in the world voted, by a wide margin, to not divest from extermination. That a leadership overhaul is necessary is both a given and a matter for another time. For now, let it be clear that we either were not paying attention or we forgot that previous generations have not had, have not shown the boldness and dedication of Gen Z in response to the 76 year bludgeoning of Palestine. Let it be clear that we either did not bother to know or we forgot—now eight months into merciless, pitiless, heartless slaughter and starvation now augmented, shockingly, in the very place Israel has said all throughout this horror was safe, Rafah—that for several dreadful grief-stricken months those same students had been protesting, holding rallies, sit-ins, die-ins, shouting out to the political world until their throats were so raw they could no longer speak—Stop the Genocide! Palestinian Lives Matter! At first they appealed to the world’s conscience, assumed that crying out for a genocide to end—the unambiguously righteous call, the unequivocal Antigonean claim—would be heeded. But they were wrong. We were wrong. I waited for that; I was wrong.
No—the world was and remains deaf to justice, its political leadership carrying on even now in smug barbarity—supplying the weapons, stood still now, with almost 40,000 dead in Gaza, in solidarity with the racist, rogue, fascist regime now governing Israel. It became clear, painfully, only after those several months that no one but no one was listening, that the global community of nation-states—other than those countable on one hand—was ignoring all the protests and all the protesters, the voice of the people those thousands of politicians were elected to represent, summarily erased.
As occurred in the movement to free South Africa, today’s struggle has become about divestiture. Its central call, now: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!” Giving up not being an option for Gen Z, the struggle was forced to morph, to train its focus, in response to the fact that any world actor or agent with the capacity to stop the ethnic cleansing in progress, to render unlawful and restrict the supply of armaments or intervene to achieve a cease-fire, failed to or, like Secretary Clinton, has been unwilling. With unconscionable arrogance, with a ruthless kind of viciousness not seen in international politics in over half a century, they simply and entirely disregard the residents of planet Earth. We, the world, the people en masse, call and call and call again for the killing to STOP. But our elected leaders, our university leaders turn from us—their backs to us, their stance one of absolute denial: See no, hear no evil, their only protest: “What genocide?”
That most of those leaders ought to resign, give over their posts to student and other Gen Z leaders—to Shruthi Kumar, to Maha Zeidan, to Britt Munro or Lily Greenberg Call or Sally Abed—goes without saying. Today’s student activists are not perfect, the encampments, not perfect, mistakes are made in any endeavor, be it political or otherwise. But Gen Z is not failing in the most vital way: to answer the call of justice, the call of their moment and of the present century. The civil rights challenge of our epoch is twofold: abolition—from mass incarceration, racism and (racial)capital, the migrant crisis, the climate emergency—and, the abolition of Palestine. What Clinton, a self-identified feminist, fails to recognize is that today’s feminists are not just educated, they are also intersectional thinkers, which means they have a keener, more nuanced understanding of matters political, social, interpersonal, and historical. They know, for example, that Covid-19 and climate change and their and their children’s futures are inextricably tangled and that the urgency of the triptych is lost on many of their leaders whether in the educational or the political sector. They understand that we cannot separate the overturning of Roe v. Wade from the deaths and the woundings and the chronic and generational trauma of all those mothers and grandmothers in Gaza, all those little Gazan “girls,” their lives more than interrupted more than brutally. Today’s feminists know, and this is perhaps Clinton’s most disgraceful oversight, that anti-racist struggle is of a piece with the struggle for Palestinian rights, safety, and sovereignty; that the loss of affirmative action is tethered to the utterly despicable loss of life in Gaza, to the fact of more than 80,000 wounded, to all of what has been interrupted for them for the remainder of their lives if they survive their injuries.
Today’s feminist is not “Hillary Clinton.” Her name is Shruthi Kumar, who gave a brilliant valedictorian speech at Harvard in solidarity with the 13 prohibited from graduating. Her name is Anne Jones, an 82 year old British woman who cycled up a treacherous mountain to raise funds to build life in Gaza. Her name is Maha Zeidan, a young woman just graduated from the University of Toledo College of Law who gave one of the most splendid graduation speeches I’ve ever heard. Her name is Lily Greenberg Call, perhaps the bravest, smartest, and most ethical member of the Biden administration, now resigned from it, resigned over Gaza. Her name is Britt Munro. Her name is Serene Jones. Their name is Judith Butler. Their names are Maya Peretz-Ruiz and Sally Abed. (Also on the leadership of Standing Together, Sally was the first Israeli woman of Palestinian descent to be elected to a council post—still, the newly elected representative from Haifa gets arrested at a protest.) Their names are Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green. His name is Motaz Azaiza. His name is Michael Roth. His name is Macklemore. Their names are Mark Ruffalo and Jonathan Glazer. Her name is Alana Hadid. She is a peacemaker; they are peacemakers; their name is withheld: “‘They want to split us up and divide us, because they’re afraid of what we can accomplish with consistency, with principle, and an unrelenting focus on our demands,’ said a student who declined to give their name.” All these feminists, these “girls” interrupted whether girls, boys, or trans persons, they interrupt their own lives, their own educations to stop a genocide they cannot abide.
Let it be clear the degree to which my generation is failing, not just failing students and not only by not understanding or not respecting them, but failing simply and purely—politically, morally, failing justice full stop. Let it be clear that the Good Fight of the 21st century is being fought and won by Generation Z. Hillary Clinton, the PSC CUNY, and anyone else who may still feel uncertain—hear this: As persons of conscience in a world that has misplaced its moral center, it is our responsibility, no—it is our duty to support them. Those who remain humane in this time of inhumanity, those with eyes wide open, who listen with all of who we are—mind, spirit, body—we hear you, Generation Z, we recognize the sacrifices you make and you risk. (Remembering Whitman: We “are with you, you men and women of a generation.”) You are breathtaking, to us, in fact. No—not because you are flawless, because you are fearless, because you are persons of conscience, and you are right. You are in the right and on the right side of history. Carry on, Students Interrupted: in precisely the way Vermeer’s painted girl averts her gaze and in so doing shuts down the imperious authority that looms—not in a leisurely way but steadfastly, as committed choice—whatever you do, Gen Z: stay the course of your chosen interruption, your backs turned to the normalization of brutality. (Whitman again: “We do not cast you aside” but “plant you permanently within us.”) Girls interrupted, gazes averted, necks craned, in your strength, your lionhearted giftedness, your principled politics, be undaunted as you herald the righteous call to justice, humanity, life, and, most importantly, to love. (Whitman, once more: “Appearances now or henceforth, indicate what you are.”) Show the world the way, build the future you want to see, make this planet the place you willingly choose to occupy.
And Occupy it. Remember, because you looked the other way, you are driving our fallen world toward the good and the just, not away from it. Toward love, not away from it. We—Hillary Clinton’s generation, my generation, my father’s generation—have failed. Yours has not. Turning your gaze, like that Girl, you turn the gaze of the world, you force the people, finally, at last, once and for all, to see Rafah.
All Eyes On Rafah.
As Netanyahu spews his lies.
And the struggle continues.
And the death toll rises, day by day.
And the beatdown of Palestine goes on…
What Does Left Internationalism Mean in the 21st Century?
May 30, 2024
Source: Jacobin
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has put international concerns front and center for the US left today. Jacobin spoke with three leading internationalist organizers about how leftists should think about international solidarity in the 21st century.
The new US socialist movement that sprung from the 2016 presidential campaign was, in a certain sense, an “America First” left. Not because it was nationalistic, xenophobic, or isolationist, but because it focused largely on domestic political questions: Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and police racism and violence, among others.
October 7 changed this overnight. Since last fall, the overwhelming focus of the US left has been on protesting the US government’s deep complicity in Israel’s murderous retaliation against Palestinians. One of the biggest stories in American politics today is the wave of protest and repression that has swept university campuses, and which seems poised to affect the outcome of this fall’s presidential election. Commencement day has already arrived for many students, but one thing seems clear — summer vacation will not end the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The Palestine solidarity movement raises a set of larger questions that the new left has yet to address. What is the meaning of internationalism today? What should socialist internationalism look like in an increasingly multipolar era? Would a multipolar world be more peaceful and progressive or just the latest version of great-power geopolitics? Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano recently spoke with three leading practitioners of internationalism on the US left — Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher Jr, and Van Gosse — about their experiences in this field and their views of what it means to be an internationalist in the twenty-first century.
Chris Maisano
What was your path to internationalist politics?
Phyllis Bennis
For me, it was a matter of timing. I graduated high school in the big year of the anti–Vietnam War movement, which was 1968. If you went to college or were around universities, it was hard not to get pulled into antiwar stuff.
The draft played a huge role in that because people were directly affected. But it wasn’t only that; it was also a moment of what we would now call intersectionality. This was the height of the black student uprisings where I was in school in California. There was also a Latino student mobilization, and the student-rights issues were all over the place. The cops were on campus every other week, and the responses were dramatic.
I spent my childhood and youth as a hardcore Zionist — I suppose that’s a perverse kind of internationalism in a way. But I left all that stuff behind and went off to work on Vietnam.
Several years later, after studying imperialism and colonialism — because that’s what you did if you were a young lefty in those days — I realized this Israel stuff I always assumed was correct no longer sounded right. I went to my father’s library and read Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and found his letters to Cecil Rhodes where Herzl asked Rhodes for his support because, as he put it, their projects were “both something colonial.” That was that, and I started looking at Palestinian rights.
Van Gosse
It was definitely the Vietnam antiwar movement for me. My parents were academics in a typical college town, and it came up as the thing that was happening there. When I was ten, in 1968, my older brother explained to me that what the Vietnamese were doing was like what the Americans had done in 1776. They were fighting for their freedom as a country, and they were on the right side, and it suddenly made total sense.
I got involved in antiwar politics as a boy — I went to the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam with my mother. I was in New York City at that point, and if you were in New York City in the late 1960s or early ’70s the antiwar movement was all around you. There was a lot of electoral work too, like the George McGovern campaign in 1972.
In 1982, I got involved in El Salvador solidarity and stayed in that for thirteen years. That was really the formative thing for me, but everything was shaped by Vietnam.
Bill Fletcher Jr
I’ve been interested in international issues since I was very young, like nine or ten years old. I was very influenced by anti-communist propaganda in connection with the Vietnam War. Then in 1965, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic (DR). I had an uncle who had been a member of the Communist Party; after the Dominican Republic invasion, he came over to my great-grandmother’s house, where I was for some reason, and he was furious about it in a way you rarely see when something is not happening to someone personally. This shook me and shook my backward views.
That incident in connection with the DR left an impression on me that worked its way around in my head. A couple of years later, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and that was the defining moment in terms of who I was to become and what I wanted to do. Malcolm’s internationalism was very influential on me, and subsequently I became very close to the Black Panther Party. I became very involved in Vietnam work and issues around Africa.
Chris Maisano
The post-9/11 antiwar movement was very formative for me. I was in college when 9/11 happened, and I very quickly threw myself into antiwar organizing with my friends on campus. The three of you were involved in founding United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which organized a number of very big antiwar demonstrations that I went to and remember quite well. What was your motivation for starting the group, and what in your estimation did it accomplish?
Phyllis Bennis
During the Vietnam antiwar movement, there was a broad movement that was basically saying, “Get the troops out, the US should not be there, the US should stop intervening,” and so on. Then there was a smaller core within that movement who said the Vietnamese are right. The chant was, “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, we’re on the side of the Vietcong.” It clearly identified with the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese. That was never a major component of the antiwar movement in terms of its numbers, but it was central to building the movement.
During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, there was a similar situation. I was in the middle of one of the big antiwar coalitions, the precursor to UFPJ ten years later. We thought there was nothing progressive about the Iraqi government, which had actually been supported by the United States for many years — but others did, which was why there were two coalitions at the time.
The same split happened again ten years later. We thought US troops should get out of the Middle East, but we also recognized there were huge human rights issues in countries like Iraq. In the case of the Vietnamese, unlike Iraq, [the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam] were fighting for a kind of progressive social program. They didn’t do it well all the time, but it was a set of principles we believed in too. That was true in the Central American wars and in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. But it was not the case in the first Gulf War or the Iraq War or the Afghanistan war.
The day after 9/11, some of us met at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and started talking about how a disastrous war was inevitably coming and how it was going to shape the next political period. We thought that what was needed after the attacks was justice, not vengeance. So we initiated a statement called “Justice, Not Vengeance” and worked with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover to get other high-profile people to sign it.
Our sense was that the American people were not being given any other options for how to respond to such a horrific crime. They were not being told that there were options other than war. The government and the media told the American people, either we go to war or we let the perpetrators get away with it. This was the context in which the three of us and a bunch of other people came together to form UFPJ.
Bill Fletcher Jr
I was on vacation in the summer of 2002. One day it really hit me that George W. Bush was going to take us to war — that it wasn’t just rhetoric. So I got on the phone with Van and I said, what the hell? What are we going to do?
Van went to work on this, and we both started thinking about people to bring together. Some efforts had already been started; Medea Benjamin had put together a website that was called United for Peace. Then, on October 25, 2002, we founded UFPJ. It was the broadest of the antiwar coalitions. It was very anti-sectarian, which distinguished it from ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism]. We did some remarkable work, and the work that led to the February 15, 2003, global march against the war was amazing.
An Iraq War protest in San Francisco, California, on March 19, 2008. (Alex Robinson / Flickr)
The work was so good that we missed some important things that we should have been thinking about, like how difficult it is to stop a ruling class from pulling the trigger unless there are real fractures and divisions within that ruling class. We also didn’t have much in the way of a strategy for what to do after the war started.
Van Gosse
I was organizing director of Peace Action for five years, from 1995 to 2000. We did some good work, but there was a kind of political abstentionism going on in the peace movement after the Cold War, in the sense that none of the national peace organizations was prepared to call for full-on national mobilization. There was lobbying, “dear colleague” letters, and what have you.
ANSWER walked into that vacuum. That was extremely problematic because it meant when you wanted to protest the bombing of Kosovo, you went to a demonstration where there were people with big photos of Slobodan Milošević. I don’t want to be marching with Milošević photos. By the spring of 2002, it was clear that the United States wanted to go to war in Iraq. I remember thinking, are we really only going to have a narrow, sectarian coalition? A coalition in name only, really; there was no national organization in it.
We didn’t have a strategy. We were just desperately trying to stop the war. I remember Phyllis saying to us at a meeting that we had a chance to stop it, and I think we did. What nobody seems to remember is that around 60 percent of the House Democratic caucus voted against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and almost a majority of the Democratic caucus in the Senate did. The potential was there; there was nothing like lockstep support for war in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Phyllis Bennis
The origins of that February 15, 2003, protest were not with UFPJ — it came out of the global justice movement in Europe, particularly the European Social Forum meeting in Italy that happened in November 2002. There were two or three thousand people crammed into the meeting place.
They were not mainly antiwar people; it was basically people from the anti–corporate globalization movement, which was on a roll at that point. That movement pivoted to focus on stopping this war. That was an incredible moment. UFPJ was pulled into that as the clear US counterpart to the Europeans and the Asian contingents that were part of it. There was less participation in planning from Africa and Latin America, but it was quite international when it took place.
What I regret the most, in some ways, is we didn’t recognize sooner that it was not a failure. Mobilizing fifteen million people in eight hundred cities around the world on one day was going to have an impact in the future, and we couldn’t anticipate exactly what that would look like at the time. But we know now that it’s one of the big reasons why Bush did not go to war against Iran in 2007. It’s one of the things that gave rise to the leadership of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Protests almost never win the exact demand they’re fighting for now, but they set the stage for future mobilization, and we didn’t recognize that enough.
Chris Maisano
Bill and Van, some years ago you wrote an essay called “A New Internationalism.” In that essay, you argued:
In the second decade of the 21st century, however, our practice of internationalism is confused and stuck in old habits and discourses left over from the era of Third World liberation, beginning early in the twentieth century, and the Cold War of 1945–1991.
What did you mean by that, and do you still think this is the case?
Bill Fletcher Jr
A rift has developed within the global left and progressive movements around international issues and authoritarianism. In 2002 or 2003, there was massive repression in Zimbabwe under then president Robert Mugabe. All kinds of dissidents were being jailed. Trade unionists, including people that I knew personally, were jailed and tortured.
I had become the president of TransAfrica Forum (2002) and was in the leadership of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) around this time. The BRC’s coordinating committee discussed the Zimbabwe repression. An organization called Africa Action put out a sign-on letter protesting the repression in Zimbabwe; the letter came to us in the BRC, and the coordinating committee unanimously said, let’s sign onto this on behalf of the BRC.
Lordy, did all hell break loose. It became clear there was a whole section of the organization that was defiantly pro-Mugabe, which took the position that Mugabe was right to carry out this repression against alleged counterrevolutionaries, completely ignoring the neoliberal economic policies his government was carrying out. The coordinating committee had made a mistake in assessing what was going on within the organization.
But separate from that was the difference that was emerging about what constitutes internationalism, and how you deal with contradictions within countries that claim to be anti-imperialist, or at a minimum, anti–United States. It was a shock to the system for me, and at that point I realized the Left was in a whole new ball game — that we were going to have to rethink how we approach the global situation.
Phyllis Bennis
We had a similar debate at IPS about Zimbabwe, but we didn’t have a project at that point dealing with African policy so it wasn’t as sharp. But we’re seeing it now around Nicaragua and around Venezuela, and it’s no easier.
I have my own criticisms of what governments that I once supported when they were liberation movements are doing now, and I am not so happy about them now. But I’m not there. It’s not my place to be organizing against what the Vietnamese, for example, have done over the years in terms of labor rights or environmental concerns. But we certainly don’t defend it, and we do call it out. I still think our main work is challenging what our government is doing — but as internationalists we do recognize other governments’ human rights or other violations as well, and at times join with social movements in other countries to fight back against those violations.
It goes to the question of what we say about what our government is doing. One thing that’s hovering over this is our differences around Ukraine, which are less about what happened or what’s happening there than what the US government does about it. That is, I think, a more useful area of contention and debate within the Left, because people can have all kinds of different views about history and about who’s on what side.
Van Gosse
There is still this reflexive mode of thinking you should be on the side of whoever the United States is opposed to. It’s crude thinking, and I felt it long before the Ukraine crisis. I remember talking to you, Bill, in 2002 or 2003 about the Taliban and Afghanistan, and you said the Taliban is a form of clerical fascism, and I thought that’s getting right at it.
There’s an idea dating from the twentieth century that anti-imperialism is necessarily on the Left or progressive, and that’s inaccurate historically. Plenty of anti-imperialism has come from the Right — from traditional power holders, warlords, religious leaders who have been displaced by the modern imperialists and are going to fight back.
This requires a certain kind of analysis of what is actually going on. It doesn’t mean you take the side of the imperialists. But that inability to name what the Taliban actually was was striking. Many of these people, whether the Taliban or Saddam Hussein or others, had been supported by the United States at one point or another.
Bill Fletcher Jr
The idea that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” discredits us as a left. I remember sitting in a living room in 1973 or ’74 with a representative from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angola who gave an incredible Marxist analysis of the struggle there and of what he claimed UNITA stood for, and his criticism of many other movements within the continent in terms of what they were doing.
Most of us were very familiar with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the MPLA, which was seen by us as problematically pro-Soviet. When UNITA emerged, many of us thought it was great. But then we found out that the story behind UNITA was a lot more complicated, including a mixture of legitimate revolutionaries with Portuguese agents and with tribalist forces in Angola. In fact, the guy that I met was later executed by Jonas Savimbi.
When it came to the Khmer Rouge, at the time many of us [thought] that the situation couldn’t have been that bad. Many of us refused to acknowledge what was going on. What that all taught me was the need for humility, and the need to investigate. I’ve seen countless people visiting the United States from alleged national liberation or left groups, and they say all the right things. But it’s not clear who they are, and you can easily jump to conclusions. We need to be prepared to do a concrete analysis and be willing to admit when we just don’t know.
Going back to when the repression went down in Zimbabwe, I remember having a discussion with this younger African American guy about it, and he was giving me the whole routine about Mugabe’s alleged anti-imperialism. I said, but they’re torturing people; I know people that are being tortured. What do you have to say about that? And this guy had no way of responding to it. That told me a lot about some of the deep weaknesses within the Left.
Phyllis Bennis
I had different kinds of experiences that led me to some of the same concerns around Vietnam. I was in Vietnam at the end of 1978, and it was just a couple of years after the war ended. Vietnam was still devastated.
The process of integration between north and south was just beginning, and Cambodia was still pretty much in a civil war. It wasn’t at the same level it had been, but the war was still going on. We began hearing strange rumors that the Vietnamese were thinking of going over the border and taking out the Khmer Rouge. I was there with an official delegation, and the Vietnamese officials who were with us assured us, no, that’s not going to happen.
We accepted that and went home, but shortly after we got back, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. We were like, whoa, let’s rethink all this.
Vietnam War protesters march at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on October 21, 1967. (Frank Wolfe / Lyndon B. Johnson Library)
It led to a sense that we need to be a little more careful. We had been hearing all this stuff about how terrible the Khmer Rouge were, and having the Vietnamese do what they did made those claims easier in some ways to accept because we still respected them so much. This kind of proved the claims about the Khmer Rouge to us, and it came at a time when it was hard to imagine how it could have been OK for the Vietnamese — who had always fought against China, Japan, France, and the United States for the notion of national sovereignty being primary — to overthrow another country’s government.
The other place where these concerns come up is on the question of armed struggle. We know that a nation under military occupation has the right to use military force to oppose that occupation. It does not have the right to use that force against civilians. We all know how to spout that idea about armed struggle in principle, but it doesn’t tell us when it’s the right thing to do.
The Palestinians are the last population in the traditional situation of being occupied by the top rank of US imperialist allies. There’s no question that a military occupation means they have the right to use military force, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do strategically. It’s a different era now. We’re no longer in an era where armed force is taken for granted as part of a global struggle against colonialism. There isn’t an armed global struggle against colonialism underway around the world.
If we look at the difference between the First and Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprisings that began in 1987 and then again in 2000, what stands out was the mass character of the First — overwhelmingly nonviolent — Intifada. The Second Intifada was an armed uprising that did include a lot of military targets, but it had plenty of civilian targets too. The biggest impact it had on Palestinians, in my view, is that it eliminated the mass character of the First Intifada, because when people with guns come out, everybody else goes home because it’s not safe. The children, the elders, the women who all played such a key role in the First Intifada had no role in the second one.
Bill Fletcher Jr
Many of us in the boomer generation used to think that a legitimate revolutionary movement equaled armed struggle, and armed struggle equaled a legitimate revolutionary movement. When you look at a lot of the splits that happened in the Left in the 1960s, they were precisely over the question of armed struggle raised to the level of principle, not over whether it was tactically the right thing to do in the given conditions. Is this what we really need to do, or are we saying that this is what one does if one’s a “real” revolutionary? Many people did not move past that framework.
There is a growing strategic question being posed globally around what one does under very adverse circumstances, when there don’t appear to be nonviolent options. That’s why I think we have to be cautious about certain things that we say. In Myanmar, do the people have any option other than armed struggle? Probably not. In Kashmir, what should happen there? I don’t know. How do you build an anti-occupation struggle when you have this semi-fascist government in New Delhi?
Van Gosse
The twentieth-century left had a great deal of trouble acknowledging the dangers of militarism. There’s a quotation from Che Guevara that nobody ever cites where he says that every other road must be explored before you turn to armed struggle. He said that — but we know how he set the completely opposite example with disastrous consequences. Foquismo didn’t work, as far as I can see, anywhere, and it got a lot of people slaughtered.
Even the most justified armed struggle is still going to leave some deep wounds; there’s nothing positive about militarism. Violence will be inflicted on the innocent no matter what, and that’s a political and moral-ethical issue that people should take seriously. [On that point,] I think Dr Martin Luther King Jr was a great revolutionary with great strategic sense.
A lot of my thinking about this has been shaped by interest in and engagement with, from boyhood, the liberation struggle in Northern Ireland. There are people there who have a hundred or more years of history of unbroken anti-colonial struggle in their families. Seeing that, and the very negative consequences that have resulted from it, has taught me a lot about the costs of militarism. The Left has not really moved beyond the era of national liberation struggles, or ever really analyzed them and asked, what are the lessons to be learned?
Chris Maisano
Van, I think your point about militarization is a good one. Many of the national liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century won power on the strength of armed struggle, and as you’re saying, that has an effect on what comes next.
The means you use to achieve a political goal do a lot to shape the ends. In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the governments that resulted from victorious national liberation struggles took that militaristic quality with them into government, whether you’re talking about Zimbabwe or Nicaragua or wherever.
Bill Fletcher Jr
I don’t think the problems that many of these governments had when they emerged from armed struggle were principally because they engaged in armed struggle. There have been a series of problems about the question of democracy and democracy in transitional circumstances, particularly when you are moving from a former colonial regime or neocolonial regime into something else. How does democracy fit into this process? What does it look like beyond voting? Vanguardism and lack of humility can lead to a whole series of problems.
For example, Amílcar Cabral and a cohort of quite brilliant theorists and strategists led the struggle against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau. If you look at some of the writings from the war, you feel fairly certain that Guinea-Bissau is going to come out of this struggle and become a model for Africa. That is exactly what didn’t happen. Cabral was murdered. There were contradictions that very few people wanted to talk about between the Cape Verdeans and the Bissau-Guineans. There was certainly a military element, but the military was largely kept under control by the party, at least during the liberation struggle. But there were underlying problems and fissures that the movement didn’t tackle.
The other thing I would add is that if you think the leading force of a revolutionary change is omniscient, then you immediately run into problems about the contradictions between the regime or state that’s put into place and the people they govern. In Grenada, the revolution that unfolded there from 1979 to 1983 had important and dynamic leadership in the New Jewel Movement. But it also had people represented by Bernard Coard, who followed a very Soviet model that saw the party as all-knowing.
They could not figure out how to build on democracy and recognize what the actual mandate of the revolution was. In Grenada, the mandate was anti-imperialist and anti-corruption. It was not a mandate for socialism. Coard ignored that and decided to plow ahead, irrespective of popular sentiment. So the mass organizations associated with the movement started running into problems and drying up. This was not mainly a problem of militarism — it was much deeper.
Van Gosse
Bill, in talking about what a movement’s mandate is, you’ve invoked a more fundamental issue in many ways, which is the legacy of Leninism. Leninism was the overwhelming political practice of people engaged in revolution. Even if they weren’t socialists or Marxists, they were still Leninists. Vanguardism is what Bill called it.
Phyllis Bennis
I think it does make sense to identify militarism as a challenge though — while certainly agreeing with both of you that it isn’t the only problem. The role of armed struggle within a broader movement strategy is a hard one.
I think the ANC [African National Congress] during the struggle period in South Africa did better than most at situating armed actions within a strategy with several different pillars, the most important had to do with mass mobilization. Armed action was relatively much less central than that. I’m not sure whether or how it was connected, but I don’t think it’s an accident that the ANC also had a strong strategy for mobilizing and building international solidarity. In fact, I think the openness of the South Africans working on building the case against Israeli genocide at the International Court of Justice to working with and taking seriously civil society is likely a reflection of that earlier strategic approach.
In addition to militarism, self-determination can be incredibly problematic when it’s taken as an absolute principle by anyone who claims it, because it’s ultimately about nationalism. Internationalism can get left behind.
I remember when Yugoslavia was breaking up, I wrote a piece about the transformation of nationalism from an almost-always progressive force — which, in retrospect, it wasn’t either — that existed largely in the Global South, in the formerly colonized countries, and was linked to socialism, anti-imperialism, and all the progressive ideas we supported. But suddenly all these new European nationalisms sprung up, micronationalisms if you will, that seemed to have no end.
Yugoslavia divided, violently, into seven small states. Within those states, there are “nationalist” movements. How do we define the right of self-determination in a way that makes it part of a struggle that makes people’s lives better, and lifts up the most oppressed?
Chris Maisano
I think what all of this points to is the question of what internationalism means today. This seems very unclear and very unsettled.
Bill Fletcher Jr
Something you hear very often on the Left — and it comes up all the time around Ukraine — is that our main job as leftists in the United States should be to fight our own imperialists. That is often used as a way of saying either that we should have nothing to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or that we should do nothing to support the Ukrainian resistance even if we oppose the invasion.
There is an old slogan, “Workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” It is not “workers, oppressed people, and progressive governments unite.” It says workers and oppressed people of the world, unite. If that is your North Star, our attitude toward specific governments is secondary to the question of the people, the masses in various countries. Regardless of who is waving what flag, when there is oppression, when there is exploitation, our internationalism should put us on the side of the oppressed — as opposed to an internationalism that is mainly about geopolitical relationships between states.
You hear a lot of people today saying that we need a multipolar world. With all due respect, that is wrong. We need a nonpolar world. We’ve seen multipolar worlds. September 1939 was a multipolar world; August 1914 was a multipolar world. In fact, when you look through the history of humanity, most of the time there’s a multipolar world.
Between 1945 and 1991, we had two superpowers, and that was fundamentally different, and then in the post-1991 period with US hegemony. The idea that having multiple poles creates better circumstances for peace and for freedom struggles and justice struggles is simply wrong. History does not back that up.
Chris Maisano
One of the most multipolar moments in European history, at least, was the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. It was about great power cooperation to protect the status quo against democratic revolution.
Van Gosse
“Multipolar” is a polite way of saying a return to great power politics. Look at what that’s already produced — there’s nothing admirable about it.
Phyllis Bennis
Polarities in this sense are certainly a huge problem. And it doesn’t do any good to, for instance, expand the BRICS movement to incorporate wealthy and repressive Arab Gulf states into its ranks. It’s kind of like the perpetual effort for United Nations reform that always seems to come back to adding more wealthy and powerful countries to the five permanent members of the Security Council: Should they have a veto like the Perm Five, or maybe only a temporary veto? Why do we need to expand the number of privileged powers, rather than trying to democratize power? That’s a much harder challenge, I’m afraid.
Phyllis Bennis is an American writer, activist, and political commentator. She is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her work concerns US foreign policy issues, particularly involving the Middle East and United Nations (UN). In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and now serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace as well as the board of the Afro-Middle East Center in Johannesburg. She works with many anti-war and Palestinian rights organizations, writing and speaking widely across the U.S. and around the world.
In a Victory for Assange and First Amendment, UK Court Grants Right to Appeal
May 30, 2024
Source: TruthOut
On Sunday 14 April 2024, supporters of imprisoned dissident Julian Assange gathered outside Belmarsh high security prison in south east London, sometimes referred to as " "Britain's Guantanamo Bay."
From the First Amendment to the European Convention on Human Rights, Assange’s defense relies on freedom of expression.
On May 20, a two-judge panel of the High Court of England and Wales handed WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange a significant victory. Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp granted him leave to appeal the U.K.’s extradition order on two grounds. The High Court will now schedule a hearing at which Assange will be allowed to argue that his rights to freedom of expression and to be free from discrimination based on his nationality would not be protected if he were extradited to the United States.
In the U.K., the right to appeal is not automatic. While they didn’t rule on the merits of Assange’s claims, Johnson and Sharp determined that the two issues have sufficient legal merit to be reviewed by the High Court.
“I welcome the High Court’s decision to allow the case to proceed to a full appeal,” said Alice Jill Edwards, UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. “This is a terribly complex case, but at the heart of it are issues around human rights and values we hold as a society and the protections afforded to those who disclose potential war crimes.”
Speaking outside the courthouse after the May 20 hearing, Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, said the ruling “marks a turning point” and “we are relieved as a family that the court took the right decision. Everyone can see what should be done here. Julian must be freed,” adding, “This case is shameful and it is taking an enormous toll on Julian.”
Assange has been imprisoned for five years in London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison on an indictment filed by the Trump administration and pursued by the Biden administration. Assange stands charged with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for WikiLeaks’s 2010-2011 revelation of evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. He faces 175 years in prison if extradited to the U.S., tried and convicted.
In March, Johnson and Sharp denied Assange permission to appeal on six of the nine grounds he raised, saying they did “not have any merit.” But the panel said that Assange had “a real prospect of success” on the three remaining grounds for appeal: If extradited to the U.S., Assange (1) would be denied the right to freedom of expression, (2) would be discriminated against because he’s not a U.S. citizen, and (3) could be sentenced to death.
The panel told counsel for the U.S. in March that if they provided the court with “satisfactory assurances” that Assange wouldn’t be denied any of these rights, he could be extradited to the U.S. without an appeal hearing. This was a departure from the High Court’s 2021 knee-jerk acceptance of U.S. “assurances” that Assange would be treated humanely if extradited, with no opportunity for the defense to rebut those assurances.
In April, the U.S. filed the following ineffective and unenforceable “assurances”:
ASSANGE will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing. Specifically, if extradited, ASSANGE will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States. A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.
The U.S. stated only that Assange could “raise and seek to rely upon” the First Amendment, but refused to say that Assange could rely on the First Amendment. The U.S. maintained that its “assurance” was adequate because judges would take “solemn notice” of it, while admitting that the assurance “cannot bind the courts.”
Even if U.S. prosecutors had provided unequivocal assurances, a U.S. court would not be bound by them because of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. The judicial (not the executive) branch of government makes the final decision about the admissibility of evidence.
At the May 20 hearing, Assange’s legal team accepted the U.S. assurance that Assange would not be subject to the death penalty. But defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald KC told the panel that the assurances on the other two issues were “blatantly inadequate” because “there is no guarantee that he will be even permitted to rely on the First Amendment.”
Johnson and Sharp agreed with Assange that the U.S. assurances on the First Amendment and discrimination issues were not satisfactory. The judges also refused to accept the U.S. argument that Assange’s appeal of those two issues should be limited to only 3 of the 18 counts against him. On May 20, they ruled, “We have decided to give leave to appeal on all counts.”
Freedom of Expression Under the European Convention on Human Rights
At a trial in the U.S., Assange would argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment. “He contends that if he is given First Amendment rights, the prosecution will be stopped. The First Amendment is therefore of central importance to his defence,” the panel concluded in March.
Like Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the First Amendment provides “strong protection” for freedom of expression, the panel noted in its March ruling. Article 10 (1) of the convention says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”
Johnson and Sharp wrote in March that if Assange “is not permitted to rely on the First Amendment, then it is arguable that his extradition would be incompatible with article 10 of the Convention.”
The U.K. Extradition Act Prohibits Discrimination Based on Nationality
Section 81(b) of the U.K. Extradition Act says that extradition is barred for an individual who “might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained or restricted in his personal liberty by reason of his … nationality.” Although Assange is an Australian citizen, his legal team argued that he should have the same right as a U.S. citizen to rely on the First Amendment at trial.
The panel noted in March that Prosecutor Gordon Kromberg, assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, stated that the prosecution might argue at trial that “foreign nationals are not entitled to protection under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.” Professor Paul Grimm of Duke University School of Law, an expert presented by Assange’s defense team, confirmed that there is a line of legal authority that says a foreign national doesn’t have First Amendment rights, at least in relation to national security cases.
Moreover, as Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2020 case of Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, “[I]t is long settled as a matter of American constitutional law that foreign citizens outside U.S. territory do not possess rights under the U.S. Constitution.”
On May 20, the U.S. argued to the panel that the Extradition Act bars only discrimination based on “nationality,” not “citizenship.” The defense said that was a distinction without a difference:
To discriminate on grounds that a person is a foreigner, whether on the basis that they are a foreign national or a foreign citizen, is plainly within the scope of the prohibition. “Prejudice at trial” must include exclusion on grounds of citizenship from fundamental substantive rights that can be asserted at the trial. On the U.S. argument, trial procedures could discriminate on grounds of citizenship.
Defense counsel Mark Summers KC stated, “In addition to being a non-U.S. citizen, Mr. Assange is a non-U.S. national as well. Whatever the distinction may be, and we don’t accept that there is any … it has no bearing whatsoever.”
In their March ruling, the panel concluded that due to the centrality of the First Amendment to Assange’s defense, “If he is not permitted to rely on the First Amendment because of his status as a foreign national, he will thereby be prejudiced (potentially very greatly prejudiced) by reason of his nationality.”
What Will Happen Next
“This was a watershed moment in this very long battle,” WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said after the May 20 ruling. “Today marked the beginning of the end of the persecution. The signaling from the courts here in London was clear to the U.S. government: We don’t believe your guarantees, we don’t believe in your assurances.”
Stephen Rohde, who practiced First Amendment law for almost 50 years, concurs. “The ruling by the High Court offers a glimmer of hope not only for Assange and not only for freedom of the press but for a welcome turn away from blind deference to the United States and in its place an insistence that the U.S. itself is not above the law,” he told Truthout.
The two-judge panel ordered the parties to agree by May 24 on a structure for the full hearing on Assange’s two appeal points. That agreement has not been made public. The judges will set the hearing date, probably sometime later this year. At that hearing, the parties will present evidence, call witnesses and file legal briefs with the High Court.
If Assange prevails at the hearing, he would be released from Belmarsh Prison and likely be sent to Australia as he is an Australian citizen. If he does not win the appeal, Assange could request leave to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court. If that request is denied or an additional appeal fails, he can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg and raise his other appellate issues that the High Court rejected.
Assange could seek urgent interim measures and request an order from the ECtHR prohibiting the U.K. from extraditing him until the European Court has ruled on his case. Interim measures are granted upon a showing of “exceptional circumstances” and are generally ordered only in cases involving the right to life or the prohibition on torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
ECtHR case law recognizes the vital role that publishing state secrets can play in a democratic society and that criminal prosecution and conviction for such publication will chill the press from playing its role of “public watchdog.” The indictment against Assange criminalizes essential journalistic practices and imposes a disproportionate sentence (175 years) – sometimes called death by incarceration – which amounts to a grave violation of Article 10 of the ECHR.
“A successful prosecution would criminalize a great deal of the investigative journalism that is crucial to our democracy,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement. “The Justice Department should never have charged Assange under the Espionage Act, and it should drop the charges now.”
Joe Biden stated last month that his administration is “considering” whether to dismiss the case against Assange. A week before the May 20 hearing, Hrafnsson said that Assange’s legal team had been pursuing a political resolution which “has been bearing fruit.”
Indeed, Biden should follow the path taken by the Obama-Biden administration, which refrained from indicting Assange out of First Amendment concerns, rather than the strategy pursued by the Trump administration, which exercised no such forbearance when it indicted Assange under the Espionage Act for revealing U.S. war crimes.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law, and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace. A member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, she is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
Can Democracy and Billionaires Coexist?
Not on this planet.
May 31, 2024
Source: Inequality
One person, one vote. The classic essence of democracy. But what if that one person happens to be a fabulously rich? Does that one person actually have just “one” vote? Can we have anything approaching democracy when some among us are sitting on fortunes grander than the rest of us can even imagine?
Americans have been actively debating questions like these for almost a century and a half, ever since we entered the era that Mark Twain quite artfully tagged the “Gilded Age.” We never totally ended that gilded epoch. But we came close. By the 1950s, Americans of massive means faced tax rates as high as 91 percent on their income over $200,000, the equivalent of about $2.4 million today.
In those same years, the wealth America’s wealthiest left behind when they entered the great beyond faced an estate tax top rate that could go as high as 77 percent. Wealthy married couples here in 2024, by contrast, can totally exempt as much as $27.22 million from any federal estate tax.
Our wealthiest today have good reason to be high-fiving these wealth-enhancing new tax realities. Top 1 percenters are now grabbing 21 percent of our nation’s income, over double the top 1 percent income share in 1976.
Back in that same 1976, the always helpful World Inequality Database reminds us, the 40 percent of Americans in the nation’s statistical middle held just over a third of America’s wealth, 33.7 percent. The top 1 percent’s considerably smaller share that year: 22.6 percent. Today’s story? Our richest 1 percent hold just about 35 percent of our nation’s wealth, our middle 40 percent less than 28 percent.
The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released report from Americans for Tax Fairness points out, are doing their best to keep these good times — for America’s rich — rolling.
“Just 50 billionaire families,” the new ATF report details, “have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the crucial 2024 elections, with that number sure to show accelerating growth in the final six months of the campaign.”
Stats like these, adds the report, offer “further proof that the nation’s richest families consider democracy just another commodity they can buy.”
Any transaction requires, of course, both buyers and sellers. In the buying and selling of our democracy, the sellers sit in Congress, and some have even called the White House home. This spring, one particular former president has been doing “selling” aplenty to get back to his former 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address.
In one recent private event, the Washington Post reports, Donald Trump “asked oil industry executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign and said raising such a sum would be a ‘deal’ given how much money they would save if he were reelected as president.”
At another event with deep-pocket donors, held at New York’s luxurious Pierre Hotel, Trump reminded all present that a re-elected Joe Biden would let Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the rich expire at the end of 2025. Warned Trump: “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”
What can we do to significantly limit how deeply political candidates can feed at the billionaire trough? The Billionaire Family Business — the new Americans for Tax Fairness report — advances two core recommendations.
The first: We need to reform our current campaign finance landscape. A good place to start would be ending our burgeoning “dark money” political contribution charade.
To end run our already feeble federal limits on political giving — and, at the same time, keep their donations secret — our contemporary billionaires have over recent years been advancing frightfully huge sums to non-profits that don’t have politics as their “primary” purpose. These non-profits have then been moving those dollars to billionaire-friendly candidates without having to publicly reveal the identity of the billionaires behind the contributions.
But closing gaping loopholes like this “dark money” two-step, the new Americans for Tax Fairness study recognizes, would only get us so far. The wealth of our richest, just like water, seeks its own level. Cut off one channel and that wealth will find another. To limit the impact of our wealthiest on our politics, in other words, we simply must limit the wealth of our wealthiest.
“We need,” as the new Americans for Tax Fairness paper puts it, “more effective taxation of billionaires.” And that more effective taxation must include moves to seriously tax the billionaire inheritances that “leave economic dynasties with plenty of spare cash to try to influence elections.”
Without those sorts of moves, the ATF concludes, we’ll continue to have “no practical limit to how much billionaire families can spend” on getting their “allies into office.”
Plutocracy can flourish in that environment. Democracy most definitely cannot.
Sam Pizzigati an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has written widely on income and wealth concentration, with op-eds and articles in publications ranging from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. He co-edits Inequality.org Among his books: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press). His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing publishing at America’s largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association.
Union Strategies Against Germany’s Far-Right
June 1, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
(Photo: Christian Jungeblodt)
Germany’s unions are afraid of being infiltrated by AfD members. A recent case from the city of Hanover is currently pre-occupying many in Germany’s union movement.
In that case, a local AfD apparatchik who was elected to the local city council has also been running for the works council of a local waste disposal company [Abfallentsorger Aha].
In the works council election, the AfD man – Jens Keller – received the most votes from his staff. He is also an active member of Germany’s public service union Ver.di.
Yet, the union wants nothing to do with the neofascist AfD. It prefers to expel the right garbage worker and AfD apparatchik from the union. But stripping the AfD operative of his union membership turns out to be rather complicated. Many German trade unions are currently struggling with similar cases.
Some workers have even elected colleagues who express the racism of the AfD. Unions fear that migrant employees might be insulted, and minorities are discriminated against once there are AfD-members elected to works councils.
Such an AfD-influenced workplace would be defined by setting “them” (non-Germans) against us (Germans). Such a workplace climate might well be characterized by right-wing populist slogans, hate speech, and far-right conspiracy fantasies like the great reset.
Meanwhile, German trade unions’ works council representatives have set the limits of what can be said on factory premises, workplaces, and warehouses. The strategy is to prevent workplace from shifting to the far right. Increasingly, people who suffer from racism and discrimination turn to trade unions asking for help and support.
Worse, right-wing ideologies are an ever-increasing problem in many German companies. It is no longer a marginal problem.
The public service union Ver.di has already hired a special assistant for the former East-German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia to help. Many trade unions are also offering training courses on how best to deal with workplace racism.
The police union’s Jochen Kopelke recently argued that his union empowers its members by giving them arguments against the far-right. Meanwhile, the IG Metall union, too, recognizes that right-wing ideas have become a problem in many companies and that unions have to counteract that.
In accordance with the progressive and human rights tradition, unions credibly warn against racism, intolerance and far-right ideologies.
Unions openly and directly attack the AfD as the party-political embodiment of a far-right state of mind. Other social institutions in Germany are also gearing up against the AfD.
Germany’s churches, for example, have recently, and very publicly distanced themselves from the AfD calling on their members to leave the party. Even the powerful corporate lobbying institution “BDI” argues against the AfD outlining the AfD’s suicidal plan to leave the EU and Euro.
Virtually all of Germany’s democratic society agree that strong worded declarations against the AfD are necessary. Germany’s churches, for example, prefer to kick out believers of far-right ideologies as these contradict their Christian and humanitarian values. Germany’s churches fight those who are AfD members and are spreading their neofascist ideologies.
Historically, it is nothing new. Fascist has often pretended to be on the side of workers. Hitler’s Nazis of the 1930s even featured the word “socialism” in its party name while – once in power – killing thousands of socialists and trade unionists.
Today, the AfD, too, is celebrating itself as a new “workers’ party.” Interestingly, both – Germany’s trade unions and the AfD – have rather similar “social markers”. Both are dominated by male, middle-aged, skilled, and unskilled workers. Seemingly, this is where both groups overlap.
Yet, nobody really knows exactly how many AfD supporters trade unions have in their ranks. Unions tend not to conduct a “mindset test” among their millions of members. A second problem is that it would not be easy to force union members to disclose their political party affiliation.
The third problem is that while being deeply anti-democratic, the neofascist AfD is not yet officially banned. This makes it more difficult to exclude union members who support the AfD.
In the case of Germany’s police union, for example, membership numbers have recently increased. The GdP is now Germany’s fifth largest union. The union has received a lot of praise from its members, from the media and from society for its “clear line against the right”.
Yet, it seems inevitable to find unionists – like those organized in the GdP – supporting the AfD. Already in Germany’s federal election (2021), 12.2% of the union members gave their vote to the AfD. Yet, the AfD only received 10.3% in overall support.
Among such support for the AfD, there is a marked gender gap. Among the female unionists, support for the AfD was 8.3% while for male unionists it was 14.6%.
In other words, a high proportion of workers can be found to support the AfD. These AfD supporters can be characterized by poorer working conditions, a lack of recognition, low trust in institutions and a relatively high degree of anxiety and stress compared to voters of democratic parties.
Many of these union members and AfD voters show a belief in xenophobic ideologies while also supporting the restriction of immigration. Both have become priorities for many of them.
Meanwhile on the institutional side, right-wing groups are still a rather marginal phenomenon in one of Germany’s most important workplace institutions: works councils.
This can indeed be seen as a success for trade unions. Right-wing influence has – so far – been kept within limits.
Yet, companies can also be catalysts for right-wing mobilization. Workplaces can be a location where shady right-wing mobilization collides with democratic political activities often organized by trade unions. This is not restricted to workplaces.
In the realm of politics, the wave of anti-right and anti-AfD rallies that soared through Germany during early 2024 is undoubtedly an encouragement for trade unions.
Yet, the immediate impact of these mass rallies remains uncertain. The AfD seems to have been pushed back – from polling just above 20% in voter support (2023) to a 16% to 18% range (mid-May 2024).
On this, trade unions think that this optimism needs to be stabilized – even if the results at the ballot box should not turn out as hoped. Elections are scheduled for June (EU parliament), and September (three states in the former East-Germany) and many expect – despite the mass rallies against the AfD – to make substantial gains.
In all of this, trade unions distinguish between short-term activities and long-term strategies against the AfD. Next to parliamentarian elections, trade unions are also facing virtually the same task inside companies and in works council elections.
Much of this is about combating the slowly but steady spreading of right-wing ideologies even into companies and workplaces.
One of the most prominent examples is the so-called “Zentrum” (center) – a right-wing extremist association affiliated with the AfD. Deceptively called “Zentrum Automobil” and in operation since 2009, it has been competing in works council elections – nationwide but mainly in the automotive industry.
Although the Zentrum has been able to win seats at works councils in past elections, the Zentrum and adjacent right-wing associations are far from reflecting the AfD’s election successes.
Currently, the Zentrum and its bedfellows are targeting other industries, and they are also trying to gain a foothold in the social and health sector.
To contain right-wing forces inside companies and to convince colleagues to stand up for anti-fascist and solidarity-based solutions, the IG Metall union also supports the “Association for the Preservation of Democracy“.
The VBD is tasked with analyzing and mobilization of workers inside companies and to develop approaches for trade unions for “right-wing de-mobilization”.
Unions agree that all this must begin at the causes of discrimination, individual devaluation, dehumanization, and racial insults. This means the empowerment of workers which will – almost by definition – collide with the incapacitation of employees based on asymmetrical and hierarchical power relations inside capitalist companies.
When corporate management structurally and deliberately disempowers workers in everyday working life – often through the use of authoritarian corporate structures, deceptive corporate communication and management control – the formation of pro-active attitudes and democratic behaviors needed to fight the radical right are blocked.
This works the other way around as well. In companies where participation and collective co-determination achieves success, self-esteem, a willingness to take care of others and commitment grow.
In short, the more positive and successful democracy and commitment are perceived in companies, the lower the tendency to devalue others and to turn to right-wing ideologies.
Such a commitment to active democracy – both inside and outside of companies – will work towards the demobilization of the far-right. Obviously, what happens inside companies cannot be separated from social and political developments in the public sphere.
No less urgent are measures against the electoral successes of the parliamentary arm of Germany’s far-right: the AfD. The clear and present danger to democracy and to workplaces is real and imminent.
Still, much of this is not too likely to affect the upcoming state elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony.
The unions’ most minimum goal is that the AfD is not getting involved in any state government. Unions do not want state governments making themselves indebted to the ideological whims of the rather dubious and deceitful AfD.
If the AfD were to get into a state government, the AfD and its far-right as well as neo-Nazi supporters will take advantage of additional state resources. As Hitler’s propaganda minister – Joseph Goebbels – once said,
“We are entering the Reichstag, in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal. We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it.”
To achieve this aim, the AfD and its far-right apparatchiks – once in government – will gain access to areas of influence and will also have the opportunity to shape official policies.
Worse, they will be able to fill public offices with right-wing extremists. They will also be able to block parliamentary proceedings and cut funding for projects that further democracy as well as slashing funding for Holocaust education and memorials.
Beyond such electoral goals, the aim of many trade union initiatives against the AfD is to prevent people whose worldviews are not yet firmly locked in right-wing thought patterns from electing the AfD. Of course, it would be preferable if undecided and potential voters of the AfD be convinced to vote for democratic parties.
The demobilization of the far-right camp, as far as possible, is the order of the day. Every vote that does not strengthen right-wing is a good vote – even if it ends up in the trash.
The task is to move from right-wing anger to courage. In the medium term, union policies are also about integrating social groups that have not yet been reached into the mobilization of social progress in companies and in society.
In other words, the battle Rosa Luxemburg was fighting (1914-1918) is still not won. This is the battle between “class” vs. “nationalism”. In 1914 Luxemburg lost that battle.
Nationalism won and millions were killed on the altar of ultra-nationalistic ideologies. In 1933, unions lost again and even more millions had to die on the altar of the worst form of nationalism the world has ever seen: Hitler’s Nazism.
In the long term, there is no way for Germany’s progressive and democratic forces – including trade unions – to avoid problematizing such ideologies as well as the structurally fragile relationship between corporate capitalism and democracy.
A neoliberal-economic development model such as capitalism inevitably and repeatedly produces economic losers. It also manufactures corporate-managerial minorities that can dominate society because of their – largely uncontrolled – access to the media and power.
Such a model will not be able to shake off the temptation of authoritarian strategies to deal with the frequent crisis of capitalism. It is not about human values, democracy and morality. As German philosopher Max Horkheimer said in 1939,
if you do not want to talk about capitalism
you should also keep silent about fascism.
Beyond all that, a kind of “double strategy” of a “clear line” against the AfD and an “open door” policy to return people back into Germany’s democratic society could promise positive outcomes: A Clear Position: a “strong union policy” for an aggressive and confrontation strategy against those who carry right-wing populist ideologies like the AfD inside companies and in society.
Open-Door Policy: this means an open door offering to participate in company-internal and societal counter-far-right movements for those who have been made to feel insecure and angry. This Union strategy seeks to reintegrate them back into the realm of solidarity, the common interest of all workers and progressive projects.
Such a union strategy is not about simply “picking up” those who are called “angry citizens” – the infamous Wutbürgber – through seemingly “programmatic concessions”.
This has been done by conservatives and liberals – sometimes to the point of self-denial. Making concessions to Wutbürger may well be a failed strategy that might even have strengthens those on the far-right side of politics.
Instead of this, a potentially more successful union strategy is about an offer to participate in an inclusive, solidarity-based and participatory policy that promises democratic solutions to problems.
Still, ideological attachments and consent to right-wing worldviews do not just “run above one’s head” (read: being theoretical issue). Hence, union counterstrategies need to respond to this directly through support for an increase in minimum wage, strengthening collective bargaining, and workers’ democracy.This would mean bringing the democratic movement into the world of work in the form of workplace and industrial democracy and into people’s everyday lives in the form of participatory democracy. This uses democracy to fight the anti-democratic forces of the AfD.
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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).
