The Radical History of the United Electrical Workers

AN INTERVIEW WITHJAMES YOUNG

The United Electrical Workers emerged in the 1930s as a democratic union with an independent fighting spirit. It represented the promise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations — until it split from the CIO in an atmosphere of anti-communist red-baiting.


Placards spell out the demands of striking CIO United Electrical Workers as employees of the General Electric and Westinghouse plants in Bloomfield hold a mass meeting on the town green on January 15, 1946. (Bettmann / Getty Images)


05.30.2024

This interview was conducted for Organize the Unorganized, a podcast from the Center for Work & Democracy and Jacobin magazine about the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Subscribe to Jacobin Radio to listen to the series (and don’t forget to rate us five stars so we can reach more people).INTERVIEW BYBENJAMIN Y. FONG

James Young is professor emeritus of history at Edinboro University and the author of Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania (Monthly Review Press, 2017). This interview focuses on the history of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, or UE for short, which was one of the three largest unions in the CIO at its peak, along with the auto and steel workers’ unions.

With its astounding growth in the late 1930s and early ’40s, its radical leadership and democratic structure, and its devastation during the later communist purge, the UE represents well the promise and limitations of the CIO project.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

How did the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers come to be?
JAMES YOUNG

The UE began largely because of the activities of people at different independent work sites. A General Electric (GE) plant in Massachusetts, another one in upstate New York, a radio plant in the Philadelphia area and also in Buffalo, New York, and so on. These, and some machine shops along the way too, were organized basically independently of each other and scarcely knew anything about each other. But the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused to work with any of them, and their common rejection from the AFL caused them to start working together more and more.

At the Erie, Pennsylvania, GE plant, individual departments came together early — like the roving Powerhouse Department workers and other autonomous workers such as maintenance and janitorial and outdoor employees — who then made use of their access to various areas to spread the pro-union message. Some were former union members, a few had experienced the fecklessness of the earlier company union, and a handful were or had been members of a local socialist or communist party. Immigrants and first-generation workers stood among them.

One or more of the plants tried to become “federal” locals, which was a particular designation of the AFL. The radio workers tried very hard for several years to get accepted, at least as a federal local. They wanted their own organization on a broader scale, but they started there. But they didn’t get anywhere from 1934 to ’36, when they finally gave it up and decided to move on.The CIO claimed they threw the UE out because of communist influence. But in fact it was partly the old cliché of ‘You can’t fire me, I quit.’

They were then joined by not only other radio factories but also some of those GE plants and others. Meanwhile, there had been strikes and other actions through the GE system going back to at least 1911. So some militant culture was already built into these individual plants in Massachusetts, Syracuse, New York, Fort Wayne, Erie, and so on. That was the raw material from which the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers union grew.

The Committee for Industrial Organization was formed by John L. Lewis in 1935, and they allowed the UE to affiliate with them. Against AFL protest — in fact insistence — that they disband, the CIO began to permit affiliations of other independent unions, even nonofficial unions not recognized by the AFL. Eventually about twenty thousand machinists, with the leadership of James Matles, were also added into the organization. So machinists got added to the union title, and they’re off.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

The UE grew very rapidly in its first decade. What accounts for that membership growth?
JAMES YOUNG

Hunger, basically. People were ready. The spirit and the eagerness to join a union, a real union, not a company union — there had been a concern and hunger for that for some time now. Major strikes hit in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, where my step-grandfather, Jim Gallivan, was a founding member of one of the first UAW locals. Same in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the West Coast. All hit in 1934, and this activity spurred legislative changes, like Senator Robert Wagner’s bill recognizing the right of workers to form unions of their own and of their own choosing.

There’s a lot of similarity in terms of the eagerness of workers in the ’30s and workers today. It strikes me that every couple of generations something like this occurs because there’s a limit to which people will be driven. It takes a while for people to realize that and to decide they can act on it. But I think it was essentially like that old movie line, “We’re not going to take it anymore.”
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

Who were James Matles, Julius Emspak, and James Carey?
JAMES YOUNG

James Matles was an immigrant from Romania. He was a very effective organizer. In all likelihood he was, at some point, a member of the Communist Party. I base that partly on what people who were there, or around there at the time, have told me in interviews. He was a dynamic personality. Very active, very impressive. Tough guy — not in terms of violence, but in terms of sincerity and activity and insistence that things be moved along.

Julius Emspak was more of an intellectual radical. He was a tool-and-die maker. He was a machinist in Syracuse who took advantage of a GE program that encouraged people to take a little time off with some support from them, including returning to work after a college or university program. He did that relatively locally at a small college in upstate New York, and then he went to Brown University with the intention of getting a PhD in something important. Because of that, he was persuaded by a radical faculty member there that he should go back to work and start doing important organizing, rather than simply studying it, so he did.When the CIO moment takes off, there’s an enormous animosity among many working-class people toward the bureaucracy, which they related to the AFL.

He had one son, Frank Emspak, who fell into the family business as it were. He was a machinist and is fairly recently retired now. He studied the way his father had looked at things. I think Frank also picked up some of that, and he published a very good book called Troublemaker. Julius Emspak died early, at about age sixty, of a heart attack, and was replaced as secretary-treasurer of the UE by Matles, who had been organizing director.

The first president of the union was James Carey. It’s hard to pinpoint him very accurately, but he makes me think of a guy who fell victim to the short-man syndrome, which I’ve understood about myself and through my family — we’re all short folks too. He was very dynamic. He could give one hell of a rousing speech, but he wasn’t terribly interested in doing much more than that. He hadn’t been in that office very long when there was an uprising against him. He had also become the secretary-treasurer of the CIO by that time. He got the nod from John L. Lewis over Lewis’s own daughter and John Brophy, who was also in line for that position.

Carey came out of the radio side of the union. And in the early ’40s, a bunch of people, not particularly radical, beginning in Massachusetts, began to argue that he needed to be replaced. They put forth a guy by the name of Albert Fitzgerald, who beat Carey in an election in 1941. For the rest of his life, Carey claimed, except in private, that this was the doing of the communists. In fact, the communists, as far as I can tell, were about evenly split on the issue. Some communists were afraid of their apparent power becoming too dangerous to the organization and stuck with Carey. It was the rank-and-file who defeated him.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

How did the UE foster a culture of democratic unionism?
JAMES YOUNG

The president is elected in the UE by delegates to a convention, who are themselves elected. There’s a lot of voting going on in the UE, every couple years. It depends on what’s going on with the constitution, but I think now it’s every three years that there’s an election at the local level for president and other offices. It’s very specific. The chief plant steward and the business agent are also elected by members, and it’s those people then who relate things to the international.

When the CIO moment takes off, there’s an enormous animosity among many working-class people toward the bureaucracy, which they related to the AFL. So there was a reaction against that. Workers also thought that the president of a union ought not to be making any more money than any other member of the union. Now, if he has to travel, of course, they do cover expenses and so forth. But the salary of the UE international president is at the level of a skilled worker with some seniority. It’s not a big salary.

That thinking has influenced some other unions too — the idea that if the officers of the union make so much money that their main concern is their stock profile rather than their members, you’ve got big trouble. The Pennsylvania Social Services Union, which is Local 668 of SEIU [the Service Employees International Union], has a salary for the president and the secretary-treasurer which is not even as much as the highest dues-paying member of their union makes. They’re public employees. So I think that was one good thing that came out of the notion that democracy ought to be integral to the union.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

Could you describe the events leading up to the UE’s leaving the CIO?
JAMES YOUNG

According to a reporter from the 1930s and ’40s whom I tend to trust, Philip Murray was allegedly reluctant to accept the presidency of the CIO, a position he held from 1940 until his death in 1952, unless he could work on removing communists from the organization. The reporter claimed that Murray’s willingness to take on the CIO presidency was contingent on his ability to purge communist influences from within the labor federation. Whoever was in power to say yes or no to that demand often said, “Yes, sure.” It could be that it goes back to his view of the communists, starting who knows when. He was a faithful Catholic, born in Scotland, and an immigrant himself who allegedly favored the Francoist military in the Spanish Civil War. He was a man, given the field he had to play in, of significant integrity. But he was working on that for some time.If the officers of the union make so much money that their main concern is their stock profile rather than their members, you’ve got big trouble.

For instance, in 1942 or ’43, the UAW began to raid the Farm Manufacturing Workers Union, which was clearly led by lefties of various sorts, including communists, but was a member of the CIO. Murray never took a significant step against that activity. The UE was number three in terms of size, behind the autoworkers and the steelworkers. So they thought they might get some protection there, just in terms of the numbers. But that didn’t work out too well, and pretty soon the UE began to come under heavy attack. This was after the ’46 strike — virtually a general strike in this country — of the major industrial unions, which had been promoted significantly by Julius Emspak and the leadership of the UE.

The steelworkers, of which Murray was now also the president, the UAWm and others soon after began raiding UE. That was grounds for those unions to be fined, expelled, or disciplined, and that never happened. So it was clearly on by that time — 1947, early ’48. UE then finally put the question in terms of their own challenge to the CIO, and that was to state that, if they did not take steps against this activity, the UE would stop paying dues to the CIO. That was a pretty powerful message because they sent a lot of money to the CIO.

That didn’t help. So just before the 1948 CIO convention, the UE held its own convention and determined that if things had not radically changed by that CIO convention time, they would not pay dues any longer. Later on, the CIO claimed they threw the UE out because of communist influence. But in fact it was partly the old cliché of “You can’t fire me, I quit.” That was the case, and it was bitter. It was just awful.

I interviewed Dave Fitzmaurice when he was just about to take over as the president of International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), which the CIO created out of nothing to give Jim Carey something to do and to destroy the United Electrical Workers. When I interviewed Fitzmaurice, in maybe 1978 or ’79, I asked him, “Who won in this whole thing?” And he said, “I don’t think anybody won. But there was one group of losers, the workers.”I asked him, ‘Who won in this whole thing?’ And he said, ‘I don’t think anybody won. But there was one group of losers, the workers.’

The members were the losers — that’s for sure. They had been, in many areas, first at getting this benefit or that benefit. They weren’t impoverished, of course, but they fell rapidly from that top status, because of this division and the piss-poor leadership of James Carey as a president. Carey said to some people at one time or another that he was a leader like Walter Reuther. A lot of it, I think, was because he had this macho thing going, which gets me back to the short-man syndrome. If you had a serious problem with James Carey, and you ran against him for president in the 1960s, what you faced was criminal behavior aimed against you. It was so blatant that he finally got caught at it and was thrown out by the federal government and his union. Since then, there’s been greater cooperation between the UE and what’s left of the IUE. It’s simply a department in the Communications Workers of America now.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

What prompted the big postwar strikes?
JAMES YOUNG

The ’46 strikes were motivated by the pathetically small offerings made by major corporations that had profited enormously during the war. They had 400 percent increases, in some cases, over their profits in 1940.

So what do you do? The UE leadership, the West Coast longshore leadership, the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union — mostly lefties — said, “We ain’t going to take this anymore,” and essentially pulled off the closest thing to a nationwide general strike that this country’s ever known. It’s really impressive to read through what was agreed to and how it was carried out. One after another, all the major industries go out: steel, electrical, rubber. The UAW was already partially out. Then coal and rail.

They had been offered, I think, a dime-an-hour increase by the corporations; coincidentally all offered the same figure. The unions put some people to work on researching the claim that “we can’t offer more. We’ve got retooling to do, and so on, and we can’t give you more than a dime.” They concluded, as did the official government agency that took that on, that they could give workers 30 percent more and still make more than they made in 1940.

The electrical workers and steelworkers settled at $0.18 an hour. In 1946, $0.18 cents an hour was money. In 1940, for instance, the UE got an extra dime an hour. The old-timers that I interviewed said, “That was money then, because we were making a$1.09 or something, so it was a 10 percent increase in our income.” Well, $0.18 cents may not have been a 10 percent increase by then, but it was still a substantial increase.It was a horrific anti-communist propaganda campaign. It worked, to a large measure, and a lot of people suffered. Not just unions, and not just union members for that matter.

It was at this time that the anti-communist forces began coalescing. They got together, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, to put out a free booklet on communism in the government and communism in the labor movement, and distributed them for nothing to at least a couple million people, and then followed up with full-page ads in newspapers, which they readily got. It was a horrific anti-communist propaganda campaign. It worked, to a large measure, and a lot of people suffered. Not just unions, and not just union members for that matter. A lot of people suffered from that fraud.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

On the whole, how would you make sense of the communist influence within the UE and the CIO?
JAMES YOUNG

The communists were not always the best friends of democracy, especially in Eastern Europe. In the CIO unions, they did pretty well in that connection. But organizations evolve, and not all of them stayed democratic by any means. So there was that. I think they erred in subverting their membership identity. When they were exposed as members or as simply having been members, it just reinforced the propaganda from the Right and from employers. I think if they’d been a little more upfront about their politics, they might have fared better. I don’t know how much difference it would’ve made in the long run.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

What lessons does the ascendance of the UE, and the CIO more generally, have for the present moment?
JAMES YOUNG

The UE was a variegated organization. There were these people making radios in Philadelphia and Buffalo. There were people who were working for GE, Westinghouse, and other manufacturers. There were machinists, and tool-and-die makers as well. But they all got together.

That’s something that people now need to keep in mind because it’s very easy still to work with and for people like you, vocationally, ethnically, or what have you. It’s important to work to overcome divides and recognize that others have an interest in common with you. And the best approach to that lies in democratic activism. That’s what the successful labor movement is all about. We are one.

CONTRIBUTORS

James Young is professor emeritus of history at Edinboro University and the author of Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Benjamin Y. Fong is honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023).

Exurbia Now: A Liberal Dissects MAGA Pathology

Review of Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra (Melville House, 2024)

By Chris Green

May 31, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




I think this is a book of some merit although I disagree with plenty of its content. I first learned of it a few months ago watching a Youtube clip of a friendly interview with the author conducted on a favorite progressive podcast of mine, The Majority Report with Sam Seder.

The author is a liberal journalist who lives in northwestern Indiana. He has published books celebrating Jesse Jackson and the music of John Cougar Mellencamp. He has written for such publications as The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Salon.com and Alternet. He teaches at Indiana University Northwest.

The book is a reflection on the pathology of MAGA voters and in that way is similar to another recently released book that has gotten much more publicity: The Roots of Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller. However, while Waldman and Schaller focus on rural America as the source of MAGA strength, Masciotra locates that strength in exurbs. Exurbs are communities of relatively recent origin around the US that have sprung up between suburbs and rural areas: their residents tend toward the higher end of the income scale. Exurbs have been notable in the last few decades as landing spots for middle and upper class whites fleeing the increasing racial diversity of suburbs.

I think this book’s focus on exurbia as the prime locus of Trump’s movement is valuable. The stereotype of the MAGA voter is the ignorant, rural, poor or working class redneck. There is some of that in Trump’s base but the latter, to a surprising extent, actually lean toward the higher end of the income spectrum. Some Trump supporters may not be college educated but they have become at least moderately wealthy as small business owners or in such roles as independent contractors in construction trades. In Marxist parlance, a lot of Trump supporters are indeed petty bourgeois–small business owners, educated professionals, police officers and the like who have ended up residing in exurbs. Masciotra relies on the research of left-wing political scientist Anthony Dimaggio for this insight.

Here are a few more of the book’s strengths:

–it is well researched, relying on the most recent academic scholarship about the sociological subjects discussed in the book. It provides brief, interesting semi-sociological surveys of some of the suburbs and exurbs in the Chicago metro area (both in Illinois and northwest Indiana).

–Masciotra’s account of Donald Trump’s con job against the rustbelt city of Gary, Indiana in 1993 is useful. I had not heard of this story before. Over the resistance of Gary’s mayor and city council, Trump got the Indiana gaming commission to approve the construction of a casino in Gary with promises (which he would not fulfill) of directing a portion of the casino’s profits to various charities, to renovate a dilapidated Sheraton hotel across the street from Gary’s city hall and to bring in local investors on the casino. The local investors later sued Trump for reneging on his promises, initially winning $1.3 million but the final ruling from the courts was that Trump’s promises were verbal and thus legally non-binding. I agree strongly with Masciotra’s denunciations of casinos as a very poor mode of economic development for rustbelt cities and other low-income areas around the country.

–his account of the Area Redevelopment Act is interesting. This was signed into law by President Kennedy in 1961 and, according to the author, was a highly successful jobs program focused on infrastructure development in rural areas. Funding for the legislation was derailed in June 1963 after powerful congressional southern Democrats threw a tantrum over Kennedy’s nationally televised speech endorsing civil rights. Masciotra notes that public universities are the largest employers in a number of states, which he argues is proof that the government can be an effective job creator. There is something to this last point although if he has in mind–as I think he does–the non-profit health care systems operated by public universities in different states, then I can only say that such models are not worthy of admiration.

–he describes a case of white flight from one of Chicago’s Illinois suburbs into exurbs in the 1990’s. In that case, after blacks began moving into a higher income suburb, local whites raised dog whistle protests about lower property values and higher crime rates. However, property values did not plunge, and crime did not rise. Local whites alleged a conspiracy among cops, city government and media to cover up the truth about crime and property values. They were determined to find any justification to flee from black folks to what they felt was the safety of exurbia.

–his reflections on megachurches and the irrational attachment of right wing white American males to semi-automatic weapons and heavy-duty trucks are highly sensible.

Limited Liberal Horizons

On the book’s weaknesses:

He harps constantly upon the threat to American democracy of exurban Trump voters with their racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious extremism and general authoritarian, anti-social worldview. I don’t disagree with him here.

However, In contrast, he seems to think the Democratic Party is nearly perfect. He insinuates that if only these jerks in the exurbs would stop voting for MAGA and instead vote Democrat, then the road would be open for the US to achieve an unprecedented, staggeringly high level of prosperity, equality and justice for all.

He elaborates at some length in defending Bill Clinton (but has comparatively little to say about Obama or Biden). He notes that certain unnamed far left thinkers have criticized Clinton but dismisses them without much consideration. To prove Clinton’s greatness, he notes that the latter lifted 4 million people out of poverty with the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. He claims that balanced federal government budgets led to the US’s remarkable economic expansion during the late 90’s. As far as NAFTA is concerned, Masciotra pooh-poohs the idea that it led to the export of US manufacturing jobs overseas. Instead he cites studies showing that the United States has lost many of its manufacturing jobs because of automation. Automation, he says, is simply technological progress–a sign of advancing civilization–and nobody can do anything to stop it. So to summarize, Masciotra implies that nearly all US manufacturing job losses have been caused by automation and none of that job loss is Bill Clinton’s (or NAFTA’s) fault.

His unwillingness to seriously engage with left wing criticisms of Bill Clinton is disappointing. It is true that the late 90’s has been the only extended time period since the early 70’s when the real wages of the majority of American workers grew and did not stagnate. But that wage growth was based on something unsustainable: a tech bubble on the stock market. Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996–an event not mentioned by Mascriotra–led to a significant rise in children living in deep poverty. His 1994 crime bill–another landmark not mentioned by Mascriotra–caused deep harm in black and brown communities, fueling the country’s mass incarceration crisis. As far as NAFTA, it is true that a large number of US manufacturing jobs have been lost due to automation. But studies by progressive economists have also shown that NAFTA caused major manufacturing job losses in the US. It also lowered wages in the US.

He denounces folks on the left (like Bernie Sanders) and the MAGA right who possess the “pipe dream” of yearning for a return to America’s post-World War II golden age of good paying manufacturing jobs. He writes:

“While manufacturing employment continues to decline, home health care workers grow by the millions. The fast-food chain Arby’s currently employs more Americans than the entire coal industry. Millions of young Americans, including seven hundred thousand part-time college instructors, struggle to stay afloat in a freelance ‘gig economy.’ The growing ranks of the marginal, low-wage workforce need access to public goods and services, higher wages, dependable benefits and affordable education–not pipe dreams about the resurrection of the 1940’s.”

At this point I have a question for Masciotra which he did not answer in the book. Have the Democrats, when in office, engaged in an earnest effort to secure “public goods and services, higher wages, dependable benefits, and affordable education” for America’s working class? I would submit that they have not. Instead their policies going back to Bill Clinton–and even back further to Jimmy Carter–have generally tended toward an embrace of corporate friendly deregulation and budgetary austerity.

I’m not arguing that they have embraced these corporate friendly policies because big business bribes them with campaign contributions (although that is one among many layers of the problem). The truth is that when Joe Biden told Wall Street donors in 2019 that nothing would fundamentally change when he became president, he was reflecting the reality of the real world. Those donors are a force that holds overwhelming power in American society. Any political party in the US and the capitalist world at large needs the cooperation of the capitalist class to govern: they need business to invest and create jobs so as to keep the economy afloat. If a business or financial elite feels that a national–or state or local–government is not creating good conditions for investment, then they will create capital flight.

As the putative “left” party of the American political system, Democrats are in a constant battle to show business that they can create good conditions for capital accumulation, that they are not moving “too far to the left.” It is why, when Democrats deign to go through the motions of pursuing any mildly redistributive measures–e.g. the push for a $15 per hour minimum wage in 2021 or the extension of the Covid era child tax credit–they easily crumble before conservative opposition. It is why prominent Democrats have refused to eliminate the Senate filibuster–in spite of Republican abuse of it. It is why they refuse to “pack” the Supreme Court to dilute the power of its far-right majority. Democrats want to show American business that they fully respect all the conservative friendly guardrails of the American political structure.

Democrats and Popular Mobilization

While Masciotra spends much of this book zeroing in on the threat of Trump voters to America’s bourgeois democratic institutions, he never mentions the largest group of voters: non-voters. In the 2020 presidential election, the non-participation rate of eligible voters was one third although in most other presidential elections of recent decades the abstention rate has been closer to one half. In the 2022 midterm congressional elections, the non-participation rate was nearly 48 percent–in other recent mid-terms the non-participation has been closer to 60 percent. Local elections around the US typically have very low turnout.

It occurs to me that Democrats might be able to better fight the MAGA malignancy if they offered serious proposals to motivate the large non-participating voting eligible population to cast their ballot. The non-voting adult population is significantly poor and working class. What if Democrats at national, state and local levels offered serious, detailed proposals to give ordinary people substantial power to organize their workplaces; for apartment tenants to have strong protections from eviction and landlord abuses; for media to be removed from corporate control and placed in the hands of local communities; for free and comprehensive college education for everyone? What if they used their vast power to direct most of America’s defense budget out of the pockets of defense contractors and into the construction of democratically run public housing and free healthcare for working Americans? What if–before providing free health care–they used a portion of the defense budget to wipe out the $220 billion in medical debt held by Americans? What if–instead of fueling highway expansion and record oil exports–Democrats offered a comprehensive plan for seriously addressing the climate crisis (and a multitude of other social and economic ills) along the lines of the Green New Deal?

What if they used the vast resources at their disposal to mobilize tens of millions of Americans(not just during election season) to push for these measures–instead of their normal course (as with the union friendly PRO Act) of using progressive proposals as bait for voters during campaigns while shelving such proposals during legislative sessions when faced with the slightest opposition?

The Democratic Party, of course, is structurally incapable of getting anywhere near pursuing any of the courses of action outlined above.. Its patrons in the capitalist class will tolerate only the most incremental reforms, the mildest sandpapering of the rougher edges of neoliberalism. Business would look with horror if Democrats used their resources to mobilize poor and working-class Americans on a mass scale to achieve substantial redistributive measures. Mass radical popular movements might be able to exert such pressure as to extract concessions from Democrats; but then again, depending on circumstances, Democrats might repress such movements.

As upper middle-class liberals of Masciotra’s ilk remain satisfied with the smallest of progressive crumbs offered by the Democratic Party–as long as they keep celebrating a Biden economy where a large majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck–I believe their complacency will only help fuel what they rightly fear: the further metastasizing of MAGA or even worse movements. Mascriotra spends parts of the book meditating on such subjects as the virtues of progressive city planning (plenty of sidewalks in downtown cores and public resources for the humanities and arts), the virtues of small business integration with local communities and the progressive characteristics of microbreweries. While such subjects are not objectionable by themselves, his excessive focus on them indicates a mindset unable to seriously grasp the nature of the malaise in the United States.

In spite of his seemingly heavy complacency, Mascriotra rightly observes that the United States possesses a “transforming and, in some ways, decaying economy.” As the contradictions of capitalism grow deeper, it is absolutely essential that intelligent people like Masciotra develop a much deeper structural critique of American economic malaise. Such analysis will ideally lead to recognition of the need to fundamentally transform the American economy away from capitalism.

Trump’s Attempt at Planeticide Was Worse Than Hush Money Sex Pay-Off

By Juan Cole

May 31, 2024
Source: Informed Comment


Youth Grieve and Denounce Trump’s Election at UN Climate Talks COP22 | Image: John Englart






It is great good news, of course, that Trump was finally held accountable for his hush money pay off to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their hook-up so as to win the 2016 presidential election. Had she gone public in October, 2016 in the wake of the release of the Hollywood Access tape about grabbing genitalia, he may well have lost. That he is now a felon invalidates his entire presidency. It does not erase all the harm he did, in reshaping the Supreme Court as a tool of white nationalist Christian patriarchy, and it won’t bring back the hundreds of thousands of people who died of COVID because of his wrongheaded public health policies. But it is some form of minor justice.

The conviction, however, underlines that American law and politics is still primarily about property rather than about the value of human life. Both Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump went down over Lockean crimes. Nixon ordered a third rate burglary (twice!). Trump arranged for a pay-off to a porn star. Both committed their crimes in furtherance of their political careers. Nixon had the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. burgled. Trump had a catch and kill scheme implemented for Stormy Daniels’ memoirs. Ironically, likely neither needed to commit those crimes to win.

It is a little frustrating, however, that our priorities as a society are still so parochial and twentieth-century in character, and that we are not more outraged at the truly massive damage Trump did to our planet. He should have been tried and convicted of attempted planeticide.

1. Trump took the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord in November, 2020, trashing all the pledges the country had made to reduce its massive carbon footprint. The US, with 4.2% of the world’s population, produces nearly 14% of the world’s carbon dioxide, putting out twice as much CO2 as the 27 nations of the European Union. By leaving the Paris agreement, Trump encouraged other countries to slack off on their climate commitments, endangering the whole world.

2. Trump scrapped President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his attempt to regulate CO2 emissions, and Trump’s rules would have put an extra half a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over a decade. When we’re trying to cut CO2 to zero by 2050, that was a step in completely the wrong direction.

MSNBC: “‘Quid pro quo:’ Trump vowed to gut climate laws in exchange for $1B from oil bosses”




3. Trump also lowered auto emissions standards, helping the big car companies avoid going electric longer and adding another 450 million tons of CO2. Now that China has more advanced electric car technology than the US and can make EVs more cheaply for the world market, it becomes clear that Trump may have knee-capped the US preeminence in the global auto-manufacturing sector, for good. Since it is increasingly clear that auto emissions cause Alzheimers, Trump also damaged our brains to be more like his own.

4. Trump actively promoted the production of the very dangerous atmospheric heating agent, methane, a greenhouse gas that prevents the heat caused by the sun’s rays from radiating back out into space at the old eighteenth-century rate. He removed government regulations requiring Big Oil to limit methane emissions from drilling.

5. Trump put a 30% tariff on solar panels, vastly slowing the expansion of solar power in the US and costing the country some 62,000 jobs in the solar industry. Since solar replaces coal and fossil gas for electricity generation, this is another way Trump promoted carbon dioxide emissions.

6. Trump’s corrupt Interior Department subsidized coal and fossil gas, but raised the rents for wind turbines on federal lands. Trump, fuelled by an irrational hatred of wind turbines, such that he falsely asserts that they cause cancer, was a constant worry tot he industry all the time he was in office.

7. The sum total of all Trump’s anti-climate regulations would have added 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere had they not largely been reversed by the subsequent Biden administration. This one man tried to engineer an extra tonnage of CO2 emissions equal to the annual output of all of Russia.

I have suggested that we could get a better sense of how disgusting carbon dioxide and methane emissions are if we called them farts instead of using a fancy word like “emissions.” How many tons of CO2 did America fart out last year?

Trump, who spent much of his trial farting and dozing, tried to have us fart out an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2.

Some small percentage of all the damage human-made climate change will do to the United States in the coming years will have been caused by one man. And if he can get into office again he will try to doom the planet.

Now that is an indictment.


Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.


‘Tough-on-Crime’ Doesn’t Apply to People Like Trump

Trump’s conviction is not proof that the criminal justice system works. The joy and disbelief we may be feeling is because it was never intended to ensnare people like him.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

June 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons 3.0

Many Americans are celebrating the news of Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in a hush-money incident that took place ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Newspaper headlines screamed “TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS” and media reports relied on superlatives such as “historic” and “unprecedented” to label the unanimous jury verdict. Given that Trump has been unusually adept at avoiding accountability for a staggering number of alleged crimes, the verdict felt like a long-overdue comeuppance.

It was even more shocking than the news of Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the murder of George Floyd four years ago—but not by much. The United States criminal justice system was not designed to be applied equally across race and class. It was designed to protect men like Trump and Chauvin—powerful elites who bend laws to suit their purpose and the henchmen who serve them.

This is why the fact that Trump is now officially a “felon” feels so earth-shattering. For years people convicted of felonies were unable to vote in elections in many states. Felony disenfranchisement disproportionately impacts Black voters. According to Dyjuan Tatro, an alumnus of the Bard Prison Initiative, as of 2016 “Black Americans [were] disenfranchised for felony conviction histories at rates more than four times those of all other races combined.” It is highly unlikely that the U.S. would tolerate the disproportionate (or even proportional) disenfranchisement of wealthy whites.

Although many states are slowly overturning the loss of voting rights for people who have finished serving their sentences, in the vast majority of U.S. states people still cannot vote while incarcerated. Republicans tend to back felony disenfranchisement, perhaps because of the assumption that those marginalized populations that our criminal justice system targets tend not to favor them.

Florida, the state where Trump officially resides, has been ground zero for the battle over felony disenfranchisement. When Floridians in 2018 voted to restore the voting rights of those convicted of felonies, the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, effectively overturned the measure by forcing it to apply only to those who have paid off their debts. It was a clearly classist move, one that prison reform advocates dubbed “pay-to-vote.” Given the preservation of felony disenfranchisement in Florida, some have speculated that Trump may not be able to vote for himself in November depending on the sentence he is handed. But given that he was convicted in New York, he may ironically be able to cast a ballot in Florida thanks to New York’s ban against felony disenfranchisement laws.

Incredibly he can still run for president in spite of being labeled a “felon,” and could even be elected from within prison walls. But if he was a low-income person of color merely looking to rent an apartment or apply for a job as a janitor or schoolteacher, he would have likely been barred from doing so freely.

States have generally enabled legalized discrimination against people convicted of felonies. Aside from the loss of voting rights, it is acceptable to engage in housing and employment discrimination against them. It’s no wonder that the label “felon,” has been considered by human rights advocates in recent years as deeply dehumanizing. The same is true for terms such as “inmate,” “parolee,” “offender,” “prisoner,” and “convict.”

This is why Trump’s conviction is so astonishing. And this is why abolitionists—those who want to dismantle the entire criminal justice system and replace it with a system based on equity and the sharing of collective resources as a means of promoting public safety—are watching with bated breath if the former president will actually be ensnared by a system intended to reward people like him and instead serve prison time. In general, we live in a system where “the rich get richer and the poor get prison.” It is a rare exception for someone of elite status to be criminalized.

Each felony count against Trump carries a maximum sentence of four years which could be served concurrently. He could also be sentenced to house arrest or be put on probation. The minimum sentence is zero. The Associated Press is reporting that “Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to say whether prosecutors would seek prison time.” In other words, in spite of Trump’s clear guilt, it is possible he could face no punishment whatsoever. His fate lies in the hands of Judge Juan Merchan who will hold a sentencing hearing on July 11.

“Without law and order, you have a problem,” said Trump in 2016 months before he won enough electoral college votes to be deemed president. “And we need strong, swift, and very fair law and order,” he added. Such rhetoric remains common among Republicans (as well as centrist Democrats such as current president Joe Biden). It is the sort of language that marginalized people understand is aimed at them. But in rare instances when the system functions in the way it was never meant to—when it ensnares powerful elites or law enforcement—the “tough-on-crime” crowd shows its hand in myriad ways.

Those who are emotionally invested in the notion that we live in a society with equal justice under the law see it as proof that the system works, even if it can benefit from some reforms. Trump’s verdict is apparently “a triumph for the rule of law.” But, it has been eight years since the Wall Street Journal first reported that Trump arranged to pay off Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence over their affair. Since then, he has remained free, even as low-income people of color are jailed before trial at the drop of a hat for far lesser alleged crimes.

Others, such as Republican supporters of the former president, see Trump’s verdict as a “shameful” exception that proves the system is “corrupt and rigged”—against the wealthy and powerful, not the untold numbers of wrongfully convicted Black and Brown people.

Meanwhile, Trump has engaged in ethical breaches and criminal acts faster than the system can respond. Just weeks before his conviction, Trump was reported to have overtly demanded a $1 billion bribe from oil and gas executives at a fundraiser. Barely did Senate Democrats have time to launch an investigation into the apparent quid-pro-quo when he did it again. His hubris stems from an implicit belief that the system was never designed to hold people like him accountable. He’s right, it wasn’t.

Erica Bryant at the Vera Institute of Justice pointed out that the U.S. would be “one of the safest nations in the world” if mass incarceration was an effective way to protect us from crime. “[W]hy do we have higher rates of crime than many countries that arrest and incarcerate far fewer people?” she asked. A Vera Institute poll found that a majority of U.S. voters prefer a “crime prevention” approach to safety rather than a system based on punishment, one that prioritizes fully funding social programs rather than traditional “tough-on-crime” policies like increased policing and mass incarceration.

Those of us who understand that Trump’s conviction is neither welcome proof that a “tough-on-crime” approach works, nor evidence that it’s rigged against elites are nonetheless celebrating the headlines. It is akin to watching an overzealous and greedy hunter step into one of his own traps. The ultimate goal is to end the hunt even as it feels incredibly satisfying to see Trump cut down to size.

Trump’s emergence in the U.S. political system and his (nearly) successful avoidance of accountability for so long is clear evidence that our democracy and its criminal justice system are rigged against us in favor of wealthy elites. The fact that there is still no guarantee that he will be punished or even disqualified from the presidency in a nation that zealously criminalizes marginalized communities ought to be all the proof we need that our criminal justice system does not deserve our faith.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. DONATE



Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

“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 Fadem

June 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?

By Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher Jr , Van Gosse , Chris Maisano 

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.