Michael Bakunin and the First International
ANARCHISM BY GEORGE WOODCOCK
Socialism from Below: A History of Anarchism | libcom.org
THE GROWTH OF libertarian thought in the nineteenth century cannot be attributed to any one man, but although the influences of Godwin, Proudhon and many lesser figures were important, it was with the rise of Michael Bakunin that revolutionary anarchism emerged as a social doctrine and that an anarchist movement grew in Europe and became the vanguard of revolutionary endeavour.
Bakunin was a Russian nobleman by birth, but his whole life and work were characterised by great intolerance of injustice and coercion and a passionate devotion to personal freedom and integrity. Gigantic and commanding in stature, before his years of imprisonment and suffering Apollonian in physical handsomeness, by nature simpleminded, eloquent, courageous and generous to a fault, Bakunin had all the attributes that might have made him a successful man of the world, a commanding statesman or the hero of a national revolution, like his friend Garibaldi. Yet he sacrificed all prospect of a prosperous or distinguished future for the suffering and poverty, the misrepresentation, obloquy and apparent failure that fall to the lot of the social revolutionary. He had neither the scientific, methodical mind of a Kropotkin nor the talented cunning of a Marx, but for the devotion and personal heroism by which he built the libertarian movement in Europe, he remains probably the greatest and certainly the most dynamic revolutionary figure of modern times.
Bakunin’s father was an ex-diplomat who held an estate of five hundred serfs in the Russian province of Tver, and who had planned for Michael, his eldest son, a respectable and patriotic career in the Tsar’s army. It was in the family that Michael first attacked authority, and his early years were filled with stormy incidents in which he incited the Bakunin children to rebel against the parental will.
Michael himself was sent to the St. Petersburg Artillery School, where he showed little zeal for military studies. Although he gained a commission in the Artillery, he left the service of the Tsar at the first opportunity. He decided to devote himself to academic studies, and became a keen student of philosophy and a disciple of Hegel, then the fashionable sage of intellectual Europe. Soon he became restive in the frustrated atmosphere of Russian society, and in 1840, when he was 26, he left Russia to study the Hegelian philosophy in its own German environment.
He departed a loyal subject of the Tsar, but in Berlin he soon fell, like Marx, under the subversive influence of the young Hegelians and began to move towards a revolutionary outlook. He studied the early socialist and communist movements that flourished in France, and first manifested himself as a revolutionary in 1842, when he published in Arnold Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher an article entitled ‘Reaction in Germany’. This article contained the famous phrase ‘The desire to destroy is also a creative desire’, which has been used by many of the more unscrupulous opponents of anarchism to misrepresent Bakunin as a monster who desired violence above all and for its own sake. In fact, Bakunin meant merely that the old form of society must be ended before the new can be built. That he should have been devoted to violence for sadistic motives is contrary to all we know of his character. Indeed, he said on more than one occasion that violent revolution was at best an unpleasant and unsatisfactory necessity. “Bloody revolutions are often necessary, thanks to human stupidity; yet they are always an evil, a monstrous evil and a great disaster, not only with regard to the victims, but also for the sake of the purity and the perfection of the purpose in whose name they take place.”
In 1843 Bakunin was in touch with Weitling, whose authoritarian communism he eventually rejected, and when Weitling was arrested in Switzerland; Bakunin’s name was found among his papers. The Swiss police informed the Russian authorities, and in due course Bakunin was summoned home. He refused to obey, and in his absence was condemned to deprivation of his title of nobility and his inheritance, and also hard labour in Siberia. For his defiance the Russian government became thenceforward his most implacable enemy.
In the same year he met Proudhon and Marx in Paris. He was impressed by the two men, and in the following years his ideas, as they grew slowly through much effort and experience, were influenced by both of them. From Marx he learned that economics were more important that politics and religion, a fact which Marx revealed in his scientific analysis of society and forgot when he came to formulate revolutionary methods. From Proudhon he acquired the main bases of his future anarchism, the opposition to government and the doctrine of social decentralisation.
The following years saw Bakunin attempting to intervene wherever revolution appeared in Europe. At first he supported the Poles, until he was discredited in their eyes by a rumour spread by the Russian secret service that he was one of their own spies - a slander which followed him for many years and was afterwards revived by the Marxists to serve their own particular ends.
Then in February 1848, he hastened to Paris for the revolution against the regime of the Citizen King. He assisted enthusiastically at the barricades, but when he began to preach the anarchist ideas that were already beginning to appear in his mind, the Jacobins found him an embarrassment, and one of them remarked of him, “What a man! What a man! The first day of the revolution, he is a perfect treasure, but on the next day he should be shot!” The new ‘revolutionary’ authorities did their best to get rid of him, and when Bakunin realised the reactionary nature of the state that arose from the Parisian revolution, he decided to return to his efforts to foment the Polish insurrection.
He went to Breslau, near the Polish border, but again he found that the Poles distrusted him, and he went on to Prague. Here he was involved in another rising and fought on the barricades with the Czech students, but the insurrection was soon defeated, and he fled back to Germany, where he found a temporary refuge in Anhalt, a tiny liberal principality islanded in Prussian territory. He still intrigued with his friends in Bohemia, and in 1849 went illegally to Dresden in order to maintain closer contact with them. Here he was again overtaken by revolution and, although he had no sympathy with the German liberals, who were rising to maintain their constitutional democracy, he offered his services with a remarkably disinterested willingness and, when most of the leaders fled, remained at the barricades and assumed control of the revolution. He conducted himself so well that even Marx and Engels praised his ability and coolheadedness and, according to Bernard Shaw, Wagner, who fought beside him, was so impressed by his heroism that he used him as the model for Siegfried.
The Dresden revolution was defeated and suppressed with great brutality by Prussian troops sent to assist the Saxon king, and the surviving rebels - the majority had either been shot or thrown into the Elbe - fled to Chemnitz, where most of them, including Bakunin, were arrested during the night. Wagner was one of the few who escaped.
For Bakunin capture meant the beginning of an imprisonment which was to last eight years, in the most terrible prisons of four countries, and to be followed by years of exile in the spiritual desert of Siberia. First he was kept in prison for more than a year by the Saxon authorities, then sentenced to death, taken out to execution, and reprieved at the zero minute. Then he was handed on to the Austrian government, who desired their revenge for his part in the Prague rising. Nearly another year passed in Austrian prisons, first the citadel of Prague and then, when a rescue was feared, in the castle of Olmütz, where he was chained to a wall for three months. Again he was tried and condemned to death, and again reprieved and extradited to the next country that desired to torture this formidable rebel.
This last country was his own land, from which, as he had already been sentenced, he could not even hope for the mockery of a trial. What he expected was an execution, this time stayed by no reprieve. Instead, he was condemned to the exquisite psychological torture of solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul fortress and the even more rigorous prison of Schüsselburg, where the enemies of the Tsar lived and died in solitary confinement for many generations of revolutionaries. He remained in these prisons some six years, during which he suffered terribly from his privations and became toothless and prematurely aged from the ravages of scurvy. He began to lose all hope of ever leaving his prison to rejoin the struggle for human liberty, which, even in his greatest despair remained always in his thoughts. In 1857, however he was released from his cell and sent to Siberia for a life’s exile. He stayed there for four years, and then staged a sensational escape and returned, via Japan and the United States, to London, where his friends Ogarev and Herzen were living. Bakunin returned to freedom with a spirit, unlike his body, preserved in all its integrity and enthusiasm throughout the years of his long suffering.
Life on Paddington Green and the editing of a liberal paper with Herzen soon tired him, and he wished to resume the revolutionary struggle, which had been torn from his hands in Dresden twelve years before. When the Polish insurrection started in 1863 he endeavoured to assist the insurgents, but again the Polish leaders would have nothing to do with him, this time because his dream of a great federation of liberated Slavs ran counter to their own imperialist aspirations and his idea of a peasant uprising was diametrically opposed to their plan of an aristocratic class government. Bakunin would not accept their rebuffs, and went to Stockholm to join an expedition of Poles who planned to land in Lithuania. The project never matured, and Bakunin’s experiences with the Poles finally taught him that the social revolution could not be achieved through nationalist movements. Thenceforward he moved rapidly towards the idea of an international revolutionary movement based on the working class.
During the ensuing years he lived mostly in Italy, where he gained a number of followers, and founded his first organisation dedicated to the achievement of an anarchist revolution, the secret International Brotherhood. This was followed by his joining the League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation of liberals with a vaguely pacifistic policy which held its first congress at Geneva in that year and which Bakunin hoped to influence with his revolutionary ideas.
Bakunin’s attendance at the conference was the first public appearance of this now famous conspirator and revolutionary, and the aura attached to his name, as the hero of so many revolutions, of so many prisons, and of the sensational escape from Siberia, combined with his gigantic presence to rouse the greatest enthusiasm. One of those present wrote “As he walked up the steps to the platform... a great cry of ‘Bakunin’ went up. Garibaldi, who was in the chair, arose and went forward to embrace him. Many opponents of Bakunin’s were present, but it seemed as if the applause would never end.”
At first Bakunin had high hopes of the League for Peace and Freedom. He was elected to the Central Committee of the League, and gained a small following therein including the brothers Elisée and Elie Reclus, who were later to become famous in the anarchist movement. But very soon he realised the essentially bourgeois nature of the League as a whole and, although he attempted some kind of fusion between it and the International, which he joined in 1868, he found that the membership of the League could not keep pace with his own development. He had now come into the open as a declared enemy of capitalism, and demanded the expropriation of the land and means of production, which would be worked collectively by workers’ associations. At the Second Congress of the League he put forward proposals for the expropriation of wealth and the establishment of a classless society. When, as he had expected, these proposals were rejected, he left the League with his few followers, and turned to the International as the instrument of his revolutionary activity.
While he was still a member of the League for Peace and Freedom, Bakunin had founded his International Alliance of Social Democracy, whose nucleus was the membership of the old secret International Brotherhood and which grew to a strength of some thousands among the revolutionaries of Italy and Spain, and the Russian exiles in Switzerland. Bakunin sought for the admission of the Alliance as a whole into the International, but the General Council, led by Marx who was already regarding Bakunin as a menace to his own authority, rejected this proposal, and Bakunin had to dissolve the Alliance and allow its various sections to enter the International as separate branches.
Through the entry of Bakunin the International grew numerically, for he gained many members in Italy and Spain, where its influence had previously been negligible. But to Marx his value as an ally was more than counter-balanced by his danger as a potential rival. For Bakunin entered the International not as a member of the rank and file, but as the representative and mouthpiece of a large section of libertarian opinion. Not only did he retain his influence over the Italian and Spanish members, but he also gained the adherence of the internationalists in French Switzerland and also of many workers in France, notably in the Jura, Lyons and the Midi, and in Belgium.
The struggle between Bakunin and Marx did not, however, lie entirely or even primarily in the matter of personal influence or in the incompatibility of their widely differing personalities. There was also a deep and fundamental cleavage between their doctrines on the vital question of authority and the state. Bakunin expressed this difference clearly when he said:
“I am not a Communist because Communism unites all the forces of society in the state and becomes absorbed in it, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of all property in the hands of the state, while I seek the abolition of the state - the complete elimination of the principle of authority and governmental guardianship, which, under the pretence of making men moral and civilising them, has up to now always enslaved, oppressed, exploited and ruined them.”
The prophetic truth of these words is borne out by a consideration of the achievements of Marxist Communism as they exist in Russia today.
The first open battle between the Marxists and the Bakuninists took place at the Basle conference of 1869, which Bakunin attended in person, Marx only by proxy. Bakunin submitted a proposal for the abolition of the right of inheritance. This was opposed by the Marxists and defeated by a narrow margin. A counter proposal by the Marxists for a programme of increased death duties was also rejected by a narrow majority. The situation was somewhat ridiculous, but the fact that a resolution of the Marx-controlled General Council had been defeated for the first time, showed that the influence of Marx was at last challenged. Marx’s chief lieutenant, the German tailor Eccarius, went away exclaiming “Marx will be very displeased!”
During the period immediately following the Basle conference both groups manoeuvred for influence and position. Marx and his followers, particularly the malicious Utin, who later made his peace with the Tsar, spread as many calumnies as they could invent regarding Bakunin. But these failed to influence any of the supporters of Bakunin and in the eyes of neutrals tended to discredit the Marxists themselves rather than their opponents.
The struggle was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war and the revolution in France that deposed Napoleon III. Bakunin, scenting revolution from his retreat in Locarno, set off to Lyons where his followers were numerous, and late in September the anarchists of this city set up a Committee for the Salvation of France, which immediately declared the abolition of the State. There was a bloodless rising in Lyons, and for a short time the city was in the hands of the insurrectionaries. Preparations, however, had been inadequate, and certain members of the Committee turned out to be police, or Bonapartist agents. A body of the National Guard soon put an end to this very minor revolution, and Bakunin was captured and imprisoned. He was, however, rescued by his followers, and, after remaining in hiding for a time, escaped from France, without his beard and disguised in blue spectacles.
The struggle within the International continued in minor skirmishes until 1872, when Marx, alarmed at the progressive increase of Bakunin’s influence and embarrassed by discontent among his English followers, decided to precipitate a showdown. In September of that year he called a conference of the International at The Hague. The Bakuninists protested that Switzerland would be a better locale, as most of their delegates had to travel from Mediterranean countries and some, including Bakunin, would be unable to reach The Hague in time as they could not enter the intervening countries. The General Council, however, refused to alter its proclamation, and the Italian anarchists then took the unfortunate step of boycotting the conference and thus reducing considerably the anarchist forces.
At the conference itself, the General Council admitted the falseness of its own position by refusing to allow voting on the basis of numerical strength. Marx had made his plans carefully, and the meeting was packed with his supporters, returned by fictitious branches of the International and by sections specially formed for the purpose of returning delegates.
Marx first surprised the Conference by demanding a transference of the General Council from London to New York, and sweeping extensions of its powers. This he realised would weaken the International, but he felt a move of such a nature would release it from the European Scylla and Charybdis of anarchism on the one side and English trade unionism on the other. The motions were carried by a narrow margin, after an extremely acrimonious debate. At this point the French Blanquist delegates resigned in a body.
In the political debate that followed, the anarchist programme was defeated and the General Council’s proposal for a programme of political action was accepted. The remaining item on the agenda was the expulsion of Bakunin and his associate Guillaume on the ground that they had attempted to maintain a separate organisation within the International. The decision for expulsion was only obtained after Marx had appealed to the fundamentally bourgeois standards of the delegates by raking up Netchaieff’s blackmailing letter to Lioubavine in connection with Bakunin’s translation of Das Kapital into Russian. There was no real evidence that Bakunin had any hand in this letter, but Marx succeeded in so misrepresenting the case that the conference decided to expel Bakunin and Guillaume.
The anarchists refused to recognise the decisions at The Hague and the federations of the Latin countries seceded and held a congress at St. Imier, in the Jura, where they agreed on an anarchist programme. The anarchist section of the International continued until 1878, by which time the increasing reaction in the Latin Countries made it difficult for open mass movements to continue. The Marxist rump, split by dissensions in its new home in America, had already expired in 1874, killed by its leader’s megalomaniac desire for complete domination of the working class movement.
The years following the break-up of the International were, for Bakunin, dominated by misfortune and disillusion with the results of his efforts. His health began to break, and he was forced to live in poverty and often almost in starvation. He quarrelled with most of his friends and disciples, who could not understand his natural profligacy with money whenever it came into his hands and the way in which he would spend the money of others as if it were his own.
In 1873 the Spanish Revolution occurred, and Bakunin, in spite of his illness, desired to go there to fight what he felt must be his last struggle at the barricades. But he was penniless, and his friend Cafiero, who had been subsidising him, refused to find the money for his venture.
The following year, 1874, a rising in Bologna was planned by the Italian anarchists, and Bakunin decided to take part in it. His health had now completely broken down, he had just quarrelled with his closest friends and disciples, Guillaume, Sazhin and Cafiero, and he had little faith in the prospects of the rising. But he realised his death was near, and wished to end fighting in the streets as he had fought in Dresden a quarter of a century ago. He wrote a farewell letter to his friends in Switzerland, which ended on the note of resignation. “And now, my friends, it only remains for me to die. Adieu!”
The Bologna rising however was completely abortive and Bakunin had to return to Switzerland, this time disguised as an aged priest. It was the last of his revolutionary efforts and the remaining two years of his life were spent in abject poverty and declining strength. He despaired of the revolution taking place until the masses were impregnated with revolutionary feeling, and realised that the growing reaction in Europe made that more and more difficult. But he saw intuitively the shape of the future when he wrote to Elisée Reclus, “There remains another hope, the world war. Sooner or later these enormous military states will have to destroy and devour each other. But what an outlook!” He died on July 1st, 1876, in the hospital at Berne, and was buried quietly in that city.
Bakunin was essentially a revolutionary of the deed, a fighter at the barricades, an eloquent and inspiring orator. As a hearer said of him on one occasion, “The man was a born speaker, made for the revolution. The revolution was his natural being. His speech made a tremendous impression.”
Perhaps it was because he was so much the-man for action, for the impulsive deed, the impromptu appeal to the feelings of Men, that his best expositions of ideas are found in documents of such immediate importance as articles, speeches and memoranda to conferences, rather than in his fragmentary theoretical works.
Bakunin’s teachings differed from those of his early master, Proudhon, on two principle points. Firstly, he realised that with the development of large-scale industry, Proudhon’s idea of a society of small proprietors owning their own means of production and exchanging their products through exchange banks, was not longer practicable. He therefore envisaged what he called collective production under which the means of production would be owned and worked collectively by co-operative associations of workers.
The means of production were thus owned in common, but Bakunin did not reach the later stage of common ownership of the products of labour, advocated by Kropotkin a few years later, and in his theory the producer would be entitled to the value of the product of his individual labour.
The second point on which he differed from Proudhon was that he believed the State could not be abolished by reformist methods or by the power of example, and therefore proclaimed the necessity of revolution for “the destruction of all institutions of inequality, and the establishment of social and economic equality”. He did not, however, advocate the political revolution of Jacobins and Marxists, carried out by organised and disciplined parties. “Revolutions are never made,” he declared, “either by individuals or by secret societies. They come automatically, in a measure; the power of things, the current of events and facts, produces them. They are long preparing in the depth of the obscure consciousness of the masses - then they break out suddenly, not seldom on apparently slight occasion.” He spoke as an expert in revolution.
Monday, June 03, 2024
Giuseppe Garibaldi Was a Proud Internationalist
On this day in 1882, Giuseppe Garibaldi died after a lifetime fighting for a united Italy. He combined his patriotism with a proud internationalism — and a thirst for freedom that inspired working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.
Giuseppe Garibaldi poses for a portrait in 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
June 2 marks the anniversary of the Italian Republic. That day in 1946, a year after the overthrow of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, an institutional referendum was held together with the vote for the Constituent Assembly. It was also the first time that women voted in a national election, as Paola Cortellesi’s recent film C’è ancora domani reminded us. Most Italians voted for the republic, leading to King Umberto II’s exile to Portugal, then ruled by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. For the first time since national unification, Italy became a republic.
But June 2 is also another anniversary in Italian history: it is the day on which Giuseppe Garibaldi died, in 1882. He had ardently dreamt of this republic, but in vain, in his later years having to settle for Italian unification under the monarchy.
Almost 150 years later, the name “Garibaldi” is still familiar to millions. His name pops up across Italy: there is no city that does not have at least one street dedicated to him, in addition to several hundred statues throughout the country. But it’s not just in Italy: squares, streets, statues, stations, and plaques dedicated to him can be found in countless cities all over the world, from Montevideo to Taganrog, from New York to Havana. Cuba has even dedicated a commemorative coin to Garibaldi, el héroe de dos mundos.
But who was Giuseppe Garibaldi, really? Here, things get more difficult. Few today would know much beyond the bland definition of Garibaldi as a key figure in Italian unification. As US sociologist and scholar of collective memory Jeffrey K. Olick recently said, half jokingly, the best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.
So let us try to “demonumentalize” Garibaldi with some facts about his life. Trained as a sailor, Garibaldi spent many years as a young man working at sea, but he was also a language teacher in Istanbul, a spaghetti trader in Brazil, a corsair in the South Atlantic (attacking merchant ships and freeing black slaves on the ships), a math teacher in Uruguay, and a factory worker in New York. Garibaldi fought in seven different official armies: the Republic of the Rio Grande, Uruguay, the Lombard Provisional Government, the Roman Republic, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Italy, and France. He was arrested, and in some cases tortured, by the Russian police, but also by the French, the Argentine army, the Uruguayan police, the Kingdom of Sardinia (which also sentenced him to death), and then several times by the Italian police after national unification. He was also a member of parliament in five different states.
Here we will not delve into all the complexity of an immense and picturesque biography that can hardly be summarized in one article. But these facts immediately show us a crucial point: we would be mistaken if we confined Garibaldi exclusively to the role of Italian patriot.
Patriot and Internationalist
Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in fact in Latin America. He had fled there after the death sentence hanging over his head in Piedmont due to a failed insurrectionary attempt against the Savoy monarchy. But his first encounter with politics was even earlier: his intellectual “thunderbolt” came at age twenty-six, when the ship on which he worked was boarded by Saint-Simonian exiles (followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, the French libertarian socialist) who deeply fascinated Garibaldi. As he recalls in his memoirs, he learned from them that “the man who, becoming cosmopolitan, adopts humanity as his homeland and goes to offer sword and blood to every people fighting against tyranny, is more than a soldier: he is a hero.” This was the underlying ideal that drove him to join the Latin American rebellions.The best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.
Garibaldi would only return to Italy in 1848, to join the popular uprisings that were breaking out that year throughout the Italian peninsula. Andres Aguyar, a former black slave who had fought with Garibaldi in Uruguay and who decided to follow him to continue the revolutionary fight for freedom in Italy as well, left with him. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as “Anita,” Garibaldi’s Brazilian partner and comrade in arms during the Farroupilha Revolution, in which they had both participated, had also left shortly before.
Both Aguyar and Anita were to die in the tumultuous events of the Roman Republic of 1849, which hoisted the tricolor in Rome for the first time and which in its few months of existence distinguished itself for its radical features in both democratic and social terms (Valerio Evangelisti has written a fine historical novel on this event). Garibaldi and Aguyar defended the Republic militarily, but the latter was killed by a grenade from the French army that rushed to restore the pope to power. (As a black-skinned man, Aguyar is the only great Risorgimento patriot to whom Italy has not dedicated a statue on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, although it seems that it will finally be put up this year.) During the dramatic escape following the fall of the Roman Republic, Anita also died. Although she was ill, she wanted to stay with the revolutionaries to the last, until, while they were being hunted in a lagoon near Ravenna, she lost consciousness and then her life. She was only twenty-eight years old.
A Revolutionary With No Love for Revolution
The international dimension of Garibaldi’s figure is also confirmed by numerous events that intersect with the history of the democratic, workers’, and socialist movements. In 1860, Garibaldi organized the famous Expedition of the Thousand, in which he and a thousand volunteers rushed to support the popular uprising against the Bourbons in Sicily. At that time, Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism and later a friend of Garibaldi’s, was exiled in Siberia. In his memoirs he recounts:
I was in the capital of eastern Siberia, in Irkutsk, at the time of Garibaldi’s memorable campaign in Sicily and Naples. Well, I can say that all the people of Irkutsk passionately [took] the side of the liberator against the King of the Two Sicilies, a faithful ally of the Tsar! . . . In the years 1860–63, when the Russian rural world was in deep turmoil, the peasants of Great and Lesser Russia awaited the arrival of Garibaldov, and if they were asked who he was, they replied “He is a great leader, the friend of the poor people, and he will come to liberate us.”
At the same time in Glasgow, Scotland, the workers decided to work extra shifts to buy and ship ammunition and medical packs to Garibaldi’s forces
A year later, in 1861, US president Abraham Lincoln proposed to Garibaldi to join the American Civil War, publicly asking “the hero of liberty to lend the power of his name, his genius and his sword to the cause of the North.” After a moment’s consideration, however, Garibaldi refused because of the North’s hesitancy in focusing the war on the abolition of slavery. He demanded the immediate and total abolition of slavery as a precondition for his participation.Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in Latin America.
But let us turn to the more socialist aspects of Garibaldi, those that have been largely obscured by a celebratory Italian historiography. Garibaldi publicly sided with the First International; it was he who gave it the name “the sun of the future,” which in Italy soon became one of the most famous slogans of the workers’ and socialist movement. Garibaldi also supported the Paris Commune, which even elected him as its military leader, a role that the general could not accept as he had just returned to Caprera after fighting in France in the Franco-Prussian war and was now old and ill. On the barricades of the Paris Commune, however, there were many Garibaldians, dressed in the ever-present red shirt. They distinguished themselves during its defense as they were among the few “professional” revolutionaries with military training.
In spite of everything, Garibaldi was not an extremist. We could even say that he was a revolutionary who had no great love for revolutionary turmoil. In fact, his adherence to socialism and his convinced support for the nascent workers’ movement were accompanied by a distrust of the more radical fringes, which Garibaldi repeatedly criticized as harmful to the workers’ cause. Moreover, in the political conjuncture of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi repeatedly showed a pragmatic stance. Famous examples are his acceptance of monarchical rule at the Teano meeting of 1860, in which Garibaldi, as a convinced republican, handed over power in the liberated south of Italy to the Savoy monarch; and the “I obey” telegram of 1866, in which, on the king’s orders, he agreed to halt his advance toward Trento, and thus the fight against Austrian occupation.
Marx, Engels, and Garibaldi
Garibaldi’s political pragmatism, combined with a lively idealism not always imbued with theoretical depth, led Karl Marx to sometimes make derogatory comments toward Garibaldi, considering him, in some private letters, to be naive and an “ass.” But it would be a mistake to conclude that Marx and Friedrich Engels opposed the general. Not only because both of them, as scholars of military tactics, were captivated by Garibaldi’s extraordinary military capabilities (they both followed the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand with daily interest and much esteem). But above all because their correspondence often also contains very positive political judgements, especially on the part of Engels, who applauded Garibaldi’s support for the International, describing it as “of infinite value.” He increasingly forged contacts and ties with Garibaldi’s followers, starting with Garibaldi’s son, Ricciotti, whom they invited to Marx’s house in 1871.Garibaldi defined the proletariat as ‘the class to which I am honored to belong.’
Garibaldi’s name also recurred frequently in the polemics between Marxists and anarchists within the nascent Italian socialist movement (which in turn emerged largely from Garibaldi’s circles). In these early polemics, the general was often “drawn on” and claimed by each of the two currents. Hence Bakunin praised Garibaldi, identifying him with his own side — he wrote enthusiastically that “Garibaldi is increasingly being dragged along by that youth that bears his name, but goes, indeed, runs infinitely further than him.” But Engels expressed his delight that Garibaldi, while maintaining friendly relations with the Italian anarchists, considered mistaken their radical rejection of any principle of authority. Thus Engels concluded:
The old freedom fighter, who did more in the year 1860 alone than all the anarchists can attempt to do in their lifetime, appreciates discipline, all the more so since he had to constantly discipline his armed forces; and he did so not like official military circles, through military discipline and the constant threat of firing squad, but rather by standing in front of the enemy.
In the preface to volume III of Capital, Engels even went so far as to describe Garibaldi as a character of “unequalled classic perfection.”
Garibaldi after Garibaldi
While postunification Italy celebrated Garibaldi as one of the great heroes who had united the country, it also tried in every way to defuse his revolutionary charge. It sought to marginalize him, putting the brakes on any further subversive aspirations he might have had. Not only was Garibaldi repeatedly isolated in unofficial confinement on the island of Caprera, where he had retired to work as a farmer, never having wanted to earn anything from his military exploits, but he was also arrested by the Italian army. On the famous “Day of Aspromonte” in 1862, it even went so far as to shoot him, leaving him wounded.
A sterile, depoliticized, and institutionalized image of Garibaldi was thus upheld by various Italian governments after his death. This created a national pantheon that equated, and distorted, profoundly different political figures and sometimes even sworn enemies from the unification period, such as the count of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Garibaldi.
Instead, it was on the Left, in the popular and workers’ organizations scattered across Italy, that the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi, linked to the proletariat (which he defined as “the class to which I am honored to belong”), long endured. It was in memory of the patriot, internationalist, and socialist Garibaldi that the anti-fascist Italians who fought in Spain in 1936–39 chose the name “Battalón Garibaldi,” that the communist partisans during the Italian Resistance of 1943–45 called themselves “Garibaldi Brigades,” and that the Italians in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav liberation army took the title “Garibaldi Division.”
Again in 1948, in the republic’s first parliamentary elections, the socialists and communists united in an electoral front whose symbol was Garibaldi’s face on a star, all in the colors of the Italian flag.
Today, 142 years after Garibaldi’s death, it is important for the Left, and not just in Italy, to keep the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi alive. This means preserving him from an institutional narrative that reduces him to a statue with no political value. But it also means defending him from some recent attempts to discredit him, dusting off 150-year-old royalist propaganda portraying him as a mercenary or a conqueror. We owe this not only to him, but also to all those in the last century who, inspired by Garibaldi, gave their lives for freedom and socialism.
CONTRIBUTOR
Jacopo Custodi is a political scientist at the Scuola Normale Superiore and a comparative politics professor at Georgetown University. His books include Un’idea di Paese. La nazione nel pensiero di sinistra (Castelvecchi, 2023) and Radical Left Parties and National Identity in Spain, Italy and Portugal (Palgrave, 2022)
On this day in 1882, Giuseppe Garibaldi died after a lifetime fighting for a united Italy. He combined his patriotism with a proud internationalism — and a thirst for freedom that inspired working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.
Giuseppe Garibaldi poses for a portrait in 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
06.02.2024
JACOBIN
June 2 marks the anniversary of the Italian Republic. That day in 1946, a year after the overthrow of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, an institutional referendum was held together with the vote for the Constituent Assembly. It was also the first time that women voted in a national election, as Paola Cortellesi’s recent film C’è ancora domani reminded us. Most Italians voted for the republic, leading to King Umberto II’s exile to Portugal, then ruled by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. For the first time since national unification, Italy became a republic.
But June 2 is also another anniversary in Italian history: it is the day on which Giuseppe Garibaldi died, in 1882. He had ardently dreamt of this republic, but in vain, in his later years having to settle for Italian unification under the monarchy.
Almost 150 years later, the name “Garibaldi” is still familiar to millions. His name pops up across Italy: there is no city that does not have at least one street dedicated to him, in addition to several hundred statues throughout the country. But it’s not just in Italy: squares, streets, statues, stations, and plaques dedicated to him can be found in countless cities all over the world, from Montevideo to Taganrog, from New York to Havana. Cuba has even dedicated a commemorative coin to Garibaldi, el héroe de dos mundos.
But who was Giuseppe Garibaldi, really? Here, things get more difficult. Few today would know much beyond the bland definition of Garibaldi as a key figure in Italian unification. As US sociologist and scholar of collective memory Jeffrey K. Olick recently said, half jokingly, the best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.
So let us try to “demonumentalize” Garibaldi with some facts about his life. Trained as a sailor, Garibaldi spent many years as a young man working at sea, but he was also a language teacher in Istanbul, a spaghetti trader in Brazil, a corsair in the South Atlantic (attacking merchant ships and freeing black slaves on the ships), a math teacher in Uruguay, and a factory worker in New York. Garibaldi fought in seven different official armies: the Republic of the Rio Grande, Uruguay, the Lombard Provisional Government, the Roman Republic, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Italy, and France. He was arrested, and in some cases tortured, by the Russian police, but also by the French, the Argentine army, the Uruguayan police, the Kingdom of Sardinia (which also sentenced him to death), and then several times by the Italian police after national unification. He was also a member of parliament in five different states.
Here we will not delve into all the complexity of an immense and picturesque biography that can hardly be summarized in one article. But these facts immediately show us a crucial point: we would be mistaken if we confined Garibaldi exclusively to the role of Italian patriot.
Patriot and Internationalist
Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in fact in Latin America. He had fled there after the death sentence hanging over his head in Piedmont due to a failed insurrectionary attempt against the Savoy monarchy. But his first encounter with politics was even earlier: his intellectual “thunderbolt” came at age twenty-six, when the ship on which he worked was boarded by Saint-Simonian exiles (followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, the French libertarian socialist) who deeply fascinated Garibaldi. As he recalls in his memoirs, he learned from them that “the man who, becoming cosmopolitan, adopts humanity as his homeland and goes to offer sword and blood to every people fighting against tyranny, is more than a soldier: he is a hero.” This was the underlying ideal that drove him to join the Latin American rebellions.The best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.
Garibaldi would only return to Italy in 1848, to join the popular uprisings that were breaking out that year throughout the Italian peninsula. Andres Aguyar, a former black slave who had fought with Garibaldi in Uruguay and who decided to follow him to continue the revolutionary fight for freedom in Italy as well, left with him. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as “Anita,” Garibaldi’s Brazilian partner and comrade in arms during the Farroupilha Revolution, in which they had both participated, had also left shortly before.
Both Aguyar and Anita were to die in the tumultuous events of the Roman Republic of 1849, which hoisted the tricolor in Rome for the first time and which in its few months of existence distinguished itself for its radical features in both democratic and social terms (Valerio Evangelisti has written a fine historical novel on this event). Garibaldi and Aguyar defended the Republic militarily, but the latter was killed by a grenade from the French army that rushed to restore the pope to power. (As a black-skinned man, Aguyar is the only great Risorgimento patriot to whom Italy has not dedicated a statue on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, although it seems that it will finally be put up this year.) During the dramatic escape following the fall of the Roman Republic, Anita also died. Although she was ill, she wanted to stay with the revolutionaries to the last, until, while they were being hunted in a lagoon near Ravenna, she lost consciousness and then her life. She was only twenty-eight years old.
A Revolutionary With No Love for Revolution
The international dimension of Garibaldi’s figure is also confirmed by numerous events that intersect with the history of the democratic, workers’, and socialist movements. In 1860, Garibaldi organized the famous Expedition of the Thousand, in which he and a thousand volunteers rushed to support the popular uprising against the Bourbons in Sicily. At that time, Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism and later a friend of Garibaldi’s, was exiled in Siberia. In his memoirs he recounts:
I was in the capital of eastern Siberia, in Irkutsk, at the time of Garibaldi’s memorable campaign in Sicily and Naples. Well, I can say that all the people of Irkutsk passionately [took] the side of the liberator against the King of the Two Sicilies, a faithful ally of the Tsar! . . . In the years 1860–63, when the Russian rural world was in deep turmoil, the peasants of Great and Lesser Russia awaited the arrival of Garibaldov, and if they were asked who he was, they replied “He is a great leader, the friend of the poor people, and he will come to liberate us.”
At the same time in Glasgow, Scotland, the workers decided to work extra shifts to buy and ship ammunition and medical packs to Garibaldi’s forces
A year later, in 1861, US president Abraham Lincoln proposed to Garibaldi to join the American Civil War, publicly asking “the hero of liberty to lend the power of his name, his genius and his sword to the cause of the North.” After a moment’s consideration, however, Garibaldi refused because of the North’s hesitancy in focusing the war on the abolition of slavery. He demanded the immediate and total abolition of slavery as a precondition for his participation.Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in Latin America.
But let us turn to the more socialist aspects of Garibaldi, those that have been largely obscured by a celebratory Italian historiography. Garibaldi publicly sided with the First International; it was he who gave it the name “the sun of the future,” which in Italy soon became one of the most famous slogans of the workers’ and socialist movement. Garibaldi also supported the Paris Commune, which even elected him as its military leader, a role that the general could not accept as he had just returned to Caprera after fighting in France in the Franco-Prussian war and was now old and ill. On the barricades of the Paris Commune, however, there were many Garibaldians, dressed in the ever-present red shirt. They distinguished themselves during its defense as they were among the few “professional” revolutionaries with military training.
In spite of everything, Garibaldi was not an extremist. We could even say that he was a revolutionary who had no great love for revolutionary turmoil. In fact, his adherence to socialism and his convinced support for the nascent workers’ movement were accompanied by a distrust of the more radical fringes, which Garibaldi repeatedly criticized as harmful to the workers’ cause. Moreover, in the political conjuncture of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi repeatedly showed a pragmatic stance. Famous examples are his acceptance of monarchical rule at the Teano meeting of 1860, in which Garibaldi, as a convinced republican, handed over power in the liberated south of Italy to the Savoy monarch; and the “I obey” telegram of 1866, in which, on the king’s orders, he agreed to halt his advance toward Trento, and thus the fight against Austrian occupation.
Marx, Engels, and Garibaldi
Garibaldi’s political pragmatism, combined with a lively idealism not always imbued with theoretical depth, led Karl Marx to sometimes make derogatory comments toward Garibaldi, considering him, in some private letters, to be naive and an “ass.” But it would be a mistake to conclude that Marx and Friedrich Engels opposed the general. Not only because both of them, as scholars of military tactics, were captivated by Garibaldi’s extraordinary military capabilities (they both followed the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand with daily interest and much esteem). But above all because their correspondence often also contains very positive political judgements, especially on the part of Engels, who applauded Garibaldi’s support for the International, describing it as “of infinite value.” He increasingly forged contacts and ties with Garibaldi’s followers, starting with Garibaldi’s son, Ricciotti, whom they invited to Marx’s house in 1871.Garibaldi defined the proletariat as ‘the class to which I am honored to belong.’
Garibaldi’s name also recurred frequently in the polemics between Marxists and anarchists within the nascent Italian socialist movement (which in turn emerged largely from Garibaldi’s circles). In these early polemics, the general was often “drawn on” and claimed by each of the two currents. Hence Bakunin praised Garibaldi, identifying him with his own side — he wrote enthusiastically that “Garibaldi is increasingly being dragged along by that youth that bears his name, but goes, indeed, runs infinitely further than him.” But Engels expressed his delight that Garibaldi, while maintaining friendly relations with the Italian anarchists, considered mistaken their radical rejection of any principle of authority. Thus Engels concluded:
The old freedom fighter, who did more in the year 1860 alone than all the anarchists can attempt to do in their lifetime, appreciates discipline, all the more so since he had to constantly discipline his armed forces; and he did so not like official military circles, through military discipline and the constant threat of firing squad, but rather by standing in front of the enemy.
In the preface to volume III of Capital, Engels even went so far as to describe Garibaldi as a character of “unequalled classic perfection.”
Garibaldi after Garibaldi
While postunification Italy celebrated Garibaldi as one of the great heroes who had united the country, it also tried in every way to defuse his revolutionary charge. It sought to marginalize him, putting the brakes on any further subversive aspirations he might have had. Not only was Garibaldi repeatedly isolated in unofficial confinement on the island of Caprera, where he had retired to work as a farmer, never having wanted to earn anything from his military exploits, but he was also arrested by the Italian army. On the famous “Day of Aspromonte” in 1862, it even went so far as to shoot him, leaving him wounded.
A sterile, depoliticized, and institutionalized image of Garibaldi was thus upheld by various Italian governments after his death. This created a national pantheon that equated, and distorted, profoundly different political figures and sometimes even sworn enemies from the unification period, such as the count of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Garibaldi.
Instead, it was on the Left, in the popular and workers’ organizations scattered across Italy, that the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi, linked to the proletariat (which he defined as “the class to which I am honored to belong”), long endured. It was in memory of the patriot, internationalist, and socialist Garibaldi that the anti-fascist Italians who fought in Spain in 1936–39 chose the name “Battalón Garibaldi,” that the communist partisans during the Italian Resistance of 1943–45 called themselves “Garibaldi Brigades,” and that the Italians in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav liberation army took the title “Garibaldi Division.”
Again in 1948, in the republic’s first parliamentary elections, the socialists and communists united in an electoral front whose symbol was Garibaldi’s face on a star, all in the colors of the Italian flag.
Today, 142 years after Garibaldi’s death, it is important for the Left, and not just in Italy, to keep the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi alive. This means preserving him from an institutional narrative that reduces him to a statue with no political value. But it also means defending him from some recent attempts to discredit him, dusting off 150-year-old royalist propaganda portraying him as a mercenary or a conqueror. We owe this not only to him, but also to all those in the last century who, inspired by Garibaldi, gave their lives for freedom and socialism.
CONTRIBUTOR
Jacopo Custodi is a political scientist at the Scuola Normale Superiore and a comparative politics professor at Georgetown University. His books include Un’idea di Paese. La nazione nel pensiero di sinistra (Castelvecchi, 2023) and Radical Left Parties and National Identity in Spain, Italy and Portugal (Palgrave, 2022)
How Palestine Led My Coworkers and Me to Unionize
Customers visit a Philz Coffee in San Francisco, California, on July 23, 2009.
Take Off the Pin or Go Home
On December 21, 2023, I walked into my 6:30 a.m. shift and was immediately pulled aside by my manager. He told me to take off my “Free Palestine” pin for my own safety. I asked if there was any written rule that could justify this demand. He replied no, but said that I either had to take off the pin or go home. I was clocked in for fourteen minutes before I was sent home.
I was enraged as I left work. But as the hours went on, I received calls and texts from my coworkers who put on their own “Free Palestine” pins at work. Of the nine people scheduled to work that day, five of us wore Free Palestine pins, were instructed to take them off, refused, and were sent home.
In the months prior, I had been attending the Berkeley City Council meetings with some coworkers in an effort to support a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, which resulted in us being looped into a group chat on Signal of enthusiastic organizers in Berkeley. My coworkers and I immediately told our story to the other organizers on this group chat, who in turn shared it on their social media platforms. Before noon, some of the most dedicated activists in the Berkeley community had rallied to our cause — including a California State Senate candidate, Jovanka Beckles, who posted about our story that very day. Community members left bad reviews on Yelp, made phone calls, and even showed up in person at our store seeking to show support.
Most stunningly, all of my coworkers expressed only love and support for the difficult decision we each faced that day. Those of us who wore pins empathized with our coworkers who could not take the financial risk of losing expected wages, and those who stayed gave us hugs and encouragement as we were sent away, despite the chaos of the understaffed shop we were leaving them. No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.
Over the next month, nine different baristas would be sent home across twelve different shifts, accumulating over thirty-five hours of lost wages due to an unwritten rule prohibiting “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace. We started group chats, shared our story with customers, spoke to news outlets, and defended each other to corporate. A community-led GoFundMe account raised over a thousand dollars to compensate for our lost wages. At the end of January, Philz corporate finally compromised with us and decided we were allowed to wear pins that displayed the Palestinian flag but did not contain the words “Free Palestine.” We relented, many of us having lost more hours than we could afford. But none of us were ready to give up.No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.
One evening in early February, almost the entire staff of our shop, about twelve of us, gathered in my small living room to discuss our response to the events of the previous month. I took all of the lessons I had learned from studying labor history in school and working for unions and shared them with my coworkers. We considered filing charges claiming wage theft for management’s unjust sending us home and had even been approached by lawyers willing to support us. Yet we didn’t feel this would satisfy the frustration felt by the entire staff, not just those who were sent home, and ultimately would not remedy the company’s abuse of power. We wondered: Could our energies be better directed toward collective organizing?
We imagined not only a workplace that allowed us to openly support a free Palestine, but also one that paid us a livable wage, provided reasonable benefits, properly staffed each shift, and safeguarded us in criticizing corporate leadership. We wanted to unionize, and we wanted to do it independently.
The entire staff of Philz Coffee in Berkeley is particularly young, the oldest of us being twenty-six. We researched what affiliating with an established union would look like compared to an independent effort. We understood the benefits of resources and legal representation that could come with an established union, but we also saw a bureaucratic institution that sparked skepticism in our shared youthful, leftist anger. We had received tremendous community support through our conflicts at work and felt confident in our united motivation to make this a member-led effort. That night, every person in attendance signed a pledge card in agreement to be represented by the independent union, Philz Coffee United.
On February 20, 2024, we officially filed with the National Labor Relations Board, turning in authorization cards showing 83 percent support for the union. But in the coming weeks, chaos ensued at our store at the hands of management — as it does for so many workers after announcing their intention to unionize.
The Boss Pushback
Our manager pulled people into one-on-one meetings, illegally threatening that the company would withhold the upcoming mandatory $20 minimum wage increase for fast food restaurants in California. Posters were pinned to our news board displaying coercive and false information about unions and our upcoming election. A barrage of corporate employees, including the CEO, showed up at our store, attempting to manipulate our votes. An email was even sent out just six days before our election to each employee at our store, stating that the company had not decided whether or not to renew its lease at our location, and they just wanted to let us know.All eligible employees showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted ‘yes.’
We were understaffed and overworked every day. Yet none of this fazed us. We held weekly meetings, formed committees, developed a social media presence, and even held bake sales outside our store to share our story and raise funds. We struggled to keep our union-related conversations at work to a minimum and relied heavily on texts, group chats, calls, and FaceTimes to discuss each detail of our organizing.
On March 19, 100 percent of eligible employees — sixteen of us — at Philz Coffee in Berkeley showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted “yes.”
This victory was beautiful. However, soon after our election, the storm of finals season crashed into our staff, over half of whom were students, including myself. The time and energy available to us for this effort shrunk, and without legal representation or dedicated resources for negotiation efforts, we ended up stalling our own union’s progress. We are now being forced to reckon with our decision to unionize independently, which many encouraged us to do, given our shop and company size and glowing community support. The members of our union have diverse skills and experiences, but we are still just early-twenty-somethings trying to find our place in this world. Between school, work, rent, food, health care, and pleasure, our priorities and capacities are splintered, and truthfully, I am not sure what the future holds for Philz Coffee United.
From Palestine to a Union
Still, we pulled off a successful unionization, which begs several questions: Why would baristas in Berkeley, California, risk their financial security to support those being oppressed on the other side of the world? How did the same passion that fostered a global call for a cease-fire in Gaza produced a successful coffee shop unionization? How does the prohibition of wearing “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace and the exploitation of employees exhibit the same system of power that is actively devastating Palestinians in Gaza?
I can hold the truth that I am incredibly privileged as a white American living in California while Palestinians are massacred in Gaza and still recognize that my own suffering is linked to the suffering of Gazans through capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. These are the terms that echoed in each conversation I had with my coworkers during those months.
This solidarity allows us to hold the complicated truths of hierarchical levels of suffering and privilege while still recognizing and naming its common source. But it is ultimately liberation that is the magnetic force drawing all members of oppressed communities together. We see one another’s pain. We see one another’s fight.
I am unsure if history will deem the efforts of Philz Coffee United successful, given the struggles we have faced in rallying ourselves toward negotiations. Perhaps the members of Philz Coffee United will come back together with an even greater force, conduct fierce negotiations, and rally other stores to join. Alternatively, it is possible that, as early-twenty-somethings, this effort will dissolve as we all work toward different life goals.
Regardless, this experience transformed each of us into activists and organizers with concrete understandings of labor rights and the unionizing process. While I deeply long to see Philz Coffee United succeed, I understand that the larger labor movement is a marathon, not a sprint. We have each gained skills and knowledge that we will bring with us into our future work environments. And our commitment to achieving a free Palestine is as strong as ever.
CONTRIBUTOR
Taylor Valci is a union organizer and barista at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, California.
When my coworkers and I were disciplined for wearing pro-Palestine buttons to work, we realized that our supposedly progressive management wasn’t enough to protect our basic rights and freedoms on the job. We needed a union.
Customers visit a Philz Coffee in San Francisco, California, on July 23, 2009.
(Photo By Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
After October 7, 2023, like many other queer, leftist baristas around the country, I began wearing a “Free Palestine” pin to work. It was a small gesture of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, but what other kind of gesture was there for an average person like me to make?
I wasn’t the only one seeking such gestures. As the horrors of Israel’s assault on Gaza became clear, throngs of new customers flooded my location of Philz Coffee and its nearly eighty other stores, mostly in California, as they responded to the call for a Starbucks boycott for its lawsuit against its own pro-Palestine union. Philz Coffee was started by Phil Jaber, who immigrated from Palestine and contributed to the third-wave coffee movement with his pour-over techniques before stepping down from leadership in 2021.
Since its founding in 2003, Philz has fostered a culture of acceptance and advocacy, often displaying LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter flags in stores. I specifically applied to work at my local Philz because I believed I would be safe and accepted as transgender in my workplace. Still, like any other barista, I was underpaid and overworked.
While experiencing a big rush of customers at work, at least one of my coworkers would usually get a few laughs by suggesting we should unionize. We all knew we were being exploited and pushed beyond our limits, but this seemed to be the expected state of things. While I had held several research and organizing positions for unions in my own professional and academic history, I had little hope that we could make tangible change to our working conditions by organizing.
After my coworker reached out to human resources at Philz Coffee asking for a public statement condemning the genocide in Gaza, not only were they dismissed, but Philz Coffee revealed itself to be an adversary rather than ally of the cause of justice for Palestine. That rejection would eventually lead to an unexpected development: unionization at Philz.
06.02.2024
JACOBIN
After October 7, 2023, like many other queer, leftist baristas around the country, I began wearing a “Free Palestine” pin to work. It was a small gesture of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, but what other kind of gesture was there for an average person like me to make?
I wasn’t the only one seeking such gestures. As the horrors of Israel’s assault on Gaza became clear, throngs of new customers flooded my location of Philz Coffee and its nearly eighty other stores, mostly in California, as they responded to the call for a Starbucks boycott for its lawsuit against its own pro-Palestine union. Philz Coffee was started by Phil Jaber, who immigrated from Palestine and contributed to the third-wave coffee movement with his pour-over techniques before stepping down from leadership in 2021.
Since its founding in 2003, Philz has fostered a culture of acceptance and advocacy, often displaying LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter flags in stores. I specifically applied to work at my local Philz because I believed I would be safe and accepted as transgender in my workplace. Still, like any other barista, I was underpaid and overworked.
While experiencing a big rush of customers at work, at least one of my coworkers would usually get a few laughs by suggesting we should unionize. We all knew we were being exploited and pushed beyond our limits, but this seemed to be the expected state of things. While I had held several research and organizing positions for unions in my own professional and academic history, I had little hope that we could make tangible change to our working conditions by organizing.
After my coworker reached out to human resources at Philz Coffee asking for a public statement condemning the genocide in Gaza, not only were they dismissed, but Philz Coffee revealed itself to be an adversary rather than ally of the cause of justice for Palestine. That rejection would eventually lead to an unexpected development: unionization at Philz.
Take Off the Pin or Go Home
On December 21, 2023, I walked into my 6:30 a.m. shift and was immediately pulled aside by my manager. He told me to take off my “Free Palestine” pin for my own safety. I asked if there was any written rule that could justify this demand. He replied no, but said that I either had to take off the pin or go home. I was clocked in for fourteen minutes before I was sent home.
I was enraged as I left work. But as the hours went on, I received calls and texts from my coworkers who put on their own “Free Palestine” pins at work. Of the nine people scheduled to work that day, five of us wore Free Palestine pins, were instructed to take them off, refused, and were sent home.
In the months prior, I had been attending the Berkeley City Council meetings with some coworkers in an effort to support a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, which resulted in us being looped into a group chat on Signal of enthusiastic organizers in Berkeley. My coworkers and I immediately told our story to the other organizers on this group chat, who in turn shared it on their social media platforms. Before noon, some of the most dedicated activists in the Berkeley community had rallied to our cause — including a California State Senate candidate, Jovanka Beckles, who posted about our story that very day. Community members left bad reviews on Yelp, made phone calls, and even showed up in person at our store seeking to show support.
Most stunningly, all of my coworkers expressed only love and support for the difficult decision we each faced that day. Those of us who wore pins empathized with our coworkers who could not take the financial risk of losing expected wages, and those who stayed gave us hugs and encouragement as we were sent away, despite the chaos of the understaffed shop we were leaving them. No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.
Over the next month, nine different baristas would be sent home across twelve different shifts, accumulating over thirty-five hours of lost wages due to an unwritten rule prohibiting “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace. We started group chats, shared our story with customers, spoke to news outlets, and defended each other to corporate. A community-led GoFundMe account raised over a thousand dollars to compensate for our lost wages. At the end of January, Philz corporate finally compromised with us and decided we were allowed to wear pins that displayed the Palestinian flag but did not contain the words “Free Palestine.” We relented, many of us having lost more hours than we could afford. But none of us were ready to give up.No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.
One evening in early February, almost the entire staff of our shop, about twelve of us, gathered in my small living room to discuss our response to the events of the previous month. I took all of the lessons I had learned from studying labor history in school and working for unions and shared them with my coworkers. We considered filing charges claiming wage theft for management’s unjust sending us home and had even been approached by lawyers willing to support us. Yet we didn’t feel this would satisfy the frustration felt by the entire staff, not just those who were sent home, and ultimately would not remedy the company’s abuse of power. We wondered: Could our energies be better directed toward collective organizing?
We imagined not only a workplace that allowed us to openly support a free Palestine, but also one that paid us a livable wage, provided reasonable benefits, properly staffed each shift, and safeguarded us in criticizing corporate leadership. We wanted to unionize, and we wanted to do it independently.
The entire staff of Philz Coffee in Berkeley is particularly young, the oldest of us being twenty-six. We researched what affiliating with an established union would look like compared to an independent effort. We understood the benefits of resources and legal representation that could come with an established union, but we also saw a bureaucratic institution that sparked skepticism in our shared youthful, leftist anger. We had received tremendous community support through our conflicts at work and felt confident in our united motivation to make this a member-led effort. That night, every person in attendance signed a pledge card in agreement to be represented by the independent union, Philz Coffee United.
On February 20, 2024, we officially filed with the National Labor Relations Board, turning in authorization cards showing 83 percent support for the union. But in the coming weeks, chaos ensued at our store at the hands of management — as it does for so many workers after announcing their intention to unionize.
The Boss Pushback
Our manager pulled people into one-on-one meetings, illegally threatening that the company would withhold the upcoming mandatory $20 minimum wage increase for fast food restaurants in California. Posters were pinned to our news board displaying coercive and false information about unions and our upcoming election. A barrage of corporate employees, including the CEO, showed up at our store, attempting to manipulate our votes. An email was even sent out just six days before our election to each employee at our store, stating that the company had not decided whether or not to renew its lease at our location, and they just wanted to let us know.All eligible employees showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted ‘yes.’
We were understaffed and overworked every day. Yet none of this fazed us. We held weekly meetings, formed committees, developed a social media presence, and even held bake sales outside our store to share our story and raise funds. We struggled to keep our union-related conversations at work to a minimum and relied heavily on texts, group chats, calls, and FaceTimes to discuss each detail of our organizing.
On March 19, 100 percent of eligible employees — sixteen of us — at Philz Coffee in Berkeley showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted “yes.”
This victory was beautiful. However, soon after our election, the storm of finals season crashed into our staff, over half of whom were students, including myself. The time and energy available to us for this effort shrunk, and without legal representation or dedicated resources for negotiation efforts, we ended up stalling our own union’s progress. We are now being forced to reckon with our decision to unionize independently, which many encouraged us to do, given our shop and company size and glowing community support. The members of our union have diverse skills and experiences, but we are still just early-twenty-somethings trying to find our place in this world. Between school, work, rent, food, health care, and pleasure, our priorities and capacities are splintered, and truthfully, I am not sure what the future holds for Philz Coffee United.
From Palestine to a Union
Still, we pulled off a successful unionization, which begs several questions: Why would baristas in Berkeley, California, risk their financial security to support those being oppressed on the other side of the world? How did the same passion that fostered a global call for a cease-fire in Gaza produced a successful coffee shop unionization? How does the prohibition of wearing “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace and the exploitation of employees exhibit the same system of power that is actively devastating Palestinians in Gaza?
I can hold the truth that I am incredibly privileged as a white American living in California while Palestinians are massacred in Gaza and still recognize that my own suffering is linked to the suffering of Gazans through capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. These are the terms that echoed in each conversation I had with my coworkers during those months.
This solidarity allows us to hold the complicated truths of hierarchical levels of suffering and privilege while still recognizing and naming its common source. But it is ultimately liberation that is the magnetic force drawing all members of oppressed communities together. We see one another’s pain. We see one another’s fight.
I am unsure if history will deem the efforts of Philz Coffee United successful, given the struggles we have faced in rallying ourselves toward negotiations. Perhaps the members of Philz Coffee United will come back together with an even greater force, conduct fierce negotiations, and rally other stores to join. Alternatively, it is possible that, as early-twenty-somethings, this effort will dissolve as we all work toward different life goals.
Regardless, this experience transformed each of us into activists and organizers with concrete understandings of labor rights and the unionizing process. While I deeply long to see Philz Coffee United succeed, I understand that the larger labor movement is a marathon, not a sprint. We have each gained skills and knowledge that we will bring with us into our future work environments. And our commitment to achieving a free Palestine is as strong as ever.
CONTRIBUTOR
Taylor Valci is a union organizer and barista at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, California.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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