Sheinbaum Will Be Mexico’s Next President, But The Military Holds The Reins
June 8, 2024
Source: Ojalá
Rosa Icela Guzmán at the polling place where she is to cast her vote. Instead of spoiling her ballot, she wrote in the name of her son Luis Ángel López Guzmán, who is disappeared. By dignifying her vote with his memory, she hopes to help make her son and the thousands of disappeared in Mexico more visible. (Photo: María Ruíz)
Claudia Sheinbaum’s electoral victory on June 2 marked a turning point in Mexican history by electing the country’s first female president. But it is imperative to go beyond the symbolism in the country’s top office to examine the balance of forces that condition presidential power today.
There has been talk of a transformation of society and an end to neoliberalism and to the war on drugs since the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) began in December 2018. This was his much vaunted “Fourth Transformation.” However, the government did not make the deep changes in the political system that it promised.
The most progressive achievement of AMLO’s government is arguably the increase in the minimum wage. But the broader economic model that it embraced leaves much to be desired. The extractive industries remain intact. Almost half of federal spending goes to Pemex, the state oil company. The wealthiest continue not to pay the taxes they should. Foreign investment in maquilas and the promotion of mass tourism—both built on the exploitation of the working class and environmental dispossession and devastation—are put forward as the great hopes for the country’s future. Today, in the midst of the hottest spring in history, 85 percent of the country’s municipalities are suffering from drought, while private companies are hoarding water in aquifers. This is how the most violent six-year presidential term in recent decades is coming to a close.
For the first time, families of some of the more than 114,000 people disappeared—most of them since 2007—called on Mexicans to write-in the name of a disappeared person on their ballots. They made this call after AMLO had disillusioned them with his broken promises. In this election, approximately 1.3 million ballots were annulled, 100,000 more than in 2018.
As president, Sheinbaum will inherit a series of longstanding problems: the hyper-exploitation of workers, the lack of access to quality education and public healthcare, water scarcity, misogynist violence, paramilitary control on behalf of organized crime and extractive corporations in large parts of the country and an increasingly aggressive neighbor to the north.
But the new commander of the Armed Forces will face an additional problem: Mexico’s immensely powerful generals.
Growing militarization
Under López Obrador, militarization has expanded beyond anything in living memory.
During his term, the government increased the budgets of the Secretariat of National Defense and the Secretariat of the Navy by 150 percent. It used much of that public money to subsidize the unprecedented entry of the Armed Forces into the business of moving goods and passengers, tourism, and port and customs operations. This is one of the most significant changes that occurred during his six-year term, which ends on September 30.
“Between 2007 and August 2023, lawmakers presented 87 constitutional and legislative reforms designed to transfer civilian functions or budgets to the armed forces in Congress,” according to the National Militarization Inventory. “Of these, 77 percent were presented between September 1, 2018 and August 31, 2023.” These figures indicate that the militarization of civilian life is not new, but that it greatly expanded during AMLO’s time in office.
Morena, AMLO’s party, has an opportunistic attitude toward party alliances. This has assured it a supermajority in Congress and left it a handful of votes short of a supermajority in the Senate. A supermajority, made up of two-thirds of lawmakers, is enough to pass constitutional changes. If lawmakers use this majority to enshrine the militarization of public security into the Constitution, the outcome will be devastating.
Candidates said little about militarization during the presidential campaign. In a press conference shortly after the launch of her campaign, Sheinbaum denied the militarization of the country and minimized the army’s role in the National Guard. The National Guard was touted as a civilian-run force that would replace the Federal Police, but from its foundation in 2019 it has been under army control and led by a retired general. Today most of its 107,000 members are soldiers.
When Sheinbaum takes office in October, the Armed Forces will align itself with the executive branch, as it has done for almost 80 years. However, maintaining their loyalty will become much more costly thanks to the immense political and economic influence that the army and the marines gained under the leadership of López Obrador and his Morena party.
Who can say no to the generals?
As we recover from the post-election hangover, one question haunts us: who can say no to the Armed Forces?
Let’s take a concrete example, bearing in mind that we are talking about a country in which public hospitals lack medicine and basic supplies.
In April, the Ministry of Defense (SEDENA) used a company it controls to request $21 billion pesos (US$1.18 billion) for the purchase of airplanes for Mexicana de Aviacion, the formerly bankrupt airline that it was charged with rebuilding in 2023. This is a huge sum of money. By way of example, it’s nearly double what the Mexican Institute of Social Security spent on daycares in 2021. The day after the elections, Mexicana announced the purchase of 20 new airplanes from Brazil.
In the current six-year term, it became clear that the army gets what it asks for, but that the same does not apply the other way around. When civilians make requests from the army, they come away empty handed, even when the civilian in question is their commander in chief.
For decades, the armed forces have violently repressed popular, Indigenous, student and workers’ movements on behalf of the party in power while enjoying total impunity for their actions. Even after the democratization that occurred in 2000, it was impossible to get any justice for the thousands of victims of state violence that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. These are facts that any leftist in Mexico understands in their bones.
But then again, who cares? What matters here is the consolidation of a political project at any cost. Who better to guarantee the Fourth Transformation than “the people in uniform,” with their vertical organization, their training in waging war against the people, and their presence in nearly every neighborhood in Mexico?
We know that over the last six years López Obrador asked the army to give the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, which was investigating the disappearance of the 43 teaching students from Ayotzinapa, files relevant to the case. The army refused, of course. The president later stated publicly that the military didn’t participate in the disappearance of the 43 students, even though eight soldiers are charged with disappearance based on their involvement in the events in question.
On June 3, as soon as his successor was elected, AMLO met with the families of the 43, along with the secretaries of defense, navy and various civilians. They handed the families 15 of the 800 missing documents pertaining to what took place the night of the attacks in Iguala, Guerrero. Reporter Pablo Ferri notes that AMLO acknowledged the existence of the other documents, which he had previously denied, but went on to say that they are under reserve.
Days before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, the country will mark the tenth anniversary of the brutal disappearance of the young college students. Ten years and two presidents have allowed the crime to go unsolved, because neither the military’s special legal jurisdiction nor its impunity could be overcome.
When she takes office on October 1st, it is likely that we will again be told to be patient, to stay hopeful, to hold our breath and let the president do her work. We’ll be told that change is right around the corner. The problem is that Sheinbaum’s six-year term will begin with an original sin that will be difficult to correct: it will begin tightly bound to the armed forces, which are the most violent, conservative and anti-democratic organizations in México.
A Renewable Energy Transition that Doesn’t Harm Nature? It’s Not Just Possible, It’s EssentialJune 7, 2024
Source: The Conversation
Image by Reegan Moen, Public domain
Earth is facing a human-driven climate crisis, which demands a rapid transition to low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power. But we’re also living through a mass extinction event. Never before in human history have there been such high such rates of species loss and ecosystem collapse.
The biodiversity crisis is not just distressing, it’s a major threat to the global economy. More than half of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) directly depends on nature. The World Economic Forum rates biodiversity loss in the top risks to the global economy over the next decade, after climate change and natural disasters.
Human-driven climate change damages nature – and loss of nature exacerbates climate change. So if humanity’s efforts to mitigate climate change end up damaging nature, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Australia, however, must face up to an uncomfortable truth: we are putting renewable energy projects in places that damage the species and ecosystems on which we depend.
Renewables on the run
Renewable energy projects are being developed that damage nature and culturally significant sites. Others are resented by communities, or fail at regulatory hurdles.
Environmentally damaging projects put another nail in the coffin of species and ecosystems already under immense pressure. Even those that affect a relatively small area contribute to nature’s “death by a thousand cuts”.
Take, for example, the proposed Euston wind farm in southwest New South Wales. It would entail 96 turbines built near the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area, potentially affecting threatened birds.
And in North Queensland, the Upper Burdekin wind farm proposal will remove 769 hectares of endangered species habitat relied on by Sharman’s wallabies, koalas and northern greater gliders. The cleared area would be almost 200 times bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The simple overlay below, which we prepared, illustrates the problem in Queensland. The analysis, part of a research project funded by Boundless Earth, shows in stark detail the crossover between energy projects, transmission lines and nationally listed threatened species habitats and ecosystems.
The ‘fast-track’ can also be the good track
In their understandable haste to get more clean energy projects built, state and federal governments are promising to “streamline” approvals processes. Fast-tracked approvals will only provide net social benefit if they are based on good data, sound analysis and genuine community engagement.
Two successive reviews of our national environmental laws, most recently by Graeme Samuel, identified what’s needed to improve the efficiency of development approvals and get better outcomes for nature. The answer? Good planning at the regional scale, underpinned by good data.
At a minimum, we need to know the locations of threatened or culturally significant species and places, high-value agriculture and valuable natural areas. A proposed new federal body, Environmental Information Australia, would seek to centralise existing biodiversity data. But significantly more data are required to fill important knowledge gaps.
Good planning can create shared purpose and bring positive environmental and social outcomes, including certainty to developers and conservationists. In Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has enjoyed strong planning support based on good data and high community participation for more than 30 years, with some conservation success.
In contrast, poor planning polarises stakeholders and communities. It erodes trust between stakeholders, developers and government by reducing the integrity and quality of planning decisions. This leads to ongoing conflict over land use, as has been observed in Queensland.
A proposal to build a renewable energy microgrid in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest is a case in point. It is causing pain for local communities, pitting renewable energy advocates against conservation organisations.
When projects fail to gain community support and necessary approvals, the proponent’s money is wasted, and we lose precious time in the urgent transition to renewables.
Renewables projects should enhance nature
It’s surprising and disappointing how few proponents of Australian renewables projects actively seek to enhance the habitat values of the land their projects occupy.
In part, this is because planning regulations are still firmly focused on avoiding impacts to nature, and offsetting damage when it occurs.
Instead, we need policies and laws that compel nature-positive approaches that regenerate biodiversity.
In California, for example, a test project to grow native plants under solar panels is restoring prairie land and pollinator habitat at the site of a decommissioned nuclear power station. In Australia, there are occasional signs we may move in a similar direction.
It’s not hard to envisage a renewables rollout that prioritises projects on degraded, ex-agricultural land, avoiding damage to critical habitats and benefiting nature. Wind turbines should be built away from natural vegetation and migratory routes for birds and bats.
Our mapping for potential wind and solar projects in southern Queensland shows strong potential west of the Great Dividing Range for energy generation without the same level of land-use conflict with natural values and productive agriculture.
A major challenge to energy project development in Queensland, as in some other parts of Australia, is a lack of transmission infrastructure, or “poles and wires”, in the places where renewable energy and nature could most happily coexist. This infrastructure should urgently be developed in a way that does not impact natural vegetation and species habitats.
Rapidly reaching net zero is not negotiable to avoiding the worst ravages of climate change. But doing so in a way that damages nature is self-defeating. We have the planning tools and data needed to create a nature-positive climate transition. Now we need adequate state and Commonwealth government investment, leadership and political will.
Five Digital Strategies of Germany’s Neo-FascistsJune 7, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image by DT Rocks, Creative Commons 4.0
Germany’s far-right extremist party – the AfD – has achieved a domineering presence on “social media” – commercial online platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc. And breaking the digital power of the AfD is an urgent task for all democrats.
Imagine Germany’s Chancellor Herr Scholz, Finance Minister Herr Lindner, and Foreign Minister Frau Baerbock answer the following question, “what can people do who are unhappy with the current government?”, with a video that shows their combined answer, “vote AfD”.
Of course, Germany’s chancellor, vice-chancellor, and foreign minister would never utter these words – as all three belong to democratic parties. Yet, this scenario of a faked online election clip – using artificial intelligence (AI) – was one of the suggestions made by AfD apparatchiks to tempt unsuspecting voters to vote for the AfD.
Worse, the AfD has already posted a total of twenty-four of such “fake clips” in what the AfD calls “a digital advent calendar” – an online platform propaganda trick in the run-up to Christmas.
The AfD’s online propaganda shows the most successful use of AI in party communications ever undertaken in Germany. In fact, Germany’s neo-fascist AfD is the “pioneer” in the use of AI for electoral purposes, for fake news, far-right propaganda and otherwise.
That the AfD’s manipulative online strategy is leading voters – and the electoral process as a whole – into a destructive and undemocratic direction that includes gaslighting and fake TikTok clips, should hardly be surprising.
Many younger AfD apparatchiks have grown up as “digital natives” – people who are born in the “Age of the Internet” and are accustomed to the Internet. These AfD flunkies prefer to focus on direct communication with the electorate.
As awareness of the success of the AfD’s online strategy started to kick in, there were plenty of media reporting on the AfD’s dominance in online political advertising. Yet, the stratospheric advantage the AfD has achieved over Germany’s democratic parties barely becomes clear through numbers and figures alone.
What complicates this is the fact that the numbers of AfD fans, supporters and online followers alone do not provide concrete information about the actual reach and impact of the AfD’s online propaganda.
On TikTok, for example, an AfD video averaged 435 viewers in 2022 and 2023. By comparison: the videos of Germany’s conservatives (the CDU) averaged at just 90 – this is the second-best result! Yet, it still is way behind the AfD reaching five times as many people.
The most successful TikTok video of the neo-fascist AfD reached a whopping 6.6 million viewers. This propaganda video was entitled “This politics is crazy”.
It contains an excerpt from a speech by the AfD parliamentarian Martin Sichert. His far-right rhetoric is a political propaganda masterpiece. He falsely claimed that an Ukrainian refugee, driving a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, receives more state-financial support in Germany than a single mother.
This is not new. Hitler’s speeches presented an endless number of falsehoods. Yet millions believed the antisemitic nonsense of an Aryan race being threatened by a non-existing ‘worldwide conspiracy of Jews’. None of those twisted conspiracy fantasies ever occurred but millions were killed. As Madeleine Albright once said,
“it is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps
than to kill the ideas that gave them birth”.
To spread its dehumanising ideology, the AfD has become “the” champion of YouTube, TikTok, and so on. Worse, the far-right party also shows manipulative propaganda videos on its own TV channel called “AfD TV”. With this, the AfD reaches the highest number of people among all of Germany’s political parties.
The most successful YouTube videos of the AfD can reach an audience of millions. One of the AfD’s more disturbing propaganda videos, for example, is entitled “The income of politicians – simply UNFAIR!” It received 3.1 million viewers.
In it, the AfD attacks the compensation of democratically elected politicians. The AfD does not attack the rich and super-rich but politicians. Perhaps, the AfD’s goal is to eliminate such compensations so that only the rich can enter the parliament.
The next most popular AfD propaganda video is “The Weidel hammer” by – now officially labelled – “nazi-bitch” Alice Weidel. The video had 2.5 million viewers.
Apart from all this, Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) are also online platforms where the AfD has the highest number of interactions and the highest reach with its unscrupulous self-marketing postings.
Until today, the “online superpower” AfD remains the unchallenged titleholder when it comes to the Internet far outmanoeuvring all other parties. Worse, it holds this title on “all” relevant social media platforms. With its individualised contributions, the AfD is able to address an audience of millions.
From a strategic point of view, the AfD’s dominant presence on TikTok, for example, seems to be of great importance. In Germany’s 2021 election, the AfD only received 6% among first-time voters. The AfD’s overall result was: 12.6%. Since then, the AfD’s TikTok activities have significantly expanded to capture the pool of young voters.
The AfD has done this at all levels: federal, state, and local. This has contributed to better results among young voters. In the former East-Germany state of Saxony, for example, the AfD was supported by 21% of young voters – ahead of the Greens (20%) – the traditional home of Germany’s young voters.
These are some of the most outstanding successes of the AfD’s digital propaganda. Structurally, the electoral victories of Germany’s right-wing populists can largely be attributed to its popularity on social media platforms.
Yet, there is also a strong link between being relevant for online algorithms and displaying the typical characteristics of right-wing populism. This is the point where right-wing sensationalism meets the commercialism of online platforms.
Both attract each other. Right-wing populists deliver emotional, polarised, sensational and provocative contents. These are promptly rewarded by online algorithms creating – almost automatically and definitely “by default” – an extremely high visibility.
In addition to these favourable conditions, there are also several very specific reasons for the success of the AfD on online platforms. In essence, five factors can be identified:
1. Resources:
Firstly, the AfD spends an extremely high level of resources in terms of finance, personnel, and technology on its digital propaganda. The AfD was also the first political party to set up a professional studio for video production on its parliamentarian premises in Berlin.
With this, the AfD has gained a competitive advantage on old (Facebook) and new (TikTok, Telegram) platforms. It also utilises the “first mover” position to systematically communicate its far-right propaganda.
2. Propaganda instead of Information, Debate and Democratic Engagement:
Secondly, the AfD follows a strong self-understanding as a political party of PR. This understanding drives the AfD’s far-right propaganda strategy. In its digital propaganda strategy, the AfD’s plan is to substitute – ideally to eliminate or at least replace – independent journalism.
As one of the AfD’s top-Führers, Alice Weidel, once said, the goal is to make people watch “AfD –not ARD”. ARD is Germany’s most watched public TV channel. Once Germans have moved from independent TV channels to the propaganda channel of the AfD, the AfD is on a winning ticket. Goebbel-style Gleichschaltung of the media – like in Poland or Hungary – would no longer be needed.
True to its right-wing populism, on the AfD’s very own propaganda website “AfD-TV.de”, the AfD announced, Germany’s “old media and old parties distort the truth … therefore, we have launched AfD-TV.de”. In a classical Orwellian twist, the very opposite is true. The AfD has launched AfD-TV to distort the truth. Its goal is a Poland-like and Hungary-like “illiberal” state.
The propaganda strategy of AfD seeks to eliminate the division between party-PR and independent journalism. As with Goebbel’s dictatorship, both are set to become one and the same.
Contrary to the authoritarianism favoured by the AfD, the separation between party-PR and independent journalism is necessary for a democracy to work. Yet, the AfD does not want democracy to work.
3. The AfD’s Counter-Audience:
Thirdly, the strategic prioritisation in online platforms that is pushed by the AfD is supported by the guiding ideas of creating a right-wing counter-public. Inside such a counter-public, AfD politicians present themselves in terms of right-wing aesthetics, style, and appealing formats.
This PR strategy also includes the use of well-known influencers like Albanian AfD lackey Enxhi Selizacharias and supporter of the neo-fascist and deeply racist “Identitarian Movement” Roger Beckamp.
Both are known for using influencer-like propaganda. Beyond that, the AfD also relies on a huge number of young activists and media professionals from Germany’s digital-oriented far-right.
The AfD’s youth organisation is called “Young Alternative”. The JA works in close association with the even more radical “Identitarian Movement” (IM). Both outfits run their own high-reach channels using their very own influencers, i.e. manipulators.
IM and JA are also important cornerstones of the AfD’s right-wing extremist digital networks. These networks have become a kind of “right-wing influencer agencies”. These far-right online networks are able to coordinate political actions, mob violence, far-right rallies and electoral campaigns.
4. Building a new Volksgemeinschaft:
One of the more chilling examples of the success of the AfD’s online strategy was the Germanic-Austrian “Pride Month” campaign of 2023. It was set to build a right-wing extremist alternative to the progressive “Pride Parade”. The AfD’s idea was to counter, attack, and intimidate LGBTQ people. The purpose of this campaign was about building a white-power-style right-wing identity.
The AfD is constructing a far-right collective identity – a new Volksgemeinschaft – merging party ideology with its hallucination of a far-right nationalistic community. This is the AfD’s fourth success factor.
In its Facebook propaganda, for example, a well-designed chauvinistic “we” is constructed. This nationalistic “we” shapes almost 75% of recent posts. A sense of a right-wing community has been developed by the party for a socio-cultural and racial homogeneity built on history, race, and tradition.
5. The AfD as a Digital Propaganda Party:
As for the fifth propaganda strategy, negative emotions like fear, anger, indignation and resentment as well as “positive” (!) aspects like racial/white superiority are conjured up. Key to much of this is the AfD’s success in what is known as “message transfer”.
This means that the AfD’s propaganda talks inside Germany’s parliament are seamlessly being transferred to its online platforms. In other words, AfD politicians deliver pre-planned “platform-compliant” speeches in Germany’s parliament. These speeches and shouting matches are not designed for democratic engagement. They are designed for far-right propaganda.
Key parts of AfD speeches are deliberately and purposefully pre-formulated with regards to a statement’s length (60 to 90 seconds) and form (completed, short, pointed, simplifying, emotional and sensational). The format needs to be perfect for short videos to be posted on online platforms.
While Germany’s democratic parties are kept in the belief that the AfD is engaging in open debates, seeks conflict resolution, is interested in finding common ground and favours democratic commitment, the AfD has only one goal in mind: far-right propaganda.
In a subsequent step, these propaganda clips are distributed on its platforms with very eye-catching, pointed, and sensationalised headings. The primary target audience of such AfD speeches is not to be found in Germany’s parliament. Such speeches are designed to generate rage, fear, and resentment. They are made for the party’s “digital rage chambers”.
Fake news, false information, disinformation, images of imagined enemies and the strategy that one’s own party propaganda should replace independent journalism defines AfD’s manipulative hype.
While other political parties are democratic parties, the AfD is a “digital propaganda party”. One set of political parties works in the framework of democracy. The neo-fascist parties work in the framework of far-right propaganda.
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Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of a book on “The AfD”.
Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).
Electoral Setbacks for BJP Won’t Unseat Hindu Fascism in IndiaJune 7, 2024
Source: Truthout
Image by Election Commission of India
What will it take to defeat fascism in India — ruled by one of the world’s largest, oldest and well-funded fascist projects, Hindutva nationalism, now equipped with one of the world’s biggest digital identity surveillance databases? Though the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now been reduced in India’s recently concluded elections from its previous 303-seat majority to a 240-seat minority government — against widely broadcast exit poll predictions — the broader architecture of Hindutva fascism remains intact.
Perhaps the most revealing reaction to the BJP’s downgrading was that of the global financial markets. “The numbers so far showed the [BJP’s] margin of victory may not be as large as exit polls suggested, leading to a rout across markets. Indian shares posted their worst session in more than four years,” Reuters reported. “The biggest disappointment for the market is the fact that BJP does not have a majority (yet),” commented one market analyst. “Despite this the fact remains that the BJP-led alliance is still set to win a third term, which means continuity in the government’s infrastructure and manufacturing-led drive to boost economic growth,” opined another.
How damningly telling of the international community’s willingness to sacrifice Indians to the BJP’s “stable” fascism for the interest of capitalist accumulation. For the last 10 years, world rulers operating according to this execrable equation have feted and fawned over BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi — showering him with awards and accolades — as Muslims, Dalits (formerly referred to as “untouchables”), and other minoritized communities have been terrorized by ascendant lynch mobs, targeted by segregationist Hindu-supremacist legal measures and threatened with genocidal “elimination” by mass gatherings of Hindutva leaders.
Now, in the wake of Modi’s latest electoral “victory,” the U.S. White House congratulated India for its “vibrant democratic process” and President Joe Biden hailed “the friendship between our nations […] as we unlock a shared future of unlimited potential.” Adding to the “vibrancy” of this whole “democratic process,” of course, were the police beatings of Muslim and Dalit voters at the poll booths, against the dog whistle soundtrack of BJP campaigners including Modi fulminating against “vote jihad” and “a deep conspiracy to snatch [Hindu] property and distribute it” to Muslim “infiltrators.”
In Kashmir — crucible of the world’s most concentrated military occupation, sequestered behind regime-imposed communications blackouts — hundreds of political dissidents were reportedly detained without charge during the election period. In Gujarat — where in 2002 Modi, as state chief minister, presided over anti-Muslim pogroms in which women had their wombs slit open and breasts cut off, then expedited elections to take advantage of the resulting political capital — the government bulldozed the homes of hundreds of Muslims and then disqualified them from voting for lack of residence. In Assam — laboratory for the BJP’s “Nazification” of citizenship law and accompanying mass Muslim denationalization — 100,000 were obliterated from the voters’ rolls as “doubtful” citizens.
According to the Indian NGO Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy, approximately 30 million Muslims and 40 million Dalits in total have been expunged from electoral lists across the country.
In 1933, the Nazis seized power in Germany with 44 percent of the vote share; in India, thanks to the colonial legacy of the first-past-the-post system, the BJP managed to consolidate its rule in 2014 with only 31 percent. Perversely, “the process of democracy can be more repressive and more facilitative of repression then that which we recognize as out and out autocracy,” as Kashmiri American lawyer and activist Imraan Mir told Truthout.
Consecrating India’s “electoral autocracy” is an obscene pageantry of “democratic transparency.” The government of India Press Information Bureau boasted of the “largest ever global delegation to witness India’s General Election” and its “huge ‘democratic surpluses’ for the world.” In what kind of democratic state is democracy described as being in “surplus”? Participants in this exercise of fascistic election-washing included delegates from Australia (the prime minister of which has exalted Narendra Modi as “the boss” like Bruce Springsteen), Bhutan (which recently conferred upon Modi its highest civilian honor) and Israel (India’s fourth-largest supplier of weapons, duly “tested” in its own ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza).
In the eyes of less willfully delusional auditors, India’s primary surpluses register in the column not of “democracy” but of gross human rights violations. Seventy-seven percent of UN human rights experts’ complaints to India remain publicly unanswered; 445 cases identified by the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances concerning India since 1980 are still “pending.” The true number of state-induced disappearances in India is in fact many times higher — under Indian law, the thousands vanished into government torture centers and buried in mass graves are merely denoted as mysteriously “missing persons,” no guilty agent attributed.
Other causes for alarm enumerated in a statement by UN experts in advance of the election included “violence and hate crimes against minorities; dehumanizing rhetoric and incitement to discrimination and violence; targeted and arbitrary killings; acts of violence carried out by vigilante groups; targeted demolitions of homes of minorities; the intimidation, harassment and arbitrary and prolonged detention of human rights defenders and journalists; arbitrary displacement due to development mega-projects; and intercommunal violence, as well as the misuse of official agencies against perceived political opponents.”
State-empowered mobs and lynch gangs burn, plunder and torture Muslims with impunity, while chanting slogans and blasting “Hindutva pop” songs pledging to make “the [Muslim] skull-cap wearer bow down and say victory to [Hindu god] lord Ram.” Repeatedly, the Muslim communities most victimized are also most penalized. State agencies’ punitive razing of Muslims’ homes and businesses — a continuous stream of micro-Kristallnachts — has become so pervasive that a new term for the phenomenon has been invented by its perpetrators: “bulldozer justice.” A February 2024 report by Amnesty International — itself banned in India following the governments’ ransacking of its offices — investigated 63 such incidents and concluded that “targeted demolitions and forced evictions were used by the state authorities as a form of extrajudicial and collective and arbitrary punishment and retaliation against Muslims speaking against injustices and discrimination they were facing.”
As in the wake of the Nazi Kristallnacht, the immiseration of the dispossessed has been further compounded by falsely labeling them as the aggressors and ordering them to pay millions of dollars in “compensation.” What is this, except a manifestation of what renowned scholar of India Christophe Jaffrelot named as Hindutva’s “majoritarian inferiority complex” — a hallmark of genocidal ideology — which persists despite the overrepresentation of Muslims in virtually every metric of social marginalization and oppression, from rates of pre-trial incarceration, to poverty, to political erasure and exclusion.
Neoliberalism requires neofascism, as esteemed Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik has repeatedly warned. As inequality in India under the BJP-enabled “Billionaire Raj” is now even higher than under the colonial British Raj — according to a March 2024 report from the World Inequality Database — almost every previous BJP campaign promise of social advancement has been unfulfilled except for the advancement of totalizing Hindutva-ization.
Under the BJP’s penchant for converting public goods into privatized profits, even the local defense airport in Jamnagar was temporarily transformed earlier this year into a “private” international facility to service the $152 million pre-wedding celebrations of the son of top BJP crony Mukesh Ambani while impoverished Indians from children to elders who have been deprived of welfare benefits suffer hunger at record levels. Postmortems of some of the starved have found not even a single grain of food in their stomachs. As of October 2023, India had the highest rate in the world of child wasting due to undernutrition.
Modi’s economic “magic” is, in reality, a cauldron of “bullshit” — concocted of hidden data and manipulated statistics. As explicated by Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt, “bullshit” is not simply the refutation of truth but, more dangerously, the wholesale rendering of truth as irrelevant.
In the furtherance of this neofascist project, almost every Indian state institution has been turned into a bastion of ethnonationalist supremacism: entrenching changes likely to long outlast the reign of their BJP instigators. Standardized school textbooks have been revised to make them less “biased” and more “inspiring,” by expurgating Muslims from Indian history and extolling Hindutva’s fascist antecedents; for example, with chapters bearing titles such as “Hitler, the Supremo” and “Internal Achievements of Nazism.”
Universities and academic posts have been stacked with right-wing ideologues — Yellapragada Sudershan Rao of the Hindutva RSS History Wing, for instance, was installed as chair of the Indian Council for Historical Research despite his dearth of any peer-reviewed publications — while academics like Sabyasachi Das have been demonized and discredited for documenting possible BJP election manipulations, and world-recognized historian Ramachandra Guha barred from a university position for supposedly “strengthen[ing] the activities of national disintegration, reckless behaviour in the name of personal freedom, [and] freedom of Jammu and Kashmir.” In BJP-dominated Gujarat, the Times of India reported that the state has promulgated a list of 82 “suitable” Ph.D. thesis topics.
India’s courts too — long implicated in the subjugation and brutalization of Kashmir — have been co-opted under the boot of BJP domination as all-purpose state crime-laundering mechanisms. During the elections, the Supreme Court roundly dismissed all petitions challenging Modi’s hateful provocations, the absence of any independent electronic poll results verification, and the BJP’s executive takeover of the appointments process for the Election Commission in direct defiance of the court’s own prior decisions. Instead, it was the petitioners seeking to curb the state’s unchecked power who were impugned by the judges as “vested interest groups endeavouring to undermine the achievements and accomplishments of the nation.”
“The BJP did not have to invest much effort to convert institutions,” remarked eminent Dalit public intellectual Anand Teltumbde, himself a target of political “terrorism” prosecution in the infamous Bhima Koregaon case. “It’s with very little effort that institutions started complying with whatever the BJP would want them to do, they started doing on their own.”
As in Germany under Nazism, the alacritous “coordination” and collusion of state “justice” institutions with fascist government cloaks authoritarianism in a veneer of legitimization.
“The administration of law, instead of being an instrument for maintaining peace and harmony, has become the means by which the minorities can be kept in a state of perpetual fear,” wrote more than 100 former Indian civil servants in a 2022 open letter to Modi. Indeed, demonstrating the fascistic talent for word resignification, “law and order” in the Hindutva lexicon now means the extrajudicial, extraterritorial exertion of the state’s self-accorded license to assassinate: already long and liberally deployed against “internal public enemies” such as Indian Muslims, Dalits, Indigenous Adivasis and Kashmiris. “This new India comes into your home to kill you,” as Modi announced at a rally in April.
Yet still, the American drones and French-made fighter jets continue to flow into India’s arsenals, social media corporations furnish platforms for Hindutva hate and give awards to “influencers” who live-stream their vigilante tortures, while British companies like JCB provide the instruments of state vengeance by bulldozer. From genocide in Gaza to fascism in India, self-proclaimed human rights paragons continue to reveal their comfortable complicity in “ambient” atrocities: the tolerated degree of violence against the past and present colonized, perpetually written off as the cost of business and profit extraction as usual.
In the face of this permitted state terror and limited possibilities for transformation through the official channels of opposition, Indian organizations, movements, activists, lawyers and scholars — including those we spoke to for this piece — continue to bravely attempt to create the conditions for a world organized differently.
As prominent Indian Muslim peace and pluralism advocate Irfan Engineer told us, “Authoritarian government in one country encourages authoritarianism in other countries. The threat to human rights in one country is a threat to human rights world over. So we have to stand up together for democracy, for human rights, for humanization.” For those of us outside India, the first obligation of solidarity is working to remove our own states’ culpability for upholding and obfuscating the Hindutva fascist behemoth.
Cut Modi to Size: ‘We the People’ Take back Ownership of the Republic
If Narendra Modi were a democrat, he would read the mandate as it is meant to be read: as a call for him to step down.
June 6, 2024
Source: The Wire
Congress workers in Himachal Pradesh. Photo: Facebook.
What a healthful comeuppance. As if lending an ear to sentiments expressed in a previous column, the constitutional proprietors of Indian democracy, namely, “we the people”, have spoken for a creatively unstable paradigm of governance.
Where a dangerously power-drunk Narendra Modi repeatedly announced his intention to run away with the system of checks and balances by garnering 400-plus seats in parliament, little women and men whom he had robbed of their ownership of the republic have cannily cut his ambition in half.
If Modi’s backers among the corporate and media-owning barons made a killing on the stock market after the release of mendacious exit polls, the actual results have brought investors low many a league in subsequent losses.
How nice for that to have happened.
Only the market-friendly economic “experts” who lord it in “think tanks” and pink papers conflate the share market with the real economy.
Ordinary voters have seen through that subterfuge yet again.
They have also seen through the crooked politics of hate and subservience to false prophets, by defeating the BJP candidate from the constituency where the new grand Ram temple now supervises the new tourism industry that investors have created in Ayodhya.
Indeed, they cut Modi’s lead in Varanasi some sixfold from last time around, and defeated ruling party satraps in nearly all constituencies that surround Kashi.
In contrast, they not only gave the much-belittled, Rahul Gandhi victory in Rae Bareli by a big margin but delivered the coup d’grace in Amethi by making a mere devoted associate of the Gandhi family victorious over the irritatingly cocky darling of the right-wing, Smriti Irani.
The verdict
If Modi were a democrat, he would read the mandate as it is meant to be read: as a call for him to step down.
But of course the Trumps and the Modis only use the democratic scaffolding of the state to perpetuate personal rule.
If Trump has proudly declared that were he to win again he would be a “dictator” from day one, Modi has gone further during this campaign by claiming that his birth was not a “biological” one, but, reading between lines, immaculately ordained to spread the Hindu nation to the firmament.
That Modi made himself the sole issue in his campaign, referring to himself in the Caesarian third person 758 times, only to bite the dust, particularly underscores the propriety of his demitting office, and letting others in his party waiting cunningly in the wings both to further diminish him and to advance their own thus-far couched ambitions.
What happens now, when the electorate has rendered Modi dependent on allies who were never more than invisible dots on a useless piece of paper?
How will he persuade a Chandrababu Naidu or a Nitish Kumar to espouse Hindutva politics, marginalise Muslims, make a uniform civil code a legal reality, or to switch to a ‘one nation, one poll’ regime that bids fair to decimate the federal structure of the constitution?
Easier said than done. Thank god.
Other allies who may now become visibly unavoidable will have their own agendas, as they should, but will Modi find in himself the cleverness to eat humble pie now and again so that he continues to remain in office?
Never having run a coalition government, the daily annoyance of having to be thwarted in one grand scheme or another may prove just unsustainable for Modi’s totalitarian psyche.
This is where the INDIA alliance stands a far better chance at succeeding.
However much Modi may chafe at the thought, the record shows that it is non-BJP-led coalition governments in recent decades which have delivered the most democratically and materially profitable governance for the common weal.
One may mention the National Front government led by V.P. Singh, the minority government led by P.V, Narasimha Rao and the two terms of the United Progressive Alliance led by Manmohan Singh in this regard.
Can Modi find it in himself to so govern the realm in a creatively dynamic order of instability where now “we the people,” Muslims included, will find ingress into policy from one day to another?
And conversely, will the INDIA alliance now see its way through to assembling a coalition of the willing on the basis of a principled common agenda of action?
And the moot question: how may the honourable President of India now weigh these new realities in initiating a constitutional move towards the formation of a new government?
State institutions and the media
Nothing would aid and abet the people’s verdict for the reinstatement of democracy and a regime of rights as much as the metamorphosis of compromised state institutions and the mainstream media from enslaved entities to protectors of the republican order, as they are enjoined to be by the constitutional system.
God knows they have, in the last decade, brought enough disrepute on themselves not to want to seize this new opportunity to do right and proper by constitutional democracy, without fear, favour or clinging to ruling chieftains of any hue.
They may have noted that in the world’s oldest democracy, a former president could be hauled up by the rule of law and found guilty by 12 ordinary citizens doing their bit to shore up democracy.
Jai “we the people.”
Jai constitutional democracy.
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
The Next Front in Palestine Solidarity: Worker StrikesJune 5, 2024
Source: Socialist Project
This spring’s university encampment protests represented a welcome step up in the Palestine solidarity movement. Now, as students leave campus for the summer, their activism is spawning a further escalation – one that holds tremendous promise for the US anti-war movement: worker strikes.
This week, 48,000 University of California (UC) workers – postdocs, graduate student researchers, and teaching assistants – began a rolling strike in response to the violent police crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus students and workers. On Monday, 3,000 union members at UC Santa Cruz walked out of classrooms and research laboratories and onto picket lines. Today, May 23, Union leaders announced that beginning next Tuesday, more than 10,000 workers at UCLA and UC Davis will begin to strike as well, and other workers in the 11-campus UC system will soon follow.
Mass anti-war street demonstrations seek to disrupt political discourse. But there are very few instances – at least in the United States – of workers wielding the strike weapon to disrupt the war economy. The UC strike could introduce a powerful new strategy to not just resist today’s US support for the Israeli war on the Palestinians but also challenge the US imperialist war machine in the years ahead.
Expanding the Strikes
Two factors will determine whether this new anti-war front succeeds: First, whether UC workers can persuade others to expand the strike strategy to more universities – and even other industries; and second, whether the workers can sustain strikes through the inevitable backlash, which will be particularly brutal precisely because opponents will properly see widespread strike action as a significant threat to their war plans.
The UC workers – members of UAW 4811 – credit the student-led protests for inspiring their union to go on strike. Along with their peers across the country, UC students this spring began building encampments in solidarity with Palestine. The backlash from UC administrators mirrored the repression at Columbia University and elsewhere: mass, often violent arrests of students, graduate workers, and faculty at UC campuses in San Diego, Berkeley, Irvine, and most notoriously, in Los Angeles, where on April 30 police stood aside while a far-right mob attacked the peaceful encampment, shooting fireworks and pepper spray and beating pro-Palestinian students and workers with sticks. Just 24 hours later, as the protesters were recovering from the assault, police swept in and violently broke up the encampment, arresting 209 people.
“We watched our union siblings beaten by Zionist mobs while the university did nothing, at first,” said Jake Orbison, an English Department graduate student worker at UC Berkeley. Then, by “calling the cops to beat their students a second time,” the UC administration “politicized every UC campus,” Orbison said.
Last Wednesday, police from at least 23 different Orange County police departments assaulted the UC Irvine pro-Palestine encampment. They beat dozens of protesters, including History Department graduate student worker Mark Gradoni, who spent the night in jail alongside National Lawyers Guild legal observers, a journalist, faculty, and others who had been seized in the police riot. “It’s surreal to be at @UCIrvine, my workplace & intellectual home, to attend my friend’s dissertation defense and then be attacked, beaten, and jailed because members of our academic community hung a banner in the memory of the late [assassinated Palestinian human rights activist] Alex Odeh,” he tweeted the next day.
In the wake of the police crackdown, the UAW filed a series of unfair-labor-practice charges against the university, detailing how it violated the members’ legal and contractual rights when it attacked and arrested union members alongside others protesting peacefully.
The union demanded that the university provide amnesty for all protesting UC workers, students, and faculty; commit to the right to free speech and political expression on campus; divest from weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza; disclose all funding sources and investments; and, most ambitiously, give research workers transitional funding to opt out of projects tied to the US military or oppression of Palestinians.
In a series of strike authorization votes last week, nearly 20,000 UAW 4811 members statewide voted 79-21 percent in favor of striking.
Contemporary strikes in America usually focus on the traditional union contract topics of “wages, hours, and working conditions.” In this strike, the UAW members are pointing out that police violence, the suppression of speech, and the university’s role in the war economy are integrally tied to working conditions; solidarity with Palestinians half a world away starts with defending your own rights at work.
“When we’re fighting for wages, it’s about who has access to the university. Right now, our fight is about our right to political speech and protest, which goes to the heart of our rights as workers,” said UAW 4811 President Rafael Jaime, a graduate worker in the UCLA English Department. Workers elsewhere should take note of this expansive understanding of union rights.
UC leaders were quick to call the action “illegal.” But the UAW members appear undeterred by these employer threats. As education workers in the #RedForEd movement of recent years know well, the go-to union-busting move for employers facing a powerful strike is to declare it outside the law. Indeed, the declaration of illegality by employers is simply proof of workers’ tremendous strike power.
Observers outside the university setting may be skeptical that graduate student workers and postdocs striking for Palestine will have much economic impact. What does the ivory tower have to do with the Pentagon or the Israeli assault on Gaza? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Department of Defense
In 2021, the Department of Defense (DoD) gave a staggering $7.36-billion in research grants to 454 different colleges and universities. Last year, the University of California accepted $333-million from the DoD; the University of Texas at Austin, $191-million; the University of Southern California, $126 million; Columbia University, $49 million; Northeastern University, $33-million. These grants weren’t just for engineering programs and the hard sciences. Hundreds of millions of dollars in DoD grants went to math, psychology, and other social science departments. And those figures are likely a vast understatement of the war economy’s iron grip on higher education – they do not include grants from other federal agencies, outside of the Pentagon, that have military applications.
“People think about academic workers as somehow being removed from the supply chain of war production,” said Sarah Mason, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student worker. “The reality is that universities are a research arm of the defense industry. Millions and millions of dollars flow into laboratories on campuses across the UC, across the country. And this money is directly funding research that supports the war and occupation, not just in Palestine, but US imperialism around the world.”
Much of this military grant money gets obscured in “dual-use research,” which Isabel Kain, a graduate student worker in the UC Santa Cruz Astronomy Department, described as “research that has an obviously weaponizable threat, but also could be put to positive use in society,” such as medical and biological research. In the past, Kain said, many university researchers avoided confronting basic questions about their role in the war economy: “My research is my research and what other people do with it is not my problem.”
But the Israeli mass killings of Palestinians and universities’ violent reaction to the anti-war movement have changed the calculus for thousands of UC scientists, Kain said. “The brutal police crackdown is the thing that’s pushing them over the edge to take collective action,” she said.
This symbiotic relationship between universities and the military puts higher-education workers in a position of significant structural power. A strike by university workers won’t have the immediate impact of, say, longshore workers blocking a weapons shipment. But over time, and enacted across many campuses, a university workers’ strike could challenge the imperial war machine.
“We have a unique opportunity – we are workers at an institution that hides its financial interests behind a veil of the pursuit of knowledge, while maintaining its position as a key node in the military industrial complex’s knowledge production,” said Tara Plath, a graduate student researcher in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. “We have a role to expose and condemn how business is conducted at the UC, and how its bottom line is prioritized over the safety of academic workers and students alike.”
Two important developments in recent decades have made this strike moment possible. First is the changing composition of the university workforce. Fifty years ago, more than three-quarters of university faculty were tenure or tenure-track. Today, under the influence of increasing corporate control, universities have flipped those numbers: Some 75 percent of college classroom teachers are precariously employed as “adjuncts” – lecturers or graduate teaching assistants with no long-term job security. Laboratories, too, are dominated by graduate student workers and postdoctoral scholars. And increasingly, universities are turning to undergraduate workers to teach their peers, lead course sections, and do lab work.
The second development is that these workers – very highly trained, but just as precariously employed as Uber drivers or Amazon warehouse workers – did what comes natural to workers in exploitative circumstances: They banded together for self-defense.
In the last decade, more than 120,000 graduate and undergraduate workers across the US organized into unions, with more than 100,000 of those workers organizing in just the last three years, according to Joseph van der Naald at the City University of New York. Thousands more faculty – more than 8,200 last year alone – also formed unions during this period. In these new unions, workers have wasted little time in exercising their strike muscles. In the last year, there have been at least 18 higher education strikes, involving as many as 29,000 workers at a time, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker project. The UC workers now on a rolling strike know what it takes to run a picket line, having struck for six weeks in 2022.
None of this potential for worker strikes would have been possible during the last major anti-war upsurge, following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Veteran union organizer Gene Bruskin, one of the founders of US Labor Against the War, recalled the uphill battle just to get unions on record opposing the war. “We had to crank it out local by local, resolution by resolution, taking it into the national unions, organizing all the different entities to bring things to the floor. And that took months and months, and in some cases years,” he said.
Today, with university workers organized into unions, the opportunities are much greater. Yet none of the UC workers I spoke with in the last week seemed to be under any illusion about the scale of the challenge. They are going up against not just hostile university administrations but also big business leaders who are lobbying for severe crackdowns on the movement, a Biden White House that shamefully has denounced the protesters, and Israeli government leaders who are pledging to bring a new McCarthyism to US college campuses.
The student-led encampments have been organized admirably, but “organizing a strike is something of a different prospect,” said Jack Davies, a graduate worker at UC Santa Cruz. “A relatively small and coherent portion of the student body can drive a successful encampment and reach advanced positions on messaging, demands, platforms, etc. When you’re trying to organize a strike, you need a far broader commitment from the body of workers.”
Yet, Davies said, UAW 4811 members on the UC campuses seem determined to accept that challenge. “It’s crucial that we punch back right now, that we actually fight back, because workers across this country are getting the shit kicked out of them on this issue,” he said. “They’re getting fired, they’re getting arrested, even beaten. We’re seeing this in all kinds of sectors. And I think an example of a genuine fightback by organized labor in any sector is critical now, one that shows workers everywhere, in this moment, that the boss can’t have it all their way. What exactly is possible in our strike, and where it might lead in terms of winning real demands and setting precedents over disclosure, divestment, and transitional funding, is hard for anyone to say right now. I only know we have to hit back.” •
The Labor Movement Is Being Strengthened by the Fight for Palestine
Labor’s increasing support of the movement for Palestine is one of the most important developments in decades, and it is making our unions stronger.
June 6, 2024
Source: Left Voice
United Auto Workers members at the University of California marched in Oakland. Attacks on campus occupations have led to unfair labor practice charges and even a strike vote. Photo: UAW Local 2865.
On May 23, every single member of the 27-member executive board of the PSC CUNY union — which represents more than 30,000 staff, faculty, and graduate students at the City University of New York (CUNY) — unanimously stood against a resolution in support of the CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment and its demands, including full divestment from and academic boycott of Israel. The board’s argument: supporting these demands would weaken the union and hurt their ability to win a good contract.
This same argument — that the question of the genocide in Gaza is a divisive one that unions should avoid taking sides on — has been used by the leaders of several education unions to apologize for their lack of action since the first encampment at Columbia University was established on April 17. Sadly, many unions have continued to refrain from taking any direct action in support of the students or the calls from Palestinian organized labor to divest from Israel. Although many unions, including the PSC and the United Auto Workers (UAW), have called for a cease-fire, and some have even criticized the violence against the student encampments, few have actually backed up such statements with any kind of action. The leadership of the PSC, for instance, did not organize a single union member to attend the CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment in defense of the students, or to mobilize on May Day to defend the movement for Palestine in New York City. In the absence of such actions, calls for a ceasefire and statements about the right to protest issued by our union leaders are meaningless. Such statements, after all, should be the beginning, not the end, of action.
Thankfully, not every union has been so reticent to stand up for Palestine. Across the United States and Canada, rank-and-file union members have been stepping up to show their support for Palestine and to push their unions to do the same. And it’s working. Despite the failure of the bureaucratic leaderships of academic unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, other unions have heeded the call raised by their members to use their power to take real action to fight for Palestine and to end the genocide in Gaza. In doing so, they are not only building and strengthening the kinds of rank-and-file organizational infrastructures needed to take collective action, they are also building trust within the communities where they work, inspiring their members to become more involved, and expanding the horizons of what is possible for organized labor as a whole.
In Canada, for example, the Ontario Federation of Labor (OFL), which represents 54 unions and over a million workers, did not sit idly by while university officials threatened to dismantle the biggest Gaza solidarity encampment in North America at the University of Toronto. Instead, they called on all of their members to turn out in defense of the encampment, telling the university President, “[If] you decide to move against the students, you’ll have to go through the workers first.” In response to this fundamental act of solidarity, thousands of union members and workers joined an emergency meeting on May 27 to defend the encampment and show their support for the students and for Palestine. This display of power and worker organization may have been a pivotal moment for the movement, since just two days later a Canadian court ruled against the university’s request to disband the encampment, thus ensuring that it would be allowed to remain until at least the middle of June, after graduation ceremonies had ended. This action, however, was a victory not only for the encampment but also for the workers and their unions. Every time workers take action like this, every time they refuse to play by the rules and win, every time they expand their struggle beyond their own immediate interests, they become stronger, bolder, more organized, and more connected to the struggle and the rest of the working class. Thanks to this action, the OFL’s 1 million members can learn lessons from this victory, and take this energy and enthusiasm into their various contract struggles and their ongoing fight against Ontario premier Doug Ford’s cuts to public health care.
Meanwhile, in California, academic workers have begun what can only be called an historic strike in support of the student movement for Palestine. UAW 4811, which represents 48,000 workers across the University of California (UC), has launched what could be one of the biggest political strikes in the United States since the Taft Hartley Act outlawed such strikes in 1947. In response to the repression of the student movement and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, 4,811 members are now striking on five different UC campuses across the state, with plans to strike at more campuses this week if the university does not meet its demands. These demands include amnesty for all pro-Palestine protesters, divestment from weapons manufacturers “profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza,” and full disclosure of all university funding and investments.
While the union is arguing that the university engaged in an unfair labor practice (ULP) when it used police to break up encampments on several campuses, including UC Irvine and UC Los Angeles, where more than 210 students and workers were arrested after a violent raid by the Los Angeles Police Department, this strike isn’t only about the safety of the union members or their right to protest. It is fundamentally a political strike in support of the student movement for Palestine. And this is why it is so important. While the strategic move to strike in response to the ULP has so far protected the union from legal consequences, the members who are on strike know that they are defying the no-strike clause in their contract as well as the federal Taft Hartley Act, which explicitly outlaws political strikes.
As UAW 4811 member and UCLA PhD student Desmond Fonseca told the podcast On The Line last week,
We are going out on strike as part of this movement, to defend our right to be a part of this movement, to defend organized labor’s right to fight for a free Palestine, and it’s such a historic step that I know all of our workers are very conscious of. … We are expanding the horizons of what is possible. And as long as we show organized labor and the country as a whole that unions can be in this fight and can be in this fight seriously, and our members can be active and participate and can grow in their political consciousness about what side we’re on — we’re on the side of workers wherever they are oppressed and exploited across the world — and that to me is a victory … and it doesn’t end when our strike ends.
In other words, these workers know, whether they win their demands or not, that they are standing against the decades-long repression of political strikes in the United States, a struggle that makes us all stronger, and which can embolden other unions to do the same. Indeed, like New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits strikes by state employees, laws that limit the power of working people are only as powerful as we allow them to be, and the strike at the University of California is a perfect example of how to fight such laws by breaking them.
As the summer approaches and students head home, it is more and more important than ever that organized labor follow the lead of these workers and take the fight for Palestine into our workplaces everywhere, because solidarity makes us all stronger. But, of course, we cannot expect our leaders to do this for us. If we want to build fighting unions that can win real political demands, we must begin by organizing ourselves as the rank and file in opposition to the fake progressivism of our bureaucratic leaderships, which remain loyal to the Democratic Party and the state.
