Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Neoliberalism’s Hollow Promise of Freedom

INTERVIEW WITH GRACE BLAKELEY
December 17, 2024
Source: Jacobin


Image by British Department for International Development, Creative Commons 2.0

Despite the many horrors of today’s world, there are still people telling us that capitalism means the “freedom” of the market. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, Grace Blakeley, journalist and staff writer for Tribune, confronts this neoliberal mythology. She shows how much capitalism owes to planning and state intervention — and combines this with engaging case studies of corporate crimes, imperialist power, and financial bailouts. These are not “excesses” of capitalism, she argues, but its very essence.

In an interview, she spoke to Jacobin’s Helmer Stoel about her new book, her politics, and the challenges for the Left.

Helmer Stoel

What drew you into politics in the first place?

Grace Blakeley

I was raised in a quite political environment. My granddad was a communist and a shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He came from a working-class background and educated himself. At age fourteen, he ran away from home, joined the Navy, and read The Communist Manifesto. He and my grandmother had three kids, my mom, Karen, and then Karl and Keir, who were named after Karl Marx and Labour [Party] founder Keir Hardie. My parents were very involved in things like the Nicaragua solidarity campaign in the 1980s. From around age thirteen, I knew I wanted to do politics, but in a less-defined, generally progressive way.

I went to university to study PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], which probably made me more liberal. But during my African Studies course, I became a bit more radicalized. Studying PPE is like studying global capitalism from the perspective of those at the top, and African Studies is like studying it from the perspective of people at the bottom. After that, I wanted to go work in the United Nations or at an NGO, or do a PhD. But I thought that if I want to fix any of these problems I should start with the City of London, because it’s laundering all the money that’s sucked out of the Global South, much more than is going to these countries in development aid. That was also when Jeremy Corbyn was running for Labour leader.

I came to know about what Jeremy was doing through the work I was doing with the Tax Justice Network, which was combating the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion by financial institutions located in the City, scarring the Global South. Jeremy talked about international development and the exploitation of poor countries. I thought: this guy seems pretty good, maybe I should start helping him. That drew me into the Labour Party. Like for a lot of friends, this was a decisive moment for me: things might have turned out different if this had not happened.

Helmer Stoel

Your new book addresses a misunderstanding about how contemporary capitalism works: you point to the Cold War legacy of equating capitalism with the free market and socialism with planning. You argue that we need to stop speaking about “free-market capitalism” and acknowledge that it’s a hybrid system that also involves planning.

Grace Blakeley

The neoliberals would accept the idea that they planned for the construction of markets. But they’d also say that what happened within those markets was unplanned. They’d say: they’ve set the rules of the game, now you guys go and play it. But in Vulture Capitalism, I go further to say that actually neoliberalism involves constant, extensive, and pervasive planning once the game has started. It’s basically planning to protect the interests of capital: governments intervening to bail out financial institutions, big corporations, etc., and promulgating legislation that benefits them, corporate welfare, but also — beyond government intervention — corporate planning.

The whole idea of a free market is that no corporate institution should plan because you can only do what the market is telling you to do: you develop a business plan and the market context changes, you have to change your business plan accordingly, so as an individual firm, you have no real power because of all the competitive pressure exerted.

But within a monopolistic market, i.e., where there’s a firm insulated to some degree from competitive pressure, it can plan in a similar way to a government. Just as a government can say: we’re investing in this kind of technology and that determines the future of our society, corporations can say: we’re going to invest all our time and energy in building AI [artificial intelligence]. No one else gets to decide whether that’s a good use of resources. Corporations are so powerful that they’re able to shape the development of human society.

Helmer Stoel

Just to understand its appeal, in ideological terms, neoliberalism was also a story about freedom, and especially about how all planning threatened individual freedom.

Grace Blakeley

In the introduction, I talk about how the neoliberal project was based on what [Friedrich] Hayek called a “double truth.” He basically says that we will need to present these ideas as about a return to free markets: so, it’s about delivering individual freedom. It’s about your freedom of choice as a consumer. It’s about your freedom to basically do whatever you want. But underneath that, there will be this broader and deeper project, which is to some extent really about planning. It’s about how we develop systems that encourage particular types of behavior and prevent others.

In the UK, the idea of the freedom to do whatever you like and become very wealthy was historically associated with the breaking up of the unions, and in place of that kind of collective power you have the sale of social housing, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the sale of those assets to individuals.

Alongside a big financial boom, that meant that those assets increased substantially in value, so people feel like they have become wealthier because of their investments as mini-capitalists. That “entrepreneurialism” is the carrot of neoliberalism: the idea that if you compete in the way that we’re telling you, you will become wealthy, you will succeed, and you will have a kind of stable, secure life, etc.

The flip side of that is the actual reason that these changes were implemented. This is what the “double truth” means. The story told to everyone is: we want to create an entrepreneurial society. So, we’re going to let you buy your home, invest in stock markets, etc. But the intention was to break up collective power and encourage people to think of themselves as individuals. This was, again, an intentional form of planning. It was about breaking the collective spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and replacing it with isolated, atomized individuals who were just competing against one another.

So, you had attacks on the labor movement and the creation of anti-union laws but also this privatization and financialization: giving people their own homes, allowing them to invest in stock markets, piling debt on top of them to purchase all these things. This is a powerful disciplining tool to encourage people to compete with each other and to think of themselves as isolated individuals.

My parents’ generation bought their houses for £30,000 in the 1980s and they’re now worth millions. They make sense of that not in terms of social trends, but by saying, “I’m a really successful entrepreneur. I’m intelligent. I’m good at reading the market.” That really encourages this shift toward individualism. But then those who don’t own assets are disciplined by the fact that their wages are lower, they have no bargaining power, they have a lot of debt. The ideology of competitive individualism encourages you to blame yourself for those things.

Helmer Stoel

You give several case studies, including the Boeing safety scandals. Many of these companies occupy a monopolistic position. Still, they have to compete. How does Boeing compete with Airbus? And why don’t they do this through price-setting?

Grace Blakeley

Rather than competing over price — which both companies realize doesn’t work in the long term — they keep prices stable and coordinate and collude. They compete over cutting costs in the form of wages, for example by gouging suppliers. They use their market power relative to smaller companies to demand concessions. Then there are also forms of political corruption to extract wealth from different parts of the supply chain. Boeing has been embroiled in multiple corruption scandals and has close links with government, as in the deal with Southwest, for example.

Helmer Stoel

The power of asset managers such as BlackRock is also enormous. Already in Stolen you introduce the idea of a people’s asset manager [PAM].

Grace Blakeley

Asset management basically involves investing other people’s money. The big investment banks have asset management arms that invest capital that is theirs to invest. I said that the synergies that arise from this model are quite significant because an investment bank might lend money to a growing start-up, for example, and then its asset management arm might also view this as a really good investment opportunity.

My proposal is that we could set up a national investment fund that would invest in, for example, sustainable technology companies or infrastructure projects — things that we wanted to invest in. Then the people’s asset manager can take an ownership stake in those companies so that any returns that accrue from the bank’s lending come to the ultimate owners, the public.

Basically, it hinges on the distinction between borrowing where you don’t get ownership of the asset, versus investment like buying a stock or a share or taking a position in a company where you do get an ownership stake. If you have that stake, then you have a right to the future returns from that project. So, the argument was that having a national investment bank isn’t enough: you also need an institution that’s capable of taking an ownership stake in those companies.

That could be funded through a citizens’ wealth fund, like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which has an ownership stake in many sectors across the global economy. The difference, here, would be that a people’s asset manager would have a democratically elected board, representation for the labor movement, and there would be frequent public consultations about what people wanted to see investment in.

Helmer Stoel

You describe how corporate planning influences the daily lives of workers — and have a chapter on Fordism. You describe Jeff Bezos as “the Ford of our age.” Many have argued that we have long since entered post-Fordism. Does something about Fordism still exist in companies such as Amazon?

Grace Blakeley

I don’t think that you can say that Fordism has continued. The model isn’t the same as it was in the 1940s. The argument is, rather, that the kind of society that we get reflects the balance of class power. The reason that Fordism was Fordism is that there was a class of organized workers who were able to demand much more from their bosses within the Ford corporation, which meant that certain demands had to be conceded.

Ford also required a certain macroeconomic context, basically characterized by stability. So, the American state stepped in to create those conditions, muting the ups and downs of the business cycle and stepping in to mediate between bosses and workers when required. So, the whole setup of Fordism, isn’t just a particular regime of accumulation that comes from legislation or institutions as these new Nobel Prize winning economists would talk about. It’s about the balance of class power.

When that balance shifted during the 1970s and ’80s, as a result of various changes related to both the structure of capitalism and to particular decisions made by institutions and individuals, that’s when you see a shift from a Fordist production process to what you could call the Amazon process. In this model, labor has been decisively defeated, so you can hire exploited workers on whatever basis you like, tell them to do whatever you like, treat them like robots and they will struggle to organize.

This model also has more frequent crises. Yet a company like Amazon is so powerful that it doesn’t necessarily require macroeconomic certainty to be able to generate profits. It basically encloses an entire market and is able to generate certainty for that; it doesn’t need the state to intervene to mediate between labor and capital because labor has no power. So, all these changes in the nature of regulation and political economy come back to the balance of class power rather than being a purely intellectual or ideological shift.

Helmer Stoel

The last part of the book discusses successful cases of democratic-socialist planning, such as Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Proposals for socialist planning often face the same objections: the problem of scale, and price as a coordinating mechanism for the market. A lot of this reverts back to the debates on socialist planning of the 1920s.

Grace Blakeley

I do get frustrated with the academization of some of these debates because you cannot abstract these questions from what is happening in practice. I’m perfectly sympathetic to the people involved in the original socialist calculation debate. This debate was grounded in a particular historical moment and also alongside particular political movements that wanted answers to these questions.

In some cases, these debates around cybernetics were being implemented in the USSR but they were shut down by central planners who didn’t want more self-organizing systems. That was all good stuff, but it was rooted in a particular political moment and movement that had the potential to make these ideas reality. Today, if we are addressing the question of democratic planning by putting a bunch of numbers into a computer model or trying to build a model that will allow us to efficiently allocate resources in a centrally planned society without money, we are not doing our jobs, because that is not the question that we need to be asking.

Right now — and this is why I start with these questions around power and planning — we need to ask how we can give people enough sense of their own power that they start challenging the system. I didn’t come to this issue of planning from an intellectual interest, like whether centralized planning is a more efficient way of allocating society’s resources. I came to it because the economy we have now is based on a pervasive and invisible form of centralized planning that is very difficult to challenge and that rests on an ideology that tells people that you live in a competitive economy and have to compete with people around you. That’s what makes the system work. Even though it’s not true, this is part of the ideology.

It’s that ideology of competitive individualism that stands in the way of any socialist transformation, regardless of how you think it might happen, because people are so convinced that they are on their own. Collectivism is the crucial condition for any socialist movement. In these competitive individualistic societies, there’s an immense amount of organized power at the top but people confront that as an isolated individual, and think, yeah, capitalism is broken. Politicians work with businesses to keep me down, but I’m on my own. There’s nothing I can do about that. That’s the big problem we have.

So, how do we break through that ideology? Well, we have to show that capitalism isn’t actually a free-market competitive system. The people at the top are cooperating with each other all the time, but they convince us that we have to compete and that we have to operate in this free-market system, because that’s the most efficient thing.

Helmer Stoel

You’re quite critical of the state of the Left. You describe cartelization: the process by which social democratic parties become intertwined with state power and the interest of capital. Can we see Blairism as the paradigmatic case?

Grace Blakeley

Yes, the political scientists who developed that idea of cartelization were studying the US Democrats and Labour. They said that the breaking of the link between labor parties and their mass spaces — both with the union movement and with the party membership — has been a decisive step toward the creation of political cartels that don’t need to pay any attention to the interests of members or the people that they’re supposed to represent. Instead, they can develop links with the state and then agreements with other political parties to neatly swap over political power when elections come without ever challenging the fundamental basis of the system.

Helmer Stoel

In the summer, Britain was shocked by far-right anti-immigration riots, starting after the terrible mass stabbing in Southport. Among left-wing commentators, there has been a heated debate on if economic factors are still relevant here, since racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric played such a major role. Do you think there is a link?

Grace Blakeley

There is a link, but it’s mediated by psychological factors. The starting point is people feeling alienated and disempowered. If you feel like you have literally no control over your own life or anything that’s happening around you, 80 percent of people will say I am just going to completely disengage from politics, whereas 20 percent will react with rage. Some will channel it into something productive, some into something reactive. How that rage is channeled will be defined by how people think about themselves and their relationships to other people.

In an individualistic society, there are no mechanisms to channel that rage into something productive. In the past, if it had made you angry, you would do something about this: join a union or a political party, go to a protest. But because today we have this pervasive individualism, you confront that powerlessness on your own. That’s what my next book will be about.

It’s not a purely economic thing: it’s not just that people’s living standards are going down. They feel powerless to change anything and they confront that powerlessness on their own, so that generates a form of individualized rage, which is kind of like Nietzschean revanchism.

You just want to take revenge on the people who are fucking you over, so you elect someone who says that they’re going to do that revenge for you. Or you get out onto the streets and you take that revenge yourself. What are you doing when you are doing that? You are taking back a sense of your own power. How? By wielding that power over people even more powerless than you are. You’re replicating the system within which you exist.

Helmer Stoel

You were also quite critical of Corbyn. Is there any way to revive a meaningful post-Corbyn left in Britain right now?

Grace Blakeley

I was very much part of it. But there are things that I’ve realized since then that matter a lot for the critique of the movement I would now have. In the book, I argue that approaching people with an offer of protection by a capitalist state is very different than approaching them with an offer of empowerment.

Today, the Left/Right divide in most advanced economies is the Left saying that the government will protect you, and the Right saying that the market will give you freedom. We played into that. We said capitalism’s failed, but don’t worry, vote for a Labour government because they’ll protect you from all the worst excesses of the capitalist market. Then they come into power and not only do they largely fail to protect people but actually end up working on behalf of the interests of big business and embroiled in all sorts of forms of corruption.

So, people look at that and they think that these people are untrustworthy; and then the Right profits from that by saying the government’s corrupt, so let’s shrink the state and give more power to the market. Then you get massive corporate scandals like Boeing planes falling out of the sky and people say: well, capitalism’s broken, so what’s the other option?

What I’m saying is that those two things aren’t separate. The foundations of political power in a capitalist society are also economic and the foundations of economic power in a capitalist society are also political. This isn’t a new argument. But it has implications for the kinds of politics that we have. If the Left says: give us power and the government will do nice things for you, people aren’t going to believe it. They’ll say: “How stupid do you think we are? We’ve had so many Labour governments and my life hasn’t gotten any better.”

That’s the problem with trying to organize an electoral political project that doesn’t have a mass base. If you want to convincingly argue how things will change when a Labour government is in power, that has to be rooted in people’s experience of a collective political project. It has to be like: we did community wealth building and all got involved and voted on how the local government spent its money and we built a cooperative and it created jobs, or we built union organization. That means collective empowerment. We didn’t have that foundation, though. All the more successful socialist movements in the world did.

Helmer Stoel

Often the word “populism” is used to mean just anything different from the established order. Should we embrace it?

Grace Blakeley

There are different kinds of populism. There is a didactic populism, where there’s a leader speaking to a bunch of different individuals, so many tiny dots connected to the leader but not to each other. That’s not going to work. There’s another type of populism which is communities, workplaces, and groups of people connected to each other in places through a movement, who are also connected to a party or an institution or a leader or a wider group. That’s the basis of a potentially successful populism. But it is built on the foundation of collective organizing.

Then there’s a technocratic anti-populism, i.e., rule by experts, which is a part of the neoliberal settlement that was aimed at depoliticizing policy. We now live in a world where because that’s become so dominant, anything that isn’t that is described as “populism,” but actually that’s just the whole of politics.

Helmer Stoel

You are involved in several left-wing media outlets, such as Tribune and Novara Media. What advice would you give to those involved in left-wing media?

Grace Blakeley

I think you have to meet people where they are. The Left is infected with the focus on the individual. I think a lot of left-wingers spend too much time focusing on how to accumulate as many ideas as possible in their own heads and in doing so they unconsciously create a huge separation between themselves and everyone else, because the vast majority of people are not going to have access to most of those ideas.

Having access to a broad range of ideas is always good for understanding the world — but unless you work really hard to avoid it, this will also make it harder for you to communicate with everyone else. You’ll be taking for granted stuff that nobody else knows about. The more deeply you become embedded in academic institutions and discourses, the harder it is to have a common language with the average person. Your world is so far from theirs that it’s difficult to build bridges.

Intellectual debates about Marxism and capitalism — at least how those arguments are expressed — have hardly any relevance for most people’s lives. So, the best thing is to go and talk to the people who we’re trying to talk to, listen to the language they’re using, listen to the stories that they’re telling, and start thinking: How can we speak that language? How can we tell our stories in those same ways? We have to confront our own egos and focus much more on talking to people who our ideas are meant to be relevant to than convincing each other we’re clever.

Expressing your ideas and your values in their language requires embedding yourself in particular communities. The best example is the Belgian Workers’ Party. Look at how they deal with anti-immigrant rhetoric in the communities they’re in. They have a network of activists and organizers who go into those communities, have barbecues where people who’ve been involved in the far right come, and they talk to them.

You’ll never convince some of them — fine — but other people are in this weird space of “I’m angry but I don’t know why.” The far right appeals to them because it makes them feel powerful. We need to be thinking about how we can speak their language.

Helmer Stoel

People often equate Marxism with equality, while in fact Marx himself was quite critical of this ideal and more interested in freedom. How do you see it?

Grace Blakeley

The idea of equality only really emerged with the development of capitalism. Any society historically is structured according to a particular hierarchy. Some people will have more power and influence than others. Equality, in an extreme sense, could mean dismantling any form of hierarchy. That’s not a realistic understanding of the way human societies work and the obsession with equality only really emerges as a preoccupation for humanity when inequality becomes so significant. Inequality obviously stems from the divergent ownership of resources, as a negative consequence of the monopolization of ownership.

But there are many other negative consequences, and another big one is that it undermines people’s freedom and autonomy. I’m thinking about what makes a good life, which is really what we’re all considering when we’re thinking about politics and socialism. You need a minimum amount of resources to survive. But if I’m thinking about what’s going to make my life better, having a sense of control and autonomy is more important than a perfect sense of equality or even accumulating a lot of resources.

I believe a more equal society in which we all had a sense of control and ownership and autonomy over society’s resources would be better for the rich as well. It would make them less narcissistic and psychologically self-obsessed. A good life also involves community and connection, and that’s something that we’re really missing today in society. We’re so individualized and isolated that we focus on this little package of stuff that we own rather than thinking about the links that tie us together in our communities, in our workplaces. And yes, I think that impoverishes our lives.


Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune, and the author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation.
Labor’s “Barbarossa” Moment

Fascism is coming. Unions ignored the warning signs.
December 18, 2024
Source: Liberation Road Notes


John Albok, "May Day (Fight Fascism)," 1937, vintage gelatin silver print



On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa commenced with a blaze of artillery, accompanied by aircraft bombardment and massive troop advances. The German invasion of the USSR was treated by many people at the time, and later, as a surprise attack. After all, Nazi Germany and the USSR had signed a nonaggression pact in 1939. In fact, up to the minute of the invasion the USSR was still shipping raw materials to Germany in accordance with the agreement.

But the attack was no surprise. For months preceding the invasion, Soviet intelligence, and at a key moment the so-called “Lucy ring” (based in Switzerland), had been sending warnings to Moscow about a pending invasion. The warnings were ignored. Stalin and his inner circle would not take the warnings seriously, claiming that these were efforts by Britain to distract the USSR from the real nature of the war, i.e., the ludicrous Stalinian argument that this was simply an inter-imperialist war, no different from World War I.

When the invasion started, the Soviet leadership was dumbfounded. Stalin disappeared for one week; no one could find him. Thousands of Soviet soldiers and civilians perished due to the absolute failure of the Stalin leadership to recognize all the signs. The German advance was ultimately stopped outside Moscow due to a combination of factors including the onset of an early Russian winter—for which the Germans were entirely unprepared—and stiff Soviet resistance. As a side note, Operation Barbarossa was supposed to have started earlier, but Germany delayed it in order to invade Yugoslavia and Greece, saving fascist Italy’s troops from disaster. That delay may have saved the world.

We are facing our own “Operation Barbarossa,” a point to which I shall return.
German invasion of Russia as depicted in the 1943 American propaganda film 
“Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia”

The US trade union movement has been seeking its bearings for decades. It has been rocked by Cold War purges and repression, vicious anti-communism destroying entire unions, collaboration with US foreign policy in a series of international horrors, changing demographics in the working class, rising insurgencies within the working class and the trade union movement, economic reorganization, and the rise of neoliberal globalization. Yet even after all this, the US trade union movement has remained trapped in the paradigm set for it by American Federation of Labor founder, Samuel Gompers, a paradigm that focused the unions on wages, hours, working conditions, with no independent political action, and with active support for US imperialism internationally. Rather than make a full break with this paradigm, though increasingly aware of the crisis of US trade unionism, the movement’s leadership largely engaged in a sort of tactical hopscotch attempting to find the right space to land upon, failing to recognize that our opponents were playing a very different game: chess.

The absence of a clear strategic vision on the part of the leadership of organized labor has been linked to its failure to appreciate the “moment” in which we are operating. So, let’s discuss the “moment.”

Since 2009, labor—both organized labor and alt-labor—as well as much of the progressive movement have failed to identify and recognize the significance of the rise and transformation of a right-wing populist movement, a movement that morphed into the MAGA fascist movement. Labor and too many progressives ignored all the signals. In fact, one should really go back to the 1980s and the emergence largely in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest of various armed fascist groups that played within the swamp of right-wing populism, hunting Jews and people of color. There was the rise of the (white) Christian nationalists, moving to the center of the Republican Party. There was the 1994 Newt Gingrich-led “Contract with America” and the change in tone—literally—of partisan exchanges. And there was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing/massacre and the revelation of the proliferation of right-wing militia groups around the US. While a few organizations, such as Political Research Associates, sounded the alarm, they were the equivalent of the “Lucy ring” sending information on the pending Operation Barbarossa, only to be largely ignored.

In 2009 we witnessed the Tea Party movement, later appended by the “birthers.” Yet, in the face of this mass movement, little discussion took place within labor and the movement was dismissed as an alleged “astroturf” movement‚ that is, a movement that was a fake, with no social base. When Trump and others promoted birtherism, again, it was ignored as the ravings of an unanchored lunatic that would have little impact…until it did.

And even after Trump 45 was defeated in 2020, there remained those who continued to deny that something of strategic significance had unfolded in the US. In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, there were two astounding comments coming from labor. One, that maybe this meant that progressives were pushing too hard and that we should slow down. Two, that US political institutions had displayed their ability to withstand a hurricane and reset themselves. For this latter group, the part two was that now the time had arrived to return to fighting centrist Democrats rather than isolating and crushing the far right.

Therefore, in addressing the question of labor’s revitalization, our starting point must be that labor becomes an antifascist movement or it has no future.

In his masterful work, Fascism and Dictatorship, the iconic Greek/French Marxist theorist Nicos Poulantzas noted that, in the years immediately preceding the victory of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, the trade union movements in their respective countries had waged militant economic struggles. But in neither case were those trade union movements fully antifascist movements. They seemed to believe, as many of our friends do today, that a progressive, militant economic message will undercut the base of the fascists.

It did not work out quite that way.

Why? Because the fascist movements are not based on one grievance alone. Drawing on racism, sexism, selective anti-elitism, economic grievance, and most importantly, revanchism, fascist movements—when they are out of power—can be militantly anti-corporate elite, though this anti-corporate elite is regularly tinged with antisemitism and/or racism.

Transforming and renewing trade unionism today necessitates prioritizing the antifascist fight. This antifascist fight must have both a defensive and offensive character. Taking on neoliberalism—one of the key foundations for the rise of the far right—and carrying on visionary organizing efforts is certainly part of the answer insofar as this work helps to unite and galvanize the working class. But it is not enough.

Antifascism also involves providing answers and solutions to why the world is in chaos and why the US is in a state of a “cold civil war.” It involves a vigilant defense of democratic rights and an equally vigilant fight to expand democracy. In this sense we are not involved in so-called cultural wars, but we are involved in a fight over whether democracy loses or whether it is expanded and becomes consistent democracy. A social justice unionist framework can help us evolve the trade union movement into an antifascist force, a movement that truly recognizes that workers are 24-hour beings with multiple interests and concerns.
Jeanne Menjoulet, “Front Populaire, tous antifascistes” (June 15 2024) CC BY 2.0

With all that in mind, here are a few suggestions on what needs to be done:Renew the education of workers on capitalism, the far right, and how to fight them both.
Link labor—both organized and alt-labor—with other progressive forces. We need our own version of the French “New Popular Front,” that is, an alignment of forces that are not only fighting the fascists, but also articulating a positive program for the future, one that many people have summarized as the “Third Reconstruction.”
Organize “democracy brigades” within all labor organizations to combat the far right, i.e., committees of workers who will offer voter protection, defense of abortion clinics, opposition to book-banners, defense of migrants, and who will stand up when the fascists tell us to sit down.
Identify the key sources of power in contemporary society and develop strategies to undermine them, i.e., know our enemies and seek out their weaknesses so that we can defeat them (whether those enemies are small fascist groups, fascist movements, or oligarchs).
Unite labor with the environmental and environmental justice movements to counter the environmental catastrophe while fighting for structural reforms to rebuild, strengthen, and advance the social safety net, essential for people to survive planetary environmental crisis.
Push labor to fully embrace geographic and industrial strategies aimed at building economic and political power for workers, another step on the road to the Third Reconstruction.

To do this, we need organization. I have had the honor of helping to found standing4democracy.org, an antifascist, worker-focused organization, committed to uniting with others in opposition to the far right and toward revitalizing and transforming the labor movement, transforming it into an antifascist movement. I encourage you to join with us or to join with some other formation that is equally committed to advancing democracy.

The “artillery” will start firing at our positions the afternoon of January 20, 2025. The “tanks” will cross the border on January 21st. MAGA is seeking to paralyze all progressive forces through the speed of their advance and the devastation they intend to inflict. To defeat MAGA we must fully understand them, but also understand that our struggle will, for the foreseeable future, be asymmetric. We will need to be creative in response, and equally determined. Victory is far from certain, but in that light, defeat is not an option.



Bill Fletcher Jr (born 1954) has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

What Happens When Climate Denialism and Misogyny Intersect? Enter: ‘Petro-Masculinity’

The 19th spoke with Cara Daggett, who coined the term, to talk about what it signals for a second Trump administration.
December 16, 2024
Source: The 19th


Image via Post Growth Social Innovation / postgrowth.earth



Cara Daggett, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech University, coined the term “petro-masculinty” in a paper she published in 2018. She used the term to describe the rise of authoritarian movements in the Western hemisphere and how they were being shaped by climate change denialism and misogyny in an appeal to men who felt they were being left behind by society.

At the time, Donald Trump had been in office for two years. For Daggett, his “Make America Great Again” message during his campaign evoked nostalgia for a time of traditionally structured families whose upwardly mobile lives in the suburbs, anchored on cheap energy production and the jobs that came with it, were threatened by efforts to confront climate change, racism or gender equality.

No longer just an energy source, fossil fuels have become wrapped up in the American identity, says Daggett. For conservative men in particular, that’s essential to a return to male-governed households and society, not only at the expense of women, Daggett says, but also the environment.

The 19th spoke with Daggett, currently a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, about how she views petro-masculinity today, and what it signals for a second Trump administration that is ready to roll back energy protections, ramp up fossil fuel production and challenge gender rights.

The 19th: For those unfamiliar with the term “petro-masculinity,” what does this rhetoric around oil and gas dominance have to do with gender and identity?

I first thought of this term after Trump was elected in 2016 because I saw this trend of support for fossil fuels and climate denial on the one hand and misogyny on the other. They were usually treated as separate problems, and just coincidentally appearing together.

I come from a critical eco-feminist background where scholars connect the domination and exploitation of the natural world to the justifications for the domination and exploitation of work that is often done by colonized peoples, and by women or feminized bodies. Historically, this process developed under colonial capitalism. It helps me understand that these are not coincidental, that these two go together. In the United States, for example, it can be seen in the way that care work is devalued or taken for granted, in the same way that nature is considered a resource, something free to be taken.

Both of these are background assumptions that drive the capitalist economy. So the separation of them into the economic sphere and the private or identity issue sphere is really making it hard for people to see that these are not separate. These actually work together.

How do you think it played into the 2024 election and why do you think it resonated with voters?

In some ways, petro-masculinity was a little more subtextual. I mean, definitely misogyny was front and center, but climate was not on the agenda in the same way it was in 2020. In this case, you still see oil companies lining up behind Trump, basically giving him their policy wish list, but at the same time, Kamala Harris did not have a strong climate message, and embraced fracking for fossil gas.

But if you look at Project 2025, the preface had four pillars, and two are related to family and fossil fuels. Pillar one is family, a traditional family—anti-queer, anti-feminist. And pillar three is about defending oil and gas, with no explanation of how this is related to a traditional family. So it’s certainly, definitely still there.

I am reading the election results as a reactionary defense of these processes of gender and racial domination and the exploitation of the natural world. We are not just in a climate crisis, but a crisis of imperial capitalism. And there is also a crisis of the traditional gender order, and the White supremacist order, with Black Lives Matter, feminists and queer movements pushing against them. The MAGA movement is a reactionary defense of these traditional orders that are in crisis.

Can you talk a little bit more about that sense of belonging and the traditional family structure and how this desire of oil and gas expansion plays into that?

Energy and the access to energy expansion still very much drives power in the world. And there is a fossil fuel nostalgia for embracing fossil fuel power as a good thing, and asking why would the US sacrifice that? Ironically, my feeling is that this right-wing climate denial and celebration of fossil fuels has understood the existential threat of climate change better than a kind of centrist Democratic position. Their reactionary response understands that the challenge to fossil fuels is a very deep one.

A sustainable future will mean more than just substituting out one type of energy for another. It really requires challenging a modern Western culture and a way of life that’s premised on unending growth and expansion of cheap energy, mass consumerism and all of the ways that those things factor in a certain traditional vision of the American way of life. Right-wing climate denial understands that the change required is this significant, and their response is defiance – to refuse that change.

A very tangible way to see the connection between the gender order and fossil fuels is if you look at the development of suburbs and the suburban way of life, especially automobility, in the middle of the 20th century. Because this led to segregated, privatized, White home spaces where you have a vision of a housewife protected from all the dirt and grime of the working world; and also of the multiracial, diverse world. Everything is only accessed by the car, and the people who are showing up in public spaces and workspaces are the breadwinners, who are coded as masculinized. This particular division of private and public, housewife and breadwinner, White and multi-racial, home and work, was built on a flow of cheap fossil fuels and car culture.

This is the kind of world that MAGA wants to inhabit and arguably, it’s a world whose innocence was only ever a dream, in terms of all the violence that has to take place to make the suburban home feel safe, clean and White. But it was a very seductive dream that has, in many ways, oriented how many people live now and how Americans design their housing and how they design their cities.

How does Elon Musk factor into this calculation around expanding oil and gas? He is essentially the poster child for electric cars yet has become one of Trump’s most prominent supporters and will have some influence in the White House.

On the one hand, it’s not surprising to see Musk and Trump as partners. On the other hand, it’s fascinating to see a segment of the Silicon Valley corporate world ally with the MAGA movement, and it begs further thinking. And that’s because, in addition to my work on petro-masculinity, there’s work on something called eco-modern masculinity, or noticing how a lot of energy transition and big-scale climate policy-making have also taken what you might call a patriarchal relation to nature — the faith in techno-fixes to stabilize the status quo.

They are patriarchal in that they rely on an entitlement to the ‘reproductive’ labor of others, and of the more-than-human world. This is a faith that capitalism can be made green, can be made more just. Musk is an extreme example of that and he always has made the masculinity piece very obvious. Everything from the Tesla truck being designed to look like a military vehicle and having muscle men, you know, try to break its windows with a baseball bat. There’s always been this kind of toxic masculinity to Musk.

So what is this relationship between eco-modernism and this defense of fossil fuels? On the one hand, you could say there’s a continuity there. Adding solar and wind power does not necessarily challenge fossil fuel power, if you assume a project of ever-expanding energy. I think what you see in both Musk and Trump is a desire to maintain a status quo that is still extractive and is still about the expansion of energy.

Recently Elon retweeted the names of women working on climate change in the federal government leading to harassment and threats. It made me wonder, what are the implications for women and LGBTQ+ people in this return to climate denial and fossil fuel expansion?

There’s so much evidence that the climate crisis and energy poverty falls hardest on women around the world, especially working-class women and women of color, and often that is because it affects basic needs, and women are disproportionately responsible for household labor and reproductive labor and things like food and housing and water. So already, many women are suffering more — and that’s at a systemic level.

On the personal level in the United States, the violent rhetoric, the normalization of harassment and sexual assault, the normalization of harassing trans people, homophobia, I mean, these are all part of this turn towards fascism. And it’s really scary.

Looking ahead to a Trump administration, what are you watching for in the next four years, particularly as the climate crisis worsens?

I’m still in a mode of recovery and head-spinning because when I look ahead, it’s hard. There are many people, including me, in the rich, consumerist world who are in some sense living in climate denial, because just to get through the working day you need to bracket how bad it is, how serious it is, how much the powers that be are failing or refusing to change.

So I see darkness in the United States. The first Trump administration tried to roll back as much environmental regulation as possible, open up as much oil and gas expansion as possible. If anything, that will be worse.

It feels impossible at the national level, but cities and states in the United States have actually been more successful at pursuing climate and environmental justice and many are already planning to continue that effort.

The most exciting voices and the most exciting energy coming for climate justice and environmental justice are from social movements, from Indigenous peoples, from small island states, from the global South.

We have to be aware that those are where the ideas are going to come from. That’s where the leadership is going to come from, not only as an ethical demand that people who are suffering the most should be leaders in terms of what should be done, but also just because of the kind of violence and power that is going to go into defending the current system in places like the United States government.


Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment in an era of planetary disruption. She is interested in questions that lie at the nexus of human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Her work often draws upon feminist approaches to power in order to understand how global warming emerged, as well as how it might be mitigated. Daggett’s book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2019), was awarded the Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory.

Only 0.16% of All US Charitable Giving Supports LGBTQ+ Groups



 December 18, 2024
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Photo by Nikolas Gannon

In an era marked by both significant advances and setbacks for LGBTQ+ people, charitable giving to LGBTQ+ organizations more than doubled in a recent 10-year period. Despite that swift growth, those donations still amount to only 0.16% of total U.S. charitable contributions, according to the latest edition of the LGBTQ+ Index, developed by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab. Put another way, less than US$1 out of every $500 donated in 2021 – the most recent year for which data is available – went to support LGBTQ+ organizations.

We are among the researchers who produce this index by analyzing data the Internal Revenue Service collects on nonprofits.

The sliver of charitable dollars funding LGBTQ+ organizations rose in inflation-adjusted terms to $823 million in 2021 from $387 million in 2012. The pace of this growth was particularly fast in 2020 and 2021, with a 35% increase over just two years.

Gifts aren’t evenly distributed

The share of overall charitable giving allocated to LGBTQ+ organizations also expanded: It grew to 0.16% in 2021 from 0.10% in 2012, continuing to lag far behind funding for other kinds of causes.

For example, the charitable donations Johns Hopkins University and World Vision received in 2021 exceeded the total of all gifts to LGBTQ+ organizations.

Giving to women’s and girls’ organizations in 2021 comprised 1.9% of total charitable giving – while still a relatively small portion of all charitable donations, this is more than 12 times the amount of money donors provided LGBTQ+ organizations in the same year.

In contrast, social service nonprofits, such as food banks and homeless shelters, received more than $90 billion in philanthropic support in 2021 – more than 100 times as much as donors gave LGBTQ+ nonprofits.

The LGBTQ+ Index also highlights shifts in how donations are distributed among different kinds of groups in this category.

Civil rights organizations, the largest category, received more than half of all giving to LGBTQ+ organizations in 2021.

Several other areas, such as youth services, community centers and transgender-focused groups, have seen significant growth in recent years. Donations to transgender-focused organizations, for example, increased by 629% from 2012 to 2021.

However, this didn’t occur across the board. Funding for organizations addressing HIV/AIDS in the LGBTQ+ community inched up by only 7% over the 10 years, resulting in a decline as a share of overall LGBTQ+ giving.

Assets are also rising

These findings underscore both the progress LGBTQ+ communities have made and the persistent challenges they face.

While heightened awareness of challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community, such as youth mental health and anti-transgender legislative efforts, have helped drive increased giving, the total funding available to LGBTQ+ nonprofits remains limited.

Smaller organizations, in particular, face significant barriers to growth, such as a lack of funding with no strings attached and a limited capacity to expand their operations.

Separately, we found that the total value of assets held by these groups in rainy-day funds or endowments has grown by 257% over the past decade. That growth in assets signals that donors have greater confidence in LGBTQ+ groups and that the organizations are becoming more established and professional. It also signals that there’s potential for further growth.The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jacqueline Ackerman, Interim Director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, Indiana University, and Jon Bergdoll, Associate Director of Data Partnerships at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University.