Shawn Fain Has Been a Light in the Darkness

By Ben Burgis

August 24, 2024

Source: Jacobin

UAW president Shawn Fain’s speech was the best part of the DNC. It featured a direct focus on workers otherwise absent from party rhetoric, and sidestepped the culture wars to identify the “one true enemy” of corporate power.

The most shameful moment at this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) came on Tuesday night. Political commentator and The View cohost Ana Navarro, whose father was part of the Contra death squads secretly funded by the Ronald Reagan administration, euphemistically portrayed her family having to leave Nicaragua as “fleeing communism” and got applause for comparing Donald Trump to “the communists.”

That was jaw-dropping. But most of the other bad moments were more predictable. Uncommitted delegates were frozen out of meaningful participation. Venture capitalist and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault was invited to talk about how saving democratic institutions from Trump is important because those institutions create such a favorable business environment. Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, in an otherwise supremely forgettable speech, jabbed Trump for not being a “real” billionaire like himself. Barack Obama’s speech was a reminder of exactly why his brand of liberalism was so thoroughly mediocre. And the less said about Hillary Clinton, the better.

The Democratic Party is a mess of contradictory forces that would be in different parties in any normal parliamentary democracy. Consequently, there were good moments too. Bernie Sanders was great as usual, showing off once again that he has the tightest message discipline in contemporary American politics. Every time he opens his mouth, he talks about wages and inequality and health care. And much of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech was good, even if it was marred by her spurious claim that Kamala Harris is “tirelessly working” to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza. On Wednesday night, the proportion of January 6 relitigation to even remotely populist policy was dismal, although Walz’s speech at the end of the night made up for that to some extent.

But the brightest spot in the whole lineup was Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers (UAW). He knocked it out of the park. He used the occasion to talk about strikes that have forced companies to reverse outsourcing. His speech even put a particular company, Stellantis, in the hot seat: on the day of the speech, UAW locals filed multiple grievances against the auto manufacturer, laying the groundwork for a grievance strike.

Fain said that workers can’t let the Right use culture-war distractions to divide them up because their “one true enemy” is the insatiable greed of corporate America. He hammered Trump not for being crass or “extremist” or a threat to the norms of American politics but for being a strikebreaker.

Amid what seems to be a regressive climate regarding class politics, Fain’s speech at the DNC — and his outspoken presence in general this past year — was a massive gust of fresh air.

Fain vs. Trump

Fain is the first directly elected president of the UAW. He was part of a reform caucus that opposed union corruption and damaging concessions to the bosses around issues like two-tiered pay structures. “Record profits,” he kept insisting, should generate “record contracts.”

Soon after Fain took the helm, he led his members out on an ambitious “stand-up strike.” It was the first time in the entire history of the union that the UAW had gone on strike against all three of the Big Three car manufacturers at the same time, and they won. Several months later, the UAW made history with a successful organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — a region and an employer that were, in combination, long thought to be impervious to unionization.

Fain’s approach often disturbs guardians of the economic status quo. In a profile for the New York Times, for example, he said that billionaires “don’t have a right to exist.” The idea of moving toward a society egalitarian enough not to support such obscene concentrations of wealth has long been unthinkable in mainstream American discourse, and Fain’s rhetoric has been enough to inspire CNBC’s Jim Cramer to babble hysterically about “class warfare” and even to compare Fain to Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder.

In real life, class warfare is inevitable given the basic structure of a capitalist economy. Business owners and workers have opposing interests, with the former always looking for new ways to use their power to squeeze more profits from the latter. The only question is whether this warfare will be one-sided. And on that issue, Fain’s simple message on Monday night at the DNC was that it doesn’t have to be.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=c8C26OlTpNI%3Ffeature%3Doembed

He took the time to talk about the UAW members at Cornell University — dining workers, gardeners, custodians, and facilities workers — who just the night before “had to walk out on strike for a better life because they’re fighting corporate greed, and our only hope is to attack corporate greed head-on.”

Fain used the phrase “the working class” over and over again in a way that no one but Bernie Sanders has done in a DNC speech in recent memory. He took on Trump’s pseudo-populist nonsense in a way that few other speakers could do with as much credibility, recalling Trump’s lying promise in 2016 in Lordstown, Ohio, to bring back lost auto jobs, and Trump’s conversation with Elon Musk last week on Twitter where the two billionaires “laugh[ed] about firing workers who go on strike.” (The Trump/Musk conversation is now the basis of a formal unfair labor practices claim by the UAW.)

In a more low-key nod to the Hulk Hogan speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), where Hogan ripped off his shirt to reveal a “Trump/Vance” T-shirt underneath, Fain took off his blazer to reveal a T-shirt bearing a slogan that he had the crowd enthusiastically chanting several times — “Trump is a Scab.”

This is exactly the right way to attack Trump. The contrast couldn’t be more extreme between Pritzker preening about being a “real” billionaire and Fain dismissing Trump and J. D. Vance in his 2024 DNC speech as “two lapdogs for the billionaire class.”

At the RNC, the hall was full of delegates waving mass-printed signs demanding “Mass Deportations Now.” At the DNC, Fain identified this demagoguery for what it was:


Donald Trump the scab . . . is pushing [the] divide and conquer tactics of the rich. It’s the oldest trick in the book. They want to blame the frustrations of working-class people . . . on some destitute and desperate person at the border. They do that because they want working-class people to be divided and to . . . keep the focus off the one true enemy — corporate greed. The rich think we’re stupid but working-class Americans see this for what it is.

The logic of his position here is simple. Blaming low wages and lost jobs on competition from a more desperate section of the working class is grotesquely hypocritical when it comes from politicians like Trump and Vance who manifestly don’t care about jobs and wages in any other context. And the position itself doesn’t make sense.

If undocumented workers are given a way to become American citizens, they can come out of the shadows and join unions, or take employers who break labor laws to court, without fear of deportation. The most conservative estimate for the total number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States puts it at about eleven million. Even if Trump and Vance escalate the already brutal machinery of deportation with some creative new forms of base-pleasing performative cruelty, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to escalate all the way to the kind of dystopian police-state tactics it would take to successfully round up eleven million people who in the overwhelming majority of cases are just trying to keep their heads down and live their lives. The practical effect, instead, will be to make the majority of them that much more terrified and thus that much easier to hyperexploit — which will drive wages down for everyone.

Fain’s speech gestured at a way forward based on solidarity between these workers and the native-born section of the working class. This isn’t just a morally better solution to the problem posed by this hyperexploitation than “mass deportations now.” It’s the only approach that might actually work.

Fain for President

The speech wasn’t perfect. Fain heaped far more praise on Harris than she deserves, especially given her campaign’s repeated abandonment of social democratic policies she’d supported as a senator, like Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, that would massively benefit workers and decrease the power of the billionaire class.

And most glaringly of all, Fain didn’t mention Gaza. The UAW as an organization has long called for a cease-fire, and Fain himself has spoken forcefully about the “slaughter and devastation” being inflicted by the Israeli military and the urgent need to end the war. Perhaps Fain simply calculated that there was no plausible way within the bounds of a ten-minute speech to square the circle of his deep disagreements with Harris on these subjects with his union’s understandable support for her against Trump, who spent his first term stacking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with hardcore union-busters.

What this really shows is that leaders like Fain who are trying to take meaningful action against the “one true enemy” of corporate power deserve far better political representation than they’re getting from the Democratic Party. With the choices currently narrowed to two of them, it makes sense that the Fains of the world prefer Harris to “Donald Trump the Scab.” But the American working class as a whole deserves better going forward. In 2028 or 2032, it would be nice to see Fain run himself.

Maybe he’ll never do that. He might calculate that he can do more good at the UAW than he can in electoral politics. But hopefully someone picks up that torch. Because the politics of broad working-class unity against the billionaires and all of their lapdogs is exactly what we need.

DNC Exclusive: UAW’s Shawn Fain on Trump, Democrats, & Class War

By Shawn Fain, Maximillian Alvarez 

August 23, 2024

Source: Real News Network

Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, didn’t mince words in his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Wearing a shirt with the words “TRUMP IS A SCAB” emblazoned on the front, Fain told the crowd, “For the UAW and for working people everywhere, it comes down one question: what side are you on? On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class. On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves.” In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Fain at the DNC about why the UAW has endorsed Harris-Walz, what is at stake in this election for working people and the labor movement, and which side of the class war Donald Trump is on.

Studio: Kayla Rivara
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Slamming Israeli Media Lies, Freed Hostage Says IDF Strike—Not Hamas—Wounded Her

By Brett Wilkins

August 24, 2024

Source: Common Dreams



“I cannot ignore what happened here over the past 24 hours, taking my words out of context,” said Noa Argamani. “As a victim of October 7, I refuse to be victimized once again by the media.”

An Israeli woman kidnapped by Hamas militants on October 7 and held hostage for 245 days before being rescued lashed out on Friday at Israeli media outlets that twisted her words to make it seem as if she was wounded by her captors when in reality she was injured in an attack by the military in which she once served.

Responding to reports in outlets including The Jerusalem Post—which on Thursday ran the headline “Hamas Beat Me All Over”—Noa Argamani said on Instagram that “I can’t ignore what happened in the media in the last 24 hours.”

“Things were taken out of context,” the 26-year-old navy veteran from Be’er Sheva said of her earlier comments to Group of Seven diplomats in Tokyo. “I was not beaten… I was in a building that was bombed by the Air Force.”

“I emphasize that I was not beaten, but injured all over my body by the collapse of a building on me,” Argamani added. “As a victim of October 7, I refuse to be victimized once again by the media.”


Prominent Israelis including President Isaac Herzog and pro-Israel voices around the world including writer Aviva Klompas and the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council amplified the false claim that Argamani was “beaten” by her captors.

Argamani was partying with her boyfriend Avinatan Or at the Nova rave near the Gaza border when the festival was attacked by Hamas-led militants in the early morning hours of October 7. In now-famous video footage, she is seen begging, “Don’t kill me!” as her captors whisk her away toward Gaza on a motorcycle. Or was also kidnapped and is believed to still be in Hamas custody.

“Every night, I was falling asleep and thinking, this may be the last night of my life,” Argamani said Thursday of her time in captivity.

Argamani was one of four Hamas captives rescued during a June raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, an operation in which Israeli forces killed at least 236 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Three other Israeli hostages taken from the Nova rave were also rescued in the raid.

“It’s a miracle because I survived October 7, and I survived this bombing, and I also survived the rescue,” Argamani said in Tokyo on Thursday.

Argamani’s rescue fulfilled a dying wish from her mother, who had terminal cancer, to be reunited with her daughter before she passed. Argamani was also freed on the birthday of her father, Yakov Argamani, who, from the start of the hostage ordeal, urged Israeli leaders to eschew revenge after the October 7 attack.

There are believed to be around 109 Israelis and others still held captive by Hamas in Gaza. Argamani implored the government to make freeing them its top priority.

“Avinatan, my boyfriend, is still there, and we need to bring them back before it’s going to be too late,” she said Thursday. “We don’t want to lose more people than we already lost.”

More than 1,100 Israelis and others including Thai farmworkers were killed on October 7, at least some of them in so-called “friendly fire” attacks by Israeli forces. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employed a protocol known as the “Hannibal Directive” authorizing lethal force against Israeli soldiers in order to prevent them from being taken prisoner by enemy forces. More than 240 Israelis and others were abducted by Hamas and other militants.

Freed hostages have recounted being fired upon by Israeli aircraft as they were being taken by Hamas militants to Gaza. One former captive said in December that “every day in captivity was extremely challenging. We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you.”

Numerous Israeli hostages have been killed by their would-be rescuers, including a trio of men who managed to escape from their captors and were waving white flags and shouting for help in Hebrew when they were shot dead by IDF soldiers in Gaza in December, and five Israelis who likely suffocated to death due to a fire sparked by an Israeli assault six months ago on the tunnel where the hostages were being held.

In contrast to former Palestinian prisoners held by Israel—who, along with Israeli whistleblowers, have reported systemic torture, rape, starvation, and even murder committed by their captors—numerous Israelis kidnapped by Hamas have reported being relatively well treated. Other former hostages said they were physically, sexually, and psychologically abused.

Taking civilian hostages is a war crime in itself.

Israel’s 322-day retaliation for October 7 has left at least 144,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and invasion, which has flattened much of the coastal enclave. A crippling siege has pushed hundreds of thousands of Gazans over the brink of starvation, with at least dozens of children dying of malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medical care. Preventable diseases including measles, hepatitis, and polio threaten public health not only in Gaza but also in Israel and other neighboring nations.

Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Israel, Gaza, and the “Merchants of Death”

By Ramin Mirfakhraie

August 24, 2024

Source: Counter currents





On July 24, 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to a joint session of the United States Congress, where nearly half of the House and Senate Democrats were not present. In his address, which was presented in terms of a binary opposition between barbarism (“Iran’s axis of terror”) and civilization (“America, Israel, and our Arab friends”), and riddled with false and unsubstantiated claims, he tried to defend his government’s horrific war on Gaza, as a result of which tens of thousands of Gazans, mostly women and children, have been killed or injured, nearly 2 million have been displaced, and the entire civilian infrastructure has been destroyed. His address to Congress was later followed by separate meetings with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, who did not preside over Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and former President Donald Trump.

Shortly after returning to Israel, fired up by all the private meetings, warm handshakes, and standing ovations in Congress, Netanyahu managed to wreak even more havoc in the region by ordering the killing of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut. Shukr’s assassination was soon followed by the killing of Hamas’s political bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, an act that has been widely blamed on Israel, which had pledged to kill him for his alleged role in Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel. Haniyeh was also the target of an Israeli assassination attempt in 2003.

Holding Israel responsible for the July 31 operation that killed Haniyeh, Iran has vowed to retaliate against Israel, albeit at a proportional level, in the days or weeks to come. Consequently, the United States and some other countries in and outside the Middle East have urged Iran to forego such retaliation for fear of a broader conflict engulfing the region. Whether or not Iran heeds their call for restraint remains to be seen.

For now, Israeli officials continue to count on what seems to be the unconditional backing of the United States, no matter what crimes they commit. And this, without a doubt, is the main source of not just the protracted nature of the current conflict, but also much of the instability that exists in the Middle East. Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, establishment of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, extrajudicial assassinations in the region, and lack of regard for international law are good cases in point here, none of which would be possible without the full support of the United States.

US support for Israel has also allowed it to ignore the rulings of the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, whose nonbinding July 19 Advisory Opinion ordered Israel to end its “unlawful” presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible and pay reparations to “all the natural and legal persons concerned” in the Territory for damages caused by the decades-long occupation. The Court’s advisory opinion further concluded: “all States are under an obligation . . . not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

And yet the United States continues to provide Israel with all kinds of assistance, prompting the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch to state: “The [July 19 ICJ] ruling should be yet another wake up call for the United States to end its egregious policy of defending Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and prompt a thorough reassessment in other countries as well.”

But by supporting Israel’s war on Gaza militarily, financially, and diplomatically, despite the ICJ’s January 2024 ruling that it is “plausible” that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention, the United States, under the Biden administration, has already shown that it is not going to stop backing Israel anytime soon, which raises the question: why is the United States so willing to be a party to Israel’s daily massacres of Gazans and other war crimes in the Palestinian territories?

International relations scholars John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University have been arguing for a long time that US support for Israel is, in major part, due to the influence of the “Israel Lobby” in Washington, and that this influence has often worked against US interests and security in the Middle East and beyond. In a recent interview with Diwan, for example, Walt stated:

“The lobby . . . has considerable leverage over politicians and policymakers, largely due to its ability to steer huge amounts of money toward its preferred candidates in U.S. elections. To take but one example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and others spent a record amount—roughly $14 million—to defeat Representative Jamal Bowman in a recent primary election, solely because Bowman had criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza.”

Mearsheimer and Walt are also of the view that, from a strategic as well as a moral point of view, Israel has been more of a liability to the United States than an asset in the region. Thus, they advise US politicians and policymakers to distance themselves from the Lobby and instead focus on protecting US interests in the region, when such interests are not identical to those of Israel.

To their analysis of the Israel Lobby’s influence in Washington, one might add, however, the lucrative nature of wars that the United States is often a party to as an arms supplier in the region and beyond, which may explain further why the United States is so willing to support Israel in its war on Gaza. Quite revealing in this regard is the New York Times article headlined “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales,” in which the author explains: “The conflict between Israel and Hamas is just the latest impetus behind a boom in international arms sales that is bolstering profits and weapons-making capacity among American suppliers.”

The Biden administration’s decision to sell $20 billion worth of additional weapons to Israel is the latest driver of this surge, which includes 50 F-15 fighter jets, tank ammunition, mortar rounds, tactical vehicles, and advanced air-to-air missiles, all being sold under the banner of a commitment to Israel’s security and the United States’ own vital national interests.

But the lucrative nature of Israel’s war on Gaza is not merely limited to the value of such contracts, as the war has also sent through the roof the stocks of US weapons manufacturers. In a Newsweek article published on October 16, 2023, and headlined “Military Contractor Stocks Have Skyrocketed Since Israel War Started,” the author explains how “Shares of some of the U.S. biggest military contractors have soared since the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, with companies such as Lockheed Martin reporting a 10 percent increase in their stock values.”

In the case of Lockheed Martin alone, the article goes on to explain that “On October 10, Barron’s investment magazine reported that the company had added $23 billion to its market capitalization after Hamas’ attack.” Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman are the other beneficiaries of the war mentioned in the article.

Clearly, then, war is big business, where “merchants of death” (known as “defense contractors” today) and Wall Street are involved. And it is also true that investors of all kinds in and outside Israel and the United States are reaping massive financial gains from Israel’s war on Gaza, in spite of the horrific fact that Israel has already killed, injured, and displaced tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in the occupied territories.

It is, thus, incumbent on the international community to do all it can to put an end to Israel’s war on Gaza and occupation of the Palestinian territories. Extremely helpful in this regard would be more protests around the world calling for a permanent ceasefire, as well as more pressure on the Biden administration to stop the flow of aid or assistance to Israel in line with the ICJ’s July 19 advisory opinion. Netanyahu and company must also be forced to relinquish their wicked plan to drag the United States into some sort of military confrontation with Iran, as this would undoubtedly engulf the whole region and might even start World War III.

Radical Municipalism Is Paving The Way For Direct Democracy In LA

Researcher and organizer Yvonne Yen Liu discusses efforts to build direct democracy and grassroots power in Los Angeles.

By Yvonne Yen Liu, Justin A. Davis 

August 24, 2024
Source: Waging Nonviolence

The launch of Los Angeles for All at Robinson Space in Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles on May Day 2022. (Los Angeles People’s Movement Assembly)

Home to almost 10 million residents in 2022, Los Angeles County can sometimes seem like a vast political paradox. Known as a quintessential example of urban sprawl, it is also the most overcrowded county in America. Over the past 20 years, robust grassroots organizing built multiracial movements for organized labor, immigrant rights and housing justice while electing multiple self-identified leftists to L.A. City Council. At the same time, brutal overpolicing, ethics scandals and rising gentrification have been constant challenges for organizers and activists there.

This summer, L.A.’s controversial efforts to reduce homelessness have reentered the national spotlight. “Home to 7.1 percent of the nation’s unhoused,” state and local governments have increasingly relied on criminalization to push houseless people out of the public eye. Arrests, tickets and the destruction of “homeless encampments” have become a common sight. A Supreme Court decision in June (passed along ideological lines) made it easier for cities to “ban people from sleeping and camping in public places,” increasing the pressure on local officials to clear remaining encampments. On August 8, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom was spotted clearing out homeless encampments himself in L.A. County, a publicity stunt meant to highlight the urgency of removing them.

Issues like these have pushed organizers to consider new frameworks for building political power in the region, including the Solidarity Research Center, or SRC. Founded in 2014 as the “research arm” of the Industrial Workers of the World, SRC has since evolved into a “worker self-directed nonprofit” that supports movements for direct democracy and cooperative economics. In recent years, SRC has been blending research with capacity-building for social movements as part of an ongoing experiment with radical municipalism. Radical municipalism draws from a variety of frameworks that place cities at the center of social transformation, looking beyond capitalism and the nation-state for new forms of community-building. In the 1970s, for example, Huey Newton theorized about “revolutionary intercommunalism,” arguing that national liberation struggles were better understood as “a dispersed collection of communities” vying for self-determination on a smaller scale. Social theorist Murray Bookchin (best known as the father of “social ecology”) used “municipalism” to describe a decentralized system of direct democracy, where citizens make decisions collectively through local assemblies.

In July, SRC released “Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit.” The toolkit functions as a “snapshot” of radical municipalism in theory and practice, aimed at organizers and activists interested in exploring municipalist tactics within their own local contexts. Shortly after the toolkit’s release, I spoke with Yvonne Yen Liu, co-founder and executive director of the Solidarity Research Center. We talked about the advantages and challenges of building a radical municipalist movement in L.A. — as well as what lessons organizers can learn by studying local campaigns for direct democracy.

For those who aren’t familiar, what are some key principles of municipalism? What makes it distinct from other frameworks for organizing locally?

I’ll start with a story. During the pandemic, I got very involved in organizing in my neighborhood — a mostly working-class, Latine community in Los Angeles. Like many other people, I was fortunate in that I was not an “essential worker” and I was able to quarantine at home. With my neighbors, I started a mutual aid network. I think the experience of organizing in a hyperlocal way made me realize the importance of building an activated community. When you know [your neighbors] and the daily struggles that each other have, [you] can support each other but also demand something better for all of us. We need to build power starting at this level and then we can scale up from there.

Specifically, we [at SRC] are inspired by radical municipalism. There’s a lot of progressive policies that get enacted by cities, which is great, but [they’re] not about building a counter-hegemony, which is what we are trying to do. We’re trying to build dual power. We are trying to create an alternative polity and a solidarity economy that will replace the nation-state, or city-state, or power elite — an economy that is not based on extraction and exploitation resulting in alienation. This has happened in other places. When I started to organize in L.A., I found examples in Barcelona, Spain, in Rojava, but very few in North America (save Cooperation Jackson). So we started the Municipalism Learning Series to learn from other examples globally and historically and then apply that to North America — and also to expose broader audiences to radical municipalism.

We have an organizing project on the ground, Los Angeles for All, which has been convening a peoples’ movement assembly for the last three years. Last year, we started a fellowship. We have 26 fellows across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico — they are also involved in municipalist campaigns and social movements in their places as well. The curriculum that we developed over the course of a 12-week program for our fellows, the Municipalism Cohort Fellowship, is encapsulated in the Municipalism Organizing Toolkit.

What made L.A. such a compelling place to try building a municipalist movement on the ground?

There’s nothing about Los Angeles that makes it a fertile ground for municipalism, which is exactly why we need to start it here. We have a river that’s layered over with concrete, we have freeways that divide our neighborhoods, there’s climate apartheid. Our built environment is not conducive to gathering and building community.

There was a specific crisis that catalyzed our peoples’ movement assemblies. In October of 2022, there was a leaked audiotape of a secret meeting between three city council members and a labor leader talking about redistricting — and it was extremely racist. It was about consolidating their own power, and drawing the lines of political boundaries in this city that would help them do that. I think it was an example to many Angelenos of how our city is structured so that politicians can amass a lot of power and not be scrutinized or accountable. We have an Ethics Commission which is essentially powerless to hold anyone accountable. We have 15 city council people for a city of four million — that’s ridiculous. Even within the scale of representative democracy, that’s not representative.Our city is also unable to care for people that are unhoused. We have over 70,000 neighbors that live in the streets, or live in their cars or RVs, or sleep on someone’s sofa. We don’t even understand the scale of it. And yet our city has been pursuing this municipal ordinance called 41.18 which essentially criminalizes people for sleeping on the streets. Thousands of people have been swept from their homes and communities as a result. The city just released a report looking at the impact of enforcing 41.18: They found that $3 million was spent by the city and only two people were housed permanently out of all who were impacted. So there’s a crisis in our city, especially around our ability to have our basic needs taken care of. Los Angeles, in that sense, is the most appropriate place to start this movement.

Three years into Los Angeles for All, what lessons have you learned so far?

Maybe I’m biased because I’m a researcher, but I think any good organizing campaign should be conducted like an experiment. We had a hypothesis that L.A. is ready for its municipalist moment or movement. And we’ve learned in the past three years that people are really hungry for this. It’s also been really hard to organize. Like I said, the built environment is working against us, there’s so much that is not conducive to trying to build community and share decision-making. We’ve convened maybe over 10 people’s movement assemblies and we’re at a point where we are reflecting. Like, have we built a movement? Have we built a base? Have we actually built power?

What we have built is a different type of culture for our movement in the city. It’s very easy to keep us separated and to not have us in solidarity with each other. The fact that we’re meeting each other, eating together, talking with each other, getting to know each other [and] our stories — that in and of itself is powerful. But we can’t just rest there: we need to come together and make decisions together and take action together. I feel like that’s the inflection point that we’re currently at.

We’re in a moment where we’re studying our housing and land crisis. How can you organize if you don’t have a place to live or if you can’t even stay in your city? In May 2024, the median home price in L.A. was $1 million. When you look at other municipalist movements like Barcelona, for instance (which started in 2015), it came out of a housing crisis. People were being evicted, and there was a group called PAH that organized to stop evictions through direct action and civil disobedience. And it was an anti-eviction organizer, Ada Colau, that became elected as the mayor on this municipalist platform, Barcelona En Comú. So there’s something very central about housing. [We’re] trying to move more intentionally in that space in partnership with our tenants unions and mutual aid groups that work with unhoused people.

[We’re] also focusing on the need to build more on the hyperlocal level. We called for a citywide assembly before we had a neighborhood base. We had a pretty strong base in East Los Angeles, but there are parts of L.A. where we’re not as strong. We can link up with groups that already have a base in [some] places, but there are also places that are not very well organized. We can’t just start at the scale of the city and go down, we need to start from the ground up. This was a big lesson for us, because how do you know unless you try it? If I look at the example of Barcelona, they called for a citywide assembly before they had neighborhood assemblies. But they were also fortunate that they have the cultural tradition of neighborhood assemblies. We don’t have that here. So I would say that the next phase of what we’re doing is about supporting the agency of different neighborhoods to congregate and gather.

I’d imagine the organizing landscape in L.A. might be very fragmented. What’s it like trying to make new interventions when you might have a lot of different people and groups talking around the same issue?

L.A. is big, sprawling [and] absolutely fragmented. Every place has complicated personalities, people who feel like they have ownership over a sector, a neighborhood, an issue area. We’re all working in these little silos: we accept the fragmentation and we internalize it, to the extent that we don’t think of ourselves as this cohesive movement.

We’ve definitely gotten questions asked of us like, “Who are you? What gives you the right to do this?” And my response is, “Anyone can do this: anyone can step up and call for a people’s movement assembly.” In fact, other groups have. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. There’s also a level of humility that I’ve cultivated personally in saying that I don’t have the answers — this is just my best effort. I’m not the chosen one, neither is anyone else, but we’re trying. This is an experiment, and we’re gonna evaluate what we find.

I will say that we have intentionally courted the autonomous actors in social movements in Los Angeles. We’re very clear that we are interested in building an autonomous social movement that will empower outside of the electoral pathway. Although we’re not excluding it altogether, we’ve seen that it hasn’t always helped. How do we enter into a strategy like that and have other irons in the fire as well? Ideally, if we do elect people into office, it’s so that they can break open the institution to allow social movements in — not that they monopolize and become gatekeepers of power.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a shift in the word “democracy” in American popular consciousness. We’re seeing elected officials and movement workers talk about the idea of democracy being “under threat.” Can movements for direct democracy on the local level inform those broader conversations?

I think people are genuinely concerned on the left and the center about rising authoritarianism. There was that Supreme Court decision [about presidential immunity], and I think that ALEC has been working on getting a constitutional convention together. We’re potentially going to see it in our lifetime.

There’s always been a tradition of direct democracy [in America]. In New England, they have direct democracy written in their state and local charters — there are town halls where people make decisions. Here in Los Angeles, we have people who are fighting for charter reform, for civic assemblies, for democracy vouchers, all these kinds of liberal interventions which are better than what we have now.

We had a conversation internally: “What’s our relationship to civic assemblies? They’re not a people’s movement assembly, but they’re better than a group of 15 people making decisions for a city of 4 million.” So we support them — they bring us closer to our vision of what democracy should look like. But they’re not our vision exactly. They’re like “non-reformist reforms.” They don’t hurt our desires for something better, but they’re not that, either.

What is that beautiful quote by Ursula K. LeGuin? “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” This is all up to us. If we want a more humane form of collective governance that values people as human beings — and we see each other and meet each other’s needs — we can decide that. I think that’s how it will enter into the liberal discourse right now.

Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit is available now. You can read and download the toolkit here.

Yvonne Yen Liu
Yvonne Yen Liu (she/her) is a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. She is the co-founder and research director of Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit dedicated to building solidarity economy ecosystems. Yvonne is based in Los Angeles, California, where the sun smiles on her every day. Although a native of NYC, she and the city have broken up and went their separate ways. She is a practitioner of research justice with over 20 years of being a nerd for racial and social justice organizations. Yvonne also serves on the boards of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network and Policy Advocates for Sustainable Economies. She teaches in the gender studies department at California State University, Los Angeles. Yvonne has a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and a MA in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she pursued a PhD.

Rationalism Has Been a Disastrous Guide for Civilization

by Kirkpatrick Sale

 August 23, 2024
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LACMA, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

The triumph of the concept of rationalism, which lay at the center of the processes that formed our Western civilization from the 16^th century on, was not as swift or easy as it would seem to the modern mind, because it had to disprove all the other ways of explaining the world that had gone on for centuries.  The task of rationalists was to  show that a logical, straight-line, objective, and non-emotive comprehension, a decidedly anomalous and unaccustomed way  of looking at the world,  could provide a picture of nature in its smallest detail that quite did away with any need to suppose a God, or gods, or miracles or magic or mysticism or metaphysics. Cast the old religions out; science would be the new faith.

And so it has been for five hundred years we have let science and its parent, rationalism, guide our lives.  Indeed Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, wrote a best-selling book pushing it in 2021 and there are organizations worldwide promoting its tenets, including a Realist Society of Australia that “exists to promote the role of reason and evidence in approaching and finding solutions to the wide range of problems that confront us in public.”

But it is exactly in that way of thinking—that rationality is the way to solving public problems—that has led to the disasters of the modern world, and indeed is now contributing to Western society’s collapse.  What we have learned after extolling rational thought for 500 years is that people are only partially rational and in fact respond and act from a variety of other impulses. Studies in neuroscience show that a human brain operates more at unconscious or emotional levels than at a rational one. The great 20^th-century attempt to apply science, including social science, to solve human problems, especially at the governmental level, had been a hubristic folly, indeed creating more disorder and dislocation than resolving problems.  The notion that society would always advance by applying rational ideas to everything, the horse that progressives since John Dewey have been riding blindly ahead, has proved to be folly, a delusional dream.

Take, as on example to begin with, liberal city planning.  It has argued, and put into many governmental schemes at all levels, that the rational solution to segregation and poverty was to have people move their homes so that housing would be integrated and have jobs guaranteed so that everyone would work.  And so for at least the better part of a century governments have made rules, given grants, passed laws, created bureaucracies, and built and unbuilt buildings and neighborhoods intended to achieve these ends.  The result has been a complete failure. People don’t necessarily want to move from their homes or welcome new neighbors or take on a new job just because it would be rational to do so.  There are many other considerations, emotional, delusional, or irrational, for their actions, and these usually outweigh the thought-out designs of the planners.

Or take, at a much larger and more important scale, the whole rigamarole that goes under the rubric of “climate change.”  As we have seen, for at least 30 years now scientists have been warning that what is in fact global overheating of our atmosphere will bring serious and sweeping, perhaps catastrophic, changes to the earth and its species, threatening the continued existence of humankind as we know it.  They have pointed to the cause, now generally agreed upon, as an excess production of “greenhouse gasses” that block the solar heat on earth from radiating back into space, driving up temperatures that effect agriculture, weather systems, ocean temperatures and heights, animal species, and the general functioning of earth systems stable for the last thousands of years.  And they have pointed to the necessary solutions to these problems: limiting and then ending the production and use of fossil fuels that cause these gasses.

Completely rational. Cut and dried. Irrefutable. And, it turns out, useless.  Because it is about something that, for the most part, will not effect us in major ways until a few decades on (we are led to hope), because there’s no apparent single act that an individual can do to alter it significantly, and because to give up carbon fuels would undermine the way of life of everyone who has always depended on them as the necessary substructure of the world’s economy—and as the source of all the comforts of modernity. That would seem to make the rational thing to do is going on as we in the West have always done, including economic growth, while encouraging the use of renewable fuels and electric cars and the like on the side.

Which is why the West is unable to avert the coming massive tragedy.  Tragedy, as Shakespeare has shown us, is the ultimate downfall of a character who knows that what he  is doing will lead to bad ends but is powerless to stop doing it.  Western civilization now knows that it is headed toward ecocide but is powerless to stop it. So much for rationalism.

Science has obviously been the triumphant offspring of rationalism, and it has totally changed the world in the last five centuries. It has brought forth new understandings in every scientific branch and produced results that have advanced practices in fields from medicine to atomic weaponry, oil production to computerization, architecture to zoology, improving health throughout the world and doubling life expectancy for most societies, as well as creating bombs capable of destroying much of life on earth.  And it has empowered an idea inherent in rationalism: progress.

Progress is the notion that things will always be better, and that comes about with widened scientific ideas and technologies as products of those ideas, and with some such machinery as the rational state to foster those technologies and deliver them to people.  It has so far in many ways proven itself, and it is now just assumed that whatever change comes about is always progress. It is the triumph of technophilia, knowing that whatever machines we create are for our increasing control of the natural world and thus for our betterment; and that there can be no danger in expanding the impact of machines on society at their own momentum even if humans may not be able to guide or control them completely.

Thus we now have machines called computers, ever-smarter each passing year, linked to a worldwide internet, and ever-smarter smart phones which have spawned global networks and “social” media penetrating societies everywhere, and now that has brought us machines that offer artificial intelligence that rivals and will soon surpass human intelligence.  And when that happens, no one knows the consequences.  But the logic of progress argues that it has been good to have machines running things in the past, so why not in the future?

The fact that it is our technologies that have permitted the worldwide destruction of so much of our ecosphere, and atmosphere, and hydrosphere, and so many of our fellow species, does not enter into our calculations about progress or technological dependence.  Thus, as we have seen, we are on the brink of ecocide.

Completely irrational, you might say.   Well, yes, but this is what rationalism has brought us to.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of seventeen books.  A 50^th anniversary reprint of his classic SDS has been published this fall (Autonomedia).

Requiem for the Home Front

by Tom Engelhardt

 August 23, 2024
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My mother and father in front of a mural she painted for the Stage Door Canteen.

Almost three-quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me. So here, on the day after my 71st birthday, is a little story about a bottle, a message, time, war (American-style), my mom, and me.

Recently, based on a Google search, a woman emailed me at the website I run, TomDispatch, about a 1942 sketch by Irma Selz that she had purchased at an estate sale in Seattle. Did it, she wanted to know, have any value?

Now, Irma Selz was my mother and I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, the drawing she had purchased didn’t have much monetary value, but that in her moment in New York City — we’re talking the 1940s — my mom was a figure. She was known in the gossip columns of the time as “New York’s girl caricaturist.” Professionally, she kept her maiden name, Selz, not the most common gesture in that long-gone era and a world of cartoonists and illustrators that was stunningly male.

From the 1930s through the 1940s, she drew theatrical caricatures for just about every paper in town: the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Journal-American,PM, the Daily News, the Brooklyn Eagle, not to speak of King Features Syndicate. She did regular “profile” illustrations for the New Yorker and her work appeared in magazines like Cue, Glamour, Town & Country, and the American Mercury. In the 1950s, she drew political caricatures for the New York Post when it was a liberal rag, not a Murdoch-owned right-wing one.

Faces were her thing; in truth, her obsession. By the time I made it to the breakfast table most mornings, she would have taken pencil or pen to the photos of newsmakers on the front page of the New York Times and retouched the faces. In restaurants, other diners would remind her of stock characters — butlers, maids, vamps, detectives — in the Broadway plays she had once drawn professionally. Extracting a pen from her purse, she would promptly begin sketching those faces on the tablecloth (and in those days, restaurants you took kids to didn’t have paper tablecloths and plenty of crayons). I remember this, of course, not for the remarkable mini-caricatures that resulted, but for the embarrassment it caused the young Tom Engelhardt. Today, I would give my right arm to possess those sketches-on-cloth. In her old age, walking on the beach, my mother would pick up stones, see in their discolorations and indentations the same set of faces, and ink them in, leaving me all these years later with boxes of fading stone butlers.

She lived in a hard-drinking, hard-smoking world of cartoonists, publicists, journalists, and theatrical types (which is why when “Mad Men” first appeared on TV and no character ever seemed to lack a drink or cigarette, it felt so familiar to me).  I can still remember the parties at our house, the liquor consumed, and at perhaps the age of seven or eight, having Irwin Hasen, the creator of Dondi, a now-largely-forgotten comic strip about a World War II-era Italian orphan, sit by my bedside just before lights-out.  There, he drew his character for me on tracing paper, while a party revved up downstairs.  This was just the way life was for me.  It was, as far as I knew, how everyone grew up.  And so my mother’s occupation and her preoccupations weren’t something I spent much time thinking about.

I would arrive home, schoolbag in hand, and find her at her easel — where else did mothers stay? — sketching under the skylight that was a unique attribute of the New York apartment we rented all those years.  As a result, to my eternal regret I doubt that, even as an adult, I ever asked her anything about her world or how she got there, or why she left her birth city of Chicago and came to New York, or what drove her, or how she ever became who and what she was. As I’m afraid is often true with parents, it’s only after their deaths, only after the answers are long gone, that the questions begin to pile up.

She was clearly driven to draw from her earliest years.  I still have her childhood souvenir album, including what must be her first professionally published cartoon.  She was 16 and it was part of an April 1924 strip called “Harold Teen” in the Chicago Daily Tribune, evidently about a young flapper and her boyfriend.  Its central panel displayed possible hairdos (“bobs”) for the flapper, including “the mop,” “the pineapple bob,” and the “Buster Brown bob.”  A little note under it says, “from sketches by Irma Madelon Selz.”  (“Madelon” was not the way her middle name was spelled, but it was the spelling she always loved.)  She would later go on to do theatrical sketches and cartoons for the Tribune before heading for New York.

I still have her accounts book, too, and it’s sad to see what she got paid, freelance job by freelance job, in the war years and beyond by major publications.  This helps explain why, in what for so many Americans were the Golden Fifties — a period when my father was sometimes unemployed — the arguments after I was officially “asleep” (but of course listening closely) were so fierce, even violent, over the bills, the debts, and how to pay for what “Tommy” needed.  But other than such memories and the random things my mother told me, I know so much less than I would like to about her.

“A Lady Drew It for Me”

As I turn 71 — two years older than my mother when she died — I can’t tell you how moved I was to have a small vestige of her life from the wartime moments before my birth wash ashore.  What my correspondent had bought in that estate sale — she later sent me a photo of it — was a quick portrait my mother did of a young man in uniform evidently being trained at the U.S. Coast Guard Machine School on Ellis Island (then occupied by that service).  On it, my mother had written, “Stage Door Canteen” and signed it, as she did all her work, “Selz.”  It was April 1942, the month of the Bataan Death March and Doolittle’s Raid on Tokyo.  And perhaps that Coast Guardsman was soon to head to war.  He signed my mother’s sketch “To Jean with all my love, Les” and sent it to his sweetheart or wife.

“Les” sketched by my mother at the Stage Door Canteen on April 20, 1942.
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Later that April night in the midst of a great global war, Les wrote a letter to Jean in distant Seattle — the framed sketch from that estate sale contained the letter — filled with longing, homesickness, and desire. (“Well, I see it is time for the ferry, so I will have to close and dream about you, and can I dream.  Oh boy.”)  And here’s how he briefly described the encounter with my mother: “Well, I said I would send you a picture.  Well, here it is.  I was up to the Stage Door Canteen, a place for servicemen and a lady drew it for me.”

That institution, run by the American Theater Wing, first opened in the basement of a Broadway theater in New York City in March 1942.  It was a cafeteria, dance hall, and nightclub all rolled into one, where servicemen could eat, listen to bands, and relax — for free — and be served or entertained by theatrical types, including celebrities of the era.  It was a hit and similar canteens would soon open in other U.S. cities (and finally in Paris and London as well).  It was just one of so many ways in which home-front Americans from every walk of life tried to support the war effort. In that sense, World War II in the United States was distinctly a people’s war and experienced as such.

My father, who volunteered for the military right after Pearl Harbor, at age 35, became a major in the Army Air Corps.  (There was no separate U.S. Air Force in those years.)  In 1943, he went overseas as operations officer for the First Air Commandos in Burma.  In Terry and the Pirates, a popular comic strip — cartoonists of every sort “mobilized” for the war — his unit’s co-commander, Phil Cochran, became the character “Flip Corkin.”  Strip creator Milton Caniff even put my father jokingly into a May 1944 strip using his nickname, “Englewillie,” and in 1967 gave him the original artwork.  It was inscribed: “For Major ENGLEWILLIE himself… with a nostalgic backward nod toward the Big Adventure.”

My mother did her part. I’m sure it never occurred to her to do otherwise. It was the time of Rosie the Riveter and so Irma the Caricaturist lent a hand.

Here’s a description from her publisher — she wrote and illustrated children’s books years later — about her role at the Stage Door Canteen.  “During the war, she was chairman of the Artist’s Committee of the American Theatre Wing.  She helped plan the murals, which decorate the Stage Door Canteen and the Merchant Seaman’s Canteen.  Miss Selz remembers setting up her easel and turning out caricatures of servicemen.  Some nights she did well over a hundred of these skillful, quick line drawings and many servicemen still treasure their ‘portraits’ by Selz.”

Imagine then that, on the April night when she drew Les, that “lady” might also have sketched another 100 or more soldiers and sailors, mementos to be sent home to family or sweethearts.  These were, of course, portraits of men on their way to war.  Some of those sketched were undoubtedly killed.  Many of the drawings must be long gone, but a few perhaps still cherished and others heading for estate sales as the last of the World War II generation, that mobilized citizenry of wartime America, finally dies off.

From photos I have, it’s clear that my mom also sketched various servicemen and celebrities on the set of The Stage Door Canteen, the 1943 home-front propaganda flick Hollywood made about the institution.  (If you watch it, you can glimpse a mural of hers at the moment Katharine Hepburn suddenly makes a cameo appearance.)  In those years, my mother also seems to have regularly volunteered to draw people eager to support the war effort by buying war bonds.  Here, for instance, is the text from a Bonwit Teller department store ad of November 16, 1944, announcing such an upcoming event: “Irma Selz, well-known newspaper caricaturist of stage and screen stars, will do a caricature of those who purchase a $500 War Bond or more.”

Bonwit Teller ad — my mother “at war.”
Click to enlarge

While my father was overseas, she also mobilized in the most personal of ways.  Every month, she sent him a little hand-made album of her own making (“Willie’s Scrap-Book, The Magazine for Smart Young Commandos”).  Each of them was a remarkably intricate mix of news, theatrical gossip, movie ads, pop quizzes, cheesecake, and cartoons, as well as often elaborate caricatures and sketches she did especially for him.  In the “March 1944 Annual Easter Issue,” she included a photo of herself sketching under the label “The Working Class.”

I still have four of those “scrap-books.”  To my mind, they are small classics of mobilized wartime effort at the most personal level imaginable.  One, for instance, included — since she was pregnant at the time — a double-page spread she illustrated of the future “me.”  The first page was labeled “My daughter” and showed a little blond girl in a t-shirt and slacks with a baseball bat over her shoulder.  (My mother had indeed broken her nose playing catcher in a youthful softball game.)  The other is labeled “Your daughter” and shows a pink-cheeked blond girl with a giant pink bow in her curly hair, a frilly pink dress, and pink ballet slippers.

Inside one of those little magazines, there was even a tiny slip-out booklet on tracing paper labeled “A Pocket Guild to SELZ.”  (“For use of military personnel only.  Prepared by Special Service Division, Eastern Representative, Special Project 9, Washington, D.C.”)  It began: “If you start worrying about what goes with Selz, here is your reference and pocket guide for any time of the day or night.”  Each tiny page was a quick sketch, the first showing her unhappily asleep (“9. A.M.”), dreaming of enemy planes, one of which, in the second sketch (“10 A.M.”), goes down in flames as she smiles in her sleep.  The micro-booklet ended with a sketch of her drawing a sailor at the Merchant Seaman’s Club and then, in front of the door of the Stage Door Canteen, heading for home (“11:30 P.M.”).  “And so to bed” is the last line.

The cover of one of my mother’s “scrap-books” sent to my father at war.
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I know that my father wrote back fervently, since I have a letter my mother sent him that begins: “Now to answer your three letters I received yest[erday]. No. 284, 285 & 289, written Apr. 26, 27, and 29th.  It was such a relief to read a letter saying you’d had a pile of mail from me, at last, & also that the 1st of the Scrap-Books finally reached you, & better yet, that you enjoyed it.”

For both of them, World War II was their moment of volunteerism.  From 1946 on, I doubt my parents ever again volunteered for anything.

People-less Wars

Here’s the strange thing: the wars never ended, but the voluntarism did.  Think of it this way: there were two forces of note on the home front in World War II, an early version of what, in future years, would become the national security state and the American people.  The militarized state that produced a global triumph in 1945 emerged from that war emboldened and empowered.  From that moment to the present — whether you’re talking about the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence services, private contractors, special operations forces, or the Department of Homeland Security and the homeland-industrial complex that grew up around it post-9/11 — it’s been good times all the way.

In those seven decades, the national security state never stopped expanding, its power on the rise, its budgets ever larger, and democratic oversight weakening by the decade.  In that same period, the American people, demobilized after World War II, never truly mobilized again despite the endless wars to come.  The only exceptions might be in the Vietnam years and again in the brief period before the 2003 invasion of Iraq when massive numbers of Americans did mobilize, going voluntarily into opposition to yet one more conflict in a distant land.

And yet if its “victory weapon” robbed the planet of the ability to fight World War III and emerge intact, war and military action seemed never to cease on “the peripheries.”  It was there, in the Cold War years, that the U.S. confronted the Soviet Union or insurgencies and independence movements of many sorts in covert as well as open war.  (Korea, Tibet, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Libya, to name just the obvious ones.)  After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, the wars, conflicts, and military actions only seemed to increase — Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, Iraq (and Iraq again and yet again), Afghanistan (again), Pakistan, Libya (again), Yemen, and so on.  And that doesn’t even cover covert semi-war operations against Nicaragua in the 1980s and Iran since 1979, to name just two countries.

In the wake of World War II, wartime — whether as a “cold war” or a “war on terror” — became the only time in Washington.  And yet, as the American military and the CIA were loosed in a bevy of ways, there was ever less for Americans to do and just about nothing for American civilians to volunteer for (except, of course, in the post-9/11 years, the ritualistic thanking of the troops).  After Vietnam, there wouldn’t even be a citizens’ army that it was your duty to serve in.

In those decades, war, ever more “covert” and “elite,” became the property of the national security state, not Congress or the American people.  It would be privatized, corporatized, and turned over to the experts.  (Make what you will of the fact that, without an element of popular voluntarism and left to those experts, the country would never win another significant war, suffering instead one stalemate or defeat after another.)

My mother draws a soldier on the set of the movie The Stage Door Canteen.
Click to enlarge

In other words, when it comes to war, American-style, the 73 years since Irma Selz sketched that jaunty young Coast Guardsman at the Stage Door Canteen might as well be a millennium.  Naturally enough, I’m nostalgic when it comes to my mother’s life.  There is, however, no reason to be nostalgic about the war she and my father mobilized for.  It was cataclysmic beyond imagining.  It destroyed significant parts of the planet.  It involved cruelty on all sides and on an industrial scale — from genocide to the mass firebombing of cities — that was and undoubtedly will remain unmatched in history.  Given the war’s final weapon that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such a war could never be fought again, not at least without destroying humanity and a habitable planet.

My mother welcomes me into a world still at war, July 20, 1944.  My birth announcement drawn by “Selz.”
Click to enlarge

Nonetheless, something was lost when that war effort evaporated, when war became the property of the imperial state.

My mother died in 1977, my father on Pearl Harbor Day 1983.  They and their urge to volunteer no longer have a place in the world of 2015.  When I try to imagine Irma Selz today, in the context of America’s new wartime and its endless wars, conflicts, raids, and air assassination campaigns, I think of her drawing drones (or their operators) or having to visit a Special Operations version of a Stage Door Canteen so secret that no normal American could even know it existed.  I imagine her sketching soldiers in units so “elite” that they probably wouldn’t even be allowed to send their portraits home to lovers or wives.

In these decades, we’ve gone from an American version of people’s war and national mobilization to people-less wars and a demobilized populace.  War has remained a constant, but we have not and in our new 1% democracy, that’s a loss.  Given that, I want to offer one small cheer, however belatedly, for Irma the Caricaturist.  She mattered and she’s missed.

[Note: I’d also like to offer a final salute to Henry Drewry, one of the last of the World War II generation in my life and one of the great ones. He died on November 21, 2014.]

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.