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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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May Day Was for Men: The History of May Day and the 8-Hour Movement

Mango Mussolini has ushered in a new wave of resistance to political oppression, and my organization encourages workers of all genders, races, sexualities, and abilities to strike back against the regime. May 1 marks the 100th day of the rapist-in-chief’s reign and what better way to “celebrate” his rule than by having a General Strike. Something I recently discovered is that May 1 originated in the norther bloc of the Western hemisphere, and its history is tied directly to the 8-hour movement for men in Chicago. Before we can discuss possible responses to the jackass-in-chief we should understand the history of the movement. Only by understanding and critiquing its limitations can we create a stronger general workers’ movement to overthrow capitalism. We cannot separate May Day from the 8-hour movement, which will be the focus on the discussion, and from here we can learn the lessons of the past to understand the obstacles of the present since the historic structures have remained today.

In the nineteenth-century during the industrial revolution, people worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day from sunrise to sunset. Gradually, during the 1820s and 1830s men demanded and won a 10-hour shift, a much-needed reduction from the incredulous workday. In 1837, President Martin van Buren decreed that all government workers have a 10-hour shift, a nod to the power and strength of the men and women who fought for shorter hours. With this victory in mind, men set their sights on an 8-hour day, and in 1857, unions made this demand; they mimicked the Australian slogan “8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation, and 8 hours of rest.” This movement did not gain steam until the 1880s due to fragmentation within the working class, when they were able to overcome religious differences within the movement.

The eight-hour movement had three specific sects, which caused tension within it. In the first group, approximately 30,000 native-born mostly Protestant workers (when I say workers, I mean men), formed nineteen unions through the Chicago Trade and Labor Assembly (CTLA). The second group consisted of Irish Catholics along with some native-born Protestants who joined the Chicago District Assembly of the Knights of Labor whose membership in 1878 contained 1,000 members and ameliorated to 25,000 in 1886. The last group contained 10,000 to 15,000 workers of German and Eastern European origin and who were organized by the anarchist Central Labor Union (CLU), the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), and the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Religious differences divided the working class along these lines as radicals took militant stances against organized religion in comparison to the CTLA and the Knights of Labor who both believed the labor movement could restore the Republic by combating corrupt monopolists. Further, the Knights of Labor and the radicals shared an inclusive vision of a labor movement which composed of skilled and unskilled workers, native- and foreign-born workers, men and women, unlike the CTLA who only included Anglo-American workers in its imagination.

Women also joined the campaign for an eight-hour week, most notably under Lucy Parsons who formed the Working Women’s Union along with Aliza Stevens. Women worked across lines of class, race, ethnicity, and religion. They welcomed the Knights of Labor and other radicals. And these women began to raise the conditions of workingwomen before the public and working women in the hopes of achieving legislation to restrict the hours of women’s labor. The eight-hour movement was a universal one in this sense because it appealed to everyone regardless of gender, religion, or nationality.

By 1884, organized labor was ready to make a city and nationwide eight-hour demand. At the time of their meeting, the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions voted to inaugurate the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. It was clear to all organizations save for the Knights of Labor that the ruling class had no interests in legislating an eight-hour day. Since the 1860s, the bourgeoisie found numerous ways to circumvent any legal attempts to mandate a shorter workweek; frequently they had their courts declare the pro-worker legislation unconstitutional. Strikes became the accepted weapon for workers to secure a shorter workday, and as history has shown, the only way to meet the capitalist class by force. Tensions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie increased by the mid-1880s, which lead workers to two conclusions: that overwork as evil, and unjust, and that the capitalist class by their own sinful greed as well as through the introduction of labor- replacing technology was the objective root cause of the injustice.

This religious framework alienated the socialist and radicals of the movement who say little hope in relying on religion to accomplish anything practical. The anarchist especially believed that the State and religion were the same. Socialists and anarchists continually made antireligious arguments, and frequently meet with religious leaders of the other two sects of the working class. They made three arguments: overworked men and women had no time to develop the moral values the clergy so highly praised or to become Christians. Second, they exclaimed that the clergy were uninformed about industrial conditions. Third, if the Christian clergy truly wanted to follow their founder Jesus, then they must be willing to challenge the capitalist churchgoers and support and eight-hour movement. Although they met with these leaders, they firmly believed that these discussions were fruitless and that the religious leaders would not accept these challenges.

Employers opposed the eight-hour movement because eight-hour shops could not compete with those that maintained long hours. If Chicago reduced the workday, employers threatened to relocate their operations to towns or cities where they could operate as they pleased. Liberal institutions as well as business owners claimed that the laws of supply and demand could not accommodate labor’s demands for shorter hours. They frequently depicted labor radicals as wild, dangerous, and drunkards who entire purpose was to overthrow the American industrial order. Initially, religious leaders existed in the liminal space between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but as May Day approached, they sided with the workers. They recognized the unjust treatment of their members by their employers. Protestant leaders especially stated, “Christianity is a form of Socialism.” When the religious leaders broke ranks with bourgeoisie, the working class pounced. The opium that placated the pain of life under capitalism no longer worked, and the workers could fight back.

On May 1, 1886, divisions and animosities within the labor movement were unexpectedly replaced with solidarity avant le mot and anticipation as the promised general strike and demonstrations for eight-hours were launched in Chicago and across the country. Membership in unions affiliated with the CTLA, the Knights of Labor, and the CLU soared as workers believed they could reduce the hours of labor through a united action. Immediately on that day 340,000 workers across the country struck to reduce their working day. Chicago alone witness 287 strikes in 1886, all for the reduction of hours. Nearly 80,000 workers were involved, and half of these workers only threatened to walk out to get their employers to promise a reduced day. Despite the success of this movement, the capitalist state combined with employers attempted to delegitimize the movement by destroying labor leaders. This came about on May 3 and 4, which ended with an explosion at Hay Market Square. Although we will never know who threw the bomb into the police ranks and killed seven, we do know that the police used it as a chance to kill and suppress the workers’ movement. The pigs responded by opening fire and killing an unknown number of workers. What we can confirm is that the capitalist state continued the violence to suppress workers.

Despite the awesome victory in 1886, we must remember this triumph came at the expense of women. Women did not receive any reduction in their hourly labor until 1909 when four women—Agnes Nestor, Elizabeth Maloney, Anna Willard, and Lulu Holley—from Chicago secured the passage of a law that made ten-hours the maximum legal working day for a significant portion of women in Illinois. These women represented the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (CWTUL), which consisted of glove makers, laundresses, and waitresses. They sought to distance themselves from the Haymarket bombing, and fought for shorter hours, higher wages, and safer working conditions to obtain a fuller, more secure life. Although 1909 may seem like a victory, the four previously mentioned women demanded an eight-hour working day, but were only able to win a ten-hour one, which covered only women who worked in the factories, laundries, and in mechanical establishments; the waitresses who spearheaded the campaign were excluded from the law. Fortunately, in 1911, Nestor secured a partial victory for women in Illinois by having a maximum workweek of fifty-four hours. And continuing the fight, women would finally receive an eight-hour day in 1937, a full fifty-one years after the men.

Men in the ruling-elite were the biggest obstacle for women reducing their hours. Male success in the 1880s rendered women invisible, which allowed for business leaders to continue their exploitation of women. They continued to sludge through twelve- to fourteen-hour days. One man, Clarence Knight, president of the Oak Park Elevated Road, boasted that “we give our girls no vacations…[and] if the hours of their labor are shortened they are likely to get a permanent vacation (emphasis mine).” Further, the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, a union of business leaders who blocked progressive legislation, even stated that they opposed any legislation that “restrict[ed] the privilege of women to sell their labor (emphasis mine).” Women filed lawsuits against their employers about their decrepit working conditions and repeatedly the capitalist State sided with the employers. The judges argued that an eight-hour working day stripped women of their liberty to choose their schedules or women freely agreed to toil a twelve- to fourteen-hour shift. The ruling elite used its legislative power and presented often contradictory arguments to justify the exploitation of women. This shows the relationship between capitalism and the patriarchy as it is men using the state and economic apparatus to control women and their labor to keep them subservient to men.

In response to repeated patriarchal capitalist exploitation, women shifted their attention from union organization to diverting resources to securing an hours’ law that would cover all Illinois’ wage-earning women. In challenging the courts, women like Margaret Dreier Robins stressed the necessity of an eight-hour day highlighting that a woman’s health and happiness directly impacted her role at the home, in the family, and for all future generations. On March of 1909 proletarian women began to exert pressure on the legislative system through strikes and petitions, which culminated in bill number 343 of the Labor, Mines, and Mining Committee, condescendingly named the “girls bill.” As men of the ruling elite debated and obstructed Senate Bill 343 women from all over the state and country traveled to Springfield to exert more and more pressure on the government. As many as 200 women a day continued entered the capital and continually forced men to stay on topic; they did this all throughout the months of March, April, May, and June 1909. Politicians believed that the passage of an eight-hour day for women would force businesses to move out of state or would replace women workers with men—typical scare tactics. Finally, in June of 1909 women earned a ten-hour working day because the capitalist class refused to give women an eight-hour day, but could not ignore the increasing pressure women exerted upon them. This campaign exhausted all funds of the CWTUL. Eventually women in 1937 earned a forty-hour workweek (one year before the federal government mandated that all workers have a forty-hour week regardless of gender expression).

The success of May Day in 1886 spread across the Western world for on July 14, 1889 the Second International adopted May Day as an international workers’ holiday. To counteract this, the capitalist class in the northern bloc of the Western hemisphere changed the day to “Law and Order” day to erase the power of the working class. Recently, May Day has come back as a workers’ holiday as on May 1, 2006, undocumented labor in tandem with organized labor launched “A Day without an Immigrant” to remind the agricultural industry and the rest of the ruling class that they cannot exist without labor to exploit. The tradition is slowly coming back. By striking back and withholding our labor, we can send a clear message to the predator-in-chief that the working class will not tolerate his misogyny, racism, homophobia, apathy to the environment. To do this, students must organize walkouts at schools, and refuse to participate in a system that teaches them obedience to the state rather than promote individual curiosity. Workers can withhold their labor and block off highways to constrict the flow of capital; the bourgeoisie only listen when they feel it in their pockets. We must not succumb to symbolic, performative protests.

Work Cited

Chase, Eric. “The Brief Origins of May Day.” Industrial Workers of the World. 1993. Accessed April 8, 2017. https://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday.

Gaitis, Dawen. “The History of May Day.” Marxists. 2007. Accessed April 8, 2017. https://www.marxists.org/subject/mayday/articles/tracht.html.

Hoy, Suellen. “Chicago Working Women's Struggle for a Shorter Day, 1908-1911.” Journal of Illinois State Historical Society (1988-) 107, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 9-44.

Mirola, William A. “Marching to Haymarket and the 1886 Eight-Hour Campaign.” In Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago's Eight-Hour Movement, 1860-1912, 91-116. Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Sawant, Kshama. “Why We Should Strike on May Day.” Socialist Alternative. February 22, 2017. Accessed April 12, 2017. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2017/02/22/strike-day/.

Further Reading

Foner, Philip. Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present. New York: Free Press, 1982.

Kirby, Diane. "'The Wage Earning Woman and the State': The National Women's Trade Union League and Protective Labor Legislation, 1903 -1923.” Labor History 28 (Winter 1987)

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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The criticism against this article reveals a lot of the colonial entitlement ingrained in radical Leftist circles. For example, people frequently stated, "this person is strawmaning Marxism." This is an entirely dishonest tactic that assumes that Marxism in, and of itself, is immune to criticism. Additionally, this criticism assumes the author does not understand Marxism, which is a position of "bad faith." To have honest discussions about colonialism and its relationship to European culture, ideas, and values, all parties must respect each other and their ideas. Simply labeling an entire critique as "strawmaning" further reinforces the veracity this article presents about the incapability of Occidental culture and the Northern and Southern blocs of the Western hemisphere.

In addition to industrial development along Western metrics, Soviets also imposed its own colonial will on the people of Turkmenistan as they “sought to transform the Turkmen – a scattered, tribally organized population of mostly illiterate nomads and peasants – into a socialist nation” (“Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan” by Adrienne Lynn Edgar, page 261). This is just an example of Socialists imposing Western conceptions of civilization on “proto-Communist” societies. Russell Means’s criticism is poignant and worth considering, especially when Edgar writes, “As the Soviets sought to promote Turkmen nationhood, they were determined to expunge the very social and cultural practices that were most closely identified with being Turkmen.” (Edgar, 222-223). This is what it means to “spread the socialism across the world.”

More concerning is many of these supposed “criticisms” are from white people in the United States are, by their very existence, invaders of the land. It reeks of colonial entitlement to demand European ideas and culture dominate the emancipatory struggles of colonized people. If they want to do it on their own volition that is fine; they should not be expected to conform to European thought. Why should the colonized consider the ideas of their colonial oppressors?

Another criticism I have seen, often levied by white people, is this article purports "the myth of the noble savage." This criticism does not understand how the "noble savage" can only be practiced through the Western colonial gaze. Colonizers use this myth used to demonize and dehumanize non-European cultures and show how specific individuals are not corrupted by their "barbarism." In the case of the “noble savage” the colonizer is imposing its fictions on a colonized subject to conquer and exploit an entire group of people. Russell Means, if anything, romanticizes his past, which is an entirely different concept all together. No power asymmetry is present when the colonized subject idealizes the past. Yes, there are often distortions of the past, which comes because of sentimentalism but, as previously stated, it is an equal relationship. A colonized-self imaging a non-colonized past.

#Decolonization #decolonialism #marxism #socialism #indigenous sovereignty #indigenous struggle #Indigenous solidarity #settler-colonialism #noble savage #colonization #Russell Means #Adrienne Lynn Edgar #Turkmenistan #Soviet History

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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Opium, Magical Realism, and French Indochina

Magical realism was an important aspect of Jules Boissière’s writing; he was a French writer who visited and live in Indochina during fin-de-siècle France, and, although he played little in the initial colonial process, his work provided a rational justification for French presence in Indochina. Postcolonial theorists define magical realism as a binary opposition between the real and the fantastic, and are locked into a dialectic between each other. Further, it represents the liminality between the development of metropolitan surplus-extract and the existing “primitive accumulation,” the point in which cultures become “creolized.”[1] This definition proves to be incredibly useful to understand how Boissière articulated his ideas and description of Indochina. Since he wrote for a French audience, he unconsciously revealed the highly racial and colonial power structures that manifested themselves as he reported on the Indochinese. Boissière never intended to condemn the Annamite culture, in fact, he appreciated it enough to live in Indochina twice. Eventually, he even died in Hanoi. However, this appreciation of culture exposed insidious and unconsciously oppressive modes of thought that were integral to the colonizer-colonized paradigm.

French writers associated Indochina with distant, magical lands that needed to be tamed through the power of la mission civilisatrice. The writers lived in colonized lands and away from their ancestral homeland. Consequently, some historians have argued, that these people experimented with drugs to cope with the feeling of a “drowning in an Other[ized] existence.”[2] Boissière began his addiction to opium six days after he arrived in Haiphong when he ventured into an opium den. He commented on the isolation he felt in Indochina, which led to his first use of the drug.[3]. He used it as a substitute for his temporary absence of cultural identity, which Stephen Bishop theorizes occurs when Occidental individuals visit Oriental lands.[4] Opium filled the loss of identity in a distant land, and it presented him with otherworldly experiences that shaped his understanding of the region. In his memoirs, as he recounted his experiences with opium, he praised it, “Avant de signer la dernière page, prosternons-nous devant Sa Divinité l’Opium”.[5] He later continued this spiritual quality to the drug as he thanked it for its supernatural power. He does not associate alcohol, a typical French intoxicant, with mystical qualities the same way he does with opium, which reveals his exotification and Otherization of Indochina. He devoted three years of his life to the drug.[6] Since he lived in a colonized land, he relied on drugs to fill the void inside him. Boissière thanked narcotics for making him complete and sought to remain eternally faithful to it, even as he claimed independency of it.[7]

References to ghosts and specters in the Vietnamese forest also illustrated Boissière’s magical realism. In Fumeurs d’opium, when the protagonist and his Vietnamese militia slept in the forest and subsequently caught malaria, they were overcome with reoccurring nightmares, and attributed them to ghosts of the forest. The militia believed the spirits were haunting them to protect the Emperor’s gold. Eventually the ghosts chased them out, and the protagonist became addicted to opium, which he used to combat his fever dreams.[8] This mysticism reinforces the idea that non-European lands are magical and irrational. The French believe that ghosts cannot exist in the material world, and since the Vietnamese think that ghosts exist, it demonstrated the need for a French education system in order to abolish their “irrational” conclusions. The protagonist feared the forests, and after he ingested opium, his anxiety subsided. Next, he began to interact with these ghosts. He watched the phantoms of the forest appear but he recognized that they did not want to frighten him for they stayed away from him due of his nerves and his weak heart.[9] He smoked opium to combat the ghosts.[10] To him, the drug retained a magical quality to make apparitions appear in the forest. This mystification of distant lands further reinforced the need for the French to tame and rationalize the country with la mission civilisatrice.

Personification played a huge role in demonstrating the exoticism of Indochina, and through this literary device, Boissière unconsciously and unintentionally advocated for French intervention Indochina. “Personification” is harmless when the power relations are in equilibrium. For example, when French author describes another part of her country, she cannot impose a power dynamic on it for all Frenchmen are racially equals—their white skin and French culture. However, when there is an asymmetric power differential like with colonialism, this device, through the words of the colonizer, dominates the colonized. Boissière’s description of a harsh windstorm advocated for the need of French intervention, he wrote, “un vent froid fait trembler les cloisons dans les cases, frissonner les paillotes et grincer lés bambous secs.”[11] He later confessed that he felt alone due to the windstorm’s hostility. Seemingly innocuous sentences like this proliferated all the subject’s writings, and he unintentionally promoted French colonization. The shaking of the huts communicated that their houses were not on par with their French counterparts, and thus required a colonial power to “modernize” them. The historian must not forget that Boissière originated in a colonial country and, thus, internalized colonial discourse with all of its blatant and subtle forms. The use of personification in this way represented the subtleties of colonial domination through literary description, and the need for French presence abroad.

Opium and magical realism worked in tandem to justify the French existence in Indochina. Individuals like Boissière became addicted to the drug because of a loss of a sense of identity, and used it to drown themselves in a colonized society. As he lived abroad, he personified the lands as having a magical, exotic quality to them. These descriptions painted Indochina as a place ravaged by spirits and an ignorant people who believed in them, and they needed of a French education to demystify and eradicate superstition in accordance with a colonial education.

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[1] Carina Yervasi, “'Ouaga Saga', Magical Realism, and Postcolonial Politics,” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 4 (Winter, 2008): 45.

[2] Stephen L. Bishop, “Mimicry of a Hallucination: The Quest for Identity à L'Orient,” Dalhousie French Studies 78 (Spring 2007): 121.

[3] Boissière, Propos d’un intoxiqué, 2.

[4] Bishop, “Mimicry of a Hallucination,” 122.

[5] Boissière, Propos d’un intoxiquè, 14. Before signing the last page, let us prostrate before Opium the Divine

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Boissière, Fumeurs d’opium, 14 – 16

[9] Ibid., 17 – 18.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Boissière, Propos d’un intoxiqué, 12. A cold wind shook the partitions in the huts, shuddering the huts and creaking the dry bamboo.

#Colonization #French History #Jules Boissière #Opium #Magical Realism #Postcolonialism #Literary Devices #Imperialism #Vietnam #Vietnamese History

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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Leftist unity in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand should and only can be achieved by uniting under indigenous struggles. We are fractured because we are insistent that our European models are the right without considering the First Nations.

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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A photograph. An anarcha-feminist flag [black and purple] with the words, “The revolution will be intersectional, or it won’t be my revolution. Time’s up, single-issue activists. There is no struggle left but our collective struggle.” Any revolutionary analysis that ignores intersectionality is an analysis that seeks to maintain oppression.

#intersectionality #feminism #Anarchism #Communism

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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All Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists of Tumblr

Reblog this for a comrade. I wanna follow you.

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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Women and the Paris Commune

This was originally a discussion post for my organization but I figured it belongs here.

Before we begin our discussion, I would just like to preface that I am a man, and while I am discussing and providing a history of women’s participation in the Paris Commune, I may not be 100% correct in my analysis, as I cannot detach myself from sexism and misogyny of our patriarchal society and its legacies. For that, I apologize ahead of time, and will immediately adjust and correct any oppressive analysis that people will reveal in the discussion. I will do my best to present the views and analysis of female historians whom I have encountered during my research on the topic.

The Paris Commune is one of the most pivotal moments in revolutionary history as it was France’s closest moment to socialism in the nineteenth-century. Before we delve into its specifics, I will provide some context about how this commune came to fruition so we get a better sense of the material conditions in 1870s France and why the Commune occurred.

Students of history cannot understand the Paris Commune without considering two key events: the revival of radical thought and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1870s experienced a bust in the capitalist economic cycle, which lead to a revival in republic and socialist organizations and anarchist thought. In June 1868, Napoleon III legalized public meetings, which the French government banned partially due to the women demanding equal rights during the French Revolution. As people held public meetings, they began to organize strikes against their bosses and other corporations for better working conditions and wages. This occurred in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The second context, the Franco-Prussian War, also served as the catalyst for the Commune. This war briefly summarized, Otto von Bismarck goaded France into a war for which it was not prepared and lost miserably. In the summer of 1870, the Germans captured the French emperor Napoleon III in the Battle of Sedan, which led to insurrection in Paris and then its eventual siege by the Germans. The siege of Paris lasted months; people who did not die of starvation resorted to eating all kinds of animals to survive. Additionally, there was a moratorium placed on rent, as people could not work and their property owners escaped Paris prior to the siege.

In January of 1871, France, not Paris, capitulated to the Germans, and the war ended. At the same time, the Blanquists began to mobilize French workers to demand a new government, a Commune. Part of the reason for mobilization was due to the landlords demanding their rents with interest. In February that same year, the Parisians held an election unbeknownst to the rest of France, and this new Parisian government established peace treaties with the Prussians. Paris was a highly volatile place and what sparked the Commune was a dispute over its cannons, which protected a working-class neighborhood. On March 18, 1871, the French army forcibly attempted to seize the cannons and a few of its defenders died in the process. That day the Parisians revolted and the Commune began.

Many Marxists focus on the role of the working class in the Paris Commune and its futility most notably by Leon Trotsky who believed the Commune came too late and did not attempt to spread the revolution. His focus is on the meaning of the commune and not on the participants themselves; he specifically ignores the role of women and the roles they performed during this revolutionary moment.

Women played a leading role in this revolutionary moment. Paradoxically, historians have credited them with the defeat of the army and blamed for the death of the two generals despite having no guns. From two o’clock to six o’clock in the morning, the struggle for the cannons was a male-centered drama; however, after six, women played a key role in the taking of the cannons for in the opening hours of the day as they opened their blinds, fetched food for breakfast, they observed the army attempting to steal the cannons. One woman, the most famous Communard, the anarchist Louise Michel, rifle in hand, alerted the city of Paris about the treasonous actions of the French army. Her and other women battled the soldiers over control of the cannons. They charged the guards shouting, “Unharness the horses [who were pulling the cannons]! Let’s go! We want the cannons! We will have the cannons! Cut the traces [the reigns]!” The women and men detached the horses from the cannons and established control over the weapons. In this chaotic moment, the French army balked at firing into a crowd of citizens to which Michel remarked, “The Revolution was made.” Working class women of the Paris set the stage for the radicalization of the Commune.

In April as the city of Paris fought Versailles to maintain autonomy, female demonstrators played an integral role in rallying supporting. Seven hundred to two thousand women gathered in Paris to propose a march to Versailles to explain the need for the Commune and they discussed also joining the men in their fight against Versailles. One working class woman suggested that women had one final attempt to reconcile with Versailles before more the armies shed more blood. Another woman, Beatrix Excoffons, reported that a group of seven hundred women was not large enough to convince Versailles of a ceasefire, so instead they tended to the wounded. Women were also warriors in the Commune. On April 11 and 12, newspapers called for the Citizenesses of Paris to join the army. Eight women formed the Union des Femmes pour la Défense de Paris et les Soins aux Blessés (The Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and the Health of the Injured) and responded to the call. The Union des Femmes declared, “It is not peace but all-out war that the women workers of Paris demand! Conciliation today is betrayal” and “Paris will not give in…The women of Paris will prove to France and to the world that…they are truly as capable as their brothers of giving up their lives in the cause of the Commune, the cause of the People.” This call to defense scared the conservatives who resided both in and out of Paris for women were acting outside of their expected gender roles. As women organized to join the fight, men joined as well, for they felt their masculinity was at stake for they clung to their toxic conceptualizations of masculinity. Fifteen hundred women ended up signing up for the military, but the National Guard did not pursue any interest in incorporating these women into their ranks.

Women were not just in the military ranks but they also composed of a significant number of them played integral roles to raising political consciousness and demanding for equality. While men excluded them from official political power, it did not stop them from exerting political pressure on their politicians. They formed women exclusive political clubs and mixed clubs as well. Anticlericalism frequently appeared in popular discourse as women, and men, demanded for the investigation, arrest, and execution of priests and nuns, which terrified the bourgeoisie. A few women demanded the people toss the nuns into the Seine for poisoning wounded soldiers. Their passion and rhetoric propelled some workers to capture churches and turned the altars into places to feed and house people.

The merits of socialism also appeared in popular discourse at the time. Women proposed the abolition of prostitution, the legalization of divorce, and the recognition of free unions (which were illegal in France until the 1880s). Additionally, some women demanded the end of religious instruction. Women who participated in these debates were largely working class. The female organizers wore red scarves like their male counterparts, some carried pistols to meetings others did not; nursing children and smoking was a typical occurrence at these events. The men who attended these discussions were horrified absolutely about the nonchalant ways in which women would suggest an end to marriage, equality between the sexes, and they asserted the superiority of women. One man remarked that these women endangered western civilization as he heard a woman comment, “To be married is to be a slave…It cannot be tolerated any longer in a free city. It ought to be considered a crime and suppressed by the most severe of measures.” She later continued that divorce was not a solution but rather an “Orléanist [bourgeois] expedient.”

Now that we have a basic idea of what happened in the Commune, we should examine and understand why women were so passionate about the “free city.” Life in the Commune for women revolved a lot around maintaining the frontlines. Women formed cooperatives to make uniforms for the soldiers. The National Guard explicitly protected women’s wages so that they were not exploited for their labor. People established contracts that defined a minimum wage. The men understood the power of female agency in the Commune for it would not exist without their participation, and given how often women threatened to disrupt the social disorder if the men did not meet their demands, and so for that reason protecting women’s wages was a top priority.

Education was another top priority for the Commune. France has had a history of demanding free, compulsory, and secular education. The socialists of the Paris Commune advocated for technical education of children so they can also have useful trade skills if, and when, they entered the workforce. Women planned and reformed the education system and soon after, they opened up an industrial arts school for girls. Further, some educators demanded and received free equipment and school meals. They dedicated most of their efforts to the secularization of education. Additionally, the Paris Commune decreed that women should receive equal pay for equal work in the education field. Further, the Union des Femmes actively fought to preserve women’s wages in a man’s world and they won repeatedly. Additionally, women fought and earned an 8-hour workday and childcare, making the Commune the most progressive socialist force at the time.

The biggest break from patriarchal oppression came from a decree on April 10 when the Commune paid women who had children, both married and single, a 600 Franc pension if they had a husband or lover who died in battle. Part of this radical decree resulted from anticlericalism and for practicality. Anticlerical in that the church held a lot of power over the lives of women, and marriage was an official part of it. Practical for marriages were costly affairs for working class families, and giving women pensions for being unwed granted them personal agency. Despite this radical break, we must remember that misogyny still pervaded socialist thought for some of them, namely the Jacobins, insisted on making no distinction between married and unmarried women whereas others were reluctant to recognize equal rights. Further, those same socialists also wanted to remove children from the care of widowed and unwed mothers.

The most famous individual from the Paris Commune was Louise Michel. She was a schoolteacher who, as I previously mentioned, played an active role in defending the cannons. She was also an anarchist and a medical worker. She regularly preached resistance to the Prussians during the siege of Paris, and tended to the wounded during the Commune. When the Parisians initially established the Commune, she immediately joined the National Guard to protect the city. When the Commune collapsed, the French government charged her with the following crimes: attempting to overthrow the government, encouraging women to arm themselves, using weapons, and wearing a military uniform. Her militancy was so infamous throughout France, that many people often shamed her and called her a lesbian; anarchists defended her by giving her the nickname, which would persist throughout history, The Red Virgin.

Ultimately, the Paris Commune was doomed to fail. It did not have enough resources to survive beyond 71 days as it went against the great French military, and it had dwindling resources. Leon Trotsky goes so far as to claim the Commune “was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy.” There is a fruitful discussion on the possibility and counterfactuals in that the Parisian Commune could have spread the revolution throughout the rest of France, especially as we have more than 140 years of distance from the events. However, the purpose of this discussion is to examine the ways in which women benefited from the Paris Commune, and the ways in which they played an integral role in creating the Commune. Given we have a 21st-century perspective, what can the role women played in the Commune tell us about the role women and all genders should perform in current events. What are new demands for women and other marginalized genders and how can a socialist society address them?

#Paris Commune #Louise Michel #Feminism #Marxism #Socialism #Utopian socalism #Commune #France #Paris #Anarchism #Franco-Prussian War #Sexism #Leon Trotsky #Jacobins #Blanquists #French History #Women's Histoy #Marxist History

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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Some Articles on Decolonization

The Decolonization Manifesto: Marx and Muslims. This applies Fanonian analysis to Marx's ideas and it introduces the idea that Marxism must be "stretched" beyond its current MLM form. He applies this analysis to the revolutionary potential of Islam to remove the colonial masters.

Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon’s Modification of Marxism and Decolonization of Democratic Socialism. This article discusses the base assumptions and internal colonial logic of Marxism and how black Marxists, and by extension Marxists of color, stretch Marxists theory to make it applicable to their own struggles. This stretching often dramatically alters Marxism.

Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. A primary source. Details ways to support decolonial struggles.

Decolonial Intersectionality and a Transnational Feminist Movement. Decolonial feminism and transnational feminism are the product of the obvious flaws inherent in Marxist/proletarian feminism. This article forces you to acknowledge your assumptions about liberation. Education is a key to liberation, but whose education should be given? A European one? Or one that pertains to the identity of the colonized?

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Intersectionality. Because Marxists pervert this theory so they can allow white people to have "intersectional" experiences.

Can the subaltern speak?. Canon. Complicates how critique of decolonialism and postcolonialism from colonized perspectives could reinforce colonial domination. The writer also questions the usefulness of Marxist and European analysis to the colonized subject. Will add to this later

#Decolonization #Feminism #trasnationalism #decolonialism #trasnational feminism #decolonial feminism #intersectionality #identity politics #Frantz Fanon #Fanon #Standing Rock #indigenous struggle #indigenous soliarity #indigenous sovereignty

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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From a post I saw on Facebook. "As an American observer, I would strongly urge him to break ties with the U.S. outside of basic diplomatic relations. The U.S. is primarily interested in involving the Philippines in another colonial game of Risk. You want to rid the Philippines of drugs and prostitution? Keep American military bases far, far away. Once the American military is able to establish bases, they will insist upon selling your government equipment that they cannot afford.

The Philippines is fortunate in that it does not really have a need for a navy or large standing army. Want to keep it that way? Again, keep out the U.S. military. Unless you too want to be dragged into global wars of conquest, regime change, have your government plunge further into debt and risk increased terrorism blow back, urge Duterte to not align with Washington. What does my country primarily export to the world that's so useful? Pornography, garbage music, mindless sports fanaticism and violence. America is also the world's largest arms dealer and guess who they'd love to sell to? Obama is not a man to admire. Some of you spineless, weak-willed people complain about drug dealers and addicts being gunned down as if it is so horrible and barbaric. What's worse? Leaving the drug trade alone to continue to flourish and increasingly ruin your country or to eliminate it by killing the criminals? Duterte isn't really your problem, it is the long line of leaders you've elected who took money to look the other way while it continued.

So why would Washington be against extra judicial killings that they themselves do routinely? It isn't the deaths they're worried about, after all, what do dead Filipinos matter to them? Why is it none of you remember you fought and lost against Washington during the Philippine-American war? They admit to murdering well over a million men, women and children, but other sources place it over 3 million. How come you don't learn that in your American organized education system? Is it because Washington loves you so much?

Washington's involvement in Vietnam came about not because of France's colonial problems in the region, but because Washington was involved in opium sales. Having communists stand up and try to free themselves from this was a threat as Washington used this money to fund CIA programs to overthrow governments hostile to its political will.

The British first had control over the opium production and sales in China. The opium wars permitted Britain to solidify control over much of China by using arms to force Chinese into buying and using opium (look it up). America took over this trade from Britain after WWI. Washington decided to protect its drug trade with CNAC (China National Aviation Corporation) by establishing Chenault's Flying Tigers. They are not heroes, but illegal mercenaries used to protect this trade from Japanese air power that was trying to eliminate it.

During Vietnam, the drug trade was revived and a new corporation was formed named Air America. They began literally shipping in heroin from Cambodia and Laos.

They paid those farmers to grow heroin and gave them rice so they didn't have to grow it. In the 80's, the CIA moved to Central & South America because Cocaine products were easier to ship in without an opposing communist government resisting by shooting down planes. Drug selling is as American as Apple Pie. Because drugs are so profitable, we have legalized drugs called pharmaceuticals. Some of which still are made from opium.

In reality, Duterte is seen as an enemy for cutting into this long history and profitable drug trade. His killing of addicts (customers) and dealers (salesman) cuts into the profit margin that is in turn invested in Wall Street and deposited into big transnational banks. Many of our politicians rely on campaign money from Wall Street and these mega banks.

Duterte is going to create financial pain for Washington as more nations decide to eliminate drug use by their own war on drugs. You see the problem?! How many of you can name countries China or Russia have invaded? How many countries do they have drones flying over to launch missiles at people they declare terrorists? Russia and China are building economic ties that do not include using the U.S. Dollar.

Russia is openly fighting ISIS while America is well known to have funded and trained the groups that formed ISIS. Do you want to be aligned with all that?

Those of you who see Duterte's possible alignment with Russia and China should know that it will likely bring about peace and prosperity down the road. The failed American empire is beyond broke and has a military that can no longer field aircraft that function properly, ships that break down at sea and is initiating hostilities all over the globe in an effort to revive itself through another world war where it can assert control over defeated enemies, as it did after WWII.

#Opium #Drug Wars #History #Vietnam #Viet Nam #France #phlippines #Duerte #Washington #United States #Anti-Imperialism #Anti-Capitalism

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anti-capitalist-historian · 8 years ago

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Letter of Resignation from Socialist Alternative

2 September 2016

Hello, [former] comrades. I have written this letter to express my desire to resign my position on the National Committee of Socialist Alternative, and also my membership in Socialist Alternative, effective immediately. I joined SA in July 2012, just over four years ago. It has been a long four years, in which time I have watched SA grow from a small political tendency of just over 200 people into a geographically diverse organization of nearly 800 people seeking to become a legitimate political party. SA can claim the first elected city councilor in a major American city since the 1970s; SA more than anyone else can claim the key role in enacting the first $15/hour minimum wage in the US and starting the chain reaction that has resulted in higher wages in many cities and states; SA has truly become influential beyond its numbers in many cities across this country. However, these victories have not come without cost.

Comparing my first two years in this organization with my last two years, I can’t help but notice a major shift in our understanding of Trotskyism, Leninism, and Marxism; our stance on mainstream American politics; our understanding of our place, as cadre, amongst mass movements; even our organizational priorities and what sections of society we cater our messages to. It has occurred to me that since at least 2014 the political leanings and priorities of this organization have changed drastically, in the process becoming incompatible with the material realities faced in some parts of this country, with the tide of the most active and most important social movements in today’s political landscape, and even with revolutionary principles that this organization once held dear. I am no longer comfortable working to build Socialist Alternative, because building Socialist Alternative has come to mean something far different than what it meant a scant two years ago.

Because of this, I feel that it is time for me to depart. Also, I feel the need to express my grievances one last time in a way-too-long ass letter—as I am so wont to do—before I show myself the door. Hopefully, many of you will learn something from this letter and be inspired to think more deeply about the direction of this organization. Hopefully, with the loss of yet another string of resignations that will accompany this letter, the leadership will be inspired to reconsider the actions that are slowly but surely causing the decline of Socialist Alternative. Being realistic, however, I am not optimistic in this regard. Then again, that’s not my problem anymore. Enjoy the read.

Democratic Centralism

To begin, let us have a much needed discussion on democratic centralism in Socialist Alternative; or, rather, Socialist Alternative’s very strange understanding of the dialectic between the horizontal decision-making of democracy, and the top down decision-making of centralism. A common theme in the debates surrounding the expulsion resignation of five comrades in Austin was the question of democratic centralism, and the democratic centralist structures of our organization. The official narrative went “Austin is trying to change SA into a multi-tendency organization by recruiting Maoists with identity politics!” and that “this is not a horizontalist organization of loose, federative structures but an organization that practices democratic centralism!” Austin certainly had some political differences from the leadership of SA, many of them irreconcilable, but the question of democratic centralism is far more complicated than “if you don’t agree with how we make decisions then you’re a horizontalist.” (Side note: I do not know what the word “horizontalist” means.)

I write this letter about six weeks into my second term as a member of the NC. Since fall 2014, I have been one of the people tasked with making key decisions shaping the strategy, focus, and political direction of this organization; at least I was supposed to be. Throughout my first term, however, I noticed a trend in the NC’s decision-making process: it being that, for all practical purposes, the NC has no decision-making process. Hell, the NC is such a symbolic, formalistic, vestigial husk of a leadership body that the EC hardly bothers to actually consult it for decisions. Tactics like the launch of Movement4Bernie and the adoption of the “safe states” tactic seem to have been formulated, discussed, and decided on solely by our Executive Committee, released on various internet forums and announced to the general public, and only after that brought to the National Committee for any serious discussion. Kshama’s 2015 City Council campaign endorsed five Democrats because “we had to in order to win,” though any NC member outside of Seattle would be hard-pressed to tell you when this “necessary decision” was made. It was only through a story on VICE News that many comrades, my-NC-member-self included, found out that an SA member was sent to the DNC as a delegate, meaning that she is a registered, active Democrat. Whether or not these very serious directives with far-reaching political implications necessitated a vote even at the NC level—much less among the national membership—apparently was not considered. The only reason given for this sudden need of expediency is basically “the EC has every right to do this because democratic centralism.”

I am—was—one among many people in this organization that strongly objects to this approach. With that said, the question I ask is not “Why can’t SA be ‘horizontalist’ instead of using democratic centralism?” The question I ask is “Why do comrades below the EC level have so little input or information on how things are done in this organization? What political or practical justification is there for an approach that relies so much on centralism and so little on democracy?”

And now, after a figurative shit-ton of internal and external backlash from the safe states tactic and from the almost outright endorsement of several Democrats, the leadership is all too willing to disavow these actions, and dismiss the importance of both the tactics themselves and the fact that there was literally no discussion about them before implementation. I would point out that doing this does not erase from history the various speeches, op-eds, and personal conversations that advocated these strategies. What you’ve done is the equivalent of sweeping the shards of a broken glass into a neat pile and proceeding to leave that pile in the middle of the floor.

Yet, what else could be expected? From my vantage point, it is clear that the EC has become used to operating in an environment with a high degree of unquestioning consensus. Although the upper tier of leadership (EC and decades-long NC members) seems increasingly willing to admit that there needs to be more nuanced discussion at the NC level, certain practices have created a self-sustaining atmosphere which breeds and feeds on blind agreement among the NC. Here’s another parable for you.

SA has just launched its newest initiative aimed at mass recruiting fresh layers of college-educated youth: Socialist Students, which thankfully did make its way onto some NC agendas for discussion before being passed around the internet. I vividly remember an NC discussion on the subject in early June. Many comrades had a number of questions on what exactly was being proposed and how it would be carried out; the document that announced its eventual launch did not elaborate. This discussion was tabled at that time for a future discussion, even though at the National Convention the next week EC member BK talked of it as if the NC had already widely agreed upon it.

At the newly-elected NC’s first phone conference on July 10 the conversation continued, ostensibly for the purpose of further explaining Socialist Students. This explanation from PL contained little, other than the fact that a team of comrades comprised mostly of students had been drafted to lead the banner/organization, set up a website and social media presence, and coordinate the campus drive and possible speaking tour—that and the use of the phrase “fresh layers” numerous times. Also, notably, came an admission from PL that this proposal had not been adequately discussed at the NC level up to that point. In the days leading up to that call, I submitted a proposal to cancel the launch of Socialist Students on the grounds that a) it was politically confused and relied on an overestimation of students’ readiness to build any sort of revolutionary socialist movement, b) that it would fail to draw broad layers of youth that were “not yet ready to join a revolutionary Marxist organization” because it was so openly tied to Socialist Alternative’s name and political program, and c) it contributed to an increasingly prominent trend of mischaracterizing the word socialism by working to recruit “broad layers” of self-identified, Sanders-esque reformist “socialists” to build a socialist movement, which lent credit to the idea that it is possible to fight for socialism without developing an understanding of Marxism. Also, I argued that the organizational structures were unclear. Sure it would be loosely coordinated nationally by students who are SA members, but will there be actual national leadership structures? Will the local leadership structures rely only on SA members? Et cetera, et cetera.

The responses to my objections were surprising in how far they went around my specific objections without actually addressing them. Responses ranged from generic examples of how we used youth groups to build around particular issues—which I should note is not the same as building a socialist movement—in the past; how the political terrain is heightened and we have to have something, even if this particular something is unclear, in place right now to counter the ISO and DSA’s campus presence; how the banner of Socialist Students is optimal for capturing those trying to find out “what they are politically”; and how Socialist Students will not take identical approaches in different locales, but be a banner in some places and an organization in others. To sum that up: “we’ll figure it out as we go”.

The subsequent vote on my proposal to end Socialist Students (including non-binding NC observers) was two (both full members) in favor and thirty-six (twenty-seven full, nine observers) against, with two (one full, one observer) abstaining. Here we were, the National Committee, voting on a directive that would represent a pivotal change in the focus of SA from here forward, after an admitted lack of political discussion and an admitted lack of finalized planning even a mere six weeks away from its debut, and Socialist Students got a resounding endorsement with little more explanation than “we’ll figure it out as we go.”

This, and the fact that in quite literally every single NC vote, the votes against the EC’s position are enough to count on one hand (out of an average of twenty-five voters), leaves me questioning how this level of consensus can be reached so consistently. I realize that the common denominator here is a consistent lack of discussion on issues. There is clearly an unwritten rule among the veteran leadership that total consensus on all issues is best to maintain stability and avoid a situation like the bad old days of stagnation and regional factionalism like in the 90’s and early 00’s; as much has been said to me by EC member TM, who was around in those days. Discussions on our political projects, when they do happen, always end up being an hour-long echo chamber of the veterans rehashing and regurgitating the EC stance on a particular situation ad nauseam.

Political justification of directives is astoundingly narrow in scope, focusing only on why “x” has to happen in the here and now and some musings about “flexibility”, especially when quoting Lenin or Trotsky and/or explaining why it’s okay to endorse Democrats sometimes. There is little to no discussion on what outcomes this may produce and how we should react to them, how this will impact our class orientation, recruitment strategies, education and consolidation efforts, etc. going forward. But, of course, the vote is guaranteed to go one particular way, so these problems become moot regardless.

To sum all that up, the NC is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the EC. Period. Because of the unquestioning consensus, EC-NC interaction is purely ceremonial and invariably reinforces the EC’s already-made decision. To echo the sentiment expressed to Mobile comrades by former NC member JG, who remained in the Austin branch after the split, (paraphrasing) “when the EC makes a decision, can’t we be humble and accept that it’s the right decision?” This person is the only one I’ve heard say such a thing, but when the bulk of the NC is a layer of highly prestigious comrades that have been in the leadership for decades and have somehow developed perfectly identical political leanings, it’s not farfetched to suggest that peer pressure reigns over many of those new to leadership (and maybe a few not so new), especially if new to Marxism in general. This was certainly the case with me upon being elected to the NC in 2014, when I was twenty-three and had only been a Marxist for barely two years.

‘Til You’re So Fuckin’ Crazy You Can’t Follow Their Rules

More evidence of the rampant centralism (read: cliquish bureaucracy) in this organization is the leadership’s propensity to bend rules: to somehow always interpret policy and protocol in a way that is unfavorable toward those viewed unfavorably by the leadership, and favorable toward those in their good graces. In February this year, nine comrades in Austin decided to lower their monthly dues to $1 as a symbolic gesture to highlight their grievances with the leadership. After about a month of warnings, five members who had not re-raised their dues were “considered to have resigned” from SA, despite not having expressed a desire to resign up to that point, and despite the warnings not specifying that this course of action would be taken. Justifications given for this de facto expulsion were that dues are a vital part of the functioning of this organization and to stop paying dues was in effect a resignation, but what was being ignored was that these former comrades did not stop paying dues. I’ll admit that I’m not as familiar with SA’s constitution as I should be, but I would wager that there is nothing in it establishing an amount that is too low to be considered monthly dues, and that falling beneath this threshold is an effective resignation. Of course, $1 is a purely symbolic amount meant to avoid paying dues in earnest while being able to say that dues are still being paid. The thing is $1 is more than zero, so this is correct; these comrades were still paying dues.

So were their dues the only factor in considering their action a “resignation”, or was this a convenient cover to dispose of a faction of political dissidents? In asking myself that question I can’t help but remember the case of JL, an NC member from New York—who was not on the EC’s bad side—being catered to despite becoming completely inactive in SA for almost two years. This comrade appeared at the face-to-face NC meeting in Minneapolis in March 2016, the first SA event he had appeared at since the 2014 National Conference, and was allowed to immediately reassume his NC role as if he had never been gone. From what I am told, he still disappears quite frequently only to reappear when needed by the leadership.

Exhibit B: I have literally lost count of how many conversations I’ve had with RK, an NC member who is also Mobile branch’s official wrangler, concerning the membership of former Mobile comrade GM. Particularly RK’s insistence that this ex-comrade be treated as a member within our branch, advocating that she be sent to the 2016 National Convention using branch treasury funds, asking her for information on the internal activities of our branch, sending her internal documents and information, and drafting her to write an article for the newspaper. Never mind that she became inactive in late 2014 and confided to me herself that she planned to stop paying dues in November 2015, these things seem to not to be important when regarding someone who agrees with most of the leadership’s politics.

Compare this to the recent vote in the Queens branch to suspend Margaret Collins. What kind of pseudo-democratic, Judge Dredd, kangaroo court nonsense allows four members of a branch committee to express a complaint about a comrade’s behavior, recommend that comrade’s disciplinary action, and then turn around and vote on it themselves? The excuse given to me by LP, one of the four complainants, after I brought up SA’s Harassment Policy and how it forbids BC members from participating in a grievance that they themselves are involved in, was that no one charged Margaret with harassment so these provisions did not apply. (I think it is important to note that of the four complainants, three are on the New York Executive Committee, two are NC members, and one is also an EC member in addition to all being Queens BC.) I would argue, and did to him, that a complaint about a comrade hindering a branch’s growth by creating an “uncomradely atmosphere”, and to cite her personal disdain for and behavior toward specific comrades as evidence of her uncomradely tendencies, is a complaint based solely on a comrade’s behavior, and does qualify as harassment. Therefore, harassment policy procedures should have been followed and the disciplinary action decided by a grievance officer. The complainants should not have been allowed to decide the course of action and participate in the vote. The fact that these comrades have such clout in New York and in SA nationally should not and does not justify circumventing procedure and carrying out a personal attack as if it were a legitimate political grievance.

Beyond that though, for these comrades to vote on suspending a member based on their own grievances constitutes a severe conflict of interest at the least. LP also said to me that only four votes of the sixteen member branch in Queens is not enough to skew the vote; this is not how math works. Theoretically, a tie of 6-6 between twelve people can become a resounding majority of 10-6 out of sixteen when four votes are added to one side. From information confided to me, the outcome of the actual vote was not dissimilar to this hypothetical scenario. Between the four complainants giving themselves authority to vote despite their conflict of interest; inviting GH, a non-branch attending, semi-active comrade from New Jersey to participate in the Queens branch specifically for this vote; and drafting TC, a former full-timer that left Queens in June 2015, to write a letter expressing how “undemocratic” it is for Margaret to debate political issues so often; it is flabbergasting that this vote could be considered anything close to legitimate. But again, we’re dealing with someone who has been a decades-long nuisance to the entrenched leadership. Rules? Pfft. What rules?

Cult of Bern-sonality

What is striking about the bobble-heading tendencies of the NC and the show trial tactics for suppressing dissidents, beyond the actions themselves, is the use of these tactics to enforce a steady march to the right on the part of the leadership. This rightward push is epitomized by SA’s tactics surrounding Bernie Sanders and other less related, but similar actions concerning Democrat politicians. Discussions before the Bern turn, what few of them there were, involved a lot of hemming and hawing over the meaning of the term “critical endorsement”, and the need to work amongst this historic campaign while criticizing points of Bernie’s platform too closely resembling those of imperialist, corporate Democrats. However, the leadership of this organization has a strange understanding of the dialectic between criticism and endorsement; much like they do with the dialectic between democracy and centralism.

As for actions that constituted this “critical endorsement” of the Sanders campaign: SA created #Movement4Bernie to draw thousands to whom we could disseminate our radical message at rallies and marches. Numerous phone banking, fliering, and other active campaign events for Bernie were carried out by SA members; the EC even advocated early on that comrades vote for Bernie Sanders in primaries in states not requiring them to register as Democrats to do so—though I’m certain this was not a deal-breaker for some. M4B phone banking and other events took precedence over branch meetings in some cities, for multiple consecutive weeks in at least one branch. Tens of thousands of people were mass invited to join M4B and further to join Socialist Alternative as the next step toward helping Bernie win in November.

So what’s the catch? What was the critical part of our critical endorsement? Every step of the way—almost every step at least—we called for Bernie to break from the Democrats and form a party of the 99%. That’s it. The end. Only at one point did SA vaguely criticize Bernie’s diet war hawk foreign policy, a point that even the most ardent Bernie Bros criticized him on. Bernie spent much of his campaign highlighting how he didn’t vote to invade Iraq in 2003; he said nothing on how he did vote to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and did approve the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and neither did SA. SA said nothing on Bernie’s past and present kowtowing to the Democrats and espousal of lesser-evilism. SA’s call to support Bernie while pushing him to leave the Democrats failed to factor in the fact that Bernie’s mission in running as a Democrat from the outset was to reform the Democratic Party, despite the fact that it has been tried and failed like six [notable] times in the past fifty years. The generic call of “break with the Democrats” treated these revelations as if they happened in a vacuum and had no bearing on the present campaign. It should have been very much clear after the DNC brazenly attempted to sabotage his campaign in December 2015 and Bernie didn’t break with the Democrats that he was never going to break with them. SA should have been prepared to move beyond Bernie and make the call to build a third party long before late June (swear to god I’ve been saying this shit since February).

Even worse than how this tactic was carried out, however, was the rhetoric underpinning it. Bernie Sanders is a New Deal style reformist; on numerous occasions he has touted Scandinavia as the basis for his brand of socialism. Bernie Sanders cannot be called anything remotely resembling a revolutionary and will say so himself. It is known. Yet, in the early stages of M4B, numerous comrades gave speeches stating that “we’re socialists just like Bernie Sanders.” It suddenly became unimportant for us to differentiate ourselves as revolutionary Marxists from reformist “socialists” believing it possible to legislate our way into socialism, all for the sake of recruiting “progressive Democrats” and other varieties of liberals. M4B was carried out on the idea that a win for Sanders would be a win for socialism because it would popularize a socialist platform and would further the contradictions in the two-party system. Even just typing that doesn’t feel right… how could a win by a politician so fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party cause a rift within the Democratic Party? That question has been answered by recent events, I believe. Bernie very much was a winner in this election in a manner of speaking. His challenge to Hillary was exponentially more successful than expected and activated a massive horde of previously apathetic and disillusioned people looking for a genuine left solution… which he promptly handed over to the Democratic Party. Even after clear efforts by the Democrats to undercut him despite him having a better chance at beating Trump than Killary, even against the wishes of a good number of his own supporters who aren’t buying the “party unity” bullshit, Bernie folded and shifted immediately into stumping for Hillary. If he had won, it is clear that faith would have been restored in the two-party system and the idea that the Democrats can be reformed. As for Bernie popularizing a socialist platform, it is excellent that these pro-working class issues are now (or were recently) at the very center of political discourse, but I would hope that comrades realize that there is more to a socialist platform than progressive measures.

What makes this foolish rhetoric so much worse than the historically-blind, cartoonishly optimistic tactics it supported is the fact that this rhetoric is internalized and for over a year now has produced all sorts of politically-confused hogwash amongst even somewhat experienced comrades. Far too many comrades were (and still are) too busy feeling the Bern during the campaign to remember our primary goal in pursuing this tactic: to capture the radical layers of Sanders supporters convinced of the need to break from the two-party system and disillusioned with capitalism and guide them to revolutionary politics. The leadership’s incorrect analysis of the prospects of a Bernie win turned us from a noble goal of building a radical movement from portions of his campaign into a mindless hysteria of OMG BERNIE CAN WIN!!1!!!11! As early as March this year, even some NC comrades were proclaiming M4B an astounding success based simply on the high attendance at M4B rallies. March was way before the moment of reckoning where if Bernie lost, his followers would have to choose between settling for Killary or fighting for a genuinely progressive party, which is where we would come in to influence their decision. Yet, the mere presence of thousands of people, even this early on, means we were already successful. Even the EC seems to have been overly enamored with these early results—numerous articles written by EC members expressing the necessity of this tactic read less like theory-based political justifications from serious Marxists and more like interviews with Charlie Sheen circa 2011: HELLOOO! WINNING! The self-gratifying over the largely cosmetic detail of rally attendance, especially in such an early stage of the campaign, is so out of control that SA’s leadership has talked itself into thinking that the Bernie campaign has awakened the beginnings of a new socialist movement! Lolwut.

So deluded was the leadership by the prospects of Bernie’s “movement”, or the prospect that he would form one, that they promulgated a “safe states tactic” calling on Bernie to run as an independent only in the forty or so states that are not “swing states”. According to the leadership, this argument thwarts someone saying that there shouldn’t be a third party (even though there are literally always more than two candidates) because it will “split the vote” and possibly hand the election to Donald Trump in those battleground states. It is hard to navigate the stupefying fear that some people have of Donald Trump, but this is literally the worst argument that can be made to undercut that fear and the resulting lesser-evilism. It actually supports it by saying that a radical movement should wait if it has the chance to put a scary Republican in office. It capitulates to Democratic Party rhetoric about the Doomsday scenario that will take place if you don’t vote for them, which is what has produced most people’s wildly ill-informed perceptions of how elections works. This is not how you radicalize people.

SA could have pointed out the massive support for progressive measures like single-payer healthcare and a $15/hr minimum wage that presidential candidates of neither corporate party support. SA could have pointed out that 91% of millennials would like to see a third party and that there is massive disillusionment with the two-party system, meaning that not every single “left vote” up for grabs in the election is already guaranteed to the person that happens to have a “D” next to their name. SA could have explained, based logically on these facts, that vast portions of the eligible voting populace likely do not vote at all because there is not an adequate leftist choice, and that the best way to fend off the greater evil is by building a left alternative to galvanize these potential voters. This is how you radicalize people.

Then of course there’s the preposterous idea that you can cut-and-paste swing states from previous elections into the context of this election. If anything is clear concerning what the experts call swing states, it’s that none of these “experts” could find their own ass crack even if they were given a map of their ass. North Carolina went blue in 2008, the only time it has done so since 1976; Pennsylvania has gone blue every presidential election since 1992; Wisconsin since 1988. Florida, Ohio, and maybe Virginia are the only states unpredictable enough to consider swing states if you look back over the past ten or so election cycles, but regardless they all went blue in 2008 and 12, and are polling a solid blue right now. In fact, all the “swing states” and even a few red states are polling blue right now. If those same polls are any indicator, the swing states in this election will be Arizona and Georgia. Fucking Georgia is polling slightly in favor of Hillary Clinton as I type. I say all this even though the leadership has officially disavowed safe states, only because one particular NC member in Chicago, SE made a Facebook post just in the past few weeks advocating a safe states approach in voting for the Green Party. Why? Just why?

All that said, let us lay to rest any delusion that SA’s M4B tactic was anything less than an outright endorsement of Bernie Sanders. It definitely can’t be called a critical endorsement just based on the fact that there was no criticism of Bernie, just of the Democratic Party. Was Movement4Bernie even a success? Nope. M4B did nothing but participate in, and try to claim ownership of, a minimally-successful walkout of a small minority of Sanders delegates from the Democratic National Convention, one that would likely have happened regardless of the highly-touted presence of PK, the mole in the opposite party’s camp (I won’t say SA’s mole in the Democrats’ camp because I’m not sure that this would be accurate). The membership boost gained from Bernie activity has long since come to a halt and even contracted as SA has hemorrhaged experienced radical organizers in favor of semi-political neophytes.

Because SA failed to adequately criticize Bernie’s shortcomings, mistook the false consciousness of “socialism” promoted in the political mainstream for sympathy with genuine revolutionary socialism, mischaracterized the enthusiasm behind the cult icon of Bernie as the makings of a socialist movement, mobilized resources for the sole purpose of helping Bernie win based on a misanalysis of what that win would do to destabilize two-party politics, failed to realize Bernie’s long-standing unwillingness to break from the Democratic Party, and failed to detach from Bernie’s campaign early enough to build an adequate campaign for a third party based on false hopes that Bernie would magically create this third party himself, SA only managed to create a stagnant hodge-podge of people whose political opinions and willingness to participate in politics are largely tied and bound to the personage of Bernie Sanders. A small number of them may be convinced not to fade back into the lethargic slumber from whence they came. A small number—smaller than it would be had the “safe states” tactic not been propagated—may be convinced to vote third party. A larger number will feel it necessary to vote for Hillary to stop Trump because he’s a fascist and will kill millions (this was literally said to me by a former comrade based near Minneapolis; actually it may be a current comrade, I’m not sure). SA can only blame itself for this outcome, for bastardizing its revolutionary message to better appeal to the more moderate portions of Bernie’s followers.

When confronting anyone [correctly] labeling SA’s tactic as an endorsement of Sanders and not merely an intervention in the Sanders campaign, our EC would typically respond with something like: “this campaign is historic and has the potential to build a socialist movement; we have to mount a bold intervention instead of just sitting on the sidelines like they’re advocating!” What the hell is so bold about rebranding a revolutionary Marxist cadre as a “Scandinavian socialist”, loosely leftist outfit that sprang forth fully formed from Bernie Sanders’ loins? The only bold things SA has done recently is to proclaim victory even as its cadre is less experienced, less educated, and less capable of building radical cadre than at probably any point since its founding; and to insist that a socialist movement can be built from the decidedly non-radical portions of the Sanders campaign that it has marketed itself to.

That and all the doublespeak concerning their interactions with the Democratic Party. As much as the leadership is willing to trash the Democratic Party in the presidential election, rightfully so I would add, it does not overwrite the fact that Kshama Sawant’s reelection campaign effectively endorsed five Democrats in concurrent Seattle city races. Why was it so necessary to endorse these Democrats? Because we had to WIN! We’re rockstars from Mars with tiger blood! Or something like that. This “it was the only way to win” excuse is laughably weak, however. When Kshama ran for Seattle’s city council in 2013, wasn’t the whole point to build the campaign through channeling a mass movement of working class Seattleites fed up with the Democratic Party machine acting as surrogates for the corporate elite at the expense of working people? I certainly do not remember the endorsement of Democrats being touted as a necessity back then, yet against all odds and predictions Kshama won her seat. And this was against a twenty-year incumbent with massive corporate and media backing! In 2015, Kshama ran a quantifiably easier race against Pamela Banks, a dark horse candidate who decided to run in the eleventh hour after two previous challengers backed out of the race, and who had less of a chance of defeating Kshama than Richard Conlin did; but all of a sudden endorsing Democrats became necessary for survival? Yeah, whatever.

SA’s leadership isn’t as repulsed by the Democratic Party as their election year rhetoric would suggest. The news of those Democrat endorsements in Seattle may be news to some of you (with all the lack of discussion of it when it happened and the attempted whitewashing that has been happening since) but the NC has been talking about it since this January (after it happened, of course). During the NC conference call in January, JH, a longtime NC member based in Philadelphia, said (paraphrasing) “I’ve been in this organization for twenty-nine years and I don’t think it was ever our position to never, ever, ever, ever support a Democrat.” PA, a recent leadership transplant to NYC who once spoke very frankly about his dislike of Bernie Sanders, recently took the opportunity to rejoice over Bernie-crat politician Zephyr Teachout winning a seat in something somewhere in New York. (Full disclosure: I had no idea who Zephyr Teachout was until about six weeks ago and now, after finding out, am still unsure why she is worth remembering.) Though SA likes to pretend it has now hopped off the Bernie train, it is following him in his delusions of affecting change through building the profile of progressive Democrats and somehow facilitating a split in the party. Here we see that lack of historical analysis again; Bernie-crats have long held positions in Congress and various state legislatures, and they have been able to wield no power individually. This is not going to change just because Bernie Sanders said so.

Maybe I’m remembering incorrectly; maybe Emmanuel Goldstein has brainwashed me into thinking there was a time when the Democrats and Republicans were both considered to be aligned against the working class and that the working class were our allies. I suppose the Ministry of Love will be coming by to teach me a lesson on how we were never at war with the Democrats and that the Democrats have always been our allies against the Republicans! If they can find me that is, all us proles look and act just alike. It’s practically impossible to tell one of us from another.

Identity[-less] Politics

The turn to political priorities like M4B and Socialist Students bring me to another objectionable feature of this party: its stance on identity politics.

Let it be said right here, right now that I do not endorse identity politics or identity-related goals as an end goal of the struggle (lest someone find it necessary to attribute to me political views that I don’t actually hold). Liberation for oppressed minorities comes when the ruling class is deposed and capitalism is destroyed, not when the ruling class contains a sufficient number of minorities doing the oppressing.

Anyway, from what I can tell, Socialist Alternative’s stance on identity politics is best summed up by the article “Identity Politics and the Struggle against Oppression” (which is on the SA website) by Hannah Sell of the Socialist Party of England and Wales. One misstep I believe this article makes is in overstating the intentions of practices like privilege checking. Sell argues that those who encourage people to “check their privilege” are suggesting that racism, sexism, heteronormativism, and other oppressions are things that extend purely from interpersonal interactions, thereby dismissing the role of class and systemic power in oppression. I would argue that privilege theory is simply a means of spreading social consciousness in interpersonal interactions.

Capitalism stratifies working people into particular identities and fabricates differences between them to keep working class people wary of one another and less able—and often less willing—to organize across demographic lines. People of one demographic are taught that they cannot relate to people of another demographic and become blind to their view of the world, especially when we’re talking about demographics that happen to look like the ruling class. As it happens, the ruling class (let’s use the Western world for familiarity’s sake) is now and has always been white, straight, cis-gender males. They have created and maintained a system that benefits this demographic more than anyone else by oppressing them less openly, and caters to this demographic with its rhetorical and cultural output. Part of their means of stratifying working people is by pushing the lie that working people who are white, especially if they are also straight, especially if they are also cis-gendered, especially if they are also male, can be rich one day through hard work and perseverance, and that anyone who says otherwise are lazy, entitled brats trying to game hard-working people; trying to game them. Of course, they stand about as little chance of becoming wealthy as most non-white working people, but they’ve been brainwashed their entire lives to believe otherwise. People who have spent their lives in these social bubbles propagated by the ruling class are likely to be unaware of the particular forms of oppression faced by people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people, and will need to be educated on them in order to understand why we struggle.

However, it is correct that privilege theory, and related tactics like “safe spaces” have no use as anything other than conversational tactics. I will not pretend that there are not identity-based sects that [foolishly] reject class politics. These groups conflate tactics like privilege theory and safe spaces with radical action and exclude those wanting to work with them in solidarity against oppression simply because they don’t look the part. However, we as Marxists should be careful about appearing to be dismissive of anyone who has ever done so little as told someone to “check your privilege”. It would be anathema for any revolutionary organization operating in today’s atmosphere to outright ignore issues of identity and those attracted to them. Sell’s article correctly states that most activists begin their careers with some degree of identity politics; I myself, even being a Marxist for several years now, relate my understanding of Marxism to my identity as a working class black man and study Marxism [partly] to understand how to reach black liberation. Our role as revolutionaries seeking to unite the working class is to understand the oppressions of various oppressed demographics, and formulate an understanding of how these forms of oppression are enforced by the ruling class in the interest of maintaining capitalism. We must differentiate between those interested only in the dead-end forms of identity politics that seek to preserve the ruling class on the condition that it become more diverse, and those radicalizing layers of people who can be brought to see their particular identity within a greater framework of class politics.

This is where Socialist Alternative comes in (yes, I’m finally getting to the point). The leadership of Socialist Alternative seems have a troubling inclination to dismiss any sort of identity-based understanding even of Marxism. A prominent factor in the aforementioned ostracization of comrades in Austin and San Marcos was their alleged endorsement of identity politics. At one point, Austin elected a BC that was deemed “artificial” by the EC for not placing someone the EC felt to be the most prevalent in guiding the branch’s politics—someone who happened to be a white man—in the branch organizer position. This “artificial” branch organizer was at the time a woman of color. In responding to this warily, and in taking the side of a female comrade of color in San Marcos who felt she was slighted by white male members of the EC, some comrades in Austin and San Marcos were apparently “fetishizing the most oppressed layers”, as Maoists are so wont to do.

In their zeal to equate even the slightest sympathies toward identity with Maoism, the leadership has conveniently ignored its own problem with fetishization of some of the least oppressed layers. Every single document on every single political directive SA has taken on in the past year prattles on about how fresh layers of youth will build this organization into a major party, how fresh layers of youth are rapidly radicalizing and can be brought into socialist politics, how fRESH LAYERS of youth will build the revolution to save us from the clutches of capitalism. The leadership has abandoned any pretense of building among the working class and helping revitalize the labor movement in favor of these fresh layers. As far I can tell, fresh layers means layers of vaguely progressive, moderately affluent, disproportionately white hipsters fresh out of the suburbs that sympathize at least somewhat with left populist ideas, even if they are not inclined toward building radical movements to achieve them.

Instead of working to understand and develop tactics to acknowledge and correct pure identity politics, Socialist Alternative’s leadership has become devoted to building a movement solely amongst people without a political identity and has consequently developed a breed of identity-less politics. In May I wrote an article for the website about George Zimmerman auctioning the pistol he used to murder Trayvon Martin, linking Martin’s murder to the birth of Black Lives Matter, and summarizing the problems with BLM and what it needs to do to overcome them. My article was returned to me three times, with RK explaining on the third rejection that it should be written in a tone more appealing to people “on the fence” about BLM. SA’s newspaper and website seem fearful to publish any content that might be too strongly-worded for people who are “on the fence” about movements related to racial, gender, or sexual oppression—never mind that droves of people are already over the fence, lounging next to our pool, and waiting on someone to fire up the grill. The newspaper has become almost solely focused on how aspects of today’s political climate fit within the context of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Identity-less politics explains the embarrassingly stark dearth of literature on race struggles, women’s struggle, and LGBTQ+ liberation written by this organization. SA’s literature has a remarkably narrow focus on environmental issues (which itself is fine, but which is an issue that most appeals to liberals) and cut-and-paste novelty pieces leaning a little too heavily on Occupy-era rhetoric to call for a break with the two-party system. Black Lives Matter, with all its faults and flaws, is a defining feature of today’s political epoch and yet our leadership was on the verge of dismissing it completely until about two months ago. Even a recently penned pamphlet on the 1969 Stonewall Riots partly edited by RK—while an admirable effort—managed to literally glance over the events of the first riot, including the role of transgender women of color in starting and leading the movement.

Identity-less politics explains the attempt to place Seattle NC member JS, a heterosexual, cis-gendered comrade at the head of the LGBTQ+ Caucus at the National Summer Camp in May 2015. Not to say that this comrade is not capable of revolutionary leadership, this I do not know, but surely there are numerous LGBTQ comrades capable of providing leadership and that have the added benefit of lived experience when it comes down to developing perspectives. Surely most people would think it foolish to place a white comrade at the head of the People of Color Caucus, this is no different.

Identity-less politics has bred a two-faced approach toward different sectors of society as well. To those who have no background in politics and who have largely un[in]formed opinions on various issues (a disproportionately white, college-educated, and affluent demographic), SA’s approach is something akin to that of the DSA: “Hate the Democrats but not really? You like socialism because public libraries and fire departments and snowplows are socialist? You’re voting for Bernie Sanders?!? Welcome, comrade! Come right on in, we’ll sort out that other stuff later.” Yet, to those who have some preexisting knowledge of leftist thought, any inkling of identity-related sympathies, and especially roots in some school of Marxism or general leftism not identical to SA’s program (a more diverse, more working class demographic), SA adopts an approach so rife with ultra-left doctrinarism and petty exclusionism that it would shock most Spartacists. To hear some of our enlightened sages in the EC like PL tell it, so much as reading Jacobin magazine semi-regularly is guaranteed to breed false conclusions and make one ineligible for membership in the most winningest organization in the history of winning. SA’s leadership lends uncritical support to Bernie Sanders and his supporters—and no, futilely saying “break with the Democrats” 999,999 times is not criticism—because they can maybe be led to proper conclusions eventually, yet some of the same people seem wary to support the “populist” Green Party because of some perceptions of minor quirks in their party structure? The Democratic Party—which routinely adopts progressive demands on a very temporary basis and discards them once they’ve drawn in rebellious progressives—isn’t populist enough to warrant caution, but the Green Party must be held at arm’s length, even as it is increasingly coming to be led by anti-capitalist and revolutionary socialist youth? Even as it is shaping a program that truly intends to fight mass incarceration, environmental destruction, systemic racism, the war on women, etc? It is utterly absurd.

Being that SA is supposed to be a revolutionary cadre tasked with understanding and interpreting the perspectives of a diverse working class into a revolutionary program, I don’t think it inappropriate to note that our EC is composed almost entirely of cis-gendered white men who are almost entirely of at least moderately affluent backgrounds. As I’ve said, there is more to providing politically sound leadership than looking the part, but certainly there are members of SA that are capable of politically sound leadership AND have the added perspective that comes with having experienced the unique oppression that comes with being a member of an oppressed minority group. Diversity of perspectives has become decreasingly prevalent in our material and in our strategies over the past year to eighteen months; notable given what I stated about the EC’s propensity to not consult anyone outside of the EC when producing strategies. At this rate—even with the dedicated comrades in the POC and LGBTQ+ caucuses doing the meaningful work they do—I wonder how long it will be before that diversity of perspectives disappears altogether. I don’t want to use the word brocialism but… wait, actually I do want to use that word. Brocialism is the perfect word for a form of “socialism” that tries to separate socialist thought from black, brown, LGBTQ+, and women’s liberation.

“Marginal Branches”, “Embryonic Forces”, and Other Such Elitist Tripe

I was born and raised in southern Alabama. I spent most of my childhood in Prichard, a ninety percent (probably more actually) black city that is a suburb of Mobile. If you’re thinking of Prichard as a poor city in the United States, think again. White flight and deindustrialization turned this city into a hyper-Dickensian dystopia well before I was born. I think of Prichard more as a relatively well-off city in Jamaica or Haiti. Comrades that moved here from other places or have visited here are always shocked by the dire poverty that in many ways is normal to me. Comrades have found Prichard and some neighborhoods in Mobile to be reminiscent of slums in Mumbai; in Lahore, Pakistan; in Lagos, Nigeria; in Quito, Ecuador. I have not seen any of these cities so I cannot fully fathom the implications, but I notice that these are all developing or underdeveloped, hyperexploited countries and I get the idea.

Alabama is one of the poorest states in the country. It typically ranks second to last in food security; for every dollar it pays in taxes to the federal government, it receives $1.67 in federal assistance; Alabama’s median household income in 2013 was $41,385, compared to $52,250 nationally. It has some of the most regressive state tax laws and wages: Alabama does not have a minimum wage, it follows the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr but only in that the federal law overrides the lack of a law establishing a state minimum; property taxes are some of the lowest in the country, yet Alabama imposes a ten percent tax on groceries, only one of two states (guess the other one) with such a tax. The state’s education budget is constantly on the decline: Alabama’s 1901 Constitution (the longest constitution in the world) forbids passing an unbalanced budget, so state lawmakers constantly raid the Education Fund to plug holes in the General Fund. In short, this place is fucked the fuck up. And that’s before you consider that Alabama is one of the most conservative states in the country. Alabama is even worse than Mississippi in many regards, Oklahoma may be the only state that is outright more conservative.

All in all, most people would find this an unlikely place to build socialism, but as Trotskyists we [should] believe in the concept of combined and uneven development. This is the concept that revolution can be fomented even in places with extremely backward social conditions, not despite, but because of the crushing levels of oppression and the sharp societal contradictions caused by this backwardness. The history of the Russian Revolution is a textbook example of this. (Here I would outline the contradicting forces in Russian society in the early 20th century, but hopefully we’ve all studied it enough that I don’t have to.)

In the South, we see backward, reactionary social forces more intensely than in most of the rest of the country. We also see forces developing slowly but surely to fight for system change, not despite the backwardness, but because of it. We very recently saw the makings of a mass movement against white supremacy, misogyny, heteronormativity, and anti-worker forces coalesce in the form of Moral Mondays. There are certainly more progressive places in the country than North Carolina, but very few of these places have generated a movement that has effectively appealed to so many oppressed layers in society. Again, this happened because of the social backwardness (and the conditions stemming from it), not despite it.

However, despite the lessons of history and the importance of organizing around the social conditions in the South, the EC has for years shown a lackadaisical attitude toward building in the South. By 2014, comrades from Mobile had recruited clusters of new comrades in Montgomery, Birmingham, Tampa, and Austin, as well as maintaining a branch of eighteen people (at the time). Of course, the work of not only maintaining our branch in a desert of political activity and spreading throughout the South convinced many of us that we needed a full-timer to dedicate themselves to this important work. I myself was offered this position at various points and gladly would have taken it—the then salary of $1000 a month would have been and still would be quite an improvement in many of our comrades’ financial situations. This offer was later postponed—indefinitely—because, as I was told by Belgian comrade and then acting EC member BV, the monthly dues threshold of the entire South at the time was less than the $1000 that would comprise a full timer salary. Of course, I had access to dues records for the entire nation as part of the party building team and I calculated the South’s dues, which came out to $844 monthly (which was actually artificially low because at least one person’s records reported an amount lower than what they were actually paying). A paltry $156 a month couldn’t be spared to promote the incredibly productive work we were doing, and naturally it collapsed. I’d like to think this neglect was only because of bigger priorities at the national level like 15 Now, but events in the past year have revealed other motives.

When the EC finally did get around to answering our request for resources, all we got was a wrangler in the form of RK, a Seattle-based NC and former EC member. RK’s first task in “assisting” us was pushing us to adopt a strategy identical to that of Seattle in forming a Movement4Bernie chapter. In fact, we in Mobile have spent all this year listening to Ramy push the party line on us—sometimes against his own instinctual judgement it would seem—as we argue materially why doing so would be impractical for us. Our request for resources got us a wrangler who is almost completely unwilling to listen to our perspectives; enforcing a strategy designed by Seattleites (more than half of the EC is based in Seattle) for liberal-leaning Northern metropolises like Seattle. Of course, Ramy is not the source of this behavior, but merely a reflection of EC members. In January, AA described the people who signed the opposition letter to M4B—which included everyone in Mobile, Tampa, Huntsville, and most of Austin—as “marginal branches”. PL doubled down on this at the National Convention in June. In response to Mobile comrade FR’s criticism of the EC for trying to force an irrelevant program on Southern branches, he dismissed us as “embryonic forces”. To deny us resources to build around Mobile’s (and not Seattle’s) material conditions and then call us “embryonic forces” is fucked up to say the least. You want to know why the entire South has left the organization en masse? There you have it. The leadership could have avoided this and a slew of other resignations simply by genuinely paying heed to the needs of its branches in this politically diverse country. But no, maintaining Joseph Stalin levels of bureaucratic hegemony over all branches is far more important than actually building socialism.

The End, the Beginning

And so to conclude, I now know that I no longer have—or want, quite frankly—a place in Socialist Alternative. This does not mean the end of revolutionary organizing for me, however; far from it. I, and the other very dedicated, very hard-working members of our cadre in Mobile, leave you as we stand on the precipice of becoming vastly influential in third-party politics in Alabama, and at the head of building a radical, class-conscious mass movement for black freedom the likes of which Mobile has never seen.

Until the day I die, I will continue to organize and work to build movements around issues that are of utmost importance in building a socialist movement here in arguably the most conservative state in the US: issues of unionism and working class unity in the face of “right-to-work” slavery; of black working class struggle against an overtly racist system; of blatant, almost 19th century levels of sexism and homophobia against gender and sexual minorities; of environmentalism and ending climate change in a city very much susceptible to rising sea levels; of full rights and recognition for refugees and immigrant workers from around the world; of endless debt and poverty for low wage workers, and for students facing continuously increasing costs for tuition; of fighting for these goals through the only method of truly achieving them, the overthrow of capitalism. In my particular situation, doing this means leaving Socialist Alternative, because over the past two years it has become unclear to me whether or not Socialist Alternative is working toward most of these goals anymore.

I am deeply thankful for the opportunities afforded me, the hospitality shown to me, the good friends and comrades I have made, and the sweet memories I have obtained in my four years in Socialist Alternative, but I must leave the past behind lest I be left behind with it. Going forward, I am elated knowing that we can go into this period unburdened by a self-aggrandizing bureaucracy pressing upon us a program designed for liberal-leaning Northern metropolises with no consideration (no fucks in general, really) given to the material conditions of this area (and many others both North and South for that matter). No longer will I have to feel ostracized for pursuing revolutionary ends and working class struggle in an organization increasingly devoted to electoral politics and semi-political, well-to-do hipsters. To those I have come to know and love, I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, though I may disagree with them. I hope to see you on the frontlines (circumstances within SA pending) someday. To those I’m not so fond of, I don’t really care what you do; it probably won’t be done competently anyway.

Peace out,

Albert L. Terry, III

Mobile, Alabama, ‘Murica

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