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In Chicago, a Socialist Teacher Takes on the Entrenched Political Machine
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/chicago-11th-ward-alderman-election-ambria-taylor-dsa

Die Probleme der kleinen Leute sind überall die gleichen: Besser Schulen, bezahlbare Wohnungen, funktionierende öffentliche Einrichtungen und Transportmittel und die Beseitigung von Gewalt und Verbrechen. Der Süden von Chicago ist wie eine viel härtere Ausgabe der härtesten Ecken von Berlin Neukölln.

In der Southside ist die Wahlkampagne einer Sozialistin Teil der Bewegung für einen gemeinsamen Kapf der Einwohner um eine Stadtverwaltung ohne die traditionelle Korruption und Vetternwirtschaft. Bis heute wird die Stadt wie der Erbhof einer Bügermeisterdynastie verwaltet. Damit soll jetzt Schluß sein.

24.2.2023 by Caleb Horton - An interview with Ambria Taylor

Chicago’s 11th Ward is the heart of the old “Chicago machine,” one of the largest, longest-running, and most powerful political forces in US history. For most of the twentieth century, the Chicago machine organized the political, economic, and social order of America’s second city. Patronage rewards like plum city jobs were awarded to lieutenants who could best turn out the vote for the Democratic Party, which in turn provided funds, connections, and gifts to the ruling Daley family and their inner circle.

Mayor Richard J. Daley, often called “the last big city boss,” ruled Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Daley spearheaded infrastructure and urban renewal projects that physically segregated white and black parts of the city with expressways and housing blocks and drove black displacement from desirable areas. He tangled with Martin Luther King Jr over school and housing desegregation, sicced the cops on antiwar protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and gave “shoot to kill” orders during the uprisings following King’s assassination.

The Chicago machine’s glory days are past, but the legacy of the Daleys lives on. Relatives and friends of Mayor Daley still hold office throughout Chicago, and his nephew, Patrick Daley-Thompson, had a strong hold over City Council as the 11th Ward alderman until July 2022, when he was convicted of tax fraud and lying to federal bank regulators and forced to resign.

Although the Daley family has lost direct control over the 11th Ward, their presence is still felt in the neighborhood of Bridgeport. While racial segregation is not explicitly enforced, the neighborhood still has a reputation among many older black residents as a “no-go zone,” and throughout the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd, white gangs roamed the streets with weapons questioning anyone who looked “out of place” — a callback to the racist mob violence perpetrated by the Hamburg Athletic Club, of which a teenage Daley was a member a whole century prior.

So what is Ambria Taylor, a socialist public school teacher, doing running for office in the backyard of this entrenched political fiefdom? Jacobin contributor Caleb Horton sat down with Taylor to discuss why she chose to run at this time and in this place, and how she is building a movement that can overturn the power of one of the nation’s most notorious political dynasties.

Taylor launched her campaign in October 2021, when Daley-Thompson was still in office. After a few months of campaigning, the 11th Ward began to undergo major changes. First Daley-Thompson was arrested and then convicted of fraud, and then the ten-year ward remap took place, removing parts of the old 11th Ward and adding parts of Chinatown and McKinley Park.

In just a few short months, Taylor was facing a newly-appointed incumbent, a new map, and six other candidates for alderman. Taylor is the only progressive in the race.

Caleb Horton

Why did you decide to run for office?

Ambria Taylor

Growing up, I experienced poverty and homelessness in rural Illinois. I moved to Chicago when I was seventeen to escape that. I slept on my brother’s floor, shared an air mattress with my mom.

Chicago saved my life in a lot of ways. Urban areas have public transportation, they have dense development where you can walk to get what you need, where you can get to a job without a car. Public goods help people survive.

Experiencing all that defined me. It’s why I’m so committed to protecting public goods like affordable public transportation and affordable housing. It’s why I’m a socialist. It’s why I got my master’s degree and became a teacher.

I had a chance to grow up and live a decent life thanks to the strong public goods and services available in Chicago, but unfortunately that’s all been under attack due to neoliberalism, the hollowing out of the public sphere, and the assaults on unions.

That’s why I’m running. We deserve a city that works for everyone like it worked for me. We deserve a city that, in the richest country in the history of the world, provides for the people who live here and make it run. And here in Chicago we have been building the movement for the city we deserve through making the ward office a space for people who are marginalized to build power.

Caleb Horton

What do you want to do when you’re in office?

Ambria Taylor

In Chicago the local ward office has a lot of local power. The alderman is kind of like a mini-mayor of their district. They have power to make proposals for spending taxpayer money, and they each get a budget of discretionary funds of about $1.5 million annually for ward projects.

Aldermen have influence in the committee that oversees Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts. On TIFs, we gave $5 million in taxpayer money to Pepsi and $1.5 million to Vienna Beef.

We shouldn’t be taking money away from our schools to fund giveaways to megacorporations, period. But if we’re going to have TIFs, residents should have democratic input into how those funds are spent. We have dozens of empty storefronts in what should be our commercial hubs — why not fund small businesses providing needed services and quality of life to residents?

My dream is to, for one thing, involve the public in development decisions. But most of all, I want to ensure that money goes to things that benefit residents. Things they can see and experience, like cleaning alleys or tree trimming or sidewalk maintenance. In this ward, there’s a history of “the deal is made, and then they have a public meeting about it.” I want things to be the other way around.

I’m excited for the potential of what we could do here if there’s a ward office that’s open and collaborative and is genuinely trying to do things that benefit the most vulnerable.

Caleb Horton

Could you talk a little bit about the ward’s political history, and why it has been such an “insiders’ club” of decision makers?

Ambria Taylor

We are on the Near South Side of Chicago. This ward now includes Bridgeport, Chinatown, and parts of a few neighborhoods called Canaryville, Armor Square, and McKinley Park.

The Daley family is from this area. The home that’s been in the family for generations is here. The family has been powerful here for a really long time. They were also involved in various clubs and associations, like the Hamburg Athletic Club that took part in the racist white riots in 1919.

The 11th Ward is well known for being an enclave of extremely aggressive anti-black racism. In the 1990s there was a young black boy who dared cross over here from Bronzeville to put air in his bicycle tires from a place that had free air, and he was put into a coma by teenage boys.

One of those boys was well connected to the Mafia here. Potential witnesses for the trial who knew this boy and were present when it happened weren’t willing to come forward. This happened in the 1990s. Think about how old the fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old boys would be now. Many people who are influential now were alive during that time and were wrapped up in that culture. This was considered a sundown town, and to some people still is.

Things are changing rapidly. People move to the suburbs, new people move in, things change over time. There still is a vocal conservative contingent here, but this is also a place where Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary two times. Because of where we stand at this moment amid all those contradictions, we have the chance to make monumental change.

There’s always been dissatisfaction with the machine, but we’ve started to cohere that dissatisfaction and the latent progressive energy into an organized base. We’ve brought together a base of people around progressive issues that many have said couldn’t exist here. We’re proving them wrong and proving the narrative about this part of the city wrong.

As socialists, narratives are often used against us. It’s that narrative of what’s possible. The “Oh, we love Bernie, but he could never win. . . .” We say that a better world is possible. And what we’re seeing on the doors is that people are very excited to see a democratic socialist on the ballot. As far as I know, I’m the only person in the city running for office who has “socialist” on their literature. That’s big whether or not we win.

Caleb Horton

In what ways is this a movement campaign?

Ambria Taylor

We launched this campaign very early. We launched in October 2021 with an election at the end of February 2023. We did this because we needed time to organize.

We started by holding community meetings for months. We brought communities together to articulate their desires for the city — like for streets and sanitation, public safety, the environment — and made those our platform planks.

We engaged people with what they want to see happen in the ward: “How do you want an alderman to be working toward making those things happen? Let’s talk about how the city council works. Let’s talk about how the ward office operates and what budget it has.”

Our residents have an appetite to get into the nitty-gritty about what an alderman can actually do to make progress on the things they want to see in this community and for Chicago. They want to take ownership over their own affairs.

This is what political education can look like in the context of an aldermanic race. The people ask questions, articulate their needs, and we try to put that through the lens of what we can do as an aldermanic office and as organized communities.

One thing we’ve found impactful is coming together for creative events. For instance, we had a huge block party with the owner and staff of a business called Haus of Melanin. This is a black-owned beauty bar that was vandalized twice in the months after they started up. A hair salon for black people? You can see why that might piss racists off.

So we stepped in and built a relationship with them. We threw this huge block party, bringing a bunch of people together to say, “We’re going to celebrate that there are going to be black people in this neighborhood. There are going to be black-owned businesses that cater to black people.” And a lot of people came out in this neighborhood to say, “We support this business, we love that it’s here, and nobody is going to scare our neighbors away.”

The business owner had talked about leaving. She had stylists leave because of the vandalism that happened. Haus of Melanin might have been chased out if the community didn’t turn out to say that these racists don’t represent us and we’re not going to take it. All of that is what a movement campaign looks like.

Caleb Horton

This is the city’s first Asian-majority ward, and the current alderperson is the city’s first Chinese American alderperson. Some people have said that this is an office that should go to an Asian American or a Chinese American person — that you as a white person shouldn’t be running for this office. How do you respond to that?

Ambria Taylor

We do remaps based on the census every ten years or so, and there was a big push to remap the 11th Ward to include Chinatown. Before the remap, the 11th Ward was 40 percent Asian, mostly Chinese. I think the biggest thing this remap did is unite a center politically that is already mapped culturally.

The incumbent I’m running against was appointed by an unpopular mayor and is backed by the Daley family. Her father worked for Mayor Richard M. Daley. Richard M. Daley and John Daley sent out a letter backing our current alderman.

It’s really exciting for this Asian-majority ward to have the opportunity to elect a representative they trust will fight for their interests.

My team has worked hard to do everything on the campaign the way we plan to run our ward office. We have made the campaign a space to build power for people who are marginalized. We have a huge campaign team that includes canvassers who speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taishanese. Just today we used all three languages while we were at the doors.

We make sure that people who are multilingual are present at our community meetings. Also every single piece of lit we’ve printed has been translated into three languages: English, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.

This election is not just about the candidate as a representative, but about electing someone who is going to focus on issues that matter to the people of this ward. This is bigger than one person, and we have been able to build a lot of meaningful connections.

For example, we’ve made deep connections with Chinese-language newspapers, and that relationship is going to go a long way. We’ve had Chinese-language newspapers commenting on union rallies I was going to, my Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsement, and so on, and we want to continue to nurture that relationship.

Caleb Horton

How has your experience as a Chicago Public Schools teacher influenced your politics?

Ambria Taylor

Teaching in Chicago Public Schools was really hard. I kind of expected that, but you have to live it for it to truly sink in.

After a year of student teaching, I started my first lead teaching position in the 2019–2020 year. A month and a half later, we went on strike for almost two weeks. We came back to the classroom, and just as I was trying to get back into the swing of things, COVID hit.

I became a remote teacher of middle schoolers, and things were really difficult. We had to eventually juggle hybrid learning and lack of staff. I became the union delegate for our school and experienced horrible retaliation from my principal. But through that, I learned to organize people in my building around workplace issues even if they had different politics than me.

I saw how the workplace can unite us — it gives you something to convene around, and it’s hard to have anything interfere with that because your reality is informing it all. Public education is in a lot of trouble, and I firsthand experienced these schools unraveling at the seams.

The city allocates money to bullshit while lead paint flakes off the walls and our buildings fall apart. As teachers, we face the struggle of trying to get through the day while kids are being put in the auditorium a few classes at a time because there is not enough staff to supervise them.

That influenced me because a huge part of my campaign as a socialist is to fight against neoliberalism, austerity, and private interests’ attempt to narrow what the public sector does by choking these various public services and then saying, “It doesn’t work!”

What is happening with Chicago Public Schools is happening everywhere — at the Chicago Public Library, in our transit system. My dream is being part of a movement that will help save our public sector.

Caleb Horton

The Chicago political machine faced an unsuccessful challenger in the 11th Ward four years ago. What makes your campaign different?

Ambria Taylor

There have been other challengers to the machine politicians in the 11th Ward. Usually it’s a person who has a few volunteers, and they raise less than $5,000. We’ve been able to raise over $90,000, and we have had over a hundred people volunteer for us. That’s something that challengers haven’t been able to muster up, and understandably so — it’s not an easy thing to do.

The people of the ward want to support this kind of effort, and despite their modest fundraising, we’ve seen previous small campaigns still give the machine a run for its money. We had a guy take Patrick Daley to a runoff election, and he raised less than $5,000. What that shows is that a strong campaign stands a chance, and we’ve made a strong effort here.

Caleb Horton

What are the biggest issues facing the 11th Ward?

Ambria Taylor

Environmental issues are huge here. Our air quality is eight to nine times worse than northern parts of the city. Our city is very segregated. The further north you get the whiter it gets, and you will notice that the South Side has way worse air quality and way more heavy — or “dirty” — industry that pollutes our air and our soil.

We used to have a Department of Environment that ticketed polluters that were breaking the rules and causing toxic contamination. That department is gone now, and the ticketing has gone down. When ticketing does happen, it happens on the North Side.

So there is a lot we can do here, like reestablishing the Department of Environment and working with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to make sure that the polluters in this area are being held to the standards they should be held to; also, when it comes to developments, saying, “No, I will not support new dirty industry coming to this region which is already severely overburdened.”

Caleb Horton

Public safety has come up a lot this election. What do you believe the 11th Ward could be doing about this?

Ambria Taylor

Public safety has become a major talking point this year. That’s not to say that everything is safe and everything is fine: we have carjackings, shootings, and assaults. People experiencing violence is unacceptable.

However, a lot of people have given in to saying, “I’m the alderman and I love the police.” What that does is absolve our leadership of any responsibility. We’ve had police officers responding to forty thousand mental health calls a year. There’s been a big movement in Chicago to shift things like mental health and domestic violence calls to other city workers instead of the police.

What we’ve seen is poverty and austerity are on the rise, and when you have high poverty, you have high crime. We need resources for young people, better social services, housing, and mental health care. A lot of people who we’ve canvassed agree that police are not enough and we need to address violence holistically.

Caleb Horton

What about affordable housing? Where do you stand on that?

Ambria Taylor

Here in the 11th Ward, there has been a push for affordable housing, but it’s really hit or miss as far as enforcement goes. Also, when it comes to affordability, we need to be stricter on how we define it. Right now, developments can say there are affordable units in a building even if they are not truly affordable and are just a little cheaper than other units in the building.

We want affordable housing, and we want to hold developers’ feet to the fire as far as prices go. Having a resident-led ward gives us the opportunity to ask developers, “What do you plan to charge for the units?” and get them to commit to something truly affordable for people to live in.

We must also expand public housing. Chicago has lots of money for it, yet we’re selling land that belongs to the housing authority off to private interests. That needs to stop. I’m interested in partnering with residents who live in public housing to make sure it improves and expands.

I also support just cause for evictions and lifting the ban on rent control in Illinois. We have a ban on passing rent control — we can’t even introduce a bill on it. I very much support the effort to overturn that.

Caleb Horton

What are your plans for this progressive base that you’re building?

Ambria Taylor

From here on out, if I’m the next alderman, we will continue to organize through the ward office and institute participatory budgeting and resident-led zoning and development boards. We will make serious changes to how the ward office is engaging with the people who live here.

And if we don’t win, we have movement institutions: we have the 11th Ward Independent Political Organization, we have DSA. We need to make sure we’re actually organizing people into groups where we can continue to grow what we’re doing. I’m really interested in where we are going to take this.
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Filed Under
#United_States #Politics #Cities #racism #democratic_socialists_of_america #Chicago_City_Council

A Live Chat with Ambria Taylor, 11th Ward Alderperson Candidate!
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9VYjSzwN_Q

6 Candidates Are Challenging Ald. Nicole Lee In 11th Ward Race
▻https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/01/11/six-candidates-are-challenging-ald-nicole-lee-in-the-11th-ward

https://lede-admin.blockclubchicago.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/01/11thWardRace.jpg

Two teachers, a veteran police officer, a firefighter and an attorney are among the challengers looking to unseat Lee, who was appointed to the City Council seat in 2022.

Ambria Taylor | Chicago News | WTTW
▻https://news.wttw.com/elections/voters-guide/2023/Ambria-Taylor

Chicago DSA Endorses Ambria Taylor and Warren Williams
▻https://midwestsocialist.com/2023/01/11/chicago-dsa-endorses-ambria-taylor-and-warren-williams-post-petiti

#USA #Chicago #southside #Rassismus #Armut #Gewalt #Korruption #Sicherheit #Politik #Organizing

The War in Ukraine Has Exposed Germany’s Strategic Quagmire
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/ukraine-war-germany-russia-china-us-economy-industry-strategy

By Jörg Kronauer

Germany’s so-called “National Security Strategy,” which Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock officially announced in March 2022, was originally supposed to be presented right before the Munich Security Conference that convened last weekend. Its goal? To hammer out a unified framework for German foreign and security policy across all government ministries — also ensuring that German state institutions speak with one voice abroad.

From the viewpoint of the Foreign Office, it would have been extremely advantageous to present the document in the run-up to the security conference, where Baerbock was guaranteed maximum international attention. But it was not to be. Reportedly, the strategy was delayed by coordination difficulties — and likely also the fact that German foreign policy finds itself in an extremely difficult situation.

In strategic terms, the war in Ukraine has significantly restricted Germany’s foreign policy options. For decades, Berlin pursued a kind of dual strategy vis-à-vis Moscow. On the one hand, the German government engaged in economic cooperation with Russia and thus ensured, among other things, that cheap Russian natural gas was always available to German industry. On the other hand, it sought to systematically pressure Russia and minimize its influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, not least with the help of NATO’s eastward expansion and, from 2014 onward, by strengthening NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe.

The war in Ukraine has now taken cheap Russian natural gas off the table for the foreseeable future, and forced the government to look for replacements. At the same time, the war entails enormous costs, immense political effort, and real dangers for the German state. To meet these challenges, Berlin is relying on international alliances more than ever.
Growing US Dominance

Above all, a year of war has greatly increased Germany’s dependence on the United States, beginning with natural gas imports. German gas imports from Russia fell from 55 to 22 percent of total imports last year, compensated by an increase in imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) brought into the country (much of it US-sourced) via the Netherlands and Belgium. When the new LNG terminal in Wilhelmshaven began operations in early January, it was with US fracked gas. The same was true of the new terminal in Lubmin that went online in early February.

According to a study published last September by the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne, the share of US fracked gas in total EU imports could rise to almost 40 percent. That would make the EU almost as dependent on the United States in the future as it once was on Russia — and on much worse terms, since LNG is more expensive than pipeline gas. It is unclear to what extent Germany’s natural gas–intensive industries, which previously relied on cheap Russian gas, will remain competitive on the world market following the switch to US liquefied gas.

Military dependence on the United States is also increasing. This applies first of all to Germany’s de facto participation in the Ukraine war through arms deliveries and the training of Ukrainian troops. While the United States is shaping Kiev’s war strategy together with Ukrainian officers and supplying target data for Ukrainian attacks, US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin heads the so-called Ukraine Contact Group, which has been coordinating arms deliveries to Ukraine since its first meeting on April 26, 2022, at Ramstein Air Base. Though Germany participates in this group and does indeed exert influence, it ultimately has to defer to the United States when it comes to, for example, decisions on war strategy or types of weapons delivered to Ukraine, which basically shape the war.

The situation is similar in NATO, which is currently massively expanding its influence. For lack of an alternative — there is no real EU army — NATO’s European members depend on the transatlantic military alliance for their military buildup against Russia. And there, the United States sets the political tone.

But Germany’s own rearmament also bolsters the position of the United States. For example, a considerable portion of the €100 billion in special funds earmarked for outfitting the German Army with new weaponry is going to US arms manufacturers rather than European firms. Why? The simple reason is that American weapons do not have to first be developed at great expense, as is the case with the planned Franco-German fighter jet FCAS (Future Combat Air System). Like the high-tech F-35 fighter jet, American systems have often long since been tested and are produced in series. The German government is using the special fund to finance thirty-five F-35s at a cost of more than $8 billion, sixty Chinook helicopters for at least $6 billion, as well as P-8A Poseidon maritime reconnaissance aircraft and all kinds of other armaments “Made in USA.”

But weapons purchases are by no means the only area where this is the case. The United States is in the process of increasing its overall importance as Germany’s top economic partner. Nowhere have German companies invested as much as in the United States: up to 2020, the sum exceeded $450 billion. The United States is also Germany’s number-one destination for exports, totaling $167 billion in 2022. Since then, both investments and exports across the Atlantic have increased at an even faster rate.

One reason is that many German companies have seen massive declines in their Russian business due to sanctions. Those who could looked for replacements; the United States was an obvious choice, not least because there are no sanctions against doing business with Americans — unlike, for example, with China. In addition, the United States offers several multibillion-dollar investment programs, the best known of which is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), set to provide almost $370 billion for energy transition technologies over the next ten years. The economic upswing it has triggered in the United States may well lead to the occasional extra order for German exporters.

There are some caveats, however. As a rule, contracts financed directly from the IRA can only be awarded to companies that produce in the United States. What to do if you want to get in on the American energy transition boom but don’t have a factory there? That’s right: you build one.

One example making headlines is Swedish company Northvolt, which had planned to build a battery factory in the northern German town of Heide, but then began to consider putting the project on hold and investing in the United States as long as those coveted IRA funds were still available. The German government is currently doing everything it can to stop Northvolt and save the battery factory in Heide, though whether it will succeed is another matter.

Northvolt is just one example among many. IRA subsidies would be quite attractive for many German companies — especially those whose factories require natural gas. After all, gas is much cheaper in the United States than in Germany, especially now that Germany has to buy pricey American liquefied gas. For months, economists have been warning that Germany my face a wave of deindustrialization caused by high energy prices and US attempts to poach companies from Germany. Even if things do not turn out quite so badly in the end, not only the political, but also the economic pull is now clearly in the direction of the United States.
An Alliance Divided

Traditionally, German foreign policy has relied on the EU to prevent precisely such a development and build up a counterweight to the US instead. Whether Brussels will succeed in slowing down or even stopping US economic traction with its own hundred-billion-euro investment programs is an open question. In any case, the EU is doing its best, most recently with its Green Deal Industrial Plan announced by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, set to provide hundreds of billions to promote energy transition technologies.

But compared to the United States, the EU has repeatedly struggled with internal divisions between its member states. These can also be seen in its attempts to prevent industry from migrating to the United States. One of the instruments Brussels uses to this end is permission to lure companies with investments in hitherto inadmissible amounts. This has led to friction between EU member states, however, as it gives rich countries capable of making large investments like Germany and France an advantage over poorer EU countries with insufficient state finances. The plan threatens to further increase inequality within the EU to the benefit of Germany and the detriment of less prosperous states.

Furthermore, traditional internal tensions are holding back the EU right when Brussels would actually need all of its strength to assert itself against the United States. Practically hardwired into the EU’s foundation is the competition between Germany and France, the two strongest countries in the Union whose interests are often at odds with one another. The most recent example is Berlin’s refusal to recognize hydrogen produced with the help of nuclear energy as “green,” while Paris, which traditionally relies heavily on nuclear energy, insists.

But there are plenty of other disagreements. Most recently, the French government began to systematically reinforce its position by concluding special treaties modeled on the Treaty of Aachen that Berlin and Paris signed to bolster their relations in 2019. First, France concluded the Quirinal Treaty with Italy in November 2021, then the Barcelona Treaty with Spain in January 2023. Both are intended to tie the two treaty states more closely together, and could create a kind of Southern bloc in the EU as a counterweight to German dominance. Berlin returned the favor by siding with Spain in the dispute over nuclear-generated hydrogen to drive a wedge between Madrid and Paris.

Either way, these sorts of rivalries do not strengthen the EU’s diplomatic clout.

The war in Ukraine is also deepening existing fault lines within the EU, the most important example being Poland. Already closely aligned with the United States in foreign policy for years, it has been far ahead of other European states in its support for Ukraine from the start, calling for shipments of fighter jets at a time when others were still struggling with sending artillery, and is arming itself more massively than any other state in Europe.

Poland plans to increase its military budget to 4 percent of GDP this year — in the long term, the figure is expected to rise to 5 percent. Warsaw wants to have three hundred thousand soldiers in its army by 2035. By comparison, the German armed forces today number around 189,000 soldiers. Some are already speculating about Poland becoming the strongest military power in the EU and thus extending its influence considerably — to the benefit of its close ally, the United States, at the expense of German dominance.
Growing Competition from China

A similar trend can be observed in the Baltic states and indeed — since the recent presidential election — the Czech Republic. These four countries have not only taken a particularly tough line in the Ukraine war, but also stand out for repeated actions against China, completely in line with Washington’s increasingly aggressive stance toward Beijing.

A “Taiwan Liaison Office,” the name of which alone represents an affront to the One China principle, opened in Lithuania in November 2021. While almost universally recognized within the international community, the One China principle is increasingly called into question by the United States. Immediately after his election, the new Czech president Petr Pavel, a former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, spoke on the phone at length with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen — this, too, can be interpreted as a deliberate violation of the One China principle and a deliberate provocation vis-à-vis Beijing.

These developments pose a real problem for Berlin. After all, China is of great and ever-growing importance for Germany. After decades of uninterrupted rise, the People’s Republic represents a rival not only for the United States, but also for Germany. Measured in purchasing power parity, China is already the world’s strongest economic power. It stands to replace the United States at the top of the world economy in absolute dollar terms by 2030 or 2035, according to the latest forecasts.

China’s breakthrough is not only quantitative but also of a qualitative nature, as seen in its development of a leading high-tech industry. The country now boasts defensive military capabilities on a scale that makes the US military doubt whether it could still win a war between the two powers, and it continues to expand its influence in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Should current trends continue, the already ailing West will not be able to maintain its global dominance for much longer. That reality is driving the United States to further harden the fronts with the People’s Republic.

In principle, Berlin shares an interest in containing Beijing, for if the power of the West diminishes, so does Germany’s along with it. At the same time, the German economy is very closely intertwined with China. The People’s Republic is by far Germany’s most important supplier, selling the country goods worth more than $200 billion last year. By comparison, the United States ranks third, supplying Germany with goods worth around $96 billion.

China may not be of critical importance to all industries in Germany, but it is to several individual sectors that form the bedrock of the German economy as a whole. The German automotive industry, for example, would collapse without the Chinese market: Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW sell between 30 and 40 percent of their vehicles there, and are increasingly moving electric vehicle research and development to China, now regarded as the leading global market for such cars. German chemical companies regularly insist that in the medium term, half the world chemical market will be concentrated in China and that staying out of that country would amount to driving themselves out of business.

Nevertheless, to at least slow China’s rise, the United States is waging a full-blown economic war and imposing more and more sanctions on the country. These also threaten German business in China. The consequences can be seen in the current example of ASML, a Dutch manufacturer of machines for chip production that has found itself allowed to deliver less and less to the People’s Republic as a result of American pressure. The company has already lost billions in business, while 15 percent of its total sales are still in limbo.

The nightmare scenario for German industry would be a so-called “decoupling,” meaning a complete disconnection of China from the rest of the world similar to what the West is currently trying to impose on Russia. Being cut off from China in the same way as they are now cut off from Russia would threaten many German companies with financial ruin.

Diplomat: Why the Minsk Agreements Failed in Ukraine - An interview with Wolfgang Sporrer
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/wolfgang-sporrer-interview-ukraine-war-diplomacy-minsk-agreements

There were three main reasons for the failure of the Minsk agreements. First, the Minsk agreements did not address the root cause of the conflict. It was stipulated, so to speak, that there was or had been some kind of ethnic conflict between Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine, and that this was the reason for the outbreak of violence. And by settling this alleged ethnic conflict, the conflict could be pacified.

This was pure fiction. The ethnic conflicts that existed in Ukraine were no more serious than ethnic tensions in many other countries.

Moreover, the dividing lines in this conflict, if one insists on understanding them in ethnic terms, are incredibly blurred. This is not about the Russian versus the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian versus Russian national identity. Nor is it about religion, not even in the slightest. At most, one could find something like an eastern Ukrainian Donbas identity. But this regional identity of the Donbas is not much stronger than strong regional identities in other countries.

What this conflict is fundamentally about is Russia wanting to exert influence over the domestic and foreign policy orientation of the government in Kyiv. In the Minsk agreement, however, this fiction of an ethnic conflict was constructed instead, although Russia actually had no particular interest in obtaining any autonomy rights for eastern Ukraine, for Russian-speaking or ethnically Russian Ukrainian citizens.

Russia was not really interested in these issues, but Ukraine was not at all eager to grant such rights either, for fear of a supposed fifth column. However, Moscow was not only concerned with what was happening in the Donbas, but above all with what was happening in Kyiv. The Ukraine conflict is about the orientation of Ukraine, pure and simple. But the Minsk agreement addresses completely different issues. That’s why the process didn’t work.

The second reason for their failure was the low technical quality of the Minsk agreements. There were far too many provisions for their verification, and the sequencing of various measures also remained controversial to the end, as the agreement itself didn’t specify any.

The third reason for the failure — and this may sound banal now, but it is true — is that it has not been possible to meet in person since the end of 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As little as the Minsk agreements were actually implemented in practice, they did help to build trust.

The very fact that the parties were sitting around a table had a de-escalating effect. You don’t get the same sort of benefit online. For that, you need coffee breaks, shared meals, unofficial contacts and the like. If you lose the seemingly ancillary aspects of diplomatic talks, such a process is doomed to failure. With the Minsk process, therefore, an early-warning instrument pointing to a possible escalation of the conflict was also lost.

ALEXANDER BRENTLER: This sounds as if the real concerns of both sides were excluded from the scope of the talks in advance. What, then, were the questions about which the parties should have negotiated, if not language laws or regional autonomy rights?

WOLFGANG SPORRER: I do not want to comment on what the talks should have been concerned with, because it’s not my place to dictate that to either Russia or Ukraine. But what was at the heart of the matter, as I said, from my point of view, was Ukraine’s international orientation. That is usually understood in a very binary way. Joining NATO: Yes or no? EU accession: Yes or no? Gas transit: Yes or no? And so on. What was at stake was the whole package of Ukraine’s foreign policy and geopolitical orientation under the new post-2014 Maidan government.

Russia believed that it should have some kind of sphere of influence, as great powers have often claimed, and therefore believed that it should have, at the very least, veto rights over Ukraine’s foreign policy and geopolitical direction, but without ever really articulating this claim openly. The Maidan government from 2014 on was quite clear that Russia should not have this kind of influence over the country. This, of course, represented a break with the line taken by the previous government under President Viktor Yanukovych, which had deliberately kept Ukraine neutral on security policy issues.

These would have been topics that could have been addressed openly. But I think that at the time, everyone involved preferred to stick to the pretense that it was about minority rights. Nobody wanted to say at that time that Russia simply has no right to a sphere of influence. And the Russian side also did not want to say that it believed in such a right in its immediate neighborhood.

Of course, one should also not forget that there is a geopolitical dimension here, which was also never addressed during the negotiations. There’s a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former White House security adviser, one of the really great theorists and also practitioners of international relations: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” This geopolitical reality has never been addressed, although there isn’t really a taboo about this question either. Everyone is aware that Russia wants to be an empire and everyone is equally aware that the United States wants to prevent it from becoming one.

...

[...] But I think the current disagreement in the West [about the goal of the war] will be negligible compared to the disagreement that will emerge about how the EU and the West should deal with a postwar Russia. There is a very broad spectrum of opinion on this issue.

Some believe that relations should be normalized as soon as possible. But there are also voices that argue: Russia will remain our eternal enemy, or at least for generations, and should best be split up, or rather must disappear from the planet.

On this issue, I see a huge split coming for Europe, which we would have to talk about now in order to confront this question honestly. Because if you don’t really define such problems clearly and address them openly, they will fall on your feet later.

#ukraine #minsk

Nineteen Eighty-Four Was Written By a Socialist
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/george-orwell-1984-prager-university-socialism

Paroles de psy en défense d’un socialiste dépourvu de ligne du parti

12.2.2023 by Chandler Dandridge - Literature is our shared heritage. Books and authors do not belong to anyone in particular — they are free to be read, enjoyed, and interpreted by all. Nevertheless, every avid reader knows what it feels like to stake a claim on a work or body of literature, then writhe at its misappropriation or misuse. For the Left, few authors inspire this response as much as George Orwell, a self-professed democratic socialist whose books are routinely used to undermine the political vision he quite literally fought for.

To be on the Left and to love Orwell means enduring opportunistic attempts to commandeer his work for reactionary purposes. For the past seventy-five years, the Right has enjoyed robbing the grave of one of the Left’s great artists. But it’s hard to greet the news, for example, that Orwell has turned up on reading lists compiled by Ben Shapiro and Prager University without indignation.

Of course, Orwell is by no means an uncontroversial figure among socialists. His opposition to Stalinism was commendable, but shortly before he died, he went so far as to create a list for Britain’s Information Research Department of writers and cultural figures he viewed as too soft on communism to warrant employment in the agency. Still, that same year Orwell himself lay on his deathbed writing to American publications to defend his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, from its hijacking by budding Cold Warriors who were reading it as an attack on socialist ideas. Had Orwell lived past the age of forty-six, one can imagine that his stout defense of the novel, and his ongoing and ironclad commitment to democratic socialism, might have reshaped his legacy.

But the Prager University book club discussion about Nineteen Eighty-four makes the tenth-grade public school classroom where I first read the book look as sophisticated as the Michel Foucault–Noam Chomsky debate. Dave Rubin and Michael Knowles offer some banal surface-level analysis and praise Orwell’s ability to think and write clearly, but they show no curiosity about the foundations of his thought. For the Prager boys, Nineteen Eighty-four is about freedom and “what it means to be human.” Quite right — but Orwell was not, as they claim, an “individualist” in the libertarian sense of the term. This is the crux of the Right’s failure to grasp the whole Orwell. His work certainly concerns itself with individual flourishing and society’s attempts to constrain it, but Orwell reaffirmed his devotion to democratic socialism and collectivism at every possible turn and in no uncertain terms.

Rubin eagerly makes the connection between Nineteen Eighty-Four’s description of the totalitarian government censoring and rewriting books to the trend, supposedly exclusive to the Left, of political correctness. He identifies it as “anti-human to be so against thought.” Perhaps so, but his hypocrisy is glaring: Rubin has praised the political maneuvering of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his own effort to ban books. Whatever Orwell would have thought of “cancel culture,” he would no doubt be vehemently opposed to DeSantis’s efforts to suppress socialist ideas in Florida’s public schools.

Shapiro tries to gloss over Orwell’s stated political commitments by claiming that the author “didn’t understand socialism on an economic level.” This criticism is confusing, as Orwell was not an economist — his novels are works of art that speak to the political dimensions of the human condition, not Marxist treatises on the functioning of markets. Dismissing Orwell’s politics on the grounds that his work neglects to offer a unified economic theory of public ownership is like claiming that Sally Rooney is not a leftist because her novels don’t comprehensively explicate the labor theory of value.

That said, there’s plenty of evidence in Orwell’s work of the sophistication of his political and economic thinking. Orwell was an apologetic novelist: he famously hated at least two of his books, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter, and considered ceasing their republication. They are not what I would call pleasant reads, nor is Nineteen Eighty-four, but they are better than their author thought and are worthwhile books, especially for those of us on the Left. In them Orwell is positively consumed by economic issues (he rarely isn’t). His characters fret over their pocketbooks throughout, and Orwell makes clear that, though it would not guarantee total happiness, their psychological and physical distress would be greatly alleviated if it weren’t for the woes brought about by their debts and low incomes. This is a point the Right fails to understand: money can’t buy you happiness, but it can certainly help with the copay at your next doctor’s appointment, leaving you with a little more freedom to attend to matters of the spirit.

In his excellent essay “Can Socialists Be Happy?” Orwell outlines aspects of his vision of socialism. For him, there is no ultimate utopia. Total happiness and a resolution to all conflicts is not the end goal of socialism. “What are we aiming at,” he asks, “if not a society in which charity would be unnecessary?” He goes on to describe a world where people need not endlessly suffer with untreated tuberculous legs and where Ebenezer Scrooge’s unearned income is unimaginable. If Nineteen Eighty-four is prescient, Orwell’s nonfiction essays are just as timeless: he might as well be writing about the scourge of American health care and twenty-first-century income inequality.

The crown jewels in the left canon of Orwell’s oeuvre are his book-length journalistic efforts: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia. The latter of these Noam Chomsky claims is his masterpiece and is for sure one of the most remarkable works of war reporting ever written. Down and Out is a rewarding read that makes strong arguments for the improvement of the lives of poor and working-class residents of both its eponymous cities. Wigan Pier excoriates middle-class liberals in mid-’30s Britain as it confronts the reader with the dreadful conditions of Britain’s Northern industrial workers.

Orwell was deeply critical of many elements of the Left. At the same time as he called for the state to oversee production and distribution of foodstuffs, he warned against how such power could be abused. Those criticisms are a gift to contemporary democratic socialists as we seek to build a movement that avoids repeating the errors of the past, but they have also made it easier for the Right to seize his legacy. Yet it is Orwell’s complexity and attention to political contradictions that make his legacy worth fighting for.

Again, Orwell is not an easy author to read. Nineteen Eighty-Four is bleak. His early novels are overwrought. And if, like me, you dare to read his diaries, be prepared for hundreds of pages detailing the dismal weather and the monotony of his English garden. There are many contradictions in his body of work, but one thing is clear: he never wavered in his adherence to the principles of democratic socialism.

Orwell was not an individualist in the libertarian sense; far from it. “The real objective of Socialism,” he wrote in his essay on happiness, “is human brotherhood.” Anyone with siblings knows that sometimes you have to wrestle with them, to yell at them, to take their toys to show them their proper use. His criticisms of various elements of the Left were a family matter. When reactionaries try to loot our family inheritance, we have no choice but to lay claim to his legacy.

There’s No Such Thing as a “Self-Made Man”
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/self-made-independence-community-interdependence-bootstrapped

02.02.2023 by Akil Vicks - Review of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream by Alissa Quart (HarperCollins, 2023)

In 2020, Quaker Oats and its parent company, PepsiCo, announced the retirement of the Aunt Jemima brand for their syrup and pancake mix. The move was a response to backlash against the negative “Mammy” stereotype the brand invoked. But the discourse being what it is, there was inevitably a backlash to the backlash, with some sharing memes bemoaning the loss of a cultural icon.

The general theme of this second backlash was that Nancy Green, who first brought the character of Aunt Jemima to life at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, was an exemplary American success story. Born into slavery, Green was an excellent cook who parlayed her talents into becoming the spokesperson for R. T. Davis Milling Co’s pancake mix. Through her individual efforts, the story goes, Green became one of America’s first black millionaires. To remove her from the box was to diminish her accomplishments.

The American self-made success story is a powerful cultural force. In Green’s case, her ascent from humble beginnings to fame and wealth was perceived by many as far more important than the brand’s flaws, namely that the persona of Aunt Jemima was a racist caricature and that the character’s fictionalized backstory was a “lost cause” style celebration of the Antebellum South.

The power of rags-to-riches narratives is the focus of Alissa Quart’s new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. In the book, Quart, a journalist focusing on working-class issues and the executive director of the journalism nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, takes aim at the fiction of the self-made man. Bootstrapping stories, Quart writes, “enforce the pernicious parable of the deserving rich” while engendering feelings of self-blame in those who can’t attain the American ideal of success.

Sometimes our bootstraps fictions are outright falsehoods. For example, a closer look at Green’s biography reveals that while she was able to use her notoriety to advocate for economic and civil rights, there is no evidence that Aunt Jemima’s parent company shared any of the profits that her advertising persona brought in. After twenty years of service, she was replaced without ceremony. Far from being a millionaire, she was still working as a housekeeper in obscurity when she died.

But there is a subtler and more pervasive untruth that connects all bootstraps narratives. The idea that anyone can be “self-made” is itself a lie. Quart’s book unravels these “rich fictions,” tracing their evolution from the romanticization of the self-made man in early American literature to the hardened individualism of Ayn Rand and beyond. Behind every bootstrapper’s ascent, Quart reveals complex relationships of interdependence.

Donald Trump is exemplary of all aspects of the bootstraps myth. To begin with, everything about Trump’s claims to self-made fame and fortune is a lie. But even more striking is just how much of his political support rests on voters’ perception of him as self-made. Some Trump voters were simply unaware of his childhood privilege and the many bailouts that kept his businesses afloat. Others were obliquely aware of these facts, but Trump’s bootstrapping narrative spoke directly to their own beliefs about what it takes to survive in America and what’s ultimately responsible for inequality and class stratification.

The attachment to the image of Trump as self-made serves a deep psychological need for conservative voters who want to reconcile their entrenched political identity with the inequality they see and experience. Meanwhile, it lets conservative politicians off the hook when they cut millions off from desperately needed help on behalf of their rich donors.

If all Bootstrapped aimed to do was expose the hypocrisy of those who promote the myth of total self-reliance, it would still be a well-written and valuable contribution. But Quart’s book has a larger point to make: there is simply no such thing as true independence within the human condition. Everyone requires some sort of help, whether it’s from mothers who perform unpaid care work and raise children, public infrastructure that allows businesses to function, or employees who sacrifice their time and effort — often for poverty wages — in order to make profits for owners who proudly tout their self-made fortunes.

Bootstrapped is presented as a journey of sorts, Quart’s personal odyssey through the social and economic ramifications of the bootstrapping narrative. She talks to people from all walks of life: those who have successfully escaped crushing poverty, people who are still living in precarity, and even ardent Trump supporters who are crushed by the weight of the expectation to be self-made. Quart finds that even in institutions where the value of interdependence is evident and systemic thinking should come naturally — public schools, social welfare, charity, and mental health therapy — bootstrap narratives have crept their way in, perverting those institutions’ functions and leaving many to fend for themselves.

Not content with mere diagnosis, Quart presents an alternative definition of and explanation for success, one where community and interdependence are the true drivers of economic prosperity and social cohesion. In her travels and conversations, Quart discovered that the pandemic had revealed the supreme importance of interdependence in providing the scaffolding for our economic system. For example, there is no way for two parents to work forty hours a week without day care, a fact that became distressingly apparent when the threat of COVID shut down day care centers across the country. Pushed to recognize their need for help, people responded by seeking support in community — tapping into social networks, church congregations, and mutual aid organizations. In the process, many learned a great deal about the myth of self-reliance, even in ordinary times.

Bootstrapped is at its strongest when Quart tells the stories of people discovering the value of interdependence and using that knowledge to create social change. These are stories not just of people marshaling resources to help fill economic need, but also finding intellectual and emotional fulfillment as part of a community. They suggest a path to happiness and security that does not rely on isolating notions of individual “grit” and “resilience,” but rather on the invigorating realization that we are never alone.

Quart also finds inspiration in the actions of politicians responding to the demands created by the pandemic, noting the significant — albeit, it seems, temporary — change in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric and legislative agenda away from Clintonite anti-welfare policies and toward universal childcare, the child tax credit, and even a potential wealth tax. The book doesn’t give much consideration to the legislative hurdles facing a Democratic Party agenda based on the value of interdependence, nor does it deal with the Democratic Party’s propensity to promote these kinds of ideas to garner electoral success only to abandon them at the behest of donors. For Quart, the material constraints keeping our national politics from wholly rejecting bootstrapping narratives are less important than acknowledging the potential for embracing and championing a new story.

The bootstrapping narrative was created and propagated to obscure inevitable relations of dependence, and its ultimate purpose is to justify the extreme economic inequality that results from and fuels capitalism. Bootstrapped promotes a new narrative, recognizing that humans are naturally dependent on one another and rejecting the idea that needing help is a source of shame.

#capitalisme #idéologie #mythologie #propagande

After Independence, Algeria Launched an Experiment in Self-Managing Socialism
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/algeria-independence-self-management-socialism-democracy-coup

02.02.2023 by Hall Greenland - After the end of French colonial rule, Algeria’s first government began to promote workers’ self-management in the “Mecca of Revolution.” But a backlash by conservative elements led to a military coup that established the regime still in power today.

There is a famous concluding scene to Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. After witnessing the French paratroopers “win” the battle by a combination of torture and murder over the previous hour and a half, the film climaxes with the residents of the Casbah surging out into the city with their rebel flags and banners blowing in the wind proclaiming independence and freedom for Algeria.

This was no sop to those of us who like a Hollywood-type happy ending but historical truth. Despite the rout in 1957 of the pro-independence Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in the actual battle of Algiers, the people themselves went on organizing.

When the French president Charles de Gaulle made his visit to Algeria in December 1960, the people of Algiers and half a dozen other cities throughout the country exploded into mass manifestations to impress on him their unbreakable determination to be free.
Popular Power

It was not the last spontaneous intervention of ordinary Algerians in the fate of their country. When independence came in 1962, most of the million European settlers decided to emigrate rather than live under Algerian rule. They left the country bereft of doctors, engineers, technicians, and teachers.

They also left behind them a trail of destruction. It was not only the terrorist OAS (Secret Army Organization) which wreaked this vengeance, killing thousands of unarmed Algerians. Farmers and businessmen also destroyed machinery and wrecked buildings as they departed.

The abandonment and destruction of the settler farms meant that Algeria faced starvation as the settlers had appropriated the best land. In addition, the French counterinsurgency had forced more than two million Algerians off the land as vast swathes of the countryside were cleared of villages and farms for free-fire zones.

Into this impending famine stepped the hundreds of thousands of Algerian farm workers who took over the abandoned farms and managed them themselves. The harvest was saved. While there were similar takeovers in the towns, the self-management phenomenon was much stronger in the countryside. That said, in the early days, teams of city mechanics were mobilized to go to the farms to repair and service tractors and other machinery.

This example of workers’ self-management was born of necessity. It did not rely on the leadership and initiative of the FLN, whose cadres had been scattered and driven out of much of Algeria by a French army of half a million soldiers. During the summer of 1962, the FLN split at a conference in Tunisia, further weakening its capacity to act. Just as in 1960, it was the self-organizing Algerian people who saved the day.

Certainly, one should not idealize this moment excessively. It was a patchy takeover of the European farms and firms. Local democracy wasn’t always perfect: there were many examples of local bigwigs, mafia, and armed mujahideen doing side deals with emigrating European owners or seizing European property. However, in the latter cases, there were often ongoing struggles between the usurpers and local workers for control.

The spontaneous reality of the summer of 1962 set the stage for the struggle that was to dominate the next three years: direct democracy versus bureaucratic and bourgeois control. To put it another way: the people against a nascent ruling class.
Radicalization at the Top

Initially the portents were good. In the struggle for power following independence, the most radical option came out on top, represented by the duo of Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the historic initiators of the war for independence, and Houari Boumédiène, the FLN’s army chief. The newly elected national assembly voted Ben Bella into office as president and Boumédiène as defense minister.

Ben Bella’s inclination was to make Algeria another Cuba. His coming to power coincided with the arrival in Algiers of the Greek left-wing activist Michalis Raptis, better known as Michel Pablo. As secretary of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Pablo had assembled the first and most important of the European support networks for the FLN, including the organization of underground arms factories to supply the movement with weapons.

Pablo firmly believed that an essential feature of socialism was the expansion of democracy. On the one hand, he did not think that you could have socialism in an underdeveloped and devastated country like Algeria, because socialism assumed a high level of economic development, which necessarily depended on an international division of labor. On the other hand, Pablo argued that you could lay the groundwork for a future socialism by fostering democratic institutions from the outset.

Pablo had become an advocate of what he called “autogestion” (self-management) throughout society. He welcomed the spontaneous creation of workplace self-management in Algeria. In his mind, here was a chance (and it was only that) to create a viable alternative to the capitalist or bureaucratic models for developing societies.

Pablo and Ben Bella struck up an immediate rapport and the new president hired Pablo as an economic counselor. A handful of supporters followed him to Algiers. There were also Algerian militants such as Mohammed Harbi and Omar Belouchrani who were already advocates of self-management.

For his part, Ben Bella persuaded the Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser to release a host of Arab communists from his prison camps to work in Algeria. Some of them assisted with schemes for self-management and agrarian reform.

However, the gathering of this small staff of cosmopolitan revolutionary intellectuals could not conceal the fact that there was no national political force committed to self-management. The FLN was a shambles that was rapidly being rebuilt, attracting as many chancers and opportunists as genuine revolutionaries in the process.

In addition, the union movement was very much in its infancy, and its leaders were men appointed by Ben Bella and Boumédiène rather than elected by the members. What we might call a culture of political democracy was largely absent.
Bureaucratic Barriers

Nevertheless, the early days of free Algeria were hopeful. Ben Bella accepted Pablo’s advocacy for a cancellation of the debts of the peasantry and the suspension and cancellation of the recent sales of European farms and property. He authorized Pablo to draw up the new laws governing the self-managed sector of the economy.

This resulted in the March Decrees of 1963, which legislated the form that self-management was to take in all former European-owned farms and businesses. General assemblies were to hold the ultimate power, including that of electing the workers’ council. In turn, the council elected the management committee which was in charge of day-to-day matters. The government was to appoint the executive director in agreement with the self-management bodies of an area.

The government launched implementation of the March Decrees with much fanfare. Ben Bella went on a national tour promoting those decrees, presiding over elections of workers’ councils and holding enthusiastic rallies wherever he went, proclaiming the birth of Algerian self-managed socialism. The Bureau national d’animation du secteur socialiste (BNASS or National Office for the Support of the Socialist Sector) was created to aid the new self-managed bodies and a regular radio program — the Voice of Self-Management — was inaugurated.

However, the assassination of Ben Bella’s radical foreign minister, Mohamed Khemisti, cut short his national tour as he hurried back to Algiers. Back in the capital, he was subject to lobbying by long-standing comrades, including his old cellmate Ali Mahsas, who was now minister for agriculture. Mahsas argued that firm central supervision of the self-managed farms was essential.

The original aim had been for the government to favor the self-managed sector with support and investment in order to boost its profitability and productivity: existing yields were about half those of comparable farms in Europe. The Algerian state would use taxes on these farms for local, regional, and national development.

Yet the party-bureaucracy had other ideas that were essentially parasitical. The ministry took control of farm machinery, marketing, and credit. It established strong links with the directors and management committee presidents. Corruption became rife.

In addition, the local préfets — officials in the traditional French administrative structure that Algeria inherited — used the farms to help solve unemployment. Often the farms now had four or five times the number of workers compared to colonial times. Ben Bella’s colleagues also persuaded him to put the BNASS under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture and the radio broadcasts were terminated.
The Struggle for Self-Management

Pablo and others protested this creeping bureaucratic coup, which basically reduced the self-managed councils and committees to the status of advisory bodies and the workers to that of state employees. As early as August 1963, Pablo wrote to Ben Bella, pointing out that all revolutions soon boiled down to a struggle between democratic and authoritarian tendencies, and he would have to choose his side.

According to Pablo, it was necessary to free the self-management sector from the ministry’s tutelage and allow it to set-up cooperative bodies in order to market and distribute its products and have control of its tractors and other machinery. Ben Bella’s government would also have to set up an agricultural investment bank to extend credit to the self-managed firms.

Ben Bella temporized. He authorized Pablo to draft an agrarian reform law redistributing land and encouraging the establishment of cooperatives for Algerian peasants, most of whom didn’t work on the former European farms and subsisted on tiny allotments. Pablo also drafted proposals for local communal councils, which would be a combination of directly elected representatives and delegates from the local self-management farms and enterprises.

Pablo’s scheme would oblige these communal councils to call regular general assemblies of citizens to guide their work. The councils would form the basis of a federated republic, mobilize the local population for public works, and help draft the overall plan for the economy.

These initiatives lay in abeyance until the first postindependence national congress of the FLN was held in April 1964. The congress adopted a manifesto, the Charter of Algiers, that Harbi had largely drafted in consultation with Pablo. It proclaimed self-managed socialism to be the goal of the FLN.

Unfortunately, this rhetorical victory did not result in control of the official party machinery by advocates of self-management or any substantial changes in the government ministries. By this stage, discontent at the bureaucratic counterrevolution in the self-managed sector was building up among the farm workers themselves. In December 1964, it culminated in the second congress of agricultural workers.

Delegates from the farms dominated this assembly of some three thousand people rather than the handpicked ministry and union representatives. The majority of speakers denounced the bureaucratic abuses and reasserted their demands for more self-management rather than less.
The Mecca of Revolution

From late 1964, there was evidence of a wider mass radicalization. A series of union conferences removed the puppet leaders that Ben Bella had appointed in 1962. The new leaders were more in favor of self-management, though understandably suspicious of Ben Bella himself.

The most dramatic manifestation of this radicalization was the International Women’s Day march through Algiers on March 8, 1965. From the photographic evidence, it is clear that the bulk of the marchers were women from the plebeian ranks of Algerian society. This was no chic parade.

Henri Alleg was the legendary editor of Alger Républicain, the bestselling (and communist) daily newspaper in the capital, and author of a damning book about his experience of torture at the hands of the French authorities during the independence struggle. He has left a telling anecdote in his memoirs about this march.

As tens of thousands of women, by Alleg’s count, made their way past the Alger Républicain offices, the staff leaned out of the windows and balconies to cheer and exchange chants with the ululating women. On the opposite side of the street was the Ministry for Agriculture. There the spectators watched stony-faced and in silence.

In his characteristic way, Ben Bella now began to pivot left despite the continuing attacks in the FLN’s army newspaper on the “atheistic communists” who held influential positions in his government. He signaled that he was about to sack the foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was a key ally of the army boss, Boumédiène. At the central committee meeting of the FLN in mid-June, he supported a raft of radical motions.

While Ben Bella was not consistently radical in domestic policies, he did make Algeria, along with Cuba, the strongest supporter of anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World. Movements such as Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa, the Angolan MPLA, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and even the Portuguese anti-fascist alliance opened offices in Algiers and sent cadres and guerrillas there for training.

Amílcar Cabral, the great Pan-African poet and nationalist leader from Guinea-Bissau, dubbed the Algiers of this period “the Mecca of Revolution” — a phrase that the American historian Jeffrey James Byrne recently borrowed for an extraordinary study of Algeria’s foreign policy during the Ben Bella years. Quite naturally, Che Guevara chose Algiers as his first port of call in his attempt to revive the Congolese revolution.

As a result of this activity, the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) selected Algeria as the site for its second conference. All the giants of the anti-imperialist revolutions — from Fidel Castro, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sukarno to Nasser, Josip Broz Tito, and Ho Chi Minh — were expected to attend or at least send their deputies to the meeting in July. Ben Bella was due to preside.
Boumédiène’s Coup

The prospect of this boost to Ben Bella’s prestige, combined with the president’s leftward move and his intention to remove key Boumédiène supporters from their posts, may have been what prompted Boumédiène to stage a coup against Ben Bella. In the early hours of June 19, 1965, a group of soldiers led by the army chief of staff entered the Villa Joly where Ben Bella was living and arrested him.

Soldiers and tanks took up positions in all the cities and major towns. The coup leader Boumédiène announced an end to “chaos” and a return to order. He denounced figures like Pablo as foreign atheists. The NAM conference was canceled.

Mahsas, the agriculture minister, naturally supported the coup. The protests against it were for the most part desultory, although Harbi has noted that one of the strongest demonstrations was in the city of Annaba, where “self-management militants . . . mobilized the people by explaining that the putchists were going to put an end to popular democracy.”

In the streets of Annaba, the Algerian army fired on and massacred its own citizens for the first time. Algeria’s experiment with self-management, hobbled almost from the outset, was now over. Advocates of self-management became hunted men and women, and Pablo had to leave the country.

Ben Bella remained under house arrest until after Boumédiène’s death in 1978. Harbi also spent time under house arrest, during which he began writing a history of the FLN. After escaping from Algeria in 1973, he went on to become the leading critical historian of the movement.

During the 1990s, hopes for democratization were quickly dashed as Algeria was plunged into a brutal civil war pitting the military against religious fundamentalists. The army dictatorship persists to this day.

But so do periodic popular uprisings to establish a genuine democracy. Boumédiène’s ally Bouteflika finally had to resign as president in 2019 after mass protests demanding an end to the dictatorship of the ruling bloc known as le pouvoir (“the power”).

#Algérie #histoire #révolution #islam #décolonialisation #autogestion #socialisme

We Can’t Ignore Class Dealignment
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/02/matt-karp-class-dealignment-american-left-politics-blue-collar-voters

02.05.2023 - Matt Karp on class dealignment and why the Left’s weakening connection to blue-collar workers isn’t a problem we can wish away.

In a recent article, Chris Maisano raises some important questions about the concept of “class dealignment” that many in the Jacobin orbit, including myself, have used to describe the recent shift in American voting patterns. Coming soon after Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley’s speculative essay in the last New Left Review, this suggests an element of dissatisfaction on the intellectual left with the dealignment idea.

I’ve written a longer reply to Brenner and Riley, which I hope will appear soon. But I wanted to respond to a few of Maisano’s points directly.

Maisano’s main critique seems to be about measurement. Using college education to stand in for class, he argues, misses a much more complex reality in America today. This is all true, so far as it goes, and Maisano’s sociological citations are helpful here. It’s one reason why the Center for Working Class Politics has designed our second study — which will appear later this spring — around fine-grained occupational data. (Much of it relies on the concepts and terms developed by Daniel Oesch, who Maisano cites. You can find a preview of the results in Jared Abbott’s essay in the latest Jacobin.)

It’s always good to have more precise evidence. But above and beyond a debate over measurement, two larger points must be kept in mind. First, the same basic pattern that we call dealignment is visible everywhere, no matter which categories we use. And second, the challenge that this historic shift poses for liberals and Democrats is a challenge for the Left, as well — a challenge we can’t hope to meet if we pretend it does not exist.

Maisano notes that dealignment appears to be weaker when tracked by income than by education. However, according to presidential exit polls (a crude but useful index), lower-income voters have in recent years moved toward the Republicans, while higher-income voters moved toward the Democrats. This is true broadly over time, and especially in the last decade.

In 1976, at the start of the dealignment era, the Democrat Jimmy Carter won the bottom rung of the income distribution by twenty-four points. He won the bottom 40 percent by eighteen points. But he lost the richest income quartile to the Republican Gerald Ford by twenty-four points. Measured by income (or by occupation, as academics showed), New Deal–era class alignment remained very much in effect.

This alignment atrophied across the next three decades, but Barack Obama’s semi-populist campaigns helped bring lower-income voters back toward the Democrats. In 2012, Obama beat Mitt Romney with the bottom 40 percent of income earners (under $50,000) by twenty-two points. He lost the top third (incomes over $100,000) by ten.

This puts Biden’s 2020 performance in perspective: a nine point win with the bottom third of incomes, according to Pew, alongside a thirteen point win with the top quarter. Other polls show a less dramatic shift. Regardless, it is almost certain that no Democrat in US history has ever won the White House with a coalition so heavily weighted toward the top of the income pyramid.

Yes, a thin majority of lower-income voters is still Democratic; and of course, many higher earners are still Republicans. But invoking these groups is a way of talking past the point. Dealignment has nothing to do with the minor auto-parts barons who voted for Trump, as they did for Gerald Ford, or the unionized health care workers who voted for Biden, as they did for Jimmy Carter. Dealignment, like most historical phenomena, is not an absolute; it is a process. Or, more prosaically, a trend: and it focuses attention on the voters who are in motion across the party system, in both directions. Not those who stay, but those who leave.

It is of course important to understand more precisely who these voters are. But after wading through all the sociological complexities, it turns out that the two key groups are relatively easy to describe, as Maisano acknowledges: lower-education, lower-income voters moving Right; higher-education, higher-income voters moving Left.

Looking at the data by occupational class, Ted Fertik found the same result: “skilled manual workers, lower-grade technicians, installers, and repairers” were the strongest Republican-breaking group in 2016; “higher-grade professionals, administrators, managers, and officials” the strongest Democratic-breaking group.

In other words, however you slice it, the essential trade-off comes down to the same constituencies Chuck Schumer called out in his famous dictum: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

Indeed: between 2012 and 2020, indeed, Erie County in western Pennsylvania (median household income: $55,949) shifted Republican by sixteen points; Chester County outside of Philadelphia ($109,969) shifted Democratic by seventeen points.

How are we to describe this shift? Or, for that matter, the even more dramatic shifts in blue-collar places like Lee County, Iowa ($54,258), which broke Republican by thirty-five points from 2012 to 2020, or Zapata County, Texas ($34,406), which broke Republican by an improbable 48 points?

Is this “a complicated new set of alignments rooted in the social and occupational structures of a postindustrial economy,” as Maisano says? Yes, of course. Is that just another way of saying “class dealignment”? I think so.

For the Left, the primal question is what we are to do about it. Maisano invokes the long and honorable history of twentieth-century socialists making alliances outside their traditional industrial base. But today, as he notes, the social base for progressive or socialist politics is a different group: sociocultural professionals, mostly, with less active support from some groups of service workers.

No one on the Left has seriously suggested a politics that excludes core constituencies like teachers, nurses, or social workers. Yet this base — even if we optimistically include other loyal Democratic groups — remains far smaller, weaker, and less united than the organized industrial workers of the twentieth century. So which other social groups must be won over to form a coalition capable of winning power outside northwest Brooklyn?

It seems obvious that the critical group is the same one that Schumer and others have successfully helped push out of the Democratic party: blue-collar workers in places like western Pennsylvania, eastern Iowa, and southern Texas. Does the Left, in its current incarnation, have any better plan to reach these workers than the Democrats do?

The concept of dealignment offers nothing like a solution to this dilemma. But it begins, at least, by acknowledging the scale of the challenge.

#lutte_des_classes #USA #syndicalisme