• Long Before Daniel Penny Killed Jordan Neely, There Was Death Wish
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/death-wish-movie-vigilante-violence-jordan-neely-daniel-penny

    C’est une analyse du film qui représente le pire dans l’esprit américain et une réflexion sur sa signification actuelle. Il n’y a plus de société pour nous protéger les uns des autresr alors on s’entretue en suivant nos instincts les plus sombres. La défense personnelle et le besoin d’argent ne sont que des prétextes pour l’expression de notre qualité essentielle : l’Homme est mauvais.

    [Ich bin] ein Teil von jener Kraft,
    Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft. ...
    Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!
    Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht,
    Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht

    Dans ce monde sans pitié ni solidarité la politique ne peut être que fasciste ou libérale.

    27.5.2023 by Eileen Jones - The New York City subway killing of Jordan Neely by ex-Marine Daniel Penny has stirred up heated commentary across the political spectrum. One common denominator in the discourse has been a frequent tendency to reach for a comparison to the notorious 1974 film Death Wish, a neo-noir film starring Charles Bronson as an affluent New York City dweller whose family is attacked in a violent home invasion. In the aftermath, he becomes a vengeful vigilante prowling the streets at night hoping to attract muggers — so he can shoot them. The subway scene in which he shoots two would-be robbers who approach him threateningly, and is acclaimed by the public for it, achieved added notoriety when the scenario was eerily carried out in real life.

    In 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers on the subway whom he claimed tried to rob him. Goetz was dubbed “the Subway Vigilante” by the New York press and ultimately tried on multiple charges, including attempted murder. But he was convicted of only the most minor charge of carrying an unlicensed firearm.

    The shooting and trial ignited a volatile public debate between those claiming Goetz as an urban hero fighting the forces of darkness in an increasingly crime-ridden New York, and those appalled by how self-appointed vigilantes, especially when they’re white and attempting to execute people of color, are applauded by the public and let off lightly by the criminal justice system. It’s nauseating reading the accounts of the Goetz case, because there are such marked similarities to the Daniel Penny case — especially in the public commentary afterward.

    The New York Post op-ed by Rich Lowry, titled “Daniel Penny is NOT a Vigilante, But the Left Can’t Stop Pretending,” typifies much of such commentary. He begins with Death Wish:

    Pretty much everything you need to know about the Daniel Penny case you can learn from the “Death Wish” movies.

    Or so you might conclude if you took seriously the left’s analysis of the tragic incident in a New York City subway car this month that has led to Penny, a former Marine, getting charged with second-degree manslaughter.

    The upshot of this commentary is that conservatives favor “vigilantism” and support it, of course, because it’s a bulwark of white supremacy.

    “The Republican Embrace of Vigilantism Is No Accident,” according to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

    Lowry goes on to cite a series of op-eds and think pieces making supposedly left-wing accusations of right-wing tendencies to support vigilantism. He then argues that Penny can’t be a vigilante, relying on a dictionary definition of the word, as if he were a desperate undergraduate the night before a paper is due: “Merriam-Webster defines a vigilante as ‘a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate).’”

    Lowry promptly invalidates the point by conceding that there can be “loner vigilantes” too. But in his view, the term still applies only in a Death Wish scenario, when someone like the Charles Bronson character is deliberately stalking local malefactors, trying to get himself almost-mugged so he can shoot someone. Lowry then makes his main claim:

    By contrast, conservatives are, as a general matter, viewing Penny as a defender of himself and, most importantly, those around him — not an avenging angel administering the justice that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg refuses to.

    Indications are that Penny (and his fellow passengers) sincerely believed Jordan Neely, suffering from untreated mental illness, was a threat to people on the train.

    There’s still much we need to know about the particulars of the case, but the impulse to protect others is deeply admirable and rare.

    Anyone who’s watched Westerns or action films could tell Lowry about vigilantism, which involves a self-appointed guardian or guardians of the public welfare acting like judge, jury, and executioner in meting out sloppy individual notions of justice — generally very rough, often fatal types of “frontier justice” — without due process under the law as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment.

    In short, little Richie Lowry really needs to put some more thought into defining his terms and rebutting implied counterarguments when writing essays. Grade: D-.

    All of which makes it interesting to go back and watch Death Wish, which remains so disturbingly pertinent. If you’ve seen it, you may not remember it as well as you think you do, as the cultural memory of the film is skewed by its notorious context. It touched a cultural nerve and was embraced by the kind of angry “silent majority” that’s never actually silent in the United States, and its popularity led to four hit sequels.
    A poster for Michael Winner’s 1974 vigilante thriller Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. (Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)

    The first Death Wish is an odd film, one of a number of films that reflected the United States’ rough political transition from a period of gains on the political left starting in the post-WWII era, culminating in the radical demands for change and countercultural turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, through the political malaise and stagnation of the mid-to-late 1970s, to the right-wing Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. In certain scenes, Death Wish actually signals a surprising awareness of how readily smug left-liberalism, entrenched in its societal gains and cultural mores but cut off from any socialist principles or serious critique of the political status quo, swings rightward under pressure toward fascism, expressed as violent, generally racist fantasies of “cleansing” a corrupt population by force.

    There’s good reason not to remember the film’s more compelling ambiguities, since its other lurid elements — such as manifest hatred of the poor and racist dog whistles — draw all the attention.

    It’s the story of how mild-mannered architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) goes from being a “bleeding-heart liberal” to a crazy-eyed vigilante after his family is brutalized by thugs. His wife Joanna (Hope Lange) dies as a result of the attack, and his daughter Carol (Kathleen Tolan) is gang-raped and so traumatized she has to be institutionalized. Soon afterward, Kersey is using the nighttime urban scene in New York City as a hunting ground, tracking malefactors, mainly unwary muggers, whom he shoots to kill.

    Several of the would-be robbers Kersey shoots are black. But regardless of race, they all approach him in states of excessive, sneering villainy and unambiguous threat, generally pulling out knives and waving them in his face. There’s no indication, through editing or cinematography, that this is the subjective vision of Kersey, deranged by the horror of his family’s experience. It’s clear that these are essentially bad people acting out of evil impulses because they enjoy it, not because they might desperately need the money they always demand with demeaning curses.

    The three men who commit the home invasion are white (startlingly, one of them is portrayed by the very young and still unknown Jeff Goldblum), but they’re the most cartoonishly villainous of all, exuding a kind of giggling depravity and love of violent chaos that ignites the protagonist’s determination that such people be put down like rabid dogs for the good of society.

    Which is the attitude expressed earlier by Kersey’s business partner (William Redfield), a fat cat in a business suit who makes a Taxi Driver–style argument that approximates the wish for a cleansing rain — or perhaps a hail of bullets — to wash all the scum off the streets. New York City is being made unpleasant for the rich and respectable, because they share the streets with the increasingly poor and desperate, which means the poor and desperate must be erased: “I say, stick them in concentration camps.”

    This is unusually bold, forthright fascism. Usually, in real-life public commentary, such statements vaguely indicate that people like Jordan Neely, who are homeless and mentally ill and shout about their misery and appear threatening to people, need to be removed from public life somehow. How often have we heard this line of talk in real life? Tech employees in the Bay Area, for example, made the news regularly for a while, demanding that the homeless be “somehow” removed from their sight while they commuted to and from work at Apple or Google or Yahoo.

    In response to his colleague’s insane rant, Kersey makes a vague, rote, half-hearted mention of his sympathy for the “underprivileged.” We’re clearly supposed to recognize the troubling weakness of his response. The early scenes of the film all indicate that Kersey, happy and successful as he is, is straining at the confinement of “civilization” and wants to break out in some way. We first meet him on vacation in Hawaii with his wife. When he proposes sex on the deserted beach instead of waiting to go back to the hotel room, she objects mildly: “We’re too civilized.”
    Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) turning around to attack a mugger in Death Wish. (High-Def Digest / YouTube)

    “We’re too civilized” is meant to resonate thematically throughout the film as a critique of American society, referring to the idea that the solid bourgeoisie allows itself to be terrorized by the raging criminal underclass out of brainwashed liberal guilt. But is it just Kersey’s fast conversion to this idea that we’re watching, or the film’s overarching argument?

    There’s plausible deniability built into the film at certain points — the final image, especially, which shows Kersey arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, having left behind “that toilet,” which is how his Arizonan colleague describes New York. He watches a couple of teenage boys harassing a girl and points his finger in the shape of a gun, making the “pow, pow” sign at their backs as they run off. The film freezes on that image, capturing the insane look in Kersey’s eyes and showing that he’s going to continue his lone vigilante killing spree.

    Brian Garfield, the author of the original 1972 novel Death Wish, hated the adaptation:

    The point of the novel Death Wish is that vigilantism is an attractive fantasy but it only makes things worse in reality. By the end of the novel, the character (Paul) is gunning down unarmed teenagers because he doesn’t like their looks. The story is about an ordinary guy who descends into madness.

    According to Garfield, the admired actor Jack Lemmon was initially slated to play the lead role, with Sidney Lumet directing rather than Michael Winner, which gives some idea of how differently the adaptation might have turned out. Once Charles Bronson was set to star, the shift from thoughtful drama toward brutal neo-noir action film was set.

    Garfield so disapproved of the eventual film, he did “penance” by writing a 1975 sequel underscoring his own critique of vigilantism called Death Sentence. Meanwhile, the four increasingly violent and successful sequels to Death Wish, all vehicles for Bronson, rocked on.

    Making Kersey look like a menace to society at the end of the film is interesting, especially in terms of the ignoble way he’s shooting at retreating backs, something we’ve seen him do several times when using a real gun to finish off wounded robbers running away. It’s something no classic Western hero would ever do, because “honor” supposedly defined all his actions. The film contains a thoroughly developed Western theme, evoking a genre known for celebrating vigilantism and “frontier justice.”

    On a business trip to Tucson, Arizona, Kersey is brought to a fake-Western town, maintained for tourists and occasional Hollywood filmmaking, and gets strangely caught up in watching the actor playing the heroic sheriff gun down bank robbers who are shooting up the town. His colleague and host during the business trip is a gun enthusiast who celebrates how freely people like them move around in the world, carrying guns that supposedly guarantee their safety from outlaws and evildoers. And it’s revealed that Kersey was raised with guns, attaining almost sharpshooter abilities growing up, before his father was killed in a hunting accident and his mother banned all guns from the house. Kersey also mentions that he was a conscientious objector in the Korean War and served as a medic. His colleague’s response: “You’re probably one of them knee-jerk liberals, thinks us gun boys shoot our guns because it’s an extension of our penises.”

    Returning to the world of guns seems to revive his father’s frontier-style legacy, which had been interrupted by his mother’s presumably weak, “too civilized” fears. It also places Kersey back within Hollywood Western mythologizing, where it seems he longs to be.

    This mythologizing was accepted by many Americans as close enough to the nation’s actual history, which Hollywood studios encouraged. The harsh revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and early ’70s, aiming at greater authenticity about the inglorious vigilante violence, robber baron capitalism, cynical land grabs, racism, misogyny, and drug use that were widespread in the actual Old West, came as a rude shock to fans and all but killed off the genre.

    That Kersey develops an idea of himself as the Western hero is clear when he challenges the last mugger he encounters, who’s succeeded in wounding him, to “draw,” as if he were starring in Shane. It’s another of the film’s ambiguous scenes emphasizing Kersey’s mental collapse, and in this case also satirizing his inability to live up to his own heroic image of himself, especially when he faints from loss of blood.

    In the end, Kersey the anonymous vigilante has gotten so popular with the public, the police don’t dare arrest him, though they know he’s the killer. They’re trying to avoid making public Kersey’s success in reducing the number of street crimes, which might unleash an epidemic of vigilantism. Kersey’s given the option to avoid arrest by relocating, and he’s told by the police officer heading up the case to get out of town. Kersey echoes a phrase used by lawmen in Westerns, asking, “You mean get out before sundown?”

    The persistence of the inflammatory discourse around vigilante violence in the United States, whether it revolves around actual events in the world or fictionalized representations, indicates strongly that many Americans, like the Paul Kersey character, are still enamored of the vigilante justice celebrated in old Westerns. The belief is widespread that we live in an ever-degenerating society, a “jungle,” beset by vicious “animals” and mobs of rampaging savages that can only be quelled by a lone “hero” ever prepared to shoot and claim self-defense and defense of others, no matter what the actual circumstances. Outraged and outrageous commentary cheering on Paul Kersey and Bernhard Goetz and Daniel Penny all blurs together, making it terrifying to contemplate who’s going to be the next Jordan Neely, whose publicly distraught state should have brought him offers of help but got him murdered instead.

    Jordan Neely, street artist who died from chokehold on a New York City subway, mourned at funeral in Harlem
    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/19/us/jordan-neely-funeral-harlem/index.html

    19.5.2023 by Zenebou Sylla - Jordan Neely, the homeless street artist who was the victim of a fatal chokehold on a New York City subway, was remembered at his funeral Friday as a “well known and loved” performer.

    Neely, 30, known for his Michael Jackson impersonations, was restrained in a chokehold May 1 on a Manhattan subway by another rider, Daniel Penny, after Neely began shouting that he was hungry, thirsty and had little to live for. Penny, a 24-year-old US Marine veteran, surrendered to police last Friday to face a second-degree manslaughter charge.

    “He performed in front of thousands of people in the streets of New York City, and on the subways where he was well known and loved,” Neely’s great aunt Mildred Mahazu said at his funeral service at the Mount Neboh Baptist Church in Harlem.

    “One of Jordan’s biggest passions was to dance and entertain. He was greatly influenced by pop star Michael Jackson, who he started idolizing from the age of seven. Over time, he began to perfect MJ’s dance moves by the time he turned 18,” Mahazu said.

    Neely’s death ignited protests and calls for Penny’s arrest while refocusing attention on struggles with homelessness and mental illness across America.

    Penny was released on a bail package last week, which included a $100,000 cash insurance company bond. He has not been indicted and has not yet been required to enter a plea.

    Neely had experienced mental health issues since 2007, when he was 14 and his mother was murdered, said Neely family attorney, Donte Mills. He had been traumatized after his mother’s brutal killing was followed by the discovery of her body in a suitcase, his friend Moses Harper told CNN.

    After Neely lost his mother, with whom he shared “an unbreakable bond,” he moved in with his father, Mahazu said, adding that in high school he was a star basketball and soccer player.
    Andre Zachary, Jordan Neely’s father, follows the coffin of his son after the funeral service Friday.
    The Rev. Al Sharpton delivers eulogy

    The Rev. Al Sharpton, who delivered a eulogy at Neely’s funeral, said the street artist “wasn’t trying to be something negative,” but wanted to “be like Michael” and “made the world smile and get on one beat.”

    Sharpton did not directly address Penny on Friday but said the city should hold him accountable.

    “You didn’t have the right to snatch the life out of this young man,” Sharpton said.

    Sharpton promised that in Neely’s name he would work to change the circumstances of those experiencing homelessness and those battling with mental health issues by providing city services.

    Before his death, Neely had been on a NYC Department of Homeless Services list of the city’s homeless with acute needs – sometimes referred to internally as the “Top 50” list – because individuals on the list tend to disappear, a source told CNN.

    “In the name of Jordan, we’re going to turn this city around to serve the homeless,” said Sharpton.

    “We can’t live in a city where you can choke me to death with no provocation, no weapon, no threat, and you go home and sleep in your bed while my family got to put me in a cemetery. It must be equal justice under the law.”

    Penny’s attorneys said in a statement last week that Neely had been “aggressively threatening” passengers and Penny and others had “acted to protect themselves.”

    “Daniel never intended to harm Mr. Neely,” they said.

    Penny’s attorneys said they are confident he will be “fully absolved of any wrongdoing.”

    Neely’s death was ruled a homicide, though the designation doesn’t mean there was intent or culpability, a spokesperson for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said earlier this week, noting at the time it was a matter for the criminal justice system to determine.

    CNN’s Emma Tucker contributed to this report.

    ‘It’s a failure of the system’ : before Jordan Neely was killed, he was discarded
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/12/jordan-neely-new-york-social-services-support-mental-health

    #USA #New_York #sans_abris

  • Class War Is an American Tradition
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/class-war-american-tradition-strikes-riot-capital-industrialization-railway

    18.5.2023 BY MARK STEVEN - In America during the late nineteenth century, class war wasn’t just a metaphor. Struggle between workers and their employers would regularly lead to actual warfare.

    This tendency has as much to do with the conditions of American capitalism as with the militancy of strikers. The global hegemony of the United States, as both an economic and a geopolitical superpower, was the result of industrialization — and its industrialization was entwined with war.

    The Next War

    So writes world-systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi and a team of researchers in their global history of political transformation:

    At least potentially, this giant island was also a far more powerful military-industrial complex than any of the analogous complexes that were coming into existence in Europe. By the 1850s, the US had become a leader in the production of machines for the mass production of small arms. In the 1860s, a practical demonstration of this leadership was given in the Civil War, the first full-fledged example of an industrialized war.

    The Civil War also revolutionized and concentrated the industrial and agricultural means of production, as waves of railway construction established privileged access to the planet’s two largest oceans. “A truly integrated US Continental System,” Arrighi adds, “was realized only after the Civil War of 1860–65 eliminated all political constraints on the national-economy-making dispositions of Northern industrial interests.” This dynamic, in which actual war countersigns accumulation while simultaneously giving it a mythic veneer, is the secret history of industrial capitalism in the United States.

    In the canonical version of this argument, the historian Matthew Josephson describes the emergent capitalist class — whose ranks included Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller — as a cartel of robber barons. Here we get a sense of the martial spirit of industrial capitalism, which found its energies liberated by war and enjoyed lucrative deals in food, produce, clothing, machines, fuel, and railways:

    Loving not the paths of glory they slunk away quickly, bent upon business of their own. They were warlike enough and pitiless yet never risked their skin: they fought without military rules or codes of honor or any tactics or weapons familiar to men: they were the strange, new mercenary soldiers of economic life. The plunder and trophies of victory would go neither to the soldier nor the statesman, but to these other young men of ’61, who soon figured as “massive interests moving obscurely in the background” of wars.

    In short: capitalists in the United States consolidated their powers in and through war, exploiting political conflict to satisfy an enormous appetite for private profit, acquiring their social form through the battle’s economy and culture. This explains why those same capitalists were so given to narrate their enterprise using the language of military bombast, adopting terms like “captains of industry” and insisting that, for the continual triumph of large-scale industry, “the war of finance is the next war we have to fight.”

    Tentacles of Capital

    American literature has been alive to the historical apposition if not the mutual imbrication of social structure and military conquest. This tendency is at its most visible with The Octopus, a work of Zola-esque naturalism written by Frank Norris and published in 1901.

    Describing the conflict between independent wheat growers of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California and the tentacular expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad company, the narrative begins with a half-ironic invocation of the poetic muse on behalf of a young writer who will come to observe the clash between ranchers and the railroad:

    He was in search of a subject, something magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters. That was what he dreamed, while things without names — thoughts for which no man had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures, colossal, monstrous, distorted — whirled at a gallop through his imagination.

    The unnamed subject here is capital, a dawning empire whose blood-drenched epic is still elusive. “Oh,” he later opines, “to put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note; sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People; the forerunners of empire!”

    The social substance of such an epic is class conflict, and its combat often takes the form of strikes. As one railway driver insists, “they’ve not got a steadier man on the road,” even as his wages are slashed and his employment terminated, precisely because he has always been a scab. “And when the strike came along, I stood by them — stood by the company,” he says:

    You know that. And you know, and they know, that at Sacramento that time, I ran my train according to schedule, with a gun in each hand, never knowing when I was going over a mined culvert, and there was talk of giving me a gold watch at the time.

    Another character, who self-identifies as an anarchist, is said to owe his militancy to personal tragedy, for his wife was trampled to death by strikebreakers during the same conflict. “Wait till you’ve seen your wife brought home to you with the face you used to kiss smashed in by a horse’s hoof,” he intones, “killed by the Trust, as it happened to me.”

    Deeply opposed to any sort of moderation or compromise, which he describes as a bourgeois luxury — “You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered, if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot” — this “blood-thirsty anarchist” advocates instead for violent action:

    That talk is just what the Trust wants to hear. It ain’t frightened of that. There’s one thing only it does listen to, one thing it is frightened of — the people with dynamite in their hands — six inches of plugged gaspipe.

    Railroad Rebellion

    There is, however, an anachronistic dimension to Norris’s book, which is set during the 1890s. Before the final decade of the nineteenth century, the railway had already been converted into a site of struggle. More than that, opposition to the railway as a capitalist technology had morphed into antagonistic social practices that used the railway as their vehicle, producing a kind of mobile insurrection for which strikes would serve as catalyst.

    As strikes escalated beyond a relatively orderly form of rebellion, anchored in place and defined by employment, the railway provided such antagonism with high-speed transport, spreading solidarity at the pace of capital, opening onto armed conflict against the state as well as the employers and their trusts. Such escalation was new to the period after the Civil War.

    As the historian Paul A. Gilje writes: “Before 1865, most violent strikes were limited to cracked heads and were local affairs. After 1865, the rioting became national in scope.” Note the modulation from strike to riot, pivoting on the use of violence, before the two modes of antagonism are regrouped as warfare. Gilje continues:

    In the great railroad strike of 1877, workers fought the military from Baltimore to San Francisco. The dimensions of these labor wars continued to capture national headlines with battles at Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, Ludlow in 1914, and Blair Mountain, West Virginia, in 1921.

    And while the escalation from strike to war often effaces the original form of struggle, with the strike vanishing from narrative description as the antagonism leaves the worksite and enters the battlefield, here we will discern how that movement shifts its organizational energy away from any one given workforce in order to mobilize as a class. The multiple interlocking rail strikes of 1877 are exemplary and seminal events in such a movement, with workers in and around the railway industry organizing for, and committing to, an armed uprising.

    Taking place during the long depression that began in 1873 and lasted until 1879 — a downturn that wrecked the railroad companies, reduced track expansion, and decimated the railroad craft brotherhood — the strike started over wage cuts in Martinsburg, West Virginia. From there it spread up, down, and along the railways, with strikers taking up weapons, burning depots, and fighting off the forces of repression, only to be joined by workers from other industries, producing comprehensive general strikes that shut down entire cities.

    According to the writer and journalist Louis Adamic, this was a time of material hardship coupled with massively diminished union power:

    Hundreds of thousands were suddenly thrown out of work. Wages were reduced. The reductions caused prolonged and desperate strikes. Every one of them failed. Some strikes were followed by lockouts, so that vast numbers of people could not get to work on any terms. Labor leaders were blacklisted. Between 1873 and 1880 real and nominal wages were cut to almost one-half of the former standards. Labor organizations went out of existence. There were no leaders to lead them and no workmen to pay the dues. In New York City alone the trade union membership dropped from 45,000 to under 5,000.

    While the train brotherhoods were fragmented according to craft, didn’t coordinate with other branches, negotiated their own labor agreements, and were universally opposed to strikes or disruptions, now the workers self-organized into their own secret union: a representative and coordinating body open to all craft workers. Their first meeting took place in Pittsburgh on June 2, 1877, where they pledged to unite across crafts: “In short, unity of capital would be met at last by unity of labor.”

    America’s Paris Commune

    If this pledge gestured at an expanded (though industry- or employment-bound) sense of class, the conflicts themselves would take that principle further. The strike’s expansive scope was more than the result of the nearly absent labor unions. In fact, it occurred despite their presence, with warlike action fulfilling its pedagogical role in the place of older and ultimately conservative institutions.

    A manifesto issued by the workers in Westernport, Maryland, on July 20 warned the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that, if wages were not restored, “the officials will hazard their lives and endanger their property,” and promised the kinds of sabotage pioneered by the Luddites in England:

    For we shall run their trains and locomotives into the river; we shall blow up their bridges; we shall tear up their railroads; we shall consume their shops with fire and ravage their hotels with desperation.

    True to their word, the strikers’ tactics were violent and destructive, including the removal of coupling pins and brakes, the tearing up of tracks, making trains only run backward, cutting telegraph wires, and shooting strikebreakers.

    As a school of war, these strikes demonstrate a double movement of expansion and escalation, from local strike to wider conflict and from reformism to insurrection; and this, as the realized threat of war, proved decisive in the consolidation not just of railway workers but of oppressed peoples from many backgrounds into a unified class. So writes the labor movement scholar Robert Ovetz:

    Several thousand Irish packing-house workers armed with butcher knives were met by cheering Czech workers marching across the city to enforce the strike and force employers to raise wages. Gender differences were also dissolving in the strike. The Times estimated that 20 percent of the strikers and their supporters were women. The Chicago Inter-Ocean generated national attention with their report of “Bohemian Amazons” whose “Brawny, sunburnt arms brandished clubs. Knotty hands held rocks and sticks and wooden blocks.” A fence around one plant was “carried off by the petticoated plunderers” and other similar portrayals of the powerful women who helped enforce the strike.

    Armed conflict serves as a shared language that leaps across racial as well as gendered divisions to forge a provisional unity against interconnected systems of oppression.

    This tendency would be carried through to the climax of the movement in the general strikes in St Louis and East St Louis, where for a few days a multiethnic coalition of strikers shut down much of their industry and the cities were controlled by executive strike committees. Comparisons were made with the events that had occurred six years previously in France. “In St. Louis and East St. Louis,” writes Ovetz, “the strike went further as workers across the cities shut down all industry and became renown in the press of the time as America’s ‘Paris Commune.’”

    Adamic made the same comparison in his history of class violence in America. “The underdog had given capitalism in America its first big scare,” he writes. “The memory of the Paris Commune of six years before was still fresh.” Not just the memory, either; it was the very spirit of 1871, the commitment to solidarity through an expansive mobilization of class, that made the movement powerful.

    #lutte_des_classes #USA #histoire

  • American Capitalism Has Produced Its Most Remarkable Innovation Yet: Breadlines
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/american-capitalism-breadlines-market-freedom-food-banks

    Want, cruelty, waste, it’s all here — the whole needless cycle symbolized by long lines outside of food banks in urban areas where there is more than enough to eat. God bless the free market.

  • Architects Are Toiling Under Brutal Working Conditions - An interview with Andrew Daley
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/architects-union-organizing-international-association-of-machinists-and-aer

    Aux États Unis les idées d’Ayn Rand ont une place hégémonique dans la pensée des ouvriers white collar . Elles constituent un obstacle majeur pour les efforts de syndicalisation. Cet interview tourne autour des efforts pour syndiquer les employés des bureaux d’architecture.

    14.5.2023 Interview by Alex N. Press - In 2021, workers at SHoP, a New York architecture firm, filed for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. They felt overworked (Curbed reported on a SHoP worker who “was hospitalized with pneumonia after working a 110-hour week and felt pressured to work while his wife was in the middle of childbirth”), and some of them carried a heavy load of student debt. They wanted a collective avenue of redress and a means to stabilize their work lives. The Architecture Lobby, a nonprofit that advocates for reform within the industry, has existed for nearly a decade, but SHoP was poised to become the first private sector architectural firm to unionize since the 1940s.

    The backlash was swift. According to the workers, SHoP management launched an anti-union campaign, hiring prime union-busting law firm Proskauer Rose LLP to craft the strategy. Management warned of losing clients and instituted an employee stock-ownership program (ESOP) that, while not providing a seat at the table or say over the direction of the firm, functioned as a wedge, peeling off support for the union by distributing company profits to workers in the form of company shares. It worked: fearing that it would lose the union election were it to go through with it, the SHoP union withdrew its petition in February of 2022.

    Andrew Daley was one of the SHoP workers who supported the union. During the campaign, Daley decided to make a change: he quit his job at SHoP and joined the Machinists as a full-time organizer. Since joining, Daley has assisted workers at Bernheimer Architecture, another New York–based firm, in winning voluntary union recognition. Earlier this week, another campaign went public, with employees at Snøhetta, a high-end firm, filing for an NLRB election.

    Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Daley about the SHoP campaign, the biggest issues facing architects, and his hopes for the current organizing efforts. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

    Alex N. Press

    You’re a full-time union organizer for the Machinists now, but you were an architect until recently. How did you decide to go all in on trying to organize the sector?

    Andrew Daley

    I’m a licensed architect in the state of New York and have practiced in four different states. I’ve been in the profession for twelve years, with experience at big and small firms. I’ve been an independent contractor, I’ve done construction. I’ve worked in lots of different environments. At those places, I’ve tried to agitate for better conditions for myself and people around me, whether that was by talking one-on-one to the owner or through committees or working groups. I had familiarity with unions, particularly from friends who are writers, but I think I had a sort of NIMBY [“not in my backyard”] attitude like, “I love this, it’s great for everybody, but I just can’t see that as a possibility for architecture.”

    In the summer of 2020 at the firm that I had then been at for around six years, we were rethinking firm policies on equity and diversity. We met with hesitation, an attitude of, “We’re doing the best that we can.” Then, they laid a bunch of people off in September of 2020. At that point, a few people, not myself, started connecting with organizers and talking about the possibility of unionizing so that even if we couldn’t stop layoffs, we could build a structure for them.

    I was brought into that conversation a few months after that, when there were about ten people in the group. We organized for another nine months after that, and I wound up leaving a little bit before the campaign went public right before Christmas of 2021. I was considering a shift to the public sector, but the Machinists asked if I’d be interested in becoming an organizer. I hadn’t thought that was a possibility, but I couldn’t pass it up.

    When the SHoP campaign went public, they had about 65 percent of workers supporting the union, and then there was another round of layoffs. Morale was low. But they filed. Ultimately, the firm ran a heavy anti-union campaign, and the workers pulled their petition, because a lot of the tactics started working.

    After that, the question was, what do we want to do at this point? We’d had a big push, we had thousands of followers on an Instagram that we hadn’t expected to get that kind of attention. People were interested in what was happening and devastated by the fact that it had failed. But a number of groups had reached out about organizing, and without exception they still felt they needed to unionize. One group in particular was the Bernheimer Architecture group, which included one member from the SHoP campaign who had been laid off and taken a job there afterward.

    Bernheimer went public in September of 2022 and got voluntary recognition. Now, we have around eight to twelve active campaigns (though of course, some of those might go dark, hit plateaus, and so on). There are around a dozen more firms where we’ve had some conversations. My point being: there is a lot of interest.

    Alex N. Press

    Are all of these firms in New York?

    Andrew Daley

    No, but the epicenter is here. A lot of that has to do with the critical mass of architecture in New York. Plus, there’s always been an ethos that the only place to make a decent living in architecture is in New York, which is a backward assumption: most of the architects I know in other cities weren’t making that much less than I was but had a way cheaper cost of living.

    So New York has a big concentration of architects and also the worst working conditions, which explains why these efforts took off here. But we’re talking to groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, one in the Midwest, a firm with offices across the country. That’s exciting, because if this were just in New York, or at one type of profile of work, I’d think we didn’t have as good of a read on the industry as I’d have hoped. But instead, it’s all over the map in terms of location, size, and discipline. These are systemic issues throughout the industry that need to be addressed in a systemic way.

    Alex N. Press

    For people who might not be familiar with the architecture world, can you explain what you mean when you refer to different types and echelons of work?

    Andrew Daley

    I don’t want to use the term “starchitect,” but there are famous firms in the field. These aren’t identifying the firms we’re working with, but some famous firms would be Zaha Hadid, the SHoPs of the world, Bjarke Ingles, SOM, and Frank Gehry — high-profile people who a lay person may be familiar with. But the ones we are actually working with: some are doing mega-developments, some are doing high-rise luxury residential, some are small-scale retail interiors, some do really institutional work, some do government work, some do massive governmental and infrastructural planning. It’s not any one kind of work — it’s all kinds.

    Alex N. Press

    So you went through the SHoP campaign as a worker, and you referred to the anti-union campaign that peeled off enough support that the union ended up withdrawing the NLRB petition. What have you and the Machinists learned from that so it doesn’t end that way going forward?

    Andrew Daley

    As much as there are similarities in how each industry fights unions, there are also differences in tactics, and now that we’ve seen it in this industry, we know what to expect. We assume firms that don’t want this to happen will follow SHoP’s playbook. We can learn from how it played out. We’re open with every group about what they might expect.

    We also tell those groups that they’re going to have to call out their employers. Firms should know that if they’re going to break the law and pressure their employees rather than respect their rights, workers will put it in the press and make what is happening clear to the public. Public perception shifting on the campaign helps make those anti-union tactics stop. We will make things public, we will file unfair labor practice (ULP) charges.

    Another thing we’ve thought a lot about is the path that the Bernheimer group laid of voluntary recognition and a collaborative environment with their owner. We aren’t steering the ship in the negotiations at that firm; we’re a fly on the wall advising, but it’s about what they want in their workplace collectively. Do I think any of the firms that have big corporate structures and an ethos about being a corporation will offer voluntary recognition? No. But do I think that firms that are still owned by founding partners, or even the next generation of partners that may understand that they have something to gain here? Yes, it’s possible.

    The Conde Nast group is another model, where they didn’t file for a union election, but they knew they had support and figured out other ways of putting pressure on management. It might be harder to replicate that within an industry where there’s no union density, but it’s an interesting strategy.

    Alex N. Press

    Do you think what happened at Bernheimer could be replicable at other firms?

    Andrew Daley

    Yes. In one way, Andy Bernheimer is incredibly unique in how he thinks about himself, how he thinks about his practice, and how he thinks about labor overall compared to a lot of other firm owners. That being said, it’s also not that different from any other firm. It’s a twenty-person firm; there are tons of twenty-person firms throughout the country and definitely in New York. Maybe the Bernheimer playbook doesn’t work when we’re talking about a two thousand–person firm that has offices all around the world, but even up to a hundred and fifty employees, it’s something that we can point to. And Bernheimer is going to set the standard in the industry with its contract; it’s going to be the only contract of a private sector architecture firm, so that’s something to follow too.

    Alex N. Press

    Some of the shops you’re working with are small, and the first thing an employer will cite to oppose a union is the competitive pressure in the industry. What’s your plan to handle bargaining and winning multiple first contracts when these shops get union recognition?

    Andrew Daley

    We make it abundantly clear to everybody that their salaries are not going to double overnight. The first contract might only get minimal gains in terms of salary increases. But what we are going to be able to get is a lot of noneconomic things and protections that, frankly, don’t exist right now.

    Another thing that we are going to be pushing is policies that in one sense are economic but in another sense are disincentives for working a lot of overtime. The model of the industry is, “I have all exempt workers, so I don’t have to pay them overtime. I’m getting pinched in every direction in terms of my fee, and the only way to make it all back is to require my staff to do excessive amounts of unpaid overtime.” That’s what we’re conditioned to do from day one in architecture school.

    What that overlooks is the amount of inefficiency that happens within those hours of work that a client never sees and doesn’t care about, from internal miscommunication, to back-and-forth between multiple different partners reviewing a project, to redoing things not necessarily in the name of a better product. If we put in lots of disincentives in contracts (and it might not be time and a half right away, and it might not be forty hours right away), but if we build in structures to guard against it, we’re giving time back to all of the employees, because most firms are going to say, “Well, we can’t afford to pay the overtime.” So then we’re all in agreement: let’s make sure it doesn’t happen. That’s the biggest one to me because it trickles down to everything else.

    Alex N. Press

    The last time there were private sector architects joining unions in the United States was the 1930s. Unemployment in the sector was a key issue back then. With these recent campaigns, a lot of architects have mentioned overtime as a major issue. Is that what is driving this push now, or are there other problems?

    Andrew Daley

    A lot of things are driving it. Being an at-will employee itself is soul crushing. I’ve been laid off. I was tapped on the shoulder and asked, “Hey, do you have a minute?” This was at a three-person fabrication studio and it wasn’t like, “Here’s two weeks’ notice.” It was, “Go home now.” That was a unique situation, but it’s not uncommon, not only in architecture of course, but in this field, there’s very little severance, and what you get is not commensurate with the rest of the market. So not only can you be dismissed at will, but you’re not set up to do anything on the flip side of that, which leads you to rush into something new to stay afloat.

    A lot of issues that people talk about come back to uncompensated overtime. Burnout is directly related to hours. Work-life balance is directly related to hours. How much you’re getting paid is directly related to hours: if you’re getting paid an okay salary, but then you amortize that out over your hourly rate, which is 25 or 50 percent overtime, all of a sudden that wage doesn’t look so good.

    Alex N. Press

    There are some stereotypes about architects, though The Fountainhead may be responsible for that. Are there actual peculiarities to this work or this type of worker, be they ideological or something to do with the job itself?

    Andrew Daley

    The general public does perceive architects a certain way, as frustrated geniuses toiling away, trying to get the world to understand their singular brilliance. The idea is that it’s an individual pursuit, and if you’re just good enough and work hard enough at it, then everyone will see you for what you are — that’s how people see Frank Lloyd Wright, for example.

    But what we miss is that he had hundreds of employees. We never talk about Wright’s workers. And not only that: he started a school so that he could not only have workers, but have people pay to apprentice under him. So even when we think about this romantic time, the stereotype wasn’t true either. We aren’t taught that history, and we are really bad at educating the public about what we do and how much time it actually takes.

    Alex N. Press

    You changed your life to try to organize a nonunion sector. Is there anything you’d like to say about all of this on a personal level?

    Andrew Daley

    I might be the only licensed architect who is doing this full time. A lot of people ask me, “Do you miss architecture? Do you miss design?” In a lot of ways, yes. I miss the camaraderie of it. I miss being collaborative with people on a project. I miss seeing projects come to life.

    But in a lot of ways, this is similar. All of these different campaigns are different projects, and I’m helping people get rights that they don’t have now. I feel closer and more connected to the industry than I ever have before. In part, that’s because it’s now my job to be able to connect on these things. But personally, I now have a reasonable work-life balance and a healthy working environment. I don’t think I’ve ever had that in the industry before, and that’s what I want to be able to create for everyone else.

    For example, I talk to so many people who are parents who find themselves in a situation where they’ll leave work at six, catch their kids for a little bit, and then log back on for three more hours. That’s soul-crushing. I would love to see it not be like that any longer. That’s what I’m fighting for.

    #USA #New_York #travail #syndicalisme #organizing #architecture #Ayn_Rand #Fountainhead

  • US Imperialism Alone Can’t Explain the Triumph of the Right in Latin America
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/us-imperialism-far-right-latin-america-dictatorships-homegrown-book-review

    Embrassez les fascistes (Küsst die Faschisten ... Tucholsky)

    2.5.2023 by Hilary Goodfriend - Histories of the Cold War in Latin America often center the United States’ bloody footprint in the region. And with good reason: US crimes in the region committed in the name of anticommunism included propping up dictatorships, overthrowing democratic governments, and enabling genocide.

    A new book by historian Vanni Pettinà takes a different approach. His recently translated A Compact History of Latin America’s Cold War shines a light on the role of Latin American nations on both sides of the region’s bitter conflicts. Rather than reducing these struggles to mere proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR), he advocates for recognizing “peripheries as active historical agents” in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggles that rocked Latin America between 1947 and 1989.

    Readers looking for a history of US imperialism can find them in works like Eduardo Galeano’s classic Open Veins of Latin America or anything by historian Greg Grandin. But Pettinà’s nuanced interpretation has something to offer even the most ardent anti-imperialists.

    Just as the region’s revolutionaries were far from Soviet stooges, Latin America’s antidemocratic forces were not created wholesale by Cold Warriors in Washington. To fight the far right, it’s important to understand how historical conditions create organic social bases and material motives for homegrown reaction — then and today, in Latin America and around the world.
    Framing the Conflict

    The author calls for greater attention to the relations within and between Latin American nations, but he does not discount the weight of foreign interventions — most significantly, the innumerable military, economic, and diplomatic interventions of the United States. Rather, Pettinà identifies both an “external fracture” and an “internal fracture” provoked by the onset of the Cold War in Latin America.

    The external fracture comes from the United States’ abdication of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in 1946, which had paused the parade of US military invasions and occupations that characterized US relations with Latin America prior to 1933. One result of the return to overt military interventions, Pettinà argues, was a conflation of US anti-communism with anti-nationalism, as Latin American nationalist reformers often sought Communist support in their coalitions. This led to US support for reactionary actors in the region, as in the emblematic case of US alignment against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. There, a CIA plot saw a democratically elected liberal reformer overthrown in favor of a genocidal military regime that plunged the country into decades of civil war.

    The internal fracture refers to the strengthening of conservative elements at the national scale. The Great Depression and World War II created the conditions for Latin American governments to try and overcome their dependency on commodity exports and develop more autonomous, diversified, and industrialized economies. Renewed postwar international trade, however, favored a backlash from traditional agricultural-exporting elites, in alignment with US free-trade dogmas that demanded the unequal international division of labor according to market-based comparative advantages.

    In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Latin American militaries and the reactionary ruling class correctly saw that developmentalism, as the state-led programs to reshape the economy and expand social welfare were known, had created a material base for more radical and inclusive politics. With US support, they dismantled these nationalist policies in favor of outward-facing economic strategies that privileged foreign capital.

    Rather than an “episodic” historical analysis that hinges on spectacular events like coups d’état, Pettinà advances a “structural” one. He divides the conflict in different stages, beginning with an early period of democratic reversals from 1946 to 1954, when Communist Parties were banned across Latin America and purged from governing coalitions and labor unions.

    Three case studies show how this played out. In Costa Rica, democratization and social reforms advanced despite opposition from landowning elites and the US monopoly United Fruit Company. This was, in part, thanks to President José María Figueres’s “skill at using his anticommunist credentials to limit US intervention,” Pettinà writes.

    Mexico’s success was more ambiguous, with authoritarian consolidation under the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) even as the party’s nationalist developmentalist agenda prevailed. The author credits the social welfare gains of this period to the fact that, unlike elsewhere in Latin America, the landowning oligarchy’s monopoly power had been weakened by land reform after the country’s 1910 revolution. He also notes the PRI’s internal legitimacy and stability, and the regime’s “discreetly anticommunist approach” even as it maintained an autonomous foreign policy that ran against the bipolar pro- or anti-communist paradigm insisted upon by the United States.

    Guatemala sits at the losing end of this continuum. Pettinà describes how Árbenz survived an earlier CIA-backed plot driven by neighboring Central American dictators thanks to the State Department’s opposition to violating the Good Neighbor Policy under Harry S. Truman, only to fall in 1954 when the new Dwight D. Eisenhower administration took a harder line. Together, these examples show how internal factors interacted with exogenous ones to determine the fate of distinct Latin American projects for reform.
    Cuba’s Breakthrough

    If the coup in Guatemala brought the Cold War home to Latin America, the 1959 Cuban Revolution took it to another level. In power, the nationalist guerrillas allied with Cuba’s Communists, who brought much-needed “experience, qualifications, ability to mobilize, and foreign connections” to the young revolutionary government. An economic and political alliance with the Soviet Union soon followed, as the United States’ initial cautious tolerance gave way to open hostility.

    The Cuban Revolution coincided with a renewal of the Latin American left. The new generation embraced counterculture and heterodox strategies that challenged the Communist Party’s insistence on working within electoral systems with allied nationalist reformers, a critique that was fueled in part by the Sino-Soviet split and confirmed by Cuba’s unorthodox success.

    By then, the USSR was promoting “peaceful coexistence” with the West, trying to win over the newly decolonized peripheral nations by demonstrating the superiority of its economic and social organization through development aid. Cuba, in contrast, took an active role backing armed insurgencies in the continent. Havana became a haven and diplomatic headquarters for Latin America’s revolutionary movements. Pettinà describes Cuban support for armed groups in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia in the 1960s, including the provision of weapons, combat training, and logistical support.

    This aid diminished in the 1970s as Latin America’s guerrilla movements suffered severe setbacks and the island’s economic situation worsened, making it more dependent on Soviet support. Instead, Cuba turned to Africa, winning important victories in Angola. It would resume its active role in the following decade, when renewed revolutionary gains put Central America in the Cold War crosshairs.

    Pettinà also shows how regional elites responded to events in Cuba, mostly with repression. Governments in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina embraced modernization and redistribution programs to counter Cuba’s revolutionary appeal, but the reformist efforts failed to fundamentally restructure these unequal, export-dependent economies, descending instead into counterinsurgent violence.

    This crackdown was bolstered by the United States. Washington’s vision for Latin America took shape under John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which provided technical advisors and aid for countries in the region that instituted market-friendly policies, accompanied by robust military support. US recipes for economic development came to little. The counterinsurgent violence unleashed on the region, however, left a devastating legacy that the region is still reckoning with to this day.
    The Counterrevolution

    Pettinà calls the 1970s the “decade of terror.” Tensions may have eased between the United States and the USSR in this period, but conflict raged across the Third World, with the Yom Kippur War of 1973 between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, Cuban interventions in West Africa, and brutal authoritarian repression in Latin America.

    “Under the aegis of the National Security Doctrine (NSD),” Pettinà writes, “the reaction of state and military institutions in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay turned citizens into enemies and targets of repressive acts, which included torture and forced disappearances” of victims numbering in the tens of thousands.

    A series of military coups, starting with Brazil in 1964, brought the militarist NSD into power across the region. Pettinà traces the NSD’s roots to long-standing Latin American military traditions, the French counterinsurgency strategy deployed against the Algerian national liberation movement, and US counterinsurgency paradigms. The latter spread throughout the region via institutions like the US Army’s School of the Americas, then located in Panama, and the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, as well as the widespread deployment of US trainers and advisors.

    US involvement ranged from relatively minor interference in Mexico to decisive intervention with the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Even there, Pettinà highlights the role of multiple foreign actors. The Soviets declined to provide Allende the degree of support that his government had expected. Instead, Allende developed a close relationship with Fidel Castro, who advised him to defend his constitutional mandate with Cuban-backed armed revolutionary groups. Allende, however, was optimistically — perhaps naively — committed to legality. Accepting Cuba’s offer to support armed resistance, Pettinà writes, “might have saved his life.”

    From the other side, the US spent millions on destabilization before backing the 1973 coup. The radically anti-communist Brazilian military dictatorship also had a part in undermining and defeating Allende, after playing an instrumental role in the 1971 coup in Bolivia and the defeat of progressives in Uruguay.

    The author stresses that repression in this period found support among conservative sectors of the middle class in countries like Mexico and Argentina. Out of both fear and tacit approval, Pettinà argues that “the silence of broad sectors of Latin American societies enabled military juntas across the region to suppress public protests almost unchecked during the 1970s.”

    The author insists that “the NSD and the juntas’ acts of repression in no way represented any external or planned imposition by Washington in the region.” Local fascists had their own momentum, and the military regimes had an “independent streak” that often clashed with the United States. While they received active US support, he argues that “the juntas and their plans to overhaul the country’s politics, economy, and society were genuinely homegrown projects” that were influenced, but not invented by Washington.
    The Central American Finale

    The Cold War–charged backlash would come to a “dramatic climax” in Central America in the 1980s, where US-backed counterrevolutionary violence cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Again, Pettinà cautions against reducing this bloodshed to “a story of binary, proxy confrontation.”

    Pettinà’s account of the Sandinista Revolution is illustrative. US president Jimmy Carter directed the State Department to condition aid to countries like Nicaragua on their respect for human rights, but his resolve in this regard was far from steadfast. Washington’s pressure had little effect on the notorious Somoza dynasty, which continued to run the country like a personal plantation and suppress democratic movements with violence.

    In the face of Somoza’s intransigence and the United States’ “wavering,” Costa Rica, Panama, and Venezuela threw their weight behind the Sandinista insurgency, which had developed a sophisticated diplomatic operation. Argentina, in turn, actively backed Somoza, and Israel supplied weapons to the regime after Carter began to cut off military aid.

    Cuba was decisive, mediating the reunification of three opposing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) factions in March 1979 and providing reinforcements to the newly united guerrillas. Havana would play a similar role in El Salvador, helping to broker the unification of that country’s leftist coalition the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front the following year. Around this time, Mexico joined Nicaragua’s southern neighbors in cutting off diplomatic relations with Somoza. Internationalist fighters from across the continent joined the guerrillas, who overcame the regime in July 1979.

    The Ronald Reagan administration reinvigorated relations with South American dictatorships and made Central America the center of its anti-communist crusade. Reagan’s infamous Contra scheme involved moving aid to anti-Sandinista paramilitaries through a dizzying network of agents and countries that ran from Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Taiwan to Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.

    Mexico also played a key role, materially supporting the Sandinistas and seeking to broker a multilateral diplomatic resolution to the broader Central American crisis. Mexico was key in convening the “Grupo Contadora” with Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela, which sought negotiated solutions for Central America throughout 1980s. Against heavy opposition from Washington, these efforts finally led to Costa Rica’s peace plan, which helped draw down the Contra War at the end of the decade.

    As this history shows, Central America’s national liberation struggles had diplomatic and even military allies across Latin America. So did their opponents. While US intervention is unmistakably responsible for prolonging these conflicts and dramatically inflating their scale, regional actors on both sides had interests in influencing their outcomes and took action to do so.
    Giving the Bad Guys Their Due

    In emphasizing Latin American agency, Pettinà sometimes downplays the extent of US meddling. For example, the author refers to Washington’s “tolerance” for left-wing governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia in the 2000s as evidence for how the Cold War “distorted” US policy in the region. He does not mention the failed US-backed coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002, to say nothing of the subsequent successful ones in Honduras (2009), Bolivia (2019), and the frustrated attempt in Venezuela again in 2020. Readers can certainly add to this list.

    Nevertheless, the point that Latin America has its own homegrown fascism is well taken. As Luis Herrán Ávila writes in the NACLA Report, “Subordinating the Latin American Right to northern designs can result in underestimating these forces’ capacity to articulate, deploy, and implement their own intolerant and authoritarian visions.”

    As the geopolitical landscape takes an increasingly multipolar form, anti-imperialists on the US left should remember that not all forces of reaction are Washington puppets. Recent events in El Salvador, where an authoritarian far-right president has occasionally butted heads with Joe Biden’s administration, are an example of these complexities.

    Analysis of the far right in this context demands a sophisticated critique that takes Latin American societies’ internal contradictions seriously. Imperialism should never be underestimated, but it does not explain everything.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG6EYL5xsfA&pp=ygUacm9zZW4gYXVmIGRlbiB3ZWcgZ2VzdHJldXQ%3D

    Rosen auf den Weg gestreut
    https://www.textlog.de/tucholsky/gedichte-lieder/rosen-auf-den-weg-gestreut

    Ihr müßt sie lieb und nett behandeln,
    erschreckt sie nicht – sie sind so zart!
    Ihr müßt mit Palmen sie umwandeln,
    getreulich ihrer Eigenart!
    Pfeift euerm Hunde, wenn er kläfft –:
    Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft!

    Wenn sie in ihren Sälen hetzen,
    sagt: »Ja und Amen – aber gern!
    Hier habt ihr mich – schlagt mich in Fetzen!«
    Und prügeln sie, so lobt den Herrn.
    Denn Prügeln ist doch ihr Geschäft!
    Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft.

    Und schießen sie –: du lieber Himmel,
    schätzt ihr das Leben so hoch ein?
    Das ist ein Pazifisten-Fimmel!
    Wer möchte nicht gern Opfer sein?
    Nennt sie: die süßen Schnuckerchen,
    gebt ihnen Bonbons und Zuckerchen …
    Und verspürt ihr auch
    in euerm Bauch
    den Hitler-Dolch, tief, bis zum Heft –:
    Küßt die Faschisten, küßt die Faschisten,
    küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft –!

    Theobald Tiger
    Die Weltbühne, 31.03.1931, Nr. 13, S. 452.

    #USA #impérialisme #fascisme #nationalisme #amérique_latine

  • Peter Pan & Wendy Is Another Lifeless Disney Remake
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/peter-pan-wendy-disney-remake-pop-feminism-film-review
    Je n’ai pas su développer un sentiment d’attachement pour les personnages de Peter Pan avant d’atteindre l’age adulte alors que je lisais les histoires de J. M. Barrie pendant ma jeunesse. Pour moi il leur manquais la cruauté et l’esprit humain des contes Grimm comme le degré d’abstraction froide d’Andersen ou la grandeur romantique de Wilhelm Hauff. La machine de transformation d’histoires inventée par les businessmen de nos temps modernes a resolu mon problème de jeunesse en confondant ces récits dans une sauce du type ketchup qui peut accompagner tous les plats culturels.

    Là les entreprises Disney se lancent dans une énième tentative d’incorporer les histoires pour enfants paradigmatiques des époques passées en convertissant Peter Pan et Wendy dans de la barbe à papa-maman-diverse-toutes-couleurs-confendues et trop sucrée. Plus les médias mutinationals avancent dans l’art du storytelling adapté aux besoins de l’impérialisme culturel anglo-saxon moins de contradictions humaines éternelles entre riches et pauvres, enfants et exploiteurs adultes survivent le grand filtre de leurs machines de commercialisation.

    Il est temps de lancer une campagne de retour au sources pour faire face à la castration des contes du royaume de l’magination.

    2.5.2023 By Eileen Jones - These insipid Disney live-action remakes of their own animated films are now a blight on civilization. Especially considering that Walt Disney himself built his empire by taking bloody-minded old European fairy tales and making them blander and more sanitized for a wimpier generation. People used to complain about how defanged they all were — imagine that! Now old Disney animated classics like Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, and Sleeping Beauty seem daring, almost ferocious. Such tragic sorrows! Such scary villains! So much death and evildoing!

    But with the new live-action retreads of recent years, where does that put us on the bland-wimp scale? Off the charts, I’d say.

    I thought the latest one turning up on Disney+, Peter Pan & Wendy, might be better than the usual run — after all, the much-respected auteur David Lowery (The Green Knight, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) cowrote and directed this one. And, with Lowery’s touch, it features perhaps a slightly richer color scheme and prettier images overall.

    But I should’ve known nobody could take on Disney. (Look out, Ron DeSantis!) Building a monstrous capitalist conglomerate doesn’t make you nice and respectful of individual filmmakers. You work for Disney, so you’ll do it the Disney way.

    So Peter Pan & Wendy is a big toothless bore, with gestures toward contemporary mores in the forms of a highly diverse cast plus girls playing Lost Boys. Wendy (Ever Anderson) protests upon meeting them, “But you’re not all boys!” and gets the stroppy answer, “So what?”

    And since this is the 2020s, Wendy herself has to be imbued with action-packed girl power and do sword-fighting and rescue the others instead of waiting to be rescued. Tiger Lily (Alyssa Wapanatahk, a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation) is now treated with what is presumably greater respect as a vaguely Native American character who appears to be a member of some unnamed American Plains tribe, which makes no sense — there’s no dodging the way Scottish-born writer J. M. Barrie treated “Indians” as fantasy figures for British children on a continuum with pirates and mermaids and fairies. Why not cut out Barrie’s Tiger Lily and her tribe altogether, but keep the mermaids, instead of the other way around in this mermaid-free adaptation? Who knows?
    Yara Shahidi as Tinkerbell. (Disney+)

    Anyway, Tiger Lilly also has to be portrayed as assertive and independent, rescuing Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) instead of the other way around. As for the other major female characters of the triumvirate surrounding Peter, Tinkerbell is played by a black actor (Yara Shahidi of Black-ish and Grown-ish), but more importantly, she’s entirely reconceived as a character. The miniature minx of the Barrie original as well as Disney’s first adaptation, who adores Peter and hates Wendy for usurping Peter’s attentions — even doing her best to murder Wendy as soon as she arrives — is now a sweet, helpful, pathetic little simp who befriends Wendy. Why? Because Wendy realizes that Tinkerbell has been denied her voice. Her voice is so tiny no one can hear it, actually. But Peter asserts that he knows what she’s saying and speaks for her, inaccurately. Only Wendy learns to hear Tinkerbell speak.

    Okay, so can we now drop forevermore the whole exhausted she’s-been-denied-her-voice narrative trope in films seeking feminist cred?

    It would be nice, too, if this were the last ever attempt to revive old material by doing Psych 101 backstories explaining how well-known characters got to be the way they are. Peter Pan and Captain Hook (Jude Law) are given the most lugubrious intertwined histories possible, because how could we possibly understand why they fight all the time, if we don’t know about their past traumas?

    Easy. By imagining vivid characters in all their details and contradictions, and not coming up with pat, reductive explanations for everything they do.

    Law, the only name actor in the cast, is talented but too contained to play the flamboyant, slashing Captain Hook, who’s also comically self-pitying, needy, and reliant on his motherly first mate, Smee (Jim Gaffigan). If you recall, Smee’s first duty is to protect the terrified Captain from the endless pursuit of the enormous crocodile that hungers for the Captain after eating Hook’s hand (cut off by Peter Pan in one of their many fights). Luckily the crocodile also swallowed an alarm clock, and the ticking sound always announces his approach. Lowery does almost nothing with that lovely plot detail.

    But you know how these kinds of movies go. Endless lesson learning, like the worst of Victorian kids’ literature. Peter has to learn he needs his friends to help him and to apologize when he’s hurt someone. Wendy has to learn that she’s actually ready to grow up and go to boarding school or whatever horrible thing her upper-class Brit parents (played by Molly Parker and Alan Tudyk) have in store for her. Hook has to learn why he hates Peter Pan, even if he can’t ever get past it. Everybody’s learning and affirming and casting loving looks at everyone else all over the Neverland map.

    It’s dreary as hell.

    Too bad, because there were real possibilities in imagining a new Peter Pan film. In the versions I’ve seen, nobody’s ever really gone for the weirder, creepier, colder-hearted Pan envisioned by Barrie. Here’s a description from his 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, which was based on his hit 1904 play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up:

    He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grownup, he gnashed the little pearls at her.

    The famed “androgyny” of the character we know, from the tradition of having slight, diminutive adult female actors such as Maude Adams, Jean Arthur, and Mary Martin play Peter Pan on the stage. But the feral qualities Barrie described, in combination with the physical beauty — the pearly-teeth snarl — never seem to get portrayed. Generally, since the squeaky-clean Disney animated Peter Pan (1953), live-action versions feature an ordinary boy, perhaps with slightly elfin facial features, stuck into a green tunic and green hat with a scarlet feather. The same thing happens in Peter Pan & Wendy.

    In these adaptations, Peter is shown to be, at worst, a bit of a jerk. But his real strangeness, the result of his perpetual childhood, living outside of time, is his amnesia and his cold selfishness. Once Wendy leaves Neverland, he forgets her, and of course he repudiates her entirely once she’s a grown-up. When he returns to her house, it’s to take her daughter Jane to Neverland to live with him and the Lost Boys as their temporary “mother.” And then a generation later, he comes to take Jane’s daughter Margaret.

    But then, Barrie’s whole attitude toward children was not like ours, and obviously his attitudes toward gender roles are bizarre as hell to us. He wrote, in the final line of the original Peter and Wendy novel describing this cycle:

    When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

    Heartless is a word that really stops you, as one that’s never applied to children now. But portraying it in Peter Pan’s case, as part of the essence of childhood, would at least have made for a bold and interesting change. Instead, we get another pointless remake so Disney can grub up a few more bucks repurposing its vast holdings.

    #enfants #culture #contes #impérialisme #commercialisation

  • How Pete Seeger Turned Green
    https://jacobin.com/2023/05/pete-seeger-environmentalism-hudson-river-sailing-activism

    J’ai perdu mon unique héro de jeunesse encore vivant quand Pete Seeger a chanté pendant la cérémonie d’inauguration du serial killer Barack Obama. J’étais écoeuré par le fait qu’une personne sincère, humaine et intelligente puisse seulement se rendre à un événement en honneur d’un futur chef des bandes armées que les impérialistes américains envoient piller le monde et détruire l’avenir des peuples.

    J’avais tort. J’aurais du me rappeller de ma première jeunesse quand je passais des soirées avec les GIs autour d’un feu de camp en chantant This Land Is Your Land et Take Me Home Country Roads . Le peuple des États Unis est tout compte fait naïf et enfantin y compris ses grandses figures culturelles de gauche.

    Cet article sur l’engagement de Pete Seeger pour la rivière Hudson me reconcilie un peu avec le pragmatisme de sa méthode.

    3.5.2023 by Jodie Childers - Styled “America’s tuning fork” by Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger (1919–2014) was known for his anthems of protest and his support for the labor struggle, civil rights, and the antiwar movement; yet arguably, his most innovative contribution to the American left was his environmental activism. Although this work spanned fifty years of his life, it has received the least amount of acknowledgment and recognition. Seeger’s environmental pivot emerged from a space of revolt in the aftermath of political persecution during the Second Red Scare. Denounced as “un-American” and pushed outside of mainstream media outlets during the 1950s and ’60s, he was forced to rethink how to enact social change from the political margins. Out of this experience of political suppression, Seeger launched a new kind of movement.

    Seeger’s decision to plead the First when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955 altered the trajectory of his life and career. While other unfriendly witnesses opted for the Fifth after the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt in 1947, Seeger took a bold, principled approach — one advocated by Albert Einstein. Predictably, Seeger was also charged with contempt. After a seven-year battle over his case, which resulted in the dismissal of his charges, he remained barred from television and faced demonstrators at his concerts who branded him a subversive. Some venues simply barred him from performing. Even WQED, the public television station in Pittsburgh known for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, canceled Seeger’s gratis folk performance on a program for children called Dimple Depot because of the singer’s “Commie ties.”

    During this political and personal struggle, Seeger took up sailing only to encounter industrial toxins and “toilet waste” on the Hudson River. For Seeger, the pollution evoked John Kenneth Galbraith’s notion of “private affluence amid public squalor.” Two books also prompted an environmental revolution in his thinking. The first and most obvious one was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The second, however, was a more idiosyncratic choice. In 1963, Vic Schwarz, fellow musician, artist, and history buff, loaned Seeger a copy of the book The Sloops of the Hudson, which featured images of the elegant single-masted wooden ships of a bygone era. This prompted an extraordinary, even preposterous idea: Could they resurrect one of these extinct vessels as an emblem for the nascent environmental struggle? By building a community boat for the people, Seeger hoped to reclaim the neglected river and the act of sailing itself, which had become a hobby for the rich, despite its ties to working-class labor history.

    In the years that followed, Seeger attempted to raise money for the Great Hudson Sloop Restoration project through grassroots benefit concerts. Musically, this green evolution corresponded with his album God Bless the Grass, which he released in 1966. Contending with resistance from some who ridiculed his idealism and even more who perceived him as a threat to national security, Seeger performed old folk standards alongside new songs about an earth in crisis, such as “My Dirty Stream.” He also told stories about the polluted Hudson and outlined the plans for the construction of the boat. Despite the benign character of this set list, he was stymied at every level. Three hundred protesters picketed his concert in Westbury, New York, in March of 1967 — a performance that had been called off the previous year and only rescheduled after a legal battle, which determined the cancellation unconstitutional. Later that month in Granville, New York, the American Legion organized a demonstration, but when Seeger arrived, they changed their course and instead opted to monitor the standing-room-only show from the back of the auditorium.

    When Seeger finally returned to television on a variety show hosted by the Smothers Brothers in September of 1967, CBS censored his performance of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” In some towns, the rumors alone were enough to prompt nervous organizers to postpone or cancel Seeger’s benefits. In January of 1969, the Nyack Board of Education voted to bar him from performing at the high school auditorium because, as one concerned member explained, “I did some research on this man. I found he did some work for the Communist Party. He was affiliated with the Daily Worker.”

    Raising the money was not the only obstacle to the project. No Hudson River sloop survived the nineteenth century extant, so finding a marine architect willing to design an obsolete vessel also presented a challenge. Nevertheless, with his expertise, eye for detail, and artistic sensibility, Cyrus Hamlin took on the task using two sources: a plan from a maritime magazine and a detailed painting. Local legend Harvey Gamage of Maine directed the labor and construction of the vessel, optimistically christened the Clearwater. After they laid the keel in October of 1968, the donations increased. Seven months later, on May 17, 1969, in South Bristol, Maine, the 106-foot wooden sloop, as Hamlin recalled, “slid into the water” for its maiden voyage.

    “We had a wonderful singing crew,” Seeger reminisced upon the group he rallied together for the journey. This cross-section of sailors and musicians included countercultural Captain Allan Aunapu; civil rights activists Len Chandler, Jimmy Collier, and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick; first mate Gordon Bok; sea shanty performer Lou Killen; and a young Don MacLean. While American news outlets covered the quest to clean up the river, reports did not highlight how the ecological mission extended beyond water pollution to encompass civil rights and antiwar resistance. When the sloop arrived in New York, Chandler performed his powerful protest song “Turn Around, Miss Liberty” in front of the Statue of Liberty. In a 1969 CBC interview on the deck of the Clearwater, Seeger belted out the chorus from “Bring Them Home” and then lamented the censorship in the American media landscape: “I don’t know what a song can do. But there must be something in a song or they wouldn’t try to blacklist them off TV.”

    Singing and sailing along a river that Aunapu described as smelling “like diesel fuel,” the Sloop Singers stopped in the towns along the banks of the Hudson to perform concerts at every port. Collier remembered their daily life on the boat:

    The hole where we slept was tiny. We were feet to head, feet to head. . . . What you got from that was being a sailor was not a fun lifestyle . . . and there was no beer down there.

    Seeger recalled the resistance they faced: “They said these hippies will have this thing sunk or sold within a year.” Yet despite the difficulties of the labor for this group of musicians, who were not all used to sailing, the dedication to the cause kept them going. “We were fulfilling a mission, and whether it was popular or not or people embraced it, we didn’t care,” Collier recollected.

    Despite the opposition, the movement grew, albeit slowly. Five hundred welcomed the arrival of the boat in Croton-on-Hudson in July; an older man came to the river and offered Seeger a mango, which he shared with the crowd. Locals jumped on board and learned how to raise the sail. Seeger made progress in Nyack too; when he returned in August of 1969, the town that had banned him now welcomed him for a concert at Memorial Park.

    However, he faced controversy close to home in Kingston that September. One of his staunchest antagonists was Democrat and local politician John P. Heitzman, who would later become mayor of the city. This was not the first time Seeger faced resistance in the Hudson Valley. The 1949 Peekskill Riots, a racist anti-communist mob attack on Paul Robeson, Seeger, and other performers left a lifelong impression on Seeger, whose car was belted with stones, shattering the windows. Twenty years later, in an editorial in the Kingston Daily Freeman, an anonymous detractor demanded to know, “Is Pete Seeger interested in cleaning up the Hudson, or is he a modern Pied Piper using this cause as a front to spread an ideology that is contrary to our American way?”

    Seeger explained how he sustained the momentum in the face of such resistance:

    The wind may be blowing against you, but if you use your sails right you can sail into the wind, into the wind, into the wind and you make slow progress using the very power of the wind that is against you. This is a great analogy in life. If you can use the forces against you to push ahead, you’re winning.

    With its distinctive aesthetic and its singing sailors, the Clearwater became a symbol of the colossal battle against corporate greed, linking the fight for the Hudson with a national environmental movement on the rise. In 1970, the Clearwater sailed to Washington, DC, for the first Earth Day, and Seeger performed before Congress. In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed, despite Richard Nixon’s veto.

    Over the years, the boat became the center of an environmental awakening that fomented campaigns and creative projects along the river, linking the local and the global. In 1978, Toshi Seeger expanded the concept of the riverside concert and created a two-day event called the Great Hudson River Revival (also known as the Clearwater Festival). The decades that followed are filled with stories of people whose lives were changed by what became a political and artistic movement, from Dan Searles, a resident of Beacon who helped transform the dump at the Beacon rail station into what is now known as the Pete and Toshi Seeger Riverside Park, to countless crew members on the Clearwater like Andra Sramek, who gave their time and energy to steer the course of the ship over the years.

    Seeger’s goal was to prompt the formation of small sloop clubs in towns along the river, all with their own boats, managed by volunteers whose activism would be driven by local concerns. He had always dreamed the Clearwater would be surrounded by dozens of these sloops, and while several popped up in the early 1970s and ’80s, including the Woody Guthrie and the Sojourner Truth, the plan did not pan out as Seeger had anticipated. The Clearwater still sails and is now a nonprofit and a historical landmark with a pedagogical and social justice mission. The local Beacon Sloop Club maintains the sloop Woody Guthrie and its grassroots character, offering free sails five nights a week and sponsoring festivals throughout the year staffed entirely by volunteers. Until the end of their lives, both Toshi and Pete could be found down at the waterfront on the first Friday of every month at the Beacon Sloop Club’s Circle of Song.

    The questions that Pete Seeger began to pose in the 1960s and the radical solutions he devised throughout the last fifty years of his life are particularly relevant to the present moment. Although Seeger maintained a defiant posture of resistance his entire life, he simultaneously channeled this creative energy of dissent into world-building as he and Toshi Seeger crafted and sustained a participatory, collectivist, and future-oriented eco-movement, devising imaginative arts-based environmental projects that carried forward the utopian spirit of the ’60s into the twenty-first century.

    As a new ecological crisis looms, the earnestness of Seeger’s response to the destruction of the natural environment is instructive. His unflinching belief that collective human action is capable of transforming the world offers an antidote to contemporary political nihilism, and a fusion of the joy of artistic expression and political participation. As we confront industrial crises in America’s waterways once again, perhaps now is the time to consider building upon Seeger’s unrealized dream, reclaiming the rivers in our country, from the Potomac to the Ohio, the Mississippi to the Cuyahoga. As Seeger proclaimed in 1969, “If there’s hope for the human race, there’s hope for the Hudson.”

    A propos de John Denver
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Land_Is_Your_Land
    https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Land_Is_Your_Land

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Me_Home,_Country_Roads

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Pie_(song)

    #USA #gauche #écologisme #socialisme #musique