Commentary: Capitol Rioters and the White Working Class

| Robert Glassman |

I think the evidence would show that the overwhelming base of support for the violent clown car attempted coup at the Capitol was not white working class, but the expected fascist base of petit bourgeois and lumpen elements.

Almost every article I’ve read about those arrested bears this out. Their social class origins may have been working class, but their current relationship to the modes of production are either self employed, small business owners, or grifters with various unsuccessful schemes in place.

The “Joe six-packs” who I worked with for more than forty years are unlikely to have been there. They are mostly too busy working overtime to pay for their travel trailers and summer cottages. Many of them may well have voted for T**** this time around, and some even voted twice for Obama and supported Bernie in the primary. They are just woefully mislead and blinded by racism and xenophobia. How to get through to them continues to baffle me.

What The Left Can Learn From the Story of the CWP

| Harrison Neuhaus |

Racist violence with minimal intervention from a sympathetic police force is a recurring theme throughout American history. The Left has long recognized affinity between the state and white supremacy as a key obstacle to social liberation. But as today’s Left grapples with a rising far-right and historic crises of legitimacy and reproduction, it’s especially critical that we learn from the lessons of our antecedents. Particularly in this moment of growing multiracial movements and a renewed labor militancy, and as we see echoes of this dark history in events like the now-infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right Rally and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, it is especially important to re-evaluate the legacy of the often overlooked Communist Workers Party (CWP). 

In 1979, the CWP organized an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, NC, which was ambushed by white supremacists and neo-Nazis under the watch of a sympathetic police. Ku Klux Klan members and members of the American Nazi Party drove up to the peaceful picket, promptly unloaded several rifles from their cars, and massacred 5 demonstrators. The attack was led by an FBI/police informant, as well as an undercover ATF agent, yet police presence was minimal and attending officers did not intervene. The attackers escaped easily. 

This pattern has gone largely unchanged in the intervening years. Police have been caught coordinating with Proud Boys, posing with the Capitol Hill rioters, parroting far-right lies and turning a blind eye to their preparations for violence — all while forcefully dispersing even the most moderate protests by the left against police brutality. So it comes as no surprise that far-right organizations have long focused on infiltrating law enforcement roles, and that police are three times more likely to use violence against left-wing protestors, despite the consensus that far-right violence poses by far the greatest threat to the public. 

Yet what is especially critical about the CWP story is not the massacre itself, but rather what preceded it — and what made it such a target in the first place. The CWP had established a strong presence for several years in Greensboro, focusing on organizing predominantly Black textile workers throughout the area. Greensboro had long been a major textile producer, home to major national mills like the Cone Mills White Oak plant. Immersing themselves in the union, the CWP quickly developed a strong multiracial cadre that was successfully pushing strong organization and militancy among the workers. 

In many ways, their approach prefigured the way today’s nascent Left is developing: from the intersectional focus on multiracial solidarity to the emphasis on developing existing working class institutions. And this is precisely what made them a threat to local power structures. What ultimately unfolded was a converging of interests between the state, the local mill owners, and white supremacist institutions that have long used terror to maintain a system of racial capitalism — these forces could not avoid responding in some way to the diverse working class strength that the CWP was building among a particularly strategic set of workers who could bring the backbone of the local economy to a standstill. 

What today’s Left must recognize is that this model of multiracial rank-and-file organizing works, that it represents a genuine possibility for social liberation, and that therefore it will inevitably come into conflict with the state or its right-wing proxies. And as surveillance regimes only expand and become more sophisticated, it is especially critical that we remain vigilant about our security as we organize. Fortunately, many are taking these imperatives seriously. Some are even going further, which is why we are seeing the growth of organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association, which aim to coordinate community self-defense efforts. 

Ultimately, if the CWP’s history teaches us anything, it is that we must remain committed to organizing multiracial coalitions, informed by our diversity, while centering a common program that speaks directly to shared needs. The severity of the efforts to prevent this kind of organizing are evidence of its efficacy. But we must remember that this makes us the target of a number of powerful and loosely-aligned antagonists. Any meaningful challenge to hegemony will generate a response. If the Left is going to build lasting change, we need to be prepared for these obstacles. 

Inequality: Why Are The Rich Getting Richer?

| Steve Clark |

This short video from Positive Money (a British financial reform group) explains how government borrowing and interest payments to banks syphon money from the public to build bank profit. The system works the same in the US, but there is a better way: direct government spending.

Job Guarantee: Economic Justice Cornerstone?

| Steve Clark |

The notion of a Job Guarantee is on a lot of lips these days, led by modern monetary theory (MMT) proponent Pavlina Tcherneva, whose short book (128 pages!), The Case for a Job Guarantee, has captured widespread acclaim. In my opinion, it’s must-reading for anyone trying to define a truly transformative agenda for the period ahead. MMT proponents consistently back this demand, and it’s also a demand of the Poor People’s Campaign. And its roots go back much further.

When he ran for president in 1932, FDR saw the need of a federal job guarantee and called it a human right. Yet, he and the Democrats failed to push it through. When the postwar boom ended in the early 1960s, unemployment returned with a vengeance, creating an ever-larger echelon of precarious workers with depressed incomes alongside a stagnant stratum unable to find any job at all (and dependent on inconsistent and inadequate government support). 

In retrospect, the failure to include a federal job guarantee in the New Deal social contract stands out as a crucial revolutionary failure of the 1930s popular uprising against the Great Depression’s version of US corporate capitalism.

This time around, we have to do better. With ecological catastrophe a mere decade away, American society cannot save itself — nor make the necessary contributions to saving the world (that our country has long dominated) — unless it provides the economic security of alternative, life-sustaining, transition employment to every worker who sacrifices a petroleum-based job in order to save our planet. A job guarantee is no longer merely a human right — a mere matter of justice — it has become an ecological and social necessity…and one with no time for delay. 

Coming out of the economic devastation of COVID, our newly-cleansed economy must rebuild along steeply modified lines; it will be a wasted opportunity if we fail to keep polluting industries in lock-down. To this end, the Biden Department of Labor should implement a permanent, federal Job Guarantee and provide block grants to state, local, tribal and territorial governments to fund — at $15/hour plus vacation, healthcare and child care — as many full-time jobs as necessary for anyone forced or willing to leave ecologically destructive employment (or finds oneself unemployed for any reason). At the same time, Biden should establish a Green New Deal industrial policy to create an array of employment opportunities in sustained, public and private investments aimed at achieving zero carbon emissions (and other ecological necessities) by 2025.

Below are some additional links to articles and videos on the subject.

There’s a Simple Solution to the Unemployment Crisis: Offer Everyone a Job

JG FAQ, In These Times, Rachel M Cohen, (10 Jun 2020)

Australians deserve a job guarantee, Noel Pearson (28 Sep 2020)
Residents of small Austrian town promised work for 3 years in world’s first universal jobs guarantee (2 Dec 2020)

Tcherneva Philly DSA (2 Jul 2020) [1:31:10]

Tcherneva at NY Society for Ethical Culture (18 Oct 2020) [38:04]

Tcherneva acTVism Munich (18 Jun 2020) [22:00]

Tcherneva New Economic Thinking (11 Jul 2018) [15:15]
Tcherneva JG in Argentina Michabo Sustainable, Harmony, (8 Aug 2020) [4:00]

Biden’s First 100 Days

| Steve Clark |

“At the end of February (1932) we were a congeries of disorderly panic-stricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.“

Walter Lippman.

For understandable reasons, many of us could barely look past the November election, given that our nation’s democratic future seemed to ride up on it. But, we did our job well — with Georgia still to decide how well — and our anti-fascist, progressive movement will find itself in a dual power situation with neoliberalism when the new Congress and Biden Administration are installed in January.

We have to be ready for that, too. We want to hit the ground running and know which way we want to go.

First 100 Days

When FDR took office in 1933 — three years into the depths of the Great Depression — he wasted no time. Immediately, he ordered a bank “holiday” (shut-down); then, in the next 100 days, he collaborated with the new Congress to enact sweeping, structural reform of America’s languishing, Gilded Age class relations, starting with the banks and empowering working people at every turn.

Every four years since the New Deal’s launch, pundits speculate about what each President’s first 100 days will mean, but it’s been a very, very long time since a President’s first days carried the import of FDR’s. This year — in the midst of a crisis at least as grave as the Great Depression — the first 100 days will matter.

Or, they won’t. Although Joe Biden is positioned just about like FDR was in 1933, it’s fair to doubt whether he has the vision, personal energy or political capital to make his first 100 days count. It’s also important to note that, despite the New Deal’s many important advances, it did not reverse finance capital’s domination of America’s economy and its government.

Thus, as everyone on the left has noted, it is crucial that our movement provide both direction and backbone for whatever can and will be mustered in Biden’s first days and through his first term.

Come January, the real struggle for social justice, economic power and ecological regeneration begins in our country. It will be a fight over executive orders, regulatory action, new agencies, legislation, civic commissions and constitutional amendments, all propelled by the nationwide, grassroots urgency that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

And, because the US is the world’s military hegemon and our dollar is civilization’s global reserve currency, come January, the real struggle for democratic control of the world’s financial system also kicks in.

We’ve come to the brink. As currently constituted, the corporate system is the antithesis of social, economic and ecological justice. If the present social uprising is going to be a real revolution, finance capital must be checked, remanded, taxed, and institutionally constrained.

Here in rough-draft is a revolutionary plan of attack for Biden’s first 100 days. A combination of immediate actions and starting points, it targets financial (class) justice as well as wider struggles for racial, social and environmental justice. I thank my friends who’ve contributed so far, and I look forward to incorporating additions and feedback from readers in a second draft (some aligned co-advocates are noted or linked in parentheses).

First 100 Days Agenda

For Presidential Edict and/or Congressional Action

1. Temporary Emergency Aid for Pandemic Relief
   1. Extend unemployment benefits, augmented with $600/week supplemental benefits, to eligible Americans; establish immediate, federal income support payments for all others, including gig economy workers
   2. Open immediate registration for those eligible for Obamacare and Medicare; for all others, guarantee coverage for all testing, treatment and sick leave for Covid-related illness; extend Family Medical Leave Act benefits
   3. Direct federal payments, as necessary, to redeem all pandemic-provoked, revenue shortfalls of state, municipal and tribal governments
   4. Establish federal Pandemic Service Thank You! Stipends for essential healthcare workers, food production/service workers and teachers
   5. Enforce a moratorium on housing evictions and mortgage defaults imposed by corporate owners
   6. Enforce a moratorium on student, consumer and personal debt payments (principal and interest) to corporate lenders
2. Social Justice
   1. Defund police and end the war on black people
      1. Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (HR 7120)
      2. End the 1033 Program and other federal transfers of military equipment to local police departments
      3. Direct the Department of Justice to establish and administer a program of national block grant funding for state-coordinated, municipally-administered, community-based, alternatives-to-police, social programs
      4. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
   2. Defund US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); support the human right of political asylum; cease deportation of status (non-criminal) offenders; correct US policy that fosters emigration from Latin America; restore Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); provide a path to citizenship for immigrant residents
   3. Expand grants to public colleges and universities to enable free tuition and expand research to advance social and ecological problem-solving
   4. Extend statehood to the District of Columbia and the option of statehood or independence to Puerto Rico
   5. Advance a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the Electoral College
   6. Advance a Constitutional Amendment to establish an annual federal Election Holiday, specifically for voting and civic affairs
   7. Drop the filibuster and return to majority rule in the Senate
   8. Ban sale of US-made, military-grade weapons to private citizens and non-government organizations; enact “common sense” gun control
   9. Appoint a blue-ribbon Civic, Culture and Sports Commission to promote diversity appreciation, tolerance and equal rights under law:
      1. Legacy education, community-based truth & reconciliation programs; reparations for African-American slavery and Native People expropriation
      2. A welcome hand to the world’s destitute and downtrodden
      3. Respect for each individual’s unique gender and sexual identity
      4. A reappraisal of American Exceptionalism as the US joins the community of nations confronting global climate crisis
3. Economic Power
   1. Declare a “market holiday” to suspend stock market operations and install protections for the American retirement system
      1. Suspend Federal Reserve infusions to US corporations that sustain the stock market bubble
      2. Convene a Market Bubble Deflation Task Force of bank, market, Fed, Treasury and monetary policy experts to de-escalate the bubble and protect American retirement accounts (pension funds, IRAs, etc.)
   2. Reinstate Glass-Steagall; forge a nationwide, community-based banking system for people and non-profits as well as small and family-owned businesses
   3. Advance a Constitutional Amendment to establish a Job Guarantee as the right of all American citizens
   4. Direct the Secretary of Labor to restructure the Department of Labor (DOL) to make achieving and maintaining genuine full employment its core mission
      1. Administer federal grants to states to permanently convert unemployment offices to Employment Offices
      2. Administer funding to guarantee on-demand, dignified, public service jobs (life-sustaining wages plus benefits) to every adult in every community
      3. Collaborate with state, municipal and tribal governments to source and fund jobs with community-based, non-profit, service organizations (NGOs)
   5. Raise the minimum wage to $15/hour; set and periodically update national labor standards to ensure life-sustaining wages, childcare and vacation benefits for all workers
   6. Ensure healthcare for all US residents
      1. Direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to refortify and reorient the US Public Health Service to ensure effective access to care in all American communities, including the capacity to test and trace during pandemics and the provision of full health services for women and transpersons; establish a national stockpile of vital health equipment and supplies
      2. Enact Medicare for All
      3. Empower the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to establish behavioral guidelines and standards during national health crises
   7. Advance a Constitutional Amendment to bar corporations from funding, advertising, fundraising, and otherwise participating in US elections
4. Ecological Regeneration
   1. Proclaim a global, climate change emergency
   2. Appoint a Green New Deal Joint Task Force to include the Vice President; the secretaries of Labor, Treasury, State and the EPA; Congressional leaders (Sanders/AOC); an NGO advisory council; and public citizens to:
      1. Design and implement a federal program to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025
      2. Design and administer state and local GND programs via NGO-public partnerships at various levels
   3. Design industrial policy and implement state and local, public-private partnerships to expand jobs while revitalizing infrastructure, recycling & waste management, electrification, transportation, communication, and civic participation (voting) systems nationwide
   4. Make the Federal Emergency Management Agency a cabinet level department and augment it with an Emergency Service Corps to provide permanent, entry-level and career employment in disaster response, crisis management, emergency relief, containment and mitigation, and community re-construction services
5. Financial Reconstruction
   1. Enact federal legislation to permanently cancel existing consumer, student, tenant and personal debt to corporations
   2. Enact a permanent federal bank tax on all corporate electronic funds transfers (EFTs) to hold the corporate sector to account for the social and ecological crises government now must mitigate
   3. Target socially and ecologically retrograde corporations (i.e., oil, guns) with higher EFT tax rates
   4. End debt ceiling resolutions and the practice of issuing US Treasury bonds to the Federal Reserve in the amount of any federal deficit
   5. Enact a permanent federal franchise fee on credit extended by corporate lenders to private sector borrowers
6. Global Solidarity and Multilateralism
   1. Revoke restrictions on US family-planning assistance under the Mexico City Accords
   2. Rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization
   3. Support creation of a Global Citizens Assembly to design and implement a Global Green New Deal and Job Guarantee (GGND&JG)
      1. Build an alliance of nation-states for the GGND&JG at the United Nations
      2. Deploy US power at International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank of International Settlements (BIS) to mobilize central banks to implement a GGND&JG for people and nations, everywhere
      3. Create a GGND&JG special drawing right (SDR) currency and a SDR-denominated bank tax (on corporate EFTs) to establish a GGND&JG world market
   4. Cancel foreign-denominated debts of nation-states, worldwide, to the World Bank and other corporate lenders
   5. Expand World Health Organization programs to ensure access to healthcare for everyone, worldwide
   6. Direct the Secretary of the Treasury to discontinue all US-imposed financial sanctions programs including those against Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Nicaragua, Iraq, North Korea, Yemen, Libya and Hong Kong
   7. Direct the Secretary of Defense to reduce department spending by 10 percent per year for the first term
   8. Direct the Secretary of State to increase department spending by 10 percent per year for the first term
   9. Restrict international trade of US-made, military-grade weapons and systems
   10. Support multilateral programs of civic administration, special reparations, conflict resolution, and truth & reconciliation for regions of enduring culturally- and religiously-rooted conflict (such as Jerusalem)

Commentary: Owners to Owners

| Albert Lee |

Commentary: “How NYC is attacking the racial wealth gap” – J. Philip Thompson, Daily News, December 3, 2020

NYC’s Owner to Owners initiative to support business owners with employee ownership solutions is bold, timely, and strategic.

It’s bold because the program will conduct outreach to 20,000 businesses in the coming months.

It’s timely because small business owners in their 60s and 70s may be ready to retire. The pandemic and lockdowns have heightened risks and made succession plans more urgent than ever.

It’s strategic because it’ll contribute to democratizing the economy, sustaining community engagement and empowerment, and stemming wealth and racial inequality. 

Still, large-scale Federal dollars in the form of grants, forgivable loans, and tax incentives will be needed because small businesses, especially in BIPOC communities, are getting crushed under the weight of a pandemic-triggered recession and the unbridled power of the biggest corporations.

Helping business owners at this historic moment to sell to their employees can be a win-win-win, starting with the business owner, the employees, and the community. The benefits can extend broadly in space and time. And they must.

An Introduction to LeftRoots

| Carl Redwood |

LeftRoots is preparing cadre as liberatory strategists for the next phases of our struggle to build 21^st  Century socialism.

In These Times describes LeftRoots as

a five-year-old social­ist group that offers a hub for on-the-ground orga­niz­ers around the coun­try to strate­gize togeth­er. Left­Roots’ mem­ber­ship includes ​“super-majori­ties both of peo­ple of col­or, and of women and oth­er gen­der-oppressed peo­ple.” Co-founder NTanya Lee says this isn’t ​“just a racial cri­tique that the con­tem­po­rary U.S. Left is too white” (though ​“that is a fact,” she adds). Instead, it’s vital, she says, that any move­ment to trans­form the world be ​“root­ed in the strug­gles of work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties of col­or who are the ones who have the most at stake in defeat­ing the sys­tem and win­ning the lib­er­a­tion that we real­ly want.

On the White Working Class

| James Bernard |

I think that there is a profound lack of compassion for poor and working class white people in this country.  I believe that there is white privilege and that the original sin of this country was slavery, something that is baked into our collective DNA.  I believe that the key to personal salvation is to admit and address our sins.  I think the idea might apply here.  Refusal to deal with our original sin is why I see why Black people have an adverse reaction to the very sight of white skin.  (If you accuse me of being disingenuous for avoiding the first person plural here, I would have no defense.)

I don’t get why the white elite, liberal or conservative, would have such a lack of compassion in the aggregate.  That’s kind of unforgivable because race does not separate the elite from those in need who are poor, struggling, and white.

However, as I joke with my friend Patricia, a former Bleecker Street singer who has fallen on hard times due to physical disability and near-homelessness, her white skin didn’t really deliver for her.  I don’t believe it has delivered for 95% of white people in this country.  But still, as a whole I believe that white people who do not have their fair share of this country’s bounty are sold a bill of goods that their whiteness is valuable, and they cling to it because they have little else but a soothing vague sense of superiority.  

And I get why.

When you live under a form of capitalist culture — capitalism is not bad in theory, but the practice here has not given us the results the vast majority of us should experience — that tells you that there is something wrong with you, a major failing, if you can’t afford luxury — much less keep a job or feed your family — it is a moral failing on your part, anything that makes you feel good about what you inherently are is going to be very attractive, even if it is, in my view, flawed, to say the least.

Most people, rich, poor, Black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, are human.  I guess that’s a circular statement.  What comes from being human is a tendency not to understand why we do things and a lack of desire to figure it out.  So I personally forgive.  

In the extreme, however, the need for this feeling produces the Proud Boys.  I would hope that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies will see groups like the Proud Boys as the kind of threat that the Black Panthers and the like were not really threats (the Black Panthers did not carry loaded weapons and if they had, they didn’t use them to kill, injure or menace anyone).  Personally, I believe that white supremacist groups are a threat to our country, they are treasonous, and they should be dealt with as such.  

Unlike many on my side of the table, I do not believe the Electoral College is automatically evil.  If we went to a straight popular vote system and Democrats could win every election on the coasts and major urban areas, they would not be forced to campaign in every state or think about the country as a whole, even if only for expediency.  That would not be good for the country.  However, I feel strongly that the Senate is unfair and undemocratic in nature, but the Senate is not the point of my little exercise here.  Maybe the Electoral College could use some reform.  I haven’t thought that through, and the Electoral College is not the point of this little exercise.

Both parties need to get serious about jobs for working class people, especially in the middle of the country.  We should have opportunities for people to earn a living that will provide enough for working class families to thrive, not just survive.  I believe that the Republican Establishment is fine with people hoarding wealth.  I think that the Democratic Establishment is too.  Both parties focus on job growth in the aggregate, rather than quality of jobs and where the jobs are being created.

I have a serious rock and roll fantasy and often imagine myself on stage when I listen to music.  I have a serious large scale social change fantasy.  In it, I spend a lot of time traveling to places decimated by trade policies, diminished unions, and just plain neglect from the powers that be. In it, I am able to explain to people that there is a plan for job growth and simply not job growth in the aggregate.  I want to be able to look individual heads of families in the eye and tell them, in effect, “I understand that your livelihood is being taken away from you due to larger forces that you cannot control.  It is not your fault.  But here is another job in a more needed industry.  If you will lose your job on Friday, here is where you will go on Monday for a job that will fill you with joy for what you are able to do for your families and for which you will be trained.  You will not miss a paycheck.”

When I allow myself my little fantasies of being onstage playing loud and offensive music that makes ears bleed, I am not the perfect performer.  However, I believe that this message is a perfect message among many perfect messages that can be conceived, codified, and made real.  Of course, the execution is the key issue, but I think we need to be on the same page first about concrete goals.