D2. Socialism

Un acuerdo para hacer frente al “territorio desconocido”

Por Pablo Solón

El informe de la Organización Meteorológica Mundial (OMM) sobre El Estado del Clima 2023 señala que el año pasado “fue el año más cálido en el registro observacional de 174 años”. Dicho texto sostiene que apenas faltaron unas pocas centésimas para superar el incremento de la temperatura del planeta en un 1,5°C. Los datos que aporta el informe de la OMM sobre el calentamiento de los océanos, el derretimiento de los glaciares y el aumento del nivel del mar anuncian que se está produciendo un salto cualitativo en la crisis climática. Las Naciones Unidas, haciendo eco del Servicio de Cambio Climático Copernicus de la Unión Europea, afirman: “La temperatura media mundial en julio de 2023 fue la más alta jamás registrada en al menos 120.000 años”. Gavin Schmidt, la principal autoridad de la NASA, escribe: “Los modelos climáticos no pueden explicar la gigantesca anomalía de calor de 2023. Es posible que estemos en territorio desconocido“.

La evolución de las crisis del sistema de la Tierra está avanzando a saltos. El año pasado el Foro Social Panamazónico (FOSPA), la Red Eclesial Panamazónica (REPAM) y la Asamblea Mundial de la Amazonía (AMA) junto a varias organizaciones indígenas, campesinas, de mujeres y sociales entregamos a la Cumbre de Presidentes de la Amazonía, reunida en Belém do Pará, Brasil, un conjunto de propuestas para evitar el punto de no retorno de la Amazonía. Los presidentes adoptaron una declaración que reconoce el peligro del punto de no retorno de la Amazonía y anunciaron mecanismos de participación social, pero no adoptaron medidas urgentes, con compromisos claros, para frenar la deforestación, la minería ilegal del oro, la extracción petrolera, la pérdida de la biodiversidad, y el reconocimiento de territorios de indígenas y afrodescendientes. Apenas meses después de esta Cumbre, la Amazonía empezó a sufrir un calor extremo, con incendios descontrolados, ríos y embalses sin agua que dejan sin electricidad a regiones enteras, mientras que en otros lugares se presenciaban ríos desbordados por las lluvias que arrasaban poblaciones cobrando vidas humanas.

El punto de no retorno de la Amazonía y el territorio desconocido al que está entrando el sistema de la Tierra son dos procesos que se retroalimentan. La falta de acciones en un lado aviva la crisis en el otro y viceversa. Desde el XI FOSPA a realizarse en Bolivia del 12 al 15 de junio, debemos profundizar nuestras propuestas para hacer frente al punto de no retorno de la Amazonía y al mismo tiempo promover acciones para confrontar el descalabro del sistema climático mundial.

El Acuerdo de París ya no es la respuesta para hacer frente al “territorio desconocido” del clima. Las Contribuciones Nacionalmente Determinadas son demasiado raquíticas para frenar al aceleramiento de la crisis climática. Estamos en un momento donde requerimos un nuevo tipo de acuerdo que confronte las causas estructurales del cambio climático. Un acuerdo que no se limite a hablar de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero, sino que establezca claramente acciones para salir de los combustibles fósiles, frenar en seco la deforestación, desmantelar el modelo del agronegocio y combatir el modelo de consumo insostenible, entre otras medidas. 

Cada año se extraen más de 4.000 millones de toneladas de petróleo, un tercio de los cuales provienen de Estados Unidos, Arabia Saudita y Rusia. Requerimos de un verdadero acuerdo climático que fije metas anuales de reducción de la extracción y consumo de petróleo, carbón y gas. De igual manera, es fundamental tener compromisos precisos de disminución de la deforestación y degradación de los bosques por cada país y región. No es posible que se gasten cientos de millones de dólares para cuantificar las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero de los bosques con el objetivo de generar mercados de carbono para la venta de permisos para seguir contaminando.  El tiempo de hacer dinero con los mecanismos de flexibilidad climática debe acabar.

El nuevo acuerdo que necesitamos debe atender tanto la crisis climática como la crisis de la biodiversidad. La división que existe entre la Convención de Biodiversidad (CBD) y la Convención Marco de las Naciones Unidas sobre Cambio Climático (CMNUCC) responde a la lógica de la diplomacia antes que a la realidad de los procesos de la Naturaleza. Requerimos un acuerdo integral que no parcele la crisis del sistema de la Tierra y menos que lo reduzca a un sólo factor como las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero.

Precisamos un acuerdo no antropocéntrico que no esté supeditado a los intereses de los gobernantes de turno. Un acuerdo que asuma a la Naturaleza como un sujeto y no como un objeto. Un acuerdo basado en el reconocimiento de los Derechos de la Naturaleza para restablecer el equilibrio de los ciclos vitales del planeta Tierra.

Un acuerdo integral del clima y la biodiversidad que establezca medidas para hacer frente al militarismo, el neofascismo, el racismo, a la violencia patriarcal y al hambre que se extiende por el mundo. Es imposible una solución a la crisis ecológica del planeta si no detenemos la escalada armamentista y guerrerista que se está esparciendo como un cáncer. Es absolutamente inadmisible que las principales potencias incumplan sus promesas de financiamiento para el clima y la biodiversidad cuando destinan una cifra veinte veces más grande para sus presupuestos militares. El acuerdo que necesitamos debe pronunciarse claramente contra las invasiones militares a Gaza y Ucrania. También, este nuevo acuerdo que necesitamos debe fortalecer la lucha contra los movimientos neofascistas que esparcen el negacionismo climático y socavan los derechos sociales, en particular de las mujeres. La paz, la democracia y la justicia son esenciales para hacer frente al “territorio desconocido” del planeta y al punto de no retorno de la Amazonía.

Necesitamos construir un proceso para la acción que esté basado en soluciones territoriales como las asumidas por el Ecuador en el referéndum del Yasuní para el retiro de todas las instalaciones petroleras que están en dicho bloque. El destino del cambio climático depende del fortalecimiento y propagación de estas acciones de autogestión territorial a nivel de los hidrocarburos, la soberanía alimentaria, los bosques, los ríos, las urbes y todos los espacios de la sociedad.

El XI FOSPA en Bolivia tiene el desafío de sentar las bases de esta construcción colectiva para este nuevo pacto por la vida en la Tierra desde la perspectiva de la Amazonía. El Encuentro de la Movilización de los Pueblos por la Tierra y el Clima, que se llevará a cabo inmediatamente después del XI FOSPA, será clave no sólo para aportar una dimensión mundial, sino para profundizar las propuestas y acciones contra las guerras, el neofascismo, y la erosión de la justicia a diferentes niveles.

Entre el XI FOSPA y la COP 30 en Belém do Pará Brasil, debemos construir una hoja de ruta de luchas territoriales como las del Yasuní en el Ecuador que nos convoca a la más amplia solidaridad para hacer realidad el retiro de las actividades petroleras y empezar la fase de la reparación a la Naturaleza y los pueblos afectados; luchas territoriales por la demarcación y titulación de los territorios indígenas; luchas territoriales contra la minería ilegal del oro y el mercurio; luchas territoriales por defender y expandir las áreas protegidas; luchas territoriales por la soberanía alimentaria, la defensa del agua y reconocer los derechos de los ríos, lagos y ecosistemas acuáticos.

La COP16 de la Biodiversidad en Colombia será otro momento clave para avanzar en esta construcción colectiva que vaya más allá de los textos de las negociaciones y se centre en las propuestas de acción y en la construcción colectiva de un nuevo acuerdo integral. No desmerezco la discusión de los textos diplomáticos, considero que algunos párrafos podemos y debemos utilizarlos; pero, después de dos décadas de negociaciones intergubernamentales, estoy absolutamente convencido que los movimientos sociales, de mujeres, juveniles, académicos y otros no podemos consumir nuestras energías en estos procesos y menos alimentar falsas expectativas.

La realización del G20 en Brasil y muchos otros encuentros a nivel regional e internacional debemos aprovecharlos para pensar más allá de los chalecos de fuerza de estos encuentros. Nuestra perspectiva debe ser no sólo construir un nuevo acuerdo desde los Pueblos y para la Naturaleza a adoptarse en Belém do Pará, Brasil, sino avanzar en un plan de acción para la implementación del mismo.

La COP 30 debe ser recordada no tanto por las declaraciones vacías a las que nos tienen acostumbrados, sino por la determinación de los pueblos que hemos dicho basta de imposturas y hemos comenzado a andar por la senda de un pacto por la vida en la Tierra.

Dana Cloud: A few weeks ago, as you know, Biden and Trump both visited the Texas-Mexico border. Biden was selling his immigration bill that Trump encouraged Republicans to vote against. Even though Biden is pushing for more resources for border policing, Trump claimed (in his articulate way) that the U.S. is being overrun by the “Biden migrant crime.” Trump emphasized crimes committed by migrants. My perception is that his rhetoric of monstrosity regarding immigrants has a different tone from Biden’s, but do you think that they are essentially proposing similar controls?

Aly Wane: Yes. I’ve been an activist on this issue since at least the mid-2000s. And I would say that the Republicans have worse rhetoric and oftentimes Democrats have great rhetoric. There were plenty of times during the Obama administration when I would hear a speech that Obama gave on immigration and just be like, yeah, that’s great. Can we just follow through on what you just said? At the end of the day, both parties are law enforcement parties, and whenever there is anything that can even be construed as a crisis, Republicans have the advantage because Democrats do not change the narrative at all.

Their whole thing is, if Republicans talk about a crisis at the border, the Democrats’ first move would usually be, okay, let’s agree on more enforcement. Like, tell us how much more enforcement to add. And the only thing that upsets them is the rhetoric of Republicans. But at the end of the day, what is Biden proposing? Biden is proposing very, very similar things. In fact, the Biden administration has doubled down on some of Trump’s worst excesses in his desperation to get a deal after this last attempt at getting a deal failed, and I want to be clear that from my perspective as an activist, that immigration proposal was the Democrats basically giving everything to the Republicans.

There wasn’t even any kind of negotiation about maybe a path to citizenship for folks with DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), for example, which is like the lowest of lowest bars, but even that wasn’t included. And I want to remind folks that Biden recently has been talking about how he wants to pass a deal with Trump.

That’s his whole thing: He’s so desperate to get something going that he’s inviting Trump to the table. The deal that was already rejected was already basically giving everything to the Republicans that they wanted. The only reasons they rejected it were that they wanted to humiliate Biden, number one, and number two, they want to propose something even worse under Trump.

And so when Biden’s inviting Trump to the table in negotiation, what he’s saying is, I’m absolutely willing to cave in even more on immigration. So all that is to say is that, unfortunately, right now Republicans totally own the narrative on immigration.

Democrats are playing on the same narrative field that the Republicans are, which is that right now we’re in the midst of a crisis. Therefore, the logic goes, we need to add more border enforcement. We need to add more drones. We need to add more agents. All of that. There is very little having to do with any kind of relief.

There was going to be some funding for more immigration judges, which would actually get to the problem because the reason why we keep having these crises is that the administrative piece of immigration has just been decimated, that people are caught up in all of these different bottlenecks and have been waiting forever. [Three million cases are pending in immigration courts.]

And that just keeps creating sort of more bottlenecks, which then makes it look visually like, oh, it’s this invasion, it’s this crisis. But the Dems, instead of actually standing up for immigrants and wanting to solve the crisis, which would involve a lot more on the relief side, are saying, yes, yes, things are really bad, so let’s add more money for enforcement.

Immigrants at the U.S. border in Del Rio. Photo credit: Sandor Csudai.

That’s what the two-party system has been throwing at the issue for years. And I promise you, if they pass even more enforcement, we’re going to be back here in another year, another year and a half, two years, however long, because all it is, is making the crisis worse.

The more enforcement you put into the system, the more you choke off the avenues for people to come legally, the more you’re going to create bottlenecks that are going to create crises. And so it’s this very vicious cycle that keeps happening over and over again with Republicans and Democrats thinking that enforcement is going to solve the issue when more enforcement is actually what is creating all of these so-called crises.

DC: Can you speak a little bit more about the content of this bipartisan compromise that Biden has been pushing? I’ve heard it described as cruel and draconian. Did you want to speak to the effects or the consequences for the migrants themselves of these policies?

AW: It’s good to talk about the migrants, who are usually the last people to be considered in this conversation. If you look at the proposals, they want to add numbers to the detention bed mandate, for example, to add the number of people who would be required to be detained. Incarcerated. I’m not sure how many people are aware that there are these detention bed contracts that a lot of private prison corporations sort of sneak into immigration legislation.

A certain number of beds are guaranteed, which obviously creates an entire incentive for the immigration enforcement system to capture as many people as possible. So the bed mandate is one thing. The second thing is basically the decimation of the asylum system. Now, to be clear, the problem with the U.S. asylum system started way before Trump. I still remember in 2014 when international human rights organizations were decrying the U.S. detention system and asylum system under Obama, but that got very little notice.

So the system already started out as very stringent. Trump almost decimated it. And Biden’s way to deal with this crisis is to enshrine some of the ways in which Trump had decimated the current asylum system. There are provisions in this legislation going towards reducing the ability of people to get asylum.

Democrats are playing on the same narrative field that the Republicans are, which is that right now we’re in the midst of a crisis. Therefore, the logic goes, we need to add more border enforcement. We need to add more drones. We need to add more agents. All of that. There is very little having to do with any kind of relief.

I want to be really clear about this. The asylum system–even back in 2014, this was a system that was very stringent in the sense of having to apply at a certain place and then you have to go through an interview and it’s a long process, usually two years.

It’s a very stringent process. You can go through all of that and still, even back then, not get asylum. Now it’s gotten to a place where, if you are able to get asylum now, you are pretty lucky.

That is contrary to the mainstream narrative, which is that the problem is that our asylum system is too open, somehow too lax, and that too many people are getting through. It’s quite the opposite. So this is very much in line with what I was saying earlier; it’s another one of those things where both parties are actually contributing to the problem by making the asylum system worse.

You’re actually guaranteeing that you’re going to see more bottlenecks at the border, more visuals of immigrants basically pooling at border sites, which is only going to be fodder then for Republicans to turn around and say, look, see, we still have a problem. I guess we need to increase funding for ICE and all of those things.

And the problem, of course, is that the Democrats keep taking the bait, and that’s because they are essentially still very much a law enforcement party. And in fact, today, I was thinking to myself, when was the last time that I felt that there was such a bipartisan agreement on enforcement and immigration?

And I thought, this reminds me of what was happening in the mid-1990s. In the mid-1990s, you had Bill Clinton, who was a president whom Republicans considered to be way too liberal. As a way to overcompensate, he pushed the [1994] crime bill. [The senate version of the bill was originally drafted by then-Senator Joe Biden.] But then he pushed incredibly draconian immigration laws that are at the heart of this detention explosion and this deportation explosion.

Those 1996 laws were really bad. And now when I think about 2024, it’s a similar thing.

You have a Democratic Party president who doesn’t want to be seen as too lax. Therefore, he’s going to push draconian immigration policies, thinking that it will help him. The thing that is different though now is that there is a movement now in a way that there wasn’t back in the 1990s. So I don’t even understand why Biden is regressing to old Democratic Party strategies of just going along with the Republican narrative instead of trying to change it.

I think that over the past 20 years, Democrats have created an atmosphere and a regime where it is easy to pass enforcement issues, but anything having to do with release is seen as too weak or dangerous. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell your readers that the ”War on Terror turbocharged the entire immigration conversation.

So ever since then, any kind of immigration negotiation starts with a “national security concern.” They’re always going to start with more border patrol agents, more ICE agents, more money for prisons.

Until we can decouple those two conversations, that’s where we’re at. And as per usual, the Dems have done next to nothing to even re-educate the public. At best, what they’ve done over the past couple of years is to create a very, very small number of targeted categories of migrants who can maybe, if they jump through about a billion hoops, eventually win legalization.

I feel like the movement has had to just really push them into even that much. I mean, we would not have had even something like DACA, which Obama talked about all the time. I still remember fighting the Obama administration for DACA and how it took two years to convince the Dems that it was a good idea.

DACA protest at Columbus Circle in New York. Photo source: Wikimedia Commons.

And now DACA is on the chopping block, which a lot of us were warning about in terms of that being a strategy. And all the Dems are left with is another one of those defensive postures, like, well, Republicans are talking about how there’s a crisis. And poll numbers maybe don’t look so great right now, so let’s not even try to change the public’s mind on this.

Let’s just do what we always do, which is to agree on more enforcement, thinking that it will appease Republicans. This is why I was so confident about this last deal not passing. It was terrible and awful, actually based on the politics of the Republican Party.

The Republicans didn’t even ask for it. It just reminds me of the Democratic Party tactic of starting just like, all right, we’ll give you like the bulk of what you want, like, are we good? And every time they do that, of course, the Republicans are like, yeah, we want more. Because they’re not idiots.

DC: Let’s return to the asylum point for a second, because when I was watching that State of the Union response from the Republicans, Senator Katie Britt invoked that story of the person who was being sex trafficked by the cartels. Apparently, Republicans think that story was great for their cause, and I guess it was, to the extent that people don’t understand it, but how does that even make any sense, because the problem is that that woman needed to have asylum, and she wasn’t going to get asylum.

What are your thoughts on that?

AW: There’s been a follow-up: The woman whose story was told came out and said, I don’t know what she was talking about. That’s not at all what I was trying to convey. First of all, this story did not happen under Biden; it happened a long time ago. And she herself was an advocate for victims of trafficking. The solution is actually more ability for people to have access to asylum, not less.

And she was clear that she was offended by the way her story was used. She said this was one of the reasons why she didn’t work with politicians one-on-one all that much, because she often felt that her story was used as a political football, as opposed to wanting to help the people that she wanted to help. That’s par for the course. They will use these stories to scaremonger and then hope that no one’s gonna do any research on it to find out what the true story actually was.

DC: We talked about Biden’s use of the word “illegal,” which he backtracked on. What do you think about his attempt to salvage something after that?

AW: You should really pay very little attention to what politicians say; you should almost exclusively pay attention to what politicians do.

To  a certain degree, I appreciate him saying, okay, I should have used “undocumented” instead of “illegal,” but to me, what really matters is policy, so it doesn’t really matter whether you call people “undocumented” or “illegal.” It’s what you actually do with these people. I want to be clear–there’s clearly a difference between the sort of open hostility of someone like Trump and Biden, who is just basically a typical Democratic Party person who just does not want to be outflanked as too soft on immigration.

So to me, it barely even registered in the conversation. You know, one of the activists that I’ve worked with in the past is Jose Antonio Vargas, who came out as documented a while back. I think he was on the Time Magazine cover, much more of a mainstream sort of activist than I am, but he wrote a pretty good piece, where he talked about how people are focusing on the term illegal, but it’s not as important as the actual policy.

He had been one of the key activists who had been fighting editorial boards to get them to stop using the term illegal. So even that was a political battle, but even as a prominent activist who had worked on this issue, it was just like, yeah, whatever.

We want action. I couldn’t care less what you call us. Just, you know, do right by us. That’s all that matters.

DC: I thought it was kind of gross that Biden in his State of the Union speech even mentioned the murder of the Georgia graduate student Laken Riley and played up that story about her having been [allegedly] murdered by an undocumented person, as if that single tragic case proves something about the entire system of immigration.

AW: I wasn’t surprised. I mean, maybe it’s one of the reasons why I veered into depression rather than anger, because so much of what I’m seeing, it’s just like, yep, could have called it. It’s his instinct; he’s looking at the poll numbers. They’re not looking great on immigration and he’s faced with two options.

The hard thing would be to make a forceful case for immigration. But the easy thing to do as a politician is to say, we’re not looking great, so I should tell everyone how tough I am on this, especially since Democrats have done such a terrible job of describing the scope of the crisis.

For example, one of the things that people have been talking about a lot recently is migrants being bused to cities like New York and Chicago. Now, a lot of these migrants are asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are different from undocumented people. Asylum seekers have gone through a legal process.

As they continue going through the process, they should have access to the legal right to work. That’s international law. That’s not partisan politics. But even that’s becoming an issue, because Republicans are saying, there are migrants at the border and we just bused them up there. And now they’re draining your resources. See how it feels?

A sophisticated way to start to push back on that would be to start to make the legal distinction between asylum seekers and undocumented people, because these are not people who just showed up. These are people going through a process. Technically, these people have internationally protected rights, the legal right to work, but the mainstream media and the Democrats haven’t made that distinction and allowed Republicans to capture the issue and charge Biden with allowing these people to work as if that’s an aberration.

I’ve been an activist on this issue for years. If it weren’t for that, I don’t think I would get all of these nuances. If I were just receiving all of this negative media coverage about migrants being bused left and right and a “crisis” at the border, I wouldn’t have time as a regular U.S. citizen to figure out what’s really going on here. No, people just get their news and they have a sense that there’s a crisis. And because the Dems have done such a poor job of explaining the crisis, right now the ball is totally in the Republicans’ corner.

So they’re stuck in this defensive crouch of like, please take as many of our enforcement concessions as possible. Save our hides, in their mind, by taking more enforcement concessions from us.

Now, who’s conspicuously absent from that circle of concern? Migrants themselves, and so that, that’s how you get someone like the mayor of New York Eric Adams, who’s been coming out and saying things that sound really xenophobic to me, but couching it the terms of, we’re trying to do our best, but all of these migrants are just overrunning our services.

For a Democratic party politician, that’s the easy route.

DC: It’s interesting that you just mentioned Eric Adams, because it was going to be my next question to ask about the context of the greater security state/tough-on-crime discourse. Are these things connected to you?

AW: As a Black migrant, as part of a cohort of Black migrants, we are at this kind of painful intersection of the “regular” law enforcement system and the immigration enforcement system.

It’s all the same carceral logic. It has not escaped me that Eric Adams, as a former cop, sees everything from an enforcement perspective. But this is why I said earlier on in this conversation that one of the things that often observers miss about this conversation is that both parties are essentially law enforcement parties.

I want to repeat that. Both parties are law enforcement parties. While I, for example, am someone who’s a leftist and I’m interested in the abolitionist conversation, both in regular law enforcement and in immigration, I know that that is far from where the Democratic Party is in terms of its concerns.

As someone who did some organizing within the Movement for Black Lives, I remember that I was excited to see that the conversation around abolition was starting to pick up steam and that it was becoming a more popular conversation, but I immediately thought to myself, yeah, but the Dems are not going to do anything about it.

Both parties are law enforcement parties. I want to repeat that. Both parties are law enforcement parties.

They’re going to give us a couple of slogans and murals, paintings, and dashikis or whatever. But when it comes to police budgets, that shit is not touched. Whether you’re talking about the law enforcement conversation or the immigration conversation, it’s the same conversation. You’re ultimately talking about who’s deserving and who’s undeserving. And the undeserving category keeps getting wider when it comes to both immigration and law enforcement in general.

There’s a corporate aspect to this. The private prison corporation conversation is very important. It’s a through line in these issues.

They’ve made a lot of money incarcerating Black and Brown citizens under the so-called war on drugs. Once the war on terror sort of exploded, those very same private corporations were the ones who helped write anti-immigrant legislation that would actually end up lining up their own pockets.

This is how you get to the whole recent conversation around bed mandates in detention centers, for example. So the two things in my mind are tied, crime and immigration. And there is a kind of purity politics there, and by purity politics, I mean in terms of symptoms of rising fascism.

You know, whenever you have larger and larger categories of who’s seen as undeserving, as diseased to the body politic, to be extricated, pushed out, that usually is a sign that we’re getting close to fascist territory.

And so, to me, it makes total sense that there are rising concerns around crime and the border crisis. The thing that’s fascinating to me is that if you look at the numbers, both crises, if you even want to call them that, have been greatly, greatly exaggerated.

Often people talk about border politics, and it’s like symbolic politics because they have very little to do with actually fixing a problem. The border has become a kind of sociological boogeyman, just this idea that there’s danger there.

We need to figure out what the problem is and fix it. But instead of actually fixing it, which would mean the types of solutions that would actually include relief and letting people through. It’s easier to just sell fear and keep adding more law enforcement, so that in some hypothetical future, we might be safe. But it is literally like watching an addict or something like that. You know, you could give them as much enforcement as you want. It’s not going to solve the problem, but it plays well in terms of short-term politics. And that’s where Republicans have the advantage.

Immigrant rights march, May Day, 2006 in Los Angeles. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

DC: That’s interesting, what you said about purity politics and proto-fascism or fascism. Since the pandemic, there has been a lot of fear-mongering about Chinese migration. And then there’s the rivalry between the United States and China as part of the context. Do you have any thoughts on that?

AW: The incidents of assault against our Asian kinfolk here were very real. I had a bunch of Asian organizer friends who were not feeling really safe. Conversations about Chinese migrants are connected to both imperial politics and the immigration issue. It’s citizenship politics writ large.

In the U.S., citizenship politics are white identity politics. Even now in 2024, when people think about who is a U. S. citizen, people think of a straight white person. I have connections with folks who are in Asian immigrant advocacy groups who are wonderful and radical. They’ve been U.S. citizens their entire lives, they’re in their forties and fifties–and to this day, people still ask them where they’re from.

Whenever you have larger and larger categories of who’s seen as undeserving, as diseased to the body politic, to be extricated, pushed out, that usually is a sign that we’re getting close to fascist territory.

They’re still seen as foreign, which tells you that the conversation around immigration is necessarily a conversation about race. And this is where those of us who are at that intersection of blackness and immigration come in. As an undocumented Black person, I don’t have any illusions that, if I were to become a U. S. citizen today, that would keep me safe. I’m looking around at my Black citizen kinfolk, and they’re not exactly taken care of by the state or cared for by the state.

They’re being gunned down left and right by law enforcement. Yes, there’s a conversation about empire and imperialism, which is really clear, but there’s also obviously the basic conversation around white supremacy and how it operates in the imaginary around citizenship.

This is one of the many ironies of President Obama becoming the first Black president and then ending up deporting people at record rates. Even though he was president for eight years, people still wondered whether he was an American.

DC:  I am wondering whether you can connect the horrific unfolding of the border “crisis” to the horrific genocide unfolding  in Gaza. Are you seeing any links between the way that the United States is treating immigrants and how Israel is treating Palestinians?

AW: There are some thematic connections. I don’t want to make the connection too strong because I don’t want to minimize the horror Palestinians are going through right now.

I feel like I’ve had a pretty high tolerance for things over the years. This is something that is very, very hard to deal with.

That being said, if you delve into some of the rhetoric around immigrants and the rhetoric around Palestinians, it’s all tied to the larger problem of nationalism. Nationalism implies citizenship. Citizenship implies inclusion versus exclusion. It implies people who are desirable versus people who are undesirable. It implies the conversation around security and who is seen as human and who is seen as non-human. There are some parallels. Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. often get trained in Israel. There’s a lot of sharing around surveillance technology between folks who work in the IDF versus folks who work in ICE and CBP.

That technology has been used by those agencies for years. So there’s a sort of corporate connection there in terms of who profits from that misery. The themes around dispossession, land, who belongs, all of those things are very, very clear in terms of what migrants go through and what Palestinians go through.

But I don’t want to be glib. We’re talking about immense misery in either case.

In both cases, we have to bring it back to the Democratic Party strategy.

One of the major reasons why Biden wanted this deal where he gave everything to Republicans on immigration was to secure more funding for Ukraine and Israel, right? So that was one of the things that was the most depressing these past couple of weeks: realizing that one of the major reasons that the Biden administration was pushing this awful deal was to increase its ability to immiserate the lives of Palestinians.

Asylum seekers at the border. Photo credit: Sandor Csudai.

I feel sick to my stomach about it. I know that there are calculations to be made about 2024, but on a personal level, and I’ve spoken to a lot of other immigration activists, people are pretty angry at Biden right now, feeling like they’re not sure if they have what it takes to push for Biden in 2024. It was hard enough to do it in 2020.

DC: So what, in your view, should we activists and the readers of Tempest and your people and my people, what should we be doing now?

AW: I always go back to what’s happening at the grassroots. Wherever you are, I’m sure there is a local activist group that is doing work that’s important for migrants. I would certainly emphasize doing any anti-deportation work or any work that would support immigrants.

That may not be straightforwardly political, but that might be helping migrants get access to basic resources, food, clothing, and health care. All of those things matter. This is what I’m thinking about as I’m trying to create this workshop for Black migrants.

There’s the immigration political conversation happening here, and that’s important, but that’s not as important as your survival. Right now, what immigrants need are allies that help them with basic survival. Also, it’s important to make spaces where they can push back on the negative rhetoric. I would just emphasize the local for people.

DC: And so what about you? Like, what is your relationship to the electoral process and the Democrats?

AW: I’m still fully undocumented. The whole voting thing is really interesting to me because as an activist for years, I’ve been telling people don’t take your access to vote for granted precisely because I can’t vote.

On a personal level with this election, it’s literally the first time that I asked myself, if I could vote, would I vote for Biden? Even if it were a state where it mattered, I don’t think I could. I’ve tried as much as possible to stay away from just being like one- or two-issue voters, but it’s Palestine. I’ve gone back to therapy because it has wrecked my soul and it is disgusting to me that Democratic Party politicians are making this out to be just an electoral inconvenience.

Children are being slaughtered as they are trying to access international food aid. And we’re being asked to look past that. No. Biden is absolutely complicit in genocide right now. That makes it much, much harder to make the case for the lesser evil.

DC: What would you say to readers who may be worried about Trump’s alignment with the far-right?

AW: I do believe that a Trump presidency would be worse. But Palestine is a major red line. I was surprised at how well the uncommitted campaign has gone in Michigan. The numbers were much larger than I thought they would be. At first, Biden and his team were like, well, it’s just a couple of Arabs and Muslims, I guess, we don’t need to worry about it.

Then they looked at the numbers, they were like, well, maybe it’s Arabs and Muslims and young people. They’re trying to convince themselves that it’s okay. I think they’re looking at a potential iceberg.

I don’t know any pro-Palestinian activists who looked at Biden’s plan for aid to Gaza and said, yes, he nailed it. No, it has infuriated more people, because, as you probably know, the issue is not the resources, the issue is access to resources.

Biden is absolutely complicit in genocide right now. That makes it much, much harder to make the case for the lesser evil.

And Israel right now is making it very hard for those resources to be accessed. What are we talking about here at this point? It’s strictly for the consumption of voters that had very little to do actually caring about Palestinians.

We should say to Biden, just tell Israelis right now to let the food in or we’re cutting off at least your military aid. The fact is that Biden can’t even cross that bottom line. At the end of the day, he’s ideologically committed to this genocide.

DC: Is there anything else you would want to say about any of these issues before we wrap up?

AW: All I want to do is send love to activists and organizers. I know it’s hard. We’ve been immigration activists for ten, fifteen years or more. Sometimes folks wonder, what is even the point?

We keep having to fight the Democrats on this. Like with Republicans, it’s always clear. We understand where Republicans stand. But it’s just that every time there’s even the slightest ripple in the water for Democrats, the first group of people that they throw under the bus is migrants. I want to send some love to those folks and remind them to find support in their own communities, and not so much sustenance in the political system which we just can’t count on.

Featured image credit: Donna Burton: modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

In Argentina, deputies and leaders of the Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores – Unidad/Workers and Left Front – Unity (FIT-U) met on Wednesday, April 3, with the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, Pedro Prada, and other officials from the Cuban Embassy. This included the national deputies Myriam Bregman (from the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas/Socialist Workers’ Party [PTS]), Romina del Pla (from the Partido Obrero/Workers’ Party [PO]) and Christian Castillo (PTS) participated on behalf of the FIT-U; the legislator for the Buenos Aires (CABA) Celeste Fierro (from the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores/Movement of Socialist Workers’ [MST]); the elected deputies Juan Carlos Giordano, Mercedes de Mendieta and Pablo Almeida (from the Izquierda Socialista/Socialist Left [IS]), Pablo Heller and Luis Brunetto (PO) and Guillermo Pacagnini (MST).

During the meeting, the FIT-U delegation called for the freedom of hundreds of Cuban workers, youth, professionals, and intellectuals convicted for participating in the popular protests of July 11, 2021 and for the right to protest on the island. The ambassador himself acknowledged that there are 564 accused protesters currently being punished, of which 297 are being deprived of their liberty, with sentences of up to several years in prison.

[T]he FIT-U, the only political bloc in the country that refuses to meet with …the representatives of Yankee imperialism, reiterated its repudiation of the United State blockade suffered by Cuba and the hypocrisy with which the U.S. claims to stand for human rights.

The FIT-U delegation asked the ambassador for a complete list of the names of the prisoners, the crimes for which they were convicted, and the sentences handed down. The delegation also conveyed their concern about the detention conditions reported by relatives of the prisoners. They highlighted the cases of Brenda Díaz, a trans prisoner, who is serving her sentence in a men’s prison and who is identified by her birth name. The delegation also raised the situation of the renowned critical leftist historian Alina López (detained soon after July 2021), who has been told that if she leaves the country she would not be allowed to return, among others.

Ambassador Prada promised to transmit to the Cuban government the concerns expressed by the FIT-U delegation and to provide information about the prisoners, taking account of the issues raised  by the FIT-U delegation.

The FIT-U delegation also raised the possibility of traveling to the island to make contact with families of the prisoners and to visit the detention centers where the sentences are being served, as well as to hold meetings in this regard with the Cuban authorities. This was, in principle, welcomed positively by the ambassador.

The delegation of the FIT-U, the only political bloc in the country that refuses to meet with Marc Stanley and the representatives of Yankee imperialism, reiterated its repudiation of the United State blockade suffered by Cuba and the hypocrisy with which the U.S. claims to stand for  human rights while, among other horrors, supporting and supplying weapons to the Zionist regime to crush the Palestinian people through genocidal methods.

[T]he representatives of the FIT-U stated that imperialist aggression cannot be an excuse to curtail the legitimate rights of the Cuban working class to protest.

However, the representatives of the FIT-U stated that imperialist aggression cannot be an excuse to curtail the legitimate rights of the Cuban working class to protest. The demonstrations, which occurred during the COVID period, encompassed broad layers of the population and reflected—as the Cuban government itself admitted—popular unrest originating from very severe hardships. Of course, we cannot lose sight of the effects of the U.S. blockade at any time. At the same time, we cannot ignore the consequences derived from the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government within the framework of the Decree of “monetary regulation”1This refers to the disastrous effort undertaken to change monetary policy and create a single currency in Cuba. Given the drastic drop of tourism during the pandemic there have been far fewer dollars around to back up any kind of monetary transformation. The peso’s value dramatically descended and continues to do so with massive impact on living standards. This has been criticized by some on the Left as representing a turn towards neoliberal policies by the Cuban government. from the end of 2020. In this context, the FIT-U representatives maintained that the protests of July 11 cannot be classified as a conspiracy orchestrated by imperialism, as the Cuban government maintains, despite the attempts to use it by some on the right.

Our demand for the freedom of the July 11 prisoners is from the standpoint of our  opposition to Yankee imperialism (and its allies), and solidarity with the suffering Cuban people, workers, and its youth, therefore, from an anti-imperialist and socialist perspective. Those of us who make up the FIT-U defend the right to protest within the framework of the defense of the full freedom of political and union organization of Cuban workers.

Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores Unidad
Buenos Aires, 4/4/2024

Featured image credit: RawPixel; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

On March 31, the surprise results of Turkey’s municipal elections completely transformed the political mood in the country. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost 15 out of the 36 cities it governed. The main opposition party, Republican People’s Party (CHP), gained 15 cities and won a plurality of the national vote with 37 percent. Last year, when most pollsters and analysts predicted his defeat in the general elections, Erdoğan devastated the opposition with a surprise victory. What has changed since then?

Inflation in Turkey had been in the double digits for the past six years, reaching nearly triple digits for the past two. Poverty is widespread in most major cities. Nearly half of the workers in the private sector work for minimum wage. Rent and food prices are skyrocketing. The disorganization of the working class through austerity and union busting throughout the 2000s prevented a major response from organized labor. In the absence of a strong workers’ movement, Erdoğan managed poverty through AKP’s control over the municipal government services that distributed food and resources. After the AKP lost most major cities in 2019, he instead focused on raising pensions and the minimum wage, while maintaining the credit access of the already heavily indebted working and middle classes.

This year, the tightness of Turkey’s government budget in the face of the ongoing stagflation and currency devaluation crisis prevented Erdoğan from raising pensions before the municipal elections. Historically, a quarter of voters and a sizable chunk of Erdoğan’s support came from older religious voters in smaller cities and urban ghettos. Yet the initial results suggest that many older voters either stayed at home or voted for other parties.

Part of the reason for the lack of enthusiasm was Erdoğan’s candidate picks in major cities, including İstanbul and Ankara. In İstanbul, the former secretary of environment and urban planning Murat Kurum, a figure partially responsible for Turkey’s earthquake disaster, failed miserably due to a near complete lack of social skills. In Ankara, Turgut Altınok, a big landlord, spent a lot of his campaign trying to justify his outrageous net worth. Despite different candidates, the situation was similar in 2019 when the AKP lost both cities. Erdoğan’s complete control over the party apparatus forces him to pick national figures close to himself who have very little context for the local conditions in urban ghettos where the AKP used to have a strong base.

[T]he surprise results of Turkey’s municipal elections completely transformed the political mood in the country. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost 15 out of the 36 cities it governed. The main opposition party, Republican People’s Party (CHP) gained 15 cities and won a plurality of the national vote with 37 percent.

AKP’s decline helped the New Welfare Party (YRP) on the right. An Islamist party founded by Fatih Erbakan, the son of Erdoğan’s former mentor Necmettin Erbakan, the YRP became the third largest party, garnering six percent of the vote. After being founded in 2019 to reclaim the legacies of the ultra-Islamist National Outlook Movement and its former leader Necmettin Erbakan, the party unenthusiastically supported Erdoğan’s presidential candidacy in 2023. Despite this, the YRP won four seats in the parliamentary elections and is now becoming the main right-wing alternative to the AKP. YRP rose to prominence in part due to the party’s support for higher pensions and for boycotting Israel. While Erdoğan claims to oppose Israel’s genocide, his inaction against Israel pushed many younger radicalizing religious voters toward the YRP.

The biggest winner of the election, however, was the CHP. The CHP’s dysfunctional alliance strategy and its failure in the previous election had fractured the opposition. The political devastation obscured the party’s relative success—the CHP’s best performance was with 41 percent of the vote in 1977, while 2023 outpaced that when the party’s presidential candidate won 45 percent. Since then, the CHP’s former presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has been ousted from the party’s leadership. His successor, Özgür Özel, had shifted the party rhetorically to the Left, but the party remained split due to the tension between the party’s nationalist wing and democratic wings.

The nationalists in various small cities attacked the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) during the campaign, while the mayor of İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, aimed to appease the large Kurdish population of the city by promoting Kurdish language programs. In 2019, İmamoğlu ran with the CHP’s alliance, which included the right-wing nationalist Good Party (IYIP) and was supported by the Kurdish Left. Because of this İmamoğlu held a moderate position on the Kurdish question, appeasing the minimal demands of DEM, such as opposing Erdoğan’s appointed mayors in Kurdish cities, while occasionally echoing the anti-terrorist rhetoric of nationalists. This time around it appears that most DEM voters voted for İmamoğlu, as DEM’s İstanbul candidate, Meral Danış Beştaş, remained at two percent of the vote, a fraction of the 10 percent Kurdish Left parties usually receive in the city.

The vote share of the three nationalist parties collapsed after reaching nearly 25 percent last year. The fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), IYIP (which split from the MHP), and the Victory Party, whose presidential candidate, Sinan Oğan, outperformed expectations in 2023, in total received about 10 percent of the vote. The defeat of the Victory Party is especially encouraging given the party rose to prominence last year in large part because of its militant support for mass deportation of all Syrians in Turkey. Nevertheless, the victory of Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş, who left the MHP in 2013, and wins by other nationalist CHP mayors will ensure that the ultranationalist atmosphere that’s been suffocating Turkey for nearly ten years will continue. While Yavaş, like İmamoğlu, held a more moderate position on the Kurdish question, despite his nationalist background, as the now second most popular figure in the CHP, he is well positioned to fill the nationalist vacuum.

The leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Özgür Özel pictured here in September 2023. Photo Credit: Oğulcan Bakiler.

Despite the colossal defeat the AKP experienced by coming second in elections for the first time since its founding, Erdoğan once again used bureaucratic mechanisms to seize control of Kurdish cities. The day after the election, Van’s local election council decided that the DEM candidate, Abdullah Zeydan, was wrongly certified to run by the council. The council then recommended the AKP candidate, who won second place with 27 percent against Zeydan’s 55 percent, should be appointed mayor. After large protests in Van on April 3, during which the local CHP marched in solidarity with DEM, and Özel and İmamoğlu declared that they would fight the decision, Turkey’s supreme electoral council decided to certify Zeydan as the mayor of Van in a 7-4 decision. The weakness of the AKP and the strong showing of the opposition emboldened the council to vote against Erdoğan’s demands.

In contrast to DEM’s victory in Van and nearly all other Kurdish-majority cities, the parties of the Turkish socialist Left had a much weaker showing. The disastrous decision by the Workers Party of Turkey (TIP) to nominate former soccer player Gökhan Zan as their mayoral candidate in Hatay was an unfortunate display of opportunism at a critical moment. Hatay was devastated by the earthquake in February 2023. TIP and Zan became more prominent, along with many other activists and aid organizations, through their role in the earthquake relief efforts. Lütfü Savaş, who was elected mayor of Hatay with the AKP in 2009 and later joined the CHP in 2014, played a major role in the systemic negligence that led to the destruction. Hatay had been filled with unsafe buildings, many of which were constructed during Savaş’s decades-long tenure. Yet, when the CHP refused to replace Savaş despite the massive pushback within the party, TIP, which was initially flirting with the idea of supporting the CHP, endorsed Gökhan Zan in an opportunistic move to the center.

TIP’s endorsement of Zan, who ran against TIP’s candidate, Can Atalay, with IYIP just months before, faced much criticism within the party as well as on the Left more broadly. It was an especially controversial move given Atalay had been imprisoned over his involvement in Gezi Park protests and illegally kept in prison after his election as Hatay MP in 2023. Zan’s swing from the far right to the far left within the span of one year also raised a lot of questions about the politics of TIP. TIP had previously been accused of clout chasing for some of their celebrity recruitments during the 2023 elections. TIP later withdrew its support for Zan over the allegations of Zan meeting with the AKP. In the end, the AKP won narrowly in part due to the lack of a viable Left opposition.

The Hatay results are especially disheartening because Erdoğan told the people of Hatay that the central government abandoned the city during the earthquake simply because Savaş was not an AKP mayor. TIP’s opportunism prevented it from taking advantage of the unpopularity of its rivals.

Nevertheless, the Left’s victory in Van hints at a completely new balance of forces. For the first time under his rule, Erdoğan backed out of his repression of the Kurdish Left due to mass mobilizations. Also, for the first time, these mobilizations were openly supported by the now-victorious CHP. Given the direness of the country’s economic crises, Erdoğan’s new lame- duck position, and the CHP’s centrism, it is possible that movements from below might be revived and create a political opening for the Left.

It is clear that CHP leaders are aware of this opening as they begin to emphasize the party’s “social democratic” legacy. However, this vision is still being carried by millionaire capitalists like İmamoğlu and nationalists like Yavaş. The CHP’s expansion of social services at the municipal level could alleviate some of the suffering, but these reforms will not fix the country’s structural crisis. Meanwhile, the disastrous showing of the Left in Hatay and its effective liquidation into the CHP in most of the country during this election shows that the Left has a long way to go.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Dear Ahern Hotel:

It has come to our attention that a notorious group with ties to insurrectionists and white nationalists has scheduled a conference at the Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel next week.

We are reaching out to you with a sense of urgency and concern regarding the upcoming plans by the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) for an all-day event at your hotel on April 17th. (See flyer below).

In addition to the concerns of our organization, it is important to note that both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center categorize CSPOA as an “anti-government extremist” group. This classification should raise serious concerns and prompt a cautious approach towards any involvement with the CSPOA.

The far-right pro-paramilitary group promotes the long-discredited idea derived from the violently racist and antisemitic Posse Comitatus that sheriffs can usurp the judicial branch’s role in interpreting the Constitution and unilaterally override federal, state, and local laws.

This event is likely to garner significant negative national media coverage. As other hospitality professionals will tell you, hosting such a toxic event can be severely damaging to a hotel’s reputation and brand.

As you consider a timely response, here are some facts about the group’s founder, the current CEO, the advisory board, and members for you to consider.

CSPOA Founder Richard Mack

The CSPOA was founded by former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack—a longtime militia movement figure and founding board member of the insurrectionist paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers. Six Oath Keepers leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their part in the January 6th insurrection. According to the Department of Justice, the “manners and means” used by defendants convicted in two separate Oath Keepers trials included “using force against law enforcement officers while inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

While Mack told Reuters that he left the Oath Keepers’ board around 2016 because the group became too militant, he and other CSPOA leaders maintained a relationship with the insurrectionist group. In fact, on January 5, 2021, CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman had Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes on his radio program the day before the insurrection to encourage others to join his insurrectionary plans. Bushman continues to defend Rhodes on his program.

Mack has also made clear that he would support using private militias against government officials, writing, “People get all upset when they hear about militias, but what’s wrong with it? I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to call out my posse against the federal government if it gets out of hand.”

During the 2014 armed standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, Mack encouraged standoff participants to use women as human shields.

Before returning to efforts to infiltrate law enforcement, in 2021, Mack toured the country with an antisemitic conspiracy theorist spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

While Mack spends considerable time stressing his devotion to Constitutional rights, his record and that of other law officers affiliated with CSPOA has too often been wanting in this regard.

Richard Mack’s history in law enforcement is also worthy of consideration. In 1985, while serving in the Provo, Utah, police department, Mack’s apparent misconduct landed a man on death row and in prison for nearly 30 years. As described in a 116-page federal court ruling, during the investigation into a high-profile murder case, Mack arranged to pay the rent, heat, and phone bills of two key witnesses and give them cash – totaling some $4,000 across several months. As a result, a Fourth District Court Judge overturned the conviction and death sentence of the man based on the misconduct of Mack, other officers, and the prosecutor. One witness also “testified that Officer Mack threatened her and [her husband] with arrest, deportation, and loss of their son, and that this occurred three times.” In addition, witnesses testified that they were coached to lie about having received gifts and about the defendant planning to rape the murder victim. The judge wrote, “Officer Mack’s inconsistent statements—all aimed at painting the police and his own conduct in a more favorable light— seriously undermined his credibility.”

CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman

When Richard Mack took a $20,000-a-month position on the board of a group spreading COVID misinformation, Sam Bushman was promoted to CEO of CSPOA. Sam Bushman never served in law enforcement. He has, however, been involved with promoting troubling white nationalist organizations, including groups advocating secession and killing law enforcement.

Already facing growing pressure for ties to white nationalists, last October, Bushman appeared on the podcast of a Hitler-loving white nationalist. On that program, Bushman confessed that he’d been a longtime reader of and remains a supporter of the white nationalist publications Spotlight and American Free Press.

CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman has used his radio show to promote and build a relationship with the white nationalist, antisemitic, and secessionist League of the South. In 1990, League of the South Chief of Statt Michael Tubbs pleaded guilty to stealing M-16 rifles from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, serving four years in prison. In 2017, Tubbs was named commander of the League of the South’s paramilitary branch, the Southern Defense Force.

Identity Dixie leader Jim O’Brien, aka Padraig Martin, a guest on Bushman’s radio show, League of the South ally, and co-editor of a pro-secessionist book promoted by Bushman, wrote this troubling passage about murdering law enforcement:

“The lesson of the egregious Stewart Rhodes prison sentence – as well as every other J6 Protester languishing in a prison, – is the following: if you are going to start a revolution of any kind, even if your purpose had legal or Constitutional merit, you better not stop at the gates. You better go all in. Do not leave a single police officer, Congressman, judge, or any other functionary of government alive…[T]he next time you take part in a rightwing protest be prepared to kill them all. Half measures are no longer an option.”

Bushman also recently announced on his radio show that he is a member of fugitive paramilitary figure Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights network. While the group is most well-known for threatening hospitals and public health officials, one People’s Rights network member is serving an 18-year sentence for a northern Idaho shootout with law enforcement. Another is awaiting trial in Nevada for threatening law enforcement.

CSPOA Advisory Board

Mack and Bushman aren’t the only CSPOA figures of concern. The group’s advisory board includes a former member of a white nationalist secessionist group and a sheriff involved in an attempt to seize voting machines.

Michael Peroutka was a national board member of the white nationalist secessionist group, the League of the South, a group that seeks a whites-only ethnostate in the U.S. South, promotes vicious antisemitism, and has forged alliances with neo-Nazis. Peroutka has denounced the Union’s victory in what he calls the “War Between the States.” Peroutka even led the League of the South convention in singing what he called the “national anthem” – “Dixie.” While Peroutka later backed away when his ties were exposed, he stated, “I don’t have any problem with the organization.”

Peroutka currently leads the Institute on the Constitution (IOTC). This group promotes anti-Muslim bigotry and state nullification. It has distributed material stating that “We see no reason why men should not discriminate on grounds of religion, race, or nationality if they wish.” Peroutka even pledged to use the Institute on the Constitution to aid the League of the South and advance the cause of imposing biblical law.

CSPOA Advisory Board member Barry County, Michigan, Sheriff Dar Leaf was an unindicted co-conspirator in a Michigan voting machine tampering case. Emails obtained by Bridge Michigan show that Sheriff Leaf tried to enlist fellow “constitutional sheriffs” to seize Dominion voting machines at the heart of the election conspiracy promoted by then-President Donald Trump.

In May 2020, Sheriff Leaf shared the stage with members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, including one of the men arrested in the plot to kidnap the governor.

Other CSPOA-Affiliated Sheriffs

CSPOA ranks are filled with members who have tarnished the image of law enforcement and harmed communities. Multiple CSPOA-affiliated law officers have engaged in intimidation and illegal and potentially illegal practices.

• Former Edwards County (TX) Sheriff Pam Elliot, a CSPOA member featured on the cover of Mack’s book, Are You a David?, and her department engaged in activity that intimidated political opponents and voters, including Edwards County deputies appearing at polling stations. Election attorney Buck Wood described the latter as “pure and simple intimidation.”
• In 2022, Real County (TX) Sheriff Nathan Johnson, who attended a Texas CSPOA training, was put under criminal investigation for repeatedly seizing money from undocumented immigrants, even if they were not charged with a state crime – actions to which he admitted.
• Culpepper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins, a featured speaker at CSPOA’s 2020 conference, was indicted in June on a slew of corruption charges related to a scheme thatoffered police badges and gun permits in exchange for payments or political contributions.
• CSPOA member Frederick County, Maryland Sheriff Charles “Chuck” Austin Jenkins wasindicted in April by a federal grand jury for breaking federal gun laws. Jenkins is alleged to have defrauded the United States by interfering with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by making false statements and representations in paperwork submitted to the ATF to obtain machine guns that were used by campaign supporter Robert Justin Krop’s firearms business, The Machine Gun Nest.
• Riverside County, California Sheriff Chad Bianco, is not only a prominent CSPOA member, he’s also been a member of the insurrectionist group, the Oath Keepers.
• Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff who received a 2012 CSPOA award, was convicted of criminal contempt in 2017 after refusing to end his department’s racial profiling practices. As of 2015, taxpayers had paid $8.2 million for the case.
• In 2019, CSPOA presented former Republic, Washington Police Chief Loren Culp with its “Police Chief of the Decade” award. On April 3, 2024, the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs issued Loren Culp a “notice of…proposed expulsion” from the Association because of “numerous offensive public social media posts and comments” deemed to be “unbecoming of a WASPC member.”

We could go on, but I think you get the idea. You have a vital opportunity to disconnect the exquisitely crafted luxury brand of the Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel from the toxicity of CSPOA’s pro-paramilitary and white nationalist brand. As this issue is time-sensitive, we would appreciate a rapid response. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

Devin Burghart

Executive Director

IREHR

 

The post IREHR Letter to Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel appeared first on Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

Luiz Marques: “¿El salto de calentamiento de 2023 nos introduce en un ‘territorio inexplorado’?”

En marzo de 2024, la Organización Meteorológica Mundial publicó su informe anual, The State of the Global Climate 2023 (en adelante, OMM 2023) confirmando oficialmente su informe provisional de octubre de 2023 [1] y lo que ya habían anticipado las agencias climáticas nacionales y europeas, así como la literatura científica reciente. Citemos y comentemos cinco de los puntos más importantes de este informe:[2]

El primer punto se refiere, por supuesto, al calentamiento medio mundial en 2023: “La temperatura media mundial cerca de la superficie en 2023 fue de 1,45 ± 0,12 °C por encima de la media de 1850-1900” (OMM 2023). Esto, de enero a diciembre del año pasado. Según Copernicus, la agencia europea del clima, la temperatura media mundial combinada de la superficie, la tierra y el mar, para los doce meses comprendidos entre marzo de 2023 y febrero de 2024 fue 1,56 °C más cálida que la media del período preindustrial (1850-1900) y la temperatura en febrero de 2024 fue 1,77 °C más cálida que la media de los meses de febrero en este periodo de referencia. [3] Es posible, por tanto, que los 12 meses comprendidos entre abril de 2023 y marzo de 2024 superen la marca de 1,56 °C y así sucesivamente hasta que cesen o disminuyan los efectos de El Niño actual.

¿El salto de calentamiento de 2023 nos empuja a un “territorio inexplorado”?

El segundo punto del informe de la OMM sitúa el calentamiento de 2023 en relación con los registros climáticos históricos, que comenzaron alrededor de 1850: “El año 2023 fue el año más cálido en el registro observacional de 174 años, superando claramente a los años más cálidos anteriores. El calentamiento de 2016 alcanzó 1,29 ± 0,12 °C (por encima de la media de 1850-1900) y el de 2020 alcanzó 1,27 ± 0,13 °C. Los últimos nueve años, 2015-2023, han sido los nueve años más calurosos registrados. (…) La temperatura media mundial para el decenio 2014-2023 es de 1,20 ± 0,12 °C por encima de la media de 1850 a 1900, el período de 10 años más cálido registrado” (OMM 2023).

En 2023, por lo tanto, se observó un aumento del calentamiento medio global de casi 0,2 °C. En el mismo mes de la publicación de este informe de la OMM, Gavin Schmidt, director del Instituto Goddard de Estudios Espaciales (NASA), publicó un artículo llamando la atención sobre la excepcionalidad de este salto en los registros históricos de calentamiento. En su título, el artículo dice a qué se refiere: “Los modelos climáticos no pueden explicar la gigantesca anomalía de calor de 2023. Es posible que estemos en territorio desconocido” (inexplorado). [4] “En los últimos nueve meses, las temperaturas medias de la superficie terrestre y marina han superado los récords anteriores cada mes hasta en 0,2 °C, un margen enorme a escala planetaria”. Para calibrar cuán enorme es realmente este margen, basta recordar que la tasa media de calentamiento global entre 1970 y 2010 fue de 0,18 °C por década, lo que ya representaba una enorme aceleración, ya que la tasa de calentamiento entre 1920 y 1970 fue de 0,04 °C por década. Es comprensible, en este contexto, que Gavin Schmidt retome la hipótesis de que el sistema climático puede haber entrado en un “territorio inexplorado”. Utiliza esta expresión, sin embargo, con la máxima cautela, subrayando que todo sigue dependiendo del comportamiento del clima después de El Niño aún en curso:

“Si la anomalía no se estabiliza para agosto, una expectativa razonable basada en eventos anteriores de El Niño, entonces el mundo está en territorio inexplorado. Esto podría implicar que el calentamiento del planeta ya está alterando fundamentalmente la forma en que funciona el sistema climático, mucho antes de lo que predijeron los científicos. También podría significar que las inferencias estadísticas basadas en eventos pasados son menos confiables de lo que pensábamos, agregando más incertidumbre a los pronósticos estacionales de sequías y patrones de precipitación”.

El término “territorio desconocido” en el presente contexto alude a los mapas de los siglos XV y XVI que utilizaban la expresión terra incognita para referirse a las zonas aún no cartografiadas del planeta. Ha sido empleado desde al menos 2022 por António Guterres, secretario general de la ONU, quien dijo: “los impactos nocivos del cambio climático nos están llevando a territorios inexplorados de destrucción”. [5] El término se ha vuelto recurrente en la comunidad científica y fue utilizado, por ejemplo, por William Ripple y sus colegas en un artículo titulado: “El informe sobre el estado del clima de 2023: Entrando en territorio inexplorado”. [6] En la conclusión de ese artículo, los autores afirman: “Tememos el territorio inexplorado en el que estamos entrando ahora. Las condiciones se volverán muy angustiantes y potencialmente incontrolables para grandes regiones del mundo”. Este mismo temor llevó a Gavin Schmidt a afirmar:

“Es humillante y algo preocupante admitir que ningún año ha confundido más las capacidades predictivas de los científicos del clima que 2023 (…) Se espera una tendencia general de calentamiento debido al aumento de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI), pero este aumento repentino del calor supera con creces las predicciones hechas por los modelos climáticos estadísticos que se basan en observaciones anteriores”.

Sea como fuere, más importante que especular sobre la naturaleza del salto de calentamiento que se produjo en el último año y en los tres meses de 2024, es entender que la última década fue la más cálida no solo en los registros históricos (mediciones instrumentales), sino en todo el Holoceno, los últimos 11.700 años. [7] Por otra parte, si la frontera del Holoceno se cruzó irreversiblemente en la segunda década del siglo, es probable que ya se haya cruzado o se esté cruzando otra frontera en esta tercera década, cuando el calentamiento actual haya superado, o esté a punto de superar, las temperaturas medias globales más altas de un período de referencia mucho más remoto: el Eemiense, el último período interglacial (hace 130.000 a 115.000 años). Esta superación ha sido ampliamente admitida desde mediados de 2023, incluso por la ONU: “Es oficial: la temperatura media mundial en julio de 2023 fue la más alta jamás registrada y probablemente la más alta en al menos 120.000 años”. [8] La ONU hacía eco entonces de Copernicus, la agencia europea del clima, en voz de su directora adjunta, Samantha Burgess, que acababa de afirmar que “el planeta no ha estado tan caliente en los últimos 120.000 años”. [9]

Calentamiento de los océanos

El tercer punto que debe destacarse en el informe de la OMM se refiere al calentamiento de los océanos: “El contenido de calor de los océanos (OHC) ha alcanzado su nivel más alto en los 65 años de registro de observación. (…) Los 2.000 metros superiores del océano continuaron calentándose en 2023. Este calentamiento es irreversible en los próximos siglos y milenios. El calor almacenado en el océano en 2023 (…) superó el valor de 2022 en 13 ± 9 ZJ [ZJ = ZettaJoule, donde 1 ZJ = 10 J21], de acuerdo con las estimaciones publicadas a principios de 2024”. (OMM 2023).

Estas estimaciones de la OMM son, de hecho, consistentes con las de un artículo publicado por Lijing Cheng y sus colegas,[10] que reporta dos valores para el calor almacenado en los océanos (OHC), obtenidos por el Instituto de Física Atmosférica de la Academia China de Ciencias (IAP/CAS) y la Administración Nacional Oceánica y Atmosférica (NOAA). En el caso de la IAP/CAS, el calor almacenado en el océano (OHC) en 2023 superó al de 2022 en 15 ±10 ZJ, y en el caso de la NOAA, el OHC de 2023 superó al de 2022 en 9 ± 5 ZJ.

Es necesario entender bien la magnitud, en términos energéticos, de estas medidas dadas en Zetta Joules (ZJ). Para empezar, 1 ZJ es igual a 10 julios elevado a la 21ª potencia (1 Zj = 10 J21). En términos más concretos: a) todo el consumo de energía de la humanidad durante un año es actualmente del orden de 1/2 Zetta Joule; [11] (b) el consumo de energía de la humanidad entre el inicio del Holoceno (hace 11.700 años) y 1950 asciende a 14 ZJ, y este consumo entre 1950 y 2020, durante el Antropoceno, asciende a 22 ZJ. [12] Esto bastaría para entender que desde 1950 vivimos en una nueva época geológica, el Antropoceno, a pesar de las obstinaciones de ciertos geólogos (pero eso es para otro artículo). Lo que importa aquí es subrayar que la cantidad de energía absorbida por los océanos dio un gran salto en 2023, en comparación con 2022. Según la OMM, este aumento del calor contenido en el océano en 2023 corresponde al menos ocho veces al consumo actual de energía de la humanidad (13 ± 9 ZJ).

Dicho en otra escala, la de los grados centígrados, en 2023 y más aún en los tres primeros meses de 2024, la temperatura media de la superficie del mar (entre 60°S y 60°N) alcanzó y superó los 21 °C por primera vez en los registros históricos. En 2024, este límite se supera desde mediados de enero y se ha mantenido por encima de este nivel hasta el 21 de marzo de 2024. La Figura 1 muestra las anomalías diarias de la temperatura de la superficie del océano (entre 60°S y 60°N) en relación con el promedio de los años 1982-2011.

Figura 1 – Temperatura media diaria de la superficie del océano entre 60ºN y 60ºS en grados centígrados, que muestra las temperaturas de 2023 (naranja), de 2024 al 21 de marzo (línea negra continua) y la media de los años 1982-2011 con dos intervalos de confianza hacia arriba y hacia abajo (líneas punteadas). Fuente: ClimateReanalyzer a partir de datos de la NOAA.

Las temperaturas medias para el período 1982-2011 alcanzaron un máximo de 20,3 oC. Estas mismas temperaturas en 2023 y 2024 alcanzan un máximo de 21,2 °C, un aumento de casi 1 °C en un período de tiempo absolutamente irrisorio. Estamos en una aceleración desenfrenada del calentamiento. Así lo confirma, una vez más, un estudio publicado en 2023, que muestra que “la absorción de calor por parte de los océanos se ha acelerado drásticamente desde la década de 1990, casi duplicándose durante 2010-2020 en comparación con 1990-2000”. [13]

Aumento del nivel del mar

El cuarto punto a comentar en este informe de la OMM se refiere al aumento del nivel del mar: “En 2023, el nivel medio mundial del mar alcanzó un nivel récord en los registros satelitales (desde 1993 hasta la actualidad), lo que refleja el continuo calentamiento de los océanos, así como el derretimiento de los glaciares y las capas de hielo. La tasa de aumento del nivel medio del mar a nivel mundial en los últimos diez años (2014-2023) se ha duplicado con creces desde la primera década de registros satelitales (1993-2002)” (OMM 2023).

La aceleración del aumento del nivel del mar es uno de los aspectos más inequívocos y también una de las consecuencias más dramáticas de la aceleración del calentamiento. Según Copernicus, “la tasa combinada de pérdida de hielo [de Groenlandia y la Antártida] se ha más que triplicado desde la década de 1980, de una pérdida de 120 km3 por año en la década de 1980, a una pérdida de aproximadamente 460 km3 por año en la década de 2010. La pérdida de las capas de hielo de Groenlandia y la Antártida ha sido de 11.000 km3 desde 1970. [14] La Figura 2 muestra la aceleración de las tasas decenales de aumento del nivel del mar entre enero de 1993 y diciembre de 2023.

Figura 2 – Evolución mundial del nivel medio del mar entre enero de 1993 y diciembre de 2023 basada en la altimetría satelital. El área sombreada indica incertidumbre. La tendencia en estos 30 años es de un incremento de 3,43 ±0,3 mm/año. La aceleración es de 0,12 ±0,05 mm por año y la curva está segmentada en tres períodos, lo que indica tres tasas crecientes de aumento del nivel medio anual del nivel del mar: a) enero de 1993 a diciembre de 2002 (2,13 mm/año); b) enero de 2003 a diciembre de 2012 (3,33 mm/año) y c) enero de 2014 a diciembre de 2023 (4,77 mm/año)
Fuente: Organización Meteorológica Mundial, Estado del Clima Mundial 2023, Fig. 6

Pero es importante tener en cuenta que el aumento medio anual de 4,77 mm/año en la década 2014-2023, obviamente ya espectacular, no tiene en cuenta la cola final de esta curva decenal, ya que hay un aumento de 7,6 mm en 2023, respecto a 2022. [15]

El aumento de la inseguridad alimentaria y los refugiados climáticos

El quinto y último punto que se comentará en este rico informe de la OMM (otros se analizarán a su debido tiempo) se refiere al capítulo “Impactos socioeconómicos”, centrado en el aumento de la inseguridad alimentaria y los refugiados climáticos: “La seguridad alimentaria, el desplazamiento de la población y los impactos en las poblaciones vulnerables siguen siendo una preocupación creciente en 2023, con peligros meteorológicos y climáticos que agravan la situación en muchas partes del mundo. Las condiciones meteorológicas y climáticas extremas siguieron desencadenando nuevos y prolongados desplazamientos en 2023 y aumentaron la vulnerabilidad de muchas personas que ya habían sido desarraigadas por situaciones complejas y multicausales de conflicto y violencia. (…) Los fenómenos meteorológicos y climáticos extremos interactúan y, en algunos casos, desencadenan o agravan situaciones relacionadas con la seguridad hídrica y alimentaria, la movilidad de la población y la degradación del medio ambiente” (OMM 2023).

El informe aborda aquí uno de los efectos más trágicos del calentamiento global. Es importante subrayar, desde el principio, la advertencia de sus autores: los impactos más visibles de la emergencia climática, es decir, picos de calor, huracanes, sequías, inundaciones, pérdidas de cosechas, etc., no hacen más que “exacerbar” la inseguridad alimentaria en “poblaciones vulnerables”, víctimas de “situaciones complejas y multicausales de conflicto y violencia”. Pakistán, que ha registrado temperaturas superiores a los 45 °C (54 °C en Turbat en 2017; 52 °C en Jacobabad en 2022), sufrió inundaciones en 2022 que sumergieron cerca de un tercio de su superficie total, imponiendo el desplazamiento de unos 50 millones de personas y la pérdida de 18 mil km2 de su tierra cultivable. Es difícil imaginar que las crisis meteorológicas y climáticas que se avecinan permitan a su población el tiempo que necesita para recuperarse de la catástrofe de 2022. Como se indica en el informe de la OMM:

“En Pakistán, las inundaciones monzónicas de 2022, que desencadenaron el mayor desastre de desplazamiento en una década, siguieron teniendo efectos duraderos en 2023. Las comunidades desplazadas aún se estaban recuperando cuando las fuertes lluvias azotaron algunos distritos en junio de 2023, causando enfermedades transmitidas por el agua y otras enfermedades transmitidas por vectores”.

En septiembre de 2023, la tormenta Daniel inundó casi 3.000 hectáreas de tierras de cultivo clave en la parte oriental de Libia. Además, estas tormentas provocaron el colapso de una presa, afectando el sistema de riego, dañando caminos y el sistema de almacenamiento de granos. Este es un caso típico en el que un evento climático exacerba una situación creada en la esfera política. En 2011, en pleno Ramadán, la OTAN inició un bombardeo sobre Libia que duraría siete meses. La operación (llamada “Operación Protector Unificado”) llevó a cabo 26.000 misiones aéreas sobre Libia, incluidas más de 9.600 misiones de bombardeo. La destrucción del país por la OTAN contravenía directamente una resolución del Consejo de Seguridad, que sólo permitía la prohibición del uso del espacio aéreo del país por parte de las fuerzas gubernamentales. Después de asesinar a su dictador, Muammar al-Gaddafi, y matar e herir a un número indefinido de civiles, nunca reconocidos por la OTAN (se estima que miles), el entonces jefe de la OTAN, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, proclamó en una conferencia de prensa conjunta en Trípoli con Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, respaldado por la OTAN: “Juntos, podemos hacerlo. Libia es finalmente libre”. Y, dirigiéndose a los presentes, concluyó: “Habéis actuado para cambiar vuestra historia y vuestro destino. Actuamos para protegerlos”. [16] Desde esta invasión aérea y naval, se ha desatado el caos en Libia. Este bombardeo es, como es bien sabido, el punto de partida de un estado crónico de anomia y guerra civil. No es casualidad que, como afirma el informe, el país ya estuviera “en estado de crisis alimentaria y necesitado de ayuda externa en julio de 2023, antes de las inundaciones” de septiembre.

El reciente aumento de la inseguridad alimentaria es particularmente cruel en su aspecto más extremo, que es también la más brutal y primitiva de las causas de muerte y sufrimiento: el aumento del hambre aguda y las muertes por inanición a escala mundial desde al menos 2015, después de décadas de progreso en la reducción de la inseguridad alimentaria mundial. Esta sinergia es tanto más evidente cuanto que, como ya se ha dicho, el hambre es el resultado de una combinación de varios factores, entre ellos:

1. El aumento de la desigualdad producido por el triunfo de los “mercados” sobre el modelo socialdemócrata heredado de la historia de conquistas sociales desde el siglo XIX, triunfo que es la primera y principal causa de la pobreza extrema.
2. La escasez real de alimentos debido a las malas cosechas debido a la destrucción de la naturaleza y la desestabilización del clima. Los casos de Brasil y Argentina son ejemplares, pero 2023 fue un año de pérdida de productividad agrícola en todos los continentes. Y el 2023 pronto será recordado con nostalgia por los agricultores.
3. La escasez artificial de alimentos, es decir, la hambruna provocada por la especulación sobre los precios de los alimentos en los mercados de futuros, el grado más sórdido de la patología financiera que hoy domina la economía globalizada, ya que los alimentos se han convertido en una mercancía blanda, es decir, en parte integrante del gran casino al que se ha reducido la economía mundial.
4. La escasez real de alimentos provocada por la pandemia y las guerras.

Es importante detenerse un momento en este último tema, ya que los caudillos han utilizado hoy, como en el pasado, el hambre como arma en los genocidios y la depuración étnica de las poblaciones civiles. Alex de Waal, director de la Fundación para la Paz Mundial, escribió en 2024 que las grandes hambrunas están aumentando de nuevo, desmintiendo sus predicciones optimistas de 2016:[17].

“Me equivoqué. Las grandes hambrunas han vuelto. Subestimé la determinación despiadada de algunos señores de la guerra de emplear el hambre como arma. Y sobreestimé lo mucho que los donantes humanitarios más grandes del mundo se preocupan por alimentar a los hambrientos en las zonas de conflicto”.

“En todo el mundo”, continúa De Waal, “alrededor de dos tercios de las personas reducidas al hambre viven o intentan huir en zonas de guerra o violentas, como Sudán y Gaza”. Y el mundo de los ricos es cada vez más indiferente a esta situación. Basta recordar, según Alex de Waal, que hace cinco años, los presupuestos de ayuda de emergencia de una parte de los países donantes representaban el 60% de los llamamientos de la ONU. En 2023, cayeron al 35%. En realidad, los países ricos no sólo son indiferentes, sino que también y sobre todo son responsables en gran medida de la extrema pobreza de los países africanos, a través del saqueo de los recursos de estos países, los golpes de Estado, la venta de armas a los dictadores de turno, etc. En el caso del genocidio en curso de los palestinos en Gaza, Estados Unidos no hace más que confirmar una vez más su invariable preferencia por la guerra, mientras que las llamadas democracias europeas, por su alineamiento automático con Washington, han perdido su identidad histórica, su prosperidad y, sobre todo, el último remanente de capital moral que les queda.

Los datos de la FAO para 2021, reportados en el informe de la OMM, muestran que los contingentes de la humanidad más grandes se ven reducidos a la inseguridad alimentaria y el hambre:[18]

• Alrededor de 2.300 millones de personas en el mundo sufrieron inseguridad alimentaria moderada o grave, un aumento de 350 millones con respecto a 2019.
• Casi 924 millones de personas (el 11,7% de la población mundial) se enfrentaron a niveles agudos de inseguridad alimentaria, lo que supone un aumento de 207 millones en dos años.
• Las mujeres, como siempre, sufren aún más: el 31,9% de las mujeres a nivel mundial padecían inseguridad alimentaria moderada o grave, en comparación con el 27,6% de los hombres, y esta disparidad se amplió en 2021 en comparación con el año anterior.
• 45 millones de niños menores de cinco años sufrieron emaciación, la forma más aguda de malnutrición, que aumenta hasta 12 veces el riesgo de muerte de los niños. Además, 149 millones de niños menores de cinco años sufrieron retrasos en el crecimiento y el desarrollo debido a la falta crónica de nutrientes esenciales en sus dietas.

Entre 2016 y 2023, el número de personas que necesitan ayuda de emergencia para evitar la hambruna aumentó de 130 millones a 363 millones, un aumento del 180%. Y esas estimaciones ni siquiera incluían la hambruna a la que el gobierno israelí está reduciendo a los palestinos en su ofensiva genocida.

Unos 90 millones de personas padecen hambre aguda en Etiopía, Somalia, Sudán, Sudán del Sur y Yemen. “Estos países, desafortunadamente, tienen sus propias historias de escasez aguda de alimentos, pero el mundo nunca ha visto a todos estos países reducidos a la hambruna al mismo tiempo”. En Brasil, la proporción de brasileños sin recursos para alimentarse y/o sus familias aumentó del 30% en 2019 al 36% en 2021, “alcanzando un nuevo récord en la serie iniciada en 2006”. Entre el 20% más pobre, este porcentaje pasó del 53% en 2019 al 75% en 2021, con impactos mucho mayores entre la población femenina. [19] Esto no solo se debe a la pandemia, sino también a la regresión civilizatoria que trajeron, sobre todo, Temer y Bolsonaro.

Por último, hay que señalar que los países ricos son cada vez más indiferentes a su propia población hambrienta, porque el hambre también aumenta en estos países, empezando por los más ricos, los Estados Unidos. Según el Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos (USDA, por sus siglas en inglés), “en 2022, 44,2 millones de personas vivían en hogares con inseguridad alimentaria. Estas personas constituían el 13,5 por ciento de la población civil no institucionalizada de Estados Unidos e incluían a 30,8 millones de adultos y 13,4 millones de niños”. [20] El avance del hambre en los EE. UU. no tiene precedentes en su historia reciente, ya que en 2021 el número de personas en hogares víctimas de la inseguridad alimentaria fue de “solo” 34 millones. Por lo tanto, se ha producido un aumento de más del 30% en la población en situación de inseguridad alimentaria y un aumento de casi el 45% en la inseguridad alimentaria infantil, el peor resultado desde 2014.

Digamos, para concluir, que el informe de la OMM confirma una vez más lo que nadie más ignora ni debería ignorar: en los últimos diez años, la economía globalizada ha hecho que el planeta sea más inhóspito para la vida. Para 2030, superar el peligroso límite del calentamiento medio global de 1,5 grados centígrados será irreversible, y en las próximas dos décadas, cuando el calentamiento haya alcanzado o superado los 2 grados centígrados, toda nuestra energía y creatividad se consumirán en la tarea de sobrevivir. La civilización termofósil que históricamente nos constituyó, y que hoy nos sigue definiendo, necesita ser superada y las dos primeras condiciones para superarla son la exigencia incondicional de paz y un renacido entusiasmo por la idea de que otro mundo es (todavía) posible.

Notas

[1] Cf. World Meteorological Organization, Provisional State of the Global Climate 2023.

[2] Cf. World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2023. WMO n. 1347

[3] Cf. Copérnico, «Febrero de 2024 fue el más cálido registrado a nivel mundial». 5/III/2024: “La temperatura media mundial de los últimos doce meses (marzo de 2023-febrero de 2024) es (…) 1,56 °C por encima de la media preindustrial de 1850-1900. (…) El mes fue 1,77 °C más cálido que una estimación del promedio de febrero para 1850-1900, el período de referencia preindustrial designado”. 

[4] Cf. Gavin Schmidt, “Los modelos climáticos no pueden explicar la enorme anomalía de calor de 2023: podríamos estar en territorio inexplorado”. Naturaleza, 19/III/2024.

[5] Cf. “Los impactos del cambio climático ‘se dirigen a un territorio inexplorado’, advierte el jefe de la ONU”. Noticias ONU, 13/IX/2022: “Los efectos nocivos del cambio climático nos están llevando a ‘territorios inexplorados de destrucción'”.

[6] Cf. William Ripple et al., “El informe sobre el estado del clima en 2023: Entrando en un territorio inexplorado”. BioScience, X24/2023.

[7] Cf. Shaun A. Marcott et al. “Una reconstrucción de la temperatura regional y global de los últimos 11.300 años”. Ciencia, 339, 6124, 8/III/2013, pp. 1198-1201; Darrel S. Kaufman y Ellie Broadman, “Revisando el enigma de la temperatura global del Holoceno”. Naturaleza, 2023, 614, 13/II/2023, pp. 425-435.

[8] Cf. “Es oficial: julio de 2023 fue el mes más cálido jamás registrado”. Naciones Unidas, 8/VIII/2023: “La temperatura media mundial de julio de 2023 fue la más alta registrada y probablemente en al menos 120.000 años”.

[9] Cf. Samantha Burgess: “no ha sido tan cálido en los últimos 120.000 años” (citado en la nota anterior).

[10] Cf. Lijing Cheng et al., «New Record Ocean Temperature and Related Climate Indicators in 2023» (Nuevos récords de temperaturas oceánicas e indicadores climáticos relacionados en 2023). Avances en Ciencias Atmosféricas, 2024.

[11] Cf. Zheng Lin, “Las temperaturas del océano ayudaron a hacer de 2023 el año más caluroso jamás registrado”. EurekAlert, AAAS, 11/I/2024.

[12] Cf. Jaia Syvitski et al., “El extraordinario consumo de energía humana y los impactos geológicos resultantes a partir de alrededor de 1950 d.C. iniciaron la época del Antropoceno propuesta”. Communications Earth & Environment, 1, 32, 2020: “El gasto energético humano en el Antropoceno, ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), supera al de los 11.700 años anteriores del Holoceno (~14,6 ZJ), en gran parte a través de la combustión de combustibles fósiles”.

[13] Cf. Zhi Li, Matthew H. England y Sjoerd Groeskamp, “Aceleración reciente en la acumulación global de calor oceánico por modo y aguas intermedias”. Nature Communications, 14, 6888, 2023

[14] Véase Servicio de Cambio Climático de Copernicus (C3S), Resumen sobre el estado del clima en Europa 2022.

[15] Cf. Phys.Org, “Un nuevo análisis ve un aumento en el nivel global del mar en 2023 debido a El Niño”, 21/III/2024, basado en datos de la NASA.

[16] Cf. Karin Laub, “La OTAN pone fin a la victoriosa campaña de 7 meses en Libia”. AP, 1 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2011.

[17] Cf. Alex de Waal, “Dije que la era de la hambruna podría estar terminando. Me equivoqué”. The New York Times, 9/III/2024: “Me equivoqué. Las hambrunas han vuelto. Subestimé la cruel determinación de algunos líderes de guerra de usar el hambre como arma. Y sobreestimé lo mucho que los mayores donantes humanitarios del mundo se preocupaban por alimentar a los hambrientos en las zonas de conflicto”.

[18] Cfr. FAO, FIDA, UNICEF, PMA y OMS, El estado de la seguridad alimentaria y la nutrición en el mundo 2022. Roma, FAO.

[19] Cf. Marcelo Neri, “Inseguridad alimentaria en Brasil: pandemia, tendencias y comparaciones internacionales”. Río de Janeiro, FGV Social, 2022.

[20] Cf. Matthew P. Rabbitt et al., “Seguridad alimentaria de los hogares en los Estados Unidos en 2022”. USDA, 2023: “En 2022, 44,2 millones de personas vivían en hogares con inseguridad alimentaria. Constituían el 13,5 por ciento de la población civil no institucionalizada de Estados Unidos e incluían a 30,8 millones de adultos y 13,4 millones de niños”.

Luiz Marques “O salto do aquecimento de 2023 nos introduz em ‘território desconhecido’?”

Por Luiz Marques

Em março de 2024, a Organização Meteorológica Mundial lançou seu relatório anual, The State of the Global Climate 2023 (doravante OMM 2023) confirmando oficialmente seu relatório provisório de outubro de 2023[1] e o que já fora antecipado pelas agências nacionais e europeia do clima, bem como pela literatura científica recente. Citemos e comentemos cinco dos pontos mais importantes desse relatório:[2]

O primeiro ponto refere-se, obviamente, ao aquecimento médio global em 2023: “A temperatura média global próxima à superfície em 2023 foi 1,45 ± 0,12 °C acima da média de 1850–1900” (OMM 2023). Isso, de janeiro a dezembro do ano passado. Segundo o Copernicus, a agência europeia do clima, a temperatura média superficial global, terrestre e marítima combinadas, dos doze meses entre março de 2023 e fevereiro de 2024 foi 1,56 oC mais quente do que a média do período pré-industrial (1850 – 1900) e a temperatura de fevereiro de 2024 foi 1,77 oC mais quente do que a da média dos meses de fevereiro nesse período de referência.[3] É possível, assim, que os 12 meses entre abril de 2023 e março de 2024 superem a marca de 1,56 oC e assim sucessivamente até que os efeitos do atual El Niño cessem ou diminuam.

O salto do aquecimento de 2023 nos introduz em “território desconhecido”?

O segundo ponto do relatório da OMM situa o aquecimento de 2023 em relação aos registros históricos do clima, iniciados por volta de 1850: “O ano de 2023 foi o ano mais quente no registro observacional de 174 anos, superando claramente os anos mais quentes anteriores. O aquecimento de 2016 atingiu 1,29 ± 0,12 °C (acima da média de 1850–1900) e o de 2020 atingiu 1,27 ± 0,13 °C. Os últimos nove anos, 2015–2023, foram os nove anos mais quentes já registrados. (…) A temperatura global média do decênio 2014 – 2023 é 1,20 ± 0,12°C acima da média de 1850 a 1900, o mais quente período de 10 anos já registrado” (OMM 2023).

Observou-se em 2023, portanto, um aumento no aquecimento médio global de quase 0,2 oC. No mesmo mês da publicação desse relatório da OMM, Gavin Schmidt, diretor do Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Nasa), publicou um artigo chamando a atenção para a excepcionalidade desse salto nos registros históricos do aquecimento. Já em seu título, o artigo diz a que vem: “Os modelos climáticos não podem explicar a gigantesca anomalia de calor de 2023. Podemos estar em território desconhecido” (uncharted territory).[4] O autor parte da constatação de que “nos últimos nove meses, as temperaturas médias da superfície terrestre e do mar ultrapassaram os recordes anteriores todos os meses em até 0,2 °C – uma margem enorme em escala planetária”. Para aquilatar quão enorme é efetivamente essa margem, basta lembrar que a taxa de aquecimento médio global entre 1970 e 2010 foi de 0,18 oC por década, o que já representava uma enorme aceleração, uma vez que a taxa de aquecimento entre 1920 e 1970 fora de 0,04 oC por década. Entende-se bem, nesse contexto, que Gavin Schmidt retome a hipótese de que o sistema climático pode ter entrado em “território desconhecido” (uncharted territory). Ele emprega essa expressão, contudo, com a máxima cautela, frisando que tudo ainda depende do comportamento do clima após o El Niño ainda em curso:

“Se a anomalia não se estabilizar até agosto – uma expectativa razoável baseada em eventos anteriores do El Niño – então o mundo estará em território desconhecido. Isto poderia implicar que o aquecimento do planeta já está alterando fundamentalmente a forma como o sistema climático funciona, muito mais cedo do que os cientistas previam. Poderá também significar que as inferências estatísticas baseadas em acontecimentos passados são menos fiáveis do que pensávamos, acrescentando mais incerteza às previsões sazonais de secas e padrões de precipitação”.

O termo “território desconhecido” no presente contexto alude aos mapas dos séculos XV e XVI que traziam a expressão terra incógnita para se referir às zonas ainda não mapeadas do planeta. Elefoi empregado ao menos desde 2022 por António Guterres, secretário-geral da ONU, que afirmou: “os impactos nocivos da mudança climática estão nos levando para territórios desconhecidos de destruição”.[5] O termo se tornou recorrente na comunidade científica e foi empregado, por exemplo, por William Ripple e colegas num artigo intitulado: “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory”.[6] Na conclusão desse artigo, os autores afirmam: “Tememos o território desconhecido em que entramos agora. As condições vão se tornar muito angustiantes e potencialmente incontroláveis para grandes regiões do mundo”. Esse mesmo temor levou Gavin Schmidt a afirmar:

“É humilhante e um tanto preocupante admitir que nenhum ano confundiu mais as capacidades preditivas dos cientistas do clima do que 2023 (…) Espera-se uma tendência geral de aquecimento devido ao aumento das emissões de gases com efeito de estufa (GEE), mas este súbito aumento de calor excede em muito as previsões feitas por modelos climáticos estatísticos que se baseiam em observações anteriores”.

Seja como for, mais importante do que especular sobre a natureza do salto no aquecimento ocorrido no último ano e nos três meses de 2024, é entender que o último decênio foi o mais quente não apenas dos registros históricos (mensurações instrumentais), mas do inteiro Holoceno, os últimos 11.700 anos.[7] Além disso, se a fronteira do Holoceno foi irreversivelmente ultrapassada no segundo decênio do século, outra fronteira provavelmente já o foi também, ou está em vias de sê-lo, neste terceiro decênio, quando o aquecimento atual superou, ou está na iminência de superar, as mais altas temperaturas médias globais de um período de referência muito mais remoto: o Eemiano, o último período interglacial (130 mil a 115 mil anos atrás). Essa ultrapassagem começou a ser largamente admitida desde meados de 2023, inclusive pela ONU: “É oficial: a temperatura média global em julho de 2023 foi a mais alta já registrada e provavelmente a mais alta em pelo menos 120.000 anos”.[8] A ONU repercutia então o Copernicus, a agência europeia do clima, na voz de sua diretora adjunta, Samantha Burgess, a qual acabara de afirmar que “o planeta não esteve tão quente nos últimos 120.000 anos”.[9]

O aquecimento oceânico

O terceiro ponto a se ressaltar no relatório da OMM diz respeito ao aquecimento oceânico: “O calor armazenado nos oceanos (Ocean Heat Content, OHC) atingiu o seu nível mais alto no registro observacional de 65 anos. (…) Os 2.000 metros superiores do oceano continuaram a se aquecer em 2023. Esse aquecimento é irreversível nos próximos séculos e milênios. O calor armazenado no oceano em 2023 (…) excedeu o valor de 2022 em 13 ± 9 ZJ [ZJ = ZettaJoule, sendo que 1 ZJ = 10 J21], consistente com estimativas publicadas no início de 2024”. (OMM 2023)

Essas estimativas da OMM são, de fato, consistentes com as de um artigo publicado por Lijing Cheng e colegas,[10] que reporta dois valores para o calor armazenado nos oceanos (OHC), obtidos pelo Institute of Atmospheric Physics da Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP/CAS) e pelo National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Para o IAP/CAS, o calor armazenado nos oceanos (OHC) em 2023 excedeu o de 2022 em 15 ±10 ZJ, e para o NOAA, o OHC de 2023 excedeu o de 2022 em 9 ± 5 ZJ.

É preciso entender bem a magnitude, em termos energéticos, dessas medidas dadas em Zetta Joules (ZJ). Para começar, 1 ZJ é igual a 10 Joules elevados a 21ª potência (1 Zj = 10 J21). Em termos mais concretos: (a) todo o consumo energético da humanidade durante um ano é atualmente da ordem de ½ Zetta Joule;[11] (b) o consumo energético da humanidade entre o início do Holoceno (11.700 anos atrás) e 1950 monta a 14 ZJ, e esse consumo entre 1950 e 2020, durante o Antropoceno, monta a 22 ZJ.[12] Bastaria isso para entender que desde 1950 vivemos em uma nova época geológica, o Antropoceno, malgrado as recalcitrâncias de certos geólogos (mas isso fica para outro artigo). O que importa aqui é sublinhar que o montante de energia absorvida pelos oceanos deu um salto imenso em 2023, em relação a 2022. Segundo a OMM, esse aumento do calor contido no oceano em 2023 corresponde no mínimo a oito vezes o consumo energético atual da humanidade (13 ± 9 ZJ).

Dito em outra escala, a de graus Celsius, em 2023 e mais ainda nos três primeiros meses de 2024, a temperatura média da superfície do mar (entre 60°S e 60°N) atingiu e superou pela primeira vez nos registros históricos 21 oC. Em 2024, esse limite foi superado desde meados de janeiro e tem se mantido acima desse patamar até 21 de março de 2024. A Figura 1 mostra as anomalias diárias da temperatura superficial dos oceanos (entre 60°S e 60°N) em relação à média dos anos 1982-2011.

Figura 1 – Temperatura média diária superficial do oceano entre 60oN e 60oS em graus Celsius, mostrando as temperaturas de 2023 (laranja), de 2024 até 21 de março (linha preta contínua) e a média dos anos 1982-2011 com dois intervalos de confiança para cima e para baixo (linhas pontilhadas). Fonte: ClimateReanalyzer a partir de dados da NOAA.

As temperaturas médias do período 1982-2011 atingiram no máximo 20,3 oC. Essas mesmas temperaturas em 2023 e 2024 atingem um pico de 21,2 oC, um aumento de quase 1 oC num intervalo de tempo absolutamente irrisório. Estamos em uma desenfreada aceleração do aquecimento. Confirma-o, mais uma vez, um trabalho publicado em 2023, mostrando que “a absorção de calor pelos oceanos acelerou dramaticamente desde a década de 1990, quase duplicando durante 2010-2020 em relação a 1990-2000”.[13]

Elevação do nível do mar

O quarto ponto a ser comentado nesse relatório da OMM refere-se à elevação do nível do mar: “Em 2023, o nível médio global do mar atingiu um nível recorde nos registros dos satélites (de 1993 até o presente), refletindo o aquecimento contínuo dos oceanos, bem como o derretimento de geleiras e mantos de gelo. A taxa de elevação média global do nível do mar nos últimos dez anos (2014–2023) mais do que duplicou em relação à primeira década de registros por satélites (1993–2002)” (OMM 2023).

A aceleração da elevação do nível do mar é um dos aspectos mais inequívocos e também uma das consequências mais dramáticas da aceleração do aquecimento. Segundo o Copernicus, “a taxa combinada de perda de gelo [da Groenlândia e da Antártida] mais do que triplicou desde a década de 1980, passando de uma perda de 120 km3 por ano na década de 1980, para uma perda de cerca de 460 km3 por ano na década de 2010. A perda dos mantos de gelo da Groenlândia e da Antártida foi de 11.000 km3 desde os anos 1970”.[14] A Figura 2 mostra a aceleração das taxas decenais de elevação do nível do mar entre janeiro de 1993 e dezembro de 2023.

Figura 2 – Evolução global do nível médio do mar entre janeiro de 1993 e dezembro de 2023 com base na altimetria de satélite. A área sombreada indica a incerteza. A tendência nesses 30 anos é de uma elevação 3,43 ±0,3 mm/ano. A aceleração é de 0,12 ±0,05 mm por ano e a curva é segmentada em três períodos, indicando três taxas crescentes de elevação média anual do nível do mar: (a) Janeiro de 1993 a Dezembro de 2002 (2,13 mm/ano); (b) Janeiro de 2003 a Dezembro de 2012 (3,33 mm / ano) e (c) Janeiro de 2014 a Dezembro de 2023 (4,77 mm / ano)
Fonte: World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2023, Fig. 6

Mas é importante ter em conta que a elevação média anual de 4,77 mm / ano no decênio 2014-2023, obviamente já espetacular, não leva em conta a cauda final dessa curva decenal, já que se registra uma elevação de 7,6 mm em 2023, em relação a 2022.[15]

O aumento da insegurança alimentar e dos refugiados climáticos

O quinto e último ponto a ser comentado nesse riquíssimo relatório da OMM (outros serão oportunamente objeto de análise) diz respeito ao capítulo “Impactos socioeconômicos”, focado no aumento da insegurança alimentar e dos refugiados climáticos: “A segurança alimentar, os deslocamentos populacionais e os impactos nas populações vulneráveis continuam a ser uma preocupação crescente em 2023, com os perigos meteorológicos e climáticos exacerbando a situação em muitas partes do mundo. As condições meteorológicas e climáticas extremas continuaram a desencadear novos e prolongados deslocamentos em 2023 e aumentaram a vulnerabilidade de muitos que já haviam sido desenraizados por situações complexas e multicausais de conflito e violência. (…) Os eventos meteorológicos e climáticos extremos interagem e, em alguns casos, desencadeiam ou agravam situações relativas à segurança hídrica e alimentar, à mobilidade populacional e à degradação ambiental” (OMM 2023).

O relatório aborda aqui um dos efeitos mais imediatamente trágicos do aquecimento global. É importante sublinhar, desde logo, a advertência dos seus autores: os impactos mais visíveis da emergência climática, isto é, os picos de calor, furacões, secas, inundações, quebras de safras etc. estão apenas “exacerbando” a insegurança alimentar nas “populações vulneráveis”, vítimas de “situações complexas e multicausais de conflito e violência”. Por enquanto, apenas “em alguns casos”, esses impactos climáticos “desencadeiam” tais crises. O agravamento da insegurança alimentar e dos contingentes de refugiados se deve, de fato, à sinergia entre fatores climáticos, ambientais em geral, econômicos, políticos e ideológicos. Mas o clima tem se mostrado um fator cada vez mais relevante nesse contexto socioambiental. O Paquistão, que tem registrado temperaturas acima de 45 oC (54 oC em Turbat em 2017; 52 oC em Jacobabad em 2022), sofreu em 2022 inundações que submergiram cerca de um terço de sua área total, impondo deslocamentos de cerca de 50 milhões de pessoas e a perda de 18 mil km2 de suas terras agricultáveis. É difícil imaginar que as próximas crises meteorológicas e climáticas consintam a seu povo o tempo necessário para se recuperar da catástrofe de 2022. Como afirma o relatório da OMM:

“No Paquistão, as inundações das monções de 2022, que desencadearam a maior catástrofe de deslocação numa década, continuaram a ter impactos duradouros em 2023. As comunidades deslocadas ainda estavam se recuperando quando fortes chuvas atingiram alguns distritos em junho de 2023, causando doenças transmitidas pela água e por outros vetores”.

Em setembro de 2023, a tempestade Daniel inundou quase 3.000 hectares das principais terras agrícolas da parte oriental da Líbia. Além disso, essas tempestades provocaram o colapso de uma barragem, afetando o sistema de irrigação, danificando estradas e o sistema de armazenamento de cereais. Tem-se aqui um típico caso em que um evento climático exacerba uma situação criada na esfera política. Em 2011, em pleno Ramadan, a OTAN começou um bombardeio da Líbia que iria se prolongar por sete meses. A operação (intitulada “Operation Unified Protector”…) empreendeu 26 mil missões aéreas sobre a Líbia, incluindo mais de 9.600 missões de bombardeio. A destruição do país pela OTAN transgredia frontalmente uma resolução do Conselho de Segurança, a qual permitia apenas a proibição de uso do espaço aéreo do país pelas forças governamentais. Após assassinar seu ditador, Muammar al-Gaddafi, e matar e ferir um número indefinido de civis, jamais reconhecido pela OTAN (as estimativas são da ordem de milhares), o então chefe da OTAN, Anders Fogh Rasmussen proclamou numa conferência de imprensa conjunta em Trípoli com Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, apoiado pela OTAN: “Juntos, conseguimos. A Líbia está finalmente livre”. E, dirigindo-se aos presentes, concluiu: “Vocês agiram para mudar a sua história e o seu destino. Agimos para protegê-los”.[16] Desde essa invasão aérea e naval, instalou-se o caos na Líbia. Esse bombardeio é, como se sabe, o marco inicial de um estado crônico de anomia e de guerra civil. Não por acaso, como bem afirma o relatório, o país já se encontrava “em estado de crise alimentar e necessitava assistência externa em julho de 2023, antes das inundações” de setembro.

O aumento recente da insegurança alimentar se demonstra de modo particularmente cruel em seu aspecto mais extremo que é também a mais brutal e primitiva das causas de mortes e sofrimentos: o aumento da fome aguda e das mortes por inanição em escala global desde ao menos 2015, após décadas de progressos na diminuição da insegurança alimentar global. Essa sinergia é tanto mais evidente porque, como já dito, a fome resulta da conjugação de vários fatores, entre os quais se contam:

1. o aumento da desigualdade produzido pelo triunfo dos “mercados” sobre o modelo social-democrata herdado da história das conquistas sociais desde o século XIX, triunfo este que é a causa primeira e principal da pobreza extrema;

2. a escassez real de alimentos por quebras de safras decorrentes da destruição da natureza e da desestabilização do clima. Os casos do Brasil e da Argentina são exemplares, mas 2023 foi um ano de perda de produtividade agrícola em todos os continentes. E 2023 será em breve lembrado com saudades pelos agricultores;

3. a escassez artificial de alimentos, ou seja, a carestia causada pela especulação sobre os preços dos alimentos nos mercados futuros, o grau mais sórdido da patologia financeira que domina hoje a economia globalizada, pois os alimentos tornaram-se soft commodities, isto é, parte integrante do grande cassino a que se reduziu a economia global.

4. a escassez real de alimentos causada pela pandemia e pelas guerras.

É importante se deter um momento nesse último item, pois os senhores da guerra têm hoje, tal como no passado, usado a fome como uma arma nos genocídios e limpezas étnicas das populações civis. Alex de Waal, diretor da World Peace Foundation, escreveu em 2024 que as grandes fomes estão novamente crescendo, desmentindo seus prognósticos otimistas de 2016:[17]

“Eu estava errado. As grandes fomes estão de volta. Subestimei a determinação cruel de alguns senhores da guerra de empregar a morte por inanição (starvation) como uma arma. E superestimei o quanto os maiores doadores humanitários do mundo se importam com alimentar os famintos em zonas de conflito”.

“No mundo todo”, continua de Waal, “cerca de dois terços das pessoas reduzidas à fome vivem em zonas de guerra ou de violência, como o Sudão e Gaza, ou estão tentando fugir delas”. E o mundo dos ricos está cada vez mais indiferente a essa situação. Basta lembrar, sempre segundo Alex de Waal, que há cinco anos, os orçamentos de ajuda emergencial de parte dos países doadores respondiam por 60% dos apelos da ONU. Em 2023, eles caíram para 35%. Na realidade, os países ricos não são apenas indiferentes, são também, e sobretudo, os grandes responsáveis pela pobreza extrema dos países africanos, através da espoliação dos recursos desses países, de golpes de Estado, da venda de armas aos ditadores de plantão etc. No caso do genocídio em curso dos palestinos em Gaza, os EUA apenas confirmam mais uma vez sua invariável preferência pela guerra, enquanto as chamadas democracias europeias, por seu alinhamento, doravante automático, a Washington, perderam sua identidade histórica, sua prosperidade e, sobretudo, o último resquício de capital moral que ainda lhes restava.

Os dados da FAO para 2021, reportados no relatório da OMM, mostram contingentes maiores da humanidade reduzidos à situação de insegurança alimentar e de fome:[18]

• Cerca de 2,3 bilhões de pessoas no mundo sofriam de insegurança alimentar moderada ou grave, um aumento de 350 milhões em relação a 2019.
• Quase 924 milhões de pessoas (11,7% da população mundial) enfrentavam insegurança alimentar em níveis agudos, um aumento de 207 milhões em dois anos.
• As mulheres, como sempre, sofrem ainda mais: 31,9% das mulheres no mundo todo sofriam de insegurança alimentar moderada ou grave, em comparação com 27,6% dos homens e essa disparidade aumentou em 2021 em relação ao ano anterior.
• 45 milhões de crianças com menos de cinco anos sofriam de emaciação, a forma mais aguda de subnutrição, que aumenta o risco de morte das crianças em até 12 vezes. Além disso, 149 milhões de crianças com menos de cinco anos de idade apresentavam atrasos no crescimento e desenvolvimento devido a uma falta crônica de nutrientes essenciais em suas dietas.

Entre 2016 e 2023, o número de pessoas necessitadas de auxílio emergencial para não morrerem de fome aumentou de 130 para 363 milhões, um salto de 180%. E essas estimativas não incluíam ainda a fome a que o governo de Israel está reduzindo os palestinos em sua ofensiva genocida.

Cerca de 90 milhões de pessoas estão agora sofrendo fome aguda na Etiópia, Somália, Sudão, Sudão do Sul e Iêmen. Como lembra ainda Alex de Waal, “esses países, infelizmente, têm suas próprias histórias de escassez alimentar aguda, mas o mundo nunca presenciou todos esses países reduzidos à morte por inanição ao mesmo tempo”. No Brasil, a parcela de brasileiros sem recursos para se alimentar e/ou alimentar sua família aumentou de 30% em 2019 para 36% em 2021, “atingindo novo recorde da série iniciada em 2006”. Entre os 20% mais pobres, essa porcentagem saltou de 53% em 2019 para 75% em 2021, com impactos muito maiores entre a população feminina.[19] Isso não se deve, sabidamente, apenas à pandemia, mas também à regressão civilizacional trazida, sobretudo, por Temer e Bolsonaro.

É preciso, enfim, ressaltar que os países ricos estão cada vez mais indiferentes aos seus próprios famintos, pois a fome está doravante aumentando também nesses países, a começar pelo mais rico, os EUA. Segundo o United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), “em 2022, 44,2 milhões de pessoas viviam em agregados familiares vitimados por insegurança alimentar. Essas pessoas constituíam 13,5% da população civil não institucionalizada dos EUA e incluíam 30,8 milhões de adultos e 13,4 milhões de crianças”.[20] O avanço da fome nos EUA é sem precedentes em sua história recente, pois em 2021 o número de pessoas em agregados familiares vitimados por insegurança alimentar era de “apenas” 34 milhões. Houve, portanto, um aumento de mais de 30% na população com insegurança alimentar e um aumento de quase 45% na insegurança alimentar infantil, o pior resultado desde 2014.

Digamos, para concluir, que o relatório da OMM confirma mais uma vez o que ninguém mais ignora ou deveria ignorar: nos últimos dez anos, a economia globalizada tornou o planeta mais inóspito à vida. Por volta de 2030, a ultrapassagem do limite perigoso de um aquecimento médio global de 1,5 oC terá se tornado irreversível e nos próximos dois decênios, quando o aquecimento tiver atingido ou ultrapassado 2 oC, toda nossa energia e criatividade se consumirá na tarefa de apenas sobreviver. A civilização termo-fóssil que historicamente nos constituiu, e hoje ainda nos define, precisa ser superada e as duas condições primeiras para superá-la é a exigência incondicional de paz e um renascido entusiasmo pela ideia de que outro mundo é (ainda) possível.

Este texto não reflete, necessariamente, a opinião da Unicamp.

Notas

[1] Cf. World Meteorological Organization, Provisional State of the Global Climate 2023.

[2] Cf. World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2023. WMO n. 1347

[3] Cf. Copernicus, “February 2024 was globally the warmest on record”. 5/III/2024: “The global-average temperature for the past twelve months (March 2023–February 2024) is (…) 1.56 °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average. (…) The month was 1.77 °C warmer than an estimate of the February average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period”. 

[4] Cf. Gavin Schmidt, “Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory”. Nature, 19/III/2024.

[5] Cf. “Climate change impacts ‘heading into uncharted territory’, warns UN chief”. UN News, 13/IX/2022: “The harmful impacts of climate change are taking us into ‘uncharted territories of destruction’”.

[6] Cf. William Ripple et al., “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory”. BioScience, 24/X/2023.

[7] Cf. Shaun A. Marcott et al.  “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”. Science, 339, 6124, 8/III/2013, pp. 1198-1201; Darrel S. Kaufman & Ellie Broadman, “Revisiting the Holocene global temperature conundrum”. Nature, 2023, 614, 13/II/2023, pp. 425-435.

[8] Cf. “It’s official: July 2023 was the warmest month ever recorded”. United Nations, 8/VIII/2023: “The global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record and likely for at least 120,000 years”.

[9] Cf. Samantha Burgess: “it has not been this warm for the last 120,000 years” (citada na nota precedente)

[10] Cf. Lijing Cheng et al., “New Record Ocean Temperatures and Related Climate Indicators in 2023”. Advances in Atmospheric Science, 2024.

[11] Cf. Zheng Lin, “Ocean temperatures helped make 2023 the hottest year ever recorded”. EurekAlert, AAAS, 11/I/2024.

[12] Cf. Jaia Syvitski et al., “Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE initiated the proposed Anthropocene Epoch”. Communications Earth & Environment, 1, 32, 2020: “Human energy expenditure in the Anthropocene, ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), exceeds that across the prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6 ZJ), largely through combustion of fossil fuels”. 

[13] Cf. Zhi Li, Matthew H. England & Sjoerd Groeskamp, “Recent acceleration in global ocean heat accumulation by mode and intermediate waters”. Nature Communications, 14, 6888, 2023

[14] Cf. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), “European State of the Climate Summary 2022”

[15] Cf. Phys.Org, “New analysis sees spike in 2023 global sea level due to El Niño”, 21/III/2024, a partir de dados da Nasa

[16] Cf. Karin Laub, “NATO ends victorious 7-month Libya campaign”. AP, 1/XI/2011.

[17] Cf. Alex de Waal, “I Said the Era of Famine Might Be Ending. I Was Wrong”. The New York Times, 9/III/2024: “I was wrong. Famines are back. I underestimated the cruel resolve of some war leaders to use starvation as a weapon. And I overestimated how much the world’s largest humanitarian donors cared about feeding the hungry in conflict zones”.

[18] Cf. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022.  Roma, FAO.

[19] Cf. Marcelo Neri, “Insegurança Alimentar no Brasil: Pandemia, Tendências e Comparações Internacionais”. Rio de Janeiro, FGV Social, 2022.

[20] Cf. Matthew P. Rabbitt et al., “Household Food Security in the United States in 2022”. USDA, 2023: “In 2022, 44.2 million people lived in food-insecure households. They constituted 13.5 percent of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population and included 30.8 million adults and 13.4 million children”.

Luiz Marques. Professor aposentado e colaborador do Departamento de História do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH) da Unicamp. Atualmente é professor sênior da Ilum Escola de Ciência do Centro Nacional de Pesquisa em Energia e Materiais (CNPEM). Pela Editora da Unicamp, publicou Giorgio Vasari, Vida de Michelangelo (1568) , 2011, e Capitalismo e Colapso Ambiental , 2015, 3ª edição, 2018. É membro dos coletivos 660, Ecovirada e Rupturas.

One way we can think about tradition is who inspires us. Traditions of struggle against exploitation and oppression go back thousands of years. Think of peasant revolts around the world; the resistance of Indigenous people on Turtle Island (a term for North America mainly used by some Indigenous nations) that’s been going on since Europeans arrived; the resistance of enslaved Africans and their descendants; anti-slavery fighters like John Brown; the Industrial Workers of the World early in the twentieth century (a high point in the history of the working-class movement in the U.S.); and so many more down to the present. Which of these inspires us most or resonates most strongly with us depends on our experiences, our ideas about who we are, and our politics. When, in I Hope We Choose Love, Kai Cheng Thom urges people on the Left to take the idea of honour seriously, she writes “Honour means acting in a way that your ancestors would be proud of, even if it requires personal sacrifices to do so.” Who we consider to be our ancestors can include people from these various traditions.

Another way of thinking about tradition is more specific: Where do we get our politics from? Where do we get our ideas about our goals, our strategy, and our tactics? That’s what this article is about.

However, before tackling that question I want to make two initial points. First, for revolutionary victory, socialists need a developed and coherent strategy for how this can be achieved: in other words, a program. Second, it’s impossible for socialists to develop a genuine program unless we can synthesize the experiences of many socialist workplace and community organizers from across the range of sectors of the working class and oppressed people in our society and fuse them with the lessons of history distilled as theory. No socialist organization on Turtle Island is large and rooted enough to be able to make such a synthesis. For that reason, none of the organizations as they exist today can develop anything worth calling a program. Tempest doesn’t have a program; all we have is some ideas about goals, strategy, and tactics. This is true of all far-left groups in this part of the world, no matter what some of them claim.

We need ideas about goals, strategy, and tactics to help us answer the political questions we face. Our answers are provisional because they can change as the world changes and as we learn—they’re not set in stone. We should have an attitude of revolutionary humility about our ideas. There are some things we can and should be certain about, since the lessons of some past victories, defeats, and other experiences are so clear. One of these is that to start a transition to a classless and stateless society of freedom, what’s needed are social revolutions made by the working class that establish its democratic rule. But the history of the socialist left tells us that we’re no doubt wrong about some things about which we feel certain today. Today, our outlook about what to do next in our society is limited by how we’re mainly drawing on the experiences of a very small number of people in a time when social struggle is for the most part at a low level. (There are important exceptions, above all at present the Palestine solidarity movement.)

What questions do we face? Let’s start with three big ones. First, what kind of society are we ultimately aiming for? In other words, what’s our political horizon? Second, what would it take to break with capitalism and start a transition to that kind of society? And third, what kind of broad organizations of workers and oppressed people and what kind of socialist political organizations would be needed to make that happen?

Aren’t those questions about far-off, long-term matters? Yes, but they’re still important. Our answers serve as a compass that points toward where we want the working class to ultimately arrive, though we certainly don’t claim to have a path mapped out. Our ideas about what it would take to break with capitalism and start a transition based on democratic planning towards socialism/communism have direct implications for the here and now (Marx used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably, and never thought of socialism as a stage before communism. That idea comes mainly from Stalinism. On this, see Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism.)

Karl Marx. Image source: Picryl.

That’s because our ideas about these long-term issues should inform how we answer more immediate questions. For example, is it important to build democratic member-run membership organizations of the Palestine solidarity movement? (Yes!) To change unions, should socialists prioritize getting elected into executive positions and hired into staff jobs? (No!) Is there a wing of the capitalist class we should seek to include in alliances against the far right? (No!)

So where should we go for our political ideas? In the twentieth century, three major political traditions that considered themselves anti-capitalist dominated the Left. They all still have influence today, though less than they used to. One is parliamentary socialism. This is the dominant politics of the Democratic Socialists of America. The second is Marxism-Leninism.

This is the state ideology that took shape in the USSR in the 1920s and was spread globally through the Communist movement and by the rulers of China and other states modelled on the USSR. The last tradition is Third World nationalist socialism, of which the United Socialist Party of Venezuela founded under the leadership of Hugo Chavez is one example. All three of these traditions treat state ownership of the economy as the basis of socialism. All three act as if socialism could be achieved by a minority (a party or armed forces) acting on behalf of the masses, as a substitute for them (substitutionism), either with or without some kind of revolution. (To be clear, mass socialist political organizations are necessary for revolution, as are new institutions of radically democratic popular power in workplaces and communities. The role of socialist political organizations is to provide direction in the struggle for the working class as a whole to take control of society through such new institutions.) These are three versions of socialism from above.

Social revolution and the transition to socialism would involve the self-emancipation of the working class. No party or other minority acting on behalf of the class can substitute for the rule of the working class itself. One label for this kind of politics is socialism from below.

Fortunately, there are other traditions. The one we should start from—which doesn’t mean it’s got all the answers to today’s political questions—is a kind of revolutionary socialism with several core ideas that distinguish it. First, our goal is a classless and stateless society of freedom in which people democratically plan production to meet their needs and repair humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Second, to start a transition towards that kind of society would take a revolutionary rupture that breaks the existing state and establishes working-class rule in the form of new radically democratic institutions of popular power. Third, such a transition would have to be a liberatory process carried out by ordinary people themselves. In other words, social revolution and the transition to socialism would involve the self-emancipation of the working class. No party or other minority acting on behalf of the class can substitute for the rule of the working class itself. One label for this kind of politics is socialism from below, but what matters is the political content, not the term.

It’s because of these core ideas that we can say,

Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others — even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.

1This quotation doesn’t mean I entirely agree with the politics of the group whose statement I’m quoting.

In the most generous interpretation, these were the politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and, to name some important figures and forces from over a century ago, Rosa Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks, and others on the left wing of the socialist movement before the Russian Revolution, like Eugene Debs in the U.S. After the Russian Revolution, most supporters of these politics united in the Communist International. Those who remained committed to these politics sooner or later came to recognize that, under Joseph Stalin and his successors, the USSR and other so-called “socialist” societies weren’t “building socialism” and their rulers needed to be overthrown. These included Leon Trotsky and socialists for whom his ideas were important. Some of them then tried to go beyond some of the ideas of Trotsky and Trotskyism, like the idea that small socialist groups should try to organize themselves by applying a model developed for  sizeable revolutionary parties—the “micro-party” approach that Tempest rightly rejects.

Rosa Luxemburg. Source: Picryl.

There were also other anti-Stalinist Marxists, including a group in Russia called the Democratic Centralists and, in Spain, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish initials: POUM). A minority of anarchists are part of this tradition too. Some of the people and groups mentioned were more consistent than others in applying a politics of working-class self-emancipation and rejecting substitutionism. And some strands of the tradition have been more insightful than others.

Supporters of these politics were nearly wiped out by fascism, Stalinism, and Cold War anti-communism between the 1930s and 1950s. The survivors were marginalized, which damaged their ability to act and think politically. In the 1960s and 1970s new forces took up these politics or were influenced by them—Walter Rodney, for instance. Unfortunately, in the decades that followed, these forces were then set back—as was the entire radical Left—by major defeats that capitalists and their states inflicted on unions, social movements, and the exploited and oppressed around the world.

Guyanese socialist Walter Rodney. Photo credit: National African-American Reparations Commission.

We should think about this tradition as a trove of political resources, not an identity. (Capitalism today pushes us to obsess about identity in narrow and static ways.) It’s an essential starting point. But its existing resources are far from perfect, and they aren’t sufficient for the politics we need today. We also shouldn’t be uncritical of this tradition: Its supporters’ answers to political questions have sometimes been wrong. Sometimes its supporters’ political practice left a lot to be desired—sectarianism has long been a problem for many political traditions. And sometimes they’ve been wrong about significant issues of analysis even when their politics were generally solid. A good example of this is Lenin’s mistaken idea that reformism—politics that seek only reforms within the existing social order2Radical reformists believe socialism could be achieved by accumulating reforms, without any convulsive rupture with capitalism.—is influential above all because of a  “labor aristocracy,” a minority of workers supposedly bribed by imperialist super-profits.

What’s more, the best answers of the past don’t necessarily answer the questions that face us today. For example, the theory of permanent (uninterrupted) revolution developed by Trotsky in the early 20th century was an important guide to socialist revolution in countries where capitalism wasn’t yet dominant. But today every society in the world is capitalist, and the theory has been superseded.

What’s still important is rejecting the idea of dividing the struggle for socialism into separate stages: first, a national liberation (or “democratic”) stage where capitalism isn’t to be challenged, followed, at some far-off day, a socialist stage. This idea has done enormous damage to the Left globally. It leads to socialists supporting governments that, regardless of what they say they’re doing, are administering capitalism through capitalist states. Examples include the African National Congress government in South Africa (which includes members of the South African Communist Party) and the Movement Towards Socialism government in Bolivia.

Vietnamese Trotskyist Tạ Thu Thâu. Source: Wikipedia.

There are no useful answers to be found in this tradition to some questions that face us today, after the passing of the classical workers’ movement. Above all, we won’t find answers about how to contribute to building unity, solidarity, democratic self-organization, and support for radical politics in a deeply divided and atomized working class in conditions shaped by contemporary capitalism, including the social industry and the deepening ecological crisis. But there are ideas that can help us as we work on this in cooperation with people who are influenced by various political traditions. One of these is the strategic concept of the united front. This theory was developed as a guide to action for revolutionary socialist parties that needed to relate to workers who supported larger and more influential reformist parties, and to the leaders of those parties. It can’t simply be applied by much smaller socialist groups in very different circumstances. Still, it’s valuable.

There are also valuable ideas from other traditions that supporters of this kind of socialism should draw on to help us develop our politics. For example, to take into account how racism confers advantages on white workers, we should build on the insights of W.E.B. DuBois and those socialists who most seriously grappled with those insights in the 1960s and 1970s, like the Sojourner Truth Organization. And there are valuable ideas to learn from today’s abolitionist, anti-racist feminism, and trans liberation politics.

Finally, we should aspire to develop this kind of revolutionary socialism in ways that confront the challenges of our times. Our task isn’t to guard a faith, a static tradition. We need to think for ourselves, collectively, using anti-racist, queer, feminist, and Marxist analyses of the society we’re trying to change. Yet, let’s remember that real advances for socialist ideas about strategy and tactics can only come from participating in and learning from upsurges of mass struggle. It’s those struggles that make real advances in political ideas possible.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

The troubling ties of Richard Mack and his far-right pro-paramilitary group, Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, have been well documented by IREHR and others. This weekend, Richard Mack looks to add to his organization’s list of bigoted associations when he makes an April 13 appearance at The Altar Church in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The senior pastor of the host church is former state representative Tim Remington (R-2B), appointed in 2020 by Governor Little.

Titled “LIBERTY, THE CONSTITUTION, AND KOOTENAI COUNTY,” the all-day CSPOA event is slated to include an afternoon session open to the public and a morning session “Open to Law Enforcement, Incumbents and Candidates,” in the words of a flyer circulating about the event.

Anti-Mormon Bigotry

Interestingly for Richard Mack and Sam Bushman, who are Mormon, the church also aims animus at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon church.

The website of The Altar Church features a section on “Apologetics,” which includes multiple videos attacking the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In a December 2018 sermon, Pastor Danny Cleave quoted the Apostle Paul in Galatians warning against those that would “pervert the Gospel of Christ, directing, “But that we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached, let him be accursed.”[1] Cleave concluded, “I believe that that passage of scripture was prophetic in regards to both Mormonism and the religion of Islam.”

Pastor Danny Cleave

Cleave went further in another video on the topic. Describing a Mormon claim of experiencing a “burning in your bosom,” in part as evidence of the Book of Mormon’s veracity, Cleave said he would “caution anyone to base truth off of a feeling. Feelings can be given by things other than God for certain…it’s no question that Satan himself could generate those feelings and cause us to feel something.”[2]

Cleave criticized Mormonism for a lack of archaeological evidence in support of the history told in the Book of Mormon, even as his own church claims that “an honest” reader of the Bible would have “plenty of confidence” that the universe was created in “six literal days;” that the theory of evolution is a “lie;” and the idea of an earth millions-of-years old “unscientific.”[3]

Anti-LGBTQ+ and Anti-Abortion

The Altar Church makes clear its religiously-constructed bigotry against LGBTQ+ people, lumping “homosexuality, lesbianism, [and] bisexuality” with “bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery and pornography” as “sinful perversions of God’s gift of sex.” Continuing that, “We believe that God disapproves of and forbids any attempt to alter one’s gender by surgery or appearance,” the group declares, “We believe that the only legitimate marriage is the joining of one man and one woman.”[4]

The Altar Church also holds that the state should be “answerable to God and governed by His Word” and rejects rape, incest, and “physical mental well being (sic) of the mother” exceptions for abortion:

“Abortion is murder. We reject any teaching that abortions of pregnancies due to rape, incest, birth defects, gender selection, birth or population control, or the physical mental well being of the mother are acceptable.”[5]

CSPOA Idaho Connections

CSPOA and its leaders have some known interactions with Idaho law enforcement. In May 2021, sitting Idaho County Sheriff Doug Ulmer posted a photo of himself with CSPOA trainer KrisAnne Hall on his “Doug Ulmer Idaho County Sheriff” Facebook page. Ulmer wrote, “Had the opportunity to meet KrisAnn (sic) Hall…Great speaker if you get the opportunity to attend one of her events it’s very informative.”[6]

KrisAnne Hall is a CSPOA trainer who holds that the 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution – cornerstones of civil and voting rights– are unlawful. Hall’s ideas have also influenced Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights network.

That same year, at a meeting of the Nez Perce County Republican Committee, Sheriff Ulmer was photographed with Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Mark Lamb—head of the “Constitutional Sheriff” group, Protect America Now (PAN) and a CSPOA member. Lamb’s group PAN is a far-right sheriff group that, like CSPOA, has entered the fray of activism around allegations of electoral fraud. Ulmer thanked sitting Nez Perce County Sheriff Bryce Scrimsher (also in the photo) for the invite to the event.

In 2014, CSPOA circulated a petition opposing Obama-administration gun policies and a related list of “sheriffs, state sheriff’s associations, and police chiefs [that] have vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun control measures.” CSPOA described that “the list below includes members of the CSPOA and any others who have gone on record to uphold their oath by having made public statements, written open letters or contacted us personally and asked to be included.”[7]

Currently sitting sheriffs whose names appeared on the CSPOA list include Twin Falls County Sheriff Tom Carter, described as a “CSPOA Member,” Adams County Sheriff Ryan Zollman, listed as signing the petition, and Bonner County Sheriff Darryl Wheeler, Canyon County Sheriff Kiernan Donahue, Clearwater County Sheriff Chris Goetz, and Washington County Sheriff Matt Thomas.[8]

According to the Boundary County Sheriff’s Department, a corporal who “may have had contact with the CSPOA and/or Richard Mack” retired effective April 1, 2024.[9]

The website Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs described Sheriff Wheeler, Sheriff Donahue, Sheriff Goetz, and Sheriff Carter as CSPOA members. However, this claim’s source is unclear and may be based simply on their appearance on the CSPOA list.[10]

The Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs declares its website “designed to be a one-stop place where citizens in the state can see if their sheriff, or candidate running for sheriffs, has pledged to uphold the Constitution, rather then (sic) the whims of the Federal Government;” that the website “will include the details of why we gave them this rating;” and describing that “If the sheriff in your county belongs to CSPOA we’ve given them a rating of Constitutional Sheriff for the time being. That can change if you have verifiable information we can use. We’ll still include the detail that they are a member of CSPOA.”[11]

Writing in 2022 for the far-right Idaho Dispatch, Doug Traubel cited CSPOA-trained officers as those who “know what the Constitution is.” In contrast to “weak establishment office holders…up for re-election in two years,” Traubel named current Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler and Adams County Prosecutor Chris Boyd as “the only two exceptions I am aware of that put their oath in action.”[12]

IREHR has sent public records requests and our concern about CSPOA’s recruitment efforts to sheriffs across Idaho. In the meantime, community members and law officers must make clear that CSPOA has no business in law enforcement.

NOTES

[1] The Altar Church Dec. 5, 2018 Apologetics, Mormonism Part I Pastor Danny Cleave.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3bG_YInb7o

[2] The Altar Church Dec. 5, Dec. 18, 2018, Apologetics, Mormonism Part II, Pastor Danny Cleave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tS2t1SF2D4

[3] The Altar Church. Did God Create the World in Six Literal Days?. https://altarcda.com/did-god-create-the-world-in-six-literal-days/; The Altar Church. Is the Theory of Evolution True?. https://altarcda.com/evolution/; The Altar Church. Dec. 18, 2018, Apologetics, Mormonism Part II, Pastor Danny Cleave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tS2t1SF2D4Accessed April 5, 2024

[4] The Altar Church. Statement of Faith. https://altarcda.com/statement-of-faith/. Accessed April 5, 2024.

[5] The Altar Church. Statement of Faith. https://altarcda.com/statement-of-faith/. Accessed April 5, 2024.

[6] Doug Ulmer Idaho County Sheriff. Facebook. May 7, 2021.

[7] Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. GROWING LIST OF SHERIFFS, ASSOCIATIONS AND POLICE CHIEFS SAYING ‘NO’ TO OBAMA GUN CONTRO. February 1, 2024. WayBackMachine. https://web.archive.org/web/20140530105709/http://cspoa.org/sheriffs-gun-rights/

[8] Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. GROWING LIST OF SHERIFFS, ASSOCIATIONS AND POLICE CHIEFS SAYING ‘NO’ TO OBAMA GUN CONTRO. February 1, 2024. WayBackMachine. https://web.archive.org/web/20140530105709/http://cspoa.org/sheriffs-gun-rights/

[9] Boundary County Sheriffs Office. Email response to public records request. April 4, 2024.

[10] The Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs website states the following; Adams County Sheriff Ryan Zollman: “a solid Consitutional (sic) Sheriff. He has partnered with sheriffs from Washington and Payette counties, as well as Malhuer (sic) County in Oregon, in an effort to defend the citizens of their counties from federal government overreach.”

Bonner County Sheriff Darryl Wheeler: “Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler is a member of the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association.”

Canyon County Sheriff Kiernan Donahue: “Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue is a member of the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association. However, there are reports that this is a recent development. According to sources Sheriff Donahue didn’t even know what the CSPOA was until recently and according to his opponent had called organizations like OathKeepers ‘anti-Law Enforcement’ organizations.”

Clearwater County Sheriff Chris Goetz: “Clearwater County Sheriff Chris Goetz is a member of the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association.”

Twin Falls County Sheriff Tom Carter is a member of the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association.

Washington County Sheriff Matt Thomas: “Washington County Sheriff Matt Thomas is a solid Consitutional (sic) Sheriff. He has partnered with sheriffs from Adams and Payette counties, as well as Malhuer County in Oregon, in an effort to defend the citizens of their counties from federal government overreach. Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs. Adams County. https://www.idahocs.org/Adams.html; Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs. Bonner County. https://www.idahocs.org/Bonner.html; Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs. Canyon County. https://www.idahocs.org/Canyon.html; Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs. Clearwater County. https://www.idahocs.org/Clearwater.html; Idaho Constitutional Sheriffs. Twin Falls County. https://www.idahocs.org/TwinFalls.html; Idaho Constituti0nal Sheriffs. https://www.idahocs.org/Washington.html. Accessed April 5, 2024.

[11] Idaho County Sheriffs. https://www.idahocs.org/. Accessed April 4, 2024.

[12] Traubel, Doug. Op-Ed: WWCSD? What Would a Constitutional Sheriff Do?. The Idaho Dispatch. Octdober 28, 2022. https://idahodispatch.com/op-ed-wwcsd-what-would-a-constitutional-sheriff-do/

The post CSPOA Gathering Scheduled for North Idaho Anti-Mormon, Anti-LGBTQ+ Church appeared first on Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

With the far-right pro-paramilitary group CSPOA attempting to infiltrate Idaho law enforcement, we alerted sheriffs across the state about the dangers and urged them to reject CSPOA’s advances. Here’s the letter we sent to sheriffs and Governor Brad Little. 

April 8, 2024

Dear Sheriff:

It has come to our attention that a notorious group with ties to insurrectionists and white nationalists is attempting to recruit law enforcement in Idaho, potentially including you and your deputies.

We are reaching out to your department with a sense of urgency and concern regarding the upcoming plans by the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) for an all-day event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on April 13th. CSPOA leader Richard Mack also announced a special morning session “open to law enforcement.” It is crucial to consider the potential risks and implications of participating in this event.

In addition to the concerns of our organization, it is important to note that both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center categorize CSPOA as an “anti-government extremist” group. This classification should raise serious concerns and prompt a cautious approach towards any involvement with the CSPOA.

The far-right pro-paramilitary group promotes the long-discredited idea derived from the violently racist and antisemitic Posse Comitatus that sheriffs can usurp the judicial branch’s role in interpreting the Constitution and unilaterally override federal, state, and local laws. The sheriff’s job is challenging enough without being saddled with these unconstitutional burdens.

Here are some facts about the group’s founder, the current CEO, the advisory board, and members for you to consider.

CSPOA Founder Richard Mack

The CSPOA was founded by former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack—a longtime militia movement figure and founding board member of the insurrectionist paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers. Six Oath Keepers leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their part in the January 6th insurrection. According to the Department of Justice, the “manners and means” used by defendants convicted in two separate Oath Keepers trials included “using force against law enforcement officers while inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

While Mack told Reuters that he left the Oath Keepers’ board around 2016 because the group became too militant, he and other CSPOA leaders maintained a relationship with the insurrectionist group. In fact, on January 5, 2021, CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman had Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes on his radio program the day before the insurrection to encourage others to join his insurrectionary plans. Bushman continues to defend Rhodes on his program.

Mack has also made clear that he would support using private militias against government officials, writing, “People get all upset when they hear about militias, but what’s wrong with it? I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to call out my posse against the federal government if it gets out of hand.”

Before returning to efforts to infiltrate law enforcement, in 2021, Mack toured the country with an antisemitic conspiracy theorist spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

While Mack spends considerable time stressing his devotion to Constitutional rights, his record and that of other law officers affiliated with CSPOA has too often been wanting in this regard.

Richard Mack’s history in law enforcement is also worthy of consideration. In 1985, while serving in the Provo, Utah, police department, Mack’s apparent misconduct landed a man on death row and in prison for nearly 30 years. As described in a 116-page federal court ruling, during the investigation into a high-profile murder case, Mack arranged to pay the rent, heat, and phone bills of two key witnesses and give them cash – totaling some $4,000 across several months. As a result, a Fourth District Court Judge overturned the conviction and death sentence of the man based on the misconduct of Mack, other officers, and the prosecutor. One witness also “testified that Officer Mack threatened her and [her husband] with arrest, deportation, and loss of their son, and that this occurred three times.” In addition, witnesses testified that they were coached to lie about having received gifts and about the defendant planning to rape the murder victim. The judge wrote, “Officer Mack’s inconsistent statements—all aimed at painting the police and his own conduct in a more favorable light— seriously undermined his credibility.”

CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman

When Richard Mack took a $20,000-a-month position on the board of a group spreading COVID misinformation, Sam Bushman was promoted to CEO of CSPOA. Sam Bushman never served in law enforcement. He has, however, been involved with promoting troubling white nationalist organizations, including groups advocating secession and killing law enforcement.

Already facing growing pressure for ties to white nationalists, last October, Bushman appeared on the podcast of a Hitler-loving white nationalist. On that program, Bushman confessed that he’d been a longtime reader of and remains a supporter of the white nationalist publications Spotlight and American Free Press.

CSPOA CEO Sam Bushman has used his radio show to promote and build a relationship with the white nationalist, antisemitic, and secessionist League of the South. In 1990, League of the South Chief of Statt Michael Tubbs pleaded guilty to stealing M-16 rifles from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, serving four years in prison. In 2017, Tubbs was named commander of the League of the South’s paramilitary branch, the Southern Defense Force.

Identity Dixie leader Jim O’Brien, aka Padraig Martin, a guest on Bushman’s radio show, League of the South ally, and co-editor of a pro-secessionist book promoted by Bushman, wrote this troubling passage about murdering law enforcement:

“The lesson of the egregious Stewart Rhodes prison sentence – as well as every other J6 Protester languishing in a prison, – is the following: if you are going to start a revolution of any kind, even if your purpose had legal or Constitutional merit, you better not stop at the gates. You better go all in. Do not leave a single police officer, Congressman, judge, or any other functionary of government alive…[T]he next time you take part in a rightwing protest be prepared to kill them all. Half measures are no longer an option.”

Bushman also recently announced on his radio show that he is a member of fugitive paramilitary figure Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights network. While the group is most well-known for threatening hospitals and public health officials, one People’s Rights network member is serving an 18-year sentence for a northern Idaho shootout with law enforcement. Another is awaiting trial in Nevada for threatening law enforcement.

CSPOA Advisory Board

Mack and Bushman aren’t the only CSPOA figures of concern. The group’s advisory board includes a former member of a white nationalist secessionist group and a sheriff involved in an attempt to seize voting machines.

Michael Peroutka was a national board member of the white nationalist secessionist group, the League of the South, a group that seeks a whites-only ethnostate in the U.S. South, promotes vicious antisemitism, and has forged alliances with neo-Nazis. Peroutka has denounced the Union’s victory in what he calls the “War Between the States.” Peroutka even led the League of the South convention in singing what he called the “national anthem” – “Dixie.” While Peroutka later backed away when his ties were exposed, he stated, “I don’t have any problem with the organization.”

Peroutka currently leads the Institute on the Constitution (IOTC). This group promotes anti-Muslim bigotry and state nullification. It has distributed material stating that “We see no reason why men should not discriminate on grounds of religion, race, or nationality if they wish.” Peroutka even pledged to use the Institute on the Constitution to aid the League of the South and advance the cause of imposing biblical law.

CSPOA Advisory Board member Barry County, Michigan, Sheriff Dar Leaf was an unindicted co-conspirator in a Michigan voting machine tampering case. Emails obtained by Bridge Michigan show that Sheriff Leaf tried to enlist fellow “constitutional sheriffs” to seize Dominion voting machines at the heart of the election conspiracy promoted by then-President Donald Trump.

In May 2020, Sheriff Leaf shared the stage with members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, including one of the men arrested in the plot to kidnap the governor.

Other CSPOA-Affiliated Sheriffs

CSPOA ranks are filled with members who have tarnished the image of law enforcement and harmed communities. Multiple CSPOA-affiliated law officers have engaged in intimidation and illegal and potentially illegal practices.

• Former Edwards County (TX) Sheriff Pam Elliot, a CSPOA member featured on the cover of Mack’s book, Are You a David?, and her department engaged in activity that intimidated political opponents and voters, including Edwards County deputies appearing at polling stations. Election attorney Buck Wood described the latter as “pure and simple intimidation.”
• In 2022 Real County (TX) Sheriff Nathan Johnson, who attended a Texas CSPOA training, was put under criminal investigation for repeatedly seizing money from undocumented immigrants, even if they were not charged with a state crime – actions to which he admitted.
• Culpepper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins, a featured speaker at CSPOA’s 2020 conference, was indicted in June on a slew of corruption charges related to a scheme that offered police badges and gun permits in exchange for payments or political contributions.
• CSPOA member Frederick County, Maryland Sheriff Charles “Chuck” Austin Jenkins was indicted in April by a federal grand jury for breaking federal gun laws. Jenkins is alleged to have defrauded the United States by interfering with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by making false statements and representations in paperwork submitted to the ATF to obtain machine guns that were used by campaign supporter Robert Justin Krop’s firearms business, The Machine Gun Nest.
• Riverside County, California Sheriff Chad Bianco, is not only a prominent CSPOA member, he’s also been a member of the insurrectionist group, the Oath Keepers.
• Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff who received a 2012 CSPOA award, was convicted of criminal contempt in 2017 after refusing to end his department’s racial profiling practices. As of 2015, taxpayers had paid $8.2 million for the case.
• In 2019, CSPOA presented former Republic, Washington Police Chief Loren Culp with its “Police Chief of the Decade” award. On April 3, 2024, the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs issued Loren Culp a “notice of…proposed expulsion” from the Association because of “numerous offensive public social media posts and comments” deemed to be “unbecoming of a WASPC member.”

We could go on, but I think you get the idea. At a time when law enforcement and community relations are already strained, efforts of a far-right group to infiltrate law enforcement pose a grave and growing threat to both officers and department credibility. I think we can all agree that groups like CSPOA have no place in law enforcement. We urge you to speak out to make it clear that CSPOA has no place in American law enforcement. As this issue is time-sensitive, we would appreciate a rapid response. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

Devin Burghart
Executive Director
IREHR

 

 

The post IREHR’s Letter to Idaho Sheriffs and Governor appeared first on Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

Por Juan Pablo Neri
Discurso presentado en la Casa Museo Solón, 4 de abril de 2024

Agradecimientos,

Antes de iniciar la presentación, me gustaría realizar algunos apuntes de contexto, que me parecen cruciales. Creo que no puede caber duda que ya estamos en un periodo de transformación profunda del sistema mundial. Es decir, no es que esa transformación va a llegar en el futuro, como vaticinaron tan reiteradamente intelectuales como Wallerstein, Samir Amin o Giovanni Arrighi. Ya estamos en ese momento. Por lo tanto, es urgente que nos detengamos a pensar ¿En qué consiste esta transformación? Y ¿Cómo nos afecta?

La hegemonía de occidente, entendido como un bloque y una alianza de potencias, se halla en un proceso de declive. Por ejemplo, la unidad europea, que era uno de los indicadores del final de la historia fukuyamista, está cada vez más en tela de juicio. En la actualidad, no existe un liderazgo europeo, como todavía ocurría hace un par de años con la figura de Angela Merkel. Personajes como Schulz o Macron quisieran ocupar ese lugar, pero esa es una causa que parece perdida. En contrapartida, no solo hay un resurgimiento de movimientos fascistas en el viejo continente, sino que también han vuelto a soplar aires de guerra. Llamados de los gobiernos a armarse y prepararse para una economía bélica, y la idea de reponer el servicio militar obligatorio. Todos acá sabemos cuál es el resultado plausible de esa combinación de factores.

Por otra parte, durante las últimas cinco décadas, por decir lo menos, la relevancia global de Europa dependió, casi plenamente, de una relación servil y subordinada con Estados Unidos. ¡Lógicamente! La recuperación del viejo continente, después de la WWII, fue posible gracias a una planificación colosal, dirigida expresamente a devolver a Europa su posición económica privilegiada. Sin embargo, esa posición económica privilegiada y dominante de las potencias occidentales ya ha sido ampliamente puesta en cuestión. ¿Cómo? Notablemente, a partir del ascenso económico y geopolítico de nuevas potencias. Principalmente, China e India, entre otras economías emergentes.

Ahora bien, esto no quiere decir que exista un proceso de sustitución entre cuál o cuáles serán las nuevas potencias dominantes. Eso es algo que debe quedar claro. Pero, el simple de hecho de que estas nuevas potencias menoscaben, en la práctica, el predominio geopolítico de las potencias occidentales, constituye una amenaza palpable para su hegemonía. Por ejemplo, la capacidad de China de promover flujos comerciales masivos que dejan de lado a occidente; el hecho de que estas potencias lograron controlar la mayor parte de la producción industrial; y la contestación fáctica de la denominada “Pax americana”, no solo a partir la incursión militar convencional de Rusia sobre Ucrania, sino también por la creciente presencia militar de China en el sudeste asiático. Todos estos elementos son indicadores claros del proceso de transformación al que me refiero.

Desde luego, Europa y Estados Unidos cargan con la mayor parte de la responsabilidad sobre este proceso. Por un lado, fueron los gobiernos de las principales potencias de este bloque, sobre todo Estados Unidos y Reino Unido, los que decidieron arbitrariamente, sin ningún fundamento económico serio, quebrar la relación Estado-Capital, para darle rienda suelta al segundo. Esto es lo que hasta el presente conocemos como “neoliberalismo”. En consecuencia, se produjo una migración de las actividades industriales hacia paraísos de superexplotación laboral, como lo fue y lo sigue siendo China. En ese contexto, China había decidido ingresar en la economía capitalista, pero lo hizo con la formula opuesta. Con un sistema en el que Estado y Capital tienen una relación rígida y planificada.

Por el otro lado, aunque este es un tema sobre el que no voy a ahondar ahora, las potencias occidentales decidieron abandonar por completo su legado histórico de valores y principios liberales, ilustrados y universales. Es posible argumentar que lo hicieron para promover intereses privados y para fortalecer su posición geopolítica. Pero esta es otra crisis, más de orden civilizatorio, que es fundamental examinar. La manifestación más brutal y abyecta de este abandono, es el infame genocidio que impulsa el Estado de Israel en territorio palestino en el presente, con el apoyo y el auspicio incondicionales de Occidente. Esta incursión es también un síntoma claro del declive de la hegemonía occidental. Esta preocupación fue expresada por el propio presidente de Estados Unidos y otros altos funcionarios europeos.

Nuevamente, con todos estos apuntes no es mi intención indicar que el poderío de estas potencias esté llegando a su fin. Simplemente, que existen elementos en la arena internacional, que lo están poniendo en cuestión. Por lo demás, el poderío norteamericano continúa siendo incontestable, tanto en términos militares, como económicos. Sin embargo, el hecho que estos cambios estén ocurriendo, en particular, el ascenso de nuevas superpotencias, como dijo Kissinger, constituye en sí mismo una amenaza para esta potencia y sus aliados. Y, como sucede con toda potencia imperial que ve su existencia amenazada, la respuesta solo puede ser una afirmación violenta de poder.

En este sentido, se pueden señalar algunas dinámicas que pueden resultar problemáticas en los siguientes años. 1.- las potencias occidentales, a la cabeza de Estados Unidos han iniciado una serie de políticas de reforma económica que son abiertamente anti-globalistas. Así es, los grandes paladines de la globalización, ahora intentan contenerla. 2.- las amenazas militaristas y bélicas que profieren las potencias europeas, para evitar la victoria de Rusia sobre Ucrania. En este caso, la oposición a Rusia es, para mí, el camino correcto, pero una escalada de este conflicto a nivel continental sería catastrófica. 3.- una vez más, el apoyo al genocidio en territorio palestino es un tema que pone en juego el destino de la humanidad moderna.

Estos son algunos temas del contexto que nos toca vivir, que me parece que son cruciales para cualquier análisis geopolítico y de relaciones internacionales. Nos toca atravesar un proceso que va a estar plagado de contradicciones. Si bien en el libro señalo que estamos ingresando en un mundo multipolar, eso es algo que puede tomar más tiempo y que, con seguridad, intentará ser contenido por las potencias occidentales.

Después de esa brevísima introducción, voy a realizar algunos apuntes sobre temas que son discutidos en este libro. Seguramente, a muchos les ha llamado la atención el título. ¿Por qué el cóndor necio y el dragón al acecho? En primera instancia, en lo que respecta al dragón, no me refiero a una amenaza de China. Ese juicio de valor se lo dejo a los think-tanks reaccionarios norteamericanos. Me refiero a un dragón sigiloso y paciente. Estar al acecho implica observar de manera cautelosa. Eso es lo que ha hecho China, durante las últimas décadas.

Desde luego, si eres un pescador filipino, o un patrullero fronterizo en Kashmir, la política exterior china no la experimentas como “al acecho”, sino como una amenaza frontal. Pero a nivel global o macro, la cimentación que lleva a cabo China de su posición geopolítica ha sido sobre todo paciente. Por ejemplo, otorgan créditos pacientes; no les interesa especular inmediatamente con los activos de otros países; tampoco consiguieron su posición económica ventajosa a partir de intervenir, colonizar y saquear, como lo han hecho las potencias occidentales, desde el siglo XVI, hasta ahora. Y, como aprendí de la tesis te Alejandro Zárate, el relato histórico que esta potencia promueve sobre su desarrollo es de muy larga data. Se remonta a 5000 años atrás, cuando inicia su historia imperial. Por lo tanto, también se proyecta en el largo plazo.

Dicho esto, salvo por la política cada vez más agresiva de China sobre su área de influencia directa, que es bastante lógica considerando que se trata de una potencia en ascenso; no existen indicadores concluyentes como para afirmar que esta potencia impulsa, en el presente, un proyecto de hegemonía global y de sustitución de las potencias occidentales. Sencillamente, se trata de una potencia que intenta afirmar una posición favorable y enfocada en fortalecer sus propias capacidades. Un objetivo pragmático y auto-centrado. En este sentido, la narrativa promovida desde occidente, sobre el peligro del ascenso de China, más que señalar una amenaza, son una cantaleta de potencias -sobre todo las europeas- que son cada vez más irrelevantes.

Ahora bien, esto no quiere decir que estamos ante una potencia benevolente. Lo que intento señalar es que ese enfoque pragmático y auto-centrado es también la manera en cómo China se relaciona con los demás países y regiones del mundo. Es decir, con el principal objetivo de seguir fortaleciendo sus capacidades y su desarrollo interno. Por el otro lado, ¿Qué sucede en el caso del cóndor, o sea, Bolivia?

Las dos críticas centrales que elaboro en el libro tienen que ver con 1.- el modelo de desarrollo boliviano y 2.- el enfoque de nuestra política exterior. Entre ambos temas, el primero es el que me parece más importante. Este es un tema sobre el que he insistido bastante, en discusiones, columnas y, desde luego, acá. Bolivia tiene la característica perniciosa de ser una economía de exportación y dependiente. ¿Qué quiere decir esto? Por un lado, que los sectores más importantes de la economía, en términos de generación de riqueza nacional, han sido y continúan siendo la extracción, producción y comercialización de bienes primarios. Por otra parte, esto significa que la mayor parte de los bienes de consumo acabados (autos, electrodomésticos, ropa, etc.) son importados. Ya sea por canales formales o informales.

Adicionalmente, estos grandes sectores vinculados con los bienes primarios, no son productivos, en el sentido de que, 1.- implican un proceso reducido de industrialización y 2.- en consecuencia, tienen una capacidad muy reducida de generar empleo formal. La mayor parte del empleo formal en Bolivia tiene que ver con el sector de comercio y servicios. Pero, lo mismo sucede en el caso del empleo informal que, incidentalmente, es el que mayor fuerza de trabajo moviliza, a través de arreglos laborales precarios o el extenso “cuentapropismo”. Es más, se puede realizar la inferencia lógica de que la mayoría de los medios de subsistencia de los bolivianos se desarrollan en la economía informal, precisamente porque somos una economía de exportación y dependiente.

Esto, a su vez, acarrea otras consecuencias. 1ro. La capacidad de recaudación del Estado es bastante reducida y, como el resto de la economía, depende del dinamismo de los mercados de los bienes primarios. 2do. Por esta razón, la capacidad redistributiva y de ejecución de políticas públicas de diversa índole, del Estado, también es bastante reducida. Eso explica que también exista una significativa dependencia en los fondos de cooperación internacional, la cooperación técnica y el trabajo de las ONG, por ejemplo, para cubrir los múltiples vacíos que deja el Estado. 3ro. Al ser una economía de exportación, otra característica perniciosa es la tendencia a la fuga de divisas. Ya sea porque los sectores que exportan de manera privada, como es el caso del agronegocio, deciden retener las divisas en el extranjero, en forma de ahorro individual, o convertirse en burguesías comerciales e importar bienes acabados. O, en el caso de los sectores públicos, como las exportaciones de hidrocarburos, todo el dinero generado es consumido rápidamente en: importaciones (notablemente, el subsidio a los carburantes); el gasto público y el pago de las obligaciones financieras que tiene el país. Incidentalmente, la 4ta consecuencia es el incremento sostenido de la deuda externa.

(De hecho, en lo que respecta al tema de las divisas, su principal destino es, o la especulación en mercados financieros externos, sobre todo en Estados Unidos; o la importación de bienes de consumo. En general, en cualquier lugar del mundo, a no ser que la economía este dolarizada, además de lo señalado, no tiene mucho sentido tener divisas extranjeras guardadas. A no ser, como sucede ahora en Bolivia, para esperar pacientemente el colapso, con la esperanza tonta de que vas a poder hacer algo con tus dólares después).

Ahora bien, esto no tiene que ver con el “socialismo” o el “comunismo totalitario del MAS”, como suelen vociferar algunos políticos y “líderes de opinión”. Todo lo que he descrito es una característica bastante duradera de la economía boliviana, que fue reforzada y consolidada durante el periodo de las políticas de austeridad del neoliberalismo. Así es. Cuando Bolivia negociaba la condonación de su deuda externa, por la crisis de deuda que estalló en los años 80, el FMI nos dijo, expresamente: “Está bien, les condonamos la deuda. Pero ustedes aplican una serie de políticas de austeridad, de privatización y, además de eso, se especializan en la producción y exportación de hidrocarburos”. Esta información se encuentra en los documentos de negociación de la deuda externa, que están publicados en la página del Banco Central.

Por lo tanto, considerando toda esta información ¿Cuáles fueron las grandes contradicciones del masismo durante los últimos 20 años? Por un lado, pretender impulsar un Estado benefactor, con amplias políticas sociales y de gasto público, sostenidas en el mismo modelo de economía de exportación especializada que nos fue prescrito por los organismos financieros multilaterales, como parte de las recetas de choque del neoliberalismo. Y, por el otro, seguir apostando por la economía de extracción y de exportación de bienes primarios, como fuente principal de recursos para el Estado. Incluso, a pesar de las promesas de industrialización y de sustitución de importaciones.

Entonces, si me han seguido hasta este punto, ¿Cuáles fueron los resultados? A.- Continuó la fuga de divisas, es decir la generación de mucho excedente sin acumulación de capital. Tanto en el sector privado, como público. B.- Consecuentemente, se incrementó la deuda externa, para sostener un gasto público que no tiene un correlato en la riqueza nacional. Insisto, no somos un país que crea riqueza, solo generamos excedente. Son dos cosas distintas. C.- Y, por lo tanto, llegamos al momento actual, estamos nuevamente en las puertas de un escenario de crisis de déficit fiscal y crisis de deuda externa. Ya nos vimos en esa situación en el pasado y, es simplemente lógico concluir que, mientras sigamos con el mismo de modelo de economía de exportación y dependiente, vamos a volver a la misma situación en el futuro.

A todo esto, se suma la segunda gran contradicción o necedad del cóndor, que es el enfoque de su política exterior. O lo que hemos denominado campismo, tomando el concepto de otros análisis. Con “campismo” nos referimos a una valoración excesivamente geopolítica de las relaciones internacionales. No me voy a extender sobre este tema, para no aburrirlos más. Pero otra contradicción de la política exterior boliviana ha sido la tendencia recurrente a la ponderación de ciertas relaciones bilaterales y a la alineación con ciertas narrativas y agendas internacionales.

Para que me entiendan, es de una ironía gigantesca leer análisis de personajes nefastos como Sánchez Berzaín y otros analistas reaccionarios, señalar “el servilismo” de Bolivia por decidir relacionarse con países como Irán, China o Rusia; solo para argumentar que deberíamos volver al redil de las potencias occidentales. Yo pienso deberíamos estar abiertos a relacionarnos con todos. Desde luego, con un alto grado de pragmatismo. Es decir, priorizando nuestros intereses y capacidades. Pero, por supuesto, sin descuidar los principios internacionalistas que se hallan en nuestra Constitución. Es decir, construir una política exterior seria, libre de recelos y vilezas.

De esa manera podremos evitar los vicios del campismo, tanto el que se dice de “izquierda”, como del campismo reaccionario. Bueno, éstas son algunas de las necedades del cóndor, a las que me refiero en el libro. Espero que, con estas provocaciones, los convoque a leer el libro, para seguir discutiendo estos temas y afinando la investigación.

¡Muchas gracias!

Por Alberto Acosta, Ecuador

“¿Está usted de acuerdo que el Estado ecuatoriano promueva la inversión extranjera y reconozca el arbitraje internacional como método para solucionar controversias en materia de inversión, contractuales o comerciales, de manera que se ofrezca a los inversores extranjeros un entorno apropiado de seguridad jurídica que genere mayores oportunidades de empleo y afiancen la dolarización?” -Pregunta (4) del referéndum del 21 de abril del 2024

El discurso de esta pregunta sintetiza una visión ampliamente difundida. La inversión extranjera sería fundamental para el desarrollo, así como para la generación de empleo. Sus defensores, los que defienden el Mundo de los Dueños, la repiten hasta el cansancio. Y como sucede con cualquier medida de política económica, tal como aconteció con el alza del IVA, la inversión extranjera asoma también como una suerte de artilugio todoterreno que apuntala la dolarización, devenida en el objetivo supremo de la economía ecuatoriana.

Por lo tanto, para que lleguen esas tan ansiadas inversiones extranjeras es preciso crear todas las condiciones apropiadas para que eso acontezca. Entonces, nada mejor que ofrecerles la posibilidad de acceder a instancias internacionales de arbitraje para que no estén forzadas a litigar únicamente en los tribunales ecuatorianos. De eso se trata el retorno a los tratados bilaterales de inversión, que plantea el presidente Daniel Noboa, quien, en su reciente participación en el conclave minero más grande del mundo, en Toronto, Canadá, dijo que con el referéndum quiere reformar la Constitución para permitir la aprobación de este mecanismo de protección de las inversiones extranjeras.

Para poder comprender los alcances de esta pretensión gubernamental, nada mejor que ir por partes.

Tratados bilaterales de inversión, una explicación

Con este tipo de tratados, partiendo de la premisa expuesta en el primer párrafo de este texto y en la misma pregunta del referéndum, se quiere atraer inversión extranjera. Para eso hay que ofrecerles un marco de seguridad jurídica súper fuerte, apropiado dicen. Es decir, que en caso de disputas que puedan surgir entre el inversionista extranjero y el Estado, cuando no se las pueda resolver en el marco de la justicia nacional, se abre la puerta de dilucidarlas a nivel internacional, en alguna corte de arbitraje.

Estos tratados bilaterales de inversión parten de una definición extremadamente amplia del concepto de inversión enmarcada claramente en relaciones contractuales con múltiples posibilidades. Tengamos presente, además, que la legislación de inversión está incorporada en la legislación de comercio; este es un punto medular para entender como las inversiones están íntimamente imbricadas con los temas de comercio: los tratados de inversión normalmente forman parte de los “tratados de libre comercio” o TLCs, los que, bien sabemos, no son libres ni solo de comercio.

Con estos tratados bilaterales de inversión se asegura un tratamiento preferencial para las inversiones extranjeras. Se establece la prohibición de requisitos de desempeño a dichos inversionistas; la prohibición de la nacionalización o expropiación directa o indirecta; la prohibición de toda restricción al movimiento y repatriación de capitales; entre otros muchos beneficios. Y, por cierto, se blindan sus ganancias ante cualquier efecto negativo que pueda provocar un cambio en la normativa nacional, como podría ser alguna nueva medida laboral o ambiental o tributaria.

Todo lo anterior deriva en el establecimiento de mecanismos de solución de disputas entre inversionistas extranjeros y el Estado, en el marco de esquemas de arbitraje internacionales que terminan por socavar la soberanía de los Estados. Estos tratados son ampliamente conocidos como “la industria del arbitraje”, tanto por sus resultados, normalmente favorables a los inversionistas extranjeros, como por sus integrantes, con demasiada frecuencia al servicio de los intereses transnacionales.

Estos tratados ampliaran las posibilidades de negocios protegidos para el capital extranjero en el país. Tengamos presente las opciones que se abren con los incrementados beneficios establecidos en la Ley de Eficiencia Económica y de Generación de Empleo, aprobada en el parlamento a fines del 2023, en el marco de las “zonas francas” y “alianzas público-privadas”. Consideremos también las privatizaciones anunciadas por el gobierno, en las que participarán inversionistas extranjeros, que contarán con este tipo de sobre protección; tan aplaudida por el Fondo Monetario Internacional – FMI. Con estos tratados se asegurarán inclusive las ventajas adicionales que tienen ya muchas empresas extranjeras, por ejemplo, extractivistas, como las mineras, que cuentan con una serie de beneficios tributarios en tanto se les exoneró del pago del impuesto a la renta hasta no haber recuperado la totalidad de su inversión o los subsidios que obtienen vía reducidas tarifas de electricidad.

Todas estas ventajas y otras muchas se cobijan con el paraguas protector de los tratados bilaterales de inversión.

Origen de esta “industria del arbitraje”

Los Tratados Bilaterales de Inversión surgieron de un intento fallido por establecer una suerte de constitución económica global que proteja los derechos de los inversionistas internacionales; es decir que asegure la hegemonía plena del capital transnacional. Este Acuerdo Multilateral de Inversiones (AMI) -en inglés Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)- se discutió -a espaldas de la mayoría de estados del planeta- en la segunda mitad de los años noventa del siglo pasado. No fue nunca visto como una herramienta para el desarrollo de los países del Sur global o algo por el estilo.

En esa época, en pleno auge neoliberal, dichas inversiones, en el marco de la OCDE (Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico), se pretendió hacer realidad este marco jurídico supranacional con alcance global. Con este Acuerdo Multilateral se pretendía establecer límites a los derechos laborales, a las políticas sociales, a la pluralidad cultural planetaria, a la relación con la Naturaleza y, por cierto, a los ámbitos del ejercicio de la democracia.

Huelga decir que no pudo ser aprobado por la resistencia de amplios segmentos sociales en varios países de la propia Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico, que entendieron con claridad los riesgos que esto implicaba.

A partir de esta realidad se empezó a buscar otros mecanismos de protección supranacional para los inversionistas extranjeros por vías bilaterales; recordemos que los mecanismos instalados anteriormente, que recurrían incluso al uso de la fuerza para cobrar la deuda externa, por ejemplo, estaban proscritos por la creciente vigencia de la Doctrina Calvo.[1] De aquí saldría el principio de la no intervención y, poco después, el principio moderno de la Igualdad Jurídica de los Estados; igualdad que, como vemos casi a diario, no se compadece con la realidad, menos aún cuando a los Estados se les pone al mismo nivel que las empresas extranjeras en tribunales internacionales.

El escaso atractivo real de los tratados bilaterales de inversión

La experiencia de Ecuador con estos tratados es larga, compleja y muy onerosa. La lista de demandas planteadas y de sentencias que afectan los intereses nacionales demuestra la realidad de esta relación. Basta revisar el informe final de la Comisión para la Auditoría Integral Ciudadana de los Tratados de Protección Recíproca de Inversiones y del Sistema de Arbitraje Internacional en Materia de Inversiones (CAITISA) [2], creada en el año 2013 y que concluyó sus funciones en el 2017.

Profundicemos en esta cuestión. La misma CAITISA y otros tantos estudios en diversas partes del planeta, han concluido que estos tratados firmados por Ecuador no fueron determinantes en la atracción de la inversión extranjera directa. Los inversionistas van a países en donde puedan hacer negocios y, además, que cuenten con un marco institucional estable. En suma, la entrega agresiva de este tipo de privilegios o la desregulación de normas nacionales no es una suerte de imán para atraer inversiones.

Recordemos, a la fecha de dicho informe, el Ecuador tenía más tratados que muchos países de la región, y sin embargo recibía solo 0,79% de dicha inversión que llegaba del mundo a América Latina y el Caribe. El principal flujo de inversiones extranjeras directas hacia Ecuador provenía de Brasil, México y Panamá, países con los que Ecuador no tenía un tratado bilateral de inversiones.

Con seguridad, la existencia de dichos tratados no fue ni el detonante menos aún el argumento fundamental para realizar esas actividades de tipo comercial en el Ecuador. Y como si lo anterior no es un argumento suficiente, téngase presente que -comparando dos países de la región de tamaño relativamente similar- Brasil, sin tratados bilaterales de inversión, superaba en inversiones extranjeras a México, uno de los países con más tratados de inversión.

El oneroso y complejo impacto de estos tratados bilaterales de inversión

Tengamos presente que el Ecuador ya acumula un monto de pagos forzados a través de dichos arbitrajes, sobre en el Centro Internacional de Diferencias Relativas a Inversiones (CIADI), por unos 3 mil millones de dólares, con perspectivas de que este monto se incremente de forma exponencial. El Ecuador está entre los veinte países del mundo que ha recibido más laudos o fallos arbitrales derivados de estos tratados de inversión.

“Todo es por nuestra culpa porque no respetamos los contratos”, dirán los cipayos neoliberales, defensores de estos tratados de inversión. No les importa, para nada, que las empresas atropellen los mismos contratos, los que en muchos casos no se apegan a las normas constitucionales y legales ecuatorianas.

Cabría simplemente traer a colación los arbitrajes en el mundo petrolero y minero, como son los de Chevron-Texaco, Oxy-Occidental, Perenco-Burlington, Murphy, Cooper Mesa, CODELCO; a más de otros en campos como el de la electricidad, telecomunicación, industria, etc.

También se puede recordar el chantaje de las transnacionales mineras, las que, a pesar de realizar actividades que afectan la Constitución y las leyes, es decir la esencia de la seguridad jurídica, amenazan con demandar usando este mecanismo si se permite el cumplimiento de un derecho constitucional: las consultas populares, establecido en el artículo 104 de la Constitución. Es más, estos tratados bilaterales de inversión, que abren la puerta a los arbitrajes internacionales, desarman muchos elementos de la Constitución, como podrían ser, por ejemplo, las posibilidades de llevar adelante consultas populares como las del Yasuni o del Chocó-Andino, si están en juego los intereses de empresas extractivistas extranjeras.

En este punto cabría señalar que -como se ha visto a la saciedad en los casos de arbitraje en los que ha estado envuelto el Estado ecuatoriano y otros Estados- los árbitros son muchas veces abogados con estrechos vínculos con las empresas transnacionales; eso explica también porque se piede con tanta frecuencia este tipo de arbitrajes. En otras ocasiones la responsabilidad radica en el Estado, que, a pesar de gastar enormes candidades de dinero en su defensa, no ha tenido la firmeza y claridad para llevar adelante estos procesos.

En varios casos se ha registrado una serie muy compleja y hasta oscura de relaciones entre diversos factores que terminan por afectar el interés nacional. Basta ver lo que sucedió en las enredadas relaciones entre Petrobras, Odebrecht y Oxy-Occidental[3] o las peripecias que caracterizan las relaciones con la Chevron-Texaco[4]. Estos casos emblemáticos develan la lógica perversa con la que funciona el capital transnacional en contra de la soberanía de los estados-nación, incluso en contubernio con los gobiernos.

Sin pretender agotar esta cuestión, simplemente recordemos que los “beneficios” de estos arbitrajes -una instancia de protección jurídica supranacional adicional- no son para los inversionistas nacionales, lo que ya demuestra graves afectaciones en términos constitucionales, como veremos más adelante.

Los tratados de inversión desaparecen en Montecristi

En la Asamblea Constituyente de Montecristi se fijó como el objetivo fundamental construir una sociedad democrática a partir de la vigencia plena de los Derechos Humanos y los Derechos de la Naturaleza. Esta decisión planteaba como un punto clave la posibilidad de que como sociedad podamos definir autónomamente nuestro futuro, sin permitir mecanismos o estructuras que puedan afectar la soberanía nacional. Es más, había claridad sobre las amenazas que representan los Tratados de Libre Comercio y los Tratados Bilaterales de Inversión, hermanos siameses del intento para imponer normas transnacionales que cristalicen el sistema del capital globalizado.

En concreto, con el fin de erradicar tratamientos de privilegio a los inversionistas extranjeros, en Montecristi se prohibieron los tratados bilaterales de inversión. Con esta disposición se estableció un marco para que no se protejan los derechos de las inversiones extranjeras afectando los derechos de los seres humanos y del ambiente, poniendo en riesgo inclusive políticas sociales y de otra índole, impidiendo inclusive situaciones que privilegien a dichos inversionistas en perjuicio de los empresarios nacionales. Esta normativa quedó claramente establecida en el capítulo segundo Tratados e instrumentos internacionales, del Título VII Relaciones internacionales, en el artículo 422:

“No se podrá celebrar tratados o instrumentos internacionales en los que el Estado ecuatoriano ceda jurisdicción soberana a instancias de arbitraje internacional, en controversias contractuales o de índole comercial, entre el Estado y personas naturales o jurídicas privadas.

Se exceptúan los tratados e instrumentos internacionales que establezcan la solución de controversias entre Estados y ciudadanos en Latinoamérica por instancias arbitrales regionales o por órganos jurisdiccionales de designación de los países signatarios. No podrán intervenir jueces de los Estados que como tales o sus nacionales sean parte de la controversia.

En el caso de controversias relacionadas con la deuda externa, el Estado ecuatoriano promoverá soluciones arbitrales en función del origen de la deuda y con sujeción a los principios de transparencia, equidad y justicia internacional.”

El Ecuador llegó a suscribir una treintena de tratados bilaterales de inversión. Si bien, el año 2009, el país se retiró del sistema de Solución de Controversias Inversionista – Estado (ISDS, por sus siglas en inglés), que incluye al CIADI, no todos los tratados fueron denunciados, como dispone la Constitución. Faltó voluntad política para cumplir con lo que ordenó el pueblo al aprobar la carta magna.

No solo eso, incluso, en el año 2018, hubo un audaz intento de reinterpretación de la Constitución por parte de un grupo minoritario de asambleístas, que intentaba echar abajo la prohibición de los tratados bilaterales de inversión; pretensión que fue rechazada por la Corte Constitucional el año 2022. Y, por cierto, no podemos olvidar, que se retornó a los mecanismos de Solución de Controversias Inversionista – Estado en el año 2021, sin que haya aprobación legislativa, porque así lo determinó la Corte Constitucional.

No más privilegios para los inversionistas extranjeros

Decir que con estos tratados se asegura un mejor ambiente de negocios y de condiciones de inversión, es decir un mejor ambiente comercial, es incompleto. Hacen falta muchos más factores, puesto que, entre otras cosas, se deben crear las condiciones para un desenvolvimiento dinámico de la economía nacional en los términos establecidos en la Constitución, la que, en su artículo 283, dispone la construcción de un sistema económico social y solidario.[5]

Este es el punto de partida para crear las mejores condiciones para la actividad económica en Ecuador. Con esta disposición constitucional -artículo 422- no se pretende simplemente recuperar espacios de soberanía económica y por cierto jurídica. Lo que se busca es un sistema que asegure una verdadera equidad para inversionistas extranjeros y nacionales. Es más, en la Constitución en el artículo 339[6], se establece con claridad que se otorgará “prioridad a la inversión nacional” y que “la inversión extranjera directa será complementaria a la nacional”.

Pongamos también sobre la mesa lo que dispone el artículo 9 de la Constitución, que determina que las personas extranjeras tendrán los mismos derechos y deberes que las ecuatorianas, no privilegios, pues, quienes provengan del exterior, siempre estarán sujetas a “un estricto respeto del marco jurídico y de las regulaciones nacionales”: como determina el mismo artículo 339.

Recordemos también que la Constitución de Montecristi establece dos salvedades para los arbitrajes internacionales. Una posibilidad, cuando se trata de sistemas constituidos a nivel regional, lo que está en línea con el mandato constitucional de construir una soberanía regional; punto en el que se registran pocos avances. La otra opción, hasta ahora no concretada, pero si discutida en foros internacionales, incluso en Naciones Unidas, es un tribunal internacional de arbitraje de deuda soberana.[7]

Un punto adicional a ser considerado, en el artículo 416 numeral 12 de la Constitución, en línea con la no sesión de soberanía nacional y si con la construcción de una soberanía compartida, se plantea la creación de mecanismos de control internacional a las corporaciones multinacionales y el establecimiento de un sistema financiero internacional, justo, transparente y equitativo.[8] De lo que se sabe, nada de esto ha sido impulsado por los gobiernos desde que el pueblo ecuatoriano en las urnas aprobó la Constitución en el año 2008.

En este punto, es preciso alertar el riesgo de confundir estos esquemas de arbitraje internacional con la posibilidad del arbitraje nacional, establecido en el artículo 190 de la Constitución, en la sección dedicada a los medios alternativos para la solución de conflictos. Son temas completamente diferentes.

En síntesis, con estos tratados bilaterales de inversión se establecería, atropellando la Constitución en varios y fundamentales puntos, una posición privilegiada a las inversiones extranjeras, que, como vimos anteriormente, tendrían una suerte de blindaje múltiple. De esta manera la inversión extranjera se encontraría en una situación en la que no estaría obligada a respetar de manera estricta el marco jurídico nacional, empezando por nuestra Carta Magna. En este contexto de irrespeto institucionalizado, puede hasta haber aflorar la viveza criolla: ecuatorianos que tienen capitales en el exterior tratarían de retornarlos camuflados como inversiones extranjeras.

Seguridad jurídica integral, no privilegios para el capital internacional

Cerrar la puerta a los arbitrajes mencionados no implica negar el potencial aporte que pueden brindar las inversiones extranjeras; aporte que, en cualquier caso, amerita un análisis detenido. No toda inversión extranjera contribuye a abrir nuevos mercados externos. Su potencial para generar empleo puede ser mínimo, pues en muchas ocasiones utilizan tecnologías ahorradoras de mano de obra, si pensamos en especial en el sector de la manufactura. En otros, cuando se trata de grandes cadenas de comercialización, por ejemplo, pueden afectar a los pequeños y medianos negocios que sumados generan normalmente más puestos de trabajo. En ocasiones estas empresas no transfieren la tecnología que dominan y con frecuencia utilizan tecnologías de vieja generación. Inclusive su aporte de capital puede ser limitado, no solo porque el monto de las utilidades remesadas supera los recursos invertidos -algo normal tratándose actividades inspiradas en el lucro-, sino que, no faltan ejemplos, de cómo estos inversionistas se aprovechan de créditos locales para realizar sus inversiones.

En este punto debe quedar absolutamente claro que, en lugar de privilegiar a los inversionistas extranjeros con estas normas supranacionales de justicia, lo de fondo es construir un sistema de justicia equitativo para todos los inversionistas, nacionales y extranjeros. Eso demanda una profunda reestructuración de la justicia. A estas alturas nadie duda que requerimos una justicia independiente y autónoma. Nadie debería poder “meterle la mano a la justicia”.

Es más, la seguridad jurídica debe ser para todos. En el artículo 82 de la Constitución establece con claridad el “derecho a la seguridad jurídica”, sin excepciones o privilegios. Dicho esto, insistamos, no puede haber “un entorno de seguridad jurídica apropiado” solo para los inversionistas extranjeros, como plantea la pregunta del referéndum.

La seguridad jurídica debe ser apropiada para los individuos, las comunidades y las organizaciones sociales, el gobierno central y los gobiernos descentralizados, por cierto, también para la Naturaleza, no sólo para el capital privado. Esta seguridad jurídica demanda integralidad, a partir de la premisa de que en este país el eje es el ser humano viviendo en armonía con la Naturaleza, lógica que debe normar los acuerdos y convenios internacionales.

De la mano de la Constitución se puede plantear una vigorosa estrategia económica para impulsar el Buen Vivir. Por falta de espacio, recordemos apenas el tema de las soberanías en plural: soberanía económica, soberanía alimentaria, soberanía energética; el mandato para lograr el desarrollo, fortaleciendo y dinamizando los mercados internos, así como la producción nacional, en línea con una inserción estratégica en la economía mundial; la prohibición de las prácticas monopólicas y oligopólicas. Esto demanda que se garantice la vigencia plena de los Derechos Humanos y los Derechos de la Naturaleza.

Ahora, tratar de acomodar la Constitución a los nuevos vientos aperturistas y flexibilizadores -que chocan con la esencia de la misma Constitución- sería no solo una violación de la carta magna, sino una muy mala señal, incluso en el exterior, al irrespetar las instituciones existentes (que tampoco fueron respetadas en su totalidad en los años inmediatamente posteriores a su aprobación, cabe recordar). La Constitución no puede ser una suerte de plastilina manipulable de conformidad con las apetencias de los grupos de poder. Y “la guerra” al crimen organizado no puede ser un pretexto para seguir profundizando la neoliberalización de la economía.

En síntesis, la sobre protección al capital foráneo es otra de las manifestaciones de sumisión, tan pro­pia de las oligarquías, pre­sas de la “co­lo­nia­li­dad del po­der”, puesto que, en este caso concreto creen ingenuamente que “la solución es el capital extranjero”. Eso explica porque es­tos defensores del Mundo de los Due­ños están siempre prestos a priorizar lo “made in cualquier parte” que no sea lo propio, incluso por su desconfianza en sus propias capacidades.

Así las cosas, es evidente que los tratados bilaterales de inversión son herramientas estratégicas y de protección para los intereses del capital extranjero, que cuenta con el respaldo de sus fieles servidores criollos en el gobierno y fuera de él. No son de ninguna manera instrumentos para el bien común, por más que se diga solemnemente lo contrario.-

Sobre el término cipayo: Se denomina cipayos a las personas que sirven a los intereses extranjeros en detrimento de los de su país. El nombre se extendió a raíz de la práctica del ejército inglés en la India que contaba en sus filas con soldados indios al servicio del Imperio británico, a quienes se les conocía como cipayos.

Notas:

[1] Venezuela en 1903 sufrió el bombardeo de sus puertos por parte de una flota anglo-germano-italiana -con la complicidad de los Estados Unidos-, cuando ese país que no pudo pagar su deuda. Situaciones similares se vivieron en la República Dominicana, Haití, México, Nicaragua, Argentina entre otros países. Recordemos la respuesta de Argentina a inicios del siglo XX, como consecuencia de la agresión a Venezuela: el ministro de Relaciones Exteriores Luis Drago envió una nota de rechazo al uso de la fuerza -agresión militar u ocupación de territorios- para lograr el pago de las deudas por parte de los Estados, por ser atentatoria contra el derecho Internacional. Este planteamiento, que se conoce como la doctrina Drago, fortaleció la doctrina Calvo, formulada décadas antes por otro argentino Carlos Calvo, quien, como representante del Paraguay en París, protestó por la injerencia británica en los asuntos internos de ese país.

[2] Consultar el “Informe Ejecutivo de la Auditoría integral ciudadana de los tratados de protección recíproca de inversiones y del sistema de arbitraje en materia de inversiones en Ecuador”. Disponible en https://www.tni.org/files/auditoria_integral_ciudadana_2015.pdf

[3] Recomendamos leer este texto del autor, escrito con John Cajas-Guijarro (2019); “Petrobras, Odebrecht, OXY: Recordando un billar a tres bandas… en contra del país”. Disponible en https://www.planv.com.ec/historias/sociedad/petrobras-odebrecht-oxy-recordando-un-billar-tres-bandas-contra-del-pais

[4] Se puede leer el artículo preparado por el autor de estas líneas con John Cajas-Guijaro (2020); “La mano sucia del capital: estragos del Chernóbil ecuatoriano”. Disponible en https://www.planv.com.ec/historias/sociedad/la-mano-sucia-del-capital-estragos-del-chernobil-ecuatoriano

[5] Artículo 283: “El sistema económico es social y solidario; reconoce al ser humano como sujeto y fin; propende a una relación dinámica y equilibrada entre sociedad, Estado y mercado, en armonía con la naturaleza; y tiene por objetivo garantizar la producción y reproducción de las condiciones materiales e inmateriales que posibiliten el buen vivir. El sistema económico se integrará por las formas de organización económica pública, privada, mixta, popular y solidaria, y las demás que la Constitución determine. La economía popular y solidaria se regulará de acuerdo con la ley e incluirá a los sectores cooperativistas, asociativos y comunitarios.”

[6] Artículo 339: “El Estado promoverá las inversiones nacionales y extranjeras, y establecerá regulaciones específicas de acuerdo a sus tipos, otorgando prioridad a la inversión nacional. Las inversiones se orientarán con criterios de diversificación productiva, innovación tecnológica, y generación de equilibrios regionales y sectoriales. La inversión extranjera directa será complementaria a la nacional, estará sujeta a un estricto respeto del marco jurídico y de las regulaciones nacionales, a la aplicación de los derechos y se orientará según las necesidades y prioridades definidas en el Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, así como en los diversos planes de desarrollo de los gobiernos autónomos descentralizados. La inversión pública se dirigirá a cumplir los objetivos del régimen de desarrollo que la Constitución consagra, y se enmarcará en los planes de desarrollo nacional y locales, y en los correspondientes planes de inversión.”

[7] Tribunal que debe partir con un ejercicio de auditoria ciudadana independiente, que establezca las posibles ilegalidades e ilegitimidades de las deudas externas contratadas, liberándolos de las ataduras impuestas en los contratos de dichas deudas que parten por la sesión de soberanía a la justicia de los países acreedores.  Posteriormente en los acuerdos a los que se llegue después de dichas auditorias, se debe considerar la real capacidad económica para cumplirlos, en ningún caso se pueden afectar las inversiones sociales; todo en el marco de una -todavía inexistente- institucionalidad financiera internacional que asegure la justicia y la transparencia, teniendo los Derechos Humanos y también los Derechos de la Naturaleza como su fundamento. Se recomienda la propuesta para conformar un tribunal Internacional de Arbitraje de las Deudas Soberanas de Óscar Ugarteche y Alberto Acosta,, presentada desde inicios del siglo XXI: Ugarteche, Oscar; Acosta, Alberto (2003); “A favor de un tribunal internacional de arbitraje de deuda soberana (TIADS)”, Caracas, revista Nueva Sociedad N° 183; o, “Global Economy Issues and the International Board of Arbitration for Sovereign Debt (IBASD)”, El Norte, Finnish Journal of Latin American Studies, núm. 2 (diciembre), 2007. Los elementos fuerza de esta iniciativa ya han sido debatidos y aprobados en el seno de las Naciones Unidas, aunque con el esperado rechazo de las grandes potencias beneficiarias de estas estructuras inequitativas en el ámbito financiero internacional.

[8] “Artículo 416.- Las relaciones del Ecuador con la comunidad internacional responderán a los intereses del pueblo ecuatoriano, al que le rendirán cuenta sus responsables y ejecutores, y en consecuencia:

12. Fomenta un nuevo sistema de comercio e inversión entre los Estados que se sustente en la justicia, la solidaridad, la complementariedad, la creación de mecanismos de control internacional a las corporaciones multinacionales y el establecimiento de un sistema financiero internacional, justo, transparente y equitativo. Rechaza que controversias con empresas privadas extranjeras se conviertan en conflictos entre Estados.”

Alberto Acosta: Economista ecuatoriano. Presidente de la Asamblea Constituyente 2007-2008.

Publicación original: https://rebelion.org/los-cipayos-neoliberales-defienden-el-arbitraje/

In 2020, some 15 to 20 million people participated in the largest anti-racist protests in history in a sustained national rebellion that inspired international solidarity. But our political leaders–both Democrat and Republican–have retrenched and pursued racist law-and-order agendas. Black people remain three times more likely to be killed in a police encounter than white people. In this conversation held at the Socialism 2023 convention, Haley Pessin and Phil Gasper think through what it will take to build a lasting and effective struggle against the racist state.

Haley Pessin: Confronting the backlash against the anti-racist uprising is what we are discussing today. From the vantage of today, it’s very difficult to remember, or put ourselves in, the time and place of what it was like to be in a context where people were openly talking about abolition.

The rebellion of 2020 was an incredible experience even for those who have been radicals for many years. Some 15 to 20 million people participated in the largest anti-racist protests in history, in a sustained national rebellion that inspired international solidarity.

The entire criminal legal system was on the defensive. In New York City alone, 47 police cars were damaged or burned. Within the first two weeks of the uprising, police had arrested more than 17 thousand people across the country, the largest such wave of arrests since the Vietnam War. In Washington D.C., protests outside the White House temporarily forced President Donald Trump to flee to his bunker–allegedly to inspect it and not in abject fear of the riots.

This all occurred in defiance of curfews and stay-in-place orders imposed by mayors and governors in every major city. The struggles were led primarily by Black youth, but the consciousness, participation, and solidarity they generated extended to non-Black people, including those in rural, majority-white regions, and even former sundown towns.

At the height of the protests an astounding 54 percent of Americans felt that the burning of a police station in Minneapolis was either justified or partially justified. And in exit polls for the November, 2020 elections, voters cited racial injustice as the second most important issue facing the country after the economy.

Yet these protests were not just about police brutality. They were also a reaction to the failure of state and federal governments to respond to the horrific death toll and economic devastation caused by a world historic pandemic and a form of resistance to the multi-pronged wave of attacks on oppressed and working-class people from the Trump administration on down.

We saw this in the evolution of the Black Lives Matter protests between 2014 and 2020. A whole layer of activists, who began with demands for more Black police officers and body cameras, came out six years later as committed abolitionists saying we needed to dismantle the whole system. The protests popularized connections between racial and economic injustice and drew attention to the social and economic priorities that require billions in funding for police at the expense of all other life-giving resources and social services.

They came to define abolition not just as the absence of police but also as the presence of a society where everyone has everything they need to thrive. The opening for connecting that struggle to the struggle for socialism— a society based on social need, not profit —should be obvious. But despite that potential, the Left by and large missed the opportunity to build mass organizations at the height of these struggles, or, in their aftermath, to push the movements as far as they could go.  There are a number of reasons for this. They include divisions on the Left around how to understand the nature of anti-racist struggle.

Fast-forward to the present, and aside from notable exceptions—like the ongoing battle to stop the building of Cop City in Atlanta—mass protests have largely receded from the streets.

Protesters holding up a Philadelphia Police armband in front of a burning police cruiser during a George Floyd Protest in May 2020. Photo by Joe Priette.

Instead, the widespread opposition to policing that the movement had forced into mainstream conversation has been largely replaced by a crime wave narrative. This continues a trend of the last four decades during which police budgets have skyrocketed whether crime rates were rising or falling as the flip side of imposing austerity budgets.

For example, in New York City where I am, former cop Mayor Eric Adams is waging a war on houseless and mentally ill people on the subway. And more recently he’s added scapegoating migrants to that list in tandem with massive budget cuts. Meanwhile, the NYPD’s budget grew to $11 billion, making it the largest police budget in the entire country.

But while homicides did spike during the pandemic, violent crime in New York remains at historic lows overall and has dropped by an additional 5.6 percent in recent months. Even according to the NYPD’s own statistics, the city’s murder rate was five times higher during the 1980s and 1990s than it is today. Of course, they’ll claim credit for this, but we know that’s not true.

Nationally, even in cities like Chicago, L.A., and D.C. where rates of deadly gun violence reached their highest point in a decade, other violent crimes actually decreased during the pandemic. But the new frightening atmosphere produced by the backlash was encapsulated earlier this year in New York following the murder of Jordan Neely, an unarmed, unhoused Black man who was choked to death by another passenger on the subway.

Neely’s murder reflects the extent to which the ruling class has succeeded in reinforcing public fears about crime and the idea that more police are necessary to address it. This is something that both Republicans and Democrats agree on regardless of their differences. On the right, Republican legislation from the top  comes in tandem with open white supremacists willing to intimidate and act with extralegal violence on the ground. Armed far-right groups like the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters came to at least 100 of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, often with the tacit or explicit support of the police.

Since May 2020, at least four states have expanded the definitions of penalties for protesting. At least eight states have created or enhanced penalties for protesters who obstruct streets, sidewalks, or gas and oil pipelines, along with bills that allow cars to run over protestors in 2021 and 2022.

Federal, state and local government officials introduced 563 anti-Critical Race Theory measures, of which 241 have been enacted. But the Democratic Party is also complicit in this backlash. The same politicians who say Black Lives Matter are actively leading the charge against the central demand of the movement to defund the police.

In fact, it has largely been Democrats at both the federal level and in major urban centers who have pursued racist law-and-order policies with police as the first line of defense, especially as ongoing economic instability has prompted city officials to embrace austerity, which in turn will require more police to control the fallout.

Arguably Biden, who was elected in the wake of the uprising, was the primary beneficiary of the movement in the absence of a truly left-wing alternative to Trump. Yet Biden not only vehemently opposed defunding the police, he called for increased funding for police departments, which at the time of his presidential campaign already received a combined annual $115 billion.

This was nothing new. Biden has a  long record of bolstering policies such as the 1994 Crime Bill, which produced the greatest expansion of policing and prisons in U.S. history. It increased contact between those living in segregated predominantly Black neighborhoods and the armed forces of the state.

Black people remain three times more likely to be killed in a police encounter than white people, regardless of whether they are unarmed, had called the police for help or were merely existing in their own homes like Breonna Taylor.

Unlike Republicans, the Democrats pay lip service to the movement while leaving the means of death and destruction of Black life full intact. Biden’s 2021 plan for criminal justice reform mimicked Obama’s 21st-century task force on policing in its focus on improving so-called community police relations.

This points to the necessity of building an anti-racist struggle that is both independent of the two capitalist parties and clear about the challenges we’re up against. But it also matters that the Left understand what it will take to resist this multi-pronged backlash against workers and the oppressed.

Meanwhile, other Democrats’ proposals to address police misconduct like the 2021 George Floyd Justice and Policing Act merely recycled some of the same meager policy changes like body cameras, diversity training, and chokehold bans. These are things that had already been implemented and failed to stop police brutality in Minneapolis, meaning that the act named for George Floyd would have not even saved his own life.

Ultimately as Naomi Murakawa notes: “Unflagging Democratic support for police sharpens the blade for Republican spearheaded criminalization of dissent, reproductive autonomy, and gender-affirming healthcare.” In other words, the consequences of the backlash impact issues beyond the resistance to police racism.

They facilitate the rollback of the rights of queer and trans folks, abortion rights and reproductive justice, and are aimed at hampering our resistance. And we’ve seen this most recently in the major police apparatus that exists to survey mosques in a call to crack down on protests in solidarity with Palestine.

This points to the necessity of building an anti-racist struggle that is both independent of the two capitalist parties and clear about the challenges we’re up against. But it also matters that the Left understand what it will take to resist this multi-pronged backlash against workers and the oppressed. And that requires clarity from the beginning on the nature of racism, the struggle for socialism, and the strategies that flow from this.

Phil Gasper: To try to understand racism without class, or to analyze class oppression without race, is really to misunderstand both forms of exploitation and forms of oppression.

In the U.S, we’re very familiar with attempts to address racism without a class perspective, because that’s the approach of the liberal establishment in politics, the business world, and the mainstream media and education system. In the immediate aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, suddenly almost everyone claimed to be an anti-racist.

Amazon, Nike, and Walmart all put out statements opposing racism. Ben and Jerry’s said, ‘We must dismantle white supremacy. Silence is not an option.” But the actions that went along with these announcements amounted to very little–training programs for their employees, perhaps some money being directed towards scholarships and education, and an effort to get a few more people of color into management positions or into the boardroom.

Colleges and universities also declared themselves to be anti-racist. The Chronicle of Higher Education in the summer of 2020 declared that this may be a watershed moment in the history of higher education and race. I wish that were true; the actions that went along with statements like this amounted to very little.

If you take diversity training in higher education, the focus is almost invariably on individuals and their ideas. There will be plenty of discussion of unconscious bias, microaggressions, and white privilege, which are all certainly real. On the other hand, there will probably be no discussion, let alone distinction, of the class interests that racism serves, or how to take collective action to challenge those interests. That’s approaching racism while ignoring class.

On the US Left, we sometimes see the reverse phenomenon, a focus on class that downplays the significance of race. One person who’s taken this position is the left-wing academic Adolf Reed. Certainly, Adolf Reed is a distinguished Black political scientist. He has often had valuable things to say. He has written a lot of books and articles, and he is often celebrated as a contrarian. I think that he and a number of people who are influenced by him have gone badly off the rails in their writing about race and class.

They start from the same place that I would start from: We need a class analysis of racism. But from there, they make a series of mistaken conclusions. First, they argue that if we have a class analysis, then we can explain racial inequality mainly in terms of class inequality and pay less attention to race.

One striking example of this was an article in Catalyst (Jacobin’s theoretical journal) a few years ago by John Clegg and Adaner Usmani, which argued that mass incarceration isn’t a product of racism. Reed himself published an article in 2020 arguing that racial inequality in health outcomes is due to underlying class inequalities, and that even to draw attention to the fact that Blacks have it worse will simply open the door to racist pseudo-summits that try to explain Black-White differences in biological terms.

Reed and his co-thinkers conclude that socialists should focus on universal demands like raising the minimum wage or Medicare For All, not on specifically anti-racist demands. So Reed, for instance, was hostile to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the call for reparations. He’s even argued that anti-racism is counterproductive. According to Reed, racism is not the principle source of inequality today. Anti-racism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it. Elsewhere he says that anti-racism gives cover to neoliberal identity politics, which elevates a few Blacks, women, and gays to prominent positions but doesn’t challenge underlying inequalities.

Now, Reed’s critics accuse him of class reductionism. He doesn’t like that term, but I think it fits. He counters by accusing his critics of being race reductionists, trying to explain everything in terms of racism. There may be some people who count as race reductionists, but that’s not the position of most of Reed’s left-wing critics.

Left-wing critics agree that we need a class perspective, but we think that race and class are intertwined in a much more complex way than Reed allows. To explain how race and class have been intertwined in the U.S. particularly, we have to discuss the history of capitalism and its relationship to racism.

My view is that capitalism created racism. That’s actually a controversial view. Not everyone on the Left, certainly not in the mainstream, agrees with that. I can’t give a detailed defense of it in a few minutes, but I’ll point to one important piece of evidence in its favor.

Race didn’t exist before the late 14th century. You don’t find it in any ancient writings. It’s not even in Marco Polo’s Diaries, which were written in the 13th century. Its emergence coincides with the wave of European colonial expansion that began in the 15th century and with the start of the modern African slave trade. It was used to justify both colonialism and the slave trade.

Photo by Terence McCormack.

The Black historian Eric Williams argued in his classic study Capitalism and Slavery that racism doesn’t explain slavery. Slavery explains racism. The slave trade was vital to the development of capitalism in the 16th century. Enslaved Africans were used to extract wealth from the new world that was essential to the primitive accumulation of capital in Western Europe.

Racism was absolutely central to the regime of labor relations that allowed capitalism to develop, but it also played a variety of other key roles. Almost immediately, ruling elites recognized its value as a divide and rule strategy in capitalism where, like all class societies, a minority monopolizes most wealth and power.

How can a small minority maintain its dominance over the vast majority? It will use open repression whenever necessary, but it’s hard to run a society just on repression. So ruling classes need to find ways to stop the majority from organizing together. And racism has played this role, especially in North America since at least the 17th century, starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676.

There were significant upheavals in the American colonies with poor whites and enslaved Blacks often joining forces to fight against their masters and ruling elites, who responded by passing slave codes to discipline Blacks while giving small privileges to poor whites.

According to the historian Theodore Allen, this amounted to the invention of the white race. Allen conducted a detailed survey of seventeenth-century records and concluded: “I have found no instance of the official use of the word white as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691.”

Because capitalism and racism are intertwined and because of the role that racism plays in dividing the working class, if we want to fight against capitalism and class inequality, anti-racism has to be at the center of our activity.

Soon afterwards, the Virginia Assembly proclaimed that all white men were superior to Blacks and passed a law requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with money, supplies, and land. Such measures kept poor whites as well as blacks subordinated to their masters. As Frederick Douglass later put it, “They divided both to conquer each.”

This is why racism survived the end of slavery and persisted both as a method of justifying continued racial inequality embedded in the labor market, housing, education, health care, and every other area of society, and as the most effective divide-and conquer-strategy available to the ruling class.

Racism also continued to play an important role in the justifications offered for colonial and imperial wars and conquest, which remain another central feature of capitalism. This raises an important question. Could capitalism exist without racism? I think that this question can be approached in two ways.

First, racism is thoroughly embedded and integrated in the capitalism we actually have. In order to end racism, we would have to dismantle the economic system that it is part of because at the very least ending racism will require an enormous redistribution of wealth and power. Second, at a more abstract level, we can ask whether in different historical circumstances, capitalism could have emerged without racism.

I’m willing to entertain that possibility. However (and this is a big “however”), I don’t believe that capitalism could have emerged without some other functionally equivalent, brutal system of oppression. Capitalism is a system of economic exploitation, but it’s a system that can’t operate without methods of dividing the mass of the population by using harsh systems of oppression. And, of course, in our society, race is not the only basis for oppression. We have sexism, homophobia, nationalism, ableism, and many other forms of oppression. So perhaps capitalism without racism is a theoretical possibility, but capitalism without oppression is not.

So what practical conclusions should we draw? Because capitalism and racism are intertwined and because of the role that racism plays in dividing the working class, if we want to fight against capitalism and class inequality, anti-racism has to be at the center of our activity.

It’s not enough, as Reed and his supporters propose, to raise universal class demands. One of the things that makes it difficult to win such demands is racism. For example, one of the reasons why social benefits are so much worse in the United States than in other developed capitalist countries is because racism is so strong here.

The standard way of opposing government programs is to portray them as handouts to undeserving people of color. Even though most whites would benefit enormously from such programs, this trick has been enormously effective. So there’s absolutely no reason to see anti-racist struggles as a diversion.

They are vital if we want to build the kind of class unity necessary to take on the whole system. But it’s worth adding that the barriers that we have to overcome are not easily overcome. Even though the argument that I’m making is that it’s really not in the material interests of workers of whatever race to hold racist ideas, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to break down those ideas.

Anti-Trump protesters gather in London’s Trafalgar Square . Photo by Alisdare Hickson.

The great Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the psychological wage that racism provides to poor whites. It makes them feel superior even if it is of no real material benefit to them. These ideas can be a very hard thing to break down. We see a lot of that in U.S. society today. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to break down these ideas. Racist ideas can be broken down, and the time that this happens is in heightened periods of struggle.

We have a kind of chicken-and-egg situation here, because racism acts as a way of dividing and making unified struggle more difficult. But if struggle can take off even in complicated and fragmented ways to begin with, it offers the possibility of fighting back against and breaking down the racial divisions.

It’s also worth adding that there’s no sharp boundary between struggles for racial justice and fights for broader class demands. The experience and victories of struggles against racism can, and often have, laid the basis for fighting class exploitation.

Many of the militants who led the upsurge in labor militancy at the end of the 1960s, like the successful postal workers’ national wildcat strike in 1970, the leadership was predominantly people of color and women. And I would bet 99 percent of them were veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Liberation Struggle, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, and the Gay Liberation Movement. The experience of fighting against those forms of oppression gave them the experience to lead.

The postal strike was one of the most important labor struggles of the last half century. Fighting racism and other forms of oppression strengthened the class struggle. If that’s right then the fight against racism is not a diversion or an optional extra. It’s a vital and central part of the fight against class oppression and for socialism.

Haley Pessin: Phil has taken us through why a Marxist approach requires that socialists understand anti-racism as essential to the fight against capitalism.

While it’s true that liberals reduce racism to a problem of bad ideas and ignorant individuals, they don’t address structural racism or the class power that racism serves to perpetuate. It’s also true that the far right is gaining a hearing today by blaming the real decimation of living standards on Black people, immigrants, women, queer and trans people. This lets corporations and the politicians responsible for those conditions off the hook.

In a 2020 survey of Republicans, a slim majority agreed with statements like: “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”; “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities”; “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country speaking English”; “English is essential for being a true American”; and “Black people need to stop using racism as an excuse.”

So any alternative the Left presents needs to be able to challenge both the ideological racism and racist institutions like the criminal legal system that create the material basis for those ideas to gain a hearing, because it’s far easier for vigilantes to feel justified in gunning down Black people, as happened this summer in Jacksonville, Florida, where three Black people were killed by a white supremacist, or in the fatal stabbing of O’Shae Sibley, a Black gay man in Brooklyn.

When this happens legally at the hands of police and the criminal system on a regular basis, uniting a working class that is structurally divided by racism requires fighting racism wherever it appears, along with every other form of oppression. And because racism is so central to maintaining class inequality, resistance to racism, particularly anti-Black racism, tends to raise bigger questions about the unequal nature of our entire society–not just for Black people, but for everyone.

The key question is what the Left can do to facilitate the process of building and rebuilding democratic, accessible institutions of resistance that are clear about the centrality of anti-racist struggle—not if, but when, the next rebellion comes—because the movement is on the defensive today.

We know that all of the conditions that led to the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 uprising in the first place have not been resolved. Figuring out exactly what we need to do next is not an easy task. There is no easy answer, but history offers some useful guides for how radicals have successfully forged unity within the working class, not by neglecting or downplaying racism, but by actively confronting it.

There are a couple of examples I would like to emphasize. Phil gave one example when talking of the labor struggles of the 1970s. I want to talk about the Communist Party (CP), the Scottsboro Boys, and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) during the 1930s.

In 1931 in Alabama, nine Black boys were falsely accused of raping two white women. All except the youngest (who was 13) were sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The Communist Party reached out to their families and organized their legal defense alongside a national campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys. This campaign ultimately mobilized thousands of protesters, Black and white, around the country and internationally, to stop their execution. It also exposed the broader racism of the U.S. legal system.

Scottsboro Boys and Juanita Jackson Mitchell – Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery, William Roberson, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Charles Weems, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Laura Kellum, Andrew Wright, Eugene Williams. Photo by Britton & Patterson.

The pressure of this mass grassroots campaign from below ultimately led the Supreme Court to overrule the Boys’ death sentences. Although the campaign was not able to win their release from prison, it did succeed in saving their lives. As a result, the CP recruited a slew of Black comrades who were leading struggles in their own communities; they gained a strong reputation as among the most committed opponents of segregation, particularly among Black working-class and agricultural workers. The families of the Boys spoke out against red-baiting and other efforts by more moderate civil rights groups like the NAACP to distance themselves from the campaigns or break it from its roots in the Communist Party.

To quote Janie Patterson, the mother of one of the boys, “I don’t care whether they are reds, greens, or blues. They’re the only ones who put up a fight to save these boys, and I am with them to the end.”

Throughout the Great Depression, the CP further solidified its anti-racist reputation when workers who were members of the Party or influenced by its organizing formed the CIO. Whereas the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had been unwilling to challenge segregated locals or racist wage differentials, the CIO made a priority of organizing Black workers within industrial unions, which ignored distinctions among unskilled and skilled workers, whether they were Black or white.

With Black organizers—some of whom were Party members leading the charge, working together with the National Negro Congress, a CP-led organization allied with civil rights organizations—the union was able to undercut reluctance or hostility among Black people toward unions given their prior experience facing exclusion or even violence when they attempted to organize themselves.

They also challenged white workers’ racism under the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight.” As a result of this, and through the experience of successful strikes in which Ford Motors proved unable to play on racial divisions by using Black workers as strikebreakers, the number of Black workers in unions grew from 56,000 in 1930 to 25 million by 1945.

This strong link between the CP and anti-racist struggles was broken before the start of the Civil Rights movement. Stalin’s Popular Front policy during which the Party abruptly shifted away from criticizing the U.S. or capitalism undermined the Party’s commitment to fighting racism and left its Black allies feeling that their needs had been subordinated to Soviet foreign policy interests.

Nevertheless, Communists had become so closely associated with anti-racist activism that, during the Red Scare, McCarthyites frequently attacked anti-racists by accusing them of being Communists. The purging of Communists from the labor movement and the capitulation of some labor leaders to Cold War politics meant removing some of the most committed opponents of racism from the AFL-CIO, and its efforts to enforce desegregation declined.

Meanwhile middle-class Black organizations who cooperated with Cold War anti-communism did not actually succeed in protecting themselves from racist attacks. In fact, the NAACP’s literature was banned along with the Communists’. In a scathing indictment, Left historian Manning Marable concluded that by serving as the left-wing of McCarthyism, middle-class Black leaders retarded the black movement for a decade or more. This is a pretty strong indictment.

Another example of mass anti-racist struggle is from the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement began as a struggle for equal rights predicated on the dismantling of this country’s Jim Crow system of racial apartheid in the South. Polls throughout the 1960s did not show a ready-made, multiracial coalition behind black demands for civil rights.

A 1963 Gallup poll found that 78 percent of white people would leave if Black families moved into their neighborhood, with 60 percent having an unfavorable view of the March on Washington. However, the truly heroic and persistent struggle of Black people in the face of police dogs, water cannons, and police and Klan violence not only shifted public opinion but also changed those participating and ultimately led them to more radical demands around the limits of integration for addressing racial as well as economic inequality.

The leading organization of this period was without a doubt the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers were an explicitly socialist organization with a mass following. Their newspaper had a circulation of a hundred thousand copies per issue at its height, and they saw their role as raising people’s consciousness, capturing this mass mood and organizing its vanguard.

Most importantly, they saw the overthrow of capitalism as essential to the project of anti racism. Today, there’s a lot of focus on different community projects that the Panthers engaged in, like their free breakfast program or the fact that they carried guns. But I really like this quote from Eddie Conway, a former Panther:

The state targeted the Panthers because we were socialists, not because we were armed. The most dangerous thing about the Panthers was that they had a mass audience and saw their project as linking up with different groups of oppressed peoples, whether they be Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, or even poor whites.

That is the context in which the Panthers and other wings of the movement were targeted for violent repression by the state, and even murder, as Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor argues in her book  From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

The backlash was intended not only to discipline rebelling African-Americans but also to reestablish order in a society where demonstrations, illegal strikes, riots, and rebellions had become legitimate means of registering complaints against the state and forcing reforms from hostile political forces, including those of ordinary working-class white people.

More threatening still was the example set by movements like the anti-war and womens’ liberation struggles, which made the Black struggle in Keeanga’s words, “a conduit for questioning American democracy and capitalism.”

Struggle creates the context in which racist ideas and divisions can be broken down. But that is only a possibility if we actually fight for it. An organization is critical. Socialists should see our contribution as helping to bring coherence to the experience and lessons of militants, particularly of many Black activists who have become leaders in these struggles in lasting organizations, including our own.

Ultimately, rolling back the gains of this movement—which had included an expanded welfare state–and instituting a neoliberal agenda that produced the upward transfer of wealth through privatization, austerity, and the gutting of what little social safety net we have—required attacking the most radical wing of this struggle. It required both racist attacks and attacks on explicit demands for socialism or burying that history.

This massive upward transfer of wealth required justification: Enter the racist myth of the “Black welfare queen” to justify the rollback of welfare reforms, obscuring the fact that the majority of people on welfare were white.

In addition, the expansion of the carceral system and the criminalization of Black people—questions that the Black Power Movement had begun to raise around racial and economic inequality but which are left unresolved until the present—has meant far more poor and working class people of all races and genders are caught up in its web today.

There are hundreds of white people killed annually by the police, and the fastest growing prison population is white women. That points to a basis for solidarity and fighting for abolition, but also to the importance of understanding that dismantling these systems requires fighting racism and the priorities of the ruling class in tandem.

To summarize, racism is ultimately an essential tool for maintaining inequality on a class basis. How do we get to a revolutionary consciousness? Marx says,

Revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of the ages and become fitted to found society anew.

That is, struggle creates the context in which racist ideas and divisions can be broken down. But that is only a possibility if we actually fight for it. An organization is critical. Socialists should see our contribution as helping to bring coherence to the experience and lessons of militants, particularly of many Black activists who have become leaders in these struggles in lasting organizations, including our own.

In this way, we can help lay the basis for stronger, more organized struggles that are better able to fight for and win our demands in the future, especially the next time that the police kill a Black person or a city cuts social services while wasting billions of dollars on policing.

We also need to tie these struggles against racism in the here and now to the need for an entirely different society. Capitalism needs to divide our side in order to rule, and any of the reforms we win can be rolled back if and when they happen to conflict with the needs of the ruling class. We can see that in the Supreme Court’s recent rolling back and putting the final nail in the coffin of affirmative action, the attacks on critical race theory and the very teaching of Black history (or rather of American history as it actually happened), and the violence of an emboldened far right.

Progress isn’t linear. White supremacy is deeply rooted in every level of capitalist society. It’s primed and ready to be mobilized when it’s in the interest of the capitalist class. This is why our struggle needs to be for more than reforms. We need revolution, and I give the last word to Fred Hampton who was a Black Panther fighting for the unity under the Rainbow Coalition of all different groups in Chicago. He was literally murdered by this government for doing that. He said,

We’re going to fight racism, not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say, we’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, we’re going to fight it with socialism.

Featured image credit: Joe Piette; modified by Tempest.

On February 1, around 100 people attended the Black Lives Matter and Palestine Solidarity Teach-In on Zoom. The event was sponsored by Black Lives Matter at School, Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN), and the Seattle Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (SCORE).

For educators and youth in the Seattle area, the Teach-In helped kickoff the local Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action which officially took place February 5-9. Participants felt the need to connect this year’s BLM at School Week to organizing to stop the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The issue grew in urgency when the following information was leaked by Seattle Public Schools (SPS) district staff in early January. According to the leak:

SPS is planning to scrub BLM@S (Black Lives Matter at School) title and language from communication and publications for the week of action in February and instead are calling it ‘Black Excellence in Schools Week of Action’… the rationale being because SPS senior leadership raised red flags about BLM@S supporting pro-Palestinian resistance movements and organizing.

Seattle Public Schools’ “red flags” referred to the national Black Lives Matter at School publishing a Palestine solidarity statement on October 17 called “The Only Lasting Peace is a Free Palestine.”

Seattle area educators and youth couldn’t allow SPS to betray both movements. In addition to the Teach-in, more than ten educators, members of the Seattle Education Association and part of the Seattle Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, some who are anti-Zionist Jews and activists in Jewish Voices for Peace, organized and spoke at a Seattle School Board meeting in early January. They made crucial connections and stood up for both Palestine and Black Lives Matter at School while calling for SPS to reverse its decision.

On January 29, the local BLM at School coalition held a press conference at the downtown Seattle Public Library. Among other issues, educators and youth spoke powerfully in solidarity with Palestine and urged the district to change its stance.

Finally, due to all the organized pressure, the district relented and changed course. Less than a week before February 5, the district released BLM at School curriculum (unsurprisingly without reference to Palestine or the organizing around it) to principals around the district. However, it was up to each individual principal to decide whether they would forward it along to the educators in their building. Then on February 7, at the end of the third day of BLM at School Week, the Superintendent of SPS read a public proclamation in support of BLM at School at the Seattle School Board meeting.

This victory for both BLM at School and Palestine solidarity should be celebrated, especially considering the BLM at School movement started in Seattle back in 2016. It would have been a huge setback for the district to end its support for BLM at School given that history. Despite this victory, youth and educators know the struggle must continue to make sure the district doesn’t try this ever again and because the genocide of Palestinians by Israel continues to this day.

Lena Jones: I really, really deeply thank y’all for being here on your Thursday evening. I know most, if not all, of us have come from work and a lot of extra stuff today, so thank you for your time.

As we’re getting started, I’ll introduce myself a little bit and our speakers. My name is Lena and I am an educator in Seattle Public Schools. I have the deep honor and privilege to teach both Black Studies and ELA (English Language Arts). I also serve my school’s Black Student Union and on our Racial Equity Team.

We’ll get started tonight with some background information. These are things that I think, hopefully, are widely known within this group of people. Soon after October 7, 2023, Israel began a genocidal bombing campaign and an invasion of the Gaza Strip in Palestine.

Since then, Israel has killed over 25,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them have been women and minors. Over 62,000 have been injured. According to the Health Ministry (in the Gaza Strip), 85 percent of Gaza’s residents have been displaced, some 1.9 million people, according to the UN. And as of mid-December, The Guardian reported that 352 school buildings have been damaged, more than 70 percent of Gaza’s educational infrastructure.

That is a big part of why we are here tonight. The other piece that we are all holding in space and in community tonight is that on October 17, the National Black Lives Matter at School’s organization released a statement that read:

We open our hearts to the anger, the fear, and the rage that many are feeling.
We feel grief alongside and with you and are committed to the responsibility we have to education and young people. We remain steadfast in our commitment to nurturing a shared vision, to collectively love and care for one another as global and extended intergenerational families. BLM at School wants to be clear in our recognition that this unfolding loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives is the direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians. Palestinians are reminding us that decolonization is not a metaphor or abstraction.

It requires real daily struggle. Education should be wielded in service of struggle. The ongoing fight to #TeachTruth in the U.S must include Palestinian existence, resistance, culture, global contributions, and the ongoing struggle. To realize a free Palestine, it also must directly name the ways that U.S imperialism has fueled and supported apartheid and war crimes.

Educators need resources, support, and protection that honor the enduring struggle for realizing Palestinian justice. This is our offering at this time.

In the wake of that statement, information was leaked that Seattle Public Schools were planning to scrub the Black Lives Matter at School title and language from communications and were instead gonna call it the Black Excellence in Schools Week of Action.

And specifically, the rationale being Seattle Public Schools (SPS) senior leadership had raised some red flags about BLM at School supporting a pro-Palestinian resistance movement and organizing. We are all here tonight in community because we are not going to allow that to happen.

We cannot allow SPS to betray both movements, the Black Lives Matter at School work and the incredible need, call, and urgency around Palestinian resistance and mobilization. We’re really happy that you are here with us tonight to hear from some leaders and voices, to share your thoughts, your questions, your expertise, your wisdom, your experience, and stand in solidarity together with Black Lives Matter at Schools and with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Tonight’s event is sponsored by WAESN (Washington Ethnic Studies Now), by the Seattle Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, and by Black Lives Matter at School. There’s been a lot of work by a lot of really incredible people who I’m really proud to be in community with and to be organizing with.

Thanks to everyone and especially our panelists for your time and all the organizing that’s gone on behind the scenes for this. It’s a labor of love and I really appreciate y’all.

Tonight we are going to hear from Jesse Hagopian, Wafa´ Safi, Diana Fakhoury, Miriam, and Emma Klein.

I will start off passing it to Jesse.

Jesse Hagopian: Thank you so much. Always good to be with you. Really appreciate everybody who helped organize this panel. You know, I began teaching in 2001 in Washington DC, and I would drive by the White House every day on my way to school.

I would cross the Anacostia River, and a few minutes later I would be in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods, most segregated neighborhoods in the nation. The first assignment I ever gave my students was to research someone from history they admired that had helped create a better world. They worked on those projects. They turned in their posters on a Friday.

Then, on the Monday, we went to present the posters. But when we came into the classroom, we saw the posters had been destroyed because it had rained into my classroom. The hole in the ceiling had allowed the posters to be waterlogged and the students weren’t able to present.

2001 was the beginning of my career. It also coincided with the 9-11 attacks. We could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon from our classroom window. It was very scary.

But I’ll tell you something that was even more terrifying. How quickly the U.S. government could mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars to go bomb people all over the Middle East, kill people in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but didn’t have the money to fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom in a school that served 100 percent Black students.

That really taught me everything I needed to know about the American Empire and its priorities. Since October 7, the 625,000 children enrolled in schools across Gaza have been denied an education because of Israel’s genocidal attack that’s already damaged over 436 schools. Every single university in Gaza has been bombed.

You remember early on there was a controversy about whether they bombed a hospital or not? Now it’s just routine. We see them bombing hospitals or raiding hospitals in violation of international law. Clear war crimes on a regular basis, killing over 10,000 children. One out of every 100 children in Gaza is dead because of Israeli bombs that were bought and supplied by our own government, by U.S. taxpayer funds.

Now it’s just routine…Clear war crimes on a regular basis, killing over 10,000 children. One out of every 100 children in Gaza is dead because of Israeli bombs that were bought and supplied by our own government, by U.S. taxpayer funds.

It isn’t just the recent attacks that have devastated Palestinian children in education. It’s the ongoing occupation. Israel is apparently inspired by the American system of schooling and policing that has contributed to the fact that more Black people are incarcerated or under the jurisdiction of the legal system today than were enslaved on plantations in 1850.

Israel is inspired by that level of inequality because it created its own particularly vicious form of the school-to-prison pipeline. Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children on average are prosecuted in military courts. It’s the only country that puts children in military courts. And since 2000, more than 12,000 youth have been detained. Since August of 2019, there has just been a massive escalation in Palestinian students being subjected to prolonged and arbitrary military detention, and denying them the right to assemble, free expression and association.

But I want to say this, in addition to targeting students and schools for destruction, Israel is actively pursuing the destruction of historical knowledge and education. That is because it is difficult to perpetuate genocide and ethnic cleansing while simultaneously purporting to be a democracy, right, without also controlling a population’s collective memory and whitewashing the brutality from its historical record.

I think we need to not only talk about genocide this evening, but I think we also need to talk about epistemicide, right? The destruction of ways of knowing and understanding the world is a practice that sociologist Bonaventura de Sousa Santos called epistemicide. This includes destroying cultural knowledge and anti-racist ideas and frameworks for understanding how to challenge oppression and colonization.

Israel has clearly studied the long and violent history of the U.S. government because it has seen the way the U.S. attacks colonized people and also the way that colonized people struggle for access to systems of knowledge that can help them get free. There are so many examples of epistemicide in the United States.

We can talk about the anti-literacy laws that were imposed on enslaved African people. We can talk about the Native American boarding schools that took indigenous children and put them into schools designed to strip them of their culture and deny them the truth about how they were dispossessed of their land.

We can talk about the laws today in the U.S. Right now, almost half of children in the U.S. are in a school district where there is legislation that denies them learning the truth about U.S. history and systemic racism. I went to Israel and Palestine in 2011. That was the same year that Israel passed the Al-Nakba law that made it illegal to teach about Al-Nakba in the schools. Doing so, results in the school’s money being revoked.

When we were in Israel, we went to Sderot which borders Gaza. Our guide took us to the top of a hill where she said that Israelis would gather to cheer the bombing of Gaza every time Israel launched attacks. I was on a delegation with African Americans, Black people who were veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. These veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, when they saw that apartheid wall they said, “separate will never be equal.”

And they broke into song adapting an old Black freedom struggle song, singing, “Like an olive tree, standing by the water, we shall not be moved.” It was an extremely moving experience for me to see Israeli apartheid through the eyes of civil rights activists. One teacher, a woman named Gloria, who was a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, described how when she went to integrate the school in Mississippi in the 60s, the school was surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan on horseback with shotguns.

When she talked about those stories, they really connected with what the Palestinian activists had been describing to us. And when the civil rights activists that I was on the delegation with said that the apartheid they saw in Israel was harsher than what they experienced during the Jim Crow South, I really understood what we are up against.

I’ll just end by saying that the best tradition of the Black Freedom Struggle has always stood with Palestinian Liberation. You can talk about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that put out a statement in solidarity with Palestinians. You can talk about Malcolm X, who did the same, the Black Panther party who did the same.

And we need to stand in that same tradition. That’s why I’m proud to be part of the Black Lives Matter at School movement that is demanding the right of educators to be able to teach the truth about Palestinian liberation. Thank you for having me.

Image by Zinn Education Project

Lena Jones: Thanks so much, Jesse. We appreciate all of the diverse connections that your various experiences are able to bring to this space. The next speaker I have the privilege to introduce is Emma Klein.

Emma Klein: Thank you, Lena. I feel really honored to be on a panel with all these incredible thinkers and speakers and activists. So just a little update on where we are at as far as curriculum distribution and the proclamation in Seattle in support of Black Lives Matter at School Week. Yesterday, after the school day ended, principals received resources to support educators in teaching during Black History Month and Black Lives Matter at School Week.

Those resources are distributed at the whim of the principal. Our principal immediately sent it out to us. I was actually in a meeting with her talking about what to do now that we are moments away from February 1st and just days away from Black Lives Matter at School Week without any resources or direction or proclamation from the district.

I have to say that providing educators with resources the day before Black History month and five days before Black Lives Matter at School Week sends a resounding message to families and staff. The district still hasn’t released a proclamation that typically comes at the beginning of January in support of Black Lives Matter at School.

What we have received is too little, too late. As a parent, I want my child’s Jewish heritage and culture to be taught and honored alongside the Movement for Black Lives, as well as that of Arab, Palestinians, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and other marginalized groups.

This is the kind of pluralistic, inclusive educational environment that I believe supports my child’s academic, social, and emotional development, and one that prepares them to engage with complex and dynamic realities of our world. As educators, we have an ethical responsibility to teach the truth and engage students to think critically about the world around them.

Removing curriculum, or even flagging it because it includes resources about Palestinian existence and its ongoing struggle for liberation, contributes to the erasure of Palestinian narrative from curricula. Given the current climate and silencing of educational institutions that uplift marginalized histories and identities, it is necessary that we draw attention and raise our voices.

This is the moment for public schools to embrace the power of education and its potential to combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, all of which are intimately interconnected. This is not a moment to shy away from critical conversations, nor is it a time to withdraw support from movements that fight for racial equity and justice.

White supremacy and white supremacist culture are at the core of oppressive systems that impact Black and Palestinian people from Seattle to Gaza. As documented by multiple international and Israeli organizations, including Amnesty International and B’Tselem, Palestinians are living under an apartheid regime.

So, as Jesse said, this is not just about genocide that has been going on since October 7. This is a decades-long intentional ethnic cleansing and ongoing genocide and, according to Israeli institutions, Israeli organizations, and international  organizations, is apartheid.

This is the moment for public schools to embrace the power of education and its potential to combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, all of which are intimately interconnected. This is not a moment to shy away from critical conversations, nor is it a time to withdraw support from movements that fight for racial equity and justice.

And currently, according to the International Criminal Court as well as U.S. courts, there’s indication and I quote, “that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore, plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.” We can all take issue with the word plausible, but despite the international and national acknowledgement that there is potential genocide going on in Palestine, U.S. media consistently portrays the Palestinian narrative in a negative and a dismissive light.

The profound horrors of internationally recognized genocide and ethnic cleansing are disproportionately covered compared to the experience that Israelis have had, which was tragic, but compared to what is happening in Gaza, quite a different situation.

I wanted to throw out just some information about how this news is being reported. According to a January 9th The Intercept survey of coverage of major U.S. publications, highly emotive language such as “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved exclusively for Israelis who are killed by Palestinians rather than the other way round. The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to one.

And “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to two, despite the disproportionate number of Palestinian deaths, at least a third of which are children. The population in Gaza is being tortured and slaughtered. Over 11,000 children have been massacred. This is horrific and we need to say that. We need our media to say that.

We can draw parallels to the language used to describe Black children by our media. In schools, the adultification of Black children perpetuates a false perception that Black children are more angry or more deviant than White peers, which is leading to higher rates of discipline for Black students compared to White students who have participated in the same behaviors. This reality may feel terrifying to White Jewish Americans who struggle to acknowledge their whiteness and the role it plays in the creation and ongoing western support for Zionism in Israel.

Let me be clear. Criticizing Zionist policy and actions is not antisemitic. Israel is a nation, and Zionism is a political movement distinct from religious and secular Judaism. I, like many Jews, do not share the perspective of the state of Israel, and that does not make me any less Jewish. In fact, Zionism is at odds with my Judaism.

It is not antisemitic to affirm the value of Palestinian life. It is one of the key tenets of my Jewishness to hold all life as equally precious and worthy of freedom and liberation from oppression and hate. It is from this place that I stand in solidarity with the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Like many movements for liberation from Anti-Apartheid in South Africa to the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. to the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction has been a powerful non-violent tool to resist. And as Lena explained, in a SEA Representative Assembly voted to approve a resolution joining the Palestinian BDS call. The assembly voted 90 percent in favor.

And this resolution is still in place. I just wanna close by saying that our public schools must commit to helping students learn to navigate difficult topics with care, curiosity, and respect for one another. As a Jewish anti-racist educator, anti-Zionist educator and parent, I feel strongly that we must support educators who teach about the interconnectedness of movements of marginalized groups for liberation.

From Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian fight for freedom from occupation and Israeli apartheid, there’s essential learning that our community desperately needs. Thank you.

Protesting AIPAC and Israeli Treatment of the Palestinians Chicago, Illinois, May 30, 2019. Photo by Charles Edward Miller.

Lena Jones: Thank you so much. There’s so much resonance in the chat and also in my heart. There’s so many things that are common points of struggle and that intersect with multiple identities that I hold that you also hold in there.

Just so much appreciation for the work and the ability to see common humanity and work from that place that I think all of us can do so much more to benefit from. I’m really excited to introduce our next speaker, Diana Fakhoury.

Diana Fakhoury: Thank you so much. I’m really honored to be here. Thank you to all the panelists. I’m very touched by what everyone has been saying and the solidarity. I feel like I wanna cry.

I really appreciate everybody being here and everyone in the audience as well. I do have a little presentation, so let me see here if I could share my screen. I wanna talk to you about my personal experience growing up in the U.S. as a Palestinian immigrant and the need to teach about Palestine.

Just to tell you a little bit about my personal history. All of my ancestry dates back to Palestine. My father was born in 1947, just a year before the Nakba. My paternal grandfather was a prosperous farmer at that time, but due to the Nakba, almost all of his farmland was stolen. He was left with just a rocky hillside that was not arable.

My father and all of his siblings grew up in abject poverty and famine. He would tell us stories of when he was a child sharing one egg between all of his family of 11, and each person taking a bite. Everybody inspecting the bite to see that it wasn’t too big so that they could all have something to eat. And many, many stories like that. To see what’s happening in Gaza right now, given the intergenerational trauma and the trauma that the survivors of the Nakba are facing, is just a re-traumatizing experience.

My family immigrated to Kuwait due to the lack of economic opportunities in Palestine. That’s where I was born.

That’s where my mom actually was born and my sisters and most of my extended family. As Lena mentioned, in 1990 we were here for a summer vacation and the Gulf War started. My family lost everything. We stayed in the U.S. as illegal immigrants. My dad went back to Kuwait to try to obtain some of his assets from his business that was being looted by Iraqi forces at the time. When he came back to the U.S., although he had a valid visa, he was denied entry by a racist customs official at the Atlanta airport. We couldn’t see my father for another two years.

I’m explaining all of this just to illustrate that all Palestinians in the diaspora have [a] similar history of forced displacement from their indigenous homeland. And then oftentimes continued displacement beyond that. I also have to acknowledge that my story is like a fairy tale compared to what Palestinians are experiencing in our homeland and in refugee camps around the world.

Palestinians in the diaspora have [a] similar history of forced displacement from their indigenous homeland. And then oftentimes continued displacement beyond that.

Growing up here in the U.S., I came here when I was in second grade. It was a challenge. I didn’t have the language to understand our displacement or how to process the microaggressions and the racism that we were facing. We, very early on, kind of figured out that we shouldn’t mention that we’re Palestinian. We would just say we’re Arab or Middle Eastern just to try to avoid the confusion and distaste that we would see from people just by mentioning the word Palestine.

Mostly, I did my best to just assimilate and not draw too much attention to my otherness, except from close friends who would come to my house, which was undeniably very Palestinian. My education in public schools in North Carolina was, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear, very colonialist in nature, very Eurocentric. Aside from hearing problematic statements like Palestine does not exist, there was rarely a mention of Palestine in school.

Even though I grew up in a Palestinian household, I think my elders did not have the bandwidth or the language to synthesize our struggle in an age-appropriate way. And so not until I became an adult did I really understand the history of settler colonialism, forced displacement, and the ongoing occupation and apartheid that Palestinians are subjected to.

Obviously, we need to teach about Palestine. I think everybody here knows that. I’ve come to learn more so now by what’s happening and by talking to Americans, that Americans are Zionists by default, unless you have sought out information about Palestine. We are dealing with decades of dehumanization and propaganda about Palestinians. That is the narrative that people know.

I’m seeing very clearly right now that there is a lack of understanding and empathy with the Palestinian people in the general public. Right now in Washington State, there is a bill making its way through our State Legislature that would mandate Holocaust and other genocide education where all of the proposed funding would be going to the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

I know that Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN) has convened a multi-ethnic work group of genocide survivors, descendants, and other concerned parents and educators to make the bill more inclusive and to receive some funding to develop the curriculum. If anyone is interested in joining that work group, please reach out to WAESN about that.

You know Palestinians and allies are facing censorship and erasure right now. I’ll just tell you a little bit about what I’ve been facing. I have been trying to speak to my son’s school about teaching about Palestine for a few years. Mostly, I’ve been dismissed, but recently given the situation, I wanted to go into his classroom.

It’s a third grade class, so I just hoped to read a couple books about Palestine, a couple kids’ books, and put them into context with the genocide, the ethnic cleansing. I saw this as my effort at cultural preservation. But the school has denied me that access. They have told me to develop a curriculum and that they will see if they can get it approved by the district.

I think that this is further dismissal of my story. And to me, I just saw it as a racist double standard given that I know that the school talked about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. I know that parents of other cultures have gone in and spoken about their cultures and their holidays and stuff like that.

Palestinian students deserve representation. Similar to the BLM demand to “Mandate Black History and Ethnic Studies,” I think students of all marginalized communities should not have to bear the burden of living and understanding their oppression in a vacuum.

Their peers need to develop this awareness and empathy as well. This is a little bit of a shameless plug, but I am part of a Palestinian-led group that is working on advocacy at the state level. I would love it if you all could sign our petition. I could drop the link in the chat as well or follow us on Instagram.

We’re gonna be talking to legislators on February 20th for an advocacy day. And we really need our allies to show support. I so appreciate that. And that’s it for me. Thank you.

Lena Jones: Thank you so much, Diana, for sharing your story and speaking so cogently, being able to tie your family’s personal story to our broader shared political struggle and the importance of language to describe reality. Sharing stories can be an important active resistance, a way to speak truth to power.

I thank you for doing it. I can only assume your children are doing it as well, learning from their powerful mother. Thank you so much.

Our next speaker is Miriam.

Miriam: Hello. I’m so excited to be here. Everyone that has spoken before me was so eloquent. They had such important things to say. I feel so honored to share the stage with all of you.

I’m Miriam. I am an Arab and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) person. Just a couple things about me. My father immigrated to the U.S. in the 80s from Jordan. My mother grew up in poverty here in the U.S. I grew up in the greater Seattle area. I went to school in Bellevue. Went to college at the Evergreen States College in Olympia.

Now I live and organize within Seattle proper. I thought that I would open up with a personal story about my family back home in Jordan right now. I went and visited them over the holidays. I was there not too long ago. After being in this country since October 7th and beyond, it felt really validating to be surrounded by people who did not question the genocide that’s going on so close to them.

Jordan is extremely geographically close to Palestine. They share a border. So my family is racially, religiously, and geographically tied to what’s going on right now. I was lucky enough to catch a story that my uncles were telling about prior to 1967; they would travel with each other from their home in Jordan over to Al-Quds or Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa.

I’m gonna talk a little bit about Palestine as a feminist issue….[W]omen and gender expansive people are on the front lines of all liberation struggles. This is because we are the most impacted by our oppressors. The systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, all work together to steal our labor, our power, and our bodily autonomy.

Then they would go over to a family member’s house in Nablus to have msakhan, and then would drive all the way back to Jordan within the day. That just really solidified how rough it is to kind of create these fake borders and displace people from land that once was theirs and is ancestrally still theirs.

I’m gonna talk a little bit about Palestine as a feminist issue. As most of us know, hopefully, women and gender expansive people are on the front lines of all liberation struggles. This is because we are the most impacted by our oppressors. The systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, all work together to steal our labor, our power, and our bodily autonomy.

Some examples of how and why Palestine is a feminist issue. Palestinian women are forced to give birth to stillborn babies at checkpoints because the ambulances aren’t allowed to pass through. This is a very common occurrence. Israeli soldiers talk about Palestinian women being targets for killing as they did specifically in the 2009 war on Gaza.

Also, Palestinians, men, women, and gender expansive folks experienced sexualized torture, rape, castration, all under interrogation, which is clearly a human rights violation. In Gaza, currently women are using tents and clothing scraps as period products because of the lack of humanitarian aid and supplies that are not allowed into Gaza.

Right now, 52,000 women in Gaza are pregnant, and the rate for miscarriages has increased 300 percent. Pregnant women are getting C-sections without anesthesia, and every hour, two mothers in Gaza are killed by the Zionist regime. 20,000 babies have been born since the start of this genocide. And one child is killed every 15 minutes by Israeli airstrikes.

Six percent of Gaza’s population is dead, wounded, or under rubble. Maybe some of you have seen the videos posted live on the grounds. There are some videos of people stuck under rubble and you can hear their screams from under and without anyone being able to save them. A lot of these people are children who are stuck and still alive.

Palestine is a feminist issue because Zionism seeks to destroy Palestinian life, love, joy, freedom, and our lands. But we know that true feminism is liberation through life, love, joy, freedom and the land. So therefore, Zionism and feminism are inherently different.

The opposite of the feminism that I know, and that a lot of my fellow panelists I’m sure know, is imperial feminism. Imperial feminism, or colonial feminism, attempts to weaponize the language of women’s rights in order to shut down the Palestinian liberation struggle. This looks like IDF soldiers that are also TikTok influencers dancing on bombed homes in Gaza.

And it can also look like women within the UN and within the U.S. government refusing to humanize Palestinians who are under violent siege. Another word for this is purple washing, where the state of Israel strategically uses fake imperial feminist tropes to make it seem like they are a woke, and forward, and legitimate state.

Going off of that, this is one of the reasons why intersectional organizing is so important. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, for those of us who don’t know, as a metaphor to understand the ways that multiple forms of inequalities compound themselves. Intersectionality challenges the mainstream and liberal rhetoric that oppression only affects one identity at a time.

In terms of intersectional organizing, all of our struggles overlap in more ways than they don’t. Our struggles often face common enemies. Some common enemies, Western imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, they all work together. If we were to all work together across oceans and false borders, to collectively take down these systems and their consequences, in my eyes, that would be the first step to true liberation.

A very important and stark example of this is the Deadly Exchange. The Deadly Exchange is when U.S. police travel to Israel, and they train with the Israeli military. Different U.S. police departments, state, federal, and otherwise, travel to Israel and basically learn their tactics. And of course, the consequences of these exchanges are felt deeply in the Black communities that are already feeling the repression of state violence every day.

And some of the U.S. police departments that are at fault for some pretty high-profile murders of unarmed Black men, including the Minneapolis Police Department, the Chicago Police Department, Baltimore, and St. Louis have all participated in these police exchanges including the Seattle Police Department. This is why our organizing must be intersectional. If our work is only focused on the liberation of one identity, there will be no true liberation. A movement that only works to undo the harm against one type of person will always fall short.

Another example of this is Israel is a settler colonial and a white supremacist project. This might be a hot take, but here we are. I know I’m at time, but I’m gonna get into this. The Zionist State of Israel asserts their genocidal racism against their own Black citizens, some of which are Jewish themselves.

There are nearly 170,000 Jewish citizens of Ethiopian heritage in addition to a lot of Sudanese and African nationals who are refugees. In 2019, Israeli police shot and killed two different Ethiopian Jews under the age of 25 within six months, and a politician under Netanyahu’s political party called Sudanese refugees cancer.

This is another great example of why our movements are always intertwined and why a united front isn’t only a good idea, it’s a requirement for a healthy and successful movement. A lot of us know a very prominent common enemy is white supremacy. If we work to dismantle that system here, we can and will dismantle it worldwide.

Lena Jones: I mean, go off though, sis. Seriously, thank you for making such important intersectional connections between the racial, ethnic, and religious and gender identities–speaking about the world with complexity and nuance. I also really appreciate you bringing the language of love into our conversation about struggle. Thank you so much for your powerful testimony and your work.

The next speaker is Wafá Safi.

Wafá Safi: Thank you so much for having me here. I kind of feel like I’m in the wrong place right now. It’s been amazing listening to everybody who’s spoken thus far.

I wanted to just quickly share. I’m gonna cut down a lot of what I’ve said because a lot of the speakers here have already mirrored the things that I’ve wanted to say, but a little bit about my Palestinian story.

My father is from Al-Haditha, which, unfortunately, is no longer in existence. That star (on her slideshow), unfortunately, has moved. My grandfather was a person who was very knowledgeable in creating economic centers or bringing businesses or connecting businesses together.

That was my grandfather from my father’s side. My grandfather from my mother’s side is from Jenin (Arabi), that area there is sectioned off for you on the right side of the screen; it is also currently in Nablus where a lot of the settlers are coming in and just doing whatever they want to the people there.

When we were at the RA last year, the Representative Assembly for NEA, my mom was overseas and I will never forget this day. A few days after the RA was finished, she called me and she was crying, saying, ‘I love you’, pretty much saying her goodbyes. Because in that time, that is when things were starting to ramp up to what we’re seeing today, which is a continuous onslaught of just continuous attacks, unfortunately.

I don’t wish that on anybody. I’m incredibly saddened all the time, just trying to live our lives, just trying to be the teacher, be the positive person, be the mom, be the wife, be everything for everybody.

You have this sadness going in a constant loop, that generational trauma that we all experience. And it’s not just us. I see it with my Black students. I see it with my Black colleagues. I see it with everybody. It’s one of those things that you just can’t shake.

In my high school years, I found my voice. I grew up in Kentucky. I don’t know why Kentucky, how Kentucky. All my dad said was “Your uncle came here before. He bought land and my father was in construction.”

Just to back up real quick, both of my parents’ families lived and stayed during the Nakba. They left shortly afterwards. My father’s side of the family stayed. My dad left in 1967. In 1952-1953, my mother’s side of the family left.

They went to Kuwait. My mom grew up in Kuwait. My dad in 1967 went to Egypt. He went to Alexandria to get his education. Then he came here and worked with my uncle. They had a construction company in Kentucky of all states because land was cheap. Where I grew up in Kentucky though, ’cause this is where I found my voice, if you were not wealthy enough to purchase land, then you were not allowed to rent an apartment.

This was their way of keeping Brown and Black people out of the area. In my whole high school of 2,000 kids, there were 11 of us Brown and Black kids. We hung together. The struggles that we went through and the things that we saw were ridiculous because the Ku Klux Klan was also very strong.

They had chapters in almost every city in our county. And it was definitely a place where either you tried to put your head down and keep going in your life and still be harassed or you stand up and fight. The day for me, for standing up and fighting, was when Halloween my sophomore year came around and a group of kids decided that they wanted to wear blackface; something in me broke.

I couldn’t handle it. I called the principal. Principal ignored me. I went to the Vice-Principal. The counselor told me I was making a big deal out of nothing. So I called my cousin, who was very active and still is in Ann Arbor. She’s an educator. She came down. We had a meeting with the Superintendent. It was from there that I found my voice because a lot of policies started to change because my cousin gave me that strength to come in there and talk about what it felt like, how it was wrong, all of these things that were happening there.

We never once had non-discrimination policy. We don’t discriminate against sex, religion. That was never anywhere in the terminology where I grew up. In my high school years, that is literally where I found my voice. Finding your voice is incredibly empowering.

I know I’m speaking to people who are using their voice all the time. As an adult, it still felt very lonely. In literally almost every building I’ve been in, with the exception of my years in Arizona, here in Indiana, I’ve always been the only educator of color in a building.

And so, again, being dismissed, being dismissed, being dismissed, but I found regained strength. I never stopped talking. Right. But it wasn’t until I went to the NEA RA where some of the people who are here in attendance of this session were there. I was so in awe of the new business items (NBI) that they put out.

[B]ecause of the work of the people in the NEA, all of our allies, we have the Educators for Palestine, and we are putting strong demands on our President of NEA to rescind our support for President Biden.

They’re talking about Palestine. When I was going to school, when I wanted to write a book report on Palestine, I was told it didn’t exist. Well, because I’m the stubborn child that I was, I still went ahead and wrote it. I got an F, but it was okay. I died on that hill and I’m all right with it, right?

But it all started with that NBI and it kept going and kept going. Then in 2022, the Arab American Educator Caucus was born. In 2023, we had a table and our membership just bloomed. And the beautiful thing about our caucus is it’s not just Arab American educators. It is our Jewish allies. It is our Black allies. It was people from all of the caucuses that we have within the NEA.

And thank you, Merrie. I’m seeing some of the comments here, are the people who have been there and the people who are going back again. But we are doing a lot to amplify our voices and to bring the issues that are happening right now.

We’ve been dehumanized for so long that I don’t think that it’s fair that we have to constantly keep trying to prove our humanity, but with all of that said because of the work of the people in the NEA, all of our allies, we have the Educators for Palestine, and we are putting strong demands on our President of NEA to rescind our support for President Biden.

We are demanding a permanent ceasefire. We want to demand stopping the spending of military funding and equipment, intelligence to Israel and demilitarizing the U.S. border. Stopping all further building of the border wall.  Permanently closing the open-air detention centers.

Which then leads us to the next slide, which is our protest that we are going to be holding, ‘Education Solidarity Rally for Palestine, and that’s gonna be on February 10th. We have educators coming from all around the United States that will be there to amplify our voices, to bring light to the struggle which is very real, and we’re still seeing it.

The Black Lives Matter movement with Black History Month in my own building, I’m practically begging teachers to join in. Let’s do the lessons. Let’s work with the BSU (Black Student Union). Let’s do this. Nobody wants to. And yet again, we keep doing this, we keep repeating this kind of vicious cycle, and it’s time to break that cycle in education.

We need to continue to raise our voices. Even though you don’t think anybody’s hearing you, trust me they’re hearing you. Continue to use your voice. People are hearing you, I promise you.

Lena Jones: Thank you so much. You are definitely in the right space. Your voice is so needed. I really appreciate you uplifting the work of yourself and your family. Bringing community, providing resources from Palestine to Kentucky to Seattle, you’re everywhere. It’s a repeated refrain in Black organizing spaces that we keep us safe.

Featured image credit: teachingforchange; modified by Tempest.

The January 14, 2024, meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s national leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC), must have been a doozy. At that meeting, the NPC was forced to reckon with a budget deficit that threatens to bankrupt the organization. The NPC posted a “Treasury Report & Short Briefing” on the DSA Discussion Board outlining the magnitude of the crisis:

In a worst-case scenario, with all funding requests approved, we could face a critical financial situation as early as August 2024, where meeting our obligations, including those to our staff, becomes a day-to-day challenge, potentially leading to the closure of the organization.

Two days later, DSA National Director Maria Svart, in the position since 2011, announced her resignation. DSA Operations Director Kristina Sepulveda was Svart’s chosen successor but resigned on January 25, less than two weeks later. Sepulveda desired debate around her candidacy to be confidential and quit when minutes were to be published for the membership.

On January 18, Bread & Roses’ The Call explained that DSA projected “$5 million in income and $7 million in expenses”—a $2 million deficit. They called for a $500,000 cut in staff expenses to begin to address the deficit. That same day, the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) responded on their blog, The Agitator, with similar details about the particulars of the deficit. They emphatically rejected staff layoffs in favor of other cuts (suspending stipends,  reducing chapter dues-share, cutting travel, printing, and technology, shuttering the national office,and more). On January 20, the Marxist Unity Group posted on their website in support of Bread and Roses’ proposals and opposed to SMC’s suggested cuts. On January 21, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, DSA’s youth organization, issued a public protest of cuts that would affect them.

The ensuing Twitter battles have been brutal. Anyone familiar with DSA will recognize the themes: “posting discipline” (discouraging public discussion of DSA business), accusations of being anti-union in relation to discussing laying off staff, charges of conspiratorial factionalism, and so on.

On February 20, the NPC passed a “Resolution to Initiate the Process of Laying Off Staff Positions,” pledging to begin layoffs by April 15. On March 8, the Red Star caucus posted an article on their website, “How Red Star is Thinking About Layoffs.” They wrote,

Our philosophy here is to cut deep and cut once: the org needs to make layoffs, and in our view, the goal is to do so to a level that secures DSA National’s continued solvency through this NPC term and at least 6 months into the next one. This is why Red Star proposed and the NPC passed a target of maintaining sufficient cash reserves through December 2025.

The NPC began a process of voting on spending cuts from March 8 through 11, 2024. This included the “Resolution to Achieve Fiscal Sustainability Through Staff Layoffs and Union Engagement”, which committed to laying off twelve staff members. The resolution cites “the need to reduce its annual operating expenses by approximately $610,038.90 for 2024 and $1,183,043 for 2025 as part of a comprehensive strategy to address the current budget deficit of $1,240,201.”

On March 9, in response to the resolutions the DSA’s staff union tweeted “Fuck 12” – inappropriately alluding to the phrase used by protestors of racist police murders. The staff union posted on the Discussion Board rejecting the layoffs and calling for members to intervene on their behalf via a petition, attendance at NPC meetings, and increasing dues donations.

Statements that this decision to lay off staff is in response to a democratic mandate or is the only choice of an exhausted budget should not be taken seriously…We encourage our members to let the NPC know how important you believe DSA Staff, and the work we do, is to the success of this organization, and call out their determination to reject so many alternative cuts while they maximize the firing of union staff.

In sum, over a million dollars of expenses were cut, including twelve of approximately thirty of DSA’s staff. Even still, DSA will continue to run a deficit of somewhere between $800,000 and $925,000 annually.

Money Talks

What is shocking is how DSA has come to the brink of bankruptcy—and how little was done to prevent it. Serious discussion of the loss of tens of thousands of members began in 2023, although the organization’s growth had already peaked in 2021. According to that Growth and Development Committee (“GDC”) report, the implications of this loss were such that 2022 “mark[ed] a 14% decrease” in membership dues (income) compared to the previous year, or about $900,000. Despite this, the 2021 NPC budgeted an increase in spending by nearly $2 million: “the budget anticipated an increase of $700,000 over 2022.” This is rather like poking a second hole in the boat so the water has somewhere to go.

But dues income did not come back up to recover the loss—it dropped further as more people left DSA. According to the GDC report, “At the end of 2023, our revenue was approximately $700,000 less than 2022, with spending exceeding the previous year by $1.6 million.” Dues are projected to fall by another $240,000 in 2024.

As this was happening, DSA held its national convention in August 2023. The deficit was acknowledged in the Convention’s Financial Report, but somehow this was not addressed as a priority issue among delegates. Instead, as they had at previous conventions, delegates passed numerous resolutions calling for additional staff and spending. Socialist Majority even went so far as to argue for doubling the staff from 30 to 60.

In theory, DSA had the information it needed about the situation early enough to respond. Declining membership figures were noted in 2021 and reported again during spring financial reports. DSA had delegated conventions in 2021 and 2023 to have a frank discussion and democratically address the situation before it spiraled out of control. However, the problem was dismissed as something that zealous fundraising and gamified membership drives could solve. The issue was deferred until it was simply impossible to ignore.

Triumphalism and Closed Doors

It is worth taking a moment to ask how this happened, particularly in a group that prizes McAlevey-esque “good organizing” and scientific socialism. How does an organization choose to ramp up its spending year after year even when its own data show declining membership figures and dues income?

A basic survey in accounting would be enough to know that when your income drops, your expenses generally should too. Going a little deeper, forecasting would give a sense of projected growth or contraction using data points to anticipate possible scenarios for the future. When the numbers keep going down, it stands to reason that this is a trend that will continue absent some major shift.

And since this is a political organization and not a business, paying attention to political events and factors should be part of this calculation. It was commonly understood that there was a relationship between the Trump election, Sanders’ campaign, and DSA’s ballooning growth. Likewise, when Biden was elected these two external factors ceased to exist and we see membership rolls hit their peak and begin to fall at the beginning of 2021. (This is to say nothing about factors internal to DSA and within its control that would have bearing on membership.) But instead of adjusting, DSA’s leadership doubled down.

When decisions are made in spite of the evidence, some idea or story has to be deployed to allow two incompatible positions to coexist. Basically, DSA’s political leadership believed that (or at least acted as though) the organization was going to continue to grow forever even though the numbers told them they were shrinking and the political situation that propelled them had disappeared. The figures showing decline were either suppressed, hand waived as a temporary setback, or rationalized as evidence that there was insufficient support for the leadership and staff.

During mid-2023, DSA’s Socialist Forum posted an article “Is DSA Really in Crisis?” Author Emmett McKenna’s answer unsurprisingly was “No,” and McKenna articulated the narrative in no uncertain terms:

Contrary to internal skepticism, DSA is in a much stronger position today than ever before. We are the most influential socialist organization in the United States in nearly a century. Where other US socialist organizations faltered, DSA has succeeded due to a flexibility that has allowed us to participate effectively in mass politics… These persistent so-called crises do not reflect the actual state of affairs in our organization, but by creating an atmosphere of internal disorder, they threaten to hinder DSA’s ability to grow into a mass movement and to return us to the margins of political life.

Let’s call this “DSA Triumphalism”: Claiming to have overcome the historic weakness of the Left, sections of the organization declared DSA’s superiority over other socialist projects, rejected the material dynamics that had led to the marginalization of the Left and which returned in force post-2021-all while policing the bounds of debate within the organization and projecting unlimited growth. DSA Triumphalists have no reservations about declaring what is good for the entire “working class,” particularly as it relates to Democratic Party elections. Somehow, at the same, time DSA is proclaimed to be the best and strongest socialist organization surpassing all others while being so fragile that any real scrutiny of its affairs would destroy the organization. Of course, McKenna was dead wrong – not only was there a crisis, but it is potentially a terminal one.

Let’s call this “DSA Triumphalism”: claiming to have overcome the historic weakness of the Left, sections of the organization declared DSA’s superiority over other socialist projects; rejected the material dynamics that had led to the marginalization of the Left… all while policing  the bounds of debate within the organization, and projecting unlimited growth.

But the subjective factors can only be a partial explanation. This kind of delusion takes hold because of the larger problem of DSA’s governance. All the major decisions of the organization are made behind closed doors, where factional politics played an outsized role on the leadership bodies in isolation from the will of the membership. DSA members have no control over their organization’s budget, even at their biannual conventions (“the highest body of the organization”). Budget and staffing have been reserved for the NPC formally, but were too often siloed off to a fraction of the leadership along with staff.

To the extent that the Convention was able to pass resolutions with financial implications, in practice these became advisory only. In the 2019, 2021, and 2023 Conventions, delegates passed resolutions that would have required a geometric increase in funding. It wasn’t that delegates were financially illiterate—this was a kind of adaptation to an undemocratic system. Because the Conventions did not decide how to allocate resources democratically, it was understood that the NPC was the final authority and would adjudicate which (if any) resolutions would be pursued and ultimately funded. Thus, the aim of many DSA caucuses became to demonstrate that their resolutions had the greatest support and then to engage in factional political maneuvering at the NPC-level post-convention to secure the funds.

“Rank-and-file” DSA members who were not attached to leadership factions became discouraged at this process, demonstrated by the plummeting number of resolutions submitted to each convention. In real terms, separating the budget process from the convention hollowed out the democratic process and reduced the convention’s function to being a vehicle for NPC elections and social networking. The outcomes of convention resolutions had little bearing on the prerogatives of the leadership layer when they steered the organization in the ensuing two years.

The budget process itself is officially charged to the NPC. The NPC creates a subcommittee, including staff, who craft a budget and return it for a vote. Former NPC-member Jenbo explained that the full leadership did not receive line item financials. In effect, the budget process was insulated not just from the membership, but even from parts of the official leadership. This starts to explain how the situation could become so disastrously out of control.

Attempts to correct the course were met with hostility, which deepened the crisis. NPC member Kara H, who raised alarm about the budget in 2023, was disciplined by other members of the leadership for doing so.

Without democratic governance, the basic self-correcting mechanisms of an organization are disabled. There is some irony in DSA members taking inspiration from the United Auto Workers (UAW) reform movement. Reform in the union was propelled by the historic UAW leaderhip’s ultra-centralization, which enabled the worst kind of corruption and spelled disaster for its members. That situation was resolved externally by the federal government’s intervention—the structure of the union was so thoroughly controlled that reform movements for decades were unable to change the UAW. DSA is not a union, but it is an interesting corollary. The Labour Party likewise resisted the will of its membership amid the influx of young radicals under Corbyn, like it has for generations before. No external force exists that is going to force DSA to be reformed – we would not want some kind of government intervention, but an ossified leadership structure is seriously resilient in the absence of member democracy.

The political moment had clearly passed, but DSA lived beyond its means as part of its self-delusion. Reality has caught up to the organization, and it simply is not possible to continue: Approximately half the staff will be laid off, the print publication will move mostly online, funds for education and organizing will be diminished, and chapter dues shares are at stake. Distributing a portion of dues money to chapters is the last thread tying them to DSA: If DSA National halts its dues share, there will be little left convincing local activists to maintain their affiliation.

There’s nothing to celebrate in the decline of the organization. In its best years, DSA was able to unite fragmented parts of the US Left and bring them into a single organization under the banner of socialism. Its weight had a gravitational pull on others, bringing them into its orbit if not directly into the organization. This was exciting and challenging – with the early DSA years having something of a social movement character in its creativity and infectious energy. Watching the demise of the organization now has greater implications than the politics within DSA itself — the disorganization of the Left amidst ever greater crises, genocide, environmental destruction, and advance of the Far Right. All of us should learn from these limitations and mistakes as we continue the project of building a force to transform society.

Featured image credit: Cory Doctorow; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

An international campaign for the freeing from prison of well-known Russian intellectual, writer, and anti-war activist Boris Kagarlitsky, along with all other jailed opponents of the war in Ukraine, was launched on March 11 by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign.

Produced in multiple languages (including Russian and Ukrainian), the campaign petition has already won the support of former British Labour Party leaders Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, eminent French left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and leaders and elected representatives of left and progressive parties North and South: in Germany, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Spain and Russia itself.

These supporters have been joined by well-known left intellectuals Naomi Klein, Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, Etienne Balibar and Claudio Katz.

The petition has been published on two platforms: www.freeboris.info and change.org, both of which carry regular updates about the campaign. By March 22, it had collected over 7000 signatures of support.

Background

Boris Kagarlitsky was sentenced to five years in jail by a military appeals court on February 13. The judges heeded the prosecution case that his initial punishment of a $6550 fine and two-year ban on administering web sites was “excessively lenient” (see here for full details of the farcical case against Kagarlitsky on the charge of “justifying terrorism”).

As a result, the international networks whose effort had helped keep the Russian writer from prison in his initial trial have come together in the present campaign. Its immediate purpose is to draw the attention of international left and progressive forces to the repression of their Russian colleagues, of whom Boris Kagarlitsky is probably the best known.

Stop the repressive machine

The left in Russia is being subjected to unprecedented repression. Many organizations have been shut down and activists who despite official threats have had no intention of leaving the country have been sent to jail on a variety of spurious grounds.

The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign is calling on left and democratic forces globally to demand a halt to the repressive machine from which their Russian counterparts suffer, because they draw attention to the serious problems accumulating in Russia due to its war in Ukraine.

The campaign believes that without international attention, Russia’s anti-war political prisoners will be left alone to face a government that condemns them not only to imprisonment, but also to the prospect of death. Conditions in Russian detention centers are far from satisfactory, as Boris Kagarlitsky, confined to a pre-trial detention center for the duration of his appeal, is now experiencing.

Kagarlitsky in 2008. Image by Женя Демина.

In his letters from prison, Kagarlitsky insists on the need to support all left-wing activists presently behind bars, especially those whose names are not as well-known as his.

Globally, the campaign aims to build so much support that it becomes impossible for politicians who are in dialogue with the Russian government to ignore it.

Within Russia, the campaign appeals to all who are concerned about the future of their country, to those who are convinced that change cannot come without an end to the fighting and the release of all who favor a progressive rethink of the Putin regime’s current policies.

It is expected that Boris Kagarlitsky’s appeal will be heard in early May: the international solidarity campaign therefore calls for an urgent effort over the next six weeks—on Kagarlitsky’s behalf and that of all Russia’s anti-war political prisoners.

The petition is presently available in the following languages (with others soon to come): Arabic, Czech, Danish,Greek, Spanish, English, French, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Swedish and Ukrainian.

For further information contact boris.solidarity@gmail.com

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

A recent Tempest editorial summmarizes the publication’s position on several matters arising from the present Israel-Gaza war. In doing so, it gives central place to a specific theoretical construct: “unconditional but critical support.”

“The method of unconditional but not uncritical support for national liberation struggles is not just old leftist language to be lightly discarded but is foundational to a Marxist method,” the editors write.

The phrase seems to have been first used in 1972 by the International Socialists (IS), forerunner to the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), as part of its position on the use of “terrorist” tactics by the Provisional and Official Irish Republican Army organizations (IRAs). Since then, it has been used from time to time by various splinters of the IS tradition, but rarely elsewhere. What does it mean? Often, that meaning has been unclear, and it has appeared to change over time.

It is worth distinguishing three possible senses of the phrase, which distinguish different attitudes to causes, organizations, and tactics.

1. Socialists support national liberation causes, even though we might oppose particular organizations that fight for those causes and certain tactics used in those struggles. We criticize those organizations and tactics when we oppose them.

2. Socialists support national liberation causes and the organizations that fight for those causes, even though we might oppose particular tactics used in those struggles. We criticize not only the tactics we oppose, but also the national liberation organizations, on grounds both of their tactics and broad political approach, including their ideas on matters not directly related to the struggle.

3. Socialists support national liberation causes, the organizations that fight for those causes, and the tactics employed in the course of those struggles. We criticize the organizations on the grounds of their broad political approach and the tactics on grounds of their strategic or tactical efficacy, even as we support both.

More permutations are possible. It would be possible to formulate a version of each in which tactics were criticized on grounds additional to, or other than, their efficacy. It would be possible to distinguish, after Hal Draper, between military and political support for certain organizations, though, as Draper acknowledged, in practice the boundary between the two is often permeable. It is possible to substitute a “neither support nor oppose” position for any given case of opposition or support. What exactly is criticized or opposed, and in what terms, also matters. But these three positions give us the basic structure from which those variations depart. (There are some fringe circumstances in which socialists might not support movements for national independence, but let’s leave those cases aside for now.)

A brief history of unconditional but critical support

Position 1 would be the least controversial in mass society in the West. Depending on its specific content, it could open up general opposition to Hamas and, for instance, the wilful attacks on civilians on October 7 last year, while holding on to steadfast support for the Palestinian national struggle as such. It does not seem to have been advanced theoretically by the IS or its successors, but justifications of the formulation are sometimes offered in terms that, in their content, justify only this position, perhaps because it is the most obviously appealing.

For instance, looking back in 2020 on The Troubles connected with the British occupation of Northern Ireland, Pat Stack of RS21 wrote that “our stance was unconditional, we did not weigh up every statement, every bombing, every tactical disaster to decide which side we were on. Yes, we reserved the right to be highly critical of republicanism, its strategy, its all-class nationalism, and at times its ill-judged, disastrous and heart-breaking military actions, but between the oppressor and the oppressed, we knew where we stood.” In this formulation, it is as if the question was merely one of whether to oppose British oppression in Northern Ireland and support the general idea of opposition to it. “[I]t was about saying I will stand against injustice, legal repression, and cover-ups of army atrocities,” Stack concludes.

But, as initially formulated in 1972, the IS position was 2. Duncan Hallas and Jim Higgins, for the majority of the organization’s Executive Committee, defended a line in a Socialist Worker editorial holding that the “killing of individual politicians and the bombing of buildings cannot be supported by socialists.” Hallas and Higgins went further than merely withholding support, however. “It is the clear duty of Marxists to oppose such tactics,” they wrote.

(Part of their position was that Northern Ireland was not in a state of civil war. One could better argue that in Israel and Palestine there is such a war. But for Hallas and Higgins the point of the distinction was that in a civil war, “attacks on individuals, destruction of buildings and so on would be part of attempts to defeat the army by military means.” On October 7, to the extent that we have evidence from footage, the killing of civilians that took place was largely not collateral to some strategic military objective. So, whatever the truth of the civil war question, it has no relevance to us here.)

They concluded with lines from the Socialist Worker editorial: “Unconditional but critical support for all those, including both IRAs, fighting imperialism in Ireland. By unconditional we mean support regardless of our criticism of the leadership and tactics. By critical we mean opposing the sowing of illusions that the struggle can finally be won except by the victory of the working class fighting on a programme of social as well as national liberation.”

Mural of Bloody Sunday in Derry. On January 30, 1972, British troops shot 26 unarmed demonstrators in occupied Derry, Northern Ireland. The mural, photographed in 2010, is based on a photo. Image by Nina Stössinger.

Even during the 1970s, however, the formulation was confusing enough that many members of the IS and its sister organization in Ireland, the Socialist Worker Movement, had different and incompatible interpretations of its meaning. One Irish socialist recalled that “most members weren’t entirely sure” what it meant, and had a variety of clashing ideas subsumed under the same slogan. Meanwhile, “in the British SWP ‘unconditional but critical’ ranged from meaning uncritical support for the IRA, to not supporting them at all.”

On the account of a Trotskyist from an opposing tendency, in practice the IS tended not to make much use of the formulation in its public propaganda or to respond to the events of the Troubles through a consistent theoretical lens of any sort. Rather, IS modulated their tone based on the mood of their audience. Hence, an October 1974 Socialist Worker editorial advised readers to respond to those “hysterical” about IRA bombings by arguing for troops to be withdrawn from Northern Ireland. Until then, the most deadly attacks on civilians had been in Northern Ireland itself. But when, the next month, 21 people were killed in attacks on two Birmingham pubs, the paper ran the headline “Stop the Bombings,” a demand presumably directed at the armed republican movement. Nonetheless, as late as 2006, the SWP still seemed to theoretically take the second position.

In an essay for the International Socialism journal, Gareth Jenkins defended Hallas’s and Higgins’s analysis, describing Al-Qaeda, absurdly, as fundamentally “no different from other national liberation movements” (in reality it has never been a national liberation movement of any sort), but opposed terrorist tactics as representing “the politics of despair.”According to Trotskyists of an opposing tendency, however, the SWP members had refused to condemn the 9/11 attack itself for several months. Four years later, after the 2005 London tube bombings, and in an echo of their 1974 tonal shift, the slogan “Stop the Bombings” was deployed immediately, albeit less prominently than before. Across 30 years the tendency appeared to have retained the idea that while terrorism against civilians overseas was neither to be endorsed nor criticized too sharply, attacks on the British mainland demanded urgent opposition. Still a more fundamental political shift was gestating.

Over the past decade the SWP seems to have moved toward the third position. In 2014, they republished a blog by Mostafa Omar, a member of their Egyptian sister organization, The Revolutionary Socialists. Omar, writing in the context of an ongoing Israeli war on Gaza that ultimately killed more than 2,250 people, of whom two-thirds were civilians, stated that

[W]e unconditionally support Hamas when it is engaged in military or non-military struggles against Israel, because it weakens the Zionist state and terrifies the Arab regimes and the United States, and therefore strengthens the potential for class struggle in the Arab states against this imperialist system.

Our unconditional support for Hamas is not uncritical, however, because we believe that the movement’s strategies in the struggle to liberate Palestine—like the strategies adopted by Fatah and the Palestinian left before it—have failed and will fail in the future.

Omar has two specific criticisms of Hamas’s strategy: that it ties itself to “reactionary” regimes in the region that repress both their own people and the Palestinian struggle, and “despite the extraordinary heroism of Hamas’ fighters … Hamas adopts an elitist approach to dealing with the Palestinian masses.” He does not criticize any tactics Hamas deployed against Israel or Israelis.

On the contrary, Omar proposed support for Hamas “when it is engaged in military or non-military struggles” because they “weaken the Zionist state,” a formulation that could be read to imply—if it does not unambiguously state—support for tactics such as deliberate attacks on civilians. Although Hamas had abandoned suicide bombings at that point, the group had never disavowed the tactic in principle. Such attacks were its defining tactical motif between 1993 and 2008. Indeed, in 2016, the organization praised such an attack. For Hallas and Higgins, writing in 1972, terrorist tactics should be opposed as counterproductive. But by 2014, that perspective seems to have vanished. On the contrary, the implication was that they might be broadly helpful, though other, separate criticisms of Hamas’s strategy could be made. For all that Hamas’s approach is “elitist,” Omar does not suggest that elitism is a necessary corollary of any particular sorts of military or terrorist tactics as such.

Nearly a decade later, the ambiguity that marked Omar’s intervention has evaporated. On October 9, 2023, Socialist Worker called on readers to “rejoice” at the attacks inside Israel launched two days earlier, a word that betrayed a total failure to empathize not only with Israeli civilians, but with the Palestinians of Gaza who had already been pushed into a new kind of hell. A week on from the war’s beginning, the paper expressly supported “any means necessary” as part of their “unconditional but not uncritical” position. The bulk of that article is concerned with an argument by analogy: that violence against white civilians by the Mau Mau in Kenya and National Liberation Front in Algeria was “justified,” and therefore so was violence against civilians on October 7. These analogies are dubious, although there is no room to set out that critique here. For now, the important thing to recognize is that the SWP has adopted a version of position 3, albeit under the rubric of the same phrase that they previously used to defend position 2.

But theirs is a particularly extreme version of position 3. In principle, the third position allows for the criticism of tactics such as the purposeful killing of civilians, but while they describe their position as “not uncritical”—an awkward double negative that hints at discomfort even with mere criticism—the SWP offers no criticisms whatsoever of deliberate attacks on civilians. The only criticisms are of Hamas’s broad political program as it pertains to class, gender, and LGBT+ questions. The tactics deployed were “wholly justified,” the SWP asserted, even when that meant the murder of migrant workers.

Even during the 1970s … the formulation [of “unconditional but critical support] was confusing enough that many members of the IS and its sister organization in Ireland, the Socialist Worker Movement, had different and incompatible interpretations of its meaning.

To the extent the SWP position has a theoretical basis, it is the idea that Israel has a “pure” settler-colonial character that materially involves its Jewish population in a commitment to ethnic superiority, or even a “logic of elimination,” vis-à-vis Palestinians. Thus, they are not available for solidarity and an appeal to them on any terms but force is useless. The SWP and its Irish affiliate made a very similar argument about “Protestant privilege” in Northern Ireland, however, which raises the question of why the political conclusions that followed were so different. A full critique of this position will have to be taken up elsewhere. But for now, it is enough to note that the conclusion arising from the strong form of this argument is impossible to sustain. No accumulation of military violence can overwhelm Israel, not from the surrounding states (it has nuclear weapons) and certainly not from Palestinian militias. Therefore, inevitably, Palestinian strategy relies on an appeal to other forces—some combination of Jewish Israelis and publics in the West. The question is therefore what tactics support that strategy.

That doesn’t necessarily mean no violence. But it can’t mean deliberate, unlimited violence against civilians. The idea that half of Americans under 35 consider the violence against civilians on October 7 “justified” in the sense the editors imply is an illusion. For all that younger Americans are more sympathetic to Palestinians than their elders, the original polling data shows larger or similar majorities among under-35 grouping for support for Israel, a range of harsh measures against Palestinians and their allies in the United States, and the elimination of Hamas. It is possible that many respondents understood “justified” to mean “justified in those terms by Hamas” rather than normative political support.

Evaluation of the positions

That the SWP has dropped substantial criticism of Hamas’s tactical choices is a function of the basic incoherence of position 3. Let us say that we adopt, as part of 3, the traditional Marxist criticism of terror tactics that they are counterproductive and tend to sideline progressive or working-class forces, and apply the resultant position to October 7. In such a case, we are left saying that we support the killing of hundreds of civilians, both Israelis and migrant workers, even though it is counterproductive from the point of view of the Palestinian struggle, as well as, obviously, horrific in its human implications. In that case, anyone can reasonably ask: Why do you support (or fail to oppose) it then? There is no good answer to this question.

Once we retreat to 2, however, we are left with a position that gives us no principle by which to hold back from sharp criticism and firm opposition to tactics directed at the killing of civilians. Why not go as far as to condemn them? Since the second position allows both opposition to and criticism of Hamas’s tactics, if we want a reason not to do so, it must be on the basis of another, separate principle. (Although there is no room to expand on this point here, my interpretation of recent interventions by a number of socialist writers is that this principle has been found in a politics of discourse—that is, arguments about what it is not strategic or ethical to say, quite apart from what is true.)

Not that position 2 is totally stable. The obvious objection to 2 is that if you criticize and oppose certain tactics as counterproductive, it is not clear why you are obligated to support an organization that consistently and characteristically deploys such tactics. It is possible to think of organizations whose use of progressive, productive tactics is or was overwhelmingly more important than their occasional use of unproductive ones. The African National Congress is an obvious example. Other organizations might share our broad political orientation or both represent a segment of society indispensable to the struggle and have the capacity to evolve tactically. Karl Marx seemed to see the Fenians, for example, in this category, whether accurately or otherwise.

But in a case like Hamas, these considerations do not apply. They have, now and then, achieved marginal progressive gains or pursued progressive policies. But overall, it is hard to argue that so far they have been productive for the Palestinian national cause. The general effect of their strategy and tactics has been to militarize the Palestinian struggle on Palestinian land, undermining the mass involvement that characterized the First Intifada and empowering the hard right-wing of Israeli politics. It is hard to point to any positive results arising from their suicide bombing campaign, for instance, and easy to point to negative ones. Was Hamas’s trajectory understandable, as an expression of the Gazan experience at the moment that the organization emerged, laden with trauma and humiliation, in the ideological climate of the Islamic revival and amid Israel’s co-optation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and its violence against Palestinian civilians? Yes. But empathy neither implies support nor contradicts opposition.

The First Intifada, Gaza, December 1987: In a scene repeated throughout the Occupied Territories, young Palestinians square off against the IDF. Image by Efi Sharir.

The more defensible position is the first. This seems to accomplish most of what socialists want from their positions on national liberation struggles, without committing in principle to the support of a range of counterproductive tactics, perhaps including crimes against humanity, and the organizations that consistently employ them. That would not preclude support of actual organizations or tactics circumstantially when they are of themselves supportable. But it would not make that support an invariant principle.

What position does Tempest hold? The recent editorial welcomed the “legitimate debates” that had arisen since October7, including over “the targeted killing of non-combatants.” The editors wrote that “socialists do not need to endorse the resistance tactics chosen by the oppressed before determining which side we’re on,” and that within those debates “our answers must be premised on our unconditional support for Palestinian liberation as a foundational principle.” None of this goes further than position 1, which would be welcome. However, that position is a novel expression of the “unconditional but critical” formulation, one sharply different from the previous uses of that phrase. Whatever the position, making the distinction explicit will aid theoretical clarity and prevent the confusion that has characterized the politics of the IS tradition since the 1970s.

A right to choose tactics of resistance?

The Tempest editors make another claim, a novel one, that Palestinians have the “right to fight in whatever way they choose.” What does this mean? Does it represent a version of position 3, to the effect that others cannot legitimately oppose the use of any tactics that Palestinians choose to deploy, even if those others do not support the use of the tactic? If so, it runs into the same problems with that position I have set out above.

Or does it mean that, even though we might harshly criticize and strongly oppose a given tactic, we still defend the Palestinian “right” to deploy it? The nature of a right is that it confers on others an overriding obligation to support the realization of that right, or at least not to impede its realization.

At one level, to say that “the choice is theirs” is a factual description of the situation. We can’t make Palestinians’ choices for them. Given that, in what possible circumstances could the right arise? Only if there were some opportunity to prevent or assist Palestinians from deploying a tactic that we oppose could such a right ever have meaning. It would only have meaning, furthermore, if this right overrode all other rights that might be in question—for example, of civilians to life.

The whole idea of a “right to choose” tactics existing separately … from the question of whether one supports or opposes the implementation of those tactics (and in what material circumstances) can only lead to confusion.

This can only lead us to affirm absurd positions. For instance, let’s say we oppose the killing of a dozen or so migrant workers, even if only on grounds that it’s counterproductive. What does it mean to say that we oppose such acts but also that Palestinians have a “right” to carry them out? The implication would be that we “oppose” the killings, but also that we wouldn’t stop them if we could, or would even prevent others stopping them—in which case our supposed opposition has no content. How do we affirm the right to life of those workers as well as the alleged Palestinian right to kill them? It might be possible to retreat to a fine distinction between the right to actually carry out the killings and the right to choose to carry them out. But what is the political value in defending choices only if they do not lead to consequences?

Counterintuitively this whole approach falls foul of the sort of critique made by Leon Trotsky of “the point of view of ‘pure morals’” and by brian bean of “moralism”: it places some putative principle mechanically over an assessment of all the consequences. Here the principle would be the right of Palestinians to do what they want—as long as it counts as resistance—rather than, for example, the right of civilians in Israel to life. Thus, it points toward more indiscriminate violence, not less. But that does not make the form of the position less moralistic.

The whole idea of a “right to choose” tactics existing separately and apart from the question of whether one supports or opposes the implementation of those tactics (and in what material circumstances) can only lead to confusion. Although no doubt inspired by respect for the subjectivity of the oppressed, the principle is the wrong way to demonstrate that respect. It can only lead to incoherent conclusions.

Conclusion

The goal of this article has just been to clarify and critique two of the ideas raised in Tempest’s recent editorial: “unconditional but critical support” and the “right to choose” tactics of resistance. I hope the result is to simplify matters: there is no general need to support any tactic or organization that we criticize as counterproductive or harmful, particularly if its human consequences are also terrible. There is no general right to implement such tactics. None of this qualifies our support for any national cause.
Given constraints of length, it has not been possible here to consider other crucial questions raised by the debate over the socialist response to October 7 and the ongoing war. What was the political effect, specifically, of the attacks on civilians inside Israel? What is the relationship between moral ideas and political strategy? What does Israel’s settler-colonial character imply about the limits of its domestic politics? Is Israel winning or losing the current war? Is Israel really a vital prop for U.S. capitalism? Once we have arrived at a position on any of these matters, what considerations dictate how we should articulate ourselves publicly in order to maximize our effectiveness as proponents of the Palestinian national cause? In what ways does the national location of those of us in the West constrain our ability to speak meaningfully on these topics? These questions will have to wait for another occasion.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by AutaAutistik; modified by Tempest.

Tempest Collective: Your book Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America presents a rich and detailed history of the impact of McCarthyism on the Left and on U.S. society more broadly. We’d love to talk to you today about some of the lessons we can draw from this history in seeking to understand what some have called the “new McCarthyism” today. But first I wonder if you could speak to the tension in the term “McCarthyism” itself. McCarthyism was never about one individual but a much broader set of institutional forces. Could you discuss how you understand the conditions that gave rise to what we call McCarthyism? Do you think we have entered or are entering a period that we can meaningfully understand through the lens of McCarthyism? If so, how? Or if not, where do you think the analogy falls short?

Ellen Schrecker: The comparison to what’s happening today is apt—because McCarthyism was not about one person. And what’s happening today within our society and the erosion of democratic practices and values is not just about Donald Trump.

And we have to keep that in our heads at all times. We’re fighting a worldwide phenomenon—and it’s absolutely terrifying. It’s so much worse today. I am so much more frightened now. And I lived through McCarthyism.

I grew up in the 1950s. Everything was shoved under the rug. My sixth-grade teacher was fired because he had once been a member of the Communist Party. But what we’re seeing today is worse because it’s dominating the mainstream.

Joe McCarthy hopped onto a bandwagon that was already playing at full amplification in the spring of 1950. The anticommunist Red Scare, which probably is the best term for the phenomenon we call McCarthyism, really began in the late 1940s. Anticommunism existed ever since the Communist Party was founded in 1919, but it never dominated domestic politics until the late 1940s.

It was a product of the early years of the Cold War. The United States had emerged from World War II victorious and very wealthy. What triggered McCarthyism was the Republican Party’s defeat in the election of 1948. They had been running on their normal program, which was to get rid of the welfare state, and it turned out that the voters liked the welfare state. You know, they liked Social Security, the various programs helping farmers, helping unemployed workers. They liked those. Well, who wouldn’t? So, the right realized they couldn’t win political power by relying on opposition to the New Deal.

So, what did they do? They said, well, the New Deal has been run by Communists. And Communists, as we know, took over Eastern Europe—which happened. And they stole the secret of the bomb—which also happened.

This McCarthyist scenario provided an opportunity that was picked up by mainstream Republican politicians. It soon developed into a huge attack on anything that smacked of the Left. Every part of the government bought into it.

In Congress, for example, there were very clever, very ideological, and opportunistic politicians like Richard Nixon, who became a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and became palsy with [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover, who was feeding him information. Nixon got headlines and attention and made a career out of it that led to the White House. And Hoover became the eminence grise of the Cold War Red Scare—devising and often running most of the repressive measures that constituted McCarthyism.

Nixon’s ascent encouraged other politicians to think, “We can do that.” And Joe McCarthy comes along. McCarthy was able to get enormous amounts of press, enormous amounts of attention claiming without any evidence, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” What’s important to realize is there had been Communists in the State Department, but they were all kicked out when the Cold War started.

McCarthy was hardly the only conservative politician to ride the Red Scare for his own benefit, for his own career. But it got named “McCarthyism” after the word was invented by a cartoonist named Herblock, who did wonderful cartoons during this period making fun of the Cold War Red Scare for attacking a nonexistent enemy.

Cartoon by Herbert Block (aka Herblock), October 31, 1947, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

TC: In your book, you look at the impact of McCarthyism in many spheres, but in particular how it impacted the labor movement.

ES: Back in the days before McCarthyism, there was a very strong labor movement in the United States, which was always being attacked by the business community. They did not want to share their profits with the workers. They wanted to cut costs. They didn’t want to ensure that the workplace was safe for its workers because that might cut into their profits.

So, once the Republicans and other conservatives gained power, the main target of the Cold War anticommunist Red Scare became organized labor. In the United States, the labor movement has always attracted the far Left. Why? Because they’re Marxists. What do the Marxists want? They want the victory of the working class. So, they do what they can to help the working class gain power. They join unions. And they organize them effectively. They’re very good at that. As a result, Communists gained influence within the labor movement. The Republicans and their political allies knew that—as did non-Communists who were vying with the Reds for control over the labor movement— [and] who, along with conservative politicians and federal bureaucrats like Hoover, kicked the Communists out of the mainstream labor movement.

The labor movement was essentially defanged. Until very recently, it did not push for social justice issues like racial equity, but only for higher wages and benefits for its members. Above all, it stopped organizing and mobilizing its members—with the result that today we have a very enfeebled labor movement, and we have to build it back.

But it is being built back, which is just so heartening. My sister, who lives in Philadelphia, just sent me an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer. The faculty at the University of Pennsylvania had a huge demonstration to insist that the rich trustees are not going to tell us what to teach our students, because they don’t know a thing about chemistry, or about 17th-century history, or about slavery, and we’re not going to let them impose lies on our students.

TC: You have studied university-based movements, including in your latest books, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s and The Right to Learn. Clearly the right has undertaken a major offensive against academic freedom, affirmative action, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other forms of antiracism, and faculty tenure protections. You also see now expression of solidarity with Palestine being repressed. Why is the right focusing so much of its energy here?

ES: That is such a good question that I’ve been trying to answer myself. Largely, I think, because universities are a pushover. They have long been one of the institutions that still harbors, protects, and even fosters criticism of the status quo.

We can look at what happened to universities during McCarthyism. And that’ll give us a little background for what’s happening today. You know, mainstream liberals have been accustomed to giving universities a free pass. Higher education helps democracy. It creates knowledge about the world we live in that’s important to have. But universities are no different from the rest of society. And, as many on the Left learned in the 1960s, they do not deserve the halo around them.

Those of us trying to protect American universities have to rethink the mission of higher education. We can’t just say it’s good in and of itself. We’ve got to be a lot more concrete, and we’ve got to fight back.

Right-wing business groups and philanthropists, people like the Koch Brothers, have been creating a sort of alternative university over the past 40 or 50 years by creating think tanks, subsidizing books and publications, using lawsuits, and gaining power within the judiciary.

But we can fight back. This didn’t happen in the age of McCarthyism. And I’m really thrilled at what is happening within the labor movement. I’m thrilled by what the United Autoworkers is doing—and they have thousands of members within the academy, as do the teachers unions, and the SEIU and other unions that have gone out and organized on campuses all over the United States, I’m thrilled with what the American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Pennsylvania is doing. I’m thrilled by the fact that people are beginning to say that if we don’t fight back, we’re going to lose everything. And they’re winning.

TC: One of the ways McCarthyism works is through a chilling effect, encouraging self-censorship among people fearful of losing their jobs for lending the wrong book from their library, teaching the wrong lessons in their classroom, or attending a protest. What do you say to people who are understandably struggling with these fears?

ES: Everybody is afraid. Understandably. I’m not—because I’m retired. They’re not going to stop me from publishing or speaking out. What do I have to lose?

But people have to act collectively. You can’t just be an individual. We are not going to win if the only people who are fighting back are heroes.

The only way out of our mess is collective action—because in union, there is strength. Trying to be an individual hero is really reserved only for the bravest of the brave. Then they are people waving the flag on the barricades with nobody around them.

We don’t need heroes. My book about McCarthyism and the universities actually had a hero, Chandler Davis. By the way, he recently died. And his wife, a historian named Natalie Zemon Davis, also just died. She was amazing. One of the greatest historians of the 20th century.

Chan, as he was called, was a mathematician at the University of Michigan. When he was called up before HUAC in the spring of 1954, he decided he was not going to use the Fifth Amendment but the First Amendment to defend himself, hoping to challenge McCarthyism and provoke a critical judgment from the Supreme Court. But the court did not intervene in his case, so he went to prison for six months. He came out blacklisted completely. He had to go to Canada to get a job. In Canada, he helped take care of the young men crossing the border to avoid the draft during the war in Vietnam.

The only way forward is through collective action…I hope people are going to begin to recognize that this is what happened with the Vietnam War, which is an example of how collective action on the part of faculties changed history.

But we don’t need many more Chandler Davises. What we need is people who are willing to go to the demonstration because everybody else in their department is going to that demonstration. The only way forward is through collective action, is to work through faculty unions or through some ad hoc group that will organize on their campuses to roll back the attack on democratic teaching and learning.

I hope people are going to begin to recognize that this is what happened with the Vietnam War, which is an example of how collective action on the part of faculties changed history. If the faculties hadn’t begun the teach-ins that educated people about what was wrong with what the United States was doing in Vietnam right at the time, when Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war in 1965, there wouldn’t have been an antiwar movement by 1967 that, for example, made it impossible for members of the Johnson administration give talks at mainstream universities and that ultimately gained enough power to force an end to war. We don’t remember that.

So, today we have a similar educational task—among many others—of explaining that opposing bombing Gaza to smithereens is not antisemitism. It is just being critical of the foreign policy of a nation that is treating people in an inhumane and perhaps genocidal way. Do not close your eyes. Please open them and look at all the other people who have opened their eyes as well—and work together.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

For almost three months, the Detroit suburb of Ferndale was the site of a concerted effort to pass a resolution calling for a permanent and durable ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank. Ferndale has a progressive reputation owing to its status as Detroit’s “Gayborhood,” yet it had not joined the other Michigan cities of Detroit, Ypsilanti, Dearborn, Hamtramck, and Ann Arbor in passing resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ferndale City Hall was lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag and then-mayor Melanie Piana released a statement that read “I’ve seen and am heartened by the incredible support our community has shown for the people of Ukraine.” Palestine didn’t receive as quick a response from city officials.

Cities around the United States have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Palestine, most recently Chicago, currently the largest city to pass such a resolution after Mayor Brandon Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote. Some other city councils have passed similar resolutions, but then been met with opposition from their Mayor’s office. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco refused to sign a ceasefire resolution and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis vetoed one. Toledo’s city council tabled a ceasefire resolution rather than vote on it. In supposedly progressive Burlington, Vermont, the city council not only rejected a ceasefire resolution, but also prevented a pro-Palestine ballot issue from being put to voters. Ferndale, population of approximately 19,000, is much smaller than most of these places yet the tactic of pressing the city council is the same.

Passing city council resolutions on foreign policy issues is, of course, a symbolic gesture. Think back to the nuclear freeze movement when city councils declared their cities “nuclear-free zones” in protest of the nuclear arms race. Obviously, city councils do not set foreign policy. But, these resolutions are a way to put pressure on a Congress and a President who are in lockstep in support of Israel even as the body count in Gaza rises. This is especially true in Ferndale, located in a swing state that’s essential for Biden to win if he’s to be re-elected in November.

The night of the first council meeting, December 18, was cold and snowy. Owing to daylight savings time, it was already dark when pro-Palestine activists assembled in front of Ferndale City Hall. The bad weather did not dampen anyone’s spirits, as dozens of people chanted and marched, accompanied by drums, as they circled City Hall carrying signs and flags. Present were Jews, Arabs, and members of the city’s queer community. It was clear that despite media attempts to paint these groups as unalterably opposed, on the issue of peace in Gaza there was unity. Chants of “Ceasefire Now!” and “From the River to the Sea/Palestine Will Be Free!” could be heard through the walls inside council chambers.

Activists packed the public comment portion of the city council meeting. Although only thirty minutes were officially allotted on the council’s agenda for public comment, so many rose to speak that the comment time went on for fifty minutes. Not a single speaker opposed a ceasefire resolution. The city council meeting was a lame-duck session. A new council would be sworn-in the following month, so for several council members and outgoing mayor Melanie Piana, there would be no political cost to supporting a ceasefire resolution. One city councilor, Katherine Bruner James, spoke up in favor of a ceasefire resolution and promised to send a letter to Ferndale’s representatives in Congress calling for peace.

Yet, when the rest of the city council responded, it was as if the public had been speaking to a brick wall. While two-thirds of voters in the Detroit-area support a ceasefire, council members acted as though a ceasefire resolution is a fringe position. They have claimed that taking a stance on a foreign policy issue is beyond their ability and that passing such a resolution would be too “divisive.” Melanie Piana, after hearing from numerous speakers about Israel’s crimes against humanity, said that the best thing to happen would be for Hamas to surrender. How this would stop Israel from bombing schools, churches, hospitals, and universities with genocidal intent or arming ultranationalist settlers in the West Bank (where, recall, Hamas has no governing presence) was unclear.

I was unpleasantly reminded of the behavior of the Ferndale Library Board when library employees organized a union with the News Guild. Despite a supermajority of employees signing union cards and overwhelming public comment in favor of voluntarily recognizing the union, the board still proceeded with hiring an anti-union law firm and forcing a vote on the union. Happily, the union won 18-2 but this was another opportunity to peer beyond the facade of Ferndale’s progressive reputation.

After Palestine solidarity activists began attending city council meetings, Ferndale mayor Raylon Leaks-May said to Oakland County Times “Adopting a ceasefire resolution by way of the Ferndale Council will have a polarizing impact on this community and that is something that I am unable to support. I care about this community and am more than willing to help coordinate community efforts to reach out to our legislators and the White House regarding a plea for peace in the Middle East.” Despite the mayor’s comments about a ceasefire resolution being polarizing, not one person spoke out against a ceasefire resolution during public comment at four city council meetings. If anything, the fight for a ceasefire resolution was a unifying force, not a divisive one.

Finally, after months of consistent pressure, Ferndale’s city council agreed to pass a ceasefire proclamation on February 12. Although many activists were disappointed that the language was not stronger, Prasad Venugopal spoke for many of us when he said “We are still pleased with the call for a ceasefire.” Since the passage of a proclamation in Ferndale, many of us have worked to pass resolutions in other Metro-Detroit communities like Hazel Park, Sterling Heights, and others. Others have been involved in the “Uncommitted” campaign that led to over 100,000 voters casting a protest vote to show disgust with President Biden’s Gaza policy. We will continue to fight for peace until Israel’s war is ended and the Palestinians have the human dignity they deserve.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

At a glance

Tempest’s 2024 Convention was an incredibly grounding event and helpful gathering. The main themes of the weekend were: recentering on our shared politics and project; building avenues for mentorship and political education for new members; the centrality of Palestine and Labor organizing for our work. A thread that wove through the whole weekend was the need for building stronger relationships between members involved in shared work—that being a missing link since the organization launched remotely (at the height of the pandemic) and grew at the national level first, often before those ties were built. The way we interact and discuss is an important component of being able to weather the challenges of strategic and tactical debates that are present in this political moment.

At our core, Tempest is a revolutionary socialist organization made up of members across the country who are embedded in different organizing spaces—Palestine and labor being the two struggles where the majority of our members are involved in one way or another. The purpose of our organization is to: 1) Build stronger and more rooted democratic organizations that are part and parcel of an effort to rebuild a Left capable of overcoming the challenges of the U.S. political terrain; 2) In order for us to contribute to the first, we need spaces for education, strategic debate, and coordination among Tempest members and our allies.

The purpose of everything we do is to be able to play a role in advancing the struggles we’re involved in, and rebuilding a principled socialist movement that understands the centrality of anti-oppression, sees the working class (in all its diversity) as the agent of change, holds a clear internationalist position, and has a revolutionary and anti-capitalist horizon. There is also a broad agreement on the need to expand our vision of what is included in “the tradition” beyond a small sample of historical examples, to make clear that socialism from below includes a wider swath of international and abolitionist currents.

To serve these aims requires stronger and more coherent structures and spaces within Tempest. This goes both for local branches, where members will be in the best position to build ties and democratically develop perspectives fit for local organizing and nationally for our working groups, educational work, and membership development.

Day One: The Tempest project in context – What is our tradition and what are we trying to build?

This session took up the importance of the tradition of socialism from below, not as an identity or a badge, but as a necessary tool for advancing class struggle, movements, and demands. There was broad agreement on the underlying principles that make up that tradition and discussion on how to make it more encompassing and welcoming to the younger radicalization that we are organizing with today. Whatever debates we may have on how to define “our tradition” the convention was united on core commitments: socialism against barbarism, self-determination for all oppressed peoples, abolition of the carceral state, internationalism, working class self-emancipation, and revolution as the only solution to climate catastrophe and genocidal wars.

Day One: Rebuilding revolutionary organization – multiracial organizing, political culture and political goals

This session took up questions of how we build relationships and create political spaces where people feel welcomed and heard. This includes embracing the idea—one that the revolutionary left has sometimes rejected to its own detriment— that the personal is indeed political. It also means developing thoughtful harm and accountability approaches.

In the presentations and discussion there was wide agreement on what we aim to be: a democratic, multi-racial, multi-gendered working class revolutionary socialist organization that is embedded in struggles against oppression, imperialism, and capitalism. It was widely recognized that newer comrades and more experienced comrades had much to learn and gain from each other. It was also widely agreed upon that we had much work to do to become the organization we want to be. A strong sense of shared commitment to tackle our deficiencies and build upon our strengths was evident. Much gratitude was expressed for the People of Color Caucus, the Harm and Accountability Working Group, and other folks helping us work through these questions..

Day Two: International greetings

We had a several guests attend the Convention and started the second day with some short solidarity greetings from: International Socialist League, Socialist Alternative (Australia), 4th International, Midnight Sun (Canada), Democracia Socialista (Puerto Rico) and Insobornables (Mexico), Solidarity (U.S.), and Barbara Smith.

Day Two: Internationalism and Palestine

Tempest has an impressive degree of participation and rootedness in Palestine organizing across the country. Some key things that came up in this discussion were: strategizing about how to extend and expand the Palestine movement beyond the ceasefire demand; the necessity and challenges of building more inclusive, democratic organizing spaces for newly radicalizing people entering the movement; leveraging our implantation in labor work in the service of strengthening the Palestine work; the importance of political analysis with regards to internationalist orientation and the Democrats; the need for a Palestine Working Group in Tempest that can contribute to the organizing members are doing locally.

Day Two: Advancing Tempest’s labor work

A majority of Tempest comrades are union members and many are active in local union chapters. The discussion focused on the labor work people are already doing and what Tempest nationally can do to support those efforts and allow us to be more than the sum of our parts. Three main proposals brought up: 1) Industry groups (starting with pre-k-12); 2) The priority of Palestine work within our labor organizing; 3) Education about labor history and theories of labor organizing and the development of resources to support those doing this work.

Day Two: Tempestmag.org and ideological projection

It was widely agreed that the website is impressive in both substance and scope given our size. The managing editors spoke at length about the work of the Editorial Board, how it functions, and the importance of having a site that reflects the organization and publishes multiple positions where there is disagreement or an evolving understanding. Questions and ideas were brought up about how we can better utilize the website in our movement work and in our efforts to educate and give voice to a new generation of revolutionaries in the U.S. and internationally. An important issue was addressed: the vast majority of pieces are still written by men—ideas on developing writers from oppressed groups were discussed and proposals addressing this concern were voted on. Ideas for how more of the Collective can support the work of the Editorial Board were also raised.

Day Three: Caucus meetings

In addition to the agenda points written above, we also had time built in for POC/Oppressed Gender Caucuses and also asked non-POC and non-gender oppressed members to meet during those blocks as well. These helped inform the discussions throughout the weekend.

Day Three: How is Tempest organized? What structures do we need to carry out our work?

This session focused on the question of how we organize ourselves in order to move forward on our priorities of both building infrastructures of dissent and providing training and education on the core set of politics. How do we link the individual work that is happening to the project as a whole? This discussion emphasized the need to have clear and accessible points for entry into the group and introductions to the politics in order for new people to better participate. It also took up the need to build spaces that are additive to the work people are already doing.