D2. Socialism

On August 12, a criminal trial is scheduled to begin against Alejandro Bodart, a leading member of the International Socialist League and representative in the Buenos Aires assembly. Initiated by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas/Delegation of Associations or Argentine Israelis (DAIA), the objective of the prosecution is to silence anyone who supports or defends the cause of the Palestinian people.

The solidarity petition demands Bodart’s acquittal and the cessation of all slanderous attacks by those who equate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the effort to silence any criticism of Israeli apartheid. The petition expresses the firm rejection of this and any attempt at political censorship, in defense of the elementary democratic right to freedom of expression.

The basis of the prosecution appears to be two tweets by Bodart. One was on May 11, 2022, when he posted a photo of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, denouncing her murder with the legend “Zionists = Nazis.” The other was days later, on May 15, 2022 on the 74th anniversary of the Nakba, the bloody invasion of Palestine to create the State of Israel, which involved thousands of deaths and the forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Bodart tweeted against the “Zionist and genocidal State of Israel” and in defense of the Palestinian cause.

Bodart’s criticism of the crimes and atrocities of Zionism and support of the Palestinian people provoked the criminal lawsuit from the DAIA accusing him of alleged “discrimination.” To warrant this claim, they appealed to the often-repeated fallacy that anti-Zionism is the same as, or synonymous with, anti-Semitism. The legal argument rests on the outrageous claim that raising any political or humanitarian criticism of the state of Israel and its reprehensible actions amounts to religious or ethnic discrimination.

Through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), Zionism promotes a misleading and false definition of anti-Semitism in order to persecute anyone who criticizes Israel, its institutions, provocations, and actions, or those of other Zionist organizations. They appeal to the legitimate sense of horror at the Nazi genocide to use the Jewish identity of the past’s victims to justify today’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

That is why we invite everyone to express their solidarity by following the link and sign the petition:

To Judge Natalia Molina

Court of First Instance for Criminal, Contravention and Misdemeanors No. 8

Before the beginning, on Monday, August 12, of the trial of Alejandro Bodart, left-wing political leader, Buenos Aires deputy (mf) and director of the magazine of the International Socialist League, the undersigned express our rejection of the false accusation of “anti-Semitism” by the DAIA (Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations), in order to silence those who defend the Palestinian cause and silence all criticism of the State of Israel and its policies of terrorism and genocide of the Palestinian people that, to this day, has taken more than 35,000 lives.

Likewise, in defense of the democratic right to freedom of expression, as a basic human right recognized by the national Constitution and the international treaties signed by the Argentine State, we ask the justice system for his acquittal.

Please sign the solidarity petition to support Alejandro Bodart.

Featured image credit: Mohammed Abubakr, modified by Tempest.

The post Solidarity with Argentine Palestine activists appeared first on Tempest.

In April 2024, amid the ongoing assault on Gaza, the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham published a comprehensive +972 Magazine article unveiling details of the Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in generating “human targets” in Gaza. The AI program—called “Lavender”—is capable of rapidly processing a massive amount of data collected on nearly the entire population of Gaza to produce potential individual human “targets” for assassination, those whom the machine identifies as possible members, including low-ranking operatives, of the military wings of Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Six sources from within the military disclosed details about this program, including the fact that the army authorized officers to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, targeting people identified by Lavender for assassination without independently evaluating the machine’s determinations despite the awareness that at least one in every ten people are selected in “error.” At Lavender’s peak it identified 37,000 people in Gaza for potential assassination. Officials then “linked” those identified by Lavender with location tracking programs—including one named “Where’s Daddy?”—allowing the army to strike people in their homes, killing them and often their entire families.

To grasp how a program like Lavender could be built and used to kill thousands of people, it is important to understand the context in which it arose. In many ways, Lavender is the culmination of a long history of Israel’s control of all aspects of Palestinian life (and death) through separation, surveillance, and systemic discrimination. To create an AI-powered “target-generating” program, it is necessary to have an enormous amount of data about the targeted population. This Israeli kill system must be situated within the historical context of decades of occupation, apartheid, and dehumanization that have preceded it.

The AI program—called “Lavender”—is capable of rapidly processing a massive amount of data … on nearly the entire population of Gaza to produce … human “targets” for assassination.

Since its 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, Israel has aimed to exercise what anthropologist Darryl Li has described as “maximum control and minimal responsibility” over the lives of Palestinians there. As part of this relationship of domination—and central to its ability to collect data on Palestinian people—Israel has long maintained control over the Palestinian population registry and ID card process in occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Additionally, separating and territorially fragmenting Palestine has been crucial to Israel’s ability to control the lives of Palestinians, and the vast checkpoint infrastructure the state has established plays a key role in the mass surveillance of and dominance over Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories.

Israel’s control over Palestinian life and death is intimately linked to its complete control of Palestinian movement and space. Without a special travel permit from Israel, it is illegal for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to travel to Gaza and Jerusalem or for Palestinians in Gaza to travel to the West Bank and Jerusalem. To travel from Gaza to any other part of Palestine-Israel (or to travel between towns within the occupied West Bank), Palestinians must move through militarized Israeli-controlled borders and checkpoints. There are more than 30 checkpoints that connect Gaza and the West Bank to Israel, and according to the United Nations there are more than 645 “movement obstacles” within the West Bank itself.

These border/frontier sites are central to Israel’s mass surveillance apparatus. The checkpoints have over the years become progressively high-tech, collecting more and different kinds of data on the Palestinian people traversing them. As Antony Loewenstein details in his recent book The Palestine Laboratory, Israel has long developed novel technologies of war and surveillance and tested them on “unwilling subjects,” the Palestinian people. “Palestine is Israel’s workshop,” Loewenstein writes, “where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.”

For instance, in its 2023 report “Automated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT,” Amnesty International describes in detail the Israeli military’s use of facial recognition technology as a tool of mass surveillance and an additional barrier to Palestinian movement. The report expounds upon a number of different facial recognition programs that the IDF employs, including “Red Wolf,” a system utilized at checkpoints in Hebron. The report, drawing from the testimony of IDF soldiers, describes how Red Wolf works, explaining that

As an individual enters the checkpoint and is kept in place with cameras facing them, their picture is taken and they are, according to testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence, assessed against the information available on record and—subject to whether they have permission to pass, or whether they are due to be arrested or questioned—they are either allowed through or barred from moving to the exit turnstiles of the checkpoint.

The report further describes how an individual’s biometric data is added to the database, noting that if the system does not recognize a face, a soldier at the checkpoint will attach the face to the ID until the Red Wolf system “learns” to recognize the person. Furthermore, “if a biometric entry does not exist on the individual in question, they are biometrically enrolled into the Red Wolf system, without their knowledge and consent.” Over time, then, the database of Palestinian faces within the system expands. Since the implementation of Red Wolf, Palestinians have reported that soldiers were able to identify them without their presenting identification cards.

The Amnesty Report also explains that Red Wolf is linked to additional, larger databases containing more information about the Palestinian people within its system. Unlike Red Wolf, which is employed specifically at checkpoints, the Blue Wolf application is mobile, allowing soldiers to utilize the facial recognition system via their smartphones. Soldiers testified that they were encouraged to take and upload as many photographs of Palestinian people as possible to the application, “creating new exclusively Palestinian biometric entries” and creating or adding to Palestinians’ profiles. Once this biometric data is added to the app, individuals can be identified quickly.

While the use of Blue Wolf and Red Wolf have been highly documented in the West Bank, until very recently there were no reports of facial recognition technology being deployed in Gaza. In March of this year, however, the New York Times reported that Israel had adopted a sweeping and “experimental” facial recognition program in Gaza starting in late 2023. Reporter Sheera Frenkel gathered information from anonymous sources within the IDF, including intelligence officers, military officials, and soldiers. According to these sources, the facial recognition technology was initially employed by the army to identify Israelis who were taken hostage on October 7, 2023.

In the following weeks and months, however, the facial recognition program was increasingly used by Israel to identify people with ties to Hamas or other militant groups, particularly to identify faces in drone footage. Eventually, more and more cameras were positioned throughout Gaza. Camera-filled checkpoints were set up on roads within Gaza, scanning the faces of Palestinians fleeing areas under heavy Israeli bombardment. Israeli soldiers were also given cameras that were connected to the technology to have in hand. As Frenkel wrote, “The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent.”

The program relies in part on technology developed by Corsight AI—a facial recognition technology company headquartered in Israel—in the wake of October 7. Although on its website the company boasts that its technology is exceptionally effective at detecting and recognizing faces, sources disclosed to The New York Times that Corsight technology “struggled” to identify faces “if footage was grainy and faces were obscured,” further explaining that “there were also false positives, or cases when a person was mistakenly identified as being connected to Hamas.” Soldiers discovered that Google Photos was better able to identify people whose faces were only partially visible, so they supplemented the Corsight technology with Google’s.

The experience that poet Mosab Abu Toha endured while passing through one of these military checkpoints in Gaza highlights some of the many human rights concerns raised by these programs. Without his knowledge or consent, Abu Toha had walked within the range of cameras that were capturing the biometric data of Palestinians passing by; his face was scanned by the facial recognition technology, and he was flagged as a “wanted person.” He describes the harrowing experience in a New Yorker essay:

They’re not going to pull me out of the line, I think. I am holding [my three-year-old son] and flashing his American passport. Then the soldier says, “The young man with the black backpack who is carrying a red-haired boy. Put the boy down and come my way.”
He is talking to me.

Abu Toha discusses the confusion he experienced when the soldiers knew his name, even though he had not shared it with them or shown his ID. The poet was then taken away from his family, blindfolded, and transported to an Israeli detention center where he was beaten and interrogated for two days before being returned to Gaza without any further explanation for his detention and torture.

The human rights concerns that Blue Wolf, Red Wolf, and the novel Gazan facial technology program introduce are immense and wide-ranging. As Abu Toha’s experience makes clear, the implications of being “flagged” by one of these systems can be substantial, implicating someone’s liberty—and perhaps even their life. Importantly, these facial recognition technologies are not applied to Israeli citizens (including settlers in illegal settlements in the West Bank) or to most foreign nationals.

This system of mass surveillance and control is fundamental to the functioning of a program such as Lavender, as it must rely on a massive amount of data. Before Lavender “learns” to identify possible “human targets,” it must first be “trained.” While the exact factors that go into the use of Lavender’s training sets are not fully known, sources disclosed the basic process through which Lavender “generates targets.”

Lavender is trained on the data of people (ostensibly “known” to be associated with the military wing of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (“PIJ”), thereby “learning” to recognize these “features” of militants in other citizens of Gaza. The “training” of Lavender on what “features” correspond to membership in a militant group raise foundational issues and questions regarding how a “Hamas operative” or militant is defined, and accordingly, whose data is used. Part of teaching the system about how to flag people potentially connected to Hamas consists in deciding which people’s data will be used to train Lavender.

An anonymous source who spoke with Yuval Abraham and worked with the IDF’s data science team responsible for training Lavender, observed, “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset.” For example, the Lavender training team used the data collected from employees of the Internal Security Ministry to teach the system. The source explained the choice to include data from government workers could have significant consequences, leading to the system more frequently selecting civilians as “targets.”

Another source commented:

How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization? It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative?

In addition to determining whose data is input as examples of “targets,” determinations must be made regarding what data is input and the significance of these “features.” Israeli Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, in his pseudonymous book The Human-Machine Team, wrote of the data input into the program: “The more information, and the more variety, the better,” including “visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.”

The list of specific “features” input as bearing on someone’s apparent connection to a militant group have not been publicized, but in his book, Sariel listed being in a messaging group with a “known militant,” changing cell phones every few months, and moving addresses frequently. Sariel further explained that while human officers must first determine what “features” correlate to membership in a militant group, the AI system will ultimately discern features independently.

While it is difficult to fully determine how these predictive AI models are trained without having access to more details on what supposedly incriminating “features” are being input and how they are weighted, the few details provided by Sariel about damning “factors” raise deep concerns about the potential for human rights violations posed by these programs.

As it sorts and weights these ever-changing data sets, the Lavender program generates a “rating” from 1 to 100 for each person assessed, ranking how apparently likely it is that an individual is actively affiliated with the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. Sources informed the +972 team that nearly every person in Gaza was analyzed by the Lavender system and given a rating, which would then determine whether they are a potential “human target.”

The number of potential targets Lavender generated for the IDF’s use depended on where the “threshold” rating at which to attack a particular person was placed. Lowering the rating threshold, therefore, led to more people being marked for execution. The speed of generating “new targets” is unprecedented. In his +972 article “A Mass Assassination Factory,” Yuval Abraham reported that Former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi explained that in the past—and before the use of AI—around 50 “targets” per year were established by the IDF. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, the chief of the “target bank” explained that, with the help of AI, the IDF was able to “cross the point where they can assemble new targets even faster than the rate of attacks” for the first time. Before this technology was developed, the IDF apparently “ran out” of what the Jerusalem Post referred to as “quality targets” after a few days.

After a potential target was identified by Lavender, officers would have to determine whether to assassinate the person who was given a high rating by the AI program. Sources reported to Abraham that—at first—Lavender was used as an auxiliary tool, but that about two weeks after October 7, the army authorized officers to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists. After the decision to adopt Lavender’s “kill lists” wholesale, there was essentially no human substantiation mandated. In fact, officers were told to treat Lavender’s decision as an order. In other words, the IDF licensed the blanket and unquestioning adoption of Lavender’s kill lists with no attempt at manual and human verification.

The only “check” that sources described making prior to bombing a particular person was making sure that the person Lavender identified was male (as there are no women affiliated with the military wing of Hamas). Because the only verification that officers conducted was checking if they believed that someone “has a male or a female voice” (ostensibly by listening through their phones), there was no one determining whether the person was actually affiliated with—let alone an operative in—the military wing of Hamas. Furthermore, it appears as though much of the tracking of individuals was done using their phones, and therefore if a “target” identified by Lavender gave their phone to someone else, that person could be targeted and killed without anyone verifying whether they were even the specific target identified by Lavender.

[A]t the beginning of its current attack on Gaza the Israeli military decided that … “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.”

The near-absolute adoption of Lavender’s list of “human targets” by the final (human) decision-makers points to numerous concerns that human rights advocates and scholars have expressed about the use of AI and the lack of significant human oversight. Many proponents of the use of predictive algorithmic models focus on the fact that a final human decision-maker acts as a “safeguard,” and that these systems are meant to assist human judgment, not replace it. However, as the unquestioning adoption of Lavender’s “kill list” makes clear, a human having the “final say” is not an adequate check on the ethical concerns raised by the use of AI in these contexts.

While some have suggested that AI can be used to protect civilian life in armed conflict, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza over the past nine months belies this claim. As of July 8, 2024, the Gaza Health Ministry estimates that more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 87,000 have been wounded by Israeli attacks in Gaza, many of them women and children. Many thousands more are still missing, trapped underneath the rubble.

The unfathomable killing of so many people over nine months is in part due to how the IDF has decided to use “target-generating” programs like Lavender. This is partly because at the beginning of its current attack on Gaza the Israeli military decided that, as Yuval Abraham reported, “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” For a high-level Hamas leader, one wonders what number of civilians would be considered legitimate collateral damage.

The understanding that singular targets have been used as a pretext to kill many people is underscored by the way that Lavender interacts with an automated tracking system that the Israeli army dubbed “Where’s Daddy?” The “Where’s Daddy?” system and others like it were used to track people identified by Lavender, “link” those individuals to their family homes, and automatically alert the “targeting officer” when the person entered their home, at which point the homes would be bombed. Effectively, the army was waiting for people identified by Lavender to enter their homes before attacking them, radically increasing the chance that entire families would be killed. The choice to name the location tracking program “Where’s Daddy?” points to the disturbing reality that the IDF intended to kill children upon their father’s return home, and that this was made possible and palatable by these automated programs.

One source described how straightforward it was to add the people identified by Lavender into the location tracking program and how it could be done by low-ranking officials in the IDF. Once these names were added and placed under ongoing surveillance, their homes could be bombed when the cell phone linked to the “target” entered the family dwelling. The source explained to Abraham, “one day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased. That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made.”

These accounts underscore the deadly consequences of such rapid and unthinking decisions: The technology allows for officials—far removed physically and emotionally from the scene—to impose mass death and destruction within a few seconds. The result of this reckless campaign has been the death of tens of thousands of civilians and the erasure of entire extended families from Gaza’s population registry.

In “A World Without Civilians,” Elyse Semerdjian writes, “[T]oday’s ‘First AI War’ is a continuation of Gaza used as a laboratory for necrocapitalism, where weapons field tested on Palestinians fetch higher dollars at market that, in turn, enriches the weapons industry and politicians with ties to it.” In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein warns that Israel has been able to insulate itself from accountability and political backlash against its human rights abuses and “endless occupation” due, in large part, to the nation’s practice of selling its state-of-the-art military technology across the globe. This raises the very real concern that murderous AI technology like Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?” will be spreading to other countries around the globe.

The immense loss of life and disregard for human rights that have been laid bare over the past nine months during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza have put the world on notice that to do business with Israel is to aid in the commission of war crimes and that this kind of use of AI in warfare can have catastrophic outcomes. The mass student protests across the globe, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the growing coalition of technology workers speaking out against their employers in organizations such as No Tech for Apartheid provide hope that Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” is being revealed as the unethical death-making machine that it is.

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On June 2, Mexicans went to the polls and made history by electing Claudia Sheinbaum of the MORENA party (Movement of National Regeneration) as Mexico’s first woman president. Claudia Sheinbaum took 61 percent of the vote and sailed to victory with an ample margin of 28 percent over her closest opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez, of the conservative alliance “Strength and Heart for Mexico.” The opposition ran a lackluster campaign and tried to undermine Sheinbaum’s candidacy, decrying a shift towards authoritarianism. When that didn’t work, they resorted to a virulent smear campaign prompted by DEA reports that insinuated a link between drug cartels and the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO.

Nevertheless, AMLO’s popularity and mostly favorable performance in government over the last six years bolstered Sheinbam’s success. Since the campaign began, opinion polls consistently gave Sheinbaum the presidency and only the margin of victory was up for debate. Eventually, the focus shifted to the Senate and the governors’ races. Sheinbaum won the popular vote in 31 out of 32 states. MORENA also won 7 out of the 9 governors’ races, maintaining control in Puebla, Tabasco, Morelos, Chiapas, Veracruz, Mexico City, and Yucatán, a former stronghold of the opposition. MORENA’s alliance with the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM) and the Party of Labor (PT) performed so well that it won a qualified majority (two-thirds of seats) in both the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house) and the Senate and gave AMLO enough power to make substantial changes to the Mexican Constitution. Currency markets and financial institutions reacted immediately to the news, with the Mexican peso losing 2 percent of its value against the dollar, reflecting capitalist fears of significant change to come.

Overall, the 4T is a strategy to develop Mexico as an advanced capitalist economy with a better negotiating position in the North American and global markets. Claudia Sheinbaum represents a continuity of this project.

As we have argued before, since 2018, AMLO has been building a new political regime and pursuing a political-development project dubbed the Fourth Transformation (4T). However, AMLO’s so-called “Fourth Transformation” is not as radical as it may seem, and while there is a considerable difference in the way the government communicates, handles public finances, and implements public policy, the 4T has fallen short of the radical transformation AMLO touts.  Overall, the 4T is a strategy to develop Mexico as an advanced capitalist economy with a better negotiating position in the North American and global markets.

Claudia Sheinbaum represents a continuity of this project, as she will try to consolidate a new hegemonic regime of a neoliberal-progressive character. Since she has weaker links to the base of the party and the popular sectors she has relied heavily on AMLO’s support as she takes office, and her biggest challenges will be maintaining the coalition that AMLO built to push through the 4T.

Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?

As preliminary results came in on Election Day, global news outlets began to announce that Mexico’s next president would be a woman. The fascination with this historic event led to an interest in the new president: What is her background and how would she continue or differ from AMLO’s project?

Claudia Sheinbaum comes from a political and academic family with links to the Communist Party of Mexico. As a member of the University Student Council movement (CEU) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the late 1980s, Sheinbaum also participated in struggles against privatization and for access to higher education. Throughout the 1990s, she dedicated herself to academic work in energy engineering, completed graduate research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and in 2007, her work with the IPCC received the Nobel Prize.

Her experience in the CEU also exposed her to electoral reform movements in Mexican politics, including the 1989 founding of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—a split from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and sections of the Mexican Left. Through these experiences, she met AMLO, and when he was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000, she formed part of his administration as Secretary of the Environment. Afterwards, she helped found the MORENA party and then returned to public office as mayor of Tlalpan in 2015 with MORENA. Finally, in 2018, she became Head of Government of Mexico City, the highest electoral office before the presidency. While in office she successfully executed projects in public transit and renewable energy, but was widely criticized by housing activists for a partnership with Airbnb to bring digital nomads to Mexico City.

Her political leanings are broadly characterized as progressive, humanist, and center-left. Along with AMLO, she is a proponent of “Mexican Humanism,” a reformist orientation that taps into Mexico’s liberal-humanist values. In its best version, the discourse of the Fourth Transformation is guided by these ideals to construct something like a Scandinavian social-democratic welfare state. But in reality, it’s a cheap imitation of that.

Mexican Humanism is loosely deployed with a new slogan of “Shared Prosperity,” a formula embraced by Sheinbaum in which big business and the poor benefit from economic growth and “development.” This translates to more infrastructural access, government stipends, and slightly higher-paying jobs with a loose commitment to worker prosperity. Nevertheless, while the government has increased the minimum wage, Mexicans still have the lowest wages of all OECD countries.

Mexican Humanism is loosely deployed with a new slogan of “Shared Prosperity,” a formula embraced by Sheinbaum in which big business and the poor benefit from economic growth and “development.”

Sheinbaum has committed herself to building “the second floor” of AMLO’s Fourth Transformation (4T), which will consolidate megaprojects across the country and expand public infrastructures, such as new power plants and passenger railroads. Although she is closely aligned with AMLO, she is not a puppet. As an energy scientist, she will likely pursue renewable energy and support programs for women more seriously than her predecessor.  In her campaign slogans, Sheinbaum used the slogan, “It’s the time for women” and offered economic aid to women over 60 who work in the home. She also says she will have a woman’s sensibility as she approaches social and scientific issues. It remains to be seen whether she seeks a rapprochement with the women’s movement, which was ridiculed and marginalized by AMLO. 

Despite a stellar record in public service, Sheinbaum’s selection as presidential nominee came about after a contested “survey” in her party dogged with allegations of corruption. Furthermore, figures close to her have a shady past, such as the former Secretary of Security of Mexico City, Omar García Harfuch, who comes from a family of state security officers. In 2014, Harfuch was head of the Federal Police in Guerrero during the disappearance of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa teachers college. He always maintained that he was absent during these tragic events, and his proximity to MORENA shielded him from further scrutiny. Although Harfuch had the support of Sheinbaum to run as head of government of Mexico City, his ties to the Ayotzinapa case and the lack of a popular profile, led to his defeat by Clara Brugada, a MORENA nominee from the working-class borough of Iztapalapa.

Overall, Claudia Sheinbaum represents a continuity of the leadership around AMLO, but she has weaker links to the base of the party and therefore depends heavily on the figure of AMLO for political clout. As she takes office, one of her biggest challenges will be maintaining the coalition that AMLO built and pushing through the “second floor” of the 4T.

What happened to the right-wing opposition?

Meanwhile, the opposition, composed of the National Action Party (PAN), PRI, and PRD, has been in crisis since they lost the presidential election to AMLO in 2018. Recall that Mexico’s “democratic transition” from one-party rule culminated with the election of Vicente Fox of the conservative PAN in 2000. The PAN ruled from 2000-2012, infamously unleashing the ongoing war on drugs in 2006. Disillusioned with PAN governments, the Mexican electorate brought the PRI back into office with the fraudulent election of Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) in 2012. By 2018, the neoliberal PRI-PAN regime was exhausted after facing mounting corruption scandals, abuses of power, and crises of governability, most notably months of national protests after the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa.

Over the next four years, AMLO took advantage of the crumbling reputation of the PRIAN and set out to build an alliance between social movements, political parties, and the upper class to negotiate a transition that led to his election in 2018. Once in office, AMLO accentuated the shortcomings of the opposition, criticizing their neoliberal program and successfully combating them in the press. Although the opposition tried to mobilize astroturf “pro-democracy” marches and virulent smear campaigns on social media (#NarcoPresidente), AMLO was able to deflect these attacks and keep opponents on their toes by setting the pace of the political agenda from his early morning press briefings in the National Palace, the famous mañaneras.

Today’s PRI-PAN-PRD alliance, “Strength and Heart for Mexico,” is headed by incompetent and corrupt party leaders Marko Antonio Cortés (PAN) and Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas (PRI). Under their leadership, both parties have lost midterm elections and their power has dwindled in state and national bodies. For its part, the PRD, a remnant of the left-reformist efforts that didn’t go into MORENA, is politically bankrupt and may lose its party registration altogether. Now in tatters, without leadership and without a program, the “Strength and Heart for Mexico” alliance will have to reinvent itself under a new figure and program, which may come from the far right, though it’s too soon to tell since their recomposition will take years.

Regime change and hegemony

AMLO’s victory in 2018 represents a negotiated transition with ruling elites to save a discredited State after years of social unrest and towards a new accommodationist hegemonic regime of a neoliberal-progressive character. The neoliberal regime that captured the Mexican state in the late 1980s was quickly exhausted after the failed “democratic transition” of 2000, culminating in the crisis of governability under EPN (2012-18). Within three terms, the PRIAN regime became discredited (a decade after the neoliberal economic crisis of 2008). This political-ideological opening allowed AMLO to present himself as the savior of the Mexican State who would hold back popular discontent at a time of widespread crisis of credibility for neoliberal bourgeois institutions around the world.

From the outset, AMLO received support from Mexico’s capitalist class, most notably from Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, and other ruling families that staffed various government posts. After coming to power, AMLO pursued a series of fiscal-monetary policies and megaprojects to reassure foreign capital of Mexico’s sound finances and friendly investment climate throughout the territory. His megaprojects provided a windfall for construction companies and hundreds of thousands of jobs and social programs for local populations, thus fulfilling part of his slogan that “for the good of all, the poor come first.” The results were immediate and MORENA consistently expanded its rule over the territory by winning the midterm elections in 2021.

But do the poor really come first in this new regime in formation? While there have been some substantial improvements for workers, such as higher minimum wage and welfare programs, these redistributive policies don’t get to the root of the problem. As the sociologist Massimo Modonessi argues, AMLO aims to achieve social harmony by “attending to the problem of poverty through a redistribution of the capacity to consume, and to access goods and services, without modifying their systemic causes: exploitation and exclusion.” Citing  Jaime Ortega, Modonessi concludes that “above all, the government of the 4T is a reform of the State, not a destructuring or modification to the market economy nor a clash with the main economic groups.”

While there have been some substantial improvements for workers, such as higher minimum wage and welfare programs, these redistributive policies don’t get to the root of the problem.

It’s indisputable that AMLO and MORENA have taken full advantage of their position in government to quickly establish a politically centrist and organizationally centralist hegemonic regime despite the pandemic. In its first six-year term, MORENA has made history by achieving consistent economic growth, paying national debt, reviving the nationalized oil and energy sector, raising the minimum wage, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), and electing the first woman president. AMLO’s 60 percent approval rating is also due in part to various social programs, including pensions for seniors, scholarships for students, and stipends for farmers. While the regime might not have achieved deep economic transformations, it has deeply transformed the political discourse in the popular imagination. It is safe to say that AMLO’s administration will be remembered for generations in poor families that benefited from these programs. Claudia Sheinbaum’s challenge will be to sustain economic growth, maintain a united political alliance, and deliver for the poor to continue pushing this process forward.

Contradictions in MORENA and its government

While some sectors of the American Left have celebrated Sheinbaum’s victory and uncritically praised MORENA’s project, it is worth giving a critical overview of the Fourth Transformation (4T) to see what Sheinbaum defends. During his six years in the presidency, AMLO has pushed a series of megaprojects, social programs, and government reforms known as the Fourth Transformation.  Sheinbaum has vowed to continue and expand the “second floor” of this project, and while she will give it her own personal stamp, her role will be to consolidate the process that began under AMLO.

The first three transformations AMLO refers to were the Mexican War of Independence against Spain after 1810, the Liberal victory over the Conservative and French forces in the 1860s, and the Mexican Revolution which raged from 1910to 1920. These transformations AMLO invokes to legitimize his project came about through large-scale popular mobilizations to destroy the old order and create a more just society. In today’s regime, the masses are mostly passive and are only called on to vote or to turnout for pro-government demonstrations. At the same time, the new regime has absorbed politicians from the opposition and considerably rehabilitated the military, actions contrary to any real, radical change in Mexico.

From the outset, it’s important to understand that while MORENA may have had roots in the social movements, as the party gained power it lost many of its connections to those movements. For example, local party members are often frustrated that the candidates they nominate for electoral races are sidelined by those appointed by AMLO and his advisors. These days, MORENA is widely criticized in the left-wing Mexican press because the party stays in power by accepting politicians from the opposition with open arms. Most recently, MORENA was criticized for welcoming Alejandra del Moral from the PRI cadre in the state of Mexico. In addition, the party depends on alliances with opportunist parties like the PVEM, a “Green” party run by a rich family and former ally of the PRI, and the PT, an electoral apparatus without principles run by undemocratic union leaders and elite families. Thus, we can see that while MORENA does have popular support, it maintains power by co-opting movements, buying out politicians, and making  alliances with opportunist parties.

The Fourth Transformation is also anchored by a series of megaprojects in fossil fuels, transportation, and tourism. For example, AMLO has made it a point to rescue Mexico’s nationalized energy sector by expanding oil production by creating the giant refinery at Dos Bocas in Tabasco state. This refinery will provide energy for the southeast and will be a petrochemical complex that connects the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Yucatan peninsula. Although Sheinbaum will shift energy policy towards renewable energies, fossil fuels will remain a pillar of the economy (and the national budget). The Interoceanic Railroad and the Mayan Train also form part of the 4T projects. The Interoceanic railroad aims to steal traffic from the Panama Canal and to detonate free trade zones in Oaxaca and Veracruz. The Mayan Train, widely criticized for its environmental impacts, aims to expand mass tourism away from the beaches of Cancun and towards new destinations in the peninsula.

We can see that while MORENA does have popular support, it maintains power by co-opting movements, buying out politicians, and making  alliances with opportunist parties.

These national projects, along with airports, hotels, railroads, and a new airline, will be managed by the military and the marines through the state-owned Olmeca-Maya-Mexica corporation. These projects have already received national security status so the military patrols these infrastructures. While AMLO’s administration has argued that these projects rescue Mexico’s national energy sovereignty, they actually consolidate the United States’ energy interests in the region. For example, the Plan Sonora consists of solar power plants and lithium mining to provide natural resources for the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, TSMC now setting up factories in Arizona thanks to the CHIPS Act, which is part of the US’s larger initiative to use  science and technology policy to counter China.

Claudia Sheinbaum will also have to oversee and enforce US immigration policy at the northern and southern borders, deploying the military (National Guard) to stop migrants from Central and South America who are trying to cross to the US. Migrants will have to deal more with Mexican Immigration Services and the National Guard, in addition to the US’s ICE and Border Patrol. Lastly, while AMLO has pursued a progressive foreign policy of unity towards Latin American governments, the same solidarity isn’t offered to others. For example, the Mexican government only recently joined the South African case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

Overall, the government is removed from social movements and MORENA’s ascent to power has marginalized the radical Left. And so, the Left needs to build with the women’s movement, labor, indigenous peoples’ movements, and environmental campaigns that remain active outside MORENA. The challenge for the radical Left and its allies will be to articulate an independent political pole to the left of AMLO.

Looking ahead

Claudia Sheinbaum likely will consolidate the so-called “second floor” of the Fourth Transformation. As Sheinbaum prepares to take over from AMLO, the president is already pushing the so-called “Plan C” to protect some of AMLO’s social programs and State entities through Constitutional Reform. This will entail protecting the state energy company, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), and expanding the state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), under Constitutional amendments. Social programs and financial aid for seniors, students, and people with disabilities will also be enshrined in the Constitution through this process.

The Left needs to build with the women’s movement, labor, indigenous peoples’ movements, and environmental campaigns that remain active outside MORENA. The challenge for the radical Left and its allies will be to articulate an independent political pole to the left of AMLO.

While Sheinbaum will support AMLO’s protection of the nationalized fossil fuel industry, she will put her own stamp on energy policy and push for renewable energy and transportation projects. Sheinbaum has already tested some initiatives during her tenure in Mexico City and projects in solar energy, EV batteries, and biofuel energy are already operating, providing models for future projects. For example, under Sheinbaum, the state’s research and development agency, the National Council for Humanities, Science and Technology (Conahcyt) will become a federal entity with a larger share of the national budget.

In the economic realm, Sheinbaum will seek to take advantage of the US-China rivalry and will continue to position Mexico as a go-between for Chinese and American manufacturers. This means that in some respects, Mexico will ally itself squarely with US policies, such as the Plan Sonora discussed above, which seeks to provide solar energy and lithium for a new microchip plant under construction in Arizona. In other sectors, Mexico will accept Chinese investments under US scrutiny to export goods to North America within the free trade framework of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

However, there remains doubt among economists if Mexico will be able to cash in on the speculation of nearshoring since foreign companies haven’t shifted factories to Mexico as fast as the government would have liked. As Reuters reported, Mexico’s advantages in attracting foreign companies are diminishing. For example, industrial space is hard to find and becoming more expensive. The price of cement, steel, and land is also increasing and the surge in the peso and a higher minimum wage could also deter investors. Sheinbaum’s administration will have to solve these dilemmas all while delivering on promises made to the working class that elected her.

Featured image credit: Eneas de Troya via Flikr; 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.”

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The United States was already headed for one of the most acute political crises in recent memory. Then former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania. Having survived, Trump has consolidated his base and cornered the Democrats by blaming them for the attack.

Trump will now position himself as a strong man and survivor over a debilitated Biden campaign. He has an inside track to victory in the election with a clear advantage despite being widely despised.

Even before the attempted assassination of Trump, President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance had thrown his candidacy into doubt with the bourgeois press, the Democrat’s capitalist donors, and centrist politicians, all calling for him to pass the baton to another nominee.

GOP Capitalizes on Assassination Attempt

The attempt against Trump has drowned out all other issues. The image of him bloodied, defiant with fist raised, and chanting “fight, fight, fight” has been plastered across the media and will no doubt end up on t-shirts at this week’s GOP Convention in Milwaukee.

At this point we don’t know much about the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, except that he was a twenty-year-old, white, registered Republican who donated to the Democrat’s PAC, Act Blue, after Biden’s election. His motives and politics remain unclear, although reports paint him as a loner with a history of being bullied in school.

But Trump and his minions have already blamed the Democrats for the assassination attempt. Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance exclaimed, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Cornered by these accusations, the Democrats immediately condemned the attempted assassination, and pulled their campaign advertisements across the country, something of course not reciprocated by the Republicans. The reeling Democrats are already muting their sharpest criticisms at least for now, while the Republicans have doubled down on their attacks on Biden and the Democrats.

Amid their spiraling conflict, both parties have united on one thing—blistering condemnation of “political violence.” Their hypocrisy on this point is plain for all to see. Both parties have jointly funded the Pentagon’s war machine to the tune of nearly $1 trillion a year, armed Israel to carry out genocide in Palestine, and unleashed their militarized police to enforce the racialized class inequalities of U.S. capitalism.

Amid their spiraling conflict, both parties have united on one thing—blistering condemnation of “political violence.” Their hypocrisy on this point is plain for all to see.

Contrary to the current bipartisan political theater, political violence is a systematic feature of U.S. society. It is as American as apple pie.

And it is getting worse. Capitalism’s long-term global slump is deepening inequality, fueling political polarization, opening space for the far right including fascist forces, and intensifying social and political violence.

Even Biden admitted this in his national address when he listed just a few recent examples like Trump’s January 6th “beer gut” putsch, the attack on then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Rhetorical pleas by Biden and especially Trump for national unity will not dampen down such violence, which is the product of a deep socioeconomic crisis and intractable political polarization.

The beneficiaries of the assassination attempt will be Trump’s campaign, the far right, the security state, the military, and the police. They, along with the, at best, qualified support of the Democrats, will whip up a moral panic about “extremism” to justify a law and order crackdown.

As a result, we are likely to see even further erosion of our already endangered democratic rights to organize, speak out, protest, and strike. Regardless of the identity, motive, and politics of the shooter, the target of this crackdown will be the Left, progressive movements, unions, and especially people of color. In particular, this will strengthen the attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, which is already subject to a McCarthyite witch hunt.

The Times of Israel reports that Biden campaign officials stated, on condition of anonymity, that, “Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president’s history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the ‘disorder’ created by campus protests against Israel over the war in Gaza with Hamas.”

Crisis in the Democratic Party

While the Republicans capitalize on the assassination attempt, the Democrats are in a full blown political crisis. Their standard bearer, Biden, has confronted eroding support from young voters as a result of his unrelenting political, economic, and military support of Israel and its genocidal war on Palestine.

His position has put him to the right of most Democrats, and repulsed almost all Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. Biden is widely and rightly called “Genocide Joe” by young activists.

On top of that, his policies have failed to alleviate the crisis in the lives of workers and the oppressed. His pandemic funding has ended, state and local governments are now turning to austerity to balance their budgets, and workers wage increases have failed to match inflation, particularly in housing costs particularly for renters.

For most oppressed people conditions have deteriorated over the last four years. Abortion has been massively curtailed, racist police brutality and murder have continued apace, and deportation of migrants has dramatically risen under Biden. Unsurprisingly, voters, even before the debate, had little enthusiasm for the Democrats.

In that faceoff, Biden had two tasks—prove that he was mentally competent to run and focus the electorate’s attention on Trump and the Republicans’ authoritarian and reactionary program. He failed on both counts. This caused panic among the Democrats who were confronted with a candidate who was simply unfit for office.

In [the debate], Biden had two tasks—prove that he was mentally competent to run and focus the electorate’s attention on Trump and the Republicans’ authoritarian and reactionary program. He failed on both counts.

The Republicans sensed blood in the water. One senior GOP strategist crowed, “Joe Biden is an anvil wrapped around the neck of every Democrat candidate and incumbent. Republicans should be praying nonstop he stays in the race.”

That led centrists in battleground districts as well as donors and the bourgeois media, which have clearly leaned toward the Democrats, to call for Biden to withdraw from the election and support either Kamala Harris or some process to select a competent nominee. Rather than listen to reason, however, Biden has dug in, touting his record, denying his obvious age-related clinical frailty, and pointing to national polls that show him in a dead heat with Trump.

But his record is for most people, despite this or that minor reform, a lead balloon. And his repeated flubs in almost every unscripted appearance only confirm his incapacity.

And national polls are irrelevant. We do not live in a democracy. U.S. elections do not turn on the popular vote, but on states and their apportioned delegates in the undemocratic electoral college. That actual race turns on seven battleground states in which Biden trails Trump.

In fact, most election analysts think that Biden’s opportunity to win has narrowed to just three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Without those he will lose, and after the assassination attempt his odds, especially in Pennsylvania, look terrible.

Biden and the Democrats are to blame for this disaster. While Trump may be a malignant narcissist, Biden has proved himself to be, at best, an arrogant narcissist, more concerned with promoting himself than defeating Trump and the Republicans.

The entire party shares responsibility for promoting a candidate that is unfit for office, including its so-called progressive wing. Neither competent establishment candidates nor progressives challenged him in the primary, leaving Biden a clear path to lock up the nomination. And, now in the wake of the assassination, he and his handlers will defend his candidacy in the name of stability and try to block any attempt to dislodge him from the top of the ticket.

Progressives Front for Genocide Joe

The possibility, if not likelihood, of a Trump victory has precipitated panic and desperation throughout the liberal and social democratic Left. The Black political establishment, union bureaucracy, as well as Sanders and the so-called Squad with the notable exception of Rashida Tlaib have for the most part doubled down on support of Biden.

As Biden’s candidacy appeared to be in serious jeopardy, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushed to his defense, declaring, “The matter is closed. He is in this race, and I support him.” Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was part of the encampment at Columbia University protesting the genocide, chimed in, “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back.”

Even worse, Bernie Sanders who has repeatedly called Biden the “most progressive president since FDR” penned a column in The New York Times that plumbed the depths of the lesser-evil argument for supporting Biden. While admitting that he opposed Biden on many questions including his support of Israel’s war, Sanders claimed that Biden was “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment.”

The precondition of the Squad and Sanders making such claims is deprioritizing opposition to genocide. But that is nothing new. They have dressed Biden’s administration in sheep’s clothing since Sanders lost the contest for the Democratic Party nomination in 2020.

In reality, the Biden administration was always a wolf, one with a strategy of co-opting the Left with an imperialist Keynesian program of modest liberal reforms, shoring up U.S. hegemony, and confronting its great power and regional rivals, especially China and Russia. Biden’s support of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine has ripped off the sheep’s clothing and exposed him as not just a supporter but an architect of genocide.

Instead of trumpeting our program and mobilizing forces to fight for it, Sanders and the Squad adopted Biden’s and became the best salespeople for it…Out the window went Card Check, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, codifying Roe, immigrant rights, and countless other demands.

That, in turn, has generated the radicalization of the best of a whole generation, most dramatically expressed in the encampments on college campuses against Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole. As a result, in the eyes of these Palestine solidarity activists, Sanders and the Squad will be looked upon as accomplices, not opponents, of Biden’s regime and its genocidal war.

These politicians are prepared to risk alienating Palestine solidarity activists based on the fantasy that in supporting Biden, they have influenced him over the last four years and that by working for his victory in the election, they can save him from defeat and thereby secure even greater influence in his second term. In reality, the capitalist establishment backed Biden to defeat Sanders and his followers in the 2020 primary.

He then used them to corral DSA and the broader Left, social movements, and union officialdom, into supporting his program, not ours. As the recent book, The Internationalists details, Biden’s program was created by his own imperialist brain trust with no consultation with progressive Democrats let alone socialists.

Instead of trumpeting our program and mobilizing forces to fight for it, Sanders and the Squad adopted Biden’s program and became the best salespeople for it against centrist Democrats and Republicans. As a result, out the window went Card Check, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, codifying Roe, immigrant rights, and countless other demands.

Moreover, even if Biden defies all the odds and wins, there is no reason to think that he would adopt anything like our program of reforms. In reality, if reelected, Biden will double down on his own program. Thus, Biden has blocked the Left in the Democratic Party, neutralizing and co-opting its elected officials as spokespersons for his regime at the moment of its greatest crisis and possible impending defeat in November.

The Self-Defeating Logic of Lesser Evilism

To justify their strategy, Sanders, the Squad, and many on the Left are yet again making all the classic lesser evil arguments, even if the last four years have definitively disproved their case. The most honest of them do not try to dress up Biden as anything but evil. They admit that readily. They actually argue that the only way for us to stop Trump and what they see as fascism is to campaign for a candidate carrying out genocide.

The basis of the argument is that Trump is the immediate danger, that he must be stopped, and that the only way to do that is to support Biden. They argue further that conditions under a second Biden administration will be more auspicious for the growth of the Left, social movements, and trade unions.

In reality, the last four years disprove their arguments. The Left’s broad support for Biden in 2020 and after has weakened organized socialists, dampened down class and social struggle, and failed to stop the rise of the right. It has tied us to a class enemy at home and its imperialist project abroad.

Before Sanders’ capitulation to Biden, DSA was an expanding organization with at least some part of it openly discussing how to build a mass socialist alternative to the Democratic Party establishment and the GOP. But instead, it followed Sanders, AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and others in rallying to support the Biden administration.

The talk of organizing a dirty break, building a surrogate party, or even realigning the Democratic Party and turning it into a social democratic party has evaporated. All that was replaced by trying to elect progressive Democrats and lobbying the establishment to adopt their demands. Of course, that yielded next to nothing.

The first crisis DSA suffered was unsurprisingly over U.S. imperialism and Palestine. When the Palestine Working Group protested DSA member Jamaal Bowman’s support for Israel, the working group was disciplined, not Bowman, leading to an exodus of Palestine solidarity activists from the organization.

Moreover, faced with the general impasse of the Left inside the Democratic Party, DSA has lost tens of thousands of members, its chapters have become largely inactive, and its remaining members are mostly inactive. Pointing to this or that electoral victory just covers up the obvious crisis the organization has suffered. It is no longer the dynamic, vibrant expression of radicalization it promised to be.

It is time to face the hard reality that lesser evilism has never worked to advance the Left, working class struggle, and the liberation of the oppressed. The last four years proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The same result has been faced by most social movements under Biden. Popular struggle on most fronts from climate to migrant rights and even reproductive justice remain at a low ebb. But perhaps the worst setback suffered was to Black Lives Matter, which the Democratic Party and the Black political establishment convinced to retreat from the streets and instead to campaign for Biden in 2020.

While that tremendous uprising has left a profound political radicalization in its wake, it is no longer an organized political force across the country. Both parties are rolling back any reforms, funding not defunding cops, and re-instituting racist repressive measures across the country.

The one social movement that has scored significant ideological victories and a few institutional reforms—the Palestine solidarity movement—has done so in defiance of liberal university bureaucrats, Democratic Party elected officials, and the Biden administration. These are all opponents of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions and the entire struggle to free Palestine from Israel settler colonialism.

What gains the labor movement has won was not the result of Biden being elected or lobbying him in office. Few to no gains have been won that way. And there have been massive defeats at the hand of his administration like breaking the strike of railway workers. The only real victories have been won by organizing and staging strikes like the UAW’s standup strike against the Big Three automakers.

But most damning of all, support for Biden in the last election and over the last four years has failed to stop the electoral resurrection of Trump and the far right. In fact, while deeply unpopular and widely condemned for January 6th, they are more organized than four years ago.

Trump and his minions have taken over the GOP as well as traditional Republican think tanks, driven out so-called moderates from the party, developed a far more comprehensive program for authoritarian nationalist rule laid out in Project 2025, and built a united cabinet in waiting ready to try and implement it upon victory. Even worse, Steven Bannon with his War Room podcast along with others in this right wing ecosystem are organizing, in Bannon’s words, “an army of the awakened” prepared, according to Kevin Roberts, the leader of Project 2025, to carry out a “bloodless” revolution if possible, but implicitly a violent one if necessary.

It is time to face the hard reality that lesser evilism has never worked to advance the Left, working class struggle, and the liberation of the oppressed. The last four years proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Our forces are weaker, more disoriented, and unprepared to carry out the fight. The only exception is the Palestine solidarity movement that knows in its bones that Biden is our main enemy right now.

Building Resistance to the Right and Establishment

Whichever party wins in November, the U.S. seems headed for a constitutional crisis. If Biden and the Democrats somehow manage to win, the GOP will not recognize their victory and will attempt to implement their far right program in the states they control, establishing separate and unequal laws for the oppressed and exploited. The judiciary, both state and federal, and especially the Supreme Court, have proven themselves just as subject to this partisan manipulation and polarization, and incapable of mitigating the constitutional crisis.

If the GOP wins these elections, it will attempt to implement Project 2025 at the federal level. That will be opposed by the Democrats in the states they control, leading to open conflict between them and the Trump administration.

Such polarization and radicalization has led even mainstream news outlets like CNN to ask whether the U.S. is headed for another civil war. Neoconservative Robert Kagan in his book, Rebellion, fears that a far-right revolt–a counter-revolution against the existing constitutional order-is a real and imminent danger.

Faced with this looming crisis, it is time to bring an end to the cycle of illusions on the Left. All those who followed Sanders into the Democratic Party now have a choice to make: Either continue speeding down this dead end or begin the hard process of building an alternative to both the Democratic Party, which is now the main party of U.S. capital, and its far right opponent, the Trumpite GOP. It is time to chart a different course forward.

[The Left] must face the fact that our forces face an emboldened and increasingly dangerous right. They will not be blocked by the capitalist establishment…[and] will only gain momentum if the Democrats are seen as the only political alternative.

Regardless of what individuals do at the ballot box, the Left must not spend our time, money, and energy on campaigning for Biden and the Democratic Party. Instead, we must build our social and class struggles, especially the movement in solidarity with Palestine against Israel’s genocidal war. Our alternative must be primarily committed to building class and social struggle and only running candidates on an independent platform and with the aim of being tribunes and builders of independent mass movements for progressive demands.

There are no shortcuts, as the last few years have proved. But we must be honest about the challenges we face in this alternative strategy. First our infrastructure of resistance—our democratic organization of social and class struggle—remains very weak. We must overcome that in order to build the kinds of disruptive mass movements and strikes that will be necessary to win even our most modest demands for reform.

Second, we must face the fact that our forces face an emboldened and increasingly dangerous right. They will not be blocked by the capitalist establishment in the Democratic Party and, in fact, will only gain momentum if the Democrats are seen as the only political alternative. Our forces on the Left must be smart in this context: We must defend our democratic rights, lend maximum solidarity to each other’s struggles, continue to protest for our demands against both the establishment and far right, and use tactics designed to reach out to the widest ranks of the working class and oppressed.

In this moment, we should also remember that however temporarily emboldened the right may be, it will not be able to create a stable regime in the U.S. or anywhere else for that matter. They have no solutions to capitalism’s systemic crises that they are exploiting politically and no answers to the demands of the vast majority of our society. Neither does the capitalist establishment, whose regimes in the U.S. and globally are also unstable. The Left must begin to build an independent pole that can offer an actual alternative for humanity.

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.”

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Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) was the book that got me active in the labor movement. I have always felt sort of awkward to say this; most organizing trainings encourage participants to come up with some wild, personal story of triumph, but McAlevey’s writing and thinking had a great impact on me, and I am sure many others will say the same. Of all of Jane McAlevey’s gifts, being able to dramatize any story about a contract campaign or union election into a swashbuckling, life-or-death battle was always the most incredible to me. Take this 11-minute video she made about getting an on-the-fence worker to join a contract action team at a Philadelphia hospital. Anyone worth their salt as an organizer has a story about something like this, but when McAlevey tells it, the narrative becomes the biggest, most audacious, and impactful thing to have ever happened in Pennsylvania. Her narrative talents have galvanized many, inspiring both new and seasoned union activists to commit themselves to labor struggles.

McAlevey spent much of her life on the road helping to support various campaigns. She was the closest twenty-first century equivalent to the traveling organizers of the IWW or CIO times, and McAlevey focused most of her energy on the workers in the “modern economy” of healthcare and education. For newer organizers raised in the age of strike-heavy, impactful campaigns like Starbucks Workers United or the UAW Stand Up Strike, it may be hard to understand how critical her arguments were when Raising Expectations came out in 2012. McAlevey had just left SEIU after a decade of organizing in various roles. At the time, SEIU was criticized as a union that often cut workers out of organizing. Her second book, No Shortcuts, makes this criticism more explicit, framing her organizing against the titular “shortcuts” of photo-ops and secret neutrality deals of Stern-era SEIU.

McAlevey’s belief in worker power and agency is shown most in her three big tactics: power-structure analysis, open bargaining, and whole worker organizing.

McAlevey’s belief in worker power and agency is shown most in her three big tactics: power-structure analysis, open bargaining, and whole worker organizing. Each of these tactics requires long-term relationships and deep conversations with workers as well as a belief that worker agency and knowledge are crucial. Her open bargaining style is by far my favorite of her tactics. It turns the usually deeply bureaucratic and boring process of bargaining completely on its head and makes it into a process completely run by the workers themselves. In her 2021 case study on open bargaining for the UC Berkeley Labor Center, she summarizes the tactic succinctly: “when workers are trusted to seriously engage in their own negotiations, they can achieve the commonly unthinkable: they can win against the odds. Whether you are a worker in Germany or Alabama, the only way you win a decent life is by building enough power to create a crisis for the employers.”

Despite the enormous influence of McAlevey’s work there have been many critiques of her method including some published by Tempest. In my own reading, I found that McAlevey was sometimes overly dismissive of the structural barriers in the union bureaucracy, which prevent some of the organizing she specialized in and advocated for. Nevertheless, these criticisms do not overshadow the important contributions she made to labor campaigns nor do they diminish the positive influence she had on a generation of labor organizers. As a missionary of worker power, Jane McAlevey was second to none. I will miss her greatly.

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.”

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Given the importance (and surprise) of the French election results on Sunday, Tempest re-runs here the statement, in translation and with minor edits, of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)/New Anti-capitalist Party. The NPA politically supported, and ran candidates as part of, the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP)/ New Popular Front. This electoral alliance of left parties shocked mainstream political forecasters by winning the most seats to the French parliament as part of a broad effort to stop the far right from taking power.

The last two days have seen quite useful analyses in both the Left and capitalist press, analyzing the breakdown of political support within the NFP, the growth of the far right, and where this leaves the attempt to cobble together a French government in the absence of a majority coalition.

These elections took place in a context in which the authoritarian far right internationally, including in the U.S., are on the ascendancy. They have positioned themselves, however cynically, as the political alternative to the growing crises of late neo-liberal capitalism. As such their defeat in France should be celebrated.

But there are also significant issues to debate, including the meaning of these elections, and the lessons to be drawn both internationally and in France. There is also the contradictory history of the 1930’s Popular Front which arose to stop the growth of facism in France, but which failed. Ian Birchall, a revolutionary socialist based in Britain, and a historian of the French Left, has written an excellent analysis for RS21, entitled “The Popular Front then and now- France and the elections.”

Of especial importance for a U.S. audience are the attempts by sections of the Left and labor movement to use the victory of the NFP to rally people behind a strategy of political support for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. However attractive the comparison of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen—both of whose fathers, tellingly, were avid admirers of Adolph Hitler—any comparison between the NFP and the Democratic Party, the balance of forces at work in each, not to mention the U.S. and French electoral system, and resultantly, the strategic challenges facing the Left in the U.S. in relation to national elections risk being simplistic or worse. And this is a strategic question, not about what an individual may do in the voting booth, swing state or not. The U.S. Left should not be be actively campaigning for, and throwing our precious organizing resources towards, support for the leader of the imperial hegemon, not coincidentally a champion of Palestinian genocide. Rallying support for Joe Biden (or whichever successor the Democratic Party may or may not be able to thrust upon us) is an error and a concession to impotence. The Left needs to build a viable alternative and reject the choice between the declining imperial status quo or twenty-first century fascism. Building such an alternative should be guiding all of our thinking and our choices such that the U.S. Left and social movements might once again stand as an independent political force, as we have just witnessed in France.

The main lesson from the first results of this second round is the setback suffered by the National Rally (“RN”) and its allies. The defeat of the hundreds of fascist, racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and ultra-reactionary candidates that the RN had presented is a huge relief for racialized people, women, LGBTI+ people and workers. This victory of the united Left halts the momentum of the far right, which nevertheless won around fifty seats. The defeat of the far right of Bardella and Le Pen was the fruit of the popular mobilization that was established thanks to the united spirit brought by the creation of the New Popular Front.

This is already a victory for the New Popular Front, which was made possible by the gathering of the entire left, political, union and associative, but also and above all by the grassroots mobilization of large sectors of the working classes, in particular racialized people and young people, who have everywhere committed themselves to blocking the RN. This mobilization allows the arrival in the National Assembly of a very large number of deputies of the New Popular Front (including a relative majority for LFI [La France Insoumise – Eds.) elected on the basis of a program that breaks not only with Macronism in the service of the ultra-rich, but also with the liberal left of the Hollande five-year term, which had made the policy of the right.

The RN’s defeat should not make us forget that it significantly increased the number of its deputies and remains a threat to racialized people, social rights and democratic freedoms. Nor should it obscure that of the Macronists, who lost a third of their seats. If they still have so many deputies, they owe it only to left-wing voters, who largely turned to them in the second round to block the RN. This blockade vote does not change the electoral results in any way: in the European and legislative elections, Macron and Attal were clearly disavowed and therefore no longer have any legitimacy to claim to lead the country. Macron has no other option today than to submit to the will of the people and allow a left-wing government to implement the program of the New Popular Front, which now has the legitimacy of the ballot box. Otherwise, he must go.

We must remain united to act, debate and outline a perspective of emancipation that will sustainably push back the far right, around a Left of combat and rupture, a Left that can radically transform this society!

This disavowal is also that of the 5th Republic and its authoritarian and undemocratic institutions. The popular mobilization, marked by an unprecedented participation for decades, also raises the need to move towards a Constituent Assembly, for a true democracy of the majority.

From now on, the commitments made must be kept, and all the emergency measures provided for in the New Popular Front program must be implemented, starting with the repeal of the pension counter-reform and that of unemployment insurance. This can only be done if the popular dynamic is maintained and expanded. This requires building grassroots New Popular Front collectives, open to all, which can help amplify the movement and build mobilizations and strikes in the coming months. We must continue to stand together. No national unity government can meet the aspirations expressed in the ballot boxes today. We must remain united to act, debate and outline a perspective of emancipation that will sustainably push back the far right, around a Left of combat and rupture, a Left that can radically transform this society!

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Jeanne Menjoulet; 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.”

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Broadcast for the world to see through TikTok live stream before quickly going viral across several other social media platforms, a video shared early Tuesday, June 25 by a young Kenyan TikTok user showed a group of anti-riot police–teargas cannisters in hand and truncheons drawn–surrounded by hundreds of peacefully protesting citizens, forcing the officers to retreat to their vehicle and speed away from the Central Business District (CBD) intersection. The nearly two-minute video shows the protestors jointly chanting “we are peaceful” as they rush to the intersection to encircle the officers, defuse hostilities, and prevent further violent repression. Other images of unity and collective action portray siblings protecting each other from unlawful arrests, groups of young protesters caring for one another amidst clouds of teargas, and Supreme Court staff and lawyers distributing water to protesters as they marched towards their destination, where they would seize and occupy parliament. These photos and videos of collective people-power are just a few of hundreds–if not thousands–of images and clips shared by Kenyan protesters on that historical day as they took to the streets of Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, Kakamega, Nakuru, and Kericho to resist and challenge parliament’s approval of President William Ruto’s austerity Finance Bill, which introduced unpopular tax proposals and levies that would further increase an already onerous cost of living for the majority of citizens.

The events marked the first time since Kenya’s independence that a spontaneous and organic people-driven movement took to the streets in droves to oppose political leadership and IMF-influenced austerity policies.

Public outrage and collective demonstrations opposing Finance Bill 2024 began the week prior, when on Tuesday, June 18 hundreds of primarily Gen-Z Kenyans gathered to protest the legislation in Nairobi CBD. As Rasna Warah explains, the events marked the first time since Kenya’s independence that a spontaneous and organic people-driven movement took to the streets in droves to oppose political leadership and IMF-influenced austerity policies. Protesters were met in the streets by brute police force, resulting in the arrests of nearly 200 peaceful protesters including the detainment of Njeri Mwangi, a member of the Mathare Social Justice Centre Secretariat.

In the hours and days that followed, more Kenyans raised their voices against the punitive Finance Bill and the government’s violation of citizens’ constitutionally protected right to peaceful and unarmed assembly and protest. Mobilized through social media under hashtags #OccupyParliament and #RejectFinanceBill2024, the politically amorphous yet unified movement quickly grew, collectively rallying around issues of concern and demands for change rather than ethnic divisions historically cultivated and exploited by the governing class for political control. On the morning of June 16, mass protests erupted across the country and following the murder of Rex Kanyike Masai by riot police and the use of live ammunition during a peaceful demonstration on the afternoon of June 20, the movement launched ‘7 Days of Rage’–a week of planned protest actions that include #OccupyStateHouse and #totalshutdown among others to express their undying determination in opposing Finance Bill 2024 and challenging the unaccountable leadership of the Ruto administration.

For the many who fought a Western-supported KANU dictatorship for decades, such as NARC Party leader Martha Karua, the Generation Z challenge to the oppressive Kenya Kwanza regime is a continuation of the struggle to liberate the country from foreign influence and revolutionize the status quo of politicians favoring their own interests.A historical, fearless moment

Public discontent reached new heights on Tuesday, June 25 as young Kenyans–many of whom are directly impacted by these financial measures–were joined by other community members and activists to show their disapproval and desire for change in the streets of cities across the country. As the day progressed, what started as a mass protest against a proposed tax bill morphed into widespread dissatisfaction with President Ruto–namely his use of colonial-era violence against peaceful protesters and the announcement of the arrival of 400 Kenyan police officers in Haiti to terrorize the population of the Caribbean Island in the service of U.S. imperialism.

In the early hours of June 25, thousands of anti-Finance Bill protesters surrounded the parliament building in the capital city to shut down procedures to approve the government’s plans to raise more than U.S. $2.7 billion in new tax revenue from workers and rural poor, as dictated by a new financial agreement with the IMF. Despite threats of police violence, internet shutdowns, and the arrests of hundreds of protesters in the days before–including the abductions of many known bloggers, activists, and social media political influencers the previous night–protesters refused to be intimidated and courageously stormed parliament in a direct action that echoed louder than ever before the youths’ political consciousness and their demands for radical social change.

In a country with a history of Western-backed authoritarian leadership carrying out disappearances of left-wing students and workers–most notably done by former president Daniel Arap Moi’s Special Branch–and the recent memory of bloody confrontation and the deaths of 75 protesters during the opposition party-led anti-austerity protests last year, Kenyans are fully aware of the dangers of opposing belligerent and brutal power and have remained fearless.

The mass demonstration on Tuesday did not end without violence, casualties, and property damage. Yet many of those active within the movement have reported that government-paid goons disrupted protests, instigating violence and looting–an infiltration tactic known all too well by many organizers and activists. Social media posts and witness accounts suggest that once again disorder, chaos, and division are what the ruling class seems intent on provoking during peaceful protests that challenge the status quo. In a comment given to Socialist Worker, one protester stated that “we are the flames burning up the country and we will not stand still while we are robbed and made poor.”

Despite challenges, Gen-Z influenced a historic moment and a unified movement that overcame all ethnic, social, and cultural differences, and defied all structural obstacles to collectively demand dignity and justice.

Despite challenges, Gen-Z influenced a historic moment and a unified movement that overcame all ethnic, social, and cultural differences, and defied all structural obstacles to collectively demand dignity and justice.

While numbers are contested, as the day ended it was reported that at least 14 protesters had lost their lives and over two hundred people were being treated for gunshot wounds and other injuries at Nairobi’s central Kenyatta National Hospital. It’s expected that thousands of others were injured across the country, and hundreds arrested. State-led violence continued into the night as Kenyan Defense Forces were deployed to harass and assault citizens as they returned home, and residents of Githurai suffered an evening of police terror that left a yet unconfirmed number of citizens dead. The day ended with President Ruto’s public address where he called protesters treasonous and vowed to quell what he called “a grave threat to national security.”

All eyes on Kenya

In a sudden reversal on Wednesday June 26, President Ruto announced plans to withdraw the controversial Finance Bill. In a statement given to the press, the president said that the people of Kenya have spoken loudly in opposition to the bill. However, according to Article 115 (1) of the Constitution of Kenya, the president does not have the authority to withdraw a bill, and instead can only assent or return the bill to parliament with recommendations. In fact, under Article 115 (6), even if the president refuses to sign the bill, after 14 days the bill automatically becomes law. Like the empty promises offered during his 2022 presidential campaign that assured voters of his platform to ease economic hardships for the poor and working class, Ruto seems to have done nothing more than provide Kenyans and the international community with political theater.

In its simplest understanding, the government’s 2024 tax bill will drastically increase the cost of foods and other basic needs. This tax increase comes by suggestion from the IMF as a way to increase state revenue, offset the budget deficit, and lessen the national debt. These are not taxes on the rich or the wealth of the bosses, but instead on daily staples such as bread and milk, as well as fuel and hygiene or menstrual products. The mass opposition to these measures comes from those who will bear the greatest burden–the poor and working class of Kenya who consume these goods at the greatest level per capita.

The IMF has influenced Kenya’s economic policies since the 1990s, but since his election in September 2022, Ruto has been an enthusiastic servant to the demands of international finance capital. As a result of his allegiance to Western influence, the demands for change from the working poor stretch beyond the Finance Bill to a rejection of public sector privatization, social benefit cuts, and the dismantling of domestic health and education systems. The visible beneficiaries to this faithfulness have been the ruling elite and political class, which has aided the wide popularity and support for the current mass, youth-led movement.

The popular uprising in Kenya has shaken the government and the ruling class. It has raised fears in other African capitals and Western boardrooms where international finance capital is negotiated. Today, June 27, Kenyans peacefully take to the streets once again to demand accountability, and remind Ruto and his government that the people in their majority hold real power in their democracy. Mobilizing people using the hashtags #RejectFianceBill2024 and #ZakayoStopKillingUs, the coalition of organizers are calling on Gen-X, Millennials, Gen-Z, and all other Kenyan citizens to join the one million people march to the state house and parliament.

While questions remain about whether this youth-led movement can inspire a broader, more inclusive national social movement that can mobilize the various factions of the working class while avoiding the cooption and depoliticization that often accompanies the support offered by international NGOs and civil society organizations, it is clear that their actions to date have sparked a nationwide political awakening. What the youth have decided for themselves is that they will not sit idly by as pawns of Western multinationals and organizations, and that they will make their voices heard for the future they desire–shedding their fear and exerting their collective power to forge a Kenya that is equal and just. Those of us in the global north, in ROAPE, and across Africa, stand in full solidarity with these emancipatory demands and with all Kenyans in their opposition to the repression of democratic rights. The world will be watching Kenya today, and we will be cheering for the people in their struggle for liberation.

Featured Image credit: Brian Inganga. Image shows Tafari Davis of the Social Justice Traveling Theatre on June 25, 2024.

The post Uprising in Kenya appeared first on Tempest.

Québec public sector unionist Benoit Renaud submitted an initial report on the Québec public sector strikes in January of 2024. Several months later, he sat down with Tempest to reflect on the strike’s victories and impact. What follows is the initial report and a transcript of the post-strike interview. This text is following up on a previous contribution to Tempest by the same author.

Strikes by teachers, nurses and other public sector workers have been the main topic of discussion and media attention in Québec since the middle of November 2023, when the four unions of the Common Front (420,000 workers) went on strike for three days and a teachers’ union, Fédération autonome de l’enseignement (FAE), began an open-ended strike.

Immediately, the government increased its wage offer slightly and signaled a willingness to abandon their demands on pensions. But negotiations over working conditions for each union were still moving very slowly.  As a result, the Common Front announced it would go on strike for a full week from December 8 to 14, which increased the pressure on the state, as the FAE strike dragged on.

Just as the Common Front started its week-long strike, Prime Minister Legault spilled the beans and admitted that he would be willing to increase the wage offer of the government if the unions accepted more “flexibility” in how their work is managed. This meant two things: 1) that the government had been lying for months when it said it couldn’t afford to pay better wages; and 2) that the real aim of the bosses, all along, was to increase their power over the workplace.

One of the leaders of the Common Front replied that they were not negotiating “for acrobats at Cirque du Soleil”… But more seriously, this showed that the mass mobilization of workers over several weeks was having the desired effect. The government increasingly seemed inconsistent in its views and willing to concede more to workers’s demands. The wage offer was again increased, but still shy of maintaining purchasing power in the face of inflation.

One movement, three strategies

It should be noted that not all public sector unions are part of the Common Front. This means we are witnessing different strategies at play simultaneously.. The Common Front itself decided to get mandates from its members to basically go on strike whenever the leadership thought it made sense and for however long they saw fit. The series of strike votes took place in September and membership adopted a motion giving the leadership the right to go all the way to an  open-ended strike, but preceding that ultimate step with “strike sequences” of unspecified duration. In practice, this has meant that the 420,000 members of the Common Front were on strike for a few hours, then for three days, then for a week. Unless tentative agreements are reached for all those workers soon, an unlimited general strike could begin sometime in January.

This strategy  spreads the pain for workers (most of whom do not have strike pay). It also shows the bosses that the strike threat is very real while keeping the ultimate weapon available only if necessary. This puts enormous pressure on the government, since a continuation of the strikes in early 2024 would be seen, at least in part, as its fault and a result of the government’s incompetence as negotiators. The downside of this strategy is that it limited the level of solidarity with unions not in the Common Front.

[N]ot all public sector unions are part of the Common Front. This means we are witnessing different strategies at play simultaneously.. The Common Front itself decided to get mandates from its members to basically go on strike whenever the leadership thought it made sense a…FAE, the autonomous teachers union, took a very different approach. They decided to go directly into an unlimited general strike…The other public sector unions have gone on strike for a few days at a time, without seriously threatening to go on an unlimited strike.

FAE, the autonomous teachers union, took a very different approach. They decided to go directly into an unlimited general strike starting on November 23, a few days after the marks for the first semester were recorded for most students. This had the advantage of putting a big spotlight on the issues faced by teachers in a sustained way. But the government had the opportunity of isolating that union and it seems to have decided not to settle with them separately, at least so far. Why did FAE go that route? Probably because of their recent history. That union was formed from a split within the main teachers’ union back in 2006, following strong disagreement within that union over the round of bargaining of 2005. Their former union being a key component of the Common Front, FAE was never invited to participate. In the subsequent rounds of bargaining, FAE had a tendency to go on strike first and settle first. They came out of the 2020 bargaining with a triumphalist attitude which may have led them to overestimate their ability to win on their own. The current situation could show the limits of their “autonomous and combative” strategy.

The other public sector unions have gone on strike for a few days at a time, without seriously threatening to go on an unlimited strike. On the part of the nurses union, Fédération interprofessionnelle de la Santé du Québec (FIQ), this could simply be because the essential services legislation doesn’t allow them to be on strike at all. Their job action has some impact on health care services (mostly delaying interventions not considered urgent). Also, they are probably counting on the settlements achieved by the Common Front to apply to them down the line. This is also the case with Syndicat des professionnels du gouvernement du Québec (SPGQ), a union representing professionals working directly for the government in different departments and agencies as well as some higher education institutions.

The next few days will be crucial. Will the government make enough concessions to reach tentative agreements with all unions? Will the union leadership be willing to accept a mediocre deal and possibly face the wrath of their mobilized members? Will the conflict linger and radicalize all the way to January, polarizing Québec society like the student strike did back in 2012? The current dismal approval rating of Québec’s Prime Minister and his government and the unprecedented level of support among the broader public are strong factors in favor of a positive outcome for workers. One inspiring example of this solidarity was the decision by the Québec section of the Steelworkers to give $100,000 to striking workers who don’t have strike pay and who need help just paying groceries. No one remembers anything like that ever happening before. With that level of solidarity across the whole union movement, how can we lose?

Post-strike interview (May 2024)

Tempest Collective: Your report takes us up until the moment that the Common Front begins a week-long Strike in November. At the same time the FAE is engaging in an ongoing general strike. Can you give Tempest Readers an update. What has happened since November?

Benoit Renaud: Since late November, quite a lot has happened. The FAE strike kept going until the Christmas break, basically, until about the end of December. For the Common Front, we had a week-long strike. This was seven days for the healthcare sector because they work on weekends, so it was actually seven full days for these workers. For those Common Front union members outside the healthcare sector, the whole thing was just five days. During that week with so many people  on strike, there were massive demonstrations all over Quebec, in nearly every region. In my region there were demonstrations every day. Sometimes it was just people in my specific union federation, and at other points every union who was part of the Common Front participated. We demonstrated together–that was during the strike week at the end of November.

At this time, the leaders of Common Front, those four big unions, were saying: “we’re going to give one last chance to negotiations. We’ve just been on strike for a week. We can feel that the pressure is having an impact at the bargaining table, but we’re going to give negotiations a chance until the holidays. If we can’t reach a deal by the end of December, then we’re going to consider going on an unlimited general strike in January.” The Common Front leaders could do this because they already had the mandates from their membership.

The strike votes that had taken place in September and October gave the Common Front a mandate to bring us all the way to a strike, including an unlimited general strike if they thought it was necessary. The leaders of those four big unions still had that card in their back pocket in December, and they could tell the government, you know, we have the right to put all our members on strike indefinitely if we don’t reach a deal.

By the end of December, there were tentative agreements reached at the different bargaining tables. Basically between Christmas and New Year’s most of the Common Front unions reached tentative agreements with the exception being a smaller union in the healthcare sector. Most of the nurses were not part of the Common Front. They have their own separate union, but some nurses were part of my union, which is essentially a public sector union. That particular federation inside my bigger union did not reach a tentative agreement and neither did the main nurses’ union. Actually, as we speak now, the nurses still don’t have a new collective agreement. So this is still dragging on now and we’re in May.

Most unions in the public sector got tentative agreements at the end of December including FAE, which is a teacher’s union that was not part of the Common Front.

Ratification votes began after the holiday throughout January. Each local union had to accept or reject the tentative agreement that was reached, and for most unions in the Common Front the ratification votes were pretty strong– 75-80 percent in favor, that sort of thing. The Common Front represents about 420,000 people.

For FAE, the ratification process was actually suspenseful, and we didn’t know until the very last vote if the tentative agreement was going to be ratified or not. There are nine regional unions that are part of that particular federation, and in order for ratification to be successful, they needed to have positive votes overall and from five out of nine locals. Some of those local unions voted against the deal and some voted for it.

FAE came out of that whole process bitterly divided….It was very contentious, very tough, which is understandable because they were on strike for a month with no strike pay at all.

The locals didn’t vote all at the same time, so the whole process was actually covered by the mass media on a day to day basis. It was front page news. At one point near the end of January, there were four unions voting in favor and four voting against.

The last local to vote is the one who ultimately decided the outcome, and it was a narrow vote in favor. As a result, FAE came out of that whole process bitterly divided. Throughout the process there were really intense debates going on and on social media and in the FAE meetings. Their general meetings were really, really long. For example, the one in Montreal, I think, lasted like eight hours. The members ended up voting at one in the morning or something like that.

It was very contentious, very tough, which is understandable because they were on strike for a month with no strike pay at all. The union had told their members back in the spring, to save money for the general strike because members were not going to get any money while on strike. That was really hard and really intense. On top of that, members are outside picketing in the cold in December, which is very unpleasant. In the end, many were generally not happy with the result.

TC: What, in particular, were members unhappy about? What was some of the opposition to the agreement?

BR: I think the most contentious issue was working conditions and mostly workload. Many of the members were basically saying you’re filling up our classrooms with as many students that will fit between the four walls and you’re not giving us any support. Many of the students have learning disabilities or special needs of some kind or another. Some do not know the language that the teaching will be happening in, and the public school teachers are expected to provide for the students in these challenging conditions. The workload has been increasingly hard on the teachers and they wanted to have some guarantees that the school system was either going to reduce the number of students in the classroom, or add resources to help such as more adults in the classroom. Students have diverse needs and sometimes the work becomes completely overwhelming if it’s just one teacher. II think that class size and workload was the main thing the teachers were hoping to make significant gains on and it didn’t happen, so there is some disappointment.

TC: What were the wins of the strike?

BR: We won on the issue of wages very clearly. Everybody, the FAE teachers, the Common Front teachers and all the other public sector Common Front members won significant wage increases. We also won on pensions. Initially, the government had ideas of pushing for some deterioration of our pensions (later retirement, less money) but that was abandoned  pretty early on in the negotiating process when they saw how mobilized people were. So, we basically got the status quo on pensions.

We won, I would say significant wage increases that are a little bit above inflation. I don’t have the details off hand, but for the first year of the agreement, we’re getting six and a half percent.  After that it’s around two to two and a half percent each year for the rest of the five year agreement. Overall it’s about a 17 and a half percent increase over five years. That was a victory, but the government. had been pushing really hard on the issue of flexibility. Workplace flexibility ended up being the obvious priority on the part of the employer. They want managers to have more power to decide what you’re going to be doing and where and when and, they’re trying to remove all kinds of obstacles to the power of management to organize work schedules and tell people what to do.

We won on the issue of wages very clearly. Everybody, the FAE teachers, the Common Front teachers and all the other public sector Common Front members won significant wage increases…we basically got the status quo on pensions.

For the nurses, one of the reasons why they still haven’t reached an agreement six-months later is that the government wants to be able to tell a nurse who spent basically their entire career at a maternity ward, for example, now they’re going to work in psychiatry or in the emergency room. The employer is refusing the notion that nurses specialize. Nurses work hard to become really good at what they specialize in, and nurses are saying we already have terrible working conditions when it comes to schedules. We’re overwhelmed. We don’t have enough people in the hospitals and other healthcare institutions, and on top of that, you’re going to tell us that we can’t keep doing the work that we’re good at and that we really know how to do well? That is just unacceptable.

Another very contentious issue is mandatory overtime. The employer can basically force someone to do overtime because they’re constantly short staffed, and it becomes a bit of a vicious circle. The working conditions keep getting harder in the healthcare sector, and so people drop out or  move to the private healthcare and organizations that actually provide better working conditions than the public healthcare system and so understaffing becomes a very difficult issue to resolve, on that front.

TC: Could you speak to the autonomous teachers union (FAE)? I understand they broke from the Common Front. Can you talk about that?

BR: The FAE broke from what used to be a single union for all teachers.

There used to be just one big teacher’s union with everybody in it, and in the early 2000s, I think it was the bargaining round of 2005, a number of locals were very unhappy with how the negotiations and the whole process was led by the executive board. So they decided to quit and create their own union a couple of years later. It was a disagreement over how to bargain and how to mobilize.

After the FAE break with the larger union, they were reasonably successful. This was my union when I was a teacher for about ten years.They were reasonably successful up to and including the bargaining round of 2020 at the height of the pandemic.

My theory about why it was so hard for them this time is that they didn’t correctly assess why they got a reasonably good collective agreement in 2020 (for only three years). At the time the government was smart enough to think, we’re going to conclude things amicably right now because we have the pandemic to deal with and can’t do everything at the same time, but it’s going to be only a three year agreement and  we’re going to have another another opportunity soon to push for what we actually want as an employer.

When the next round of bargaining took place last year, that particular federation thought “we did well in 2015, we did well in 2020, we can do even better this time.” So they had an oversized confidence in their ability to win on their own.

Because they had several rounds of bargaining on their own without being part of a broader coalition (from 2010 all the way to 2020), they thought “ok we can go on an unlimited general strike in order to make really significant gains”. However, they misread the balance of strength between the parties–the balance of forces. They overestimated their own strength and so they basically hit a brick wall.

TC: Would it be fair to say that the FAE were able to achieve the wins they did at the bargaining table this time around because the Common Front also went on strike, even if not unlimited strike?

BR: Well, it was part of the equation, but that’s always difficult to analyze because these two mobilizations were taking place at the same time with different strategies. You might conclude that the common front strategy was the more effective. If you look at the kind of ratification votes they got in January,the members were generally happy with the results, so I guess that’s one way to measure success.

But on the other hand, the fact that those like 60,000 teachers in the FAE were on strike nonstop for a whole month was certainly part of the reason why the government had to make a deal with the Common Front unions. Also it’s important to note the Common Front’s potential unlimited strike in January. The pressure piled up from all sides and the government could have decided to go the other way and say, ok, we’re going to reach a deal.

TC: In the past you have emphasized the important role that cross union solidarity played in this round of bargaining. Did that solidarity continue? What are cross union relations like now?

BR: Well, the Common Front is a temporary arrangement between independent organizations, so as soon as the bargaining was concluded the Common Front also concluded. It’s like a supergroup in music, you know, like they did their one big concert and now they’re going back to their usual band. The strategy had a lot of success. To me that means there’s likely to be a Common Front again in four years with the next round of bargaining.

In terms of solidarity from other unions, the most remarkable thing back in November and December was that some private sector unions actually gave money to the strikers,  especially the teachers. You know, the teachers were on strike for four weeks with no pay at all. That was hard and that struggle struck accord with some private sector unions and other public sector unions not in bargaining, who decided to give money to help them keep going. There was that feeling of solidarity from the entire labor movement. With the public sector strikes going on, that was a very good sign for the health of our labor movement in general.

There were at least two significant unions that were not on strike but that put forward around a hundred thousand dollars each for groceries for the strikers.

TC: You mentioned the steelworkers union was one of them. Do you know the other union?

BR: I think the other one was actually a union that has a lot of members in the public sector but at the municipal level (CUPE). They were not on strike because their members tend to work for cities or universities and other institutions that were not affected by the strike. The steel workers, who are just in the private sector, gave a hundred thousand dollars. That was pretty impressive, you know, like to give a hundred dollars worth of groceries to a thousand teachers on strike. It doesn’t change the world, but it’s a significant gesture.

People who got that money appreciated it, and so I think overall that strike was a good thing for the union movement as a whole.

For the Coalition Avenir Québec, who tried to confront the public sector unions and make all those workers accept all kinds of concessions, it looks like they lost their advantage and popularity in a major way. They tried to impose significant setbacks on pensions and wages and working conditions and the end result is not only that they were unsuccessful in pushing for all those setbacks.

Another thing that came out of the strike actions that’s remarkable is the effect the actions had on the political landscape. It’s hard to have a precise idea of cause and effect here, but the current Quebec government–Coalition Avenir Québec, a nationalist, conservative party–who led that entire negotiation operation, had just been elected to their second term. This party came to power for the first time in 2018 and then they were re-elected in 2022 with a stronger majority like an overwhelming domination of the political landscape. They got something like 40 percent of the vote and won three quarters of the National Assembly as a result. But, when the opinion polls came out in January that party had lost something like a third of their popular support.

Another party that did very badly in the last two elections (Parti Québécois) came out on top in the polls. For the Coalition Avenir Québec, who tried to confront the public sector unions and make all those workers accept all kinds of concessions, it looks like they lost their advantage and popularity in a major way. They tried to impose significant setbacks on pensions and wages and working conditions and the end result is not only that they were unsuccessful in pushing for all those setbacks, but also that the union movement came out of it with a sense of confidence. The Coalition Avenir Québec lost a big part of their popular support and is unlikely to be elected again in 2026. Things can change between now and the October 26 election, but it doesn’t look good for them.

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A new turning point is emerging in U.S. labor politics as the Unity Caucus, which governed the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) since its first election in 1962, has experienced its first major defeat. The union’s retiree chapter, made up of around 70,000 members, elected Unity’s opponent, Retiree Advocate, as its chapter leaders.

Unlike other teacher unions, retirees play an exceptional role inside the UFT. Even as schools have deteriorated under neoliberal education reforms supported by Unity leaders, the caucus’s dominance in the retiree chapter sustained its long lasting hegemony. In the union’s 2022 leadership elections, Unity won 71 percent of the retiree vote. In contrast, in this year’s retiree chapter elections Retiree Advocate won 63 percent against Unity’s 37. This drastic shift was driven by UFT president Michael Mulgrew’s attempts to cut healthcare for retirees by shifting to a Medicare Advantage privatization scheme.

The retirees’ abandonment of Unity took place alongside a growing movement of paraprofessionals fighting for a living wage. The Fix Para Pay slate won their election with an even bigger margin than the retirees. These developments indicate a potential for ending Unity’s reign in next year’s union officer elections. A change of leadership inside the UFT could lead to major shifts in its affiliates as the UFT remains the largest local inside the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Unity’s legacy

The UFT’s impregnable system of caucus-based domination was built by Albert Shanker after he took over the union in 1964. Through Unity, Shanker shaped the UFT in his own image and moved on to remake the AFT through a series of bureaucratic moves, militant business unionism, and allying with neoconservatives. The caucus and the national network that emerged from it remained the core element of Shanker’s dominance within the AFT. While Shanker died in 1997, his legacy survived through the policies of his handpicked successors, Sandra Feldman and Randi Weingarten, both of whom continued to enable neoliberal school reforms that hurt public schools and teachers.

In 1975, during New York’s budget crisis, when Shanker was the president of both the UFT and the AFT, the school district laid off tens of thousands of teachers and imposed major cuts on much of the public sector. Shanker was pressured into a strike against the cuts but quickly called  it off and agreed to bail out the city with the union’s pension fund to get teachers rehired. Shanker’s bailing out of teachers with their own pension money in the face of cuts emboldened reactionary forces and contributed to the emergence of neoliberal hegemony that brought more cuts for decades to come.

Unlike the vast majority of teachers in the United States, Shanker quickly embraced the outlook of the Nation at Risk report in 1983, which shifted the blame for poor educational performance to teachers and working-class students instead of the injustices in school funding and governance. Shanker was an early proponent of reforms such as school choice, charter schools, standardized testing, merit pay for teachers, and watering down of tenure protections, all of which ended up weakening teacher unions. Shanker supported these reforms under the premise of promoting educational “excellence.” The emphasis on excellence served to cover up the poverty and de facto racial segregation that remained intact across most of the U.S. education system after the rollback of integration policies in the 1970s.

Shanker was an early proponent of the reforms such as school choice, charter schools, standardized testing, merit pay for teachers, and watering down of tenure protections, all of which ended up weakening teacher unions.

Shanker was a vehement cold warrior for most of his life, and his adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1980s was consistent with his views on foreign policy. Shanker worked to build “free” teacher unions that supported U.S. allies against communism. His support for the Vietnam War and the coup in Chile, as well as his planting and promoting of people who were later exposed as government spies, are among many examples of his commitment to fighting communism.

After Shanker, the Unity Caucus remained a major obstacle to change, especially with its unbreakable allegiance to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Feldman’s UFT supported the imposition of charter schools, as well as standardized testing, and she continued the union’s neoconservative foreign policy by backing regime change in Iraq in 2003. After Feldman, Randi Weingarten supported the shift to mayoral control in New York City under Michael Bloomberg, which sped up the growth of charter schools as he also shut down hundreds of schools in majority non-white neighborhoods. Bloomberg’s policies and Mulgrew’s toothless resistance to them weakened union protections and led to the longest period without a contract for the UFT after the Great Recession.

Weingarten tried to maintain a progressive image by embracing Clintonite liberalism and through her efforts to diversify the top ranks of the AFT and the UFT. She supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. She became a campaign surrogate for her in 2015, after pushing the AFT to endorse Clinton without considering the possibility of endorsing Bernie Sanders, who would later be endorsed by the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

After the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) was formed and took over the CTU in 2010, its delegation and others protested Bill Gates when he was a keynote speaker at the AFT convention in 2010. Nevertheless, the tensions between the CTU and Weingarten eased after Weingarten supported the union’s 2012 strike, despite her enabling of many of the neoliberal policies the strike fought against. This shift allowed Weingarten to remain at the top of the AFT as Unity’s hegemony began to deteriorate under Michael Mulgrew’s regime and weaken her base of support in New York.

Unity’s defeat

When DeBlasio became mayor, the decline of the Unity Caucus temporarily stalled, although the opposition continued to grow and consolidate. In the 2016 union election, while the opposition nearly caught up with Unity at high schools and middle schools, the massive retiree vote and its consolidation around the caucus kept them in power. But Mulgrew’s disastrous leadership shifted the balance of forces over the past few years.

The past two contracts of the union had below inflation raises. In fact, the Occupational and Physical Therapists chapter of the union voted against the 2023 contract, only to be defeated in a re-vote imposed on them by Mulgrew. An even bigger loss for teachers came from a memorandum in the appendix of the 2018 contract. This memorandum was an extension of the healthcare for raises deal that was part of the union’s 2014 contract. The memorandum indicated the UFT’s support for limitless cuts to the city’s healthcare expenditures. It also became the basis of the union’s adoption of Medicare Advantage, a Medicare privatization scheme that funnels federal funds to the private insurance companies that drive the intolerable cruelties of the U.S. healthcare system.

While Medicare only covers 80 percent of the healthcare costs for retirees, the other 20 percent comes from the city and its contract with GHI-EmblemHealth. The switch to Medicare Advantage would shift the provision of healthcare to Aetna. While the costs will be lower for the city, Aetna can increase out of pocket costs while restricting the services retirees could receive, even forcing them to switch doctors based on in-network status. Private healthcare costs have been increasing for decades and the denial of authorization for services by Aetna would be especially detrimental to public sector retirees with the lowest incomes.

The opposition can win if it can unite around a new strategy of strike readiness to make up for the pay losses experienced in the past two decades by all school workers in the next contract, and continue the fight for healthcare for all school workers, retirees and everyone else.

After a group of retirees organized around the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees successfully sued the city, the transition to Medicare Advantage was struck down by the Manhattan Supreme Court “permanently.” While New York City mayor Eric Adams’s administration is trying to get the decision overturned by the New York State Court of Appeals, the outrage around the effort to cut retiree healthcare has already led to a major defeat for Unity.

The only winners of the election were the Retiree Advocate and Fix Para Pay slates. Both groups are big tent rank-and-file formations that gained traction in response to Unity’s failings. While retirees have been radicalized by the cuts to Medicare, the paraprofessionals continue to suffer from the poverty wages they’ve been condemned to by the series of UFT contracts with sub-inflation raises. New Action and Independent Community of Educators, two of the older opposition caucuses, as well as the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), which is made up of younger teachers, supported the Retiree Advocate slate.

Prior to the retiree chapter elections, the three groups supported Ben Morgenroth against Unity in his unsuccessful campaign to become a pension board trustee in the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System. Morgenroth won about a third of the vote among active teachers and supervisors on May 8, but MORE’s abstention due to Morgenroth’s alleged Zionist commitments limited his potential.

What’s next?

Next spring the UFT will hold its union officer elections. The opposition is in a very advantageous position to overturn Unity’s decades-long hegemony, but will face all types of bureaucratic maneuvers by Unity to weaken them. While there is a relatively wide consensus against some of Unity’s neoliberal policies, the question of the union’s investment in Israeli assets remains the biggest point of contention inside the opposition.

MORE has been the most active group in favor of student protests against Israel’s genocide, opposing “US military aid for war crimes” early on. MORE and most of its members are younger than the other opposition caucuses in the union. Many of its hundreds of members are high school teachers, but the caucus also has a broader base of support inside the elementary schools relative to New Action and ICE. MORE forced a vote on a ceasefire resolution in November’s UFT delegate assembly meeting. When the resolution failed, with 43 percent voting in favor, MORE members walked out, joining a protest outside of the meeting. In February, MORE proposed an agenda amendment to discuss another ceasefire resolution. However, the amendment failed, despite 50 percent voting in favor. Agenda amendments require a two-thirds majority in the UFT delegate assembly, a  threshold introduced by Shanker decades ago to ensure Unity dominance.

Many older teachers are personally related to Holocaust victims or survivors, while others have direct personal or economic relations to Israel. Partially because of this, some in the union tragically embraced the Israeli government’s cynical use of the Holocaust, the Hamas attacks of October 7, and antisemitic attacks, as well as Islamophobic antiterrorism rhetoric, to justify its genocide in Gaza and apartheid in Israel and the West Bank. Others in the union took this further and engaged in bad faith attacks against MORE by trying to frame them as “pro-Hamas.” Meanwhile, New Action and Retiree Advocate took no public position in favor of MORE’s push for pro-Palestine resolutions. Nick Bacon of New Action, who serves on the executive board of the UFT, suggested that the efforts distracted from other union business.

On the other hand, Unity continues to maintain the UFT’s decades-long support for Zionism. Mulgrew forced out Queens Borough Office Representative Amy Arundell over her pro-Palestine tweets. Norm Scott, a former member of MORE who was elected with the Retiree Advocate slate, argues that Arundell was immensely popular among the ranks of the Queens chapter and that she was forced out of her position because of Mulgrew’s fears of her popularity outshining his own flawless record of selling out teachers. Mulgrew has previously removed the Brooklyn Borough Office Representative over similar fears.

Regardless of whether or not Arundell’s positions on Israel’s genocide were the main reason for her ouster, the fractures over the question suggest that it can be used by Unity to polarize the opposition. The UFT’s rank and file would benefit from holding open multi-caucus discussions for union members. These forums could both educate members about Israel’s long history of U.S.-funded crimes against humanity while also addressing the legitimate concerns of Jewish teachers against the rising tide of antisemitism.

The strategy of concessionary bargaining imposed on union members by Unity has run up against its limits. Unity’s diminishing power, however, won’t lead to the collapse of the caucus on its own. The opposition can win if it can unite around a new strategy of strike readiness to make up for the pay losses experienced in the past two decades by all school workers in the next contract, and continue the fight for healthcare for all school workers, retirees, and everyone else. If it does that,  the opposition stands a good chance of ending Unity’s hegemony next spring.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

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