Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On December 1st, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) officially voiced their support for a ceasefire in Gaza, becoming the largest labor union to do so. The announcement came from the union’s director, Brandon Mancilla, during a press conference outside the White House. In announcing, the UAW added its name to a growing list of union locals, national chapters, and labor organizations that have called for an end to the genocidal violence still unfolding in the region.

On January 24th, the UAW went on to announce their endorsement of Joe Biden for president during the union’s national Community Action Program (CAP) conference. Thus, in just under two months, UAW managed to call for an end to a genocide whilst simultaneously endorsing a second presidential term for one of its most powerful proponents. And they are not alone. Of the roughly 150 organizations that have signed onto the labor movement petition calling for a ceasefire, nearly one third have also publicly endorsed — or are directly affiliated with a national chapter that has publicly endorsed — Biden for the presidency. Such a gross contradiction cannot be ignored, especially as it represents only the latest example of a broader phenomenon present in much of the American labor movement: capitalist dissonance.

The movement’s shortcomings are well-documented. Much of the labor landscape in the United States — while certainly working to win immediate material improvements for the working class — often fails to provide a more comprehensive framework for revolutionary praxis that looks to a liberated future. The Black Rose Anarchist Federation said it best in their piece ‘The State of Labor: Beyond Unions, But Not Without Them,’ when they described contemporary American unionism as a largely “bureaucratic, service-oriented form” that remains “controlled by a hierarchy of career officials who operate outside the workplace, manage the sale of labor to capital, confine union struggles to narrow and legalistic ‘bread and butter’ issues within their respective industries, and encourage members to pin their hopes to the Democratic Party.” In other words, unions in the United States exist within a heavily enclosed space, one in which their organizational structures and strategic logics, either by external force or internal conviction, do not move past the operational and theoretical limits imposed by the powers that be.

On the domestic front, this can mean a gross lack of worker militancy. Pro-establishment sensibilities make many labor unions averse to necessary direct action and militant resistance in the workplace, especially when financial and legal stability is at stake. This was the case when bureaucratized inaction kept grocery workers across the country from winning tangible post-pandemic gains with their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It exacerbated the ever-growing division between rank-and-filers and leadership in the education sector with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It also prompted members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to begin a petition campaign calling on leadership to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, career organizers and labor leaders are incentivized to chart the path of least resistance, forged by impotent contract negotiations and anti-strike clauses. The same can be said for international solidarity. A top-down labor union in cahoots with the US government may state their disagreement with a foreign policy decision — as many did by signing the ceasefire petition. But their entrenched incentive structures and hierarchical layout will rarely allow for a wielding of labor power that truly beats the state into submission. 

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This is because such radical resistance would put the stability of the managerial labor class at risk. Domestically, opposing a two-party candidate for the presidency means foregoing an otherwise surefire way of securing business-as-usual governance for the next four years. The third-party-facing or non-electoral implications of such opposition would produce a level of uncertainty not compatible with the otherwise predictable “bread and butter” issues, industry-specific bargaining, and established labor relations so characteristic of big unions. On the international scale, the same is true. The stability of managerial labor is feasible only if preceded by that of US capital, as downturns in economic growth and fluctuations in performance can pose a risk to corporate power -- the de facto handler of labor managers -- and radicalize workers into embracing more militant sympathies and radical action as a result. One outstanding threat to such stability is the emergence of left labor movements abroad, as such movements are often characterized by policies that harm US economic interests such as the nationalization of industries and the cutting of economic ties with Western nations. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic can be seen in institutions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center. This agency has a stated mission of “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” Meanwhile, its exploits have heavily involved confrontations with leftist governments in South America, often via funding they provide to opposition groups in countries such as Venezuela.

Highlighting this unfortunate reality is hardly an all-encompassing indictment of the US labor movement. The undeniable upsurge in union activity following the COVID pandemic improved people’s lives and deserves credit. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, “the National Labor Relations Board saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, the highest single-year increase since fiscal year 2016.” The embrace of more militant leadership by unions such as the UAW and the Teamsters has yielded significant victories as well, not to mention the advances made by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in September of last year.

But the imperative of organizers and class strugglers to reshape unions to better facilitate collective liberation remains. This can take many forms, such as bolstering organizing efforts by independent unions like (ex: Trader Joe’s United, Amazon Labor Union), supporting the ongoing work and growth of rank-and-file-oriented unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, and backing the emergence of caucuses and coalitions within established unions that either organize to push their organization in a more radical direction, or ultimately become an independent union that can subsequently hold a candle to its establishment counterpart in terms of size and resource access.

Reformist concessions at the negotiating table and rhetoric restricted to the worker-boss dichotomy do not have to be our daily bread. Worker militancy on the shop floor and a rhetoric of class warfare are more in line with the aims of a revolutionary movement. Moreover, symbolic slaps on the wrist and stern talking to’s — petition signatures, public denouncements — needn’t be the only forms of accountability when our government actively finances and endorses acts of genocide. We can do better. Acknowledging this potential will allow us to transform labor in America, liberating ourselves and each other in the process.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Pivotal Moment for Unions

[Pictured: Striking writers and actors picket outside Paramount studios in Los Angeles on Friday, July 14, 2023. Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

By Bavand Karim

Last summer, the premiere episode of Marvel's Secret Invasion featured opening credits crafted by artificial intelligence. While reviews were mixed, the credits were objectively effective for exploring AI’s potential as a storytelling tool. Perhaps more importantly from the studio’s perspective, the production costs were likely much less than an agency like The Mill or an artist like Daniel Kleinman would demand.

It’s no coincidence that Marvel’s use of AI occurred amid union-led strikes by Hollywood’s writers and directors. And as studios were negotiating with creative unions, they were simultaneously rolling out the tools that might eventually replace many of those creatives. At the time of the negotiations, it was unclear what impact AI would have on the entertainment industry. But the prevailing wisdom seemed to support the general anxiety among insiders that an industry-wide shift was coming.

By November 2023, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that AI will replace 90% of artists on animated films within three years. It may even be sooner. In December, Google released Gemini, its most advanced AI tool to date. One of Gemini’s advancements is the ability to process up to an hour of video and 11 hours of audio in mere minutes. Although Google warns that processing times vary, their demonstration of long-context understanding analyzes a 44-minute video in under one minute. Earlier this month, OpenAI released Sora, a powerful new tool that generates one-minute video clips based on text prompts. Sora is what is known as a diffusion model. It converts text to videos that resemble static noise, and then removes the noise over several passes. While these emerging AI video tools are not perfect, they are compelling enough in their first-generation iterations to provoke meaningful questions about the future of all creative industries.

It was less than a year ago that we began speculating whether AI visualization tools would disrupt the artistic foundation of Hollywood. Now, it appears the event horizon is upon us.

Last year’s strikes were a watershed moment for unions who were forced to acknowledge the wide uncertainty that the looming threat of AI has introduced into Hollywood. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ (AMPTP) agreement with the the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) defines AI as “not a person” and clarifies that it will not replace the role of any DGA member. However, it allows studios to use AI as long as a “consultation” takes place with the director, which has stirred debate around the validity and integrity of the agreement.

The Writer’s Guild (WGA) similarly resolved their dispute with new guidelines prohibiting the use of AI in creating written source material such as scripts for films or TV shows.

No other artistic guild or technical union has yet defined how AI will be regulated within their respective domain. The Art Director’s Guild (ADG), which represents title and graphic artists, one of hundreds of International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) chapters nationwide that could potentially be impacted by AI, released a statement expressing concern over AI video generators, but the path forward remains unclear. While animation industry professionals are unionizing at a record rate, IATSE Local 839 — the Animation Guild — still has fewer than 10,000 members, meaning that the vast majority of the animation industry’s workforce of more than 200,000 artists, assistants, coordinators, and managers are not unionized.

As more major studios utilize AI, the inevitable result will be a wave of disenfranchised and marginalized artists. This industry shift will produce a flood of new independent content as those artists attempt to find their own audiences. While studios like Dreamworks and Pixar are cutting costs in the short term by exploring the benefits of AI, they are also creating a new generation of pissed-off indie competitors.

It feels nefarious of Disney, which owns Pixar, to use the stories most beloved by audiences to sideline workers. The most popular tentpole story franchises like Marvel and Star Wars likely won't be impacted too seriously by viewer backlash. Diehard fans love those stories and they pass that love through generations. So audiences will continue to watch those films and TV series even if they incorporate AI. Disney is surely hoping so. And they probably don't consider those disenfranchised artists, taken independently or collectively, to pose any kind of real economic threat to their business model.

Can human artists use AI to produce their own creative work? Sure. But they can't sell it in the same way. The independent market is nothing like a studio job, which typically offers long-term stability, training, networking and advancement opportunities, health and retirement benefits, and — most importantly — an audience. Copyright laws prevent indie artists from accessing the most desirable story franchises without the impending doom of litigation, and the privatization and monopolization of distribution outlets prevent all artists, disenfranchised or not, from ever being compensated equivalent to the true value of their labor. 

The next three years will be pivotal for the entertainment industry and will test the power of America’s labor unions. Will Disney’s move toward AI produce a greater awareness of, if not a fully-fledged social movement against, these AI tools exactly because of the threat that they pose to human labor? Right now, there is little stopping major studios like Disney from engaging AI across the range of artistic disciplines involved in media production — titles, graphics, story generation, script writing, character design, 3D modeling, environment design and lighting design, editing, visual effects, sound design, music composition — potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.

Disney’s strategy is nothing new. Corporations have always primed consumers to accept socially deleterious but profitable change. During the Industrial Revolution, automobile manufacturers sold individuals on independence and freedom, and gave them an entire infrastructure built around private individual transportation with little regulation resulting in disconnected, unwalkable, traffic-plagued communities. At the dawn of the information age, technology companies promised us enhanced efficiency, connectedness, and socialization. Now it’s apparent how modern electronics and software invade our privacy, harvest and sell our personal information, micromanage our productivity, and erode democracy. The proliferation of AI into mainstream life — even through such an innocuous injection point as entertainment — has the potential for much more destructive erosion of our personal freedoms. Will society nonetheless embrace it, only to later realize the damage done? Or is Disney betting that, as in the past, we will grow to love the chains that bind us?

Make no mistake: once major corporations establish a model for displacing human labor with AI, it will be a global phenomenon. Workforce reduction will occur in every industry to satisfy capitalism’s demand for infinite growth. The Big Four consulting firms will justify it and The Wall Street Journal will report that it was great for the economy while thousands of Americans find themselves unemployed. As they have throughout history, the powers that be are reforming the economy to their own benefit. The rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.

Multinational corporate monopolies determined to undermine workers’ and human rights in the name of profit must be met with equivalent, equally resolved multinational resistance. Indie artists should leverage as much power as possible and cooperate with unions across the globe to foster government support against the ongoing exploitation and oppression of the working class. Society’s hope may be that in the face of continued oppression, America is able to form a new political party that represents and protects workers, and promises them an equal share of a company’s revenue as if they were shareholders.

We must fight for a world in which technology, including AI, is liberatory — socially and economically — and not corrosive. AI must be a tool for the greater good, not for the profit of the few at the expense of the many.

For an industry that markets and congratulates itself for telling authentic human stories, the result of film’s shift to AI will ironically be narratives about humanity produced with minimal human input through a process that economically disenfranchised as many humans as possible for the sake of profit. This cataclysm will force us to question not just the impact of late-stage capitalism on human creativity but whether creation is a uniquely human trait at all.

Soon, audiences will pack theaters to watch a film produced exclusively by AI. On the screen, a long-deceased Harrison Ford will star as a young Indiana Jones. As he holds up a copy of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, written by a human and produced with practical effects, the AI Indy flashes a sardonic smile and says, “This belongs in a museum.”

Bavand Karim is a creative executive and academic residing in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder and chairperson of CINE and Lost Winds Entertainment, and co-director of the film program at the College of the Canyons.

The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

Artificial Intelligence and the Class Struggle

By Chris Fry

Republished from Fighting Words.

Since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, workers have fought company owners over their use of automated machinery to step up the pace of exploitation.

“Programmable” looms in textile mills allowed owners to hire children to work 12 to 14 hours a day at half pay.

Famously, workers used to throw their wooden shoes called “sabot” into the machine gears to force them to stop, hence the word “sabotage”.

At the Flint sit down strike in 1936, workers barricaded the doors to prevent General Motors from removing the assembly line machinery and setting it up at another location. This tactic helped the workers win the strike and force union recognition.

Today, the focus of automation has moved from mechanical to digital, particularly with the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence).  Webster’s dictionary provides two related definitions for AI: “1) a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers; and 2) the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.”

Current AI applications depend on vast databases of different fields of knowledge (e.g., street maps, pictures, languages, literature, etc.) plus powerful computer hardware and software to interact with those databases to allow applications to simulate human intelligence, speech, behavior, appearance and more.

The incredible pace of AI’s increased use has even alarmed some of its developers, so much so that 1,000 of them wrote an open letter calling for a six month pause for AI’s most powerful technologies, as a May 1 New York Times article reports:

In late March, more than 1,000 technology leaders, researchers and other pundits working in and around artificial intelligence signed an open letter warning that A.I. technologies present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

“Powerful A.I. systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.

“Our ability to understand what could go wrong with very powerful A.I. systems is very weak,” said Yoshua Bengio, a professor and A.I. researcher at the University of Montreal. “So we need to be very careful.”

These systems can generate untruthful, biased and otherwise toxic information. Systems like GPT-4 get facts wrong and make up information, a phenomenon called “hallucination.”

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Automated weapons systems – the Pentagon’s “Terminator” syndrome

The most dangerous application of AI to humanity is its use in modern imperialist warfare. On July 9, PBS held an interview with Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, a war industry “think tank”, who said that the Pentagon is already preparing autonomous weapons in its proxy war in Ukraine:

Well, we’re already seeing drones being used in Ukraine that have all of the components needed to build fully autonomous weapons that can go out over the battlefield, find their own targets, and then all on their own attack those targets without any further human intervention. And that raises very challenging legal, and moral and ethical questions about human control over the use of force of war.

Of course, these “questions” have not stopped the war industry’s head-long rush to implement AI technology. Scharre complained in his interviewer that the Pentagon is moving too slowly:

Well, they’re not keeping up. That’s the short version, they’re woefully behind because the culture is so radically different. And the bottom line is, you can’t buy AI the same way that you might buy an aircraft carrier. The military is moving too slow. It’s mired in cumbersome bureaucracy. And the leadership of the Pentagon has tried to shake things up. They had a major reorganization last year of the people working AI and data and software inside the Defense Department.

But we haven’t seen a lot of changes since then. And so the Pentagon is going to have to find ways to cut through the red tape and move faster if they’re going to stay on top of this very important technology.

In the famous Terminator movies, autonomous robot weapons destroy their own creators before attacking humanity in general. In a recent blog from the British Campaign for Nuclear disarmament, that scenario was described in a U.S. military simulation:

Also in May, the Royal Aeronautical Society hosted the ‘Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit’ conference that brought together over 200 delegates from around the world to discuss the future of military air and space capabilities. A blog reporting on the conference mentioned how AI was a major theme and a presentation from Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the Chief of AI Test and Operations, USAF, warned against an over reliance on AI systems and noted that they were easy to trick and deceive. They can also create unexpected strategies to achieve their goals, and he noted that in one simulated test an AI-enabled drone was told to identify and destroy ground-based missile sites.

The final firing decision was to be made by a human, but the system had been trained that destruction of the missile site was the top priority. The AI decided therefore that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission and, in the simulation, it attacked the operator. Hamilton was reported as saying that the human operator would tell it not to kill the threat, “but it got its points by killing that threat. So, what did it do? … It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.” Although the system was trained not to kill the operator, it started destroying the communication tower used to connect with the drone.

The Pentagon excuses itself for developing these dangerous weapons AI applications by saying that the People’s Republic of China is also developing these systems. But it must be pointed out that it is the U.S. fleet that is parading its nuclear-armed warships just off the coast of China in its arrogant and provocative “freedom of navigation” campaign, giving China no warning time to respond to an attack. U.S. Imperialism has no such justification.

AI and the strike by the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds

Artificial Intelligence is a major issue  in the ongoing strike by writers and movie production workers, including actors, and the entertainment industry’s corporate owners, called the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP). This “alliance” includes such giants as Amazon, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, HBO and The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ABC News.

This is the first combined strike by these two groups of workers since 1960. The real pay for these workers after inflation has greatly declined in the last decade while the pay for owners and executives has skyrocketed. Along with demanding higher pay, these unions are demanding that AI applications not be used against them to lower their compensation.

AI applications like ChatGPT can “scrape” millions of documents from the internet without the writers’ permission to create new documents, or in this case, new story scripts. The writers call AI “plagiarism machines.”

For the writers, they demand that their writing not be used to “train” AI applications, and they not be tasked to correct AI generated scripts, for which they would receive less pay.

As one striking worker put it:

On Twitter, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill expressed similar concerns, writing, “The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start. This is what the WGA is opposing, and the studios want.”

The Screen Actors Guild has parallel demands regarding AI as their fellow strikers from the Writers Guild. As ABC News reported on July 19:

In addition to a pay hike, SAG-AFTRA said it proposed a comprehensive set of provisions to grant informed consent and fair compensation when a “digital replica” is made or an actor’s performance is changed using artificial intelligence. The union also said it proposed a comprehensive plan for actors to participate in streaming revenue, claiming the current business model has eroded our residual income for actors.

These AI issues may seem obscure to many members of the working class and oppressed communities. But it is important to remember that artificial intelligence in the hands of the Wall Street billionaires and Pentagon generals will lead to more and more exploitation for our class and increase the chances of a global nuclear catastrophe for our planet.

AI could offer tremendous social benefits, such as medical cures and economic scientific planning, but only if it is controlled by the workers through a socialist system.

Unions Fight Back: The Transformation of Labor Law in the United States and its Impact on Union Organizing Strategy

[Pictured: Christian Smalls has become an instrumental part of a nationwide labor resurgence in the United States, heading up union efforts at Amazon]

By Noah Streng

The state of union organizing in America is intimately tied to the legal structures governing labor. Court rulings during the late-19th and early-20th century, for example, created a semi-outlaw status for unions and their activities. Nearly every time unions tried to get the political system to pass pro-labor legislation, their efforts were overturned by a reactionary Supreme Court that had the final say over labor law. A prime example of this was Lochner v. New York (1905).

In the case, the Supreme Court overturned a New York law that prevented bakers from working more than 10 hours per day, citing liberty of contract guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Unions had fought hard to pass this and other protections for workers in the New York legislature. But, despite the public’s mandate via their elected representatives, the Supreme Court overruled them in favor of private property rights.

Cases like Lochmer were common in postbellum labor relations. The outsized influence of the judiciary left elected legislatures with little say over American labor law. Many unions consequently lost faith in the potential for winning reforms through the ballot box and adopted an anti-statist approach to labor organizing. These unions had never experienced a state that worked on behalf of the working class, so it was hard for them to envision one.

This disillusionment gave rise to the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and voluntarist American Federation of Labor (AFL). Both prioritized grassroots labor action over state intervention. But, despite this commonality, the two unions practiced very different kinds of anti-statism.

The AFL focused on upholding liberty of contract by fighting to remove the government from labor relations entirely. When the AFL participated in elections and legislative advocacy, it was typically to preempt judicial intervention in labor disputes. Meanwhile, the IWW sought to unite laborers across race and gender lines to overthrow capitalism. In their organizing, the IWW gained significant traction — especially among unskilled workers, immigrants, people of color, and women. Unlike the AFL, which organized along craft lines, the IWW ran industrial unions that united all workers in a given shop.

Despite early momentum, however, many judicial rulings stifled the IWW’s ability to organize across racial lines. In Hodges v. United States (1906), for example, the Supreme Court officially stripped black workers of equal labor rights. This — in tandem with other hostile decisions — divided the American working class, thereby frustrating the IWW’s universalist strategy.

The environment for labor improved significantly following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which guaranteed many American workers the right to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining, and partake in concerted union activity such as strikes. The NLRA did this by expanding executive power over the judiciary, transferring power from courts in labor law cases to the National Labor Relations Board. This paved the way for much of the pro-labor legislation in the New Deal, which the Supreme Court almost certainly would’ve struck down had it been able. The NLRA thus redefined what was politically possible for unions. Now, they could plausibly build worker power through the organs of the state.

Nevertheless, the NLRA had its flaws. Following the precedent set by Hodges and other discriminatory cases, the bill excluded domestic, agricultural, incarcerated, and sex workers from its labor protections. This would be hard to reconcile if we interpret the NLRA as something intended to advance working-class liberation. But that arguably wasn’t its intention at all.

Indeed, the NLRA’s legality was based on the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce. The bill provided concessions to labor in order to achieve “labor peace” and ensure the stability of the capitalist economy. Nevertheless, the NLRA — coupled with other pieces of legislation like the Norris-La Guardia Act — was undoubtedly beneficial to workers. By shifting power over labor relations from courts to the administrative state, the NLRA opened new opportunities for radical pro-union reforms.

Despite gains in the previous century, however, we still find ourselves in an era where the federal government and judiciary are aligned with the interests of capital. As both continue to chip away at the progress made by the NLRA, organized labor in the United States needs to develop new strategies for our current context. That includes finding ways to work around — or, preferably, reverse — legal restrictions on union activities as enshrined by, for example, the Taft-Hartley Act and infamous Janus vs. AFSCME (2018) Supreme Court decision. Just as union leaders in the past had to adapt to rapidly changing rules governing labor, leaders today must strategize to meet the moment and revitalize class struggle in America.

One way to do this would be through rekindling the socialist labor movement in the United States. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America have already begun doing so by raising over $100,000 for strike funds, engaging in solidarity actions, and directly organizing workers into unions across the country. Labor is at its strongest when grassroots, militant, rank-and-file-led unions organize to radically change society. Part of this strategy should include capturing state power and wielding it to redefine labor law, empowering workers in their fight against the owning class.

Noah Streng is a member of River Valley DSA’s steering committee and a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Labor Center.

Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Three Lessons From the World’s Biggest Worker Uprising

By Aayaan Singh Jamwal

The Kisan Ekta Morcha (Farmers United Front) is a mass movement of 100,000+ farmers, youth, workers and allies from India and the diaspora. For the past 27 days, Satyagrahis have occupied all but one highway leading into Delhi, the capital of India. 1.5 million union members in Canada have declared solidarity with KAM. Protestors say that people of the country and world are with them. They are determined and equipped to occupy Delhi’s border roads until the government repeals three farm bills that were made into law in September 2020. The significance of this ultimatum by the country’s working-class peasantry is twofold: first, they are mounting an uncompromising opposition which is salient in an age of police violence forcefully suppressing anti-capitalism protests worldwide. Second, the farmers are publicly renouncing their faith in an elected ruling class whose actions do not display any care for their wellbeing.

The world’s largest general strike

On November 26, 2020 Indian workers organized the world’s largest general strike.(1)  Why did 250 million workers strike? Members of national trade unions struck from work to protest a number of the central government’s policies, such as the “dismantling [of] protective labour laws, refusal to negotiate an increase in minimum wages, [and] selling off several public sector units to private entities'' (Varma 2020). This government promises “empowerment” and keeps unilaterally passing laws to make extraction and exploitation easier for wealth-hoarding billionaires. How is the Kisan Ekta Morcha peasant uprising connected to the general strike? Peasant-farmers (at the time largely from neighboring states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) called for a march to Delhi to show their solidarity with striking workers. As farmers approached, the police sealed border roads to try to prevent them from entering Delhi. The farmers overturned barricades and continued to march. They were injured by cops who assaulted them with tear gas and water cannons. It’s important to note that tear gas is internationally classified as a chemical weapon that is illegal to use in war as per Geneva Protocol 1925, yet nation-states continue to use tear gas domestically to harm and deter popular revolutions.

Farmers have strong precedent to believe that laws deregulating agricultural markets will create yet another profiteering mechanism for Modi’s capitalist friends.(1)(2) Narendra Modi has been the Prime Minister of India since 2014 and his party (BJP) currently has a majority in the Parliament. Despite the fact that the BJP’s dubious leadership has been sinking India into insecurity for the last 6 years, the party’s politics still have sympathetic right-wing, “anti-communist” supporters. However, KAM has also ignited many people across the world who were previously indecisive to BJP’s regime to proactively oppose its blend of economic incompetence, fascism, nationalism, and caste supremacy politics. What began as a kisan-mazdoor ekta (farmer-worker solidarity) day march on that day is now an ongoing occupation and mass movement challenging the legitimacy of harmful governance.

Down with capitalist monopolies

Modi’s collaborative relationships with India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani and with coal mining billionaire Adani are well known. Organizing unions say  The Bharatiya Janata Party says that replacing regulatory laws with “free markets” based on “freedom” and “choice” are the “revolutionary reforms” that will make “a new India”. Certainly, the claim that capitalism is the best/only structure for growth or “development” is propagated widely, and not just by the BJP, but largely by the very capitalists funding the political campaigns of all major parties. In reality, sympathizers of capitalist governance find it hard to explain why a single corporate overlord should be free to hoard billions of dollars. The middle classes say, “It’s his wealth, he earned it”-- forgetting that no wealth in the world can be created without laboring workers, farmers, and unpaid care-workers. Protestors say that increasing private monopolies instead of improving existing local structures (1) (2) is not only the opposite of balanced governance but so unethical that they will not stand it. There is now also an international campaign to boycott all products sold by Ambani and Adani’s companies (1) (2) in India and internationally. You can go to asovereignworld.com to find a developing list of their products, businesses, and investors.

The ethics this revolution works on

Even as climate change is accelerating, political elites continue to use public institutions to strengthen empires of capitalists. 2020 is the time for an ethics of care, a politics of support. However, since the prime minister’s government has refused to consider repealing the laws, despite a number of experts pointing out its flawed assumptions and the farmers’ case for its potential to harm. Farmers and youth are done watching modern empires try to pass off their destructive extraction [from People and Planet] as “goodness,” “growth” or “empowerment.” The farmers’ uprising is a non-partisan issue: the farmers are frustrated with slimy political elites writ large: they have prohibited any party’s politicians from taking the stage at their protests. Since a lot has been written and propagated about the farm laws, here I want to focus on the working-class politics of unity that are at the heart of the Kisan Ekta Morcha. Here are three key lessons about the ethics behind revolutionary actions that are fueling one of modernity’s most well sustained mass uprisings. I pay special attention to present practices of care and the power of working-class led collectives in bringing revolutionary theories to life.

1. Our love for all beings terrifies fascist mindsets.

“Love is the weapon of the oppressed. Revolution is carried through our embrace.”

- Nisha Sethi

Hand in hand with an ignorance of the structural barriers that prevent the working-poor from accessing capital and ownership of land/resources, pro-government stooges also steadfastly believe that some lives are of more value than others. On the other hand, the Sikh and Punjabi organizers of this agitation can be repeatedly heard leading with chants such as, “Nanak naam chardi kala, tere bhane sarbat da bhala!” This prayer approximately translates to “Nanak, with your name we stay in high spirits, with your blessings may all beings be well!” The first Guru (divine guide) of Sikhism was Guru Nanak Dev Ji, a legendary figure loved by Indians. At the age of 14, he repudiated his caste-privileged birth and refused to be marked as a Hindu Brahmin. Instead, he created a framework that is the 4th most-followed in the world today, a faith that tells its followers to eliminate social hierarchies. While forms of hierarchy still exist within Sikh communities, like all others, they also continue to collectivize radical protest practices like serving langar and creating free, open schools. Nobody at or near the border sites is going hungry. Since the occupation began, thousands of farmers have arrived with rations and cooking utensils. Volunteers doing langar seva (service) have been serving vegetarian food to everyone. You can eat as much as you like, and payment is not part of the equation. Langar is the Sikh practice of sitting down on the floor to eat in community. What makes KAM langars even more radical is that unhoused people and working-poor children who live nearby are regularly joining langar with protestors.

On the matter of schooling and education for all, protestors Navjot Kaur and Kawaljit Kaur were the first to initiate ‘Phulwari’ (lit: flower garden) when they noticed that young children at Singhu Border were not attending school. Navjot Kaur has a Bachelor’s in Education and believes that awareness is the cornerstone of revolution, so they began teaching them with the help of volunteers. Activists have also created libraries on-site with revolutionary texts in Punjabi and Hindi, two of the languages most spoken among protestors. Everyone is welcome to take books to read, and contribute books they want others to have. The ecosystems I’ve described that people power has created resemble what anarchist Murray Bookchin described as a free municipality. A comrade told me that the Delhi Government refused to respond to their appeals for more portable toilets, so they reached out to their own networks, and a friend’s family contributed suction trucks. Their capacity to safely manage the waste on-site has now increased. Despite the chilling cold and an uncaring regime, farmers and their comrades are well-prepared to eat, debate, sleep, dance, pray, sing, and read on these streets until their demand is respected.

2. Creating communities based on care, not hierarchy, is an ancestral commitment.

 I’m a community organizer who experiences life at the intersection of systematic advantages I was accorded through no goodness of my own and multiple systemic disadvantages. So when I began actively creating an ethic of care to bring into the spaces I was helping to build, I started to notice that it is not as an individual that you unlearn patriarchal, colonial, or capitalist tendencies. The process of taking responsibility for change around you happens in community with people who’ve cared for you, and those you care for. Revolutionizing social relations requires seeing those dominating ways that have lived within your community as house guests for so long that unless you look closely, you would not be able to tell where the hierarchies end and the furniture begins. The farmers uprising has reaffirmed something for me about creating post-capitalist visions for a life where we get respect and support instead of violations and terror. It’s that capitalist mindsets can’t swallow the realities of these protestors being friends, families. Singhu and Tikri Border are places of ancestral reverence, where protestors as young as 4 and as old as 90 reify their commitment to sharing love and building futures that prioritize well-being.

Predominant portrayals of modern protests in which working people occupy the streets to demand more life-affirming material conditions most often depict able-bodied men as the orchestrators of action. When farmers first reached borders and news of their agitation began circulating, women were said to be largely absent from the ranks of protestors. Hearing this, some organizers acted with a class and gender consciousness uncritically and began centering testimonies from women. Shergill writes that “according to Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch (MAKAAM) [Women’s Farmers Rights Forum], 75 percent of all farm work is conducted by women yet they own only 12 percent of the land.” This land ownership statistic will prove even more harmful for women if these laws are not repealed. The only “choice” they will be left with to earn a living, will be contracting out their bodies to Ambani Agro and Adani Agri Logistics.

3. Opposing one unjust hierarchization means discarding all in/visible forms of hierarchy.

Punjab is the place of my birth and ancestry. Our communities are large-hearted, and they are also rife with caste, patriarchal, and land-based degradation. Radical love is less a theory to be explained and more the undeniable bond we form in fleeting moments, and shared connections with our comrades who persist, despite the despair of our times. Radical love can look like accompanying uncomfortable exchanges, such as when a young protestor shared an image she took of two men: a Hindu priest and a Sikh elder who were engaged in conducting a ritual together, despite being from different religious backgrounds. Her caption said, “I wonder if they know the kid watching them and taking this photo is bisexual.” People who create revolutions and uprisings from the ground up have not forgone all prejudices within themselves. But they have taken a monumental risk; the risk to arrive within a public where they may be faced with forms of difference that they cannot immediately resolve. It is by intimately and carefully accompanying the tendency to distance ourselves from our own prejudices that we begin to circulate an ethic of care, a more considerate way of relating than one’s will to harm or hurt.

Author’s notes:

If you’d like to track on-ground updates, I recommend the following:

1. Trolley Times Official (IG: @trolley_times_official) - the protest’s own newspaper!

2. Instagram: Sikh Expo

   To hear more testimonies from the agitation:

1. Youtube: Scoopwhoop Unscripted (English subtitles available)

2. Videos: Aljazeera English’s coverage on the basics, including Shergill’s piece.

3. Web reportage: Newsclick.in, especially this (half-satirical but fact based) piece.

4. Kisan Ekta Morcha: the unions’ official handle on all social media platforms.

For thoughtful analyses of the farm laws:

1. P. Sainath, agricultural expert, for the Tribune, Newsclick, and the Wire.

2. Dr. Sudha Narayanan for the India Forum.

The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

West Virginia's Ongoing, Anti-Capitalist Struggle

By Michael Mochaidean

One year ago, teachers and school service personnel in West Virginia rocked the nation with their historic nine-day statewide walkout. The movement was sparked in part due to declining state revenue for state employees' insurance plan - PEIA - and a persistent lack of wage growth compared to contiguous states. In the wake of the Mountain State's first statewide walkout in twenty-eight years, a rupture began to emerge between education workers and their states. Soon thereafter, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona witnessed their own statewide actions, ranging from a few days of actions to weeklong walkouts.

State legislatures were forced to compromise by these strike actions. In Oklahoma, teachers won an additional $6,000 raise and an increase in school funding by over one hundred million dollars. In Arizona, teachers won a twenty percent raise and increase in support staff salaries to entice teacher retention. West Virginia's victory was smaller by comparison, but no less impactful. There, state workers won a five percent pay raise (equivalent to $2,000 for teachers), a one-year hiatus on PEIA premium increases, and the promise of a PEIA Taskforce whose sole purpose was to find a long-term revenue source for the state's ballooning health care costs. The year had ended with an empowered, engaged, and militant rank-and-file, who were at the forefront of these battles.

The present legislative session in West Virginia is reminiscent, in many ways, of last year's militant struggle. Before the session had even begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael had touted Senator Patricia Rucker's appointment to the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. Senator Rucker, a bourgeois reactionary Venezuelan who has spoken damningly about the Bolivarian Revolution, ended 2018 with an attack on socialism in her op-ed, "Socialist-style policies won't grow WV." Senator Rucker, who moved to West Virginia only a decade prior, founded a local Tea Party chapter in 2009 whose sole purpose it was to recruit "liberty-minded" candidates to run for office. Rucker even claimed that she and her family had moved to West Virginia "as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland]," and thus her desire to implement right-wing libertarian fringe elements into the state's political discourse could be better accomplished in more conservative-leaning West Virginia.

Yet despite her consistent redbaiting, which became an all too common feature during last year's legislative session, Senator Rucker's most troubling pieces of her background are her ties to the far-right in both the religious and education realms. Rucker is a self-described member of the Traditionalist Roman Catholic strand of Catholicism, a right-wing segment of the Roman Catholic Church that believes Vatican II was an illegitimate liberal reform effort. Rucker is also a homeschool advocate who has no experience teaching in public schools. Though Rucker had initially claimed to be a public-school teacher, a freedom of information request with the Maryland State Department of Education found that Rucker never held a teaching certificate with the state board of education, but was only a substitute teacher between 1993 and 2002, before she began homeschooling her children full-time.

In conjunction with her role in the reactionary right's religious and education fields, Rucker is also one of a handful of West Virginia legislators affiliated with ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a front group for corporate lobbyists and state legislators who help funnel resources from large corporate donors into crafting legislation beneficial to the ruling elite. Corporate backers of ALEC help to draft "model" bills that are then used by ALEC-sponsored legislators in a hastily-fashioned copy-and-paste procedure, whereby tax breaks and deregulation maneuvers are inserted into legislation on a state by state basis. Ninety-eight percent of ALEC's revenue, according to ALEC Exposed, comes from "sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations." Some of the largest donors to ALEC include the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, all backed by some of the wealthiest Americans - the Koch, Coors, and Scaife families.

Rucker was highlighted as ALEC's "State Legislator of the Week" last year as a model for right-wing libertarian deregulation and privatization efforts in state legislatures. Her down-home charm as a candidate, running for "limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom" obscures her larger role as an austerity-minded politician whose proudest achievement at the time was the repeal of Common Core. The ability to receive taxpayer funds to provide religious indoctrination - either at home or in private school settings - appears to be one of Rucker's larger goals now as Chair of the Senate Education Committee. Intersecting her relationship to ALEC with the reactionary religious right makes it evident that Rucker's initial goal to help modernize West Virginia's education system is a ruse, obfuscated by her larger desire to implement neo-liberal "reforms" within the state's public education system.

Once this legislative session began, Rucker's Senate Education Committee wasted no time in pushing their privatization, austerity-ridden omnibus bill - SB 451.

The omnibus bill would impact education in the following ways:

- Unlimited charter school development throughout the state.

- The creation of educational savings accounts (ESA's) that provide families with a percent of district funds should they choose not to send their children to public schools.

- Payroll protection clauses, which force unions to individually sign up members rather than having members sign up and have their paychecks automatically deduct their dues.

- Eliminate seniority as a factor in transfers and layoffs when consolidations occur, potentially eliminating higher scale workers in favor of lower scale state employees.

- Increase student cap sizes in elementary schools.

The bill itself passed quickly through the Education Committee - spending less than a week in committee - before it was debated for only two hours, passing in the State Senate on an 18-16 vote. Senator Mitch Carmichael stated at the time that, "It's a historic, great day for the state of West Virginia," at a press conference soon after. "We are so thrilled about the vote today and the aspect of finally, comprehensively, reforming the education system in West Virginia." Senator Rucker likewise claimed that she and her committee were "determined to do the right thing no matter the political pressure."

Education workers, however, were prepared for the worst retaliation from the Senate in advance. On the first day of the legislative session, roughly one month prior to SB 451's passage, hours before Governor Jim Justice held his State of the State address, teachers in twenty counties held walk-ins to remind their fellow workers, parents, and community members what it was they were fighting for. The theme of the walk-ins was a need for mental health and community support for children most impacted by the twin factors of neo-liberal capitalism and the opioid crisis.

To give some perspective on the relative crisis schools are facing, West Virginia:

- Ranks forty-sixth for child poverty, and last for child poverty for children under the age of six.

- Has over one-third of children being raised by their grandparents, which ranks it second in the nation for this. Grandfamilies, as they are called, make on average $20,000 less than the average household in the state.

- Is operating at sixty-six percent efficiency for school counselor to student ratio, and at twenty-three percent efficiency for school psychologist to student ratio.

- Has more than one-in-four children experiencing an adverse childhood experience (trauma leading to depression, violence, substance abuse).

The educator and activist Bob Peterson describes this brand of unionism social justice unionism in that the union represents the interests of the community in conjunction with the material interests of the workers themselves. It is little wonder that this was the theme, given that the walk-ins were organized by the newly-formed West Virginia United caucus, whose five core principles include social justice unionism. An affiliate of UCORE (United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators), West Virginia United began in the wake of last year's statewide walkouts. The caucus is a combination of members from the state's three primary education unions - West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA). In a video released back in September that announced the caucus' formation, steering committee member Jay O'Neal stated that, "We need a caucus, because we saw what happened when teachers and service personnel came together, stood together, and said, 'Enough is enough.' We know that our power lies in us; it's not in the politicians down at the capital."

Worker self-management of unions with respect to bargaining and actions is a component of what the famous Wobbly historian and organizer Staughton Lynd calls solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism, in its broadest form, is a concept in union organizing that recognizes that the individual union member knows best their conditions and their contractual obligations. In lieu of relying on business unionism - lobbying and mediation to gain power - solidarity unionism utilizes direct action to mediate disputes between members and management. Union representatives become less impactful in organizing efforts or disputes, as workers themselves take on the task of building their union at the local level. In addition to social justice unionism described above, solidarity unionism is also one of United's five key principles.

Already, West Virginia United has begun the work of constructing a left-libertarian dual power institution that can challenge both their own business unions and the reactionary right. Members engage in online-on-the-ground campaigns that work to build power across the state within online spaces that are then transformed into on-the-ground efforts. On the Public Employees United page, which was used last year during the nine-day walkout for organizing efforts, over 20,000 public employees engage with one another across the state to educate themselves on this legislation, agitate their co-workers against it, share stories of triumph and anger, and organize as a larger collective. West Virginia United is uniquely poised to capture and redirect this anger towards the larger struggle against austerity, given that their model of organizing relies on worker self-management in both a right-to-work state and in a state where public employees do not have the ability to collectively bargain. The primary education unions in West Virginia act more so as business representatives for teachers, assisting them with insurance, certification, and classification issues. Both WVEA and AFT lobby the legislature to push for laws that benefit members while holding electoral campaigns through their PAC's to provide resources that help elect likeminded candidates. The disconnect between business unionism and the militancy West Virginia has sparked nationwide last year, however, means that the tactics of solidarity unionism and social justice unionism must be central in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism.

The battle between the austerity-minded education reformers and the militant education workers will continue regardless of what happens to SB 451. As of the writing of this article, SB 451 is being debated in the House of Delegates, and its longevity is uncertain. Whatever may come of this lone bill, it is clear that the fight West Virginians are taking on once again is one in opposition to the rampant capitalism we have witnessed since privatization of public education began a little over two decades ago. The victories of the recent UTLA strike provide hope to many in the Mountain State that unions, driven by a desire to protect public services and in direct confrontation with neo-liberal capitalism, can win the day, but we cannot concede an inch to privatizers in the meantime. To open the floodgates would be disastrous to far too many engaged in this struggle. Should West Virginia strike again, it will be because the working-class educators of this state have developed a burgeoning class-consciousness that was lit last year, and is now carried on in the ranks of its militant citizens.

Michael Mochaidean is an organizer and member the West Virginia IWW and WVEA. He is currently co-authoring a book detailing the 2018 education walkouts, their triumphs and limitations one year later.

Teaching and Resistance in Los Angeles: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Jen McClellan, a teacher in the Los Angeles school district. We discuss her journey to becoming a teacher, the recent LA teacher's strike, and the state of teachers in the US.

What made you want to become a teacher? How long have you been working in the LA school system?

I like the first part of this question. I have so many answers. I'll give just a few.

I was in fourth grade when I gave my first summative assessment. My best friend, a very distracted person like me, was going to spend the night. I wanted her to watch The Tigger Movie with me because I had seen it and I liked the themes or morals of it. I knew we usually couldn't sit through a whole movie paying attention only to the movie the way I could alone, so I made a quiz with questions that would assure my friend got the main points I wanted her to get. She made fun of me, but I knew she would, and I insisted that it was of upmost importance, what this movie had to teach us. I don't remember that particular movie or the lesson that the 4th grade me thought was so important. It was probably something to do with friendship. The best part of that experience though, is that it set precedent for our relationship, one that is still and will infinitely be how I understand the term "soul mate." From that night on, every book we read, every movie we saw, every song we heard, every week of summer camp, every notebook full of poetry, every major life accomplishment and every utterly tragic loss we've held in common, so many pieces of our lives are stamped with a theme. Because of this, we can take a period of our lives, classify it, reflect on it, move on from it, draw connections and distinctions from it, and write about our experiences like our lives are stories that mean something. That's a big deal for us, because we hit nihilism and existentialism hard and young and we held on tight to that reckless abandon for so many years that sometimes it still surfaces and tries to drag one or both of us under.

That didn't make me want to become a teacher, though. That's just one of those things that when I did make the decision to pursue teaching as a career, I realized, I've always been a teacher. Then again, I am absolutely certain that there is no one that is not a teacher, and in that sense, deciding to teach is really about recognizing and stepping up to meet this responsibility consciously; and for money.

Another distinct memory I have that I cited as my inspiration for teaching in my scholarship or college application essays is of Mr. Gill running up to my trouble-maker-ass as I was skateboarding loudly up and down school hallways during class time, shouting with quick, sharp, certainty, "HEY!" and once he was right up in my face, with a final stomp and his outstretched arm dramatically pointing towards his classroom, and in a slightly quieter voice, he goes, "there are students trying to learn in there." That was all he had to say to throw me reeling in my newfound sense of self-awareness. I may forever be trying to attain that Gill level mastery over metacognitive teaching. That kind of teaching where you can't remember the teacher telling you anything except maybe two life-changing truths like, "writers write everyday" or "if you're going to insult someone, publicly and in writing, make sure you know how to spell." Someone had written "Mr. Gill is Satin" on the board. He left it up all day for everybody to see and laugh about. That kind of teaching, like how Basil (my criminal justice professor and Bujinkan Sensei) can lecture for three hours and afterwards none of us students knew we'd been lectured or learned anything because we thought we'd just been having a long, super-engaging conversation, but then when it was time for finals, if you showed up to class you got an A, because we had been learning everything that was in the textbook through his conduction of everyone's experiences and knowledge, supplemented with just the necessary sprinkles of what only he knew.

However, "what made (me) want to become a teacher" was deep, fundamental unhappiness. Not just the philosophical self-imposed kind I mentioned before. Not the psychological, clinically diagnosed and medicated kind; though I certainly had that too. No, because it's hardly describable. It's universal, you know? It's that feeling of knowing how insignificant any one of us is in isolated introspection. It's looking at the stars in the middle of the night in the middle of the Eastern Sierras, seeing the Milky Way, and feeling both incredible awe and unfathomable loneliness. It's the reason we love stories about orphans so much, that permeable sense of abandonment I imagine all beings on this planet must get the very moment they come into conscious life. At least that would explain why the smartest (or most conscious) of us, hurt the most.

As I was saying, I was made to want to become a teacher by my own unhappiness, and after a solid eight years of indulging that spiraling dissent, I found the right combination of tools, practices, and willingness to climb up out of myself. I stole a lot of things before and after I went to jail for petty theft as an 18-year-old, so it wouldn't surprise me if I had stolen the book that made me see my unhappiness as a simple monster. I was twenty-three and in an abusive relationship with a six foot three, two hundred eighty pound, twenty-eight year old, thrash-metal guitarist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal version of myself when I pulled the gold-yellow hardback copy of The Art of Happiness out from the books that lined the uneven floor from the bedside table to my desk in the old workers' quarters I was renting then.

Back in Mesilla, New Mexico, in the pecan fields off the Rio Grande, my insomnia and I watched the packs of wild chihuahuas transform, into the giant toads our pit-bull mutts loved to lick until their mouths salivated with foam, into mosquito swarms so thick I couldn't step outside into the dim light of dawn before I would slap my arm instinctively and look down to see it covered in blood. The fields had been flooded. Another summer was coming to an end. I had gone out there in 2006 after graduating high school with a scholarship to NMSU. And after serving 24 hours in San Luis Obispo Women's County for minor in possession of a stolen fifth of vodka, which stuck me with a lifetime ban from the Vons in Grover Beach and a nine hundred dollar fine that followed me over ten years. It's sad that I left my home town, my family, my friends, my coaches, my mentors and my memories on that note of shame and guilt. It's humorously ironic that when I came back to California to teach, it was the loan money from the state of California to go to school that paid off the remaining eight hundred something dollar fine to - you guessed it - the state of California. And maybe it's karma that the book Howard C. Cutler published, that contained his interview with the Dali Lama about Buddhism in the West, the book that had belonged to someone I once knew as a friend, someone who had revolutionized my ideas of music and politics, of film and art, of how to be a human being, the book that symbolized my betrayal of him and of all those things, and of myself, was the book that made me want to become a teacher.

That September I had reread all the writing I had compiled over ten years. I had started searching for a way out of the suicidal cycle of working thirty to forty-five hours a week in food service for five fifteen to seven fifty an hour just to stay drunk and in so many ways fucked up under transient roofs. Thank God for Mr. Gill and that statement prompting one of our free-writes. "Writers write everyday" gave me the notion that even if I failed at everything else, even if I didn't know what else to do with my life, even if I never fully tried at anything, so long as I kept writing, at least I'd always be a writer. I love and have always loved writers, not always for what they write, but at least for how I could always relate to the shit in their lives. You know? The shit that they had to go through to be able to write anything. The shit they had to go through to write like that was all they had and they could die without anyone ever reading anything they wrote just so long as they didn't have to take all that shit with them into whatever came or didn't come next.

Autobiography and biography. That's my favorite genre if anyone asks. Everything California's public education system ever taught us under the guise of "history" was a lie; propaganda for our modern state. Everything except autobiography, especially those of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and every black person up through Malcolm X, Assata, and Ta Na-Heisi Coats, including every Asian-American, every Chicano and Latin-American, and every indigenous person who ever wrote or inspired one. Everything except biography, excluding any written by or about white settler-colonialists and especially the ones like John Smith's because his ego was so overwhelming, even to him, that he had to write his own autobiography in third person.

Becoming a teacher wasn't ever something I wanted to have to do. I knew, in kindergarten, when the kid at the table near me declared his belief in our beloved teacher's sincere suggestion that we could be "anything" we wanted when we grew up, that I didn't believe anybody could be the president. I knew when he used the picture of Abe Lincoln on the worksheet to guide his answer, that I didn't want to be someone who lied to people or let them think they were smart and "good" for saying or doing what they were obviously supposed to do or say. I knew, increasingly, with every teacher, with every detention, suspension, and Saturday school, that most people in charge, even if they had started out with the right intentions, had become or maybe always were tools. I feel this way about the teachers I have loved the most too.

I have loved them because... well, because as long as I haven't been able to see a way out, I have felt the timeless empathy teachers are able to sustain for their students. Because students are our best selves as we have ever been, and they are all the potential we have ever had and might ever hope to see met.

I didn't ever want, I still don't want all that empathy to come from me. Because empathy means you have the hurt, the pain, the suffering, the particular kind of sadness that someone else is feeling.

I didn't want to have to be a teacher, because for teaching to take place there has to be someone who is willing to receive and someone who is willing to give. The best conditions for teaching are those where people are in need, are searching, are students. Those are the conditions for empathy and empathy is the only bridge I know of that can hold enough authority to see the human race from this world with its globalized late-stage capitalism, rampant individualism, ever expansive militarization, and polarizing dichotomies through communism, through socialism, to the abstract idealistic notions of interconnected autonomy and stateless anarchy that fuels my dreams.

Or if you believe the same misinformation that still confuses us and keeps us from acting in the face of global warming when it says anarchy is chaos, then substitute "anarchy" for "freedom." Anarchy, as I dream it, means I don't have to be what you say I have to be and I don't have to tell you what to do or be. Freedom means I have the autonomy to neutralize gender norms and that I live unhindered in whatever my idea of a home is, on public land. I mean that everything we ever called "public" can't be private, can't be owned, and can't be used to oppress people in any way, shape or form because "public" means we all share it. "Public" means it belongs to everyone and therefore no one. "Public" means you can carry shit around with you and call it yours, call it "personal" but even that ignores the disprovable physical laws of spacetime every human being is linearly confined by. How did you come to be? How did the things you think you own come to be? "No man is an island entire of itself," if you like Donne.

From that gold-yellow book, in September of 2012, the Dali Lama asked me to see myself and he did it a different way, but also the same way that Gill did when we he ran up on me in my high school hallway. After Gill, who I only knew then by reputation through the rumors spread by poor spellers, showed me that new way of seeing things, I sought him out. We don't have much choice or agency as high school students, but I dropped out of AP English the following year because I had learned that Gill taught regular English classes, and when I went on to the next grade and back into AP, I also took creative writing because I had learned that he taught creative writing. I took journalism and wrote a column in the paper too, because if I was going to take creative writing, I might as well take journalism too.

If I could go back and do it all intentionally, I would have studied the sciences. I would have passed pre-calc rather than failing it twice out of a concocted aversion I manifested out of early onset senioritis. I would love to know where that would have taken me. But Charles Gill got to me, so I'm teaching English and I am grateful to read biographies about Einstein, to be able to translate religious texts that give context to phrases like "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds", and to have even the slightest theoretical comprehension of what is being discussed in papers on String Theory. I'm even grateful to have been allowed to audit Charles Hatfield's Science Fiction and Time Travel course, since it's there I last learned that while multi-verses and parallel timelines are widely accepted as possibilities, the only thing that goes wrong more than traversing those, is the story that supposes we can go backwards in time.

Just think, this is only one of my stories about what made me want to become a teacher, and I haven't even finished answering the first half of that question yet! Let me shorten it up by directly addressing the "made" in that prompt. I was made to want to become anything by drugs. Specifically, I abused drugs and alcohol to the point that I was frequently blacking out and overdosing without a second thought past "fuck. Being hungover fucking sucks." My journals said I was a writer and could potentially teach other people to write. The Art of Happiness said it was my right as a human being to be happy and that to be happy I should do less of the things that made me unhappy and more of the things that made me happy. So, I put as much as I could fit in my car while the passed out freckled drunk who would later justify holding me off the ground against the wall in a choke hold as a response to me punching him in the face snored. In the morning I left.

I stopped at the Grand Canyon. I wandered through the woods on the edge of those gaping cliffs in the dark of 2am, with my delirious, sleep-deprived paranoid echoes bouncing off the startled silent forest around me, and with my own madness and fear that this was as far as I was going to make it flying back at me in blinding flashes of lightlessness. After the second sun rose, I decided the things I learned in school were good enough, the things the Dali Lama said were simple enough, and I had gone nowhere enough, that I could at least make it back to California. From there, with a lot of help from a lot of people, I figured out that I wanted to teach.

The way I saw it, I was joining the army or becoming a monk, only I wasn't going to murder anybody with a righteous fist of forced democracy, and I wasn't going the other extreme of disappearing into some other desert or mountain range in a vow of silence. This way, under the guise of teaching English, I would forfeit my ego, be humbled before everyone around me and be of service to their learning, to their seeking and finding, and thereby enter the realm of possibly finding purpose or meaning in my life as I simultaneously repaid everyone and anything which came before me and contributed to me still somehow being alive.

I decided I wanted to teach in LAUSD because the teaching at the school I went to felt too small. San Francisco seemed unattainable, too costly, and I simply felt as though I shouldn't go there. Maybe one day, if I had a real reason, I would go there. Los Angeles, with Hollywood, the ports, LAX, all its smog, traffic, diversity, and skateboarders everywhere, shouted at me like, "aye! Your moms is an hour away. Halfway point. Sleep there for a minute, then come down. Do you really need to think about it?" That was it. I was made to become a teacher by a long series of mistakes, because yeah, you have to make mistakes to learn anything worth knowing, but if you don't do better, do different, you can't really say you're learning anything. I learned that I needed my mom's help then and that I might at any time so I worked to restore that relationship first, and then every other relationship I had. Then I made new ones.

I met Justin Simons in Nenagh Brown's Monsoon Asian Civilization class, after wrestling with the concept of Western imperialism and its effects on China, India, and Japan all semester, after falling asleep for months to Marx and Engles audio readings, on the very last day of the semester. That was May 2013. That summer I started going with Justin to Los Angeles. He showed me the places he knew, like The Bourgeoisie Pig and Amoeba, and his friends' houses. We went to Socialist Party USA's LA local meetings and I learned about alternative structures of power like horizontalism. [1] I learned what the feminist process meant in practice. I threw myself into the LA left, joined the California Student Union (which coincidentally took me on a life-changing weekend trip to San Francisco), started a chapter of the Young Peoples' Socialist League at Moorpark with Justin, took the prerequisite classes I needed to tutor for the college's Writing Center in the library, got to know people in every club across campus as I toured their initial meetings to see who was there and how they did what they did, tabled and used free doughnuts and anarcho-syndicalist zines to lure in new members, got to know the school's groundskeepers, custodians and maintenance workers, asked them and the students, professors and staff about their experiences and working conditions on campus, then with the practices I learned in LA I taught my peers in affluent, conservative suburbia how to earn a reputation as the most active and subversive club on campus. A legitimately recognized and funded club, I might add. Well at first. After a year we outgrew the parameters that came with that status.

So some of us focused our efforts on taking direct action to provide the students that would come after we left with a long term solution to the scarcity of food on campus resulting from a district wide contract with Coca-Cola and the Vending Machine company that claimed sole distribution over all nutritional possibilities and hence left us stuck on a relatively remote campus for up to fourteen hours, not giving a fuck that all we had to eat was gummy worms and the occasional over-ripened apple.

From the summer of 2013 until I transferred to CSUN in the fall of 2015, I learned from Schools LA Students Deserve, the International Socialist Organization, the Valley Socialists (club at San Fernando Valley's Community College off the Orange Line a couple stops north of NoHo), independent organizers, politicians (one of whom became an LAUSD Substitute just in time to go proudly on strike with UTLA the second week of January 2019), members of the International Workers of the World, people like Vanessa Lopez whose identity I can't limit with labels or affiliations, people who stood out to me because in the midst of this new (to me) realm they were able to think ahead and convey to those around them a general, but malleable, flexible and collectively inviting purpose and place to envision direction.

That summer, 2015, I moved into a two bedroom apartment with Jose and Jay who taught me about being American with Salvi parents, about being Korean in LA, about how to bring the motherfucking ruckus almost anywhere, about how to share a kitchen with the smell of abandoned squid, and a hallway with a forth roommate; also from Korea, but he got his own master bedroom and bathroom because he had more money than us - from the App he had invented - and I don't remember his name, but I do remember us all stifling laughter as he marched with the overzealous and disproportionately heavy weight of his own self-importance, up and down the hall, in his saggy off-white underwear). I smoked cigarettes on the roof next to 18th Street tags and watchers who watched the watchmen who always hover above all of us in black ghetto birds. They oppress us with the loud pervasive sound of rapidly spinning blades and thereby they unite the richest diversity of the densest populations in the nation with a common enemy. #FTP

I had been doing Supplemental Instruction which is basically being a TA with mad tutoring and small group teaching skills, at Moorpark. I applied and qualified to be an SI Leader at CSUN when I transferred. So, Fall 2015, I started teaching my own class of freshmen in English for 50 minutes a day, two days a week. Then I had two classes in the spring. That is the valley; I don't know if you count it as LA's school system. But if we're being particular about when I started working as a teacher in LA's schools - I haven't started yet. I'm in my second semester of student teaching (unpaid) as CSUN's credential program requires. I've been a student for, well as long as I've been alive - 30 years. I will be over 40,000$ in debt after a quick two-year AA, two more years for a BA, and this last year and a half for my credential work (not classified as graduate school but is essentially graduate school). If all goes as planned, I'll be paid to teach in LAUSD this fall.

Give us a historical background for this strike. Place it into a larger context of what has been happening to teachers, students, and the school system at large.

I mentioned that when I started going to meetings in LA in summer 2013, one of the grassroots organizations whose meetings I frequented was Schools LA Students Deserve. We called them SLASD then. They were high school students, parents, teachers, staff, and a community of dedicated, unyielding, persistent public education advocates. We met at and near Dorsey and Robert. F Kennedy, in classrooms, auditoriums, cafeterias, and community spaces. I met one of Dorsey's English teachers because she hosted a series of free public classes about how capitalism, industry, and global warming had historically affected and was currently affecting people and their neighborhoods in and around, of and in fact, Los Angeles. She hosted an interesting group of us students, workers, student-workers, teachers, people, at her house off the Expo line in Inglewood. I thought, this is what I want. I want to live in this place that feels like the word neighborhood and brings it new meaning.

For five years I've worked towards that goal. Now it is the end of January and the beginning of 2019. I'll get lost in too many words if I give historical background beyond my personal experience of it, but I can recommend Bill Ring's " Guerilla Guide to LAUSD " for that history.

I felt inspiration, happiness, and hope from Students Deserve's role in the strike. They work to bring a vast, diverse, segregated, and by all means intentionally divided district together to repair, reinvigorate, rebirth, decolonize, demilitarize, and democratize public education in Los Angeles. They have proven that the people have the power. They have it because without people, the rich, white, elite, house of cards currently dictating the abuse of our collective resources does not stand. The current pyramid scheme of a system stands only to be further stacked against humankind's survival. This is not something that can be concealed anymore. The students, parents, teachers, psychologists, nurses, librarians, groundskeepers, custodians, maintenance men, and everyone who hungers for learning or yearns to live rather than to be murdered or just barely survive, have the power. They have social media to make transparent all that might be concealed. They have strategic planning, passion, and humility. Their vulnerabilities are their strengths.

I have explored Marx's critique of capitalism my whole life. Through punk rock, skateboarding, writing, the blues, gender defiance, criticism of those who falsely claim authority, and every breath I take is an effort to teach through action what I, and they, and every person must instinctively know.

Why is it that whenever teachers' strikes occur, people argue that the strikes are related to pay? Why does the media never focus on the other demands of teachers that actually help to aid students learning?

This is a rhetorical question. Have you read George Orwell's " Politics and the English Language " essay? What do you know about the Sapir-Warf Hypothesis? The question you are asking yourself is why are you on the side of teachers rather than the state-run, corporate-sponsored media?

In what ways do you think that this country undermines education?

What comes to your mind when you think of public education? The sentiment I'm hearing is that the education system is "broken." If that's the case, privately owned charter schools aren't going to fix it by taking students, and therefore funding, out of the public sphere. They're just going to profit off of the work of others.

What did you feel about school as you were in your last years of it? I loved learning, the few good teachers I had, my friends, and having somewhere to go be away from my parents. But I got in trouble a lot for challenging authority in various ways. From my experience there, San Luis Obispo County undermined education by denying us the responsibilities, respects, decencies and liberties everybody needs to experience from a young age if they're meant to graduate and go off to college with the ability to sustain a living.

Don't even let me get me started on student debt.

Schools in LA are segregated by race, class, and status. My school had gates and fences around it, but it also had large gaps or holes in the back fences where we'd easily get out into the cow pastures or strawberry fields; circa rural Arroyo Grande, 2002-2006. However, the schools in Koreatown don't even try not to look like prisons. The tracking systems like GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), AP (Advanced Placement), and Honors make sure that the right candidates are given advantages to counter its failing efforts to exclude students by race (aka ethnicity), nationality or citizenship, gender, sexuality, class, or ability.[2] Those that do make it through without conforming to become another agent of this web of oppression are rare.

Those people, the ones that manage to escape the school to prison pipeline or manage to make it in and out of the prison industrial complex are the best educators we have. And most of them probably don't teach in public schools (I'm thinking of bell hooks at The New School or people who teach under other employment classifications). Hence, I see school as the Juvenile Detention Recruitment Facilities that scout for slave labor more than a system of education that should empower citizens of a free nation with the agency and autonomy to actively practice democracy within their local communities, at least.

It seems we pay lip service to the idea of it being a 'great equalizer' but then aren't willing to do the heavy lifting to actually make that a reality.

If you're alluding to the saturation of empty rhetoric our lives are bombarded by, I agree. We are living a crossover of every piece of Dystopian Literature ever written. We let it happen too. Remember when the Simpsons predicted Trump as president?[3]

This gives me insight to another reason I was so happy with the victories won by the recent UTLA strike. The fact that there still exists powerful veins of opposition in an Equilibrium-like dictatorship is amazing when you consider how much it takes to live versus how much it costs to live.[4] Economic surveys give us some ideas about this, though there are so many more un-quantified, unrecorded, and unrecognized variables that should be factored into cost of living. Even so, the abstract understanding I have of wealth disparity from profit driven reports whose audience is intended to be capitalist investors is enough to fill me with humility when I see organizers who work well beyond the legal maximum of 8 hours a day.

My own short-lived period of organizing, when paired with what I am able to observe in LA equates to burnout. How long would you be able to go 16-24 hours a day and seeing people that are basically your grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, or children passed out in the middle of the sidewalk, clothes dirty and falling off their bodies, pushing carts full of plastic bags full of plastic things, discarded human beings hauling around discarded belongings like ghosts? How long would you go into Skid Row to meet with, plan and carry out action with, organize with folks to detail the level of surveillance and control the military and police and corporations have over everybody? How long would you go to "public," "democratic," Board of Trustees meetings to speak in shaking vulnerability knowing all you stand to lose, just to be given a 3 minute maximum time slot in which you are made to stand outside the circle where menacing, suit-wearing demagogues who sit facing each other and ignoring you like the judges, jurors, and executioners of your hopes and dreams?

How long before you burn out? How long before the cynicism overcomes you?

And then what?

Unions are demonized in general, but teachers' unions seem especially hated. Why do you think that is?

An old adjunct professor and mentor of mine is a union representative. Adjuncts are called freeway fliers because universities or community colleges "can't afford" to hire them full time (because they are spending money building facilities that will draw more students who can afford to pay higher tuitions). My friend, the professor who I invited to lunch immediately after Justin Simons told me she was an anarchist, she says adjuncts don't have offices. Then she laughs, unless you count their trunks. She burns an image into my mind, of the post-secondary educator's car filled trunk, back, and passenger seats, floor to ceiling with books, student and personal supplies, as they drive from classroom to classroom dawn to dusk. Before I got butt-raped by the UAW she let me know how useless unions have become. But we are historians, we listen to Eugene V. Debs speeches and read about him in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. We know it's useless, but what else can you do? You have to fight with everything you have left until you die even if all you're doing is pissing them off or slowing them down a little.

I haven't worked in UTLA's ranks yet. I don't know how long I'll last when I do get in there to see how it is. However, I have to hope beyond hope that the reason you or anyone thinks that teachers' unions are hated is because they are most widely supported, most critically strategic, and most international laborers the world has. Teachers are the last resistance and I'm joining up, if nothing else, at least for vengeance.

What labor has not been assembly-lined? What effective union member has not been murdered, banished, enslaved or otherwise lost, broken, and forgotten? Yet here we are with our poetry and banned books, with our librarian allies, with our entire communities of food-deserted, exhausted, fed-up, impoverished families behind us. Here we are, after Raegan, Nixon and Bush and they're dreading us still being here after Agent Orange (Truuu - no I can't say it - he's like Voldemort).

Here we are after the drugs and diseases they've infested us with so they could quarantine us, go to war against us, send us to war against ourselves and make us manufacture all the weapons we use against ourselves while they profit and laugh. And we're still fucking here, because the working-class teacher unions still holding out are punk rock and kung fu. The teacher's unions aren't hated, but the hills have eyes and mouths that spread lies, and that sounds like good news to me. Sounds like it's working, no?

Do you have any regrets about becoming a teacher. I ask this as being a teacher seems to be extremely disrespected, no matter where one is.

I could ask the same of any service member. In fact, I asked my fiance, an Iraq Army Veteran of the U.S. Calvary, a similar question once. He said that when he found himself pointing his gun at women and children, he found himself knowing he was being made to do things entirely opposite of what he had signed up for. He came back from a dirty war, after being blown up more than once, with PTSD. I won't even tell you what he had planned to do before he started coming to Socialist Party USA meetings. I'll just say that even after the straight-up, downright, real human love we gave him dissuaded him from carrying out those plans and even after Agent Orange became Commander in Chief, he was considering rejoining because he thought that was his only option. But then we got together as I was graduating with my BA and talking about how it would only be another year or two before I was a salaried teacher with summers off and a strong union. Then he proposed and re-enrolled in community college and I don't doubt that he'll get to be whatever he wants to be in life. Right now he dreams of being a director and a father. We lost our first baby 7 months in utero and he's currently delayed from school to work 6 months to extend his VA benefits. We won't let anything stop us though, you know? We've got a foundation of unconditional love and acceptance, between us, with our families, with our neighbors, and in our community at large.

Really terrible shit happens all the time and it's unavoidable that we do things to contribute to the horrors of life and death. But I think once you see clearly what the things are that people to do cause suffering to themselves, to other people and all manner of living beings, then you have the opportunity to stop. From that point on the more you do contrary to all that horrible shit gets you further and further away from the guilt and shame and regret that would eat you alive while keeping you trapped in that cycle of destruction. Regret is a negative feedback loop.

So, no. I have had no regrets only ever since I decided to become a teacher. And I think, so long as you have a genuine love and conscious intent to practice compassion, as long as you work to cultivate or revitalize a support network, as long as you know that your purpose is to make meaning by holding fast to the ropes, and as long as you remember that he who fears death cannot enjoy life and those who hesitate are lost... then you have no cause for regret.

Endnotes

1: Marina Sitrin, "Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements," Dissent, Spring 2012 ( https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements )

2: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, United States Department of Education, https://sites.ed.gov/idea/

3: Maya Salam, "'The Simpsons' Has Predicted a Lot. Most of It Can Be Explained," New York Times, February 2, 2018 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/television/simpsons-prediction-future.html )

4: Investopedia,

Cost of Living https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-of-living.asp