America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump

By Kate Shea Baird and Steve Hughes

With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build progressive alternatives from the bottom up.

"I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we're going to use them. And we're not going to take anything lying down." On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the US presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America's cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.

However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders' primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people's desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.

In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the US today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called "municipalist wager". The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.

In Spain, this network of 'rebel cities' has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves 'refuge cities' and remunicipalizing public services. US cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.

Rebel cities in the USA

In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the US. One hundred years ago, the "sewer socialists" took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.

More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local "Fight for 15" campaigns.

Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics from within.

Why cities?

There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote. Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation's 35 largest cities, but she beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000. In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that can be harnessed to challenge Trump's toxic discourse and policy agenda.

But alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people's lives. This new process must have feminism at its heart; it must recognize that the personal and the political are intimately connected, something that is clearer at the local level than at any other.

It's for this reason that the municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any 'bottom-up' strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative-and successful-examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.

Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport we hold.

Why a network of rebel cities?

By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.

On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist nature of Trump's campaign and policy platform, cities across the US have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim communities.

Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years. While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump's claim that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the federal government and many of the largest cities in the country, including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050. US mayors must continue on this path, working with international networks of cities like ICLEI and UCLG to exchange good practices and to lobby for direct access to global climate funds in the absence of support from the federal government.

Even on issues that are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, like immigration, cities have some room for maneuver. For example, although Trump has pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants from the US, 37 'sanctuary cities' across the US are already limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests to reduce deportations. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles have already pledged to continue with this practice, and De Blasio has promised New Yorkers that the city will protect the confidentiality of users of the city ID-card scheme and continue to ensure that police officers and city employees won't inquire about residents' immigration status, predicting that Trump will face "a deep, deep rift with all of urban America" if he does not re-evaluate his stance on sanctuary cities.

What next?

First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified 'Sanders Democrats', to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities. Such cities must work, not only to counteract the worst excesses of the Trump administration, but also to continue to move forward on issues like gay rights and climate change, as well as forging new ground by standing up to corporate interests, increasing citizen participation in decision-making, and promoting the social and cooperative economies.

But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider's understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond. This is something that the Working Families Party is already doing successfully in many states, as well as supporting these candidates in primary campaigns against Establishment Democrats.

Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics. There is no reason why candidates should wait until taking office to invite people to participate in decision-making. Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct; in Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.

A resurgence of rebel cities in the US would tap into a long-forgotten American tradition of radical municipalism and align with a new and growing international network of municipalist movements. Now is the time for us to seize this opportunity and to reclaim democracy from the bottom up.

This article was reprinted from Medium .

Fight Back or Go Under: A Modern, Working-Class Call to Action

By William T. Hathaway

The presidency of Donald Trump is going to be a slap in the face of American workers that will wake us up to the reality of social class. Big T's pedal-to-the-metal policies will show us clearly that we are one class, the ruling elite are another class, and our interests are diametrically opposed. Our declining standard of living is essential for maintaining their wealth, and they will do whatever is necessary to continue that. They will jail us, deport us, kill us, anything to crush resistance.

But in the long term they won't succeed.

Why not? Because we, the working people of the United States of America, are stronger than the ruling elite. We are the 99%. Everyone who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class, but many of us have been indoctrinated to emulate and admire the owners. They are a small, parasitical class that has stolen our labor for hundreds of years. The wage slavery they impose saps and undermines our lives, our energies, our futures, even our sense of ourselves. They are truly our enemies.

Their attempts to crush us will teach us that. We'll realize that the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, they are now taking away our freedom. When we choose to fight back rather than go under, we'll become tougher. The struggle will temper us. Our outrage will become revolt.

The forces of repression will gradually become less effective. Police and soldiers aren't machines; they are workers who have chosen the wrong side. When they realize they are attacking their own people, their loyalty will begin to waver. They'll start disobeying their masters. Eventually, the power structure, weakened from within and without, will grind down, falter, and fall. Then the revolution can succeed with a minimum of violence.

To avoid the unpleasantness of this conflict, many people hope that capitalism can be reformed. That's why progressives and pseudo-leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein are popular.

Reformism has been tried ever since the Fabians of the late 19th century, without bringing any lasting changes. Reforms have had only a temporary impact. From the 1950s to the '70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. Back then, capitalists could afford this because the main market for products was the home country, and higher wages stimulated consumption. This Keynesian approach created a bubble of prosperity in North America and Europe that has now burst and can't come back. The hard-fought gains of those days are being reversed because the world market has become more important than the home country. To compete globally with low wage countries such as China, India, and Brazil, corporations here have to slash their labor costs. The pressure of international competition is being shifted onto us, the workers. We are beginning -- just beginning -- to get the same treatment as third world workers.

These conditions will inevitably intensify; capitalism needs ever more profits to keep growing. It finances its expansion through bonds and bank loans, so it needs increasingly more money to pay the interest charges. And it must invest more in plant and equipment to stay competitive. Its rate of profit is always under pressure. And if it stops growing it dies.

Those pressures are increasing as the global economy approaches its limits of exploitable resources and markets. The rival capitalist blocs are fighting among themselves in a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival. To lower costs and hold on to its markets -- to remain top dog -- the US elite are pursuing repression at home and war abroad. The smiley mask that covered the face of the establishment has dissolved, revealing the predatory beast beneath.

A kinder, gentler capitalism is impossible, and the hopeful rhetoric of progressive reformists isn't going to change this economic reality. Their program is designed to divert potentially revolutionary energy into the dead-end of tinkering with the system, trying to fix it. But capitalism isn't broken; this is how it functions. We have to junk it, not fix it. It needs to be replaced with socialism. The two systems are mutually antagonistic, and the struggle between them can't be comprised.

We can win this! It's no more difficult than other evolutionary changes humanity has mastered. This is our time - a historic battle for liberation.

But to defeat the beast we need to be unified. For that we have to heal the divisions the elite fuel within the working class: the antagonisms of white vs. black, men vs. women, straight vs. queer, earlier generation immigrant vs. recent immigrant.

The decisive battleground is not the streets or the ballot box but the workplace. That's where our true power lies, where we can fight and eventually win. Workers run the profit machine. When we stop working, profits stop flowing. Withholding our labor through general strikes is a step towards breaking the power of the owners who have been getting rich from the profits we produce.

This requires being organized, and not in the sell-out capitalist unions we now have. We're going to have to take over these unions and throw out the labor bureaucrats, or form independent militant organizations that really represent us.

Then we'll be able to seize the companies and run them democratically to benefit humanity rather than the elite. It could take 50 years, though, before we're ready to do that. Those years are going to be filled with hard struggle -- not an appealing prospect.

But what's the alternative? Increasingly degraded lives. If we start fighting now, we'll discover a glory in that battle even in our losses, because they teach us and make us stronger. Rebelling is invigorating. It's an authentic life, not the superficial pleasantries of a lackey life.

To eventually win and give our grandchildren a better life (which is really what the human endeavor is about) we must build a revolutionary party that can lead the working class with a successful program. Leftist organizations are now in the process of discussing what that program should be. The more people involved in this discussion, the better the results will be. That's revolutionary democracy.

To take part, not just in the discussion but in the whole magnificent struggle that lies before us, we need to be in an organization. Just being angry isn't enough; unless we actively join with others, we won't be able to build a successful alternative to the capitalist parties.

An organization enables us to support and assist workers' battles. The debates within the group can broaden and clarify our own positions. Working with comrades is an antidote to the isolation that can afflict those who try to go it alone. Bonds of companionship and solidarity sustain us in difficult times. As the system's decay increases and conditions worsen, we're going to need all the help we can get ... and give.

In this protracted fight against capitalism many of our efforts won't show immediate results. An organization is our link to the future. It gives us concrete assurance that when the objective conditions for revolution have finally been achieved, knowledgeable and committed people will be there to make it happen: to overthrow capitalism and build socialism, in which the resources of the world are used to meet human needs rather than to generate profits for a few owners.

To work towards that, each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the Left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. This list of US groups is a good place to start: http://www.broadleft.org/us.htm. The best program I've found is the Freedom Socialist Party's: www.socialism.com.

William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran now working to overthrow the empire he previously served. He is the author of Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the true stories of activists who have moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct action: helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. Noam Chomsky called it, "A book that captures such complexities and depths of human existence, even apart from the immediate message." Chapters are posted at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.

Japan: The Next Battleground for the Left

By Emma Yorke

Anime, manga, Japanese video games. I love it all. I found Japan through my love of their art, music, and other media - I fully admit to being one of those dorky girls that's into all that stuff. Japan is a complex place; so much is nuanced, from their language to their rich, ancient history. The more you study Japan, the more questions you have...and I know I'm far from the first person to have made that observation.

But I think my most troubling question is political. Is Marx welcome in Japan? What does their current social and political landscape tell us, and how does it reflect what's going on in the U.S. right now?

On the surface, the similarities between America and Japan are striking. Japan's government is being hijacked by militant far-right nationalists, their airwaves are overrun with the shrieking of a small but really loud faction of nazi internet trolls, and tension is growing against ethnic minorities. There's a hostile current running through the Japanese working class, resentful of South Koreans for causing - or so they believe - a lot of the troubles Japanese people face. A group called Zaitokukai, short for Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai (在日特権を許さない市民の会 - Association of Citizens Against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi), has formed with the express purpose of denying rights to Zainichi, or permanent Korean residents of Japan. They're a small fascist political action group, but they've definitely made waves since their formation in 2006, launching online harassment campaigns against prominent Korean writers and activists. It's easy to look at them and see the likes of Gamergate, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Breitbart, which is frightening because they're not afraid to inflict violence to achieve their aims (they've been arrested for fighting counter-protesters more than once). With a membership of between 9,000 and 15,000, they're hardly a mass movement. What they are, though, is loud and determined, and they're getting widespread attention...they've even got world-famous voice actresses preaching their platform. That's like One Direction campaigning for Trump.

I brought up Zaitokukai because they're a good example of grassroots ethno-nationalism in action. Fascism tends to start at the bottom, and it usually starts small, just by tapping into populist anger. What we're seeing across the world, and especially here in the U.S., is that when the working class gets swindled by big business and trade deals that only benefit the top 1%, it seems easier for so many struggling workers to look at "the other" in our society and blame them. People are discouraged and angry, and they're not looking left for the answers. Instead, the far-right seems like a more tempting solution to their problems. In Japan, angry working people are taking out their frustration on ethnic Koreans. Here in the U.S., a billionaire con man from Manhattan rode working-class rage to the White House, even as many people are still learning what the word "socialism" means. We're taking our economic anger out on Latinx people, and our police are allowed to murder black people at will.

When things get bad, it's way easier to scapegoat our minorities than it is to stop and look up to see the plutocrats sneering down at us.

A failure on the part of the U.S. Left has been for us to ignore just how deeply capitalism is entrenched in a given society. Here in America, it's easy to just look back to McCarthy and the Red Scare and blame that for American anti-left indoctrination. But it might go deeper than that. Japan has been deeply classist for centuries, and remains so today. Classism and capitalism go hand in hand, since one tends to reinforce the other. When you consider the 2012 case of Rina Bovrisse, an employee of Prada Japan, you see that misogyny is also part of the mix - a Tokyo District Court threw out her lawsuit against Prada Japan, even when CEO Davide Sesia claimed that he was "ashamed of her ugliness". Sesia once told Bovrisse that fifteen shop managers and assistant managers "needed to disappear" because they were "ugly" or "fat." Women over 30 are considered "old," and Prada outlet stores are commonly called "garbage bins for old ladies." The fact that one of the country's highest courts didn't take this woman's lawsuit seriously, forcing her to take her case to the UN, says a lot about the country's deeply reactionary culture. A patriarchal society that views women as commodities is a fertile seedbed for exploitation; capitalism thrives on inequality.

That's not to say that there isn't a vast desire for equality in Japan. At one of Zaitokukai's anti-Korean rallies, huge numbers of Otaku (anime fans) showed up as counter-protestors, holding signs condemning racism and shouting anti-racist slogans. Japan has a strong, growing feminist consciousness as well -- feminist author Mitsu Tanaka has been agitating for women's equality since the 1970's. "I realized that men only saw women as a convenience - either as mothers or 'toilets,'" Tanaka says (using the word "toilet" to refer to a repository of male bodily fluids). "While it might have been difficult (to stand up to men) as individuals, it ultimately became possible when women stood together, side by side."

Tanaka's call for female solidarity, as well as the young anti-racist crowds coming out to support their Korean friends and neighbors, seems to be a yearning for a true leftist movement in Japan. Over the last decade or so, the Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō) seems to have steadily gained ground; as of 2015, the JCP jumped to 21 seats in the House of Representatives, making them the world's largest non-governing communist party. As their membership surged after the financial crisis of 2008, it seems easy to see that many Japanese people are looking to the left for solutions to working-class problems. The Japanese Communist Party calls for an end to the long military alliance with the US, the removal of American bases and armed forces from Japanese soil, and forcing North Korea to the bargaining table by nonmilitary measures. On the equality front, the JCP promotes legalization of civil unions for same-sex couples. This is a highly radical stance in a country where women are still required to take a man's last name when she marries, though the measure might seem halfhearted to westerners. Josef Stalin once deeply criticized the JCP for their pacifist stance and their reluctance to fight a campaign of covert warfare against the Imperial government. The JCP's stance on the Emperor may be the most controversial; the Central Committee promises that, under their leadership, the Emperor would be allowed to remain, so long as the role of Emperor becomes purely symbolic. This position has chafed leftists for decades.

Naturally, a global working-class consciousness might be more necessary now than ever before; it's the only force that can stop the rise of fascism across the world. Whether it's through the Japanese Communist Party or a yet-unknown radical coalition, we westerners need to lend all the support we can to our leftist comrades in Japan. Socialism in action would start a brilliant chain reaction across every facet of Japanese society, and its effects would arguably be more visible there than anywhere else.

Sources

The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21648771-communists-become-japans-strongest-political-opposition-provinces-red-revival

Japan Times: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2015/10/03/lifestyle/women-japan-unite-examining-contemporary-state-feminism/#.WEHPdX3nVG0

How to Go On: Do We Have the Stomach for What's Required

By Luke Bretherton

Watching the election results come in, and as the dawning realization of what was happening began to become apparent, the following quotation from Henry James came to me:

Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly ever apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion … we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

I learned this quotation from reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, a book penned in 1971 when the 60s were going sour. Richard Nixon was in office, the Weather Underground had issued their "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States and were in the midst of a bombing campaign, and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers had revealed a long history of the U.S. government deceiving the American public about the war in Vietnam. The scandal of Watergate was yet to come. This quote seems as fitting now as it did to Alinsky in 1971.

But, theologically, the quote is always fitting. This is the world as it is: a world that a robust doctrine of sin should teach us to expect but which idolatry seduces us into forgetting. The chasing after idols is always foolish, but some have the luxury to indulge such foolishness at no physical cost to themselves. The election of Trump is a wake-up call to remember what those who are black, brown, queer, disabled, or a religious minority can only forget at their peril: that oppression is likely to get worse, but the struggle goes on; that the absurd becomes normalized, but must nevertheless be ridiculed even to the point where ridicule feels absurd; that love is more real than hate, but real love means hating what is evil; that the space between the world as it is and the world as it should be must be grieved in order to find the hope to go on; that a truly good, happy and meaningful life cannot involve leisure built off the domination of others. No form of life can be good if it does not have in its institutional forms and ends justice and generosity for all, and pursues this in such a way as to foster the agency of everyone, especially the vulnerable and dependent.

The temptation is not to abide with the truth of what Henry James is saying so that we might more fully confront the reality of the world as it is. The temptation is to blame others before we accept our responsibility for this situation and the judgment of God on us. Falling prey to this temptation to blame others by white Christian men and women, and the racial and religious scapegoating it generated, is partly what propelled Trump to victory. But his victory is also partly the responsibility of the left and the failure to confront its own failures.

A mood of nativist discontent and racial scapegoating married to actual economic displacement among a broad cross section of American society has up to this point lacked a determinate and focused ideological articulation. It is a mood that is easily captured by a demagogue like Trump. The only way to counter this kind of capture are forms of organizing that intervene to disrupt the sense that only Trump is speaking into and giving voice to this mood. Such organizing helps dis-identify potential supporters from either a right-wing populist like Trump, or explicitly fascist groups, through creating alternative political scripts that disarticulate the reasons for discontent from the interpretative frameworks the likes of Trump provides. But the kind of engaged, relational organizing that does not begin by denouncing people as a "basket of deplorables" requires leftists to stomach building relationships with people they don't like and find scandalous.

Yet this is exactly what successful anti-fascist organizers did in the 1930s in the U.S. and Britain, unlike on the continent of Europe. For example, Alinsky, who explicitly saw his work as anti-fascist, was a secular Jew organizing anti-Semitic Catholics, yet who was also able to recognize these same people as not wholly reducible to that and as potential renewers of democratic life. It was difficult and threatening work but the likes of Alinsky had the stomach for it, as did many others in the British and U.S. labor movements. And it worked. The question is, do those on the left have the stomach for it today?

In the wake of Trump's victory, fascist groups will be on the ascendency. They have the potential to move beyond Trump's vague populist message to ideologically capture the mood and turn it to directly fascist ends. This is seems to be happening in Europe. There is a crucial distinction to be made between potential supporters of and actual fascist groups. The latter needs vehement, agitational, uncompromising opposition. And it is incumbent upon whites to do this work, and especially white Christian men like me, as a form of atonement and repentance for the ways other white Christian men helped create this problem. We need to "come get our people."

Part of this organizing work is to help potential supporters of fascists reckon with a hard truth of building any form of just and generous common life: that is, everyone must change and in the process we must all lose something to someone at some point. This is part of what it means to live as frail, finite, and fallen creatures. Sacrifice and loss, and therefore compromise and negotiation are inevitable. The temptation and sin of the privileged and powerful is to fix the system so that they lose nothing and other always lose, no matter how hard they work. The fight is always to ensure that the loss is not born disproportionately by the poor and marginalized. And that is a Christian fight. It is part of what it means to love our neighbor.

Folded into loving our neighbor is the call to love our enemies. But Christian enemy love tends to fall into one of three traps. Either we make everyone an enemy (the sectarian temptation to denounce anyone who is not like "us"); or we make no one an enemy, denying any substantive conflicts and pretending that if we just read our Bibles and pray, things like racism and economic inequality will get better by means of some invisible hand (the temptation of sentimentalism that denies we are the hands and feet of the body of Christ); or we fail to see how enemies claim to be our friend (the temptation of naiveté that ignores questions of power). In relation to the latter trap, we must recognize that the powerful mostly refuse to recognize they are enemies to the oppressed and claim they are friends to everyone. A loving act in relation to those in power who refuse to acknowledge their oppressive action is to force those who claim to be friends to everyone (and are thereby friends to no one) to recognize the enmity between us so that issues of injustice and domination can be made visible and addressed. This involves struggle and agitation - something Christians are often reluctant to do because of a desire to appear respectable.

In place of these three traps we must learn what it means to see enemies as neighbors capable of conversion. This is simultaneously a missiological and political orientation. Agitational democratic politics is a means of "neighboring" that goes alongside actively building relationship with people we don't like or find scandalous in order to "seek the welfare of the city" (Jer 29.7) so that it displays something of what a just and generous common life might look like.

This article originally appeared at Sojourners.

Luke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. Before that he taught at King's College London. His books include: Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship & the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing. He has extensive involvement in community organizing and has worked internationally with numerous churches, mission agencies and faith-based organizations.

On Queer Anarchism: An Interview with the Pink & Black Collective

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview I had with Gywnevere, an administrator of the Facebook page Pink and Black anarchists, where we discuss her interest in anarchism, an anarchist take on the modern LGBT movement, and how people can learn more about queer anarchism.

If you can, tell us a little bit about the history of queer anarchism and how you yourself became an anarchist.

My introduction to the anarchist school of thought has come about rather recently, perhaps within the last six months I have fully come to appreciate where my beliefs lay. However, given my interest in politics, I believe it was inevitable. I grew up listening to Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh on the radio with my grandparents, often they'd discuss their feelings on it through their own lens. After 9-11 occurred, my mother joined in on politicking, and my immediate sphere of influence was cemented in as a right-wing echo chamber.

I have known that I was a transgender woman since I was old enough to create memories of the world, and as I began to critique my own beliefs and theirs it began to chip away at the prison which had been constructed around me. As I desired for other people to be free from the same cages I had to deal with, I steadily shifted towards libertarianism of the right. When Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, I viewed it as an egregious overreach of government, and quickly took to the streets in protest, gave speeches, the whole nine yards. It was during that research that I first discovered the feelings of cognitive dissonance. While pouring through the thousands of pages of the legislation, I could not verify any of the right-wing distortions about it nor any evidence that it could be anything but a blessing for thirty million people. Yet, I still swallowed the bitter pill and forged ahead - ignoring it and my own principles.

From what I have seen these last few months, the history of anarchism is a principled one. More often than the adherents do not, an ethical stance is chosen through careful consideration of the complexities of a topic until it is picked clean as though carrion beetles defleshed it themselves. Emma Goldman's explanation for why she chose to stand up for her friend Oscar Wilde when he was convicted for his sexuality in the 1900s struck the biggest chord with me, "No daring is required to protest against a great injustice." Her collection of thoughtful pieces published in 1910, "Anarchism and Other Essays," shaped the lens through which I burned away my nationalist feelings, my internalized misogyny, and my support for the prison industrial complex. It's a lens through which I must continuously burn away what society constantly heaps upon us. Beyond hearing of other names here and there, I know little of the exact history of anarchism, as often state education glosses over an individual's ties to the community, their contributions, or the individual entirely. However, I continue to add writings and facts to my knowledge daily, and I hope others will take the opportunity to do the same with me. We all must start somewhere.

In what ways do you on an individual level interact with the mainstream LGBT movement, if at all?

I believe that the biggest way in which I interact with the community is by being very vocal, proud, and unapologetically secure in who I am as a femandrogyne individual. However, many of my friends are also somewhere in the community - even prior to my own coming out. If there was one issue which would make my blood boil during a holiday with my immediate family around it was the rights for LGBTQIA+ people. I still flashback to July 4, 2012 where I yelled at my grandmother for being ignorant and stormed off to another room while being yelled after by the two reactionaries left in the room. That incident uncorked the bottle on feeling as though the ideology I was a member of was wrong and that I should begin to be extremely vocal when something was an injustice - no matter the victim. After all, at that point in time, I was simply an "ally."

These days I spend most of my time posting thoughts into the void as myself based on the identities that intersect with my own life. For the past two years or so, I've also been running a page focused on bringing positivity or select information to individuals of the LGBTQIA+ community, but with the recent election results that has been ever-so-slightly changed. Keeping up morale and sharing information, both behind the scenes and at the forefront, has been my life for the last several years as I have grown to understand myself and others.

Why would you say that'd the history of LGBT people, especially more radical instances such as Stonewall, are glossed over while simultaneously being held up as important events in US history?

I do not recall ever hearing about anyone's sexuality when studying at public school or in any community college classes I had. The first time it was ever acknowledge was in a university course on American literature where the teacher wanted to highlight the identities of the authors so that we could better understand them.

It seems likely that such information is glossed over mainly because it is viewed as trivial. As I often recall seeing in other courses, "It is an exercise better left up to the student to figure out." I do not believe that is the only reason, however, because many of our textbooks are printed with the state of Texas, my home state, in mind. The Texas State Board of Education has a longstanding history of historical revisionism, inaccuracies, and outright errors which they convince companies to publish, as they are the largest purchaser of school texts in the nation. They carry a lot of weight, thanks in part to how our society has been constructed, and as such they dictate what is emphasized, ignored, and omitted based on their own traditionalist lens. I recall having a set of books for home, a set readily available in the classroom, and a set in the back storage if either were damaged, a grand total of six textbooks, for a single English class. I never understood it, in the past.

There seems to be a lot of support for groups like HRC, which in reality is a hotbed of white gay men who aid each other (I will include the link later) to the detriment of lesbians and transgender people. Why do you suppose this is?

If I am perfectly honest, I believe it is the byproduct of a traditionalist society within which we live. The clear majority of us were indoctrinated within households that viewed the male figure as superior or dominant which arose from the major influence that Christianity has had on our country's society both past and present. Couple that view of male superiority with the white supremacy that seethes within the United States, and it gives the predominant figure which is likely to be chosen to "normalize" LGBTQIA+ people: a white gay man. It is not that other platforms which aid transgender and lesbian individuals do not exist, it is merely that the most "socially acceptable" ones as described previously bubble to the top in our social consciousness.

Are there any strategies you use to get people, especially LGBT people, to understand that it is OK for LGBT people to defend themselves from violence? As we have seen, the only acceptable LGBT person is one who sits there smiling, while the other person screams that they should die and are going to hell.

I try to engage with them both in public and in private to help them grapple with their fear of direct action or their pacifist/peaceful ways. I share the resources that I have used to help me to shape my own stances on when violence is justified or not. I believe that the only way through which we can help people overcome our natural desire to protect everyone against those who cannot fathom such altruistic behavior without incentive is directly. One-on-one. Engaging with our friends, family, or even acquaintances and getting them to a level to where they may engage with others trying to fathom the kind of brutish behavior exhibited by those with a reckless disregard for those which lay beyond their in-group.

How can people learn more about LGBT anarchism?

Reading. Seeking out information. Filling one's mind with the observations and critiques which combine ethos, pathos, and logos in powerful ways. I found that "Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire" (2013) by Deric Shannon et. al. was a deeply insightful work which helped solidify my feelings about anarchism in place. It discusses why we must protect one another within this community, and those who have yet to realize they are a part of it, with our love and our actions. "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) by Thoreau, while not particularly tied to LGBT anarchism, I believe is also a necessary read as it highlights the struggle to apply pacifism when the laws themselves are unjust and unethical. There's so much information online and elsewhere, but with this starting point I hope individuals that are just realizing that their liberty is at stake and threatened will gain as much information as they can as quickly as possible so that we may move forward together.

To Escape Trump's America, We Need to Bring the Militant Labor Tactics of 1946 Back to the Future

By lifelongwobbly.com

Back to the Future, Part 1:

The last general strike in the US was in Oakland in 1946. That year there were 6 city-wide general strikes, plus nationwide strikes in steel, coal, and rail transport. More than 5 million workers struck in the biggest strike wave of US history. So what happened? Why haven't we ever gone out like that again? Congress amended US labor law in 1947, adding massive penalties for the very tactics that had allowed strikes to spread and be successful - and the business unions accepted the new laws. In fact, they even went beyond them by voluntarily adding "no-strike clauses" to every union contract for the last 70 years, and agreeing that when they do strike in between contracts it will only be for their own wages and working conditions, not to support anybody else or to apply pressure about things happening in the broader society. When we allowed ourselves to lose our most important weapons 70 years ago, we took the first step towards Trump's America. We're stuck in the wrong timeline - if we want to get out, we have to bring the militant labor tactics of 1946 back to the future!

Back to the Future, Part 2:

The Oakland General Strike began early in the morning of December 3, 1946, when police were trying to break up a picket line of mostly female department store clerks who had been on strike since October 21 ("Back to the Future Day"). A streetcar driver saw it happening and stopped his car. This stopped all the cars
behind him. All of the passengers who were no longer going to work began immediately picketing at other businesses in Oakland, calling out those workers, and shutting down the businesses. The strike spread from there. Some important points:

1. The heroes of this story are the department store clerks who maintained an effective picket for 6 weeks, shutting down the operations of the business, refusing limitations on their ability to picket, and defending their picket when the cops were trying to break it. We need to re-learn how to organize "hard" pickets which actually disrupt commerce, and how to defend those pickets from our enemies. We also need to reject all of the limitations that courts, and the unions, will tell us we have to impose on our pickets.

2. The streetcar driver who stopped his car when he saw the cops breaking the picket deserves an honorable mention, like Peter Norman ("the white dude" at the Mexico City Olympics). He knew which side he was on, and he didn't just keep moving. He saw fellow workers under attack and he used his power as a worker to support the right side - despite the fact that the retail workers strike had no immediate tie to his own wages and working conditions. He didn't ask his union if it was OK. He didn't wait to go back to his union meeting and ask them to pass a resolution supporting the retail workers. Basically, it doesn't even matter whether he was a union member. It doesn't even matter if he abstractly thought that women should be quitting their jobs now that World War 2 was over, or if he abstractly supported Jim Crow - he supported fellow workers against the cops. Since 1947, "secondary strikes" like that have been illegal, and his union could have been attacked by the court - but the union probably would have been training him all along that he can only strike in between contracts, and definitely not for anyone else's cause. We need to reject any limitation on our ability to strike in support of fellow workers, or to strike about things beyond our own specific workplaces.

3. The passengers on his streetcar and the ones behind it also deserve credit for immediately forming mass pickets, reinforcing the retail workers' picket and also spreading throughout the city and pulling other workers out on strike. They didn't come up with this all in the moment, they learned how to do this over years of tough strikes, including the 1934 general strike in San Francisco that also shut down Oakland. Mass pickets have also been illegal since 1947, and we've lost those traditions. We urgently need to relearn them.

4. The unions didn't call the Oakland General Strike - but they sure as hell called it off, and left the retail workers alone in the cold. The general strikes that have happened in the US have almost never been called ahead of time by union. They've almost always happened by workers semi-spontaneously going on strike in solidarity with other workers, supporting the demands of the first group and adding their own. (I say "semi"-spontaneously because the working class had years of practice and preparation leading into each strike - something that's been forcibly removed from our culture over the past 70 years.) Yet by the third day of the Oakland General Strike, the local union leadership was already declaring that the strike was over and everyone except the retail workers should go back to work. As the streetcar drivers were told by their union president, " The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible … No general strike has ever yet brought success to the labor movement. " Once the retail workers were left to keep striking alone, it was only a matter of time before they were beaten and had to give up. If we're serious about reviving strikes, we need to prepare people as much as we can for how quickly the union leadership and the Democratic Party will do everything they can to prevent strikes from the start, and to get workers back to work.

Back to the Future, Part 3:

The 70th anniversary of the Oakland General Strike is coming up in three weeks, on December 3rd. As all of our movements go into overdrive, and we all start networking and holding bigger events than we're used to, we should consider holding "Spirit of '46" events across the country on December 3rd to talk about the Oakland General Strike and the relevance of their tactics for today. This is obviously coming up very soon, but it seems do-able, and if it's presented right, could pull a lot of interest. What else can we start doing to prepare for the kind of labor movement we need - the kind that is ready to stand up to the state and the capitalists? What should we think about the calls that have already started circulating for a general strike to stop Trump's inauguration?

1. The "Labor for Bernie" initiative showed the potential for a cross-union, bottom-up movement that fought for big goals, overcame the separation that is built into the labor movement, and directly challenged the right of the Democratic party and the labor bureaucracy to speak for union members or the working class . We've all just seen that electoral politics are inadequate to stop fascism - it's time for union members and supporters to build a similar movement that is based on supporting all labor action, rejecting all limits on strikes and pickets whether they come from the government or the unions themselves, making all pickets effective, and spreading strikes when they occur (through so-called "secondary" strikes and pickets) - as well as driving police out of the labor movement. This movement should organize in city-wide groups independently of any union structure, inviting all workers to be involved, and then those groups could network nationally. The groups should be open to any worker, union member or not, but should keep union and non-profit staff and and high officers out. Once they get going, it is important that they consider themselves to have all of the legitimacy they need to organize pickets or call strikes, whether through calling for mass workplace meetings to organize action or through supporting minority action - these groups will need to do this because the existing labor structures will put brakes on all action by citing their no-strike clauses and respect for labor law. It's important for these groups to have a name that people can identify with, like "Labor United for All", "Labor Against Fascism", or "One Big Union."

2. The IWW is experiencing a sudden growth spike, as most radical left groups probably are right now. In particular, the IWW's General Defense Commitee, which focuses on defense of the working class and community self-defense, is seeing a lot of interest of people wanting to start new locals. The GDC has a picket training that began with the 2005 Northwest Airlines strike, when the union was trying to tell workers to keep the pickets tame and ineffective. The training focuses on the tactics needed to hold effective, disruptive pickets and to maintain them against scabs. These tactics have ended up being very useful for community self-defense. We should try to make sure that we spread this picket training to as many of these new locals as possible, and prepare as many trainers as possible. If we're going to have the labor movement we desperately need, we're going to have to re-learn how to hold effective pickets, and how to engage in community self-defense - very, very quickly.

3. The growth that we're seeing shows that people think we have something to offer now that electoral anti-fascism is discredited. We should double down on our efforts to recruit and to integrate these new members. We also need to prove that they are right when they think we have something to offer. We need to organize boldly, which will inspire our new members to become active and take leadership, and will also inspire hundreds and thousands of more people to join.

4. We absolutely need to double down on our support for Latino workers. We need to prepare to mobilize boldly against any repression that they face, and to support them when/if they take action. They've already proven through the May Day strikes of 2005 and 2006 that they know how to organize mass industrial action better than any other group of workers in this country. We also need to emphasize our Spanish-language materials and infrastructure in an effort to make our organization a useful tool for Latino workers.

5. Millions of union members, and workers, voted for Trump. A lot of factors went into this, including massive undercurrents of hatred and bigotry, but it also seems that there was an economic element - many white workers saw him as the only program offering anything different from decades of factory closures, social cuts, and poverty with no escape. Our best bet to win them away from fascism is if we show that we have a real program to fight for, and win , a better world. If we can't do that, we won't. (The business union leadership have already thrown themselves on the mercy of the victor and declared that they're ready to work with Trump - but it's debatable whether he'll have any use for them.) We're on the verge of being in a similar situation for organizing as radicals were during Jim Crow - and we will have to organize in the same way, focusing on the needs and defense of the most oppressed and vulnerable groups of workers and forcing bigots at work to decide whether they'll side with the boss or with their co-workers. Someone can vote based on abstract bigotry and still choose to side with their flesh-and-blood co-workers against the boss that yells at both of them every day. And if they don't, they're scabs, and we'll have to treat them as such. As CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs put it in 1958, " if a white worker or group of white workers after reading and contributing to the paper as a whole finds that articles or letters expressing Negro aggressiveness on racial questions make the whole paper offensive to him, that means that it is he who is putting his prejudices on the race question before the interests of the class as a whole. He must be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary fought to a finish. "

6. It's good that people are already thinking in terms of how we can use our power at work to exert pressure on our lives outside of work. We're supposed to think that we only have power at the ballot box, every four years. It's just become much more obvious to a lot of people that we don't have any power there. We need to encourage workers to think about leveraging their power at work in new ways in every possible respect. As the old slogan goes, the National Guard can't dig coal with bayonets - if the government legislates against women's reproductive rights, it can only do so if healthcare workers accept it; if the government sends more police into schools, they will only find students to criminalize if the teachers have not gone on strike. We need to push as hard as we can to break through this limitation of self-confidence, where workers think that workplace action (if they even take it at all) can only be about their own conditions. Even the head of the Chicago Teachers' Union, one of the most confrontational and inspiring unions in the country, accepts copsin schools and does not challenge these limitations. When workers do break through on this - and they've got to, sometime, somewhere - we need to be ready to support them with everything we've got.

7. The initial discussion of a general strike points to the kind of labor movement that we've needed for a long time and we're going to desperately require now. We are entering a period where the state will bring on all ferocity against any oppositional movement. They've also made it clear that the very existence of unions is one of their targets - Reagan focused on crushing militant unions to scare the rest; the current Republican party, including Trump, want to completely abolish unions, as they basically have in Wisconsin since 2011.

8. A general strike will only ever happen over the ruins of labor law and workplace contractualism. As we saw in Wisconsin in 2011, the day after people began talking about general strike, the international unions came down hard saying that nobody in Wisconsin had the authority to call a general strike, since each union's contracts prohibited striking. Ironically, if the Republicans try to pass nationwide right-to-work laws or outlaw dues checkoff, the only way to stop it would be a general strike - but the union leadership is neither willing nor even capable of calling such a strike. At the end of the day, if we believe that workers can overcome capitalism - then we have to believe that they can overcome US labor law and workplace contractualism.

9. We will also need to be ready for minority strikes or action when and if they happen. Many workers and union members may have voted for Trump and may actually want him to take office. We still need to create a movement that encourages and supports action by any size group of workers, whether it's individual fast food workers refusing to serve cops , or groups of workers going on strike, for whatever reason, even if they aren't the entire workforce. We particularly need to support trends where workers are taking action at work over issues beyond just wages and working conditions, and to emphasize how much potential power we have if we only use it. As we all begin holding mass meetings in cities around the country and building new infrastructures, we should plan out some kind of "flying picket" infrastructure which can mobilize mass pickets in immediate defense of any minority workplace action especially.

10. And what about the ideas which have begun floating around about a general strike on January 20th to stop Trump's inauguration? I would say that we in the IWW should be cautiously optimistic, but should wait and see whether this catches on more broadly before we consider officially engaging with it - in the meantime, we should emphasize our efforts to build a sustained, pro-strike culture and infrastructure along the lines of what I've written above. I want to be clear, that I think it is absolutely correct to promote as much unrest as possible (including industrial unrest) to prevent the inauguration. If there is a lot of excitement around the country for a day, or a week, or a month of "no work, no school" to prevent the inauguration, that would be a fantastic development. There are some who think that the IWW can just ignore Trump because we do not take a stand on politicians - this is missing the point of what is happening in this country and would be a disastrous mistake. The biggest challenge towards any industrial action will be the union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO is "ready to work with Trump", and would be incapable of calling for or organizing a general strike even if they wanted to. We need to build the kind of movements which can challenge the hegemony of the business unions and call for strikes over their heads. Maybe a starting point would be agitating hospitality and restaurant workers in DC to shut down all hotels and restaurants leading up to the inauguration, or agitating media workers to refuse to broadcast anything by Trump. The main point is that there won't be one general strike that saves us and then we all go back to normal - our focus has to be recreating a culture of militant, production-stopping strikes which seek to spread through secondary strikes and mass pickets, and which take aim at all injustice in society, not just workplace issues.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion, as bad as it looks right now. One day we will raise a cooperative commonwealth from the nightmare of capitalism, and one day there won't be any more presidents to inaugurate. As surprised as we all might be to have waken up on November 9 and found ourselves hurtling towards fascism, we have to remember that sometimes we will be surprised by spontaneous outpourings of solidarity that people will show as they create new movements which leave us struggling to catch up. The protests which began the night after the election are a very encouraging step in that direction, and they still have time to spread from the street to every aspect of society.

This was originally posted at lifelongwobbly.com.

Is Communism Dead, and Can Spirituality Revive It?

By Paul Tritschler

"Every cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation."

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you he doesn't exist. This oft-quoted phrase from Baudelaire's short story, The Generous Gambler, could well apply to the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and communism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism assumed a position of unparalleled power, and its ideology became entrenched as common sense. No viable alternative exists. It might need to be tweaked here and there, but capitalism is now the only deal on the table.

Politicians of all stripes battle it out over problems that have capitalism as their source-financial failures, social inequalities, global warming, and military conflicts-but they seek solutions exclusively within the same system. Even many protest campaigns around these problems implicitly believe that capitalism-a system that reproduces itself through exploitation-can be civilised.

By contrast, in his 1846 treatise on The German Ideology, Karl Marx saw communism as a state of mind-more accurately, a revolution of the mind: a movement which searches for emancipation and truth. By testing the boundaries of reality and questioning common sense, communism becomes "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things."

For Marx, the revolutionary potential of communism resides in its revelatory status: not a blueprint for utopia but a way to explain capitalism's irresolvable conflicts and flawed moral position-a means of exposing Baudelaire's devil. It seeks to redefine the meaning of wealth, and to render the principle of caring as a global imperative in place of competition. In this sense, communism is capitalism's greatest enemy, but it's clear that this enemy must be approached with different tactics in a post-communist world. This is where spirituality comes in.

Rudolf Bahro , the German Left-Green philosopher, is perhaps the most interesting exponent of these new tactics. The motivation behind his attempted 'spiritualisation' of politics had its source in prison. Bahro's dissenting views, expressed in his book The Alternative in Eastern Europe, brought him an eight year prison sentence in East Germany, and the bible was the only book that happened to be available to him in his cell-a cynical move, perhaps, on the part of the Stasi.

He studied it whilst on hunger strike, and although he was never wholly converted to Christianity he saw its place in the world and embraced many of its qualities. His writings reveal an acute sensitivity to personal suffering and the recognition that human needs are spiritual as well as physical and social. True to its origins, therefore, communism for Bahro was above all a revolution of the mind-an awakening.

Bahro was freed and deported after serving a little over a year, thanks to a campaign in the West that had the support of such literary luminaries as Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene and Arthur Miller, as well as many New Left academics, including E.P. Thompson and Ralph Miliband. The Bahro who entered prison, however, was not the Bahro who was released; this new version of himself set out to save the world.

For Bahro, a peaceful eco-communist alternative to capitalism is both possible and essential, but the belief that capitalism offers a life that is desirable must first be overturned if this alternative is to flourish. Through a variety of psychological strategies subsumed under the rubric of 'retail therapy', capitalism promotes pseudo-individualistic lifestyles, drives the desires of the self-absorbed, and promises fulfillment from the menu of all-you-can-eat. Retail therapy locates meaning in life through clothes, cars, homes, holidays and furniture. As the name implies, it even offers a way of self repair.

Consumerism resembles a cult that uses paradoxical statements to transcend rational thought: 'we must spend our wages and leisure hours in pursuit of unnecessary things.' Were this meaningless cycle to stop, capitalism would evaporate, and in the process we might even find our true selves. As Bahro puts it, "Today we consume around ten times as much energy for a worker to be able to sit in front of the TV in the evening with his bottle of beer as was needed in the eighteenth century for Schiller to create his life work."

But the working class will not be the bearer of an alternative society, he concludes. In fact the traditional labour movement's response to the problems of industrial society narrows the space for building those alternatives. Employers and trade unions are traditional power blocs which together institutionalise and manage conflict, thereby stabilising the system. It is not just the bourgeois class but the industrial system itself which threatens our survival. Seen from this angle, class struggle is not the solution.

Instead, Bahro's vision is that of a post-industrial spirituality which represents values that are at variance with hedonistic tendencies, consumerism, and contemporary levels of acquisitiveness. He saw this transition as a peaceful process characterised by dissolution: we don't go in and disband something, he argued, we allow it to disintegrate by withdrawing our energy from the system. That's not to say that this is a wholly passive process: any strategy for non-violent social change that is interwoven with the transformation of consciousness still requires a nudge.

Bahro wanted to reclaim the language of transformative consciousness for an eco-socialist movement, and sought ways to summon the power of whole populations in pursuit of common goals. His focus was on a revolution of the mind-a radical renewal in keeping with Marx's German Ideology-but there is also evidence of a parallel to St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, with its emphasis on transfiguration and metanoia : a 'way of seeing' completely at odds with the political philosophy of possessive individualism and capitalist exploitation. In this revolutionary process he saw the potential for overcoming common obstacles to socialism such as the tendency towards competitiveness, selfishness, greed and fear.

Every major cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation, and Bahro therefore wanted movements for human development and self-realisation to combine within a political-psychological context. Moreover, he wanted to explore the possibilities for a spiritual awakening that are linked to such a movement. He saw the necessity to bring together all the amorphous groups that are concerned with emancipation and the rescue of civilisation into one coherent form-a mass social movement of cultural transformation. Crucially, this would consist of unity between the Greens and the socialists: the socialists need the Greens because survival is a precondition for them to attain their goals; and the Greens need the socialists because survival can only be ensured by dissolving the basis of monopoly competition.

Similarly, Bahro argued, Christians need socialists, because capitalism is the furthest epoch from God. The moral stand that more and more Christians are adopting on animal rights, ecological issues, the capitalist plundering of impoverished countries and the oppression of the working class is ineffective without political action. But socialists also need Christians, for some degree of religious transcendence is necessarily bound up with subjective values-something which is frequently lost in the struggle to meet the needs of the oppressed.

Bahro was not advocating that socialists convert to Christianity, but that they recognise the necessity for the re-creation of spiritual equilibrium. Socialists should be sensitive, he suggested, to the Christian precept 'Do not store up treasures on earth,' and to the fact that individuals require a basic level of security, not only in the material sense, but also in the sense of having favourable social conditions for the cultivation of their own inner development.

I was fortunate to meet and discuss these ideas with Bahro at a conference in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s, and we maintained a correspondence for some time after his return to Worms in Germany-though language difficulties rendered it short-lived. His political position revealed various hues of red and green before his life was cut short in 1997, but what remained at the heart of his philosophy was the unwavering belief that a spiritual awakening was needed to ensure the rescue of civilization. What was required, as he put it , was 'the reconstruction of God .'

Shortly before he embarked on a journey to investigate the 'alternative' community of Findhorn in the Scottish Highlands, I asked Bahro for his thoughts on the likelihood of a small country like Scotland gaining its independence and fulfilling his vision. He promptly replied that the problem is not that Scotland is too small, but that it's too big. At that time he was exploring the possibilities for 'autarkic equilibrium,' looking at what had worked in medieval forms of communalism fused with contemporary cooperative experiments and variations on the theme of syndicalism. I imagined his idea of self-sustaining communities as something akin to eco-balanced rock pools refreshed by a wider Scottish tide.

Seeing that another Scotland or another world is possible is one thing; sustaining the belief in our ability to effect that change is quite another, but that's where Bahro's ideas are so important. Faced with reversing the tide of industrialism, averting ecological catastrophe and avoiding nuclear annihilation, Bahro calls on all of us to sense and activate our own strength.

This was originally posted at Open Democracy.

Paul Tritschler is a psychology lecturer in Suffolk. Follow him on twitter @TritschlerPaul.

Gay Liberation through Socialist Revolution: A Political History of the Lavender and Red Union's Gay Communism (An Interview)

By Marquis M.

The following is an interview with Walt Senterfitt, a former member of the Lavender and Red (which was also briefly known as the Red Flag Union), in his home in Boyle Heights, LA, to see what today's revolutionaries can learn from the unique history of the Lavender and Red Union.

This interview looks at the development, history, politics, and legacy of the Lavender and Red Union, an early gay communist political organization that was based in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1977.

Regardless of the specific politics of the Lavender and Red Union (which should be seen as a product of their time and of their relationship to the rest of the mid-'70s US left), we can gain a lot from studying the experiences they made during their brief life before they decided to merge with the Spartacist League in 1977. One of the points that came up in this interview again and again was the perspective that queer people will not be able to win alone. If we want liberation, then we will need to fight together in the same struggles as all the other oppressed groups that make up the working class with us. We cannot only focus on building organizations that just address our own concerns or our own narrow community (which the Lavender and Red Union called 'sectoralism'). This lesson, and many of the other points discussed in this interview, continue to be of importance for those of us who struggle with pushing back against the liberal, reformist, and class collaborationist tendencies in our movements.

Marquis: You grew up in the south?

Walt : I grew up in the south, mostly in northern Florida in the era of de jure Jim Crow racial segregation. Being in an officially legally segregated society - schools, public facilities, neighborhoods - and my reaction against it, which was based largely on a religious impulse initially, was what initially propelled my political awakening. However, it was kind of stunted because I was a white kid in a fairly backward small Southern town without any allies or anybody much to learn from even. So I would follow things through the news, like the awakening civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s. When I began to try to reach out to young black people on the other side of town, I quickly got squelched rather vigorously by the town fathers coming down on my parents and threatening to fire them from their jobs if they didn't shut up their noisy and traitorous kid. So we worked out a compromise that I would cool it for six months in exchange for leaving home early and going to college in the north. Which I thought would be a decisive act of liberation and freedom because I would get away from a small Southern town.

And go to someplace where everything was enlightened....

Where everything was enlightened, non-racist, and kind! Well of course that also led to my political awakening at the next stage. Oh! It's not just the south! Racism is not simply a southern problem. It just has a different accent up here, and different forms. But my political activity was still within the confines largely of liberalism, but inspired by the Southern black civil rights movement and I was in fact organizing fellow university students from the north to support it, and to travel down south and participate in voter registration, and Freedom Summer, and liberation schools and things like that. And then increasingly also turning to community organizing in poor communities in northern cities. I dropped out of university without finishing. Partly over conflict over feeling impulses towards being gay but not being able to accept that yet, or not having a context, or not knowing anybody else.

You weren't in contact with any gay community?

No. Now remember this period was pre-Stonewall, we're talking early-to-middle '60s. I worked with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and a group called the Northern Student Movement in Philadelphia after I dropped out and then moved to Washington D.C., worked for the National Student Association, which was basically a confederation of student governments. Unbeknownst to me until later it turned out to have been substantially secretly funded by the CIA together with thirty or forty other cultural and educational and artistic organizations in the US as a Cold War tactic because of the US government knowing that it wanted to be able to operate in third world and left movements internationally but wouldn't be able to get any traction if it were doing that in the government's own name.

So the whole story of the Lavender and Red Union goes back to the CIA.

No, but my own history does! So I ended up accidentally coming across this information and helping to expose it, in 1966, 1967. The government was at first going to deny it, but we had enough inside information that could corroborate it. So I got a call in the middle of the night from the controller of the NSA, the person who oversaw the relationship and the funding from the CIA, and he put this guy on the phone who at least said - and this was at three o'clock in the morning - that he was Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and he told me "Young man, you've betrayed your country..."

Congratulations!

"...we have ways to do deal with people, like drafting you and sending you to the front lines of Vietnam." I did stuff like write up the story and put it in a safe deposit box and write stuff telling my parents that if something happens to me.... But fortunately it became a big enough story with national press, and then they started unraveling all these different other organizations.... So I was an embarrassment but it also gave us some protection. Anyway. Not too long after that I left the NSA and moved to - I got married - moved to San Francisco, started an alternative school, was involved in the counterculture. And other ways of, you know, the whole mid-late '60s stuff that we were going to...

So you were kind of generically political. You didn't have a particular direction.

I knew that I was committed to social justice, to building a new society, but I was not primarily political in any organized way. Then in the course of that I also began to realize that I was queer, and that ultimately my marriage was not going to be sustainable in that context, so I came out, but fairly late, in my late 20s. This was two or three years after Stonewall. Stonewall helped me come out 'cause all of a sudden - OK, here are people that I can identify with, at least the radical wing of gay liberation was something that I could identify with. So I got involved in that a little bit late. Particularly since I moved back to Washington which was a bit late, since Washington D.C. has tended to be politically behind other parts of the country. For example, when I moved back to D.C. in '72 and the next year '73, I hooked up with a group of people and we wanted to propose the first gay pride in Washington, and we got shot down violently by the nascent gay community - "Oh no! You'll turn everybody against us! It will set us back for two years!" - just to have an open gay pride, which was already happening in New York, San Francisco, LA. So Washington was a few years later.

Had you been to a gay pride march before then?

No. I left San Francisco and I came out, and had been dealing with it pretty much on a personal level. So when I got to D.C. I was involved at the gay community level in terms of institution building, like helped to start a counseling center that was peer-based and sort of liberatory-based, not psychologically-based, started an alternative to bars for people that didn't drink or didn't like the atmosphere of bars to have social dances and interaction, started a VD clinic which later grew into a health clinic for gay men and ultimately for lesbian women.

That's a lot of things to start. Seems like you were very active.

Yeah, I was active. I was politically involved with what was left of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had already kind of gone rapidly up and down in DC. We fought things like the discriminatory and racist behavior of the gay bars. They would triple card black gay men in the city, or they would have a quota that when a bar got up to more than 10 or 15 percent black patrons, then they would start discouraging any more coming in on the theory that too many black people would discourage white patrons from coming. So we were fighting racism within the gay community, or within the institutions that serve the gay community. And with the people I was organizing with and with my own experience, looking back over the last few years, we became unhappy with this community building counterculture method of social change, and also with liberal pressure group politics for democratic rights.

Why were you unhappy with this? What did you see was limiting yourselves?

We weren't getting anywhere. Except short-term and limited demands. And the more you got involved and the more you opened your eyes, you saw that it was an interconnected system of exploitation and oppression, not just a question of a bad policy of the government, or incomplete or imperfect democracy, or not giving enough rights or equality to one group or another. It was a little inchoate but it was largely frustration with a lack of vision. I also personally felt frustrated with the New Left. We were basically informed by the New Left, and one of the things that was typical of the New Left is the old left is bad. They were wrong. That's associated with the Soviet Union. Nobody wants anything to do with them. At best they're stodgy, conservative, bureaucratic.... But the part that was frustrating me about this was that we didn't have anything to learn from the people who came before us. So frustration, or the New Left running its course, led to a number of people who were looking for a chance to study history and a chance to find theory that made sense, that would help explain the world, system, capitalism. At the same time there were beginning to be these generally Maoist pre-party formations, they called themselves - collectives that were aspiring to become part of the new communist movement, towards building a new party.

You mean like Revolutionary Union?

Yeah. Revolutionary Union, October League. Some of them had been around before, like the Progressive Labor Party. The Communist Workers' Party. And then some of the Trotskyist movement, which had been pretty much off to the side, but present, started coming in and intervening with the New Left in one way or another. So anyways, we found a woman who is now identified as a Maoist, who was a former Communist Party leader who had come down from New York to D.C. in the late '30s, early '40s. She agreed to teach the rest of us Marxism. So we collectively studied. We had a study group complex, as we called it, and there were 125 of us in 10 different groups of 12. So I got involved, while continuing the kind of the things that I've described before, in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought - MLM-T3. On the one hand it was very exciting and it was like the first time I had read or study Marxism, other than reading the Communist Manifesto when I was a college freshman. This was like turning on the lights in a tunnel. It was like, Wow! Oh, yeah! OK! Class struggle! Working class! Capital! Fundamental contradiction! Exploitation! Class struggle driving motor force of history! Having that framework, rather belatedly, you know, because I was thirty years old or something coming to this, was exciting. We started having this trouble though, because I brought up homosexuality in the study group complex, and this woman said "No, we can discuss it, but the line's going to be unless you can show me different, unless you can show me the material basis for homosexuality and it's theoretical contribution to revolutionary struggle or the working class, you just basically need to know what's wrong with it. That it's like bourgeois...."

Bourgeois decadence?

Yeah... a symptom of bourgeois decadence. She wasn't so overtly homophobic. It was polite and soft in the language, but that was basically the line. It basically was the Chinese Communist Party's line. That this is one of the many deviations of human behavior that will disappear with socialism. I essentially got marginalized by this MLM-T3 study group complex. They didn't kick me out because I had some friends who respected me and who would have refused to allow that. But I saw that I was an uncomfortable minority. It made me think back to when I was a twelve year old boy in segregation Florida and there was nobody else there. So I started questioning. These people may have turned on the lights in the tunnel, but they sure do put blinders on. There's something wrong with this Stalinist-Maoist version of Marxism. And also, I wanted to be queer. A queer communist. A queer Marxist.

So through that study group you became Marxist.

Yes.

But you realized, "I am Marxist, but not this Marxism."

Yeah. So I started looking around and I found this little ad in a national gay paper that was about two lines at the bottom that said "Gay Liberation through socialist revolution!" I said, "What! Did I read that right? They sound like my kind of people!" So I wrote them from DC. They had just gotten founded about this time, '74 or early '75. In between my two years of nursing school, which is what I was doing my last few years in DC, I drove out here to LA to meet them to see what they were like. So I met them and was reasonably impressed, although they were awfully small. There were three to five of them total. I had discussions, and then I went back to DC and I started a little DC gay socialist study group that was using a kind of edited version of that same curriculum of this other study group complex, a little of the Mao and adding in a little Trotsky. Basically it was an introduction to Marxism. I wanted to recruit some other queers to Marxism so that I wouldn't be the only one. I also tried horizontal recruitment, as they called it - from the straight ones. So that went OK. One person ended up later moving with me to LA to join the L&RU and a couple others remained sympathizers. But I stayed in touch by correspondence with the people out here, the L&RU, and invited them to come to DC. We did a forum for this left milieu called 'Gay liberation through socialist revolution'. Later through struggle with the Spartacist League we dropped that slogan, but at the time it was cutting edge; it was the main slogan of the L&RU and of course it drove most people in the liberal and sectoralist queer community crazy - "What are you talking about socialist revolution, we just want equal rights". But we got 125 people to come out to that in DC, including some of the Maoists who spoke up and gave their line, but.... Since I got my nursing degree I came out here to join them.

So how did those three or five people in L.A come together?

I don't know exactly because I wasn't here and I don't remember the stories. I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. Because the Maoist milieu dominated the new left decomposition products of that time, and if you were a radical revolutionary anti-capitalist, that was the main game in town, with the Trotskyists having a little left field pocket, and then the anarchists - I don't know about LA, but they weren't a factor in DC. So then in '76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to 11. So we had brought in more people, including people that were less politically experienced. But there were some core politics, like we believed in a working class orientation, including implantation of cadre in industry and work in trade unions.

Can you explain what the implantation of cadre in industry means?

It's that you want to recruit people from the working class, but you also wanted to send people who may be from a petite bourgeois or working class background, but who became won to communism, into industry or into strategic places where they could help organize other workers or recruit from working class struggles and to work in the trade union movement. So out of our 11 we had two in communications, who were telephone workers and in the communication workers union, and me in health care, joining the health care workers union. We actually talked about that within the L&RU - you notice we weren't just talking queer politics, we were also trying to do our bit to help build a revolutionary working class movement. That's a part of the problem that we began to see here pretty soon. First of all, 11 is awful small, being out queer. And so being a gay liberation communist organization was not particularly helpful in organizing a revolutionary caucus within the communication workers union, or the nurses.

Did the organization actually send people into these workplaces to organize? You said that was a strategy.

Yeah. At least one of the communication workers was sent in. The other may have been their to start with, but he was there in part with the idea of being an organizer within. And before we later moved on into the Spartacist League, we were training a couple or three other people for jobs for implantation. Apprenticeships, and skilled trades for example, and electrician, transport workers. We were aiming for somebody in the ports. Didn't get that far, though.

So the goal then in doing this workplace organizing, would not be to, say, organize a queer caucus in the health care workers union.

No. It wasn't. Not at that time. And it was also contrary to our politics.

Why was that?

Well, we were saying that the role of queers in the maintenance of American capitalism is not strategic in the same way that, particularly black people - and later other people of color - and women is. That American capitalism and the domination of the American ruling class is integrally dependent on maintaining the special oppression of blacks, in particular, and also increasingly Latinos and other immigrant forces, and women. And that gay people are probably not going to find, or likely to find, full democratic rights without the leadership of a radical or revolutionary movement. But it's conceivable that they could. And I think that in the outcome of the last few years you can kind of see that it's conceivable that the nominal granting of democratic rights can happen within the structure of capitalism. So we were saying that we wanted to organize around the things that were strategic and fundamental while also we fought for women's liberation - and we sort of saw the queer question as in some ways integrally related to that - and for full democratic rights for everybody, that we have to make a point of fighting for everybody, even unpopular or small minorities, whether strategic or not. Though we didn't organize gay caucuses in our trade union work, we did raise the demand that unions should support full democratic rights and oppose discrimination against LGBT people. That way, we established a track record of the importance of the unions and the working class fighting to defend gay people when under attack, as with all marginalized groups. So we were in a position to quickly mobilize support when pogrom-type attacks came, as later happened during the hysteria around AIDS.

Earlier you were talking about whether it was possible to realize full democratic rights under capitalism. I think you were saying that at least for the United States.

It's theoretically possible to do that.

But it's not possible to do that for, say, black people, because capitalism, in the US, is formulated on the foundation of racism. But you said that for queer people, it's more of an... open question?

Yeah. I would say, once again I personally don't see it fully, but it's possible to extend democratic rights more and more and more on things like marriage, on things like serving in the military. They could also do, although they haven't yet, on nondiscrimination in the workplace, or nondiscrimination in housing. All these are aspects of full democratic rights. They can grant that without threatening hegemony, rule, power, including power to exploit the working class as a whole.

In some of Lavender and Red's writing about their goals or demands for sexuality and for queer struggle, they talked about a vision of being able to actually move beyond gender distinctions entirely, and not have - obviously - straight, gay, bisexual; not have masculine/feminine gender roles, not being assigned male and female. Is that something beyond democratic rights, are those things that you think can be achieved under capitalism?

No, that's beyond democratic rights. I think that's part of what that ultimately needs the socialist revolution. But I think that's integrally related to, and you can contextualize it within, the "woman question", in the traditional Marxist terminology. In terms of the elimination of patriarchy. I think retrospectively we could have gone beyond this to expand the potential contribution of queerness. But it's still a terrain that was opened up. I mean we want to be able to, for example, socialize reproduction of labor to create freedom from those traditional sex roles, including forms of sexual partnering. So I would say that's tied to to the original liberatory vision of Marxism. And we were certainly into extrapolating on that, and talking about that, and envisioning and imagining, but on the other hand we're not utopians. We're saying you don't get these things just by imagining them, you get them by working to change the material bases and the structure of capitalism and class rule.

You saw that struggle for liberated gender and sexuality as being part of what you called the "women question", and also that's clearly part of the gay liberation struggle. So how did you separate out the gay question from women's liberation struggles and patriarchy, and separate it as something that was not strategic?

Well, by saying not strategic doesn't mean it's unimportant. But because you were asking me initially around caucuses and about how you would organize caucuses. And it gets back also to sectoralism. To the extent that we sort of made a hard line about this, it was because we were fighting against sectoralism, which we felt is really going to weaken and divert the movement, or building a powerful unified working class movement that can ultimately smash capitalism, and the solidarity necessary to do it. With sectoralism, the tendency is that it ends up focusing more and more on the particular gains and demands and organizing increasingly narrowly around those, and often then it leads to, as we can see time and time again, to bending away from a revolutionary purpose by making alliances and concessions with capitalist forces, particularly liberals, saying "Oh, you support us on this so we won't challenge your basic power." At it's worst sectoralism can lead to support for fascism. For a very authoritarian form of capitalist state as long as you got your crumbs, or your particular narrow interests were protected. So we were very motivated by fighting against sectoralism. We were talking in terms of how you organize the fight, and particularly when there's a justification for separate forms of organization. And that wouldn't necessarily be hard and fast for all time. For us, for a caucus in the health care workers union, or the communication workers union, it was much more important to have a revolutionary or a class struggle trade unionist perspective that we were uniting all people around, as opposed to prioritizing a gay caucus, or a series of caucuses that might be parallel, like a gay caucus, and a women's caucus, and a Latino caucus, and a this and that caucus. At another time or with a more "advanced" nature of the struggle, you might have some of these different caucuses, all of which were revolutionary and class struggle, and were united at the same time.

But going into an industry, the first thing you do would not be going to find the other queer people there.

Yeah. Right. So, since we're on the labor thing, I had gotten involved in the trade union struggle struggle activism at Kaiser here in LA as a nurse. I had been involved in the new RN union, including pushing the contract negotiations in the most militant direction I could, including some democratic rights demands, including for queer people, and for the right for Filipinos to speak their language - they had a rule that you couldn't speak non-English in the hospital even in off-duty areas. And then a strike was coming up from the "non-professional" workers - the vocational nurses, and the nurse's aides, and the housekeepers, and the dietitians. And so the question was, what are the RNs going to do?, because we were in a different union than the majority of the workers. The perspective of the union leaders was, "We will keep working. But we will work to rule. We won't do other workers' jobs. But we will cross picket lines and come into work to take care of patients because that's our highest duty and blah blah blah." I argued as a class struggle trade unionist, no, picket line means don't cross, working class solidarity is an important principle that we must - in the case of the US - reestablish as inviolate, and furthermore practically for all of you worrying about the patients, if we have a solid strike Kaiser will be much more likely to settle then if we do this piecemeal work-to-rule shit. I was putting this forward as the queer, and also the commie. I put forward a position that no, we need to commit, we need to take a vote to not cross the picket line. I won that argument, and Kaiser settled the strike the next day, without even actually having gone out on strike. That was an example - a small one - of the kind of trade union work and class struggle intervention into a workplace that we tried to do.

Is that part of the reason why you thought it was a necessity to go beyond just being a small gay socialist organization, so you could include people like your coworkers? Because you saw it as necessary to organize there, in the hospital, as working class people, and that being working class people was the primary point of unity in the workplace?

I think so. Plus we needed size and you've got to open it up and have it on a different basis if you're going to recruit size. We weren't exactly making headway recruiting out of the gay political organizations.

Why? Why do you think that was?

'Cause we were commies. I mean 'cause people were saying, "You're unpopular. I'm a pro-capitalist queer. I want to succeed. I just want the right to make it in this society free from discrimination." Or they'd say "Oh, my main problem is not as a worker, my struggle is against patriarchy and male bosses." We were increasingly seeing we were gonna be stuck in a niche that is not exactly a springboard to being part of a movement for power, as long as we were just isolated as a small queer communist organization. That's just setting aside the question whether we were effective or not in our organizing. But just by definition we were narrowing ourself to this little piece, whereas our basic idea - the more we thought about it, and the more we studied broader history and movements - was that we needed to build a party. That was our belief as people being won to Leninism. That we needed to build a vanguard or a disciplined democratic centralist party. So we needed to find somebody else to hook up with.

Did you focus on trying to win the gay community over to socialist politics?

We tried. But first of all this history is pretty short. We're talking here just a matter of three, four years maximum before we abandoned that narrow existence. We went to gay pride. We leafleted. We put out a newspaper. We intersected issues in the gay community like the Gay and Lesbian Center strike. We were active in a campaign to boycott some big bar in West Hollywood because of it's anti-black discriminatory behaviors, just like in Washington. And we would try to organize queer contingents in anti-war and Chilean solidarity demos or actions. We did those kinds of things that would be trying to attract attention. Although then increasingly we focused more on study to try to figure out where to go next. So we took a lot of time reading.

What were some of the challenges that Lavender and Red brought to the LA gay movement?

We basically criticized saying capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Capitalism cannot be reformed. We're not the only ones in a shaky boat here. That it's all of us or none. There's other oppressed groups and if we don't express and fight for solidarity with your working class fellow gays and lesbians, who are also maybe Latina, and maybe also black, then that even more bluntly poses, well, are you going to have freedom as a black sissy queer without also challenging racism? Without also challenging sex roles and patriarchy? So you put that out there continuously.

So pointing out that actually, despite who the leadership of these liberal gay organizations might be, the vast majority of the queer community was in fact the working class, was in fact not white. And so by being so narrowly focused, they were leaving most people behind.

Yeah. Without fighting the other sources of the oppression of our community.

What were some of the challenges that you brought to left organizations around Los Angeles?

Why are you all so backward? Defending the worst in bourgeois society or Stalinism?

Did you have conflicts?

Well, we had arguments. We would often be shown the door. We would go to meetings that were run by these Maoist organizations or popular front coalitions and speak up, including queer demands or just speaking as out queer communists, and sometimes we'd get thrown out, shown the door by the security squads. You know, they said "You're being provocateurs", or sometimes we'd be police-baited, or disunity-baited, or, in a couple cases, "Get out of here faggots - will the security show them the door". Twice, that I went to.

Despite the rejection that Lavender and Red got from the established Maoist left, you still remained very committed to the idea that what queer people needed was socialist revolution.

Yeah. We thought these weren't really socialists. They were corrupter socialists, this tradition. Also things were beginning to change. I mean, we were having some impact - not just us, other people. I mean these people were getting a bit embarrassed because they were trying to recruit people too, from a broader perspective, like ex-liberals or still liberals, and they were getting uncomfortable with this. We were also suspicious, though, because then people began to switch, including some of the Trotskyist groups, like not only the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], but Workers' World. We would point out the hypocrisy of these groups that a few years ago wouldn't talk about queer people, and now they didn't come out with some analysis admitting how come they were wrong and why they changed, they just suddenly started being friendly and welcoming and adding a few token gay demands to their kitchen sink demand list. We were telling other gay people, don't be fooled by this kind of pandering. Ask for their analysis. Where's their strategy. Where's their program. And, most fundamentally, do they have a program for overthrowing capitalism.

Seeing the class contradiction, seeing the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class as being the crucial linchpin, is that perspective what made Lavender and Red realize it was necessary to not just organize gay people, not just organize working class gay people, but also to be together with anti-racist and feminist, and anti-imperialist struggles?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You talked about how your perspective on feminism was that it needed to be working class feminism. And you came into some debates about that with feminist groups during the strike at the Gay Community Services Center, which was one of the first established gay social service organizations, and which ended up getting a lot of funding....

This was actually before I moved out from DC, so I just know this second hand. But the workers attempted to organize a union because there were wholesale and arbitrary firings. And we supported those workers, and to some extent we might have implanted the idea that you need a union, you need to organize and negotiate as workers with the management for wages, working conditions, and against arbitrary firings.

One account I was reading basically said that the Lavender and Red Union were the people who came to the workers and said, "You should go on strike", and that idea won out, but there is one quote from one of the workers who was speaking against Lavender and Red's proposal, saying "This is not a labor issue. Our fight is about lesbian feminism versus male dominated hierarchy." It seems Lavender and Red's position was that actually workers being fired for organizing against their boss is probably a labor issue.

Yes! I think so. That's not to deny, and we didn't at the time, that it's not also a feminist issue.

So how did that play out in that strike?

As I recall the workers lost, but our position got a substantial amount of respect. But there was some lingering disagreement, sort of like markers were cast down: OK, this is how they see it, this is how we see it. But it did raise the issue - for some people for the first time - that even in the nonprofit, NGO, social services sector, there are labor issues. That because we're a queer organization does not suddenly resolve capitalism or resolve the tendency of bosses and managers to exploit, and abuse, and mistreat workers. That workers have a right to organize. And I think we had some modest success in at least instilling these basic principles which we were fighting for.

How did Lavender and Red see this NGO-ization of the early gay movement affecting things and what was your position on it?

It hadn't really happened yet enough for us to take it up as that issue specifically, except in specific concrete cases like this one. We saw that strike as an example of that, that a voluntary organization becomes an institution. We didn't foresee that it was going to become a tidal wave, or the degree to which it became the dominant mode.

Lavender and Red's existence is very interesting because it was very contradictory in the sense that this group formed that saw there was no place for queer struggle in the revolutionary left, and then at same had a political understanding that there wass no place for queer struggle by itself. And so I guess Lavender and Red probably saw its own existence as something of a failure.

Well, yeah, it certainly was contradictory from the start. That contradiction was embedded in it. But I would say that's not necessarily a failure, to have then gone through and transformed ourselves, and whoever else we influenced, with a vision that was not only transformative but transitional to a different perspective. And we probably played a small role in helping to transform at least a corner of the left. I would say that we also, we and other people who came along after us or in parallel, did have struggles within the left to clarify, or rectify, or challenge leftover or former positions. And a lot of these contradictions still.... Well, I started to say still exist but....

But for the contradictions to exist in the left, the left would need to still exist.

Yeah, that's why I sort of backed off. No, the thing that I'm saying that still exists, because I saw it again in Act Up twenty years later, was the fight against - in less explicitly political terms most of the time - a sectoralist, single-issue approach versus any solidarity, integrated struggle, and anti-capitalist perspective. And that has existed in different movements in the queer community as well.

So this approach against having a focus on just this one oppressed sector, and instead organizing in the united working class struggle with other oppressed groups - that's a perspective saying that revolutionary political organizations shouldn't be based only in one oppressed group. But is it a perspective saying that social movement groups shouldn't be only based in one community as well?

I personally wouldn't say that. I would say that there are rules for mass movements that are based in one sector, but there's always going to be the danger of that bending towards class collaborationism and accommodation with capitalism unless there's some countervailing active tendency. So I think, like your Chilean comrade was saying in that meeting a couple weeks ago, about there being different sectors of the popular movement, but then needing to have a party, a political organization, a formation, a structure, by which the unity of the struggles and the cross-fertilization and the critique and challenging takes place within the popular movement sectors. So I would say that I can certainly see - first of all, it's going to happen whether I or any other revolutionary approves of it - but I can see that it's not necessarily something to always to be fought and polemicized against, but to maybe be intervened within with a unified revolutionary perspective, and to have some way to link these together. And at times then it may outlive its usefulness. You could actually see if it's objectively becoming more of an obstacle in it's sectoral boundaries than it is a benefit in its mass mobilization potential.

Tell me a little bit about the transformation of the Lavender and Red Union. You said that after this period of intense activity, there was then a period of intense political study, saying "OK we've been doing this work in the left, in the gay community, where are we going?"

Right. Part of it was since we were coming out of a Maoist milieu, even though we weren't splitting from any explicit organizational connection, we felt like we needed to decide between the original Bolshevik vision of global international revolution, or as Trtosky concretizes, permanent revolution, versus the Stalinist/Maoist conception of socialism in one country, that, among other things led to accommodations with the...

National bourgeoisie.

National and international bourgeoisie. I mean, this was also Nixon in China time, you know. That shook up a whole lot of people in the Maoist left milieu - "What the fuck is he doing? The butcher of Vietnam being welcomed to Beijing!" That was the first big study. And so we came up with a document rejecting socialism in one country. So then we decided, OK we're basically committed to the Trotskyist tradition, so, which one?

It may seem interesting to someone that a gay communist organization would spend so much time studying the question of socialism in one country instead of spending that time studying sexuality and gender.

Well we saw ourselves as a part of - or wanted to be a part of - the global communist movement for revolution. And you can't just study one piece of that. You've got to try to find the central dividing lines or questions. That's the one that we encountered.

And it had a lot of importance in the context that you were in at that time.

Yeah, right now it might seem arcane and esoteric, but I think in the context why we did that instead of sexuality is not so hard to understand, because we were gay communists. Or gay revolutionaries. So he needed to study and sort ourselves out according to the key revolutionary questions that were facing us, as well as then we would expect to dialogue and counter with any putative partners about how they related to queerness and sexuality.

Basically at that point you're just choosing between Stalinism and Maoism and Trotskyism.

Yeah. This was a two stage process. The first was to choose Trotskyism and then to move to find out what form of Trotskyism. Then that requires a study of the Russian question. Is the Soviet Union a degenerated workers' state, or is it state capitalist, or bureaucratic collectivist? Once again a question that seems far removed from queer liberation, and I tell you people that we talked to about this said "Are you guys crazy?" Then somebody wrote a little headline on a story about the fusion of the Red Flag Union - as the Lavender and Red Union was known at that time - with the Spartacist League as "The fruits merge with the nuts".

After the Lavender and Red Union began studying the Russian question, there were a number of parties that came trying to....

Trying to pitch their version to us. We talked to the SWP, we talked maybe briefly to Workers World, although by that time nobody much had much respect for them; they had already gone over to Kim Il Sung as an exemplar of the revolution. Though maybe that came a little later. And the International Socialists [IS], and the RSL [Revolutionary Socialist League], which had been kind of a left split from the IS. We did talk to the Freedom Socialist Party too. They were the ones that were articulating the vision of socialist feminism. But it pretty much came down to between the Spartacist League and the Revolutionary Socialist League. It ended up being a twelve-three split. Twelve of us joined the Sparatacist League and three joined the RSL. It was partly a question of the way you came down on the Russia question. But it was also partly a question of style, temperament, and bent thing. The RSL was a little more loose, not such hard democratic centralist in their style. Right after the merger we were all in LA, and the Spartacist League was saying "OK, we're a national and international tendency, so you can't all stay in LA because we want you to spread out, so where are you going to go?" And some of us went to Detroit. Partly because the auto industry was hiring again. So there was going to be an opportunity of implanting a bunch of people in the auto industry after a period of stagnation and shrinking. As far as I know those three people who went with the RSL stayed in LA. The SL fraction split - a couple stayed here, some went to Detroit, Boston, Chicago, New York.

So the Lavender and Red Union mostly joined the Spartacist League, and the Spartacist League allowed you to filter out across the country. So what happened next? What was the legacy that you saw the Lavender and Red Union having within further organizing and militancy?

I think that one theme of this discussion is that we felt like we were able to express our deeper or broader political commitments through our involvement in a more comprehensive national and international revolutionary organization. To that extent I think we felt like it was successful for us as individuals and for the continuity of the political work or the political vision that we had. Later the SL certainly got more involved in queer struggle, even during the time that I was still there, which I was there for ten years. Like that case in Chicago. We were explicitly defending and mobilizing and getting labor union locals to defend a gay pride march in Chicago from a Nazi attack. And most of the rest of the left eschewed or shied away from that. The most they would do was say, "Oh, let's have a rally to protest the horror of the idea of the Nazis." And we're saying "Fuck that namby-pamby liberal-ass shit, let's stop them from coming here." Lavender and Red Union people had different skills. Some people continued to work in the communication workers' union, for example, only in a different city. Some people found skills as internal organizers, apparatus people. I worked in both health care and and in these anti-fascist mobilizations, and in the legal and political defense work. People went through with apprenticeships and were implanted into industry and industrial fractions. At that level, I would say that we also were able to bring the particular knowledge and skills of the queer community where there were opportunities to intersect, like with the anti-fascist organizing, and later in the AIDS movement, including infusing in the party - before the Spartacist League got totally isolated - and the other forces it it influenced in Europe, and Mexico, South Africa, Poland, Russia, with its commitment to queer liberation, queer rights as a part of a comprehensive communist party. That we brought that, our tradition and our personal histories into the broader life of this broader political organization; I think that had an impact.

You feel that the Lavender and Red Union was able to spread a bigger change to the rest of the left.

Yeah.

And so then you left after ten years.

Largely I burned out and just needed to take a few years off. But I was also beginning to question the continued relevance of the Spartacist League's fairly narrow application of Trotskyism and democratic centralism. Because I feel like the farther you get away from having a history of active involvement in leadership in mass workers' struggles, the more distorted, precious, esoteric, and just quirky the idea of embodying this tradition becomes. My own politics now, I would say I define myself as an anti-capitalist revolutionary, and sometimes I say I'm a communist. I mean readily I'll say that, it's just not always appropriate. But I'm not affiliated with any particular political organization or sectarian tradition. I'm still influenced by the Trotskyist tradition of Marxism more than any other single tradition, but I believe in, and I'm open to, more eclectic revolutionary anti-capitalist movement building. So there's this organization COiL [Communities Organizing in Liberation] that I've been an associate member of, and I'm a member of this Ultra-red political sound art collective that's international in three countries, and largely involved in trying to build a mass movement of tenants for housing justice, connected to the other struggles against capitalism that people in LA are engaged in right now.

You were involved in the AIDS movement after you left the Spartacist League.

I was. And I went back to school, got graduate degrees, and then AIDS kind of happened. So that's where I worked. I was involved in Act Up, and more broadly in pushing things within the AIDS movement that came out of that tradition that I've been a part of. Which is that an injury to one is an injury to all, that struggles against capitalism, against all forms of oppression, are indivisible. That you've got to solve the AIDS crisis with people who are also poor, black, trans, living in under-resourced countries, and that therefore the struggle has to be reflective of, or address, or connected to, struggles against all forms of oppression. And I've similarly found myself oppositional in many cases to people who said "No, the emphasis has just got to be on getting resources and focusing the attention of the system to solve this one crisis."

Any concluding wisdom on the lessons of the Lavender and Red Union?

Talking indirectly to the Turkish comrades, one of the things that we were attracted to from the Lavender and Red Union in the Spartacist League, is that the Spartacist League was committed to internationalism in an active way. Not just solidarity. But trying to found, or bond with, or establish relationships with revolutionary groups in other non-US countries. And that the US left should subordinate itself to an international revolutionary collective process, at least in ideal, and move in practical concrete steps. I still believe that.

From Solidarity to Trump: White Working-Class Culture in the Rust Belt

By Michael McQuarrie

Before embarking on my current career, I worked as a labor organizer, mostly in West Virginia and Ohio. In the course of doing that work, I probably did two thousand "housevisits" with people I was attempting to organize. The purpose of these meetings was to understand people's motivations and interests in order to assess how they would vote in a union recognition election (as the union president once said to the organizers: "I don't care if you lose, I care if you can't count") and assess their leadership potential for either the union's organizing committee or for management's anti-union efforts.

The work entailed a never-ending confrontation with the slow social death of a region. Proud people-who once possessed the social honor that came with hard work, supporting a family, and meeting one's civic responsibilities-were confronting the fact that their skills, their values, and their mores were not only no longer valued, but had become an object of ridicule. This is on my mind these days as I look at my RSS feed, awash as it is in horror that populist revolt, which has already claimed Brexit, Poland, and Austria, will soon claim the American presidency.

I sympathized, and I understood the people I visited. Not all of it, of course; not the racism, misogyny, or jingoism-all often coded in the language of merit and worthiness. What was refreshing about it was that it amounted to a rejection of the material calculus that dominates in so much of our political culture and in academic theories of action. In school I learned that politics was about delivering material incentives to people in order to win their support. Democrats win because they deliver the welfare state. When they vote for Republicans, people are being fundamentally stupid in a way that warrants intrepid journalistic explorations of how it is that people can have motivations they do (what's the matter with Kansas?). But of course, Republicans have much to offer too: assertive nationalism, moral righteousness, and validations of white privilege and heteronormativity, to name a few.

The working class of the Rust Belt has been in its death throes for decades. Deindustrialization first began to take hold with the "Southern Strategy" of American manufacturers who moved to the southern United States where "right to work" laws ensure an environment that is hostile to unions. But Japanese competition accelerated the problem. Then there was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who abandoned the working-class base of the party in his pursuit of free trade agreements. Companies received tax breaks for moving jobs overseas. Then there were the tax preferences for financial investment over manufacturing investment, practically guaranteeing that money would flow out of the industrial economy. In a valiant defense of their social order, workers in Youngstown and Wheeling tried to stem the tide by purchasing their plants and hoping that they would remain viable if only profit could be subordinated as a motive. The plants closed anyway.

Wages stagnated and even shrank for many. It was open season on unions not just because of deindustrialization, but aggressive union-busting. Today, the United Mine Workers, which once had 800,000 members and the fortitude to strike in the middle of World War Two, now has 60,000 members. My partner, also a former union organizer, recalls the elderly retired miner she met on a housevisit who bragged about happily paying union assessments to cover John L. Lewis's legal fees when Roosevelt had him thrown in jail. Lewis, unlike many labor leaders today, was happy to fight a losing battle in the name of a principled defense of working-class autonomy and dignity. His combativeness earned loyalty. But West Virginia workers don't have unions anymore to help them fight the decline of their communities.

With income stagnation the norm in the 1990s and 2000s, Democratic policy often focused on helping people maintain their standard of living through the possession of assets. Policy encouraged homeownership and investment in securities. Predictably, people lost their pensions or retirement savings in the tech bubble, and then lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis. The Democratic President, Barack Obama, chose to bail out bondholders while leaving homeowners to rot. He then pursued more free trade policies, expanding the number of countries that American workers would have to compete with. Cities like Cleveland had a windfall in their stock of postindustrial porn. In addition to rusting plants they now had naked and rotting houses. Suburban houses lost as much as 75% of their value in postindustrial Ohio. They were never worth anything to start with in West Virginia. Since that time, the problems of disinvesment and unemployment have been compounded by drug addiction. These are problems that, thanks to scholars like William Julius Wilson, we once associated with the urban black working class. They are now the problems of white, small-town America too. It turns out race isn't the relevant variable for explaining the crisis of the family.

Young people are rare in many of these communities. Nursing homes have replaced mines and mills. Working as a nurse's aide is a young person's work, but not in this part of the country, especially in rural areas. The nursing homes I encountered were staffed by women who went back to work when their partner lost his job as a miner or a steelworker. Back then it wasn't surprising to encounter a forty year-old nurses' aide working two jobs, "one for the bills and one for health insurance." Not only is the structural decay of towns a constant reminder of the demise of a way of life, but the decay of the people themselves is as well. It is hard to sustain optimism when the young people most imbued with the characteristic are gone.

Men lose their breadwinning jobs, making the justification for their authority in the household precarious. Women return to work. I was organizing at a moment when women carried with them an attitude towards bosses and unions that their husbands had learned in decades of struggle in their workplaces. This wasn't all good, workers had plenty of fights with their union representatives too. But it did sustain a culture of combativeness and solidarity that was possible to transfer into healthcare, with modifications, of course. Patients had a different significance for healthcare workers than rivets did for autoworkers. Healthcare workers wanted to use unions to defend their patients against the depredations of the profit motive, though they probably didn't mind the health insurance and wages they won in the name of patient care. As for the men, pride and combativeness can easily become authoritarianism and misogyny when they're dependent on a female breadwinner. A shibboleth in the local I worked for recounts ex-UMW members opposing the unionization of their wives and girlfriends: "We know that if you teach them to fight the boss at work, they'll know how to fight the boss at home," they said.

In order to stave off the indignity of dependence on their wives and girlfriends, some men would go to extreme lengths that illustrate the value of white working-class identity for people who haven't known anything else. I'll never forget the autoworker I encountered on a housevisit to his wife, a nurse at a local hospital. He liked unions and what they stood for. He told me about the notorious Lordstown Strike against GM in 1971. He participated in the torching of a motel that was housing strikebreakers. He didn't seem to regret it. When I met him he was still working as an autoworker. His UAW contract meant he could bid on jobs in other plants with seniority rights. Laid off at Lordstown, three times per week he would carpool with friends for the five-hour drive to another plant in order to maintain his income and, one had the sense, his working-class identity. Other men figured out that staying at home and maintaining their income meant a switch to healthcare and nursing, but that work didn't confer status in the same way as manufacturing work did, it was "women's work." A Youngstown-area hospital I was organizing had a huge number of male nurses (nationally, about 12% of nurses are men, in Youngstown back then it was more like 25%). Obviously for them, the money was worth more than working-class pride.

The serial destruction that has faced the Rust Belt has not occurred without a struggle. "Fighting the good fight" was extremely important to many Rust Belt workers, as if it were a matter of social honor and recognition. And fight they did, often enough anyway. Why did they fight? Was it for material gains as so many assume? Sometimes. There is always the nurse that will throw some Randian entrepreneurial freedom stuff at you (workers read too), but that particular ideology wasn't that common, despite the assumptions of economists, pundits, and union busters.

Union busters use a kit, a sort of paint-by-numbers sequence of things to talk about and do in the run-up to a recognition election. One standard item is the checks. This is a mock-up of a check with the worker's name and current weekly pay. Next to it will be a comparison check with the costs of a strike deducted. How do workers react? Certainly some were influenced. People have different economic circumstances and different reactions to them. But often enough the response was something like: "that's a small price to pay to tell the boss to fuck off." And there it is. The value that many workers place on being able to express their opinion or fight just for a chance to speak is an awful lot higher than many expect. Workers stage sit-down strikes, even though they are completely illegal and could result in the bankruptcy of the union. Transit workers did this in New York in 2006, but nursing home workers were doing it in Ohio too.

Perhaps such a fight is worth a few dollars, but surely there is an underlying material instrumentality, isn't there? Union staff often told the story of a contract fight for county mental health workers in Mentor, Ohio. The county had told the workers that if they refused to accept the contract the county would simply stop funding mental health altogether, costing all of the workers their jobs. As the votes were counted, it became clear that the workers had placed more value on their right to protest the behavior of their employer than they did on their own job. They ratified the contract, told the boss what they thought of his threats, and, presumably, headed for the unemployment line.

In 1998, I found myself on a picket line in front of a prison in Lima, Ohio. We represented the social service professionals who worked for the state: doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers. That year the union representing the non-professionals negotiated a concessionary contract with the state. We could either also accept the concessionary contract or fight it despite having very little workplace power. But our members and our president wanted to fight, not least to show everyone what cowards the other union was. Our picket had signs like: "Grandmas shouldn't have to strike." Prisoners were jokingly shouting "we want a contract too!" out their cell windows. We won. The threat wasn't because our workers were off the job, and it certainly wasn't because the guards respected the picket (though a few did). But the prisoners rioted. State troopers had to be called in to quell riots, including one at the notorious Lucasville Prison. It turns out representing nurses isn't such a weak hand after all, at least when you're striking a prison. The culture of solidarity reaches far in the Rust Belt, especially when people choose to fight the boss.

I have long thought that the workers of the Rust Belt and their communities were an underutilized political resource. Unions once did important work holding white workers in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that Democrats have been ignoring them for three decades. But unions have mostly been destroyed in the Rust Belt. Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW and Industrial Unionism, became a Right to Work state two years ago, joining Wisconsin and soon to be followed by West Virginia. States which once had 40% of their workforces represented by unions now have 10-11%. As a result, the populist outrage of the white working class is available to both the Right and the Left. Over the years various Democratic candidates, Tom Harkin, John Edwards, and Bernie Sanders among them, have attempted to recapture white workers for the Democratic Party and, in the process, reorient the Party away from its deference to finance capital. These efforts have failed. The Democratic coalition is a party of free trade, finance, and tech with a diverse base recruited on the basis of social liberalism and fluency with identity politics. This is not a party of the working class and is especially not a party of the white working class.

Trump has stepped into this political vacuum and it has served him well, enabling him to trounce establishment and Tea Party Republicans in the primaries. Trump seems to be furious at the establishment politicians that long ago wrote off the Rust Belt. He is combative, he doesn't defer to the political correctness that is sensitive to the feelings of everyone other than the white poor and working class. Trump's performance emphasizes action as much as words and ideas, which exasperates the educated, but appeals to Rust Belt workers. Ideas and rational consistency are not, academic dispositions aside, particularly important to people without Ph.Ds. Trump performs the combativeness of Rust Belt culture, the lack of deference to odds or the focus-grouped lowest common denominator. He seems as lost playing the politically-coded game of pandering and recognition that people in Portsmouth, Ohio, are. He is a manifestation of the "fuck you" id of the Rust Belt that leads workers to fight their bosses even when they will probably lose. And sure, it isn't exactly about the working class, but if Trump has been consistent on any issue, it has been trade. He promises to rip up the trade agreements that forced workers to make a choice between their dignity and their jobs, and that forced them onto an unfair playing field against workers with government health insurance or lower housing and food costs. He promises to protect them from immigrants that are somehow simultaneously competing for their jobs and sucking state coffers dry.

Hillary Clinton had a word for the Rust Belt in her convention speech, just like she did for every other constituency in the Democratic coalition. She pointed out that Donald Trump's merchandise is made overseas. My first thought was that it was a good opener, but that was it. No policy, no recognition, just "That guy is a liar". Now, granted, Rust Belt workers do get pissed off about stuff like that. For years the draw for the Central Labor Council annual picnic in Dayton, Ohio, was the destruction of a Japanese car with a wrecking ball. Watching a crane destroy a perfectly good automobile is exciting, but it's downright cathartic when that car represents an existential threat to your existence and an offense to your patriotism. But I fully expect that Rust Belt voters, many of whom are pretty familiar with the dynamics of these issues (thanks unions!) would hear that and think: "ok, she's taking us for suckers… again". Just because that stuff worked with patrician Romney (and it did) in no way means that it will work with combative, disrespectful, trade-deal trashing, and immigrant-deporting Trump. Clinton's move was calculated and condescending. She volunteered for an authenticity fight with Donald Trump, a fight she will lose.

Trump has nailed down populism for the Right. Sanders made a bid to win it back for the Left, but no one named Obama or Clinton is going to win it back for Democrats. Now pundits and Trump's campaign are plotting a path to the presidency through the Rust Belt. Trump's (former) campaign manager has said that victory depends upon winning Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania . Trump has talked about extending the map to Michigan and Wisconsin which, after all, are enthusiastic enough about Republicans to vote them into power in every branch of government and watch them pass Right to Work laws and create punitive social welfare regimes. The electoral map might be realigning to situate Democrats as the representatives of the New Economy and Republicans as the champions of Smokestack industries and their workers. Trump has made it clear that this potential political opposition is real.

But the anxiety and the worry is misplaced. There is no Brexit majority here. The path through the Rust Belt is actually a cul-de-sac, not because Trump lacks appeal with white workers, but because there are so few of them left. Cities aren't filled with factories and working-class neighborhoods anymore; they're filled with artist studios, tech startups, coffee bars, and criminalized hyper-ghettos. Latinos have been moving to Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, but they sure aren't voting for Trump. White people have been leaving many of these states which has increased the minority share of potential voters. Trump polled at 0% among African-Americans in Ohio during the Republican Convention. The Rust Belt economy has been diversifying. Unemployment in Ohio and Pennsylvania has mostly been below the national average since the financial crisis. Ann Arbor, Madison, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Lansing and others have been increasing in importance. These towns are hubs for tech and pharmaceutical startups, advanced manufacturing, and software engineering. They have concentrations of educated people who are less likely to vote for Trump.

The work of economic transformation has already been done in the Rust Belt and the demographic results are real. Trump missed the window for exploiting the alienation of the Rust Belt as a path to national office. White workers were angrier, more numerous, more combative, and more motivated twenty years ago when they were smashing Japanese cars at picnics. But back then unions had more capacity to hold white workers in the Democratic coalition. Unmoored from unions, racism and terrorism can be exploited to harvest white votes. Trump's combativeness is the ideal vehicle for effective exploitation, but the harvest is getting smaller every year. Trump can tap into the dispositions of the white working class, and speak to the issues of Rust Belt workers, but it is doubtful that he can overcome the demographically- and economically-determined fact of their declining relevance.

This was originally published at New Politics .

Michael McQuarrie is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a labor organizer in West Virginia, Ohio, and New York and as a community organizer in the South Bronx.

'Our Revolution' is Not a Revolutionary Movement

By Dan Arel

On August 24, Bernie Sanders officially launched his post-presidential bid project, Our Revolution. Hoping to build on his primary success, Our Revolution looks to endorse and financially support down-ticket Democratic candidates around the country. This is part of the vision Sanders laid out about reforming, or in his words "revolutionizing" the Democratic Party.

It offers an ambitious, and a somewhat respectable goal, to fight to push a center-right party further to the left. However, as many have noted Sanders himself while being much further left than his Democratic counterparts, is not the bastion of leftist politics the media, and many of his supporters think he is.

Sanders campaign, which he called revolutionary, only offered revolutionary politics inside the Democratic Party. To his credit, he gave the party a big scare, he offered a viable alternative to the neoliberal politics of Hillary Clinton, making such waves that party officials even conspired to possibly use Sanders lack of religion against him. Leaked emails showed that a few DNC officials wanted to out Sanders as an atheist in two southern states they feared Clinton could lose.

Sanders also inspired millions of young voters to become interested in politics. His campaign was reminiscent of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign in that regard. Tens of thousands packed auditoriums to hear Sanders speak up for the 99%, to stand up for Native American rights, and to demand workers be paid a higher minimum wage. Yet, his politics still came from a liberal, pro-capitalist mindset, and so does Our Revolution.

What Sanders is selling as a revolution, is, in reality, nothing more than an attempt to reform a capitalist, centrist party. Our Revolution cannot be revolutionary in this sense, as it is simply not possible to revolutionize a counter-revolutionary party. At the end of the day, Our Revolution is still supporting capitalist candidates who by and large support the Affordable Care Act over universal healthcare, or at least support slowly progressing the struggling health care plan towards some version of socialized care, meanwhile courts around the country pick apart the plan, leaving it in shambles and as further rises in health insurance costs skyrocket, leaving what might be left of the affordable part of the plan on the cutting-room floor.

Candidates being endorsed by the new organization include the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, a United States Congresswoman from Hawaii who has criticized President Obama's foreign policy as not being tough enough against the likes of ISIS. Her criticisms of his lack of military action have earned her critiques for being a right-wing hawk when it comes to fighting ISIS in the Middle East. The organization also threw its support behind a now-failed bid to oust Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz by supporting the anti-Iran, vocally pro-Israel supporter, Tim Canova.

These are not revolutionary candidates, and they are hardly reform candidates. In reality, they are simply candidates who either vocally supported Sanders in the primary, or in the case of Canova, offered a challenge to Wasserman Schultz, someone Sanders knew was fighting to ensure he did not receive the Democratic presidential nomination.

Throughout the Our Revolution endorsements you will find candidates who are outside of the Democratic norm, but all are still liberal, capitalist, mainstream candidates who are not rocking the Democratic boat too far and who don't step out of the liberal mindset to join the left.

While even those on the left can appreciate the election of further-left Democrats, as they do, to a degree, make the life of many Americans better, a greater understanding of the party tells us that even the most domestically left Democrats still generally fall into foreign policy imperialism and American exceptionalism. Those being endorsed by Our Revolution do not break that mold.

Our Revolution is not revolutionary, and it should not be discussed as revolutionary. Revolutionary politics will only come from outside the two-party establishment and will likely not come by playing by the establishment rules. Even parties such as the Green Party are not bringing about revolutionary change as they seek to gain power through the already established system and offer no path to changing or overthrowing that system. They wish to reform our politics, not revolutionize them.

As socialists, the goal should be to educate the influx of young voters who are seemingly attracted to the socialist label, but only understand it in the context of Bernie Sanders. When speaking to a crowd at the University of Georgetown, Sanders proclaimed that his brand of socialism didn't involve workers owning the means of production.

If the mainstream understanding of socialism in the United States becomes offering partly socialized programs through the means of capitalism, the goals of socialists around the country become a greater uphill battle than ever before. Socialists still find themselves explaining that socialism isn't aligned with Stalinism and the USSR, and now have to further explain that it doesn't support "fixing" capitalism. Even the term democratic socialism has been muddied by Sanders campaign. What Sanders thinks of as socialism is merely an old-school, post-New Deal Democrat. A liberal who understands the importance of a welfare state, but who cannot see past the blinders of capitalism to understand why this economic system makes welfare necessary. Instead of fighting to change the system, they instead fight to put band-aids on it. The world socialism should be nowhere near that.

With that said, we can admit that Sanders can be praised to some degree for removing a lot of the stigma around the "S" word, while at the same time realizing that by using the label for his liberal version of socialism, he has also done damage to what the word means.