Biden’s Climate Bill Leaves Workers Behind in Shift to Electric Cars, Union Says
{authorlink}
{authorlink}
https://portside.org/2023-08-15/bidens-climate-bill-leaves-workers-behind-shift-electric-cars-union-says
Is This a Form of Capitalism Progressives Can Embrace?
{authorlink}
{authorlink}
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/working-class-jobs-capitalism/
More Americans Are Ending Up Homeless—at a Record Rate
{authorlink}
{authorlink}
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/homelessness-increasing-united-states-housing-costs-e1990ac7?mod=latest_headlines
Gen Z will be last generation with white majority in US, study finds
{authorlink}
{authorlink}
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/08/gen-z-americans-white-majority-study
Because desire is a social construct, love desired is a collective action toward our liberation. We desire life-giving and honest love. We desire liberation. Karl Marx once stated that our consciousness comes through experience as social beings. Capitalism is not only a political and economic system as most people understand it, but also permeates and colonizes our daily lives as a social structure. As such, we strive to build community, and mostly in the form of “family”. As M.E. O’Brien states in Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, “oftentimes we feel as though we have found it.” Under capitalism, though, we are prevented from constructing the family we need.
The post The Revolutionary Power of Love appeared first on puntorojo.
At two Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in California’s Central Valley, a cycle of resistance and retaliation has been intensifying over the past three years. Detainees at the facilities, which are operated by for-profit prison company GEO Group, have organized against abysmal conditions, prompting detention center authorities to respond with increasing levels of punitive action.
A motion was filed with the Eastern District Court of California on May 18 as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit against GEO pertaining to the facilities. The filing marked a major escalation in a multipronged campaign being waged by current and former detainees, and outside advocates, to hold ICE and GEO accountable for their mistreatment. It reaffirmed a key demand that detainees in the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield and the Golden State Annex in McFarland put forward when they launched a labor strike last year: pay for detained workers commensurate with the prevailing minimum wage in California.
The consequences detainees appear to face for failure to participate in the purportedly voluntary work regime can render it akin to forced labor.
The motion entreated a federal judge to issue a ruling that affirmed the plaintiffs’ contention that the $1-per-day pay detainees receive for labor within GEO’s “Voluntary Work Program” inside Mesa Verde and the GSA violates California’s minimum wage law. The state’s minimum wage stands at $15.50 an hour as of January 2023.
According to the new report “One Dollar A Day: Labor Conditions Within California Immigrant Detention Centers” from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, detained individuals scrub toilets, mop bathrooms, and sweep and perform other maintenance tasks as part of the VWP. The report includes testimony from current and former detainees as well as data and research on commissary expenses, grievances, and information about the working conditions from within the detention centers. “They didn’t have supplies to actually clean,” said one person interviewed for the report. “Whether it was to mop or disinfect the phones or the tables… they just weren’t there… People had to clean the showers a lot of times in their shoes… [Y]our shoes get wet, and we only get one pair of shoes, so that’s unsanitary.”
The same interviewee mentioned the shortage of gloves needed for the work. “Who wants to be scrubbing a toilet with no gloves on? Or clean the showers when you’re dealing with these chemicals,” the individual told the authors of the report. Detainees inside the GSA and Mesa Verde facilities labor under difficult conditions for only a dollar per day, which saves GEO the extra expenses of hiring outside professionals—and increases the corporation’s already bloated bottom line. “GEO is benefiting, because if we don’t do it, they have to pay somebody to do it,” a UCLA report interviewee explained. “And they had to pay somebody good money to come in here and do those jobs.”
While the class-action lawsuit plays out in the Fresno Division of California’s Eastern District Court, individuals confined inside the Bakersfield and McFarland facilities continue to withhold their labor and coordinate with attorneys and immigrant rights’ advocates. They do so despite the retaliation GEO and ICE have repeatedly meted out in response to their refusal to accept the treatment and conditions inside the Central Valley detention centers.
“GEO is benefiting, because if we don’t do it, they have to pay somebody to do it,” a UCLA report interviewee explained. “And they had to pay somebody good money to come in here and do those jobs.”
One person interviewed by the UCLA researchers mentioned that staff get angry when detainees raise issues with detention center staff. “And then they want us to get mad and interact with them, just so they have a reason to get us in trouble, because whenever we get a petty ass write-up, it sticks, and we get denied commissary, and you get all these other violations that are put against us. When we write to them we will see no benefits at all,” the detainee said.
The cycle of resistance and retaliation escalated in early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to rage across the United States. Dozens of men in Mesa Verde went on multiple hunger strikes in response to the dangerous conditions inside the facility. According to a class-action lawsuit filed in February 2023 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, hunger strikers called on authorities to release medically vulnerable persons, to stop bringing new people into an already-crowded detention center, and to provide adequate cleaning supplies. In response, the legal complaint alleges, the GEO Group “retaliated against hunger strikers” by withholding sanitation services, commissary access, medically necessary items (including prescription medication and walking canes), contact with attorneys and loved ones, and recreation time.
Two years later, dozens of individuals went on strike against the prison’s $1-a-day labor compensation scheme. ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards set the minimum pay within the Voluntary Work Program at $1 per day. As explained in the “One Dollar a Day” report, in the “70 years since its inception, a provision under an appropriations bill that the 95th United States Congress passed has allowed immigrant workers in detention centers to earn just $1 a day.” According to a 2017 report by Seth H. Garfinkel, the 1978 Appropriations Act passed by Congress codified the remuneration rate, which enables companies like GEO to “compensate workers at $0.13 an hour for as many as eight working hours a day,” while the VWP helps detention centers save about $40 million in labor costs each year. The UCLA report notes that $1 in 1978 is now worth $4.61, and the reimbursement rate has not been adjusted for inflation.
“Detained people are forced to submit to GEO’s $1 per day scheme, the so-called ‘Voluntary’ Activities Program (‘Work Program’), to buy the basic necessities—including food, water and hygiene products—that GEO systematically deprives them of,” states a July 13, 2022, lawsuit filed by two advocacy groups and a Bay Area law firm in the California Eastern District Court.
Mohamed Mousa, an immigrant from Egypt, said that detention center meals typically consist of unappetizing, unsalted beans or unpalatable soy-based meat substitutes. At the time of the interview, he was still detained in the Mesa Verde facility. “It tastes just like newspapers,” Mousa said. “It’s just terrible.”
Detainees in both the GSA and Mesa Verde told the authors of the UCLA report that they found cockroaches in their food. Even when not on hunger strike, people inside won’t touch what the detention centers serve. “Inadequate or inedible food provided by GEO led many detainees to rely on the commissary to supplement some or all of their meals,” the authors of the UCLA report wrote. “Interviewees we spoke to expressed that the commissary was also vital to supplement basic care products that the facility failed to provide, creating additional economic hardship for them.” To afford necessities, detainees thus feel compelled to participate in the VWP, making it less than voluntary.
Likewise, the consequences detainees appear to face for failure to participate in the purportedly voluntary work regime can render it akin to forced labor. For example, participating in the work stoppage almost got one person confined in the Bakersfield immigrant jail transferred, if not for the swift actions of those advocating on behalf of detainee rights.
In August 2022, ICE officials in the San Francisco field office prepared to transfer a striker from solitary to a facility outside of California. “The Facility Administrator stated in a written message to this individual that his efforts to ‘stand up for [his] rights’ would “not be tolerated,’” according to the lawsuit filed in February. ACLU attorneys responded by sending a letter to the field office stating a retaliatory transfer would constitute a violation of the detained person’s First Amendment Rights. ICE returned the man to Mesa Verde shortly thereafter.
The [UCLA report] authors noted their team “felt it necessary to physically go onsite to Mesa Verde in order to collect the grievances and write-up forms” referenced in the report because of the real fear of repercussion for interviewees.
The lawsuit from last July alleges other forms of retaliation perpetrated by GEO against detainees on labor strike. Per the suit, GEO stopped allowing entire dormitories outdoor exercise time when individuals inside refused to work, and staff placed strikers in “administrative segregation”—a form of solitary confinement.
According to a September 2022 complaint the ACLU and other organizations sent to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Mousa spent two months in solitary confinement for allegedly posing a risk to the Mesa Verde facility. Rigoberto Hernandez Martinez—a Mesa Verde detainee who joined the strike—was also confined in solitary for over a month due to an alleged security risk after being initially moved there for medical reasons; he was later told he remained in solitary because he participated in the collective action, according to the February lawsuit. “The GEO Group [is] using security as an alibi,” Mousa said.
“Regarding the strike, many described the retaliation by GEO employees, resulting in additional write-ups and denying access to the commissary,” the “One Dollar a Day” report states. Indeed, the authors noted their team “felt it necessary to physically go onsite to Mesa Verde in order to collect the grievances and write-up forms” referenced in the report because of the real fear of repercussion for interviewees.
Retaliation for failure to participate in the VWP also illustrates the not-so-voluntary nature of the labor regime inside the detention centers. The UCLA report states that the filing of grievances significantly increased after the labor strike started, “which detainees described as a response to increased retaliation from GEO officers.” Interviewed individuals said GEO staff used disciplinary write-ups to punish people for participating in the labor strike.
“Write-ups have two impacts on you,” one person explained. “The first is the psychological taste of injustice. So, when you get a write-up for something that is definitely clearly you committed no error, nothing wrong, you didn’t violate anything, you didn’t commit a crime… The mental agony of this is bullshit…. The other aspect is… You can’t even order commissary. You’re gonna have to be starving because they know that you don’t eat their food that they offer.”
The labor strike that began in April 2022 continues, with at least 59 people participating, per sources. Previously, it drew the attention of members of Congress. In September 2022, 16 members of the House and Senate called on ICE to investigate reports of unacceptable conditions and retaliatory behavior directed at detainees in the two California facilities. They also called on DHS to terminate the federal contracts with GEO if the allegations against the facilities could be confirmed.
According to a press release from the ACLU, on March 7, ICE and GEO employees in full riot gear and wielding batons and pepper spray entered Mesa Verde’s Dorm C to confront weak and depleted hunger strikers.
In December 2022, advocacy groups filed a complaint over unsafe working conditions inside the GSA and Mesa Verde. Following a California Division of Occupational Safety and Health investigation that uncovered multiple state code violations, regulators levied a $104,510 fine against GEO Group.
In an effort to increase the pressure on ICE and GEO, more than 70 detainees at the GSA and Mesa Verde facilities participated in a hunger strike between February 17 and March 24, 2023, demanding their immediate release and the closure of both immigrant jails. A hunger strike support committee made up of advocacy groups including the ACLU, the Asian Law Caucus with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, published a press release in which the men inside described the living conditions as “soul-crushing.”
Milton Mendez, who spent 11 months inside Mesa Verde, said GEO not only failed to provide basic necessities and urgently needed medical care, but the company also maintained intolerable living conditions within the jail. “The bathroom, in the shower, there is mold all over,” Mendez said in a March 17 interview.
In the class-action lawsuit filed this February, attorneys for the plaintiffs rebuked ICE and GEO for violating the First Amendment rights of detained individuals on hunger strike. As a result of the pressure, the detention center relented. “ICE officials and GEO officials [came] to the dorms and referenced the pending litigation,” said Minju Cho, a lawyer with the ACLU, adding that afterwards detention facility staff “ameliorated some of the conditions, including offering the strikers Ensure nutritional shakes to allow them to maintain their strike but not experience death—and allowing them to receive medical care inside the dorm, which would have been a big point of contention. They also restored arts and crafts, law library, barber shop and yard time, all of which had been taken away.”
In response to the hunger strike, GEO deployed retaliatory measures more violent than previously used. According to a press release from the ACLU, on March 7, ICE and GEO employees in full riot gear and wielding batons and pepper spray entered Mesa Verde’s Dorm C to confront weak and depleted hunger strikers. They forcefully removed four strikers from the dorm, handcuffing some and shoving others to the ground. At one point, as Mousa described, “ICE people in camouflage … grabbed [a detainee as if he were] a fucking animal … and they threw him on his face on the ground.”
Aseem Mehta, a legal fellow with AAAJ, said that after several hours, the attorneys for the four individuals who’d been removed from Dorm C received word that their clients were transferred to El Paso, Texas, supposedly for medical care. “Those individuals [had] never before requested medical care [and] showed no signs of acute medical distress,” Mehta said, adding that no explanation was provided as to “why whatever medical care that they purportedly needed could only be accessed in El Paso, Texas,” and not in California. He suspects GEO and ICE might have initiated the transfer to intimidate and punish hunger strikers.
“We hope that, in exposing the futility of the grievance system, this project will show that immigration detention is not a system that can be reformed; it must be dismantled.”
Sana Singh, Immigrants’ Rights Fellow at ACLU of Northern California
A week after the Mesa Verde raid, ICE and GEO also raided GSA dorms. During that raid, an officer also kneeled on one detainee’s head, injuring his face, according to a March 29 ACLU press release. One hunger striker had to be hospitalized several times as a result of the raid, and GEO transferred three individuals to a Texas facility under medical pretexts, per the press release.
Detainees have learned criticizing the agency and its detention practices can also result in retributive relocation. In February, advocacy groups filed a complaint with the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties that documented ICE’s transfer of an individual in November 2022 after that person and a fellow detainee from another facility authored an op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune criticizing conditions of confinement and the agency’s “brutal and excessive use of retaliation.”
In response to the March raids, lawyers from ACLU and other groups filed another emergency motion in federal district court seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent ICE and the GEO Group from retaliating against those on hunger strike. Days after the motion was filed, the seven people transferred to Texas were returned to California.
The anti-carceral group Freedom for Immigrants released a report early this year titled “Trafficked & Toured: Mapping ICE Transfers,” which shows how the transport of human beings functions within “a larger system of punishment of detained individuals for organizing for their rights.”
When reached for comment via email, an ICE spokesperson said that the agency “does not comment on ongoing or pending litigation,” while a GEO spokesperson said via email that the company “has a zero-tolerance policy with respect to staff misconduct.”
“We take our role as a service provider to the federal government with the utmost seriousness and strive to treat all those entrusted to our care with dignity and respect,” the GEO spokesperson said.
Most detainees who participated in the recent hunger strike—including Mousa—resumed eating food by mid-March, but with help from outside advocates, they are continuing a campaign to break the cycle of violence. Lawsuits by allies at the ACLU, CCIJ, AAAJ, Immigrant Defense Advocates, and others have helped defend the rights of those in custody, stem retaliation, and put pressure on ICE and GEO.
On June 23, the ACLU of Northern California filed another suit, this one against ICE for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests for grievance logs kept at the six agency-affiliated immigrant detention centers in the state.
The ACLU also just launched the “California Immigration Detention Database” to track grievances submitted in the state’s immigrant jails. One individual who contributed to the database, Jose Ruben Hernandez Gomez, a former Mesa Verde detainee who was transferred to El Paso after participating in the hunger strike, filed grievances without success while incarcerated in the Central Valley facility, as detailed in an ACLU NorCal report published on June 26. “I’m participating in this project because I want people to know that detention centers are not safe to house human beings,” he told the ACLU.
In 2021, a district court in Washington ordered GEO to give more than 10,000 current and former detainees $17.3 million in backpay for labor they earned $1 to perform each day inside the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
Of the nearly 250 complaints already in the database, many come from Mesa Verde and date back to the 2023 hunger strike, an ACLU press release explains. “We are committed to working alongside people in detention to expose the cruelty of the immigration detention system—even as ICE fails to come clean about its oversight of facilities marred by systemic neglect and abuse,” said Sana Singh, an ACLU NorCal immigrants’ rights fellow, per the press release. “We hope that, in exposing the futility of the grievance system, this project will show that immigration detention is not a system that can be reformed; it must be dismantled.”
Further augmenting the campaign against ICE, GEO, and their detention regime, recent precedent suggests the lawsuit alleging GEO’s dollar-a-day VWP compensation rate violates the minimum wage requirement in California could prove successful. In 2021, a district court in Washington ordered GEO to give more than 10,000 current and former detainees $17.3 million in backpay for labor they earned $1 to perform each day inside the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Judge Robert Bryan also issued an injunction requiring the company, which pulled in $2.2 billion in revenue that year and receives a quarter million dollars from ICE annually for every detention facility it operates for the agency, to pay detainees participating in the VWP at the Tacoma facility Washington’s minimum wage, now $15.74 an hour.
In addition to using their support networks to exert legal pressure from the outside, those in the GSA and Mesa Verde have inspired and drawn inspiration from detainees elsewhere. Mousa said that hunger strikers in California heard about similar actions in the Tacoma detention center, and in the ICE-affiliated Aurora, Colorado, facility. “We live in [the] same conditions they’re facing all over the place,” he said. “So we’re all supporting each other.” Actions and support for those inside the GSA and MV seemed to have inspired some 300 detainees inside the also GEO-run South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, to launch their own hunger strike in March.
Organizers and advocates have reason for cautious optimism regarding the possibility of ending for-profit detention for good. In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to phase out private prisons, immigrant detention centers included, but last year an appellate court ruled that the law might be unconstitutional. President Joe Biden voiced support for ending for-profit immigrant detention, but under his administration the Justice Department joined GEO in the suit challenging the law the California legislature passed and Newsom endorsed. A final judgment on the unconstitutionality of the ban was handed down in May 2023, effectively repealing the ban.
Despite these setbacks, current and former detainees and their advocates remain undaunted in their efforts. From inside the GSA in mid-March, Gustavo Flores, a man in his early thirties, said immigration detention “is like waking up in a nightmare.” He hopes to see both ICE and GEO abolished and he and his fellow detainees released. “We’re gonna keep pushing,” Flores said. “If I were to get out [and] win my case… I’m gonna continue advocating.… This is gonna be an ongoing effort that’s going to continue on until our goals are met.”
A still from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers. (Tristar Pictures / Touchstone Pictures)
If you don’t know who Vivek Ramaswamy is, I don’t blame you. He’s currently hovering around third place in polls on the race for the Republican presidential nomination behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — but it’s a distant third. And he’s been so reluctant to criticize the front-runner that I can’t help wondering if his real goal is to become Trump’s running mate.
Like Trump himself was in 2016, Ramaswamy is a wealthy businessman with no political experience. Like the rest of the Republican field, he wants to invade Mexico. The most distinctive thing about Ramaswamy is a policy position so extreme that his own campaign staff reportedly hates it. He wants to raise the minimum age for automatic voting rights to twenty-five.
That’s obviously pretty eyebrow-raising in itself, but what really caught my attention about Ramaswamy’s proposal is that it would allow some eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to get back their right to vote. They could earn it back by passing a civics test, becoming first responders, or joining the military.
The idea of earning the right to vote by joining the Army is hilariously reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s science-fiction classic Starship Troopers (1997). In the world of the movie, as viewers are told in bombastic public service announcements, “Service guarantees citizenship!”
Of course, Verhoeven knew he was making a dystopian satire. Ramaswamy is overruling his staffers’ concerns because this proposal represents his fondest political hope. And it’s one that reveals a lot about how the Right sees the world.
Plenty of Republican politicians have been willing to chip away at young people’s voting rights through such mechanisms as passing laws forcing college students to drive back to their hometowns if they want to register to vote. It’s not hard to see why — in the 2022 midterms, 63 percent of voters in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age range voted for Democrats.
But only a politician as eccentric as Ramaswamy would openly advocate the age group’s disenfranchisement. Actually implementing his proposal would take a constitutional amendment. It’s awfully hard to imagine that happening. And if there’s one thing that would get even fewer eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to vote Republican, it would be nominating a candidate who openly said that he didn’t think they should be allowed to vote.
But as much of a nonstarter as it may be in those senses, so far it doesn’t seem to have disqualified him the eyes of Republican primary voters. Right now, Trump overwhelmingly dominates the race, with DeSantis coming in a distant second — but depending on which polls you’re looking at, Ramaswamy is doing about as well as or better than people like Nikki Haley, who used to be governor of South Carolina, and Mike Pence, who just three years ago was vice president of the United States. And it’s not impossible to imagine Ramaswamy actually getting Pence’s old spot on the 2024 Republican ticket. Stranger things have happened.
Whether his star continues to rise or not, though, so far other Republicans don’t seem to be treating Ramaswamy as a crank. And that’s interesting in itself.
The majority of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds losing their voting rights is a stomach-churning idea. Millions of people who live on their own and work in workplaces regulated by labor laws and have their lives shaped by government policies in a thousand other ways would lose the right to shape those policies. But raising the age isn’t even the worst part of Ramaswamy’s proposal.
The idea that voting rights come with the transition from dependent childhood to relatively autonomous adulthood makes sense in a general way, but any specific cutoff is bound to feel a bit arbitrary. No one wants to extend the franchise to twelve-year-olds, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere, but there’s surely nothing magical about eighteen as opposed to, say, seventeen or nineteen. And the way we stagger the rights of adulthood in American society has little rhyme or reason to it — sixteen for driving, eighteen for voting, twenty-one for drinking or — in most states — renting a car. As much as twenty-five seems like an unreasonably late age for the most basic right of citizenship, I suppose I might feel differently if I hadn’t grown up in a society that set the bar seven years younger.
The part that’s much worse, and much more revealing about how many conservatives see the world, is that — starting with the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age bracket — Ramaswamy’s fantasy is all about changing the way we think about voting rights. The fundamental premise of democracy is that everyone has a basic right to self-government.
Those of us on the socialist left take this idea to its logical conclusion. In the workplace no less than the political realm, we apply political theorist Michael Walzer’s maxim that what “touches all” should be “decided by all.” We don’t think some people should have more power over the shape of our collective existence than others just because they have enough money to own their own business.
But even more mainstream small-d democrats who wouldn’t go that far think that the right to have an input at least in political decisions is innate. Like, say, the right to free speech, you don’t need to do anything special to earn the right to have a say in decisions that impact you. It’s something everyone should have just for being a person.
The truth is that the Right, with its love of hierarchy and its instinct toward seeing politics through a prism of individual sin and individual virtue, has never been entirely comfortable with that idea. There’s something about the notion of making people jump through hoops to earn a right to have a say in their society’s collective decision-making that scratches a deep itch in the right-wing soul.
Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein was certainly scratching that itch when he wrote the original Starship Troopers novel in 1959. Heinlein started out as a New Deal liberal, and even volunteered for democratic socialist Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor of California in 1934. But he’d made a sharp turn to the right by the 1940s. He’s often thought of as a libertarian, which might imply anti-interventionism in foreign affairs. But in the 1950s, Heinlein was every inch a Cold Warrior, and that shows in Starship Troopers, where humans are engaged in a brutal and righteous war against an alien race of Arachnids (or “bugs”) who seem suspiciously, well, collectivist.
In the world of the novel, the only way for anyone — male or female, young or old — to become a citizen of the Terran Federation with a right to vote in the federation’s elections is through military service. The protagonist, Juan Rico, does exactly that, and the battle scenes make for a good read. But the lion’s share of the novel’s word count is taken up with lectures in which Heinlein’s ultra-militaristic ideology is put into the mouths of drill instructors, “History and Moral Philosophy” teachers, and other characters.
The genius of Verhoeven’s adaptation is that, first, he reverses this ratio, transforming his Starship Troopers into a much more entertaining story and, second, he brutally satirizes Heinlein’s militaristic authoritarianism even as he retains much of the original dialogue. Bombastic music, dark, over-the-top humor, and military imagery suspiciously reminiscent of the Third Reich make it abundantly clear what Verhoeven thinks of lines about how, for example, “the moral difference between a civilian and a citizen” is that a citizen “accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic.”
Vivek Ramaswamy would let civilians become citizens at the age of twenty-five — and even before then, he allows a couple of alternate routes to voting rights. A candidate for president, who may harbor real hopes for at least the VP slot and who in any case doesn’t want to be laughed off the debate stage, is bound to restrain his fantasies a bit more than a science-fiction novelist writing about warfare between humans and insect-like aliens seven centuries in the future.
But the instinct to see political power not as something everyone has a basic human claim to participate in, but a prize some are more worthy of than others, ties together Heinlein and Ramaswamy — and reflects a much deeper conservative impulse. So does the idea that warfare is a particularly worthy and virtuous activity.
Personally, I’ll take a hard pass on that vision. Peace and democracy may not stir the blood the way war and hierarchy do — but they’re infinitely better for us.
I love Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. And I’m sure a movie depicting a society where everyone’s needs are met and everyone has a meaningful say in collective decision-making would be far less entertaining to watch. But that’s the world I’d actually want to live in.
May 30, 2023 3:33 pm ET
Jake Sullivan speaks to the press at the White House, April 24.
Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press
Jake Sullivan,
President Biden’s national security adviser, delivered a speech in April about economic and foreign policy that deserves more attention. Mr. Sullivan crisply laid out a critique of what he regards as the excessively market-oriented policies of recent decades and offered an alternative, a “foreign policy for the middle class.”
His speech reflected fundamental changes in the American economy and political order over the past three decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration (in which I served) was confident that the emerging global order of market economies and democratizing nations would benefit the U.S. and the world.
For a decade, events seemed to vindicate this view. The American economy grew vigorously, and the gains were shared broadly. U.S. manufacturing stabilized during the 1990s. Real wages grew, and, despite a surge in worker productivity, the U.S. ended the decade with as many manufacturing jobs as it had begun.
Then the bottom dropped out. Between January 2001 and the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007, the U.S. lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, about 20% of the total. By the end of the recession, another two million were lost. Most of these losses were permanent, devastating many small towns and rural areas.
These developments helped fuel the populist revolt that began with the tea party and culminated with
Donald Trump’s
election. They also challenged assumptions that had guided both political parties for a quarter-century. Support for free-trade agreements weakened, symbolized by Hillary Clinton’s shift on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious multinational pact she backed as secretary of state but repudiated during her presidential campaign. President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products entering the U.S. market.
With this history in mind, Mr. Sullivan led with a key assertion: Past policies have “hollowed out” America’s industrial base. At the heart of these policies were assumptions that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently, that the type of economic growth doesn’t matter, and that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open and the world more peaceful and cooperative.
Each assumption turned out to be partially false, he argued. When certain types of investments yield positive externalities—such as building an ecosystem of innovation—their benefits won’t be fully captured in market prices, which reduces investment in these sectors below optimal levels.
All growth is not created equal.
Michael Boskin,
chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, once said: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? A hundred dollars of one or a hundred dollars of the other is still a hundred dollars.” But the difference is obvious: Potato chips have consumer value but no strategic significance, and a sharp reduction in their availability would have no negative effect on other economic sectors.
Nor, Mr. Sullivan argued, had economic integration yielded the expected results. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization gave it all the advantages of access to America’s open markets without liberalization or democratization. The result: a “China shock” that hurt millions of American workers, the growth of China’s subsidized state sector, a turn back toward outright autocracy in Beijing—and a hardening of anti-Chinese sentiments across the American political spectrum.
At the heart of the response Mr. Sullivan proposed is a “modern American industrial strategy” that would invest public funds in sectors essential to economic innovation and national security—semiconductors, critical minerals and energy—as well as in traditional public goods such as infrastructure. “Our objective is not autarchy,” he said, “it’s resilience and security in our supply chains.” The point of new trade agreements is no longer tariff reduction but promoting national objectives—security, sustainable economic growth and the creation of good jobs that allow workers to support their families.
In effect, Mr. Sullivan has updated
Alexander Hamilton’s
1791 “Report on Manufactures,” adapting the first Treasury secretary’s strategy of promoting domestic manufacturing through protection for key industries, coupled with robust public investment.
This shift has been challenged in Democratic circles. Former Treasury Secretary
Lawrence Summers
It’s hard to know whether events will prove Mr. Summers right. But it’s clear that political support for the market-centered approach of the immediate post-Cold War era has weakened in both political parties. What will replace it? Donald Trump’s “America First” or an alternative that leaves room for international alliances and institutions without sacrificing the interests of U.S. workers?
Mr. Sullivan deserves credit for setting out an organized response to the question. If others have better ideas, it’s time to present them so we can begin the debate our future requires.
People participate in a march in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter and to commemorate the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth on June 19, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
At forty-seven million, the African American population in the United States is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Despite the size of one of America’s largest minorities, discussions of black politics tend to be reductive and ahistorical. In cavalier fashion, critics of racism chart a long line of oppression that has its origin in the United States’ earliest days. Similarly, the forces that have, according to the dominant view of American racism, sought to oppose this monolithic racial tyranny have all fought under the single banner of “the black liberation struggle.”
Admittedly, these attempts to examine the history of discrimination offer correctives to right-wing defenses of forms of ascriptive hierarchy. However, they do so at the cost of flattening the complexities of actually existing black politics. This approach ignores, the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr tells Jacobin, that black politics is not immune from the economic and class forces which have and continue to shape American politics more broadly.
You’ve been a longtime critic of the notion of a cohesive or transhistorical “black freedom movement,” or the idea that one can trace an unbroken line from the fight to abolish slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Why isn’t this framework helpful for understanding black politics either now or in the past?
When people talk about something called the “black freedom movement” or the “black liberation struggle” or the “long civil rights movement,” they’re rehashing an old trope that goes back to the beginnings of the study of black American political history and black American political thought. At that time, that construct was called something like the “Negro’s struggle for freedom” or “Negro’s quest for equality.” Both then and now, the construct presumes, first of all, that black people are a singular collective entity. It also presumes an overarching struggle where black people have always unanimously wanted the same thing, and that whatever disagreements you might encounter if you go through the archives of black politics are just disagreements within a fundamentally shared commitment.
Any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it obscures class differentiation among black Americans.
So the main problem with the idea of a timeless black freedom movement is that it’s a single-thread narrative and a reduction of a much more complex reality. The narrative posits racial unity as the essential foundation for understanding black people and constructs and imposes an anti-historical understanding of black people’s experiences in American political life. It defines black people as being somehow outside of history and collapses differences in historical moments by presuming that people are fighting for the same things in 2020 that they were fighting for in 1860 — or 1619, for God’s sake — which is absurd.
Why do you think people find this idea of a singular and cohesive black freedom movement so compelling?
I think there are several reasons. One is simply that people have heard it over and over, so it seems to comport with commonsense knowledge. It’s a framework that gives you the familiar dyads of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois versus Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr. That’s convenient for people who don’t think there’s anything complex that goes on among black people.
Then there are people who have an interest in propagating the narrative. The black freedom movement construct has always functioned to obscure real distinctions among black people. Fundamentally, the most aggressive and insistent proponents of this view have been people who are pushing a class program: any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it’s part of a discourse of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call racecraft, which obscures class differentiation among black Americans, with or without conscious intent. If the black freedom movement narrative were even a reasonably accurate account of black American political history, then you could say, okay, well, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it. But it’s not. It’s false and it works for the other side.
The alternative to this kind of simplistic approach is to recognize that black people, like all people, live within historical circumstances. They’re diverse and have different interests and perceptions, not only at different points in time, but also at the same point. That was true in the nineteenth century and even true to some extent in the eighteenth century. It’s certainly true after Emancipation and once black people were able to claim some kind of civic participation, however badly the deck may have been stacked against them. Eric Foner has compiled a list of black people who held elected office in the South by the end of Reconstruction, and there were hundreds of people who had been elected to all kinds of offices. And that suggests that there was a lively culture of political debate and struggle, and that blacks engaged with nonblacks, as they always have and continue to do today.
It really comes down to following an injunction from Ralph Ellison: he cautioned observers of American life against the tendency to believe things about black people that they would not believe about any other human beings.
How, then, should we think about black politics now, particularly after the 2020 racial reckoning?
I’m probably getting more crotchety by the day, but I would almost argue at this point that the most crucial racial reckoning in US history was at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1864.
Anyway, to answer your question, at the beginning of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Touré [Reed] was talking to a mutual friend and colleague who was part of the campaign’s inner circle and encouraged the campaign not to concentrate on pursuing something called the “black vote” as much as they could possibly avoid it. His argument was that what we think of as “black politics” today is a class-specific interest-group politics that’s rooted entirely in the black professional and managerial strata, whose approach to political life is race reductionist. It’s an elite-driven activity that really has no base at all. And the reality is that once you start catering to the idea of a coherent “black vote” or “black community,” it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
Once you start catering to the idea of a coherent ‘black vote’ or ‘black community,’ it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
And then there’s the Potemkin thing that happens whenever there’s a police atrocity or some other outrage: people respond to the outrage with protest actions, and then somebody who’s articulate and MSNBC-ready jumps out in front of the protest and talks to the media and is declared the new voice of the black youth or the rising wave of the future.
The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.
There’s another tendency in this type of politics that I trace back to the buildup to the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999. There were activists during that moment who complained that the movement was too white and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to affected “communities.” And I’d say to people, look, if there’s some constituency that isn’t involved that you think ought to be — and you purport to have connections to that constituency — then the thing to do is for you to go out and organize them and bring them into the movement.
Well, of course nobody who was complaining actually wanted that; what they wanted was just the opposite. They wanted to represent or embody the amorphous, voiceless masses. And that’s really the only context — that and nineteenth-century race theory — within which it makes sense to assume that the black American population, which is bigger than the entire population of Canada, can be spoken for in the first person plural.
You and Walter Benn Michaels have a new book out, No Politics But Class Politics. Over the years you’ve both been sharply critical of the tendency to focus on racial disparities. While there do exist plenty of liberals whose idea of justice is a diverse ruling class, what would you tell leftists who oppose the capitalist order but also want to take racism seriously? What does it mean to fight racism today?
Of course we should do what we can to protect and buttress the antidiscrimination apparatus, which includes an affirmative dimension. But this might also be of interest to readers:
In 1945, when the Full Employment Bill was still in play in Congress, the civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray wrote an article in the California Law Review on employment discrimination. In the article, she addresses the argument that you have to fight racism or discrimination before you can win social democracy. She points out that the reality is that racism becomes most politically viable in conditions of scarcity: when jobs are scarce, that’s when people get anxious, and that’s when employers and right-wingers can mobilize the anxiety. And so Murray argues that because of that, the only way to move forward as black workers is to win the social democratic reforms — in particular, at that moment, the struggle for a real political commitment to ground national economic policy on the pursuit and maintenance of a full employment economy — and that those are ultimately even more important than the antidiscrimination measures themselves.
Most people in this country who work for a living need the same things, right? And we don’t necessarily need to have a fight over what happened in 1860, or a fight over what happened in 1890, or even 1920, or even 1960 to recognize that we all need economic security, health care, jobs, and education. And the way for us to get to those things is to articulate our needs and to come together around the things we have in common.
When the anti-racist sensibility now is that making a reference to the working class is somehow conceding to white racism, it’s pretty clear what the class character of this politics is. And this is even before you start counting up all the billions of corporate and investor-class dollars that have gone to Black Lives Matter and other nominal antiracist activist groups since the murder of George Floyd.
So it’s time for us to stop playing around and to be serious and hardheaded about this. Especially for those of us who are professors, part of our job is trying to get the story straight, to demystify the mystifications. That’s what we do for a living, right? Otherwise, we should all just go to church.
RUPTURE.CAPITAL IN 2025