Archive for category: PUBLIC SEMINAR

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The latest Judith Butler story goes like this: Butler, a renowned philosopher and queer theory bigwig, did an interview with Jules Gleeson of The Guardian. The interview was published on September 7, 2021: social media instantly exploded over Butler’s assertion that so-called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (otherwise known by their opponents as TERFs) “have allied with rightwing attacks on gender.” Thus, they “will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.”

In typical social-media style, Lefties were elated; TERFs, vindictive.

In chapter two of the drama, however, The Guardian then released an edited version of the interview that omitted Gleeson’s original question and Butler’s controversial three-paragraph answer. The Guardian explained this stunning journalistic reversal by claiming that Gleeson’s question did not meet its journalistic standards—even though Gleeson offered to revise the question rather than cut the passage.

Cries of censorship exploded all over social media. Of course.

In the aftermath of this mess, I recommend that you read Butler and Gleeson’s original text (hat tip to the Internet Archive’s quick work in saving it). Where the social-media buzz was impassioned and Manichean, the interview itself is refreshingly nuanced, easy to understand, and intellectually rigorous. And let’s be clear: Butler did not, in fact, “call TERFs fascists.” They did something much more useful: they situated TERFs within the context of the larger conservative movement to confine gender to a binary, and described how fascism feeds on biological essentialism, whether it comes from the right or the left.

In other words, TERFs don’t have to be “fascists” to contribute to the political conditions on which fascism thrives.

In the wake of the Texas Fetal Heartbeat Law, Laura Briggs called the statute’s tight control of women’s bodies “creeping fascism.” Butler develops this argument further, challenging us to go beyond simplistic accounts of both conservative backlash and fascism. It’s too easy, and incorrect, to say that conservatives “hate,” and progressives are completely allied with, women and trans people. Analyzing conservatism through the lens of hatred reduces it to an overly simplified war of groups identity: straight people against gays, cis-gendered people against trans people, men against women.

It’s not how the world works, for one. But it also only adds fuel to the fire for conservatives, who are all too eager to claim that the progressive left is nothing more than an army of fragmented identities, each asking for a share of the proverbial pie.

By contrast, Butler rejects identity politics. As they explain in the original interview:

“If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realize ideals of radical justice, equality, and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions.”

What made TERFs so angry? That Butler is a feminist who refuses to reify the category of “woman” as a principle point of knowledge for dismantling patriarchy.

Why does Butler think this way? Because their feminism operates not from a place of fear, but from a place of creativity—a place of, to quote civil-rights icon John Lewis, “good trouble.”

If you’ve ever talked to a TERF, you know that fear is crucial to their feminism. They are afraid of cisgender men, of trans people, of non-binary people—they are even afraid of other cisgender women who refuse the logic of TERFdom. Like many conservatives, theirs is a politics of scarcity: there are not enough resources for “women” as it is, so newcomers to the party are seen as taking things—jobs, starting positions on varsity field hockey, locker room space—that properly belong to what they call “natal women.”

Among its other traits, fascism is an ideology that relies on fear. As a modern ideology, it was built on the principle that for society’s largesse to be equitably shared, the recipients of those benefits need to be pure agents of the ideal state—racially pure, sexually pure, and ideologically pure. For fascists, the role of the state is not to negotiate difference, but to eliminate it. For fascists, gender is not a category, but a fact: a clear, naturally-occurring binary whose opposing poles contribute to a healthy and balanced society that is free from fear.

According to the tenets of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, “women” deserve equality as women. Women have been oppressed by “men.” Men are violent, dangerous, and unrestrained. Trans women, according to TERFs, are “biologically male,” and therefore embody all of the above traits.

In fact, TERFs’ anti-trans agenda is built on the implication that trans women are not just men, but worse than men. Violent and dangerous because of the sex they were assigned at birth, TERFs accuse trans women of willfully invading “single-sex” spaces and—this has emerged most prominently in the debate over athletics—stealing opportunities from cisgender women.

According to TERFs, maleness is the source of women’s oppression and “authentic” femaleness, the source of women’s liberation, and thus something to be cherished and protected. TERFs believe that sexual categories are innate, binary, and unchangeable, and that a just society can only emerge from a balanced gender/sex binary in which maleness is no longer dominant.

Needless to say, queer theory’s central project is to explode not just the binary, but gender itself: thus, for TERFs, queer theory—and the activisms and new identities it has produced—are an aberration of feminism. As one TERF activist wrote in The Guardian in 2017, “Queer politics positions gender as an innately held identity. The radical feminist understanding is that gender exists as a political system, not an identity.”

This is, of course, not only hypocritical, but a gross misunderstanding of queer politics and queer theory. As Butler explains in their own recent interview, the word “queer” was conceived by early activists as a way of “affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity—opposing the police, in fact.”

Like all prominent struggles led by marginalized groups, however, queer movements have been reduced by their detractors to “mere” identity politics (itself a term coined by Black feminists to express the possibility of creating new, broad-based social movements). And ironically, TERFs, like conservative critics of transgender people, discount the radical potential of queerness by claiming that identity is a flimsy basis for politics—while basing their own activism on the need to protect female identity as exclusive and unique.

TERFs share a penchant for vigilante justice with the drafters of Texas’s SB8 bill, which mobilizes private citizens to punish people seeking and providing abortions. For TERFs, any cisgender woman has a “right” to identify and examine anyone she perceives to be “biologically male,” expose them, expel them from the “single-sex” space they have supposedly invaded— whether it is a bathroom, a locker room, or a soccer field. And, like Texas abortion vigilantes, TERFs claim to be “protecting” women—and, increasingly, children, as we’ve seen with the new anti-trans obsession with sports.

But what is really being protected here? The purity of the female body: one that matches the sex it was assigned at birth and carries out the “natural” functions of that sex.

The antidote to fascism is not feminism, but queerness—a theory and a politics built on the notion that nothing is natural and no one owns the truth of gender. Because gender is, as historian Joan Scott puts it, a “primary way of signifying relationships of power,” queerness also teaches us that no one owns, or should own, the key to power. Queerness is not about the right to have an identity, but about the right to question its source and its meaning, and by doing that, question the society that determines those identities.

As Butler reminds us, gender is “a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities.” A truly radical feminism is not one that depends on exclusion, but one that questions power—its sources, its language, and its effects—and welcomes anyone who is willing to take part in that questioning to join the fight.

Hannah Leffingwell is a PhD candidate at New York University in the departments of History and French Studies. Her work centers on the intersections of queer identity, feminism, and social justice. Her first chapbook, A Thirst For Salt, was published by Gazing Grain Press in 2018. @hanleffingwell

Book image provided by Harvard University Press

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Despite its centrality in public life and scholarly debate, education, surprisingly, has not been a chief focus of political or economic histories of the modern United States. The role of schools, however, has been fundamental to American historical development in several key ways. Politically, education was a key driver of American state-building from the local level up. Nineteenth-century public school enrollment rates in the northern United States surpassed those of France and Great Britain, and schools made up the largest share of municipal expenditures during the early twentieth century. The United States relied on schools as the basis of its decentralized welfare state, as opposed to robust social insurance or job protections characteristic of leading European welfare states, and school systems became vehicles for the provision of many social services.

Economically, schools played a central role in the making of American capitalism, structuring access to employment and serving as the training grounds for the new staff of the American corporate economy. By providing exclusive credentials, educational institutions gave economic elites a tool for controlling entry into the most well-paid positions. The Education Trap shows how the Progressive Era—popularly named for efforts to rein in the excesses of capitalism—in fact deepened and legitimized long-standing forms of inequality. Indeed, it was during this period, rather than in the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, that income inequality reached its height. This book also bridges common divisions within labor history to examine the working lives of domestic workers, pink-collar staff, and highly paid professionals alike, contextualizing work within families and communities and highlighting the relation between groups of workers that shaped the development of each.

Culturally, schools also helped consolidate an ideology of individual advancement. This ideology is often characterized as a belief in equality of opportunity in contrast to equality of outcome. While rooted in a long American tradition of favoring reward for individual talent over hereditary privilege, this ideology was not static, nor should we imagine it operating autonomously. Rather, it was grounded in, fortified, and validated by experiences of schooling in the early twentieth century. As schools were imagined as a social panacea, they became a new foundation for individualized policy solutions to structural inequalities. “Educationalizing” social problems reduced pressure for more direct measures of reducing poverty and inequality. A growing body of scholarship has highlighted the ways in which American policymakers have persistently turned to solutions that place the blame, and the burden of re form, on individuals rather than society. The triumph of schooling in this era can help us understand why.

The ideology of education as a path toward social advancement was premised on the belief that one’s economic success reflected one’s skill level, or educational “merit.” Recent critics of meritocracy have pointed to the role of elite professionals in exacerbating social inequality, but many still cling to a faith in meritocracy in theory and point to educational solutions to address the problem. This book challenges us to reinterpret “merit” as a culturally constructed set of knowledges, behaviors, and values that reflect historically specific personal preferences and prejudices, often used by elites to maintain their power. Moreover, this book shows how the reconstruction of economic opportunity on the basis of education created a new institutional and ideological infrastructure for upholding socioeconomic inequality. As schools remade path ways into work across the employment structure, educational achievement (or lack thereof) became a new way of explaining and justifying the wealth of some and the poverty of others.

While education has many different meanings, this book focuses specifically on the role of education in shaping paths to work. The “vocationalization” of education, or the use of schools for economic reward, has long been criticized by educational reformers, from the early twentieth century through to the twenty-first Many nonvocational roles of education—such as education for democratic citizenship, intellectual and artistic creativity, and emancipation—are under threat, and are absolutely worth fighting for. But it is important to acknowledge that schools’ vocational role was enormously meaningful to those able to use schools, including “nonvocational” academic and liberal arts programs, to access better employment. Indeed, we can only explain the dramatic expansion of schools in this period if we acknowledge the role of parents and students who, by voting with their feet, pushed the educational system to expand its offerings and provide instruction that they believed would benefit them in the workplace.

To understand changes in training for work, we also need a wide lens that contextualizes schools as just one institutional form within an ecology of many sites of learning. By examining the full landscape of job-training institutions (including schools, universities, workplaces, the family) and the contested processes through which they forged links to distinct economic sectors, this book challenges long-standing silos in the field of educational history: between public and private, secondary and higher, formal and informal, “vocational” and “liberal” education. Public high schools and private universities a century ago were substantially shaped by competition with a flourishing ecology of proprietary and parochial schools, and the emerging public-private educational “system” was a distinctive feature of the American welfare state. While vocational education has often been interpreted and studied predominantly with reference to men’s industrial training, this book broadens the focus to encompass women’s occupational trajectories, as well as service-sector, white-collar, and professional jobs. In doing so, this book challenges the dichotomy between vocational and liberal (or academic) education by showing how forms of liberal education served as key paths to specific future employment opportunities. Liberal arts education, imagined in opposition to vocational concerns, was held up as an ideal across the political spectrum toward a variety of ends. In practice, however, this idealization became an important tool used by leading educational institutions to secure their status and prestige, as well as a means of legitimating the economic benefits attained by those with a supposedly nonvocational degree.

This book begins in the late nineteenth century, at a time when American pathways into employment looked haphazard. As detailed in Chapter 1, for nearly all wage earners in Boston, paths to work were based on family and social networks, and learning took place in the workplace rather than in school. Despite its lack of formal channels, the occupational structure was defined by many overt gender, ethnic, and racial inequalities. The rest of the book moves through each economic sector to illustrate the two interrelated patterns of transformation that restructured the labor market in the next decades: the failure of education intended to train students for low-wage and industrial work, and the success (and hence proliferation) of schools that trained students for white-collar and professional jobs. These two dynamics together reveal how education offered advantages for some, while simultaneously undercutting the power of organized workers and strengthening the power of elites. Faith in education as a way of mitigating a growing class divide was solidified just as the educational system provided a new institutional basis for reproducing class advantage. As a means of addressing social inequality, education became a dangerous trap.

Chapter 2 examines the failure of reformers’ efforts to improve the precarious employment of recent immigrants and African Americans in the lowest-paying service and manual-labor jobs. Based on the common diagnosis that low-wage work was due to a lack of skills, many progressive reformers pushed for the expansion of vocational training schools, such as “schools of housekeeping,” in order to elevate the status of household work. These efforts were largely unsuccessful. More popular services for low-wage workers included nurseries, kindergartens, English-language instruction, and citizenship classes, yet these services proved equally ineffective in reducing patterns of exploitation at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy.

For jobs in manufacturing and the trades, the subject of Chapter 3, conflicts between unions and employers over control of the training process hindered new industrial schools in both the private and the public sectors. Employers pursued managerial strategies to undercut the power of craft unions, and in place of the small shop with several craftworkers, sprawling assembly-line factories with immigrant operatives would come to define industrial America. Instead of receiving an education in specific industrial schools or industrial tracks within schools, which suffered from declining reputations and low enrollments, these factory workers learned basic literacy and numeracy in public elementary schools. This reorganization of the workplace was made possible by an army of school-educated white-collar workers that firms deployed to staff their corporate bureaucracies. Rather than the “organization man,” it was women who were the chief protagonists in this transformation.

Chapter 4 traces the changing landscape of training for clerical and sales work. With broad public support and without organized opposition, proprietary “commercial” schools and public high schools multiplied. The success of many women and second-generation immigrants entering positions as clerks, secretaries, and retail workers challenged some labor market inequalities and solidified the link between education and social mobility. Their entry, however, also sparked a reaction among a predominantly male, white, native-born elite. Upper-class Bostonians used professional strategies, relying on advanced educational credentials, to control access to the most remunerative jobs. An expanding white-collar sector became a differentiated hierarchy, with a vast pool of feminized pink-collar clerical and sales workers at the bottom and a new managerial class at the top. Thus, this new landscape of schools, while offering some opportunities, did not empower workers as a whole; rather, schools provided an opportunity for employers to centralize power. Professional strategies of control are traced in the professions of law and education and the “new profession” of business. By forging pathways from elite schools into corporate law, educational administration, and financial and business management, professionals and universities became coarchitects of the top rungs of the managerial ladder that undergirded twentieth-century corporate capitalism. In so doing, they defined the meaning of “merit” on the basis of academic knowledge as well as cultural norms, personal characteristics, and family background. They also shaped steep internal ladders within each profession, differentiating the corporate lawyer from the courtroom advocate, the administrator from the teacher, and the executive from the low-level manager. Rungs on the professional ladder not only corresponded to a hierarchy of schools, but also to hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, and race.

This book ends when these trends were consolidated in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, when youth employment collapsed, school enrollment continued to grow. By this point, employers across sectors had come to prefer school-educated employees, and formal education structured the majority of pathways into jobs. The triumph of school based training had significantly reshaped the employment structure and the balance of worker power. While the expansion of formal education opened up many new pathways into work and limited the overall supply of labor by keeping youth out of the labor market, this transition also undercut earlier forms of worker control by facilitating the transition to a nonunionized workforce and a credentialed elite. The 1930s and 1940s marked the beginning of a new chapter in the American political economy, when workers launched more inclusive organizing strategies for building power through industrial unions and the role of the federal welfare state greatly expanded.

Additional studies of other places and eras will be necessary to fully piece together the historical relationship between education and in equality in the United States. But the case of Boston challenges deeply rooted assumptions among both scholars and the general public about how education works. In early twentieth-century Boston, education expanded as socioeconomic inequality increased. The contested history of this development suggests that our national faith in education may be obscuring how schooling can in fact deepen economic inequality and conceal the ways in which educational merit has become a new foundation on which this inequality is justified.

By shifting the contemporary conversation about social inequality from the 1970s to the early twentieth century, the historical narrative presented in this book should also prompt a change in our understanding of the “great compression” between 1940 and 1970, when inequality was substantially reduced. The expansion of public higher education in that period has been heralded as a key contributor to the decline in inequality during those years. This golden age is also the basis upon which economists have rested claims that the best policy solution to address inequality in the present is more education. According to these scholars, we can think about the relationship between education and technology as a race, in which, if education falls behind technology, inequality in creases. From the late nineteenth century to the late 1970s, educational attainment rose faster than “skill-biased” technological change (or technological change that favors highly skilled workers), causing a reduction in social inequality. After the 1970s, however, educational attainment slowed as technological change continued apace, disproportionately benefiting those with the most human capital, and thereby increasing social inequality.

The evidence presented in this book suggests that many other political and economic factors were necessary preconditions and supplements to education during the midcentury decline of inequality. These include the expansion of social and economic protections by New Deal and Great Society welfare programs, progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, and the broad economic power of industrial labor unions led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which increased the power of workers and ensured that the jobs they entered had living wages and good working conditions. Education has always operated within a broader political and economic context that shapes its impact on social inequality. In addition, rather than imagine “education” monolithically, this book shows the very different roles played by distinct institutional types, some of which were much more effective as tools for concentrating wealth than redistributing it.

Beginning in the 1970s, social welfare protections, labor rights, and workers’ collective power began to be stripped away. Wages stagnated and middle-class jobs were “hollowed out.” Educational enrollment, meanwhile, continued to grow. Between 1963 and 2006, enrollment in public and private four-year colleges and universities nearly doubled, and community college enrollment increased by over 700 percent. To human-capital economists, this educational expansion has not been enough to mitigate the benefits accruing to those with the highest human capital. But the equation of skill and economic reward cannot explain the surging income and wealth of the top 1 percent, nor why the economic payoff of advanced education is so much higher in the United States than in other countries. As observed in the early twentieth century, educational expansion can trigger reactions from distinct organized political interests, in particular those at the top of the economic ladder who seek to preserve their power. Credentialist theories of occupational control seem better equipped to explain why the primary beneficiaries of rising inequality today are concentrated in highly credentialed professions in key positions in the corporate economy. Without a corresponding increase of power for working people, the benefits of additional educational attainment can be captured at the top.

The historical perspective offered in this book suggests that focusing only on expanding educational opportunities traps us into a narrow policy framework that can exacerbate the very problem it seeks to address. In our new Gilded Age, we can look back to the first Gilded Age over a century ago for insight. The role of education in amplifying unequal opportunity was not a unique product of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s or the corporatization of higher education, but a deeply rooted outgrowth of the historical relation between education and the economy in the United States. In an era of skyrocketing inequality, we need a new historical understanding of the consequences—sometimes for the better but more often for the worse—of the American faith in education as the panacea for social inequality.

Cristina Viviana Groeger is an Assistant Professor of History at Lake Forest College. Her research has been funded by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.

Excerpted from THE EDUCATION TRAP: SCHOOLS AND THE REMAKING OF INEQUALITY IN BOSTON by Cristina Viviana Groeger, published by Harvard University Press.

By Trebor Scholz, Doug O’Brien, and Jason Spicer

For anyone who could, work has moved to digital platforms over the past twelve months. But it’s not all Zoom and doom. In fact, U.S. President Joe Biden promised to become “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.”

It’s a moment of transformation; with hopes for the revision of broken U.S. Labor Law, which, over the past fifty years, has not meaningfully supported workers, should be high on the agenda of the incoming administration. That’s why we welcome the Clean Slate Project, co-directed by Professor Benjamin Sachs at Harvard University and Sharon Block who has just joined the Biden-Harris Administration. In 2020, the Project’s co-directors published the report “Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy.”

It’s much needed: The pandemic is hurting people working in tourism, healthcare, and the service industry; it harms incarcerated people and those with disabilities. Millions are unemployed. A year into the pandemic, many people are struggling with childcare, and 28 million Americans are facing evictions. Twenty-two percent of small businesses in the U.S. are devastated. Forty-one percent of African American businesses closed in the first few months of the pandemic alone. Meanwhile, some of the digital platforms which have enabled work to continue through the pandemic (“pandelivery”) have only served to exacerbate precarity and the long-running decline in worker power against capital.

Frequently, experts point to U.S. history, identifying unions and government as the two key countervailing forces to capital by asking: “What else has ever changed anything on a large scale?” In his book Beaten Down, Worked Up, for instance, veteran New York Times journalist Steven Greenhouse celebrates union successes: “In the late 1940s and the 1950s, through landmark contracts with General Motors, Ford, and other industrial giants, unions played a decisive role in building the biggest, richest middle class the world had ever seen.” The Clean Slate for Worker Power report echoes the understanding as the main force for good, pointing out that “We know from history that when workers come together and collectively build organizations that are capable of countervailing the power of the wealthy and the power of corporations, the outcomes are profound.”

Thus, while it is true that unions and government can claim major successes in the fight to advance worker power, are these the only options? The Clean Slate report has drawn on dozens of experts for their opinions, but only one co-op expert was consulted and cooperatives do not appear at all in the report.

This is not a one-time oversight. Policymakers, union advocates, and professors in the halls of esteemed American universities, systematically ignore cooperatives in the discussion about worker power.

Skeptics cite a lack of funding, an inability to scale up, and inefficient governance as insurmountable obstacles. Worker co-ops, in particular, are portrayed as idealistic aberrations of little consequence. In the U.S. context, with its individualistic culture and particularly virulent strain of capitalism, cooperatives are assumed to be an unrealistic option. But as the pandemic deepens the troubling consolidation of economic power among a small number of venture-capital backed digital platforms, the promise of platform co-operatives to act as an innovative and countervailing force in directly advancing worker power warrants a second look.

In his popular book Platform Capitalism, the British scholar Nick Srnicek argues that fighting monopolistic trends by building up platform co-ops faces all the “traditional problems of co-ops (e.g., the necessity of self-exploitation under capitalist social relations) which are made even worse by the monopolistic nature of platforms, the dominance of network effects, and the vast resources behind these companies. Even if all its software were made open-source, a platform like Facebook would still have the weight of its existing data, network effects, and financial resources to fight off any coop rival.”

Yet platform co-ops, as an example of digital cooperative ownership, can scale their operations and governance at a lower cost than brick-and-mortar cooperatives with the help of blockchain, other distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and data trusts. They benefit from the fact that cooperative ownership of companies is more easily scaled online than offline; a long tail of federated, small producers can act as one large entity, thereby competing in the marketplace. In fact, as the economy continues to be transformed by digital platforms, the cooperative model offers the potential to meet the moment, directly reversing the decline in worker power through the creation of democratically governed alternatives to the likes of Amazon. This countervailing potential of cooperatives was noted long ago by the Canadian-American Harvard economist Galbraith himself, in his original work which developed and made famous the idea of ‘countervailance’ to advance worker power against capital.

There is a long list of often-rehearsed claims that put the effectiveness of co-ops in question, some of them going back to the comments Rosa Luxemburg made in 1900. Skeptics argue that co-ops only serve the members of the co-op which limits the impact of the model significantly. They may not have learned about multi-stakeholder co-ops, in which workers can be one class of owner-members alongside consumers, producers, and socially-minded investors. Worker co-ops too can empower workers. Their membership includes 62.5 percent women and 58.8 percent people of color. They are businesses that are owned and controlled by the people who work at or depend on a given business. These businesses can also be unionized, adding further protections for workers.

Another claim suggests that platform co-ops when scaled internationally through digital platforms can no longer guarantee the trust of members. Consider a co-op with tens of thousands of members, distributed all over the planet. The effective connection and trust of local co-op members could be lost with a global platform co-op.

While this is an understandable concern, one of the cooperative movement’s central scaling innovations, the formation of cooperatives-of-cooperatives, offers a possible solution and the potential of the best of both worlds: scale and trust. In such structures, local or regional co-ops can act to maintain local trust among members. In turn, these local or regional co-ops can federate, and be joint co-owners of related “upstream” businesses. Variations on this well-known cooperative federating structure, which are effectively a reverse franchise model, can be seen around the world in large worker and multi-stakeholder cooperatives. While Mondragon of Spain is of course the most high-profile example, there are many others around the world, and today, platform cooperatives build on this long legacy of cooperative innovation to achieve scale in an ever-changing economy. At Harvard University, Professor Richard Freeman goes so far as to suggest that worker ownership of robots is the only way to build ethical Artificial Intelligence.

An additional critique of co-ops, especially worker cooperatives, is their rarity and lack of scale, particularly in the U.S. There are a mere 465 known worker cooperatives in the U.S. It’s a tiny sector. But there are, nonetheless, successful worker cooperatives in the United States, in multiple industries: the largest, with a few thousand worker-owners, is New York-based CHCA, a women-of-color-led, unionized home health care cooperative, but others of substantial size include Wisconsin-based Isthmus Engineering and California-based Arizmendi. And it is the promise of worker platform co-ops to scale this model up and wide.

What’s more, the overall co-op movement is hidden in plain sight; its size is significant. The cooperative blind spot ignores that more than one third of all Americans—120 million people—are members of cooperatives. There are over 65,000 co-op establishments in the U.S. and 3 million co-ops globally. U.S. co-ops employ 2.1 million people, provide more than $74 billion in annual wages, and earn a revenue of $650 billion. These establishments exist in energy, consumer finance, childcare, food distribution, health care, insurance, agriculture, telecommunications, and other industries. Roughly 1.5 million out of the 2.2 million farmers in the United States belong to a co-op, accounting for 55% of total U.S. agriculture sales. Nearly 80% of all milk production is touched by cooperatives at some point. When one looks at sectors that have gone to scale in the U.S.—agriculture, rural electricity, and credit unions—one finds the same story at work, again and again: People come together around a common problem; they create cooperative businesses to solve the problem, and they also work to change government policy to enable the creation of the cooperatives. For example, at the beginning of the 1930s, for example, only 10 percent of rural people in the U.S. had access to electricity, while 90 percent of urban households were already electrified. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created grant, loan, and technical assistance programs to solve this problem, but investor-owned utilities chose not to participate as the projects were not profitable enough. Meanwhile, farmers who had already been using cooperatives for decades in agriculture decided to form consumer utility cooperatives to access the government programs and to work to improve the enabling policy for cooperatives. Within a generation, 90 percent of rural households had access to electricity. Today, rural electric cooperatives serve 20 million businesses, homes, and schools in 48 states reaching well over 40 million people.

Concrete Policy Actions That Federal and Local Actors Can Take

Given this legacy of success in the U.S.—and around the world—the Clean Slate report’s exclusion and implicit dismissal of cooperatives is unfortunate. Just as any business model requires appropriate policy treatment to enable its widespread use, so do worker, platform, and multi-stakeholder cooperatives. In 2020, the Urban Institute released a report outlining actions that could be taken by policy makers to support people seeking to use cooperatives, including better enabling legislation, financing tools, technical assistance, and preferences in contracts and procurement. But there is still much that needs to be done to improve cooperative policy frameworks to enhance worker power in the U.S..

Nationally, the Biden-Harris administration could seek to finally implement the Main Street Employee Ownership Act. Passed in 2018, this legislation empowered the Small Business Administration (SBA) to include employee and worker ownership models, like cooperatives, across its various lending and technical assistance activities. The SBA, which in 2020 alone guaranteed nearly $30B in loans through its 7(a) program, has long performed a critical role in the development of new businesses. Beyond the 7(a) program, its Small Business Development Center program provides assistance to entrepreneurs around the U.S., and its Small Business Investment Company fund-of-funds program provides additional capital. Historically, co-ops were often either excluded or not clearly eligible for these programs. The Trump administration failed to implement this legislation. Nominated SBA administrator Guzman, from California, however, has some familiarity with these models, and we hope under her leadership, the SBA moves to fully include worker and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, including platform cooperatives, as eligible for lending and technical assistance services across the Agency’s portfolio.

COVID-19 economic recovery efforts also create an opportunity to advance worker power, by creating dedicated funds and technical assistance for businesses which might transition to worker-ownership as part of the recovery. As it was, in the pandemic “before-times,” a wave of healthy, Baby Boomer-owned small businesses were at risk of closure simply because they could not find a buyer. With the effects of the pandemic on small businesses, this problem—and the appeal of worker ownership as a solution—has only become more appealing. A host of groups, like Project Equity, PCC, and the Main Street Phoenix Project, among others, are already getting traction on this front. How much more broadly could this scale, with the kind of policy frameworks that policy makers chose to create to enable people in the U.S. to establish rural electrical cooperatives, agriculture cooperatives, and credit unions?

Beyond the SBA and COVID-19 recovery actions, more generally, the Biden Administration could consider re-animating the Obama-era Inter-agency Working Group on Cooperative Development (IWGCD) and prioritizing employee and cooperative ownership to examine ways to improve cooperatives’ access to and inclusion in programs across Federal government agencies.

Historically, U.S. federal policy action has often followed experimentation and organizing at the local scale. Around the U.S. today, cities and states have been experimenting with a range of policy actions to support worker and community ownership, including cooperatives, by removing barriers to their eligibility and inclusion in existing urban economic development programs, improving provision of technical assistance and education to new entrepreneurs about cooperative models, and incenting cooperatives’ use in existing government procurement/purchasing programs and direct lending programs. States are undertaking similar actions and have also moved to update the laws governing cooperatives’ incorporation, many of which were woefully out of date. As a sense of the best practices across cities and states emerge, we suspect they might inform the development of other federal policy recommendations. This might also help harmonize the treatment of cooperatives across states, which is a particularly critical issue for digital and platform co-ops, which often seek to work across state lines.

But for any of these recommendations to have a chance of succeeding and to gain a place at the policy table, however, they need widespread backing, including from the broader movement for worker power. If the American movement supporting Democratic Socialism gets traction, centrist Democrats are likely to push for cooperatives as a way to temper the severity of American capitalism. To that end, efforts like The Clean Slate for Worker Power project would do well to consider the potential of platform cooperatives and lend their active support to the cooperative movement and its policy goals.

A defining debate of the political moment? Or liberal hairsplitting? Eurozine talks to James Miller, editor of Public Seminar, about what we mean when we talk of fascism – and whether it makes any difference anyway.

Eurozine · Fascism for our time?

‘Fascism’ has entered America’s political lexicon as a way to understand and oppose the rise of the far-right. Trump’s polemics against the left have also propelled the label ‘antifascism’ into the mainstream. But are we really seeing a US fascism? What baggage does the concept of ‘antifascism’ carry? And what are we doing when we invoke Weimar?

In this episode of Gagarin, the Eurozine podcast, editor Simon Garnett talks to James Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and editor of Public Seminar, about their collaboration on the focal point ‘Fascism for our time’.

This was originally published by Eurozine.

Daniel Dale is a reporter for CNN. His beat is unique, but it shouldn’t be. Every reporter and editor following the president’s reelection campaign should do what Dale does: report Donald Trump’s lies as lies, not as part of some opaque political strategy or a subtheme of another story of interest to the public.

Dale’s work is different categorically from fact-checking. Anyone can do that. Dale, however, makes the lies the story. Moreover, he permits his methodical reporting to culminate in a moral conclusion, one vital to the healthy functioning of a free and open republic. “Trump is a serial liar,” Dale said.

Before I go on, I should say Dale is special. Not just anyone can give frequent, news-making, magisterial, and awe-inspiring performances on live television without notes or visual cues, as Dale did Thursday night after Trump’s acceptance speech. He knocked down one falsehood after another. He informed Anderson Cooper’s viewership of the whole truth, drawing entirely on his prodigious memory.

But reporters need not be virtuosos to understand that their job—their American duty—is to inform the citizenry. What’s more important than telling your fellow citizens that our president can’t be trusted?

There is something more important, actually, something that makes the moral burden on the press even heavier.

While every other word coming out of this president’s mouth is a lie, about 40 percent of the country, the same percentage approving unwaveringly of Trump, despite everything, isn’t just being duped. They desire lies. They fear the responsibility of freedom, taking immense pleasure in surrendering themselves to the authoritarian hivemind. And based on this dense thicket of desire, they decide to believe the president’s lies.

After all, believing lies—however harmful, poisonous, or even treasonous—is more comfortable, and therefore better, than accepting and reckoning with the whole truth. More vexing perhaps, it’s a choice. Believing Trump’s lies is, therefore, rational.

This analysis might sound surprising, but it shouldn’t. White Americans choose to believe the biggest lie of them all when they deny the existence of racism in our society and ourselves. This lie is so omnipresent as to be blindingly invisible—unless you’re not white. In that case, you, my friend, see the truth plainly and don’t need me to explain it. (You also don’t need me to say that you don’t need me to explain it, but I trust you appreciate the gesture.)

Every white person understands how our society treats Black people. That’s why few white people would opt for walking a mile in a Black person’s shoes (even if he’s rich, as Chris Rock once said, “That’s how good it is to be white!”) While some white people fight racism, most don’t. Why should we? The system works for us, even if we struggle as individuals. Inaction by white people is tacit action, a choice made in keeping with our self-interests. The lie is rational.

Racism does not need proving as a precondition to reporting, because it’s always already a precondition to our society. Journalists are, therefore, justified in thinking anyone denying racism is acting rationally in their self-interest. And journalists are therefore justified in thinking anyone denying racism is acting in bad faith. As University of Connecticut philosopher Lewis Gordon put it, such people are trying to “escape personal anguish” by deciding to ignore evidence counter to “cherished beliefs.”

If you’re escaping something, the reporter’s job is easy. Why is the truth painful? What is there to lose? Are you prepared to be held responsible for your choices? Daniel Dale’s beat is holding Trump accountable for his lies. But the press corps is justified in doing the same for 40 percent of Americans choosing to believe them.

I’ve said the reason a handful of Black people vouched for Trump at the Republican National Convention wasn’t to expand his appeal among Black voters. It was to make white voters, especially Trump’s supporters, feel good about supporting a racist and feel all right about systemic racism’s sadist outcomes. Indeed, you could say the entire point of this week’s convention was advancing, deepening and expanding the biggest lie of them all: that white Americans aren’t racists, that white Americans deserve their power and privilege, and that Black Americans deserve their fate.

When journalists cover lies as part of another story, instead of as the story itself, they not only spread the lie but, in the case of systemic racism, fuel America’s self-destruction. The point of a free press is to enable a free people.

Instead, it’s enabling our captivity.

John Stoehr is a journalist and a fellow at the Yale University Journalism Initiative. This article was first published at The Editorial Board.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Attorney General William Barr will testify before the House Judiciary Committee today for the first time. Democrats tried to get him to appear to explain why he had misrepresented what was in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. He refused to show up after learning that staff lawyers would be allowed to question him. Then coronavirus slowed down another meeting. Finally, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) threatened to subpoena him, and he agreed to come in voluntarily.

But not happily.

Last night, he released a combative opening statement which begins by slamming “the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal,” despite the fact that, in December 2019, the Justice Department’s own inspector general, Michael Horowitz, found that the investigation had been initiated properly and without political bias. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has also unanimously supported the conclusion of the Intelligence Community that Russia attacked the 2016 election to benefit candidate Trump.

The rest of Barr’s opening statement similarly echoed Trump talking points.

The Attorney General of the United States is, of course, not the president’s lawyer. The AG is supposed to be the attorney for the United States, protecting the rule of law. (The office of the president has its own lawyer—the White House Counsel—and the president has his own bevy of personal lawyers.)

Today, as Barr testifies, a new book about him by Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings, will come out. It examines how Barr’s misleading summary of Mueller’s report derailed the public inquiry into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, because no one wanted to believe the new Attorney General would “be willing to sacrifice his reputation for the sake of Trump. Now,” Eisen said in an interview with Just Security, “over a year and many lies later, we know much better.” Eisen says that Barr’s summary made Americans think—incorrectly—that Mueller had exonerated Trump, when in fact, the opposite was the case.

In a piece in Newsweek yesterday, Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) expanded on this idea. He noted Barr’s lies about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election; his attempts to dismiss the charges against Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and lighten the sentence against Trump’s friend Roger Stone; as well as his firing of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman… and concluded that Barr has simply taken the place of Michael Cohen as Trump’s fixer.

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, who spent 8 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote today that in Barr’s 18 months as Attorney General, he “has done profound and pervasive damage to the Justice Department.” He has undermined its credibility and independence. Honig outlined five issues where Barr has lied in public, including the quite transparent lie that Berman had resigned, which Berman himself promptly contradicted. Honig urges tomorrow’s questioners to ask about them.

It is unlikely that Barr will do more than obfuscate in today’s testimony. Because Senate Republicans will almost certainly never agree to convict Barr, impeaching him is a stretch, especially since Republicans will instantly insist that it is an election-year ploy. It could well backfire. But there is no doubt that Barr’s behavior is problematic.

Today conservative commentator Tom Nichols noted that Barr has emerged as the de facto leader of the Executive Branch, since Trump is “functionally incapacitated.” It is, Nichols says “a total collapse of constitutional order within the Executive branch” as Barr is using federal law enforcement officers against U.S. citizens. Nichols urges courts, state attorneys general, and state authorities to step into Barr’s way.

Nichols is an advisor to The Lincoln Project, which is hammering on Trump’s mental incapacity to perform the duties of the president. It must be acknowledged that Trump is giving them plenty to work with. Today the New York Times reported on Trump’s announcement that he would be throwing out the first pitch to the New York Yankees on August 15 at Yankee Stadium, an announcement Trump made just an hour before Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has been advising Trump on the pandemic, threw out the first pitch at the opening game between the Yankees and the Washington Nationals.

Someone in the White House leaked that Trump had not been invited to do any such thing: Trump made up the event because he was annoyed that Fauci was getting more attention than he was. Then, of course, he “cancelled” the made-up plan with a racist tweet. “Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the [Yankees] on August 15. We will make it later in the season!”

It is fair to say that this is not normal behavior for a president.

In tweets yesterday, a day in which coronavirus deaths passed the number of Union Army soldiers killed on battlefields during the Civil War, Trump outlined his plan for reelection. He will try to convince voters to forget about his botching of the pandemic response by insisting that Democrats will usher in an apocalypse.

“The Fake News Media is trying to portray the Portland and Seattle “protesters” as wonderful, sweet and innocent people just out for a little stroll,” Trump said. “Actually, they are sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators who our great men & women of Law Enforcement easily control, but who… would destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn. Our Country would suffer like never before. We will beat the Virus, soon, and go on to the Golden Age – better than ever before!”

It’s an aggressive argument, since of course markets have actually crashed and cities “burned” on his watch, and our country is suffering as never before with an unaddressed pandemic. The argument that the best way to overcome our current trouble is to trust him with another four years is going to be a hard sell, especially since a report released today in The Guardian notes that a new database of 893 politically motivated terrorist incidents in America since 1994 shows that just one attack that led to a death came from an anti-fascist agitator. In that incident, the single person killed was the perpetrator. In the same period, white supremacists and rightwing extremists have killed at least 329 people.

Once again, the Republican narrative is running into reality. But in this case, Trump has the advantage of having his man at the head of the Department of Justice.

There was, in Barr’s opening statement, a line that jumped out. He wrote that what is happening in Portland, Oregon, where protesters have vandalized a federal courthouse, “is, by any objective measure, an assault on the Government of the United States.”

No, it is not.

The interference of a foreign country in our elections is an assault on the government of the United States. Undermining the rule of law is an assault on the government of the United States. Vandalizing a courthouse does not threaten our nation. It is vandalism that should result in arrests by local police officers, as it has.

That the Attorney General is characterizing local vandalism as an assault on our national government is worrisome. It suggests that, less than four months before an election, he intends to keep sending into Democratic cities federal officers who are loyal to him and his president.

And if it happens, that will be an assault on the government of the United States, for sure.

Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History, Boston College. This was originally published in her Substack newsletter: get your free subscription here

Jair Bolsonaro. Photo credit: Marcelo Chello / Shutterstock.com

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring out the fascist ideology in countries under far-right rule. In the world’s three largest democracies, national leaders are using the COVID-19 crisis to wage war on immigrants and minorities, while testing the limits of common sense.

NEW YORK/NEW HAVEN — In stark contrast to the effective leadership shown by German chancellor Angela Merkel, South Korean president Moon Jae-in, and Singapore’s autocratic technocracy, the world’s far-right nationalists have met the COVID-19 crisis with something not seen in decades: the fascist politics of disease. And no one typifies this brand of politics better than Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro.

True, a few other world leaders — including Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and the dictators of Belarus, Turkmenistan, and North Korea — still deny that the coronavirus poses any threat. But, among coronavirus deniers, Bolsonaro is in a league of his own.

Among other things, Bolsonaro recently fired Brazil’s minister of health, Luiz Mandetta, merely for advocating mild social-distancing measures. Bolsonaro seems to be emulating his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, who recently ousted a senior health official for resisting his efforts to champion an unproven treatment for COVID-19.

Throughout the crisis, Trump has been out of his depth, oscillating incoherently between denial and calls for decisive action, and most recently speculating that the coronavirus could be treated by injecting household disinfectants. And yet he and Bolsonaro channel the same political impulse to place themselves above science and expertise, exalting their own gut instincts and justifying their decisions with faith and myth. Though their “strategies” are superficially distinct, both share a fascist historical background, which centers around the cult of a leader and the myth of national greatness — a greatness that has supposedly been compromised by internationalism and liberalism (which fascists equate with communism).

Around the world, far-right leaders’ responses to the pandemic feature key elements of fascist ideology. After members of Spain’s right-wing nationalist Vox party were infected at their own political rallies, they suggested that their antibodies represented the nation’s fight against a foreign invader. As one Vox leader, Javier Ortega Smith, put it, “my Spanish antibodies fight against the damned Chinese viruses.”

Similarly, Bolsonaro, in his first major speech on COVID-19 (on March 24), claimed that Brazil was not particularly vulnerable to the virus. Unlike feeble Italy, with its “large number of elderly people,” contemporary Brazil, he argued, “has everything, yes, everything to be a great Nation.” Bolsonaro then touted his own “athlete’s history,” thus indulging another standard fascist motif: the leader as the embodiment of the nation’s health and vigor. According to “Bolsonarismo,” Bolsonaro simply is Brazil.

There is good reason why some in the media have dubbed Bolsonaro, elected in late 2018, “the Trump of the tropics.” Bolsonaro’s affinity for Trump has never been clearer than in his reaction to the pandemic. When Trump called in late March to reopen America by Easter, Bolsonaro quickly imitated him.

But, unlike Trump, Bolsonaro actually follows through. While Trump has often hinted at a desire for absolute power, he invariably retreats. By contrast, Bolsonaro joins public protests in support of intervention by Brazil’s military to disband Congress and the courts. He is essentially Trump’s id, acting out what Trump can only fantasize about. And, given that fascism is, at root, a fantasy of total domination by a leader, Bolsonaro has now surpassed his teacher in approaching it.

Moreover, in fascist politics, reality is merely an instrument through which to propagate ideology and assert domination. As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, “[t]he national State will look upon Science as a means for increasing national pride.”

Beyond Brazil and the United States, one other great democracy — the world’s largest — has come under far-right rule: India. There, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, have used the pandemic to advance an ongoing campaign of demonization directed at India’s Muslim population.

To that end, the Modi government has been publicly attributing the spread of the coronavirus to an annual meeting of the Muslim missionary group Tablighi Jamaat, while ignoring similar meetings held by Hindu groups. It is not surprising, the journalist Rana Ayyub observes, that “the hashtags #CoronaJihad and #BioJihad have inundated Twitter” in recent weeks.

The Modi government’s message is based on a repugnant lie, but it has far-reaching consequences for India’s Muslims. Well before COVID-19 arrived, Muslims were being targeted by a campaign of state discrimination. In addition to an official government effort to strip millions of Muslims of their citizenship, there has been an upsurge in extrajudicial violence against Muslims, including a pogrom that coincided with Trump’s lavish official visit to India earlier this year.

In fascist politics, members of the hated outgroup are almost always depicted as bearers of disease. That is how the Nazis described the Jews, and it is how far-right governments today justify policies targeting immigrants and minorities. In Italy, home to the first fascist regime, Matteo Salvini of the right-wing League party argued in February that “[a]llowing migrants to arrive from Africa, where the presence of the virus has been confirmed, is irresponsible.” At the time, there were already 229 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Italy, and just one in all of Africa.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration, too, has used the COVID-19 crisis to strengthen its anti-immigrant stance. Going beyond its obsessive attacks on undocumented immigrants, the administration has also now imposed a sweeping moratorium on legal immigration.

Political leaders will always be tempted to blame problems on familiar ideological enemies, because doing so provides narrative coherence. But as Hannah Arendt reminded us, “[t]he chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”

Now that the US has surpassed 92,000 confirmed (and almost certainly far more total) COVID-19 deaths, reality is asserting itself against propaganda. But, as we know from the history of fascism, there is no guarantee that common sense will prevail.

Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of From Fascism to Populism in History, Transatlantic Fascism, and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

This article was first published at Project Syndicate on May 4, 2020.

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