On the Importance of Jill Stein

This past week, I watched my Facebook newsfeed fill up with links iSideWith.com, an app that provides a presidential election quiz. After completing the quiz, Facebook users can post links announcing the candidate they side with. Surprisingly neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney were the most common results posted. Instead, it was Jill Stein, candidate of the Green Party, whose face was all over my newsfeed. It seemed everyone, from committed communists to disillusioned liberals, had found Jill Stein's platform at least nominally compatible with their views. While normally I would be suspicious of a candidate attracting such a breadth of sympathizers, the trend of the election quiz's results has given me hope that there may finally be a genuine Left alternative to Barack Obama. Assuming the app continues to gain popularity, and assuming more and more disillusioned liberals find they have more in common with Jill Stein than with Barack Obama, Jill Stein could stand a significant chance of making a noticeable political impact.

Moreover, as national media attention has focused away from Occupy, Jill Stein's open endorsement and participation in Occupy's struggles could bring attention back to the movement. Occupy was criticized constantly in the mainstream press for lacking a leader and, later, for failing to transition from direct action to legislative action. Though many involved with Occupy reject legislative avenues and view the idea of an "Occupy candidate" as antithetical to the movement's commitment to horizontalism, Jill Stein could be the voice of the movement's reformist tendencies and the link between the movement's activists and the rest of the public. Her platform - A Green New Deal - translates many of the grievances voiced by the Occupy movement into concrete policy proposals. Stein calls for "an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions"and has vowed to create "a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgage and either restructure the mortgages to federal levels...or...rent homes to the occupants." Her Full Employment Program is designed to "create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence peddling." The aforementioned proposals address the concerns of Occupy. Both activists and the media should look to Stein's candidacy as a crystallization of an Occupy electoral platform.

The very idea of an electoral platform for the Occupy movement undoubtedly upsets a lot of people involved with the movement. And that is fine. Occupy participants who are committed to effectuating social justice outside of the legislative or mainstream political framework will be able to continue their radical activism regardless of whether Stein is on the ballot. But for Occupy participants who have grown weary of having no concrete platform, Jill Stein's candidacy is a chance to finally engage in the electoral process under an unabashedly left-wing banner.

Occupy's skeptics of organization and hierarchy, despite their disagreements with Stein's proposals, should nonetheless pay attention to Stein's rhetoric and the values espoused by the Green Party. Decentralization and local control have long been Green Party pillars, in contrast with the platforms of other left-wing parties. While not horizontalist, Stein and the Green Party share many of the more radical Occupiers' values. And that is a good thing. Stein's presidential campaign puts a pragmatic spin and concrete platform behind a set of criticisms and ideas that have been derided in the press as vague or idealistic and ignored by many. It would be a mistake for the Left to disregard her candidacy, especially when faced with the false choice between to servants of corporate interests and the wealthy.

May Day Reflections - One Week Later

Union Square was packed. Aging Maoists, reformist liberals, and the occasional steampunk-looking person stood shoulder to shoulder under a sun that had grown progressively warmer as the day wore on. Tom Morello's atrociously banal "Worldwide Rebel Song"" rang out from the speakers placed around the park. We had marched there from Bryant Park, starting on the sidewalk and then gradually taking the street. We had streamed down the avenue as police on their scooters tried desperately to corral us at each intersection. The air in the square was triumphant but apprehensive. It felt like we had finally done it. Thousands were assembled in Union Square. We had effectively shut down a major boulevard in the busiest city on Earth.

As Tom Morello's final chords echoed around one last time, I left the park to survey the surrounding streets. Were more people coming? Where were all the street cleaners, garbage men, and bus drivers who should have already joined us? A taxi whizzed past, probably carrying some wealthy European tourist. More cars drove by. People entered and exited luxury shops. Kids just out of school exercised their civic imperative to consume. Just two blocks away from Union Square, business carried on as if nothing was happening. Yet somehow, sympathetic writers (see the Nation's Allison Kilkenny's post-May Day article and Natasha Lennard's pre-May Day article) have been reluctant to recognize the May 1 General Strike for what it was - like many recent Occupy actions, a disappointment. 

Firstly, May Day was disappointing because it wasn't really a strike. Sure, lots of students, young members of the creative class, and veterans of the anti-war movement were there. But the unions didn't join the march until later in the afternoon. Transit workers, teacehers, sanitation workers all worked on the day of the General Strike. Indeed, the May 1 General Strike action would not have been possible had there been an actual strike. Many of the activists who arrived at Bryant Park via subways or buses would not have been able to do so had there been a strike. The students from New Jersey, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens would not have been able to make it either. The supreme irony of the May 1 General Strike is that no action would have been possible if the city's workers had actually refused to work.

The second disappointment has to do with tactics. And there's been a lot of writing about the NYPD presence and the brutal tactics it employed against protestors. The NYPD learned from last fall - it wanted nothing to do with the mass arrests that marked the early days of the Occupy movement. Instead of the spectacle of arrests, like the Brooklyn Bridge in October, the NYPD adopted a subtler and more brutal strategy. But what is disappointing is that the effectiveness of this strategy - "snatch and grab"- is not due to the sheer power in numbers of the police. Rather, the Occupy movement has made it easier, and this was the case on May Day, for police to apprehend activists and disrupt marches by using the "snatch and grab" strategy.

"Snatch and grab" as crowd control is successful chiefly because it disrupts the flow of a march. When thousands of pople are flowing down a street, the best way to effectively impede their motion is not some kind of colossal barricade but rather some kind of threatening distraction. When the police pull a young woman out of a crowd and throw her down on the pavement - as has happened countless times - the attention of the march is diverted. Movement halts and confusion takes over. What just happened? Who was that? And of course there is the concomitant attempt to make an un-arrest, which diverts the attention of the marchers even further. The answer to this police behavior is not to become callously indifferent to the abuse of our comrades; instead, we must find a way to make "snatch-and grab" ineffective, if not impossible. 

Police fire on protesters blocking an intersection

I am not a seasoned protester or professional activist by any means; I am a high school student from New Jersey. But I was there on May Day, and I witnessed the disappointment. I was weaned on the legend (and I say legend because I was five years old in 1999) of the protests at the WTO conference in  Seattle. It is almost impossible to compare Occupy to the global justice movement of the 90s and the coalition of groups that came together in Seattle in 1999. And even so, Seattle has already been dissected, analyzed, and fetishized. But there is one image from the grainy youtube clips of Seattle of which I am reminded nearly every time I think about Occupy: protesters blocking an intersection, forcing the police to open fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. The protests in Seattle prevented the conference from happening. It blocked the WTO delegates from entering the meetings. To do this, activists took over intersections, blockaded roads, and halted the flow of traffic. In most cases, these tactics have been absent from the Occupy protests. Though unpermitted marches have become a hallmark of sorts of the Occupy movement, they create only minor disruptions and occur almost randomly. There is no specified goal or target (and I'm not taking about demands here). The unpermitted marches simply end up leading several hundred people down New York City sidewalks.

The Occupy movement, at its core, is about putting an end to business as usual for Wall Street - putting an end to the unquestioned reign of the "1%" over the "99%." Occupy, then, is about disruptions - so is the General Strike. The purpose of both is to stop the flow of capital. But this is hard to do when marches simply rush through the streets or sidewalks. disrupting little and certainly not halting the flow of anything.

The unpermitted march inhabits a strange place on the spectrum of public protest. It is not a state-sanctioned event, so the police remain antagonists instead of facilitators - but it is not an act of civil disobedience. In most cases, walking with a group down a sidewalk is not illegal, but it is still moderately disruptive and it irritates police. Occupy has often been reluctant to use flat out civil disobedience - such as public sit downs and blockades of city streets- out of fear of directly violating the law and the sensibilities of mainstream Americans. Occupy's strategy, instead, has been to tread the line of legality in the hope that a violent police response will win the movement sympathizers. But this strategy has not worked. Those the movement hoped to win over simply react to the roving sidewalk protests as a nuisance. "Shut up and stop crowding the sidewalk" is a common response. If the public is not receptive to timid attempts to remain within the bounds of the law, then the law must be broken.

If we're going to get arrested anyway - snatched and grabbed off the street into a paddy-wagon - then let's get arrested the right way! What better method of clotting the arteries of capitalism is there than to sit our asses down in the middle of a Times Square intersection with 5,000 of our closest friends? The cops will need to do more than "snatch and grab" to get rid of us. And we can be sure the amount of time that would be enough to turn those clogged arteries into a stroke. But to successfully induce a cardiac arrest, we need more people in the street; as long as the number of protesters remain in the thousands, the media will continue to ignore them.

Austerity and Dependence

Welcome to the era of the gerontocracy. Nearly all political energy is exhausted in dealing with the ramifications of the growth of one demographic: the elderly. Such a political climate was predicted a decade ago. But, now that the call for austerity measures has been issued, the American public has been asked to reckon with the facts. 

"Today the ratio of working taxpayers to nonworking pensioners in the developed world is around 3:1. By 2030, absent reform, this ratio will fall to 1.5:1, and in some countries, such as Germany and Italy, it will drop all the way down to 1:1 or even lower. While the longevity revolution represents a miraculous triumph of modern medicine and the extra years of life will surely be treasured by the elderly and their families, pension plans and other retirement benefit programs were not designed to provide these billions of extra years of payouts" (Peterson, G. Peter. Grey Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis. Foreign Affairs. Jan/Feb 1999). 

Faced with the financial crisis on one hand and this demographic crisis on the other, neoliberalism presents us with a false choice - cut education and social services for the young and the most in need and leave Medicare and Social Security untouched, or cut entitlement programs for the current generation of retirees. The choice is a false one; agreeing to any kind of cuts affirms the logic of neoliberalism and its arsenal of moral conceptions regarding debt and deficits.

The generational conflict must be acknowledged. The youth of today are going to foot the bill the profligacy of the ruling generation - a generation that includes the Baby Boomers, the first cohort of which is about to retire. Students and recent graduates already drowning in debt are being asked to pay for the continued State support of their parents, whether through taxes or cuts to public education. Yet this generational politics described by Connor Kilpatrick in this essay at Jacobin and Malcolm Harris in this essay at the New Inquiry will not be solved by fighting the elderly for the last scraps of government assistance. Such an argument does not break from the logic of neoliberalism. In fact it uses the very language of neoliberalism to make its case. To truly fight austerity and the economic order it rationalizes, we must throw out the market-based conception of "dependence". 

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of successfully fighting austerity is the continued use of "dependence" by the left. Declarations such as, "batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while" are characteristic of a reactionary argument. Indeed, Reagannites and Thatcherites provided this same rationale provided during for cutting social services during the 1980s. 


The reasoning behind portraying the elderly as dependent is as follows: since the elderly, like the unemployed, do not participate in the productive process they are not entitled to any kind of support. And, because those populations do not participate in productive life, the rest of the able-bodied population is forced to subsidize their indolence. A serious challenge to the rationale for austerity rejects the idea of dependence completely and reframes government assistance as an issue of freedom.  In an essay for the Nation last year, Corey Robin discussed how this might be done:

"We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job."

Social Security and Medicare do not abridge freedom by way of government intervention. Instead, these social welfare programs expand freedoms for the members of a polity. Social Security allows the elderly to live free from the threat of starvation, provides the elderly to move about freely despite living on a fixed income, and frees the elderly from the threatening vicissitudes of post-employment life. This kind of reasoning must be extended to all corners of economic life. Austerity measures, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans say, do not expand freedom. Placing the fates of those citizens most in need - students, the poor, and the elderly - at the mercy of the market does not enhance individual freedom; it limits it.

This mode of thought can even be extended to explain the relationship between the youth and the retired. Asking the younger generation to pay for the care, in the form of cuts to healthcare and education, absolutely constitues a curtailment of freedom. Yet, the way to prevent this state of unfreedom is not to in turn cut social services and entitlement program for the elderly. That, too, is a curtailment of freedom. The State, empowered by a democratic polity, can instead expand support for at-risk populations, in turn expanding freedom. This idea, that an expansion of social services is the answer to the problem of intergenerational conflict, is the real challenge to neoliberalism and austerity.

***

There is another component to the popular picture of generational conflict. The irony of living in a gerontocracy is that when the government is run by old people in possession of fantastic wealth - Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, John McCain, to name a few - it is easy to forget that the many older Americans are not so fortunate. Baby Boomers, from the union-shop manufacturer to the school teacher, have been also been fleeced and exploited. They, too, have seen wages stagnate, houses foreclosed on, savings wiped out, and debt increased. The response to the crisis and concomitant calls for austerity measures should not be a cry of "eat the old." It should be the cry of "eat the rich", accompanied with a hearty shout of "no one is dependent!" 

Don't fight the elderly simply because, after years of wage slavery, they finally get to step off the unceasing economic treadmill. Fight those who argue that anyone deemed "unproductive" does not have the right to a basic level of social security. Challenge the idea that people are only of value to society when they have productive potential. If neoliberalism is an economic model that awards power to those with the fattest wallets, fight for an economic paradigm that insures everyone has an equal ability and equal resources to engage in the political process.

It is true that the young have been made to bear a disproportionate burden of the austerity measures that have come out of the financial crisis, and that they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Students and recent graduates are paying for the profligacy of the bankers  and the ruling class in the form of cuts to public education. These same students, in the event that they find a job, will then pay for those same profligate bankers to retire, while the students, when they grow old, will not have the luxury of that same kind of safety-net. All of this is tremendously distressing and reason enough to take to the streets. But, at the same time, the pensioned factory worker or school teacher is not the enemy; they are partners in the fight to alter the status quo that forces us to make the false choice - to side with either the youth or the aged. When you face off with the police in during the next occupation, remember to stand side-by-side with your parents, not face-to-face against them.

Quotes of the Day - March 4, 2012

The next book on my reading list is Power and the Idealists, by Paul Berman. I decided to read it after a debate with an uncle of mine about humanitarian interventionism. I argued that while well-intentioned, humanitarian intervention has tended to exacerbate conflicts rather than end them and that, more often than not, humanitarian intervention is used a pretext for the expansion of military power. My uncle framed the debate in purely ethical terms; if you have the ability to stop a massacre you are morally obligated to do so. So, I had a general idea of what the book was going to be about. That said, now that I'm halfway through the book, Berman covers a lot of material that I did not expect to see. With a fast-paced, journalistic tone and occasional humorous flourishes, Berman deftly describes the transformation of the radicals of '68 and the New Left into the champions of liberal intervention on the world stage. And, over the course of the first two chapters, he provides a stinging critique of left-wing anti-Zionism and a humorous take on contemporary American conservatism among other noteworthy points that I have highlighted below.

Berman characterizes well the conservative fear of the moral bankrupting of America by spooky academic liberal elites. For the Right, and probably for for David Brooks, too,

 "The American public seemed to have sunk into a swamp of moral indifference, even depravity. Right and wrong had disappeared into a marshy haze. And the conservatives grew wide-eyed in astonishment and horror."

Berman's description of the non-terrorist New Left is harsh. It paints the activists of '68 as silent accomplices in the wave of left-wing terror that gripped Europe in the 1970's. His description also verges on a criticism of lifestylism.

"They were not entirely resistant to the terrorist argument. So they dithered....they labored at building their communes, kindergartens, food co-ops, new gender relations, and other elements of the new Left utopia in its countercultural version. Or else they followed the retro-Marxist example and colonized the factories in search of proletarian followers. They mooned nostalgically over the anarchosyndicalist vision of a revolutionary general strike" (pg. 52).

The last line jumped out at me. As May 1st grows nearer and talk about a general strike seeps into the mainstream media (See this Salon article). Berman's mocking tone frustrates me. A general strike, however unrealistic it is to hope for a complete halt to all business on a single day, could have intense localized effects. Even if only one factory is taken over, or one business shut down, that is a small victory that can propel the movement forward.


As much as I try to avoid Israel nowadays, it always seems to find me. I've argued for years now, with friends and family, about the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Yet, in describing the Left's post-1967 backlash against Israel, Berman shows that there is, regrettably, an often blurry line between the two.

"The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And, under those circumstances, the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Easter conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly reconfigured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state" (pg. 54).

Of course, to describe Israel as a Nazi state is utterly preposterous. It is not possible to compare the actions of the Nazis to the occupation of the West Bank. Israel may be an oppressive, even apartheid state, but it is certainly not a reincarnation of Hitler's Germany. The great irony of left-wing sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and thus opposition to Israel, is that by opposing Israel for being Nazi-like, the Left puts itself quite literally in the same camp as people who themselves are Nazi-like - Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamofascists) and even Neo-Nazis themselves.

"He found himself in a military training ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part, European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist military training" (pg. 55).

I have no love for the French New Philosophers, but Glucksmann's attempts to create a new and coherent set of political ideas out of the antiquated Marxism of both the old and New Left is certainly something admirable.

"[H]e set about trying to construct a new set of political ideas. That was his project. He did this in three big steps between 1975 and the early nineteen eighties. His first step, in the mid-seventies, was to give up on his old-fashioned anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the fundamentals of the left, in favor of what he began to call antitotalitarianism" (pg. 67).

Today, the Left is in need of revitalization more than ever. The resonance of Occupy Wall Street has provided a certain spark to segments of the political left, but it remains as disparate and factionalized as ever. Every ideological subgroup, from the insurrectionary anarchists to the social democrats, compete for scraps of political power. As much as I loath to admit it, a strong and well organized party, well-grounded in theory, might be the antidote to the Left's chronic disorganization.