By Jonathan Michael Feldman

In a recent interview Noam Chomsky has argued that what antifa does “is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive.”  He continued, “when confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is…That’s quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism.”  Do we resist or reconstruct society? That is the larger problem as I see it.

I don’t agree with the idea that Chomsky is entirely wrong. First, Chomsky’s arguments are potentially plausible in some instances.  One key question is whether such a movement provides legitimacy for the Right by engaging in anti-democratic practices. For example, there is some resonance with blocking free speech and what happened in Evergreen State College (where the pseudo-Left aided the Right) or elsewhere in the United States when valid forms of free speech or democratic rights are disrupted.

Peter Beinart has explained this problem in an essay in The Atlantic:  “Antifa activists are sincere. They genuinely believe that their actions protect vulnerable people from harm. Cornel West claims they did so in Charlottesville. But for all of antifa’s supposed anti-authoritarianism, there’s something fundamentally authoritarian about its claim that its activists—who no one elected—can decide whose views are too odious to be publicly expressed. That kind of undemocratic, illegitimate power corrupts. It leads to what happened this April in Portland, Oregon, where antifa activists threatened to disrupt the city’s Rose Festival parade if people wearing ‘red maga hats’ marched alongside the local Republican Party. Because of antifa, Republican officials in Portland claim they can’t even conduct voter registration in the city without being physically threatened or harassed.”

The antifa effort seems directed in part at the symptoms of the fascist problem. Is this movement doing any proactive work related the underlying causes of fascism, racism or the racist variant of nationalism?  This kind of in the street activism is not proactive regarding the educational basis of an anti-fascist movement which might start by mobilizing in the schools (not that this always succeeds as the teacher of James Alex Fields can attest).  Yet, in Sweden there has been some success in anti-fascist education in the schools in terms of attitudinal change.  Another issue is how the larger Trump/nationalism movement is based in part on valid arguments related to de-industrialization, capital flight, unemployment and manufacturing.  I don’t see ANY direct line between antifa politics and building jobs for white people who are totally desperate, committing suicide in record numbers.   Nevertheless, the existing state security regime against fascists is dysfunctional, unable to offer basic protections against Nazis, fascists, and racist thugs.  The police failed in Charlottesville, as Alex S. Vitale explains in The Nation: “Backed up by armored vehicles, riot police stood rooted in formation, quietly watching fascists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis battle Black Lives Matter, religious leaders, and antifascists.”

The very language deployed by the Left, centered on key terms like “white supremacist” is totally misleading, confusing, and self-defeating. By understanding this confusion, one sees part of the larger problem. First, there is nothing “white” about “white supremacists” other than their investment in a fictive narrative in which “whites” are superior.  The fiction is twofold: (a) these people don’t speak for all white people, so using the label “white” as a modifier makes no sense; (b) they don’t really believe all whites are superior because they often hate Jews (many of whom are white). The countervailing argument is the modifier “supremacists,” so you could argue that they are not just talking about “whites” but a new entity, i.e. “white supremacists.”  Yet, these people do not believe that all whites are supreme or superior, i.e. they don’t put “white” Jews in that category.  So, the whole concept of “white supremacy,” whether mouthed by racists or those opposed to them, makes utterly no sense whatsoever.  The term “white supremacy” reminds me of a similar term, “Islamic radicalism,” which similarly contains a kind of malware tied to Islamophobia, although fears of Islamophobia have also sustained terrorism as Gilles Kepel argues in the book, Terrorism in France.

The term “racist thug,” however, does not contain an encrypted advertisement for an academic theory within it (centered on so-called “white privilege”), so the idea of “white supremacist” is a bit like malware.  To identify these people by their own self-description of their ideology is not exactly a radical or critical conception, reminding one of a Republican Party that does not embrace “republican” ideals or a “Democratic Party” that does not support “democracy.”

At best, this term is part of a background explanation to something else.  At worst, it is part of a postcolonial displacement system unable to recognize any broader totality to what being white is or isn’t or the dialectical character of fascism and racism, i.e. it partially builds on valid narratives or feelings of victimization, some of which is grounded in reality rooted in the destruction of jobs, which are distorted by historical inaccuracy, hatred and a juvenile if not insane version of sociology.   Just as Judith Butler viewed working class whites supporting Trump with utter contempt, objectifying them so as to complicate any serious movement to defeat Trump, we need to think a bit deeper about the problem.  Many whites suffer from job loss and a feeling that they are not validated by a system glorifying elites and celebrities.

Police failure and the breakdown in the state security regime does not mean, however, that a defensive measure against fascism or even a physical confrontation with fascists gets at the larger underlying basis of support for fascism in (a) economic decline, (b) deindustrialization, (c) the lack of a coherent pro-active discourse vis-à-vis this phenomena.  We see how the failure of the system creates an opening for a left political innovation which does not quite work properly because it is partially based on a kind of morality play which is divorced from deep political or economic analysis, or even cultural analysis.

Donald Trump is rather clever by bringing up the racism of Thomas Jefferson.  Yet, Thomas Jefferson believed in radical democracy, something Trump’s narrative effectively buried.  Jefferson believed in local, grassroots democracy in which the masses of citizens created an accountability system with respect to the State, through town meetings and related forms of action and assembly.  I don’t see antifa leading to that and I see it potentially excluding that mode of action.

There might be a division of labor where groups like antifa do their thing and other groups do something else, i.e. there is no “zero sum game” and so antifa protects people from the fascists.  That is a plausible argument, but the problem is that antifa’s tactical mistakes (noted above) and the way they become the epicenter of social movement ideas about how to fight fascism put the Left into a potential swamp where they can never win.  Street fights and street protective measures are not the epicenter of anti-fascist action.  You cannot compare anti-fascists who volunteered to fight Franco with the effort necessary to defeat Trump who–at this point–is the most significant support system for Fascists in the U.S.  Or, more accurately, if antifa sees its lineage in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, perhaps they could recognize the failure to support a proactive politics within the Left which helped sustain fascism.  In sum, antifa is another left product, with potential roots in a dysfunctional academic culture, which is not radical, sometimes useful, but can’t put the Left on a pathway to systematically accumulate power.

Postscript, August 19, 2017

A reader has pointed out that Peter Beinart’s use of the word “claims,” leaves the impression that Cornell West’s argument that antifa saved his life or that antifa saves lives is patently false. We do not doubt West’s account. We do not doubt that antifa saves lives.  Moreover, in the post above, we imply that antifa can serve a useful purpose.  Our point of departure is not focused on debunking everything about antifa so much as showing that parts of Chomsky’s argument (if not much of it) is entirely plausible.

The article suggests that the larger movement (of which antifa is a part) uses language and arguments which has drawbacks.  It is entirely conceivable that a street-centered movement to oppose fascists can be necessary, but the way that plays out as a larger defensive system can be constrained.  These constraints or limits occur when such a movement simply becomes a defensive or reactive system organized with respect to its enemies and cannot be part of a larger effort which takes on a broader cultural, economic and political agenda.

Another reader suggested that the term “white supremacy” is valid and should not be questioned given the current political context.  I have no doubt that there is a mistaken belief by certain persons who are white that whites are superior, but I still believe that their linguistic and symbolic claims to whiteness are based on an absurdity that should not be validated.  In fact, just as the term “Islamic extremist” partially legitimates the credentials of terrorists as Muslims, the term “white supremacists” validates the adjective “white” as a proper modifier.  While, objectively speaking, the persons in question might be considered Muslims and can be characterized as “white” (respectively) clearly there is a lot more going on. The additional modification or explication of what is going on can’t be limited to “extremism” or “supremacy.”

More importantly, the various terms used to explicate terrorists who self-describe themselves as Muslim or try to root what they do in Islam, end up being deployed in Islamophobic practices.  This has made it actually hard to act against terrorists because the fear of Islamophobia prevents measures to regulate, monitor or control such persons because of the way they deploy or engage in Islam for their purposes.

The parallel point with “white supremacy” or “white supremacists” is admittedly not so transparent.  There are structures associated with caste or social constructions of race which create a hierarchy and basis of power for some or many whites vis-à-vis non-whites.  The idea of “white privilege” can become highly problematic, however, when it fails to acknowledge mass unemployment, poverty and despair among whites who are hardly privileged or whose privileges pale in comparison with their non-privileges.  The basic point is that we know that there are so-called “inter-sectional” forms of oppression involving race, class, gender and the like.  So the term “white supremacy” only captures a fragment of the oppression totality.

More importantly, some people will argue even though the term “white privilege” is problematic, it does not mean that we can’t think of “white supremacy” as valid.  Yet, when the “white supremacist” is a fascist, we know that their power deployment system or origins are not simply reducible to racial structures, castes or even alleged or real “white privileges.”  The power base involves a discourse related to de-industrialization, manufacturing decline and globalization as well, e.g. indirectly rooted in economic alienation.  None of that is captured in ideas of “white supremacy.”

The counter-argument is that these persons have an ideology rooted in white superiority and this motivates their political engagement.  But, what gives these groups a great deal of power (or potentially is most threatening about them) is their capacity to exploit citizens’ economic fears. This capacity is not simply rooted in the self-identification of so-called “white extremists” or the labeling system and analysis of much left analysis of such groups.  Rather, there is a value in aspects of economic nationalism that anchor jobs within the U.S.  The counter-arguments in which the left celebrates globalization, the achievements of Indian or Chinese capitalism to develop at the expense of the white (and non-white) working class are partially being manufactured by elite, academic universities which themselves are often patronized by global financial capitalists or those aligned with them.  A radical agenda to support manufacturing and control over the economy is often considered heresy (with notable exceptions like Ha-Joon Chang at Cambridge University).

In the case of Richard Spencer, the discourse often centers on a belief of white marginalization and encirclement.  As he says, “our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.” His ideology is tied to validating identity based around whiteness: “What blocks our progress is the meme that has been carefully implanted in White people’s minds over the course of decades of programming, from Mississippi Burning to Lee Daniel’s The Butler—that any kind of positive racial feeling among Whites is inherently evil and stupid and derives solely from bigotry and resentment. And that the political and social advancement of non-Whites is inherently moral and wonderful.”  Basically, Spencer invalidates the idea that racism exists, but does advance some notion of political mobilization around “whiteness.”

If a person who is white is excluded from society and the multi-cultural, Neoliberal society offers that person very little, it is possible (as opposed to morally acceptable) that some fraction of such persons will gravitate to Spencer and his ilk.  Yet, it strikes me that the supremacist language tied to deploying notions of “whiteness” conflates problems of scarcity, alienation, and feelings of having one’s culture or identity devalued into a simple problem that can be solved by “white power.”  That notion is clearly idiotic, but I don’t think we should cede to such persons their claims to deploying whiteness in this way.  Islamic extremists want their self-understanding of being Muslims and deploying Islam to be validated.  White supremacists similarly want their self-understanding of being white and deploying whiteness to be validated.  Any such validation gives these people power and defines them from a vantage point partially rooted in these persons’ self-understandings.  I don’t think that is sufficient as a basis for triggering a characterization of such persons.

Certain variants of postmodernism, identity politics, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and the like are very weak at identifying non-cultural, non-ethnic, and non-racial forms of motivation, identification and social processes, e.g. those rooted in materialism, political economy, and capitalism requiring equitable economic development and economic democracy as means of redress.  When journalists and such academics describe the supremacists they often use the supremacists’ own self-referential modifiers (or parts of them) to do so and end up creating confusion as to what these people represent and how to stop them (if they are dangerous, as they increasingly are).

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

June 7, 2017

@KyngStyle [Tweet, May 26, 2017]

If u think #ExposeEvergreen is only about bret weinstein or 1 email, u dont have a clue. Thus u should stop telling POC how 2 feel about it

@willmcwill2   [Tweet, May 30, 2017]

Replying to @KyngStyle

No one is telling POC how to feel. That’s in your head. What’s going on is that a scientist called out critical race theory for the bs it is

Birds, Atheists and Radicals

The recent student protest movement at Evergreen State College provides a useful signpost that we are seeing the final stages of New Leftism.  In the present stage, so-called oppositional movements objectively aid their alleged political target because they simply lack the capacity to do otherwise.  They end up replicating the very systems they attempt to oppose.  Let us start with three analogies.

We know that birds sometimes are trapped in buildings, but they ram their heads into glass windows.  They attempt to free themselves, but they just hurt themselves. The window, which some have described as a metaphor for openness and closure, shows us the contradictory position of the bird.

We know that some atheists vehemently attempt to deny the existence of God or religion as a kind of obsessive and sole explanation for a larger reality.  Yet, these very same atheists seem defined by God, if only by spending most of their time denying God.  Some atheists use God as their window.

We know that some radicals regard the system as defined by a narrow group which wields police and media power, yet they design social movements whose main fuel is referenced by what the police and mainstream media do.  Like some atheists, they live vicariously off of what they claim to oppose.

Background

The background to the protests were outlined in an article in The Olympian by Matt Driscoll, who wrote on June 5^th that there have been a series of protests and demonstrations at Evergreen that go back at least to September of 2016.  These were tied to “a strained relationship between students of color and local police and campus police — similar to tensions between communities of color and law enforcement across the country — to accusations of unequal punishment for white students versus students of color.” In addition, Driscoll’s informants have said, “there’s mounting anger over what’s viewed by some as a lack of action from the school’s administration to deal with a number of longstanding issues of racial equity.”

A series of meetings with the college administration proved to be less than fruitful and according to students were the other side of being ignored for years:  “For years students of color, trans and queer students and other minorities have been asking, then demanding, for mandatory equity training for staff and faculty.”

When The Left Turns on Its Own

In an article in The New York Times published June 1^st, Bari Weiss explains the case of Bret Weinstein, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, the Occupy Movement, and Glen Greenwald.  Weinstein is a Professor of Biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.  Weiss and a post in the Heterodox Academy explain why Weinstein suffered the wrath of so-called, “left” students and activists.  According to Heterodox Academy: “For several years, Evergreen has held a ‘day of absence’ in which students, staff, and faculty of color are invited to stay away from campus and take part in discussions about racism and other intersectional issues, organized by the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, Rashida Love. But this year, the event was inverted; people of color were invited to stay on campus while all white people were asked to stay away from campus. White professors were asked to not teach their classes. White students were asked to not attend their classes.”

Weinstein objected to this move which he saw as oppressive.  But students claim that white absence was voluntary. This argument may have been a red herring as Weinstein explains in an interview: “There were several emails inviting people to participate…Let’s be very careful about this.  There was no implication that white people would not be allowed on campus. There was, however, the implication—when this finally was described—the implication was that white allies would be off campus and therefore there was the implication that if you were white and you showed up on campus that you were therefore not an ally and that is the thing that pushed me to respond.  I did not like the implication that by the very act of being there [on campus] I was not allying with people of color.”  Weinstein says he received private support, but was attacked for being against students of color.

Frank Bruni, a columnist for The New York Times, blames Weinstein for “quickly” taking “the part of lightning rod” and “repeatedly characterized the Day of Absence as coercive, though it didn’t seem to be.”  He adds that “Evergreen’s president, Bridges” to him “that it flat­out wasn’t.”  Weinstein, in an “exchange with protesters outside his classroom, he proclaims, ‘History could pivot on this hallway right now.’ It’s Olympia, Professor Weinstein, not Iwo Jima.”  Assuming hypothetically that Weinstein’s claim that white absence was coercive was inaccurate, we see nevertheless that Weinstein’s email objecting to the event was part of a trigger for student demands that he be fired.  Thus, given that firing is coercive, the aura surrounding students’ demands seems rather coercive to me, irrespective of the accuracy of Weinstein’s specific claim.   As for Bruni’s other point quoted here, I think he fails to see that the Evergreen episode has wider implications for the left and the whole problematic of identity politics and styles of acting that lack any sense of reciprocity.  This essay will demonstrate why.  Nevertheless, one informant interviewed by Driscoll argues that “the ‘Day of Absence’ email…was actually one of many emails that (Weinstein) had sent over the course of the year.”  Students of color according to Driscoll’s sources view “Weinstein’s written words — taken in total — as ‘tone deaf.’”  Nevertheless, no one offers any proof that Weinstein’s tactical disagreements are a reason to send a group to his office and demand that he be fired.

I can’t find any evidence that being “tone deaf” or having tactical disagreements (which may actually be the same thing stated differently) is a good reason to demand that someone be fired, but some of the video material referenced in this essay shows students’ being “tone deaf.”  Another report appearing in a blog post connected to USA Today, points to a press release attributed to student and custodian Blake Vincent and posted on a Facebook page.  It claims that students were not threatening, but is a crowd demanding that someone be fired and speaking in harsh tones not “threatening”?

The paradigmatic split in this dispute centers on what students feel they are entitled to do and say and how they are allowed to act without expecting a response that reacts in kind.  The press release continues: “The students chanted and continued to try to make their feelings known to Weinstein, but he was refusing to listen and instead attempted multiple times to take over the discourse and make the students listen to him. During all this, some of Bret’s students were surrounding him and verbally attacking the group of protestors.”  If “make their feelings known” equals, “demand that he be fired,” and Weinstein does not want to patiently listen to that, who can blame him?  And, as there seems no valid reason to fire Weinstein, why shouldn’t his students react to what they probably view as an absurd demand?  In essence, Evergreen State students appear to have a valid grudge and set of demands against police harassment and perhaps institutional racism, but their way of dealing with Weinstein makes their rights appear devalued by a sense of entitlement regarding persons who disagree with them.  The coercion of police violence from above is matched—in a different form—by the coercive demand for firing from below.  To the extent that the students’ larger claims are valid, their tactical mis-steps seem all that more absurd.

Some of the controversy at Evergreen State rehearses the New Left era practices of nationalism and separatism and their appropriateness in different contexts.  To make a long story short, we can say that the New Left did a good job in making the case for tactical separation for regrouping, consolidation and advancement of specific interests, but the tactic advanced into a strategic failure which clearly played into the right’s hands.  Separatism and casting whites out of all kinds of organizations appeared to validate racism in the name of opposing it.  As in the Weinstein case, separatism required that even white allies have to be castigated when they don’t obey the dictates of would-be activists who are simply acting according to a managerialist impulse.  A related problem, as we will see, is how personal politics leaves larger social structures off the hook.   In sum, the moral high ground is quickly lost by political styles that quickly help deflate the value of political action.  The students’ certainly got their administration’s attention, but they also provided soundbites nationally for right-wing and liberal pundits whose interests in opposing institutional racism (or necessary national policy shifts) are mixed at best.

Scott Jaschik in the Inside Higher Ed blog also explains that: “Weinstein…has come out against a recommendation on faculty hiring by the college’s Equity and Inclusion Council. That recommendation, currently under consideration by college leaders, would require an ‘equity justification/explanation’ for all faculty hires.”  Various structures tend to perpetuate the bias that significantly over-represent whites and men in the hiring of faculty.  These structures are rather deep and selective, short-term quotas can help break down the cycle of exclusion in which the absence of a diverse faculty helps perpetuate ethnic and gender stratification.   Yet, quotas or equity investigations based on intersectional criteria don’t necessarily generate a competent faculty or even an ideologically diverse one.  In this sense quotas are rather much like the status quo systems of hiring.  One might therefore think of alternatives (or possible supplements) to both approaches, e.g. more investment in quality primary and secondary education upstream.  Even if Weinstein were wrong on the equity issue, the larger problem for me is how his “community” has treated him.

The Times reports that Weinstein “has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge the ideological orthodoxy on campus.”  Fifty students confronted Weinstein outside his office, calling him a racist and told him he supported “white supremacy.”   Following the protest, the college police informed Weinstein that they were unable to guarantee his safety on campus.  Jaschik notes that “‘Fire Bret’ graffiti is visible on campus.”  Weinstein claims that he and his “students were specifically followed, harassed and doxed.”

These are clear acts of character assassination where a difference of opinion leads to harassment of another person as a racist who has no relationship to racism.  Here the students believe that they themselves embody anti-racism such that opposition to the students’ will equals racism.  Yet, the students through their tactics actually pass over many significant representations of anti-racism.  Very much like robots, they have been coded—likely by their academic milieu—to deconstruct and oppose narratives which run counter to that which they religiously deem acceptable.  In the Stalinist model, the primary flow of oppression is top-down, directed by bureaucrats, but sometimes enlisting the populace as spies.  In the new model with roots in the New Left, various ideologies manufactured by academics take the form of a kind of disease which flows from the bottom up and engulfs the bureaucracies.  The disease I speak of is not the self-righteous (or even angry) opposition to racism, harassment, police violence and surplus hierarchy.  Rather, it is the disease of using the ideas of racism, intersectionality, whiteness, police violence and professional authority to justify just about any arbitrary action which goes against politically correct and peer group-defined norms.

A video which opposes the protestors shows a student or students cursing at Weinstein and demanding that he resign.  A large group chants that he resign. That is clearly harassment and even if Weinstein is wrong about various claims and his positions, he certainly has the right to express his opinions without such a backlash.  Tolerating his speech does not constitute repressive tolerance as there is nothing overtly oppressive in his speech.  The film shows a student complaining about police harassment, but in turn the very same student engages in a kind of verbal harassment.  A timeline of key events by the campus newspaper reported that on May 23^rd, students disrupted Weinstein’s class “to discuss emails,” with some declaring that he should be fired. This led the campus police to be called, who in turned called the County Sheriff’s office for backup: “When the cops arrived, student protesters formed a protective ring around the students of color conversing with Weinstein. This ring of students was ripped apart by Officer Timothy O’Dell when he shoved through protesters, injuring two students.” In any case, disrupting the teaching of a class because of a tactical disagreement seems could be interpreted as a violation of free speech. Blake Vincent’s press release, quoted earlier, mentions state troopers and Olympia police threatening students with mace.  What happened?  As best I can surmise, the pursuit of Weinstein helped trigger the intervention of the police in a way that has made the students involved looked very bad from a national media lens.

One might argue, as the Afropunk journal claims, that the protests at Evergreen were centered on racial justice, without Weinstein being the main event. His suspension is just one of many other demands by students. Others claim in social media that other forms of marginalization were also central to student concerns. The problem with this line of argument is that the protestors’ harassment of Weinstein has made that the main event, providing ammunition for both Breitbart and Fox News as well as The National Review and scolding commentaries from The New York Times.

The Occupy movement used protest to leverage an equality discourse in mainstream media related to the larger national if not global society; its cousin in Evergreen uses protests to manufacture right-wing debating points, centered on a narrow preoccupation with university governance and outing dissenters who reject their tactics.  The student demands express a total disinterest in affecting the larger political system which it turns out leverages their mistakes to reproduce systems of racist, militarist and class power. In contrast, Occupy had a kind of internal discipline based often fostering mutual respect among dissenting views, i.e. there was a tendency to oppose sectarianism.  Yet, there were also tendencies in Occupy to normalize some ideas that were off the wall.  The problem is that both Occupy and Evergreen never transcended the limits of the earlier New Left’s failures, partially because they have assimilated these failures through academics and other ideologues who recycle separatist and politically correct tropes.  As Kenan Malik explains there are “common bonds between racial and multicultural notions of human difference.”

It should not surprise us therefore that the students were supported by a group of faculty who blame Weinstein for assisting right-wing media.  This group wrote a letter stating that: “Weinstein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.”  A June 1st, press release by the group Stand with Students, posted on faculty member Melissa Ponder’s Facebook page, explained that Thurston County officials received an anonymous phone call from someone threatening “to murder as many people on…campus as I can.” The threat led the campus to be shut down as safety measure.  The press release argues that “the caller was likely emboldened by incendiary misinformation in the media about recent protests on campus.”  Yet, the press release denies harassment of Weinstein.  One major charge against Weinstein is that he or others falsely claim that he was threatened with violence.   The displacement of consciousness about how Weinstein was harassed by debunking the charge of violence is a clear indicator of what has turned out to be a dangerous lack of introspection.  The bubble surrounding the protestors and their allies seems to be a side effect of their post-modern disdain for truth and the way in which they dogmatically filter out facts that contradict their self-righteous narratives.  The students are likely victims of racism and negative engagements with police, but this has clouded their thinking about how to act politically as they are under the toxic influence of identity politics and faculty-sanctioned narcissism.

An Alternative to Postmodern Politics      

The student actions, supported by various faculty and parts of the administration, represent a case of what Stanley Aronowitz called “Postmodern Politics.”  This is the term he uses for intellectuals who “have abjured ‘grand narratives’ (antitotality), and utopian visions and have abandoned the search for a new or significantly altered paradigm of social transformation.”   Basically, we have a disagreement on tactics and persons purporting to be leftists harassing someone who disagrees with them, in the name of the left and anti-racism.  How are we to interpret this episode?

First, one might argue that the students basically only view politics as the projection of symbols and become angry at persons who do not validate their symbolic politics.  In contrast to attacking a nominally left professor for a disagreement in tactics, so-called left students could have done the following (in addition to pursuing some of their own, reasonable demands):

(a) Organize a study circle to learn about the limits of their own discourse.  This discourse, by needlessly feeding actions creating soundbites for right-wing media, has helped to endanger their community.  The readings could include Chistopher Lasch’s The Agony of the American Left, Adolph L. Reed’s essays, “Black Particularity Reconsidered” and “The Limits of Antiracism,” James A. Geschwender’s Class, Race and Worker Insurgency, and Kenan Malik’s Multiculturalism and Its Discontents.

(b) Organize a protest against the high levels of incarceration in Washington State, 482 persons for every 100,000 in the population (in 2016).  This rate was higher than Thailand, New Hampshire, the Russian Federation, New Jersey, Rwanda, New York, Panama, Belarus, South Africa, Finland, Sweden, China and Iraq (to mention more than a few). In 2013, the proportion of African Americans working in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) workforce was only 11 percent.  In contrast, in 2017, the share of African Americans in the prison population was 37.7 percent. Clearly this discrepancy is a central reproduction system for inequality.

(c) Link the above protest to a march on the state capital to demand state funding for cooperatives to help employ unemployed workers.  Develop such cooperatives on campus to create jobs for excluded populations. In 2015, 8.9% of African Americans in the State of Washington were unemployed.  These cooperatives could of course build on the tradition of African American cooperatives, a strategy for equitable economic development championed by W. E. B. Du Bois.  Here we get at a root cause of powerlessness rather than engagement in symbolic politics and harassment of individuals that one does not like.

(d) They could have established a folk high school (based in a supporting community center, church, mosque or synagogue) which gave courses for teachers and university administrators on how to combat institutional racism.  A Google search of these terms: “anti-racist” “folk high school” “Washington State,” yielded only seven results—none of which seemed terribly relevant for intervention proposed here.  One way to put this: Don’t just get whites or African Americans off campus, remove everyone off the campus to learn how to reorganize universities and other institutions.  The university might hire an expert on British policing to train its own university police and other police forces in the region.

(e) Support national, state and regional policies that would shift budgets from military commitments towards investments in mass transportation, alternative energy and a green recycling infrastructure within buildings. They could have supported cooperative firms and banks to provide employment in disinvested areas, particularly those communities where desperation leads to support for Donald Trump or other extremists.  This approach is necessary because racism is not simply based on ideas, psychologies or identities, but also material conditions.  In contrast, the reforms proposed by Evergreen State College President George Bridges to address problems of racism and diversity are simply an inner-directed appeal to students; it lets the larger society generating racism off the hook but appears to buy off student complaints.

(f) Design and implement a pod-cast and radio network, supported by a door-to-door canvass, which championed the strategies above as well as solicited memberships which would pay for an advertising campaign on local buses supporting these goals.  Investigate extremist communities and where they are located and broadcast counter-programming to such areas pointing out how the absence of solidarity hurts unions, wage gains and solidarity, i.e. appeal to these persons’ self-interests rather than talk down to them with a language invented by university professors and associated with the professional managerial class.

Second, one might argue that many mentoring some of these students formally or informally are doing a terrible job.  In my class called Democracy, Policy and Social Change, I teach students about how to organize economic, media and political power to support democratic goals.  I teach them about the limits to their own potential class, the professional-managerial class, as well as how to democratize higher educational structures.  Most importantly, I teach students that it is not enough to argue that you are a victim and lack power, or that power can be defined by A having more power than B or even that A can make B do something that B would not ordinarily do.  Rather, I show how B can get as much power as A or at least learn about how to get much more power, more rapidly, by emulating the practices or access of power that A has cultivated.  I would not teach my students that yelling at a left-leaning professor is a way to accumulate power to challenge capitalism, racism, ecocide or even harassment.  I would tell students that this strategy is “barking up the wrong tree.”  Apparently, Evergreen has taught students that using obscenities, being rude and telling people you disagree with that they are privileged are useful tactics for gaining power, i.e. authority figures at the university have not significantly counter-acted this message.  Concessions to students on police safety and harassment are certainly necessary, but these seem to accompany a symbolic politics that easily passes over the larger social structures.

Third, Evergreen State College has embraced a superficiality filter that students are celebrating.  John Sanbonmatsu, in an essay entitled, “Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Academic Intelligentsia,” published in the Socialist Register, 2009, writes: “The destruction of the public sphere, the decline of social movements, and the virtual disappearance of an independent press has shunted much of the intelligentsia into the academic system.  There, the ‘state nobility’ finds its mental labour mediated through the tenure process and the competition for scarce federal grants and fellowships.” Sanbonmatsu goes further, explaining how social movements become distorted by the ideological dogma of universities.  He writes: “Postmodernist ways of knowing can in fact be found in a growing number of social movements.”  The intellectual vacuum represented by the absence of constructive proposals and plans to redesign society at Evergreen has been filled with moral relativism that ends up tolerating harassment.  Weinstein for his part blames the administration of Bridges (hired in 2015) for “arming the postmoderns” at the school.  He claimed that the plan to vacate whites from campus would “let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college” and that those who insisted “on discussing the plan’s shortcomings” were “branded as racists.”

We can surmise that the Administration at the Evergreen State College is perpetuating the status quo by tolerating these students’ harassment of Professor Weinstein and promoting what appears to be a pathetic mentoring and educational system for social change.  The College should know that there is no shortage of fully competent teachers who live in exile, outside the United States—or even reside within the country—who have been marginalized from the academic system by their lack of interest in identity politics or associated narratives.  Some of us regard pseudo-diversity moves, identity politics and the concealment of class realities as an elite, right-wing cosmopolitan narrative which parts of the left have embraced so that they can unwittingly promote the agenda of large-scale, transnational corporations.  These corporations support all free migration, free capital mobility, and nominal cultural representations of diversity.  They are often far less interested in democratizing their workplaces, creating apprenticeship programs linked to qualified jobs for a diversity of workers, or lobbying against the under-investment in mass transportation and over-investment in the U.S. military budget. They certainly did not put up a major fuss after Iraq was invaded, a coup was launched against Honduras and billions in arms were promised to Saudi Arabia.  Hardly any intersectional theorist embraces a systemic program for demilitarization as militarism is not one of the categories that they deploy, except as a passing (and ill or undefined) buzz word.

Awaiting the Death of the New Left Paradigm          

Fourth, we can safely regard the manifestation of the anti-Weinstein campaign as a sign that the New Left/identity politics paradigm has long outlived its usefulness.  Put differently, a large segment of the current left has its origins in a strain of the New Left which has basically followed a pattern similar to that of the U.S. Communist Party.  On the one hand, a few offshoots learn the lessons of history and are reflective about what their politics has actually been based on.  On the other hand, a great many are not reflective about anything their politics has been based on and how it is rooted in an obsolete paradigm.  Ironically, the cross-racial, ideological politics of the U.S. Communist Party was actually more subversive and authentic than the latest strains of identify politics and the politics of “resistance.”  The problem, however, is that these New Left strains (like a large part of the somewhat-related Occupy movement) are totally indifferent to a critical reflection about social movements’ history.  Of course, part of the early and later New Left associated with names like Paul Goodman, Tom Hayden, Herbert Marcuse and the like is a completely different matter.  Parts of this movement could perhaps be seen in the Sanders campaign, but that strain is clearly threatened by the developments described here.

To be blunt, there is a very American strain of anti-intellectualism here which requires far more introspection than the students or the Administration were capable of. Evergreen State College has created a milieu where such reflection is significantly weakened, probably because many academics there have such a weak understanding of the limitations of both past and present social movements and the academic symbols they use for career advancement.   The tiresome cheerleading (as opposed to reflective redesign) of social movements ends badly, sometimes in repressive tolerance, i.e. the tolerance of repressive activity.  As Paul Goodman explained, certain forms of left propaganda is “prone to arouse guilt just because it is irrefutable and on the side of the angels.”  Thankfully, Evergreen has some courses which try to promote reflective thinking, but perhaps this does not filter down to the undergraduate level.

When a nominally left organization or social movement reproduces the very inauthentic and repressive politics of the system that it claims to oppose, we know we are at the beginning of the end for that particular tendency.  We are sadly, not necessarily at the end of the end.  In the case of the Communist Party, Stalin’s crimes did not immediately lead to the death of the party in other countries.  Stalin died in 1953, but the repression of radical democracy movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) was still followed by diehards who stood by the party.  One final blow was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the mothership for Communist movements everywhere.

In the New Left case, one might place the epicenter of that movement in the United States.  Under the Trump regime, coming after doses of Bush and Obama, the United States appears on a trajectory of rapid decline.  We see presidents who alienate allies.  We have “Leftists” who alienate and harass other leftists. And let us not forget, the presence of ecological groups who cooperate with oil companies, rather than try to dismantle them. We see police who murder senselessly. The list goes on and on to reveal a society defined by stupidity, chaos, and narcissistic self-indulging behavior.

Trump’s election should have been a wake-up call for all persons practicing identity politics to figure out how to authentically incorporate class, economic democracy, political accountability, and the reconstruction of major institutions into their portfolio of ideas.  An explicit anti-sexist and anti-racist agenda is needed, but is being defeated by academic theories like Critical Race Theory which in practice validate individuals’ narcissism and personal agendas. Many social movements and university-based activists are already processed by the control systems vetted by Right-Wing Cosmopolitanism, e.g. Hillary Clinton and her allies or even publishing companies who cash in on identity politics. The full death of the New Left will only come when a new movement and intellectual tendency emerges that outs the New Left and identity politics for what they really are.  We see some tendencies in that direction, but they are currently far from the hegemonic power seen manufactured by the stupidity of our contemporary social movements and their allies in the knowledge factories of mediocrity.

The author can be reached on Twitter here: @globalteachin.  He encourages sympathetic readers to contact the Evergreen State College Board of Trustees by writing them here. 

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

The Problem of Decentralization as Scarcity

Every few weeks, when I study The New York Times, I read about another police shooting of some innocent citizen–killed for no reason. It gives me a feeling of nausea. That is the emotional side of the problem.  There is also a cognitive side and that is my suspicion that large parts of the so-called “Left” don’t have a clue about what to do regarding these things. I don’t mean Black Lives Matter (BLM) which has in theory a pretty comprehensive program of activities or set of organizing ideas.  Rather, I mean a more comprehensive problem which I will get to shortly.

Adolph Reed, however, has offered some criticisms of BLM which are certainly worth considering.  First, there is an “immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure” behind the repressive state. Challenging that state “will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing.”  Second, “the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.”

One element of Neoliberal structures are rooted in a certain form of decentralization. Decentralization might mean “community” control of police, but it could also mean decentralization to a level of fiscal responsibility defined by shortages of capital and resources. The latter problem associated with fiscal decentralization has been noted by Bo Rothstein, author of Just Institutions Matter.

Texas and Florida: Two Cases of Neoliberal Scarcity Regimes

Jordan Edwards, an unarmed African American fifteen year old, was shot in the head by a white police officer on April 29 as he “sat in the front passenger seat of a car leaving a house party last Saturday after police officers arrived to break up the party,” as The New York Times recently reported. The shooting took place in Balch Springs, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.   One source stated that the city had a majority Latino population (55.5%), with the next biggest group being African Americans (23.1%) followed by Whites (19.2%). The Times explains that even though “the city is majority black and Hispanic, only a handful of the department’s nearly 40 police officers are either black or Hispanic.” Cedric W. Davis Sr., the city’s first African American mayor (2008-2009) argued that this discrepancy was “unacceptable.”  As Davis explained, “You can’t represent a community as diverse as this one if you don’t have anybody that can relate. They do some good work. But a lot of the people are afraid of them.”

The Dallas News reported in 2015, that “Eight out of 10 Balch Springs police officers are white — though three out of four residents are not. And state records as of early February [2015] indicated that only one of the city’s 42 police officers is a woman.” Moreover,  “Balch Springs is part of a larger pattern. A Reporting Texas analysis found that suburban police departments in Dallas County have some of the largest demographic gaps in the state. In all but a few, the majority of police officers are white and the majority of residents are minorities.”

Why is Balch Springs unable to rectify this racial discrepancy?  Pedgro Gonzalez, a spokesman for the city’s police department, explained that his department found difficulty to recruit African American and Latino police officers because they lacked sufficient resources and because nearby departments offered better pay.  Gonzalez said, “we’re a 35-, 37-man department, and we don’t have money to recruit.” Gonzalez said, “we recruit through Facebook. Our top-out pay is like $68,000. Mesquite, which is right next door, makes $78,000. It’s very difficult to recruit.”

We might  learn something by comparing Texas with similar states as well as with other states which differ on key parameters.  Texas is one of the U.S. states that does not levy an income tax.  In  theory such taxes could be used to pay for diversifying police forces and training in preventative means of crime prevention, i.e. that don’t lead police officers to shoot unarmed youth in the head.  In Texas, the poorest 20% pay 12.6% of their income on taxes, the middle 60% pay only 8.8% of their income and the top 1% pay a pitiful 3.2% of their income (in 2015). The Texas police killed 98 persons in 2015 and 82 persons in 2016.  Florida, like Texas, lacks an income tax.  The poorest 20% paid 13.2% of their income on taxes, the middle 60% paid 8.3% of their income, and the top 1% only 2.1% of their income on taxes.   Florida police killed 60 persons in 2015 and another 60 persons in 2016.  In theory, the fiscal constraints on police departments on the state level might have something to do with self-imposed fiscal poverty.  Economic poverty, a problem which is aggravated by impoverished governments, also plays a role.  Reed notes research by Zaid Jilani who found  “that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.”

Sweden and New York as Alternative Regimes

There administrative differences between various police departments could easily be leveled by merging police departments at greater levels of administrative aggregation. This is what has occurred in Sweden, for example.  The fiscal difficulties would then be based on problems at the local state or national state level, depending on which level of aggregation were chosen.

We can also see how fiscal and political alternatives play themselves out on the state level within the United States. New York State is one of the states that has guidelines against racial profiling.   In contrast to New York, Florida and Texas were two of the more than twenty U.S. states in 2014 with racial profiling laws that were not clear and specific in prohibiting racial profiling. New York also has a more robust welfare state than Texas or Florida, even if that welfare state is under duress.  New York State also has income taxes and a population about 72% the size of Texas and about 98% of Florida’s. New York State police killed only 19 persons in 2015 and only 17 in 2016.

Constraining the Risk Society: Reconstruction, Not “Resistance”

Simpy resisting police violence won’t be enough. That strategy won’t stop Trump or police violence. The tragedy of the Jordan Edwards shooting is partially a byproduct of what Ulrich Beck, the famous German sociologist, calls a “risk society,” in which we should come to expect risks to our livelihood.  These risks are partially created by a climate of racism and what Beck calls a lack of self-reflection, i.e. in this case governing the proper training and financing of police forces and the organization of government functions.  There are institutions of power and ideology, backing dysfunctional decentralization, an impoverished welfare state, and a lack of power for those persons who are victims to this irrational system.  The alternatives can be found in reconstructive principles that support political, media and economic democracy, i.e. social and economic reconstruction.

One central problem is that people of color in cities like Balch Springs suffer from disempowerment in political and economic power.  On the political front, citizens of Balch Springs are represented in the U.S. Congress by white, conservative Republican Jeb Hensarling and African-American, Democratic Eddie Bernice Johnson.  In March of this year, a district court ruled that gerrymandering in the state of Texas violated the Voting Rights Act.  The case was filed originally in 2011, charging that the redistricting to disempower minority voters took place after 2010 census in Texas as a result of intentional designs.  One the economic front, the median worker income is $26,476 in Balch Springs which is lower than the national average of $29,701.  The city’s poverty rate of 19.3% is higher than the national average.

The original platform of the Black Panther Party contained elements or a reconstructionist regime to address such power disparities.  Huey P. Newton, co-founder and Black Panther leader, explained the organization’s ten point program.  The first point he said was that “we want freedom, we want power to determine the destiny of our black communities.”  The second point was “full employment for our people.” The third point was “housing fit for shelter of human beings.” The seventh was “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.”  On a smaller scale it is interesting to note the trajectory of Sam Allen, a police officer and administrator of forty years, who retired in 2008 and joined Balch Spring’s policies department as the city’s community service director. There he was charged  “with creating and expanding programs and events that bring people together” including crime-watch units and a citizen-police academy.  He was also responsible for getting “more minorities and women to join the Balch Springs Police Department.”

One key idea behind reconstruction is the promotion of alternative ways to design the deploying of the political, media, and economic forms of capital which promotes social change.  What that might mean is the following.   Occasionally the Left organizes demonstrations and conferences involving anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of persons.  The meet in one centralized location, usually a place like New York, Washington, or Chicago.  BLM often organizes local demonstrations, however.

While national gatherings have their place, the limitations to like-minded individuals assembling in one spot are the following. First, often this amounts to a “self-congratulation” society, where those who think similarly congratulate each other for thinking similarly (this practice extends to Facebook which has perfected that kind of cultural deformity).

Second, it ignores that regional differentiation is jeopardizing the enlightenment project and elements of democracy in the United States. Such regional disparities helped elect Donald Trump. In contrast to Obama’s famous proclamation at the 2004 Democratic Convention, that “pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats” and how misguided that was, we do see regional patterns that differ, partially based on the legacy of slave states, rural and urban disparities and the like.  If some areas of the country are more enlightened and have greater resources than others lacking enlightenment and resources, persons in these enlightened and resource rich regions have a responsibility to intervene in the knowledge and resource poor areas.  This pattern partially occurred in the Civil Rights movement which involved a solidarity system between North and South and not simply postcolonial manipulation.

Third, in contrast to the notion that there are simply these angry people out there who expressed their rage as Trump voters and such persons should be demonized and subject to a kind of distancing and psychological analysis, one could argue that such voters exist in a kind of bubble.  By objectifying the Trump voter, the Leftist does not have to take any responsibility.  It is a cop out.  In contrast, one can try to influence such voters and their cultural sphere. For example, the U.S. once had a great debate on slavery and the Abolitionists intervened as part of this debate.  Today, we must realize that there are parts of the United States in which we must similarly intervene like high police violence regions.  Recently, the U.S. far right has intervened in the French election to try to promote a politician whose party has a fascist legacy.  It is only fitting that the Left try to adopt certain places where they try to intervene by advancing progressive candidates for office, e.g. a kind of investment bank for candidates who support income taxes, community control boards for police, and an expanded welfare state.  Or, they could intervene by creating local internet broadcasting or radio and community television platforms promoting such an agenda.  One way to intervene would be to rescue one city at a time.  Each city rescued could contribute to what amounted to a kind of “revolving loan fund,” with such capital financing courses in how to democratize a city, develop cooperatives, regulate police violence and provide subsidies to recruit more culturally enlightened police officers.

A final thought exercise.  Assemble about 1,000 persons for whatever reason in a kind of left meeting.  Each person donates 30 dollars to a fund to hire a political organizer in Balch Springs, Texas.  The money is matched by a foundation grant.  The organizer promotes worthy left publications, organizes book tours by authors, and champions a program of economic, media and political reconstruction.  Just a thought.

The author teaches at Stockholm University and can be reached at @globalteachin on Twitter.

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

February 5, 2016, Edited February 7, 2016

The Police Museum in Stockholm currently has an exhibition about hate crimes in Sweden.  In this short post, I want to review some of the statistics about such crimes and make proposals about how to fight this menace.  The review of hate crimes I make is not systematic, as I will just focus on three kinds of social groups: Jews, Muslims and Afro-Swedes.  The exhibit clearly documents a long-term pattern of xenophobia and a clear blot on the so-called “Swedish model.”

Let us first turn to Jews living in Sweden. According to recent statistics, these crimes have increased in Sweden as can be seen in Figure 1.  There were 159 in 2008, but 277 in 2015.  Some of the difference in figures may be based on different methodologies, but news reports suggest an increase in such crimes. These statistics have been compiled by Brottsförebyggande rådet (BRÅ).  In this figure, data from 2012 on is based on a sample survey.  The museum exhibit profiles Henryk, a victim of anti-Semitism who is a school teacher.  

His story is told through the accompanying photograph and the text to the left.   Anti-Semitism in Sweden is partially driven by general xenophobia and hostility to heterogeneity in the culture as well as by a misguided and ill-informed backlash system against Israel’s policies.  While some explain anti-Semitism by pointing to how Jews in Sweden support Israel, others point to systematic anti-Semitic propaganda in various Arab countries. Such propaganda is matched by various propaganda statements by the Likud bloc in Israel.  The idea that people can be harassed and assaulted because of their political beliefs is questionable in any case, i.e. it is a slippery slope that can easily damage a democracy.  The characteristics of someone who is visibly Jewish or easy to identify as Jewish can’t be reduced to foreign policy opinions.  These characteristics, rather than foreign policy ideas, are usually what make Jews subject to attacks.  Nevertheless, foreign policy crises can unjustifiably trigger  anti-Semitism. 

Let us next turn to Islamophobia in Sweden. According to recent statistics, these crimes also have increased in Sweden as can be seen in Figure 2.  This data, also collected by (BRÅ), also uses a survey starting in 2012. There were 272 hate crimes against Muslims in 2008 and 558 in 2015.  Here again shifting data sources may explain a part of the increase, but there is no shortage of statistics to document a rising pattern of hostility towards Muslims in Sweden.  Various news reports tell the story, including incidents where numerous mosques have been attacked by vandals.

  The museum exhibit profiles Hala (above) who was attacked by racists for wearing a hijab.  Here is a clear case of a fear or hostility to difference which is potentially connected to false generalizations against Muslims. Hala’s story is told in the accompanying text.  Islamaphobia has many explanations.  Like anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia involves elements of xenophobia and scapegoating of persons falsely associated with foreign policy developments, especially terrorism (which can also arise domestically).  In other cases, negative actions by some persons who happen to be Muslims are generalized to all Muslims.  Some persons who engage in terrorist activity or support ISIS claim to act “in the name of Islam.”  This pattern is similar to actions by Israeli leaders who act “in the name of Jews,” such that Israeli actions are compressed into being “Jewish actions.”  

The heterogeneity of Islam and Judaism clearly argues against essentialist reductionism, i.e. offering explanations about activities by persons who happen to be Jewish or Muslim as if their religious affiliations explain all. One problem is that individuals who adopt a certain value system or ideology can use their religious affiliations as a cloak by which to disguise their political agendas.  In the book, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, Bassam Tibi defines the appropriation of religion for political purposes as fundamentalism. Such fundamentalism is not limited to the Muslim world, but also extends to the Jewish world as Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky explain in their book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.  There is also Christian and even Buddhist and Hindu fundamentalist which backs various kinds of militarism tied to racist nationalism.

The last kind of hate crime I want to discuss involves racism against Afro-Swedes. According to recent statistics, racist incidents involving hate crimes with an Afrophobic motive also have increased in Sweden as can be seen in Figure 3. Again, the data shows a steady increase over the last few years, with survey data coming into use in 2012.  In 2008, there were 761 such incidents, but by 2015 there were 1,074.  The systemic character of such racism has been documented by news reports, including a recent analysis by the United Nations.

The Police Museum exhibit profiles the story of Jallow who reported a racist incident at Lund University and in turn was harassed by racists at that very same university.  His story is explained in the accompanying photograph below.  Racism in Sweden has many explanations, the simplest one being a fear of difference and a devaluation of difference. This devaluation runs very deep in Swedish society and is not limited to a few extremists.

While Swedish society has elements of tolerance, it also has elements of “repressive tolerance,” i.e. a toleration of racist activity which can be seen in minimal prison sentences for some racist offenders, a lack of in depth discussion of racist problems and a normalization of a political party whose origins lie in the Nazi movement.  This party has been given lots of free air time on Swedish TV, part of a journalist practice which grants media access to elected officials simply because they have been elected.

Mainstream society might want to blame a narrow group of extremists for racist activity, but racism can also be seen in mainstream culture managed by cultural elites. For example, Eastern Europeans (particularly from former Yugoslavia) are typically treated as ruthless criminals in Swedish films and television programs. The widely praised film “Snabba Cash” (“Easy Money”) was just one of many examples where such persons are identified as criminals.  For the last few weeks, the TV series, “Innan vi dör” has some more Eastern European (former Yugoslavian)  criminals who are trailed by white ethnic Swedish heroic police.  In fact, the Police Museum exhibit also brings up the prolific images of police in movies and television, potentially opening up an introspection as to how police are portrayed.  In some television programs, one even sees ethnic police, even Afro-Swedish police; corruption within the police force is a theme that often comes up. The larger problem, however, is the normalization of ethnic hierarchies which is common place and is found in news and cultural programming alike.  

There are many solutions to the problem of hate crimes.  One solution would be a greater policy focus on such problems by police forces, backed by political decisions. Yet, the police can’t monitor all of society’s institutions, particularly the mainstream ones which also tolerate various degrees of racism.  This racism indirectly legitimates thought patterns that could help racists rationalize their actions, perhaps legitimating them.  The fictional portrayal of racism in universities, labor unions, and other spaces in civic society is largely missing–if it even exists. There are no regular, institutionalized programs on racism or even class inequities, with the discussion limited to social movements, academics and a few marginalized politicians.  

While some deconstructions of Swedish society as systematically racist often sound like tiresome politically correct tropes, the reality never fails to disappoint in terms of validating the larger argument behind such tropes.  Persons who do appear on the very rare television program to discuss racism, help explain the problems of racism and can go into some of its details.  Yet, the linkage of problems of racism to alternative budget priorities (such as the trade off between social exclusion and its associated violence on the one hand and military spending on the other) is almost taboo on all sides of the political spectrum).  Another taboo is explanations of how to systematically “empower” (for lack of a better word) the diverse groups who are victims of hate crimes.  There are many models for how to promote such an accumulation of power, but the most systematic involve the mobilization of economic, media and political power on behalf of disenfranchised groups.  

The non-racist society should marshal its procurement power, ability to deliver a media audience, and its votes to a new kind of social movement dedicated to fighting racism in its core and periphery.  It would not simply take aim at Nazis and racists, but it would also expose mainstream society’s contributions.  Relying on the incumbent institutions which continue to engage in the repressive tolerance of racism is no longer an option.  Rather, new kinds of institutions must be forged which show how to rebuild society with economic democracy, new media platforms and social movements able to create a reconstructionist practice in the state.

By Jon Rynn

November 13, 2016

The Core Problem: Trump Plays the Employment Card

Donald Trump offered a solution to the problem of not enough good jobs, and Hillary Clinton did not.  That is the core of what happened.  Democrats need to offer a better solution than Trump, and then they will take the Presidency and the Congress.  Sure, he stirred up racism, sexism, xenophobia and other bigotry, but progressives are not going to compete to be the best bigot.  They can compete to be best at creating jobs, and by creating jobs they will clear away the bigotry.  I will argue that the best way to create jobs is to spend trillions on a massive green infrastructure building program, which will revive manufacturing and the Democratic working class coalition.

Let’s look at what Trump offered, and what Hillary did not.  One of the core parts of his rally speeches was a story: that he would threaten a company that was going to close a factory and go to Mexico instead.  He would tell the company that he would slap a 35% tariff (he called it a tax) on the imported goods from the factory that moved.  At the end of his story, the company backs down and keeps the factory and jobs in the United States.  He also promised to renegotiate bad trade deals, like NAFTA, that have destroyed jobs.  Both of these ideas, renegotiating trade deals and imposing tariffs on runaway factories, are to the left of most of the Democratic Party.  They appealed powerfully as a story of hope for people who have lost most hope.

The next batch of ideas are not good ideas, and progressives don’t need to deal with them:  attacks on immigration, rhetoric like the wall between Mexico and the U.S., and mass deportation.  These are obviously horrible.  But they are logically consistent and concrete (literally), an argument for creating jobs.

Democratic Party Deficits

Now let’s look at Hillary’s ideas — actually, maybe we shouldn’t because they are pretty sparse and very wonky, and they bore me and just about everybody else in the country.  She said she would spend $50 billion per year on the infrastructure, which considering the state of the infrastructure is inadequate and wouldn’t lead to many jobs anyway.  She also talked about ending the tax break corporations get for moving factories overseas.  This is the same, small idea that John Kerry pushed out in 2004.  I am still furious about that one, because at the time there was a huge media spotlight on factories going overseas, and when he proposed to end the tax break as the solution the entire issue went floating away.

So clearly, we need, at the core of a Democratic/progressive campaign, a solution to the problem of not enough good jobs.  Other issues should be discussed, but jobs have to be at the center, and we need a concrete policy that people can readily understand.

An Alternative Economic Plan

I would like to propose the idea of a massive program of rebuilding the infrastructure — on the order of one or two trillion dollars per year, not per decade.  Something large enough that it would clearly lead to tens of millions new jobs.  Something large enough, in fact, that it would not just lead to jobs to construct infrastructure, but would also lead to the creation of millions of new manufacturing jobs, and thousands of new factories.  This would not only pull in the non-racist part of the white working class (and probably many of the superficially racist), but also it would increase the enthusiasm of the black and Latino working class.  And rebuilding cities and suburbs would keep the college-educated/white- collar voters engaged as well.

I offer the following as constructive criticism: as important as a raise in the minimum wage may be, it is not enough to challenge the Republican domination of national politics.  Even health care, climate change, or changing the justice system, separately are not enough.  These issues can only be addressed if the economic problem is solved at the same time.  Otherwise, Trump and his successors will feed on the lack of jobs and pit segments of the public against one another.

The only way to guarantee that jobs will be created is for the Federal government to provide the funds to hire tens of millions of people.  What Trump offers is to keep the existing jobs by imposing a 35% tariff; but renegotiating trade treaties do not guarantee jobs because they depend on the vagaries of the market.  If you want the enthusiasm of both the white, black, and Latino working classes, you need to guarantee jobs, and only the government can do that.

There is certainly plenty to be done.  The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that we need to spend over $2 trillion dollars just to get our roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc up to an adequate level.  But I am talking about an entirely higher level of infrastructure rebuilding: to create a society that does not create greenhouse gases, in other words, a society that will prevent the worst of global warming.  If you look at my site GreenNewDealPlan.com, you will see how $1.7 trillion could be spent each year over a twenty year period, including plans for an Interstate Wind System, an Interstate high-speed rail system, a building boom of dense residential housing in city and town centers, transit, solar panels, and many other kinds of production that would then lead to a boom in manufacturing in this country.  In fact, the government could probably guarantee a job for anyone who wanted one.

So we can address two existential threats at the same time: mass unemployment (by fixing an economy that is leading to authoritarianism), and sustainable development (by creating a society that prevents global warming).

How Do We Pay for It?

One of the obvious objections to a massive jobs program would be that “we can’t afford it.”  How would we pay for all of this?

When the financial system was teetering on the brink of collapse, the funds were found to help the banks; basically the government simply created money, and nothing terrible like inflation happened.  The same thing can be done in order to fix the economy and create a large middle class.  And unlike bailing out the banks, this money would lead to real, concrete wealth, not changes in bank accounts.  When money is created to reflect new wealth, that money does not lead to inflation.  So most of the money to rebuild the country could simply be created, not borrowed.

Of course, we could also increase taxes on the very rich and on profits of the large corporations, and we could also cut the fat out of the military budget.  These could be part of a larger solution.  But I think the main way to get away from being dismissed as not being “serious” is to simply respond that we can do what private banks do all the time: create money. In fact, we could also create a network of public banks to create money.

If the infrastructure can be rebuilt without borrowed money and its attendant interest payments, then another innovation could change politics: the revenue from the new infrastructure, from things like wind-generated electricity, rents from new housing, or fare for high-speed trains, or interest charged at public banks, could be used to decrease or even entirely eliminate income taxes for the middle class.  Here is a way to do an end-run around the Republican Party and their constant blathering about cutting taxes.  Income taxes were originally designed to be only paid by the rich, and we could go back to that model if most of the revenue for the government came from revenue-generating industries that the government owned.

Why Planning Can Work

Of course, many people in the Democratic Party would object that the era of big government is over, that nobody thinks the government can do anything right, and that the main strategy of the Democratic Party should be to capitalize on the fear of the bigotry of the Republican Party.  Well how well is that strategy working?

The Democratic Party has, frankly, become very pro-corporate, and their policies pretty much reflect that position.  In order to create a program to rebuild the country, almost all of the goods used to rebuild the infrastructure would have to be manufactured in this country. “Buying American” would be a rejection of free trade ideology and of many of the ongoing trade policies that Democrats have been supporting.  There is a central question that must be asked and answered. What do you want: (a) to be ideologically pure and help Trump create authoritarianism, or (b) to create a country with a thriving middle class committed to progressive causes and one that prevents the worst of global warming?

The idea of government has been trashed, from both the Right and Left.  From the Right, we have been told that the market can solve all problems, and that the government is the problem, not the solution.  From the Left, the government has been fought to stop horrible wars and resist encroachment of the national security state.  Many progressives have given up and don’t think the government could ever do anything useful again.  But we need to be reminded that throughout American, indeed, throughout human history, government has been at the center of economic life.

FDR was not the only president that used government to save the economy.  As far back as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the government has been used to encourage manufacturing and infrastructure.  The original Republicans implemented a very strong program of building infrastructure, education, and trade protection.  Teddy Roosevelt and the progressives legislated necessary regulation of the market and protection of the environment, and even conservatives like Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower oversaw expansion of the national infrastructure.  Of course, FDR and the New Deal led to Social Security, support of unions, a massive jobs program in the 1930s, the creation of governmental infrastructure systems like the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification, and support for agriculture.  All of these supports for the economy led directly to political realignments, as large sectors of the population saw the good that government could do for their daily lives, and we can build on this stellar history to reverse the conventional wisdom about government.

So what kind of political realignment would a massive green infrastructure jobs program kick start?  The Democratic Party would once again become the party of the working people.  New factories and the promise of more factories would not only revive white working class areas, they would transform African-American population centers in the inner cities as well, because the loss of manufacturing hurt African-Americans years before it hurt white communities.  Manufacturing decline is the root cause of income inequality. This is a multiracial issue, and the mantra of “manufacturing won’t come back” is not based on fact, it is an argument for decline of the United States and of the Democratic Party.  Either the Democratic Party implements some kind of program to revive manufacturing, or it will forever be lost in the wilderness.

The white-collar class wants rebuilt cities and a full employment job market, and they want a prosperous economy.  Even the rural areas should profit from a rebuilt infrastructure, because they are even more spread out than surburbia, which should also want a rebuilt infrastructure that is bankrupting their towns and counties.

With an infrastructure jobs program at its core, the Democrats could add various other important policy changes that would fit in with the core agenda.  Medicare for all would be easy to finance if everybody has a job.  Free public college, a high minimum wage, better policing, childcare, a decrease in the sources of bigotry, all of this can be integrated into a massive jobs program.

We stand at a crossroads.  If progressives and the Democratic Party don’t offer an alternative, the right-wing nationalists like Trump (and others in Europe and around the world) will offer an alternative, because regular conservatism and Clinton/Obama liberalism will not.  A progressive alternative is easy: use the government to rebuild the infrastructure and manufacturing, creating tens of millions of jobs, and ushering in a new era of progressive prosperity.

Jon Rynn is author of Manufacturing Green Prosperity.

March 13, 2016, Revised March 14, 2016.

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

A New York Times editorial published on March 12, 2016 faults Sanders for claiming that a political revolution is either desirable or operational.  They write: “revolutions are typically bottom-up, not top-down events.” They also note: “there are not enough elected office holders in Congress or in statehouses to carry out his revolution through new laws or policies.”  This limitation represents “the big difference between running an inspiring campaign and actually governing.”  The formula here is that revolution is a function of governors and not the pressure that a social movement inspired by a leader can bring on elected officials.  Yet, the history of the United States shows how various social movements can successfully challenge legislators and make changes in policy.  The Civil Rights movement is a case in point, having charismatic leaders who led massive social movements to effect change.

The counter-argument to this claim is twofold.  First, Sanders is just running a presidential campaign and not necessarily directing a social movement.  Is this claim accurate?  Sanders has thousands of followers, a detailed mailing and fund-raising list, organizing staff, discrete policy messages about a number of social issues and problems, etc.  His campaign has all the ingredients for a social movement and is in fact based on various social movement actors. For example, when activists mobilize to shut down Trump rallies such episodes represent a social movement action and some portion of these activists are supporters of Sanders.

The second counter-argument is that activities like the Civil Rights movement took place when the Democratic Party had a lot of power in statehouses and the U.S. Congress and now the situation is different.  This counter-claim is supported by the Times when they write: “should Mr. Sanders win the nomination and the White House, he would very likely inherit a Democratic Party whose numbers in Congress have sharply dwindled and whose proportions in state legislatures–the farm team for potential national office holders–have likewise declined.”  Now, in contrast, “the oldest members of both the House and the Senate are Democrats; the youngest in both chambers are Republicans.”

This second argument is weak for many reasons.  One reason is that large parts of the Democratic Party, before the ascent of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, were tied to a politics of segregation and racism.  Another reason is that the very young Republicans now in government positions are partially there because of a social movement linked to the T-Party.  As The Wall Street Journal explained recently in an article entitled,  “Grass-Roots Anger Transforms Republican Party in Congress and Presidential Campaign,”  local movements are challenging political leaders:  “insurgent uprisings rocking the Republican Party in Congress and the presidential campaign are creating heartburn among establishment party figures, who worry an unguided fury will keep the GOP from reclaiming the White House next fall. But that same turmoil is eliciting cheers from many in the party’s grass roots, who, far from fearing the turbulence, think it serves their burning desire to force changes in the government.”  The very youth of the Republican Party cannot be detached from social movement action: “This ground-up rebellion is shaking a party long dominated by seniority that habitually elevates the next person in line. This is particularly true in the presidential primary. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the son and brother of the last two GOP presidents and the early favorite among the party’s establishment voters, has failed to generate enthusiasm among the grass roots.”

Of course, one might argue that the T-Party phenomena is limited to right-wing grassroots action, with little implications for the Left or the Sanders movement. This is hardly true when it is the Sanders campaign that is most attracting younger voters.  In Michigan, Sanders won 81% of the youth vote, with Clinton getting only 19%.  If we turn to the United Kingdom, we see Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for leadership of the Labour Party, his success and related movement support, has led to a dramatic expansion in the number of Labour Party supporters.  As The Guardian explained in one news story: “Corbyn’s campaign has also been helped by a surge in new members and supporters who paid £3 to take part in the vote, leading to a near-tripling of those eligible to about 550,000 people. Throughout the campaign, he addressed packed rallies and halls, where he had to give speeches outside the buildings to crowds gathered in the street.”  Likewise, Sanders has led numerous rallies, mobilizing in one sense thousands of supporters throughout the United States.  While Corbyn runs to the Left of Sanders, the similarities between the campaigns should not be underestimated.

Another argument by the Times is that “Sanders’s own political career illustrates what can happen when a revolutionary has no ground troops.”   In his 25 years in Congress, they argue “he hasn’t gotten many big things done.”  Being “an uncompromising political independent, his outsider status has largely prevented him from attracting the support that would be needed among Democrats to turn into law his liberal ideals on health care, on college education and on fighting poverty and climate change.”

In this particular paragraph of the editorial, there are again numerous problems.  First, Sanders now has more “ground troops,” in contrast to his 25 years in Congress. Second, the idea that “getting things done” is always virtuous is belied by the trajectory of President George W. Bush who–by getting things done in Iraq–helped waste and destroy thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and also helped give rise to ISIS.  In contrast, if Bush got fewer things done, the United States would have been stronger militarily, economically, and politically.  Third, the idea again is that mobilizing young and progressive people is somehow bad for getting young and progressive people in Congress.  This line of thought is clearly illogical and shows how the editorial seems to be grasping at straws.  It almost seems like an intellectual form of desperation to make points that invert realities. As Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker explained: “With Sanders winning young voters overwhelmingly, his campaign may eventually be seen as an incubator for the Party’s future politicians.”

Towards the end of the editorial, the Times suggests that President Obama, like Sanders, created an electoral apparatus outside of “traditional party structure,” but failed when he could not reverse the growing tide of Republican Party support. Yet, Obama did not mobilize the millions of Americans on the Obama campaign’s mailing lists but rather killed “the Obama movement” as soon as the election was over.  Obama did not create ways to organize the social movement or consumption power of millions of voters.  He did not support mass rallies and marches against Republican retrenchment.  He did not put empowering trade unions at the forefront of his first months in office, but took up other concerns.  He did not back some kind of community action programs which would have used government money to empower local organizing campaigns or try to raise money for such campaigns by organizing a series of speeches that supported local organizing efforts.  He did none of this while the T-Party was busy generating a mass movement to help take over Congress.

At the end of the editorial, the Times praises the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements and sees them as a potential base for future Democratic Party support.  Yet, the former movement could not offer a comprehensive program linked to a legislative agenda  making it a weaker vehicle for social change. In fact, the Sanders campaign builds on some of the themes of that movement and so to set the two in opposition is somewhat misleading. So too is the attempt to suggest that Sanders has little to do with the Black Lives Matter movement.  Sanders slowly has taken up many themes addressed by that movement including police repression, the prison-industrial complex, and the very need to create social movements to combat racism and poverty.

It is true that there is a need for a social movement support system that operated in concert with but independently from the Sanders campaign, giving it a more critical direction.  Such a system could  complement the routines of electoral politics with other forms of economic, media and political action.  Electoral politics in itself as Sanders acknowledges will not change much.  But so too will traditional social movement activity not change much unless it develops new strategies and designs.  The counterfactual argument that working within the system through pragmatic deals changes much is belied by Obama’s trajectory and the relative success of the T-Party and Corbyn revolution.

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

April 28, 2016

The Logic of Subversion:  Capitalism, Fascism, and Democracy

Some parts of the Left or apparent Left have used the term “Fifth Column” to describe their activities.  The term is used on a Facebook page to describe one such group.  While social media may not have a large impact on mainstream society, it does inform the thinking of various activist networks (for better or worse).  Therefore, some analysis of this term and the larger phenomena seems warranted.

At the outset it is worth considering the following propositions. The first proposition is that the choice today is between “socialism or barbarism.”  These choices might be exemplified between the choice between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  The second proposition is that capitalism is one step away from fascism.  This choice is exemplified by the support which capitalists gave fascists, with companies like IBM a key reference point.  The third proposition is that capitalism was promoted by revolutions that advanced the power of the “bourgeoisie” and democratic spaces, rights, and capacities.  Which of these propositions makes sense?

The first proposition seems true enough, except if Sanders looses the election then the choice will not be between socialism and barbarism (like it or not).  Thus, thinkers like Noam Chomsky suggest voting for Clinton in this scenario.  One reason might be that a divided Left in pre-Nazi Germany led to the ascent of fascism. Of course, the Left may have better choices in Sanders, but opponents of Sanders and supporters have severely constrained their options given the way his campaign has been organized or those opposed to him have failed to organize.

The second proposition has elements of truth, but the main problem is that capitalism may be one step away from socialism or economic democracy.  This is because capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own dissolution. The spaces exist in cooperatives, networks of consumers, and other ways in which networks come together and organize public goods or cooperative or public energy companies and the like.

The third proposition has value in that it represents the dual character of the contemporary moment, creating possibilities for progress and regression.  The strategic problem, however, is the need to exploit the spaces suggested by the second proposition.  This exploitation is not based on the language of espionage, secrecy and hidden subversion but rather the language of mass engagement, participation, and mobilizations tied to organizing.

Why Does the Left Adopt Slogans Used by Fascists?

The origins of the term “Fifth Column” are tied to a description of fascist supporters who were thought to undermine Republican Spain (the anti-fascists). Therefore, I don’t think progressives should use this term to describe their own activities. The idea that the Left is some clandestine group on the margins is also a very bad starting point. Notice how the campaign of Bernie Sanders does not take on this idea of self-inflicted marginality, clandestine cult and the like. Part of these sentiments may be linked to Third Worldism and the inspiration some on the Left take from insurrections there. This inspiration is very much based on a misinterpretation of reality. Frantz Fanon described media influences in a way in which “majorities” and not “minorities” were won over. Therefore, it is not sufficient to argue that Sanders is a tool of the “non-revolutionary” pseudo Left or other such reductionism to counter my main point.  I would hardly describe Sanders in this way because he is opening up spaces for social change and–if the Left had its act together–could be pushed further to the Left.  Fanon was decidely favoring the Algerian Revolution, which did not turn out so well given that Algeria is hardly emblematic for supporting cooperatives and progressive social experiments today. Today Algeria is authoritarian, so we must think also about what Fanon did not say.

I think the real Fifth Column today are the far right groups which are trying to undermine the aspects of democracy which are left in advanced capitalist states by floating and promoting racist and marginalizing ideas (in the United States and Europe). In other regions of the world, fundamentalists play a similar role. The idea of military or espionage like subversion as the key tool of social change lends itself to Bolshevik and Leninist type analysis which has long been criticized by critical Liberals and anarchists alike as well as Social Democrats. Leninist itself has been criticized by those on the Left like C. L. R. James, Arthur Rosenberg or Noam Chomsky. Parts of the Marxist left are unaware as well of the capacities for mass social change within the rules or spaces of the established system in part because they use bad theories, deploy bad designs and are bad (uncreative) organizers. The cult of being different and subversive tends to be reinforced by the self-marginalizing identity politics sponsored intellectually by branches of Neoliberalism and the liberal elites as a way to allow critical persons to let off steam without changing much.

An Alternative to Fifth Columnism

An elegant statement of an alternative view of politics comes from C. L. R. James in his essay, “Every Cook Can Govern.”  Here he describes how spaces for democratic engagement can be a natural extension of the capacities that each human being has to be responsible, to think, and to contribute to society.  Similar ideas appear in the work of Seymour Melman discussing cooperative economics or Gar Alperovitz explaining a variety of democratic openings in the contemporary United States.  Similarly Lewis Mumford also addressed how various spaces for democracy compete with undemocratic spaces throughout contemporary society in advanced capitalist states like the United States. He makes this argument in the book, In the Name of Sanity.  There, Mumford argues that democracy “is necessarily most visible in relatively small communities and groups, whose members meet frequently face to face, interact frequently, and are known to each other as persons.” In contrast to the idea that technocratic rationality and concentrated power forecloses most options under capitalism, Mumford writes: “even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity.”

Political repression may convince some persons that the best path to system change is to take on the appearance of a secret agent or underground spy.  Yet, counter-revolutions are most easily opposed by active, public, mass engagement.  This opposition can be seen in the relative success of non-violent movements, although the fight against British colonizers or Nazis were not pacifist fights.

February 7, 2016

By Jon Rynn

Bernie Sanders has stirred the passion of many voters by concentrating on the problem of growing income inequality. Inequality, he points out, leads to stagnating and declining income for most people. The higher income for the top 1% completely distorts the political system. With more power for Wall Street and billionaires, politicians who depend on the rich and powerful for campaign funds pass more bad policies, leading to even worse income inequality, in a vicious cycle.

Thomas Piketty’s book about inequality showed that income and wealth inequality have been getting much worse over the last half-century. There seems to be a “positive feedback” process occurring, that is, the most powerful people accumulate more and more income-producing assets, and this greater wealth allows them to gather yet more wealth. “Positive feedback” is the process that occurs in nature and in engineering that leads to quickly escalating gains, such as when a microphone feeds back and starts screeching. Growing income inequality is our economy screeching.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, is the economic sector that turns off the “positive feedback” of income inequality in the economy. Manufacturing does this in a couple of ways. First, manufacturing generates so much wealth that a middle class can develop, as happened in the 19th century. Before that time, what little surplus wealth was generated was grabbed by the ruling elite, and almost everybody else engaged in the toil of farming. But the surplus that manufacturing creates can also be taken by the ruling elite, leaving everyone else in the same boat as before. However, the second reason manufacturing leads to a middle class is that manufacturing requires high skill levels — which is why Germany now, and the United States before, have had comfortable middle class families working in factories. When people have high skills — assuming they can organize, as in unions — then they have power, and with power comes better income and better income equality.

So a country that has manufacturing has more wealth, and more economic and therefore political power for a large part of its population, what is known as the middle class. But if the manufacturing sectors starts to decline, then so does the wealth-generating power of the country, as well as the power of the middle class. And thus we find that the United States is declining in power and in its middle class. By not focusing on the role of manufacturing in the economy, both Sanders and Piketty miss an opportunity to explain the phenomenon of income inequality that they are describing — and they have trouble proscribing effective solutions as well.

Income equality, and manufacturing, both peaked around 1968 in the United States. Manufacturing has almost always been the quintessential middle class sector because manufacturing employs about the same percentage of the workforce as the income it receives. In 1968, 25% of the workforce was engaged in manufacturing, and 25% of the country’s income went to manufacturing. On average, in 1968 people in manufacturing received the average income of the economy. No other sector can boast this “middle class-ness”.

For finance, insurance, and real estate (abbreviated as FIRE), in 2009 these industries employed only 5.7% of the work force, but received a whopping 21.5% of national income.   Therefore the average person in FIRE made almost four times the average of a working American (these figures come from data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis).

On the other hand, if you total up the hotel, restaurant, health, and retail sectors, you will find that in 2009 these lower-income service sectors employed 30% of all workers, but received in income about 20% of the nation’s income. Thus, on average, a worker in a low income sector received about 2/3rds of the average income. And this is an average — if you take out the doctors and other highly paid professionals from these sectors, the rest of the workforce has even lower income.

From 1968 to 2009 the manufacturing sector declined from one quarter of the economy — every fourth working person — to about one in every 11 people, a decline of about 16% of the total employment pool.   Where did those people go? Most of them went into the lower income service workforce, which grew from 12.8% to 20.5% of the workforce (and many others stopped working altogether). So, on average, the people that moved from manufacturing to low income services lost 1/3rd of their income, if not more since most were not the highly paid professionals in those sectors. In mainly white communities, these are some of the people interested in Trump and suffering from high death rates. In mainly African-American communities, the loss of manufacturing is the economic crisis that has been decimating African-American communities for decades.

While many communities were being devastated by factory shutdowns, about half the income drop of manufacturing (from 25% to 11%), was scooped up by FIRE (from 14.2% in 1968 to 21.5% in 2009). Most of the rest of the income was claimed by what are called professional, technical, and scientific services (from 2.4 to 7.6), where on average people are also highly paid. This professional sector accounts for about one quarter of the loss of manufacturing employment (moving from 2.1% of the workforce to 5.6%). Because of this shift from manufacturing to professional income, many in the Democratic Party focused on professional voters instead of working class voters.

Thus, there has been a movement of people from middle class manufacturing jobs to lower middle class and lower class service jobs, even within the higher average service sectors, while at the same time income moved to smaller, non-manufacturing sectors, particularly FIRE, and particularly to the “ruling elite” within FIRE.

The decline of manufacturing in the United States is usually framed like this: “Because of globalization and automation, manufacturing is never coming back.” I will address the nature of globalization and whether ‘manufacturing is never coming back’ in subsequent posts, but automation is not the reason manufacturing in the U.S. is declining.

Manufacturing is automation. That is, manufacturing is the process of people using machinery to create goods, including other machinery which can then be used for making more machinery and goods. When people use the word “automation,” they are generally referring to using some kind of computer technology within the machinery used for production. Computer technology is another form of machinery, and is in turn made by people and machines. But more importantly, there is no sharp break in capability that computer technology has brought to manufacturing. For the entire 20th Century, the productivity increase of manufacturing, that is, the value of goods that a particular value of machinery could produce, has been going up by about 3%, at a pretty steady rate, and computer technology has not significantly increased those gains. The German middle class has been doing very well, even with computer technology, because the German government intervenes in the economy in order to support manufacturing. Although the share of manufacturing in Germany has been going down over the last 40 years, it is still at around 20% and forms the basis for their prosperity. Moreover, a recent assessment by Bernard S. Bernanke at the Brookings Institution found that “in 2014, Germany’s trade surplus was about $250 billion (in dollar terms), or almost 7 percent of the country’s GDP,” continuing “an upward trend that’s been going on at least since 2000.” Manufacturing has therefore continued to contribute wealth to German society which conceivably can be partially taxed or redistributed to lower income earners.

Throughout history, and even at points in American history (for example, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln), the government has made manufacturing the focus of national policy. There is nothing inevitable about the decline of manufacturing, in the U.S. or anywhere else.

The rise of FIRE and the decline of manufacturing are linked, because the increased profits resulting from the imported manufactured goods that used to be made in the United States now go to the top 1% or so, where much of FIRE resides. That is, when goods are made in China, and sold in the US, the profits eventually wind up in FIRE and with billionaires, instead of going into the pockets of middle class manufacturing workers in the US. With those greater profits, FIRE and the billionaires indulge in the positive feedback processes of accumulating greater and greater economic and then political power, leading to growing inequality.

By the late 1990s, this financial power led to a further positive feedback loop, as the government deregulated the financial industry, allowing for the emergence of the “too big to fail” banks, leading to our financial oligarchy of five or so huge banks and a bunch of hedge funds and their billionaires. Thus, Sanders correctly calls for breaking up the banks, to roll back this “positive feedback” process. Trump, too, has used what used to be called “economic nationalism” to call for tariffs (or taxes) on imported goods to encourage manufacturing, and both Sanders and Trump are against the TransPacific Partnership, whose passage would continue a long tradition of destroying the manufacturing sector. However, both politicians do not explicitly get to the bottom of the problem: we need to rebuild the manufacturing sector, which will simultaneously decrease the power of FIRE and increase the power of the middle class.

Of course, Bernie Sanders would fight for policies that are much more progressive than Donald Trump. But I fear that unless we start to attack the root of the problem, and in particular unless progressives make rebuilding manufacturing a central plank of their platform, there will be more and even worse Donald Trumps to come.

Even calling for the rebuilding of manufacturing is much easier than laying out policies to do it. I think that the US has passed a point of no return, and the government must step in and directly encourage a manufacturing renaissance by rebuilding the American infrastructure. That is the topic of the next post (you can see a more detailed look at this and other issues in my book chapter, “A green energy manufacturing stimulus strategy,” available at jonrynn.com, and also look at plan details at GreenNewDealPlan.com)

Jon Rynn is the author of Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to Rebuild the American Middle Class, parts of which are available for reading at ManufacturingGreenProsperity.com.