Preface

There are many current and historical reasons that support the overthrow of the United States of America. Add up the body count of man, woman, and child from the genocide of American Indian peoples, the enslavement of African peoples, colonialism, perpetual imperialist wars, support of apartheid regimes, poverty, crime, and mass imprisonment; the current and generations to come face not only reckoning that history but with the existential threat of Climate Change. 

In order for someone to sincerely voice How Do that individual first has to have already accepted that the vampire of the Americas has to die for planet Earth to continue into perpetuity supporting sustainable animal and plant life. 

Picking up a stone starts in one's own mind and given voice.

War & Peace – Peace & Respect – Resistance & Defiance.

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The Poem How Do

This was amplified in a subsequent UAW statement that added opposing the Contra War to the precedents behind the union’s demand for a ceasefire. That history is a reminder that when unionists call for a ceasefire and justice for Palestinians, they are acting within a tradition of international solidarity that links domestic struggles against corporate greed with international struggles against war, racism, and injustice.

To understand the growing support within union ranks for an end to unconditional US military and financial support for Israel in its conduct of a brutal war, it is important to look back at the legacy to which the UAW statements refer.

World War II

For unionists in the United States and throughout the world, the Second World War was a war against fascism, a war against the brutal destruction of labor organization; it was a war against anti-Semitism, against racism in its every manifestation – and it was a war to make military aggression a crime.

While disagreements existed within union ranks about how best to contribute to the defeat of fascism while upholding worker rights domestically, there was overwhelming agreement around the need to do both. For many anti-fascists inside and outside the labor movement, victory in a war forced upon humanity by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan meant overcoming greed and hunger, unemployment and hopelessness, insecurity and fear, all breeding grounds of hatred. This hope was embodied in the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed the interdependent needs for economic, social, and political rights if peace were to prevail in years to come. The creation of the United Nations was an attempt to give meaning to that promise.

These initiatives came to nought. The effort by European colonial powers – Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium – to hold onto their colonial empires and deny millions the rights to self-determination was an early sign that the promises made during World War II would not be kept without a struggle; so too, visions of US corporate/political global dominance made clear that war and militarism, not peace and justice, would dominate world politics. With the onset of the Cold War, economic, social, and political rights were torn asunder, becoming a source of working-class division. And far from abolishing war, a harbinger of what lay ahead took place on August 6 and August 9, 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Victory on the battlefield can be its own curse if what follows is the illusion that destructive violence can be the basis of creative freedom and universal justice.

Yet an alternative vision of a world of peace, of the need for a determined struggle to make peace a reality, remained. The need for a different path was expressed by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (imprisoned throughout the war and thereafter) in verses written in 1956 in the imagined voice of a girl killed in Hiroshima; a poem later put to music by Pete Seeger:

I need no fruit, I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead
All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play.

Peace or war, justice or oppression, were and remain dividing lines domestically as New Deal ideals gave way to Cold War realities. Normalization of a permanent war economy served as a substitute for an alternative economic model based on democratic input. That necessitated a lessening of internal union democracy, coincident with the weakening of civil liberties within society.

Yet notwithstanding the path of subsequent developments, the anti-fascist posture of organized labor during World War II, the democratic ethos it embodied, the international solidarity at its heart, remained a touchstone of union social justice activism and global solidarity in the years ahead.

Vietnam

Post-World War II contradictions came to a head during the war in Vietnam, costing the lives of nearly two million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of American soldiers, with countless more wounded in both countries, in addition to millions of victims in Laos and Cambodia/Kampuchea. Throughout this time (1960s to mid-70s), the AFL-CIO and most national unions strongly supported the bombing campaign, the draft, the commitment to troops on the ground, and every call to expand the scope of our military engagement. A significant section – likely a majority – of union members and the broader working-class similarly supported the war at first, but unlike the dominant leadership of the AFL-CIO, opposition in labor’s ranks, opposition among working people overall, grew as the reality of the cost of fighting mounted.

Part of the growing cynicism about the value of killing and dying in Vietnam was due to mounting evidence of the lies upon which the war was based. Soldiers were being sent into combat not to defend our way of life (as was said at the time), not to defend the Vietnamese people or a mythical South Vietnamese democracy, but in defense of our corporate power, our military establishment, our imperial project. The dishonesty was put simply in a Tom Paxton song popular at the time:

Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation
Have No Fear of Escalation
I Am Trying Everyone to Please
And though it isn’t really War
We’re sending 50,000 More
To Help Save Vietnam from Vietnamese.

Lingering realities of McCarthyism initially made it difficult to find space – literally and metaphorically – to build an anti-war movement; something even more difficult within organized labor where criticism of the war was deemed “anti-labor”. Some unions in the building trades and East Coast waterfront advocated and engaged in physical attacks on anti-war demonstrators – with sympathetic winks and nods from then AFL-CIO President George Meany.

Walls of repression can only hold for so long. Labor statements in opposition to the war were initially issued by left-wing unions like the United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Leon Davis, president of Local 1199 hospital workers, publicly condemned the war as early as 1964. District 65’s (Distributive Workers Union) leadership of Cleveland Robinson, Al Evanoff, and David Livingstone all took part in anti-war events, The Packinghouse Workers issued one of the strongest denunciations of the war by a union in 1966. Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers also publicly denounced the war in 1966 – the UFW officially announcing its opposition a few years later. Each year that list grew – eventually, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butchers Workers; the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees; the International Chemical Workers; the International Union of Electrical Workers’ the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers; and the UAW called for an end to the bombing, negotiations and withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.

Opposition to the war was rooted in local and regional unions including the St. Louis Joint Council of the Teamsters (led by Harold Gibbons who joined David Livingstone to lead a trade unionists for peace delegation to North Vietnam in 1972) along with many locals from unions supporting or silent on the war including the Bakery and Confectionary Workers, Furniture Workers, Hotel and Restaurant Workers, Retail Workers, and Steel Workers (including old Mine Mill and Smelter units which had merged into the USW in 1965) to name but a few. Many UAW leaders and locals took a stand against the war well before the national union. Amongst the most vocal was Sam Meyer from UAW Local 259 – part of Region 9A and so part of Mancilla’s heritage. Rank-and-file groupings formed in unions where any dissent on the war was subject to sanctions, including within building trades unions, and the aggressively anti-Communist International Longshoremen’s Association. It was this that made anti-war activism more than statements at a press conference or buried resolutions; rather, they became the source of discussion and mobilization. In virtually all unions, opposition to the war met resistance from sections of the membership, just as unions supporting the war faced membership pushback. Inner-union debate, largely suppressed for many years, could no longer be prevented.

In other words, the rising tide of labor anti-war sentiment served as an assertion of the need for greater democracy within the trade union movement. This reflected a change in mood within the working-class more widely – the vociferous support with which many working people initially greeted the war began to lose steam as the faces of returning veterans became visible, as the economic cost by way of inflation and economic stasis mounted. The sense of society coming apart could not be separated from the senselessness of a war without meaning or endpoint. Coextensive with the growth of peace sentiment in union ranks – though not directly linked – were outbursts of rank-and-file militancy expressed in a growing number of authorized and wildcat strikes.

Although support by many rank-and-file union members for the war continued, it had lessened and became “quieter” – vigilante attacks on student anti-war protesters, by and large, ended after 1970. Critical to growing dissension within union ranks with “business as usual leadership,” was how unrestrained spending on the machinery of destruction reinforced economic hardship; the “war on poverty” – notwithstanding genuine accomplishments – was never funded on a scale remotely comparable to the war waged on Vietnam. Eventually, that “war” against hunger and want, against racial inequality, was largely abandoned.

With the formation of a trade union division within the peace organization SANE in 1966, unionists became part of the wider anti-war movement. Broad labor participation in the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium deepened those connections which were formalized in 1972 with the establishment of Labor for Peace.

Yet, there was no change in the top leadership of the AFL-CIO, which remained committed to the war. If anything, the divide over the war – and over the growing restiveness of working people, which was perceived as threatening to labor’s existing bargaining and political “power” – sharpened. This revealed itself during the 1972 presidential elections when the Federation and most affiliates refused to endorse Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern because of his support for withdrawal from Vietnam, which amounted to a de facto endorsement of Nixon. Top AFL-CIO leaders continued to oppose any steps toward peace, continued to denounce efforts by people abroad to lay claim to their own natural resources, and remained war supporters until the final troop withdrawal.

That, however, is only part of the story. The peace movement in union ranks marked the beginnings of a new more genuine unity below the surface, the revival of the too-long buried outlook that had previously united labor in the fight against fascism by making a connection between civil liberties and civil rights and political and economic democracy. Just as during the Second World War, there were disagreements over how best to organize for social justice here and overseas, but the recognition that these were linked and that labor rights required democratic unions, commitment to equality and peace was rising again to the surface.

South Africa

One of the hopes following the Second World War was that – unlike after the First World War – the commitment to self-determination would apply to countries in Asia and Africa still under colonial rule. Not willing to rely on hope alone, popular movements grew and demands for freedom became unstoppable. The Vietnam War, lest we forget, began in 1946 as resistance against the attempts by France to reimpose colonialism. So too, throughout Africa, from Ghana and Kenya to Guinea and Algeria to the “Belgian” Congo, demands for independence gained greater strength than ever before. By 1961/62, most of the countries on the continent had gained their freedom. However, the limitations of the freedom soon became evident with the murder of the newly independent Congo’s President Patrice Lumumba.

Nonetheless, the gains made throughout Africa during the 1960s were profound. Not everywhere, however, as Portugal held on to its colonies while white settler rule remained in South Africa and Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe). Those two countries had declared “independence” from Great Britain while retaining the structure of colonial rule that necessarily relied on an unvarnished racism. In South Africa this took shape as apartheid; a system which bore striking similarities with Jim Crow segregationist South. Nelson Mandela recounted in his autobiography a visit by a Southern congressman in the early 1960s to the Robben Island prison where he was being held. That congressman saw nothing wrong with the treatment of the prisoners there, hardly surprising as it was much the same as could have been found in Alabama or Georgia or Mississippi. That similarity reinforced popular understanding that the struggle against apartheid and against racism in the United States were linked.

Recognizing this, solidarity movements grew within the black community and within sections of the labor movement from the early 1960’s on. Notably the ILWU boycotted South African ships in 1962 and again in 1977 and 1984. Other unions that had been early opponents of the Vietnam War, such as the Distributive Workers under Cleveland Robinson’s leadership, added their voices in opposition to South African apartheid especially after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre when 69 people were killed by South African police during a peaceful protest, Labor activism was, however, initially limited, for the dominant leadership of the AFL-CIO viewed with suspicion the African National Congress and the emerging broad-based independent South African labor movement (which in 1985 took shape as COSATU: the Congress of South African Trade Unions). This was partly due to the Federation’s rigid Cold War mentality, which objected to Communist participation/leadership in the South African freedom movement, partly due to the (related) support for US corporate global expansion, perceived as being in the interests of US trade union members. In consequence, the AFL-CIO took the position that unions had to be “apolitical,” concerned only with bread-and-butter issues.

This logic led the AFL-CIO to criticize South African unions fighting apartheid as a system (for that was “political”), and instead, the Federation supported – with funds and advisors – “approved” segregated unions. But organized labor could not close itself off from what was happening outside its confines – the growing militancy of the African American community in response to the faltering civil rights movement contributed to greater solidarity with movements for liberation on the African continent.

This solidarity became more insistent and reached wider numbers in 1976 after South African police massacred school children in Soweto who were protesting a law to make Afrikaans the language of instruction. Hugh Masakela’s “Soweto Blues,” popularized by Miriam Makeba (both exiled during the years of apartheid) brought the suffering to the wider world:

Soweto blues – abu yethu a mama
Soweto blues – they are killing all the children
Soweto blues – without any publicity
Soweto blues – oh, they are finishing the nation
Soweto blues – while calling it black on black
Soweto blues – but everybody knows they are behind it
Soweto Blues – without any publicity
Soweto blues – they are finishing the nation
Soweto blues – god, somebody, help!
Soweto blues – (abu yethu a mama)

Accusations that violence was “black on black,” that police violence was designed to be “without any publicity,” spoke to the ways the apartheid government sought to hide and isolate opposition to their rule. The myth of South Africa as the continent’s “only democracy,” where black Africans lived better than where they gained self-rule could no longer stand scrutiny. South Africans, in response to violent repression, looked to global solidarity launching a “divestment, sanctions, boycott campaign.”

After the Soweto uprising, and following the 1977 murder, while in custody, of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, the AFL-CIO changed its position and began to sharply criticize the South African government and support release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. The Federation, however, opposed the boycott campaign, instead advocating for “constructive engagement” with the apartheid government and corporations, like General Motors, which operated factories there. The Federation’s support of efforts to reform the system, rather than challenge its framework, however, gained little traction, and was rejected by unions in South Africa and increasingly rejected by unionists within the United States.

Reflecting the upsurge in workplace militancy and the growing working-class radicalism of the Black Freedom movement, support for solidarity with South African unionists grew. In the late 1960s and early 70s, an emerging rank-and-file movement took shape in the formation of factory-based black caucuses in the Auto Workers, Steel Workers, and numerous other industrial, craft, and public-sector unions, making the connection between the shared need to undo systemic structures of racism domestically and globally with calls for solidarity with South African labor. During those years, there were relatively few unions with African Americans in national leadership or in key staff positions;in fact, there were unions that ran hiring halls that in practice excluded or segregated black workers. Therefore, demands for greater black representation in local and national union leadership and support for affirmative action hiring practices were core issues for African American workers.

In contrast to the Federation leadership’s attempt to separate economic and “political” demands, those caucuses, as well as left-led multi-racial rank-and-file caucuses and progressive local and national union leaderships tended to link demands against corporate racism, the tolerance of racist practices in organized labor, with community demands opposing racist practices in housing, healthcare, education, and policing. This paralleled how issues were framed with the political unionism of South Africa, which was rooted in solidarity with all working for freedom on the job and beyond the workplace.

These strands of opposition to domestic racism, opposition to the racism of US foreign policy, and calls for a more militant labor movement came together in 1972 when over 1,000 unionists founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU). Bill Lucy, AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer and a leader of the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis (where King was assassinated) was elected its founding president. Other key figures were Charles Hayes (later elected to Congress) and Rev. Addie Wyatt (a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974), both from the Meatcutters Union; William Simon of the Washington [DC] Teachers Union, who was also a leader of the Black Caucus in the American Federation of Teachers and later an AFT vice president; Ola Kennedy, a steel worker, a member of the first women’s caucuses in the USW and later a supporter of Ed Sadlowski’s reform movement; Nelson “Jack” Edwards, an auto worker and first African American to serve as a UAW Vice President; Dennis Serrette who as a rank-and-file CWA member had led a successful wildcat strike in New York; and the ever-present Cleveland Robinson. Noting those names is to recognize how deeply rooted CBTU was within a range of labor and community struggles.

So, it was natural that, alongside opposition to the Vietnam War, support for ending South African apartheid was central to its program from the beginning. Subsequently, CBTU became the first US labor organization to call for an economic boycott of South Africa, a call that was taken up by local unionists who formed city-wide and union-wide action committees. By 1975, the boycott campaign had spread far beyond the ranks of labor, especially through the work of TransAfrica. Daily sit-ins in front of the South African Embassy were organized, the arrests that followed keeping the anti-apartheid struggle in the public eye, laying the basis for the formation of the “Free South Africa” movement in 1985.

And this was transformative within organized labor. By the 1980s, the UAW and the United Mine Workers were playing leading roles in South African labor solidarity, and the AFL-CIO itself would completely reverse course and fully support the ANC-led anti-apartheid struggle and publicly support COSATU.

Contra War: Nicaragua (and Guatemala/El Salvador)

In 1979, after an 18-year armed struggle against the dynastic military-backed Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua and immediately commenced a land reform and literacy program alongside other sweeping social reforms. Their aim to improve the life of people in one of the Central America’s poorest countries was deemed threatening to the elite in Washington DC. US opposition began immediately after Anastasio Somoza fled the country, intensifying after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

The US established military bases in Honduras, then financed and helped unify paramilitary organizations to form the Contras who launched a war of terror designed to make Nicaraguans pay for the revolution’s victory. The Contras targeted beneficiaries of land reform programs, literacy teachers, healthcare workers, and unionists. This intervention was done in the guise of anti-Communism, a category that enabled policy makers to label any attempt to redistribute wealth in favor of the dispossessed, any attempt to assert national control over foreign investment, as a direct threat to national security. The contempt for international law this entailed was unambiguously reaffirmed when the Reagan Administration defied a World Court ruling that the US naval blockade of Nicaragua’s ports was illegal.

This assault on the revolutionary process in Nicaragua met with opposition from anti-war and solidarity movements; the Nicaragua Network was formed out of numerous faith-based, community, and local union groupings to coordinate these initiatives. Although support for US militarism and overseas corporate investment by AFL-CIO leadership was still in full swing, the movement in union ranks for an alternative foreign policy had gained considerable strength, building upon the prior movement against the Vietnam War and the still on-going anti-apartheid movement. Opposition also grew within working-class circles that had not been part of earlier social protests. Although Reagan’s war policies had supporters, the experience of Vietnam considerably widened the numbers of people skeptical of official claims that we were engaged in a struggle for freedom and democracy. Frequently, local union initiatives against the Contra War found support amongst veterans who had paid the cost of the illusions in government proclamations not too many years earlier and did not want their children to suffer the same fate.

Critical to this was a recognition that, with the Reagan Administration, tolerance for unionism that had been a legacy of the post-World War II social contract had come to an end. The resulting wave of union-busting and demands for concessions by management executives meant that the rules of the game had changed. Even Lane Kirkland (having replaced George Meany upon his retirement in 1979) was forced, rhetorically, even if not substantively, to respond to this change as union membership began to precipitously drop.

Yet changes in AFL-CIO policy were limited in conception and practice. Moreover, they were fatally flawed by the Federation leadership’s continuing support of aggressive, militaristic foreign policy in alliance with anti-union government and corporate leaders – as if assaults on human and labor rights at home did not spring from the same source as assaults on such rights abroad.

This was put into sharp relief by AFL-CIO leadership’s backing of US intervention in the simultaneous civil wars being fought in Guatemala (1960 – 1996) and in El Salvador (1980 – 1992). Even when the Maryknoll sisters – American citizens – were assassinated, even when death squads murdered two US agricultural advisors working on behalf of an AFL-CIO reform program in El Salvador, Federation leadership was unwilling to reconsider its uncritical support of White House and State Department policy. If the lives of American citizens could be taken without consequence, the murder and torture of El Salvadoran unionists, peasant leaders, priests, and the rape and brutalization of nuns did not lead to any change in policy. Similarly in Guatemala, in which repression reached virtually genocidal proportions when directed at that country’s indigenous population, a deafening silence was the response in Washington to reports of terror. Although the United States (like Great Britain in the years of empire) often justifies imperial adventure by “defense of women,” violence against women was central to the terror of the military we financed in Central America. In all three countries, beneficiaries of US government policies were US-based corporate investors and local business/landholding elites; the victims were working people in the fields and factories.

As the wars continued, refugees fled to the United States where they became sources of exploitable labor. Immigrant communities also became centers of resistance, grounding opposition to US intervention. CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of EL Salvador) and NISGUA (Network in Solidarity with Guatemala) alongside the Nicaragua Network, worked closely with union-based anti-intervention activists such as the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador and the Guatemala Labor Education Project. City-wide anti-intervention committees of local unions and rank-and-file committees within national unions formed to organize against US intervention. North American union delegations traveled to Central America, meeting counterpart unions of all political persuasions, seeking to coordinate demands for an end to US support and weapons supplies to those aimed at destroying economic justice and political rights.

Ultimately, the anti-intervention movement was strong enough to force Congress to cut off funding for the Contra War. The Reagan Administration, however, decided to add violation of US law to violation of international law; using the combination of drug-running and arms smuggling (while cutting a deal with our “enemy” Iran) to surreptitiously supply weapons to the Contras. The resulting “Contragate” scandal – little more than a decade after Watergate –marked the increased presidential contempt for democratic institutions. The cynicism at work was striking as the “War on Drugs” was starting to replace anti-Communism as the excuse for military engagement abroad (and mass incarceration at home).

Simultaneously, the internal struggle within the AFL-CIO intensified for – unlike in the case of South Africa – the Federation refused to change its position, continued to support the whole framework of Reagan’s foreign policy while engaging in red-baiting to attack those trying to develop an alternative foreign policy for labor, independent of the government and corporations. This came to a head at the AFL-CIO’s 1985 Convention when American Federation of Government Employees President Kenneth Blaylock challenged Kirkland’s pro-Contra, pro-US intervention policies from the Convention floor.

Blaylock did not stand alone – William Wipisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, and Jack Sheinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, similarly challenged Reagan’s (and Kirkland’s) policies. Altogether, about 1/3 of AFL-CIO affiliates stood in open opposition to its leadership’s pro-militarism stance as was visible in the labor presence at mass rallies held in Washington DC and San Francisco in 1989, protesting US Central America policies.

That labor presence highlighted the connection between domestic and global struggles, coincident with the recognition of the importance of immigrant workers to the labor movement. It is no accident that the Service Employees – whose locals played an especially critical role in building the anti-intervention movement – was the union that embraced organizing drives amongst those workers driven from their homes by US backed wars, initially through the Justice for Janitors campaign. Similarly, the organizing and strike activity carried out by the Hotel Workers (now UNITE-HERE) in Nevada and elsewhere, the willingness of the Laborers and some of the other building trades unions to reach out to Spanish-speaking workers, and the successful campaigns launched by the Farm Laborers Organizing Committee in Florida reflected a reorientation taking place within many unions. This was the backdrop to the successful challenge to AFL-CIO leadership a decade later that led to John Sweeney’s election as Federation president.

Those changes in labor were real and should not be minimized. Yet they were limited as neoliberal globalization, combined with union-busting, decimated labor’s size, strength, and sense of power in the 1990s. An analogous development took place in Central America. By the early 1990s, the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had ended – with conservative and right-wing forces holding the upper hand. Yet those wars ended in negotiation, not annihilation, and the struggle has gone on since then throughout the region, largely on a political basis, with setbacks and advances, and a legacy of possibility that, however frayed, remains alive.

Although those aspirations failed to be realized, not all was lost. In both North America and Central America, the dreams that inspired movements of resistance and affirmation of popular power remain stronger than the nightmares of repression. The Highwomen, a song by the group of the same name, The Highwomen, (country singers Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires), (first performed in 2019, decades after those civil wars) connects the dots between sacrifice and rebirth, reminding us that defeat is never final:

I was a Highwoman
And a mother from my youth
For my children, I did what I had to do
My family left Honduras when they killed the Sandinistas
We followed a coyote through the dust of Mexico
Every one of them except for me survived
And I am still alive.

Cease Fire: Gaza

Labor demands for a ceasefire today build upon the legacy of unionists whose sense of solidarity crossed borders, as Mancilla noted in his December 9 press conference. Until recently, however, criticism of United States complicity in Israeli violations of international law and human rights has been muted. Nothing comparable to the movement in opposition to South African apartheid or US funding of the Contras has emerged even though Israel was an ally of the apartheid government and a major conduit for arms for the Contras and the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries. Israel’s establishment out of the ruins of World War II and the horrors of the death camps, alongside a largely unexamined racism toward Palestinians and Arab communities overall, contributed to the silence of too many for too many years.

The depth of the current unrelenting assault on Gaza has helped bring about a change, exposing the cynical use of the Holocaust to justify oppression of others, exposing the lies and half-truths rationalizing United States military and financial support of Israel. Significantly, Palestinian-Americans have become more visible in social justice movements, thereby amplifying their collective voice calling for justice for Palestinians living in Palestine.

Labor’s cease fire demands build upon opposition to the 2003 Iraq War. The US invasion of that country was “justified” by the attacks on the World Trade Center (the “War on Terror” now overtaking the “War on Drugs” as the main excuse for killing people overseas), while opponents of the war were accused of being supporters of Sadam Hussein’s authoritarianism. But labor’s anti-war movement was not defending the attacks on the Trade Center, nor defending Hussein; rather, it was defending working people victimized by our guns and bombs. US Labor Against the War, organized by local unionists, won approval for an anti-war resolution at the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention – something unthinkable in prior years.

We are seeing something similar today. The criminal assault by Hamas on October 7 revealed the powder keg underneath accumulated injustices; the irrationality and cruelty of that day’s attack revealed the lack of pathways out of the oppression of occupation. Hamas’ action was preceded and followed by brutal policies by Israeli governments designed to control the fabric of everyday life in Gaza with any and every pathway to self-determination closed. The war now underway has made every resident a target; the predominance of children, caregivers, the elderly amongst its victims, exposes its nature as a war against a whole population.

As in the past, free speech by anti-war opponents in our country is also under attack – university professors and students, high school teachers, and others have been subject to sanctions for support of Palestinian freedom, for denouncing Israeli policy. That this takes the form of the false equation of being “anti-Israel” with “anti-Semitic,” erases the fact of systemic and individualized bigotry and violence directed at all Arabs, at all Muslims. So too it ignores past usage of “anti-Americanism,” to shut down dissent. Such attacks today cannot be separated from a broader atmosphere of repression as seen by book banning in schools and public libraries.

In a time when the danger of a Trump re-election has heightened awareness of the fragility of Constitutional rights, of labor rights it has also intensified awareness of the need to confront all forms of racism – be it directed at African Americans, Spanish-speaking immigrants, Asian Americans, Jews, or Muslims. All this has contributed to the rapid growth of the ceasefire movement.

When the independent United Electrical Workers helped initiate a Labor for Cease Fire movement, it was alone amongst national unions, joined initially only by UFCW Local 3000. When American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimonstein argued on behalf of a ceasefire at the AFL-CIO Executive Council last November, his was a lone voice. The National Writers Union, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, other union locals, and individual union members added their voices but none of the large unions. Various state labor federations began to call for a ceasefire on their own – and were quickly informed by the AFL-CIO that this was contrary to Federation policy and ordered to cease doing so.

As the carnage in Gaza has continued, along with the flow of weapons from the Pentagon, voices calling for peace and justice have grown louder. By the beginning of March, ten national unions – including SEIU, the National Nurses Union, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, American Association of University Professors, along with APWU, UE, Painters, NWU, and UAW – representing the majority of all union members – have called for a ceasefire. The strength of that demand has led the AFL-CIO itself to support that call, a change that enabled state and city labor federations to issue their own statements.

On February 16, seven national unions and over 200 local unions formed the National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC). Although ceasefire calls have reflected a range of views, the core positions are reflected in the Network’s central demands:

• An immediate ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas,

• Restoration of basic human rights,

• Immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas,

• Unimpeded full access for humanitarian aid,

• Our president calling for a permanent ceasefire.

We can call that solidarity, we can call that empathy, we can call that putting human values about the values of wealth, power, possession – whatever the term, it means recognizing ourselves in people whose suffering is greatest, sentiments expressed by a song Phil Ochs wrote during the Vietnam War:

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I’ll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune go you or I.

Today those bombs are falling on Gaza, ruins of buildings once so tall commonplace as are loss of life, loss of home, loss of place. Arming and supporting those dropping the bombs poses a danger for the Palestinian victims of war, for Israeli where right-wing leadership is an inevitable consequence of being an occupier, and for US society, inhibiting our ability to defeat the fascist danger knocking at our door.

Lurking Fascism

That fascist threat grows larger every day, just as our war machine rolls on, becoming ever larger. United States financial and military support for Israel doesn’t stem from any putative support for “democratic values,” no more than did US support for Diem and later Thieu in South Vietnam, for apartheid South Africa, for Somoza in Nicaragua nor, for that matter, our support for the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Rather, it reflects a policy concretized after World War II that seeks to sustain US global dominance through direct intervention in the affairs of other nations and through alliances with countries that share strategic goals irrespective of their political system. Israel, in that sense, carries out on a small scale policies we carry out through military bases, arms sales, and economic power throughout the world. This is the reason the US government has consistently rejected UN General Assembly/Security Council votes condemning Israeli violations of international law, just as, in reverse, the US consistently ignores UN General Assembly votes condemning as illegal our blockade of Cuba.

Today, we are paying a price, domestically and globally, for failing to end the dependence of the US economy on weapons and war – a dependence that is at the root of our inability to address climate change, unhinged inequality, and the erosion of democratic rights. The war economy has contributed to a culture of violence and insecurity in everyday life, and crucially has contributed to undermining labor strength. The war in Gaza, while it has its roots in Palestinian dispossession, reflects the current rise of right-wing nationalism as the means to impose the stability of oppression. Global neoliberalism and its perpetual wars reflect the defeat of the hopes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, creating the framework for the global re-emergence of authoritarian governments and popular support for neo-fascism. And we are not immune in the United States.

The reactionary, “anti-globalist,” anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and openly authoritarian politics of Trump/MAGA have gained a powerful base of support within a significant section of capital and amongst a wide swathe of working people in response to a pervasive sense of precariousness and instability building since the 2008 financial collapse and intensified by the COVID pandemic. For too many these events have been connected to the loss of power symbolized by our perpetual wars and inglorious retreats. Trump’s demagoguery posits simple “answers,” including unilateral US assertions of power without moral or ideological pretentions. Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians fits neatly in that picture, as does building the border wall. His opposition to NATO and global alliances enables him to project a rhetoric of “peace,” that hides the danger of greater war, just as his “pro-worker” rhetoric hides an anti-labor agenda.

When the Biden Administration attempts to counter that by its own assertion of the critical need to ramp up arms spending, and to maintain NATO and the whole panoply of Cold War and international financial institutions created to sustain US global hegemony, he both fails to counter Trump and undermines the social reform programs that are the only pathway to overcome the crisis in society. LBJ’s decision to prioritize war abroad over domestic reform laid the basis for Nixon, and later Reagan. Today we can see how support for Israel’s war undermines the Biden Administration’s goal of overcoming the challenge posed by the “MAGA” movement.

The images of dead bodies in Gaza bring to mind images of warplanes dropping napalm on Vietnam, reports of school children being shot in Soweto, of the mounting deaths strangling hope in Central America. We can only respond by remembering that the concentration camps; the destruction of unions, of socialist and communist parties, and dissenting churches, as well as the mass slaughter during World War II were overcome. As Len Chandler in a song from the era of the Civil Rights movement reminds us:

The seas are gettin’ stormy and the hour’s gettin’ late
If that ship starts seepin’ water you know how to bail
You can’t change the weather but you sure can change the sail
And our harbor looks much better when you’ve made it through a gale
So I guess I’ve gotta keep on keepin’ on.

Labor’s statements for a ceasefire points our ship of state in a direction we need to travel. It is critically important to push harder, turn words into action. We must connect that need to end war to a broader program of structural reform to control capital investment and recenter economic policy on public ownership rooted in community and workplace power. We must set a course to finally end systemic inequalities and address looming climate catastrophe.

For this to happen peace is paramount. Current realities dictate that unions need to and will support Biden over Trump, but labor needs to do so around its own course that challenges Biden’s limitations. Organizing to end US support of Israel’s war in Gaza, as part of a broader program to reduce military spending and take steps toward negotiated peace to end wars taking place in Europe, Africa, the Middle East is a means to recapture the hope that flickered briefly in 1945: that all people are entitled to live a life of dignity, equality, and peace. As the ceasefire resolution issued by the Coalition of Labor Union Women concludes:

“The time has come again for the labor movement to speak up and act out against the atrocities of war. We cannot become inured to the barbarism our species still resorts to when conflicts arise. As women, workers, veterans, and citizens of the world, we must continue to demand a peaceful world, and work to create it.” •

This was first posted on April 25, 2024 at Socialist Project: The Bullet https://socialistproject.ca/2024/04/from-wwii-to-gaza-us-labour-opposition-war-fascism/

IN A REFERENDUM HELD IN 2021, the city of Greenbelt voted in favor of reparations for the descendants of slaves and for Native Americans whose lands were stolen – an initiative strongly supported by members of DSA in Prince George’s County. The step that represented was an acknowledgement of the realities of racial exclusion at the town’s birth; more broadly it was a recognition of the continual impact of that legacy in income and living standards and, equally, important, in the sense of belonging. A local movement, it is very much a part of a wider set of initiatives which includes the establishment of DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – programs nationally.

By contrast, the Trump Administration has launched a war against DEI programs since assuming office in January. Opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion by definition means supporting exclusion, upholding inequity, and denying the rights, liberties, freedom of all those who don’t conform to a certain appearance, religion, way of life, i.e., to the overwhelming majority. It is thus fundamentally an assertion of hierarchical power asserting white supremacy, male supremacy, religious intolerance; it is anti-democratic to the core. As such, it is also an assault on the rights of working people, for the working-class in its diversity gains its strength through mutual understanding rooted in equality. Without equity, it will be impossible to assert public control over capital, assert the rights of people over profit. That is the core of unionism and the heart of socialism.

For too many people, however, a misconceived triumphalist understanding of our history provided the backdrop of Trump’s MAGA appeal – blaming those asserting their rights for the decline in quality of life and standard of living that is a reality for working people across the board. “Greatness” is thereby found where freedom means the right to oppress, where democracy consists of some choosing, others obeying. The legacy of racism drives a wedge through our understanding of who we are and where we are going, threatening the rights of all – for it is based on the pretense that our lives are not intertwined.

An alternative notion, rooted as deeply in our history, was expressed by Martin Luther King, when he stated a truism we neglect to our cost, to the world’s cost:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Freedom and Equality

Last year, on Juneteenth, my wife Lisa and I attended an event at the African American Civil War Memorial in Northwest DC. Frank Smith – SNCC activist and former DC Council member (when a member of DSA) – opened the ceremony commenting that this event was a tribute to the 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the US army and navy during the Civil War in a battle to end Southern slavery as part of a struggle to enhance democracy nationwide for all. The democracy being fought for was not conceived of as an abstraction, but rather as a means for the majority to protect their interests and improve their quality of life against the minority of wealthy plantation owners in the South or industrialists in the North.

The desire for freedom was concretized in the demand for “40 acres and a mule” – that is for sufficient means to lead a life of economic independence, the land being compensation for generations of unpaid labor. One might say today: reparations. Beyond that, there was a demand for voting rights, civic rights, public education (for African Americans and people of European heritage alike). Former slaves working in crafts, trades, on the waterfront, began to unionize. That was the promise of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Though it was a promise not fulfilled, it is a promise central to our national heritage, central to Juneteenth’s commemoration and celebration.

Paying tribute to that living history, a Baptist Choir sang patriotic songs celebrating our country as a land where people have always fought for freedom. Following the communal singing, everyone present was given a list of names of the African American Civil War soldiers inscribed on the memorial. Saying their names aloud was a way of recognizing the individual contribution of each, a means of remembrance of personal identity that slave owners tried to erase in the human beings who were their “property.” Striking back against enforced anonymity serves to give back a sense of history to people whose history had been brutally suppressed.

Breaking free from anonymity is critical to the meaning and substance of the labor movement. Working people are not just “hands,” a term once common amongst factory owners, but human beings with thoughts and ideas and dreams of their own. Thus it was wholly appropriate that the program concluded with the DC Black Workers Center Chorus singing songs about justice and worker rights, labor songs and civil rights songs merging in voice. And bringing the program full circle, it ended with both choruses singing the spiritual, labor and civil rights anthem – “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Throughout the day, we saw and heard linkages that reminded us that the nature of our society is defined by how we act, how we work to change what needs to be changed, for therein lies the only valid definition of patriotism.

The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are crucial to our national heritage. Every attempt to fill the gap between what is promised in those documents and the refusal to do so becomes a defining characteristic of our national history. Similarly, the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speech and the 13^th–15^th Reconstruction Amendments, are markers of the Second American Revolution, completing what the compromises made at our country’s founding left undone. And, as with the first American Revolution, the struggle to fulfill the promises then made is a thread that runs through political division in the years since and is especially marked today.

Juneteenth is a critical part of that heritage. The commemoration of the public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas – the last state where news of slavery’s end was publicly announced – on June 19, 1865 reinforces the centrality of equality to the vision of what our country could be. The brief ceremony at the African American Civil War Memorial, was also an assertion that our country belongs to all who live in it, contrary to those who by wealth, race, gender seek to proclaim that it belongs to some and not others.

Reparations

On June 19^th 1838, one of the innumerable tragedies inherent in the system of racial slavery took place – for on that day, Jesuits sold 272 slaves working on their plantations in order to raise money needed to save Georgetown University from bankruptcy.

That coincidence was noted in the documentary The Cost of Inheritance (directed by Yoruba Richen) at last August’s screening sponsored by the Greenbelt Interfaith Leadership Association (GILA) Reparations Education Task Force. The Task Force was established to determine how best to implement the city’s reparations commitment. Nearly 100 people viewed the film either in-person or via Zoom as part of an effort to broaden discussion about the need and possible forms reparations could take.

The film itself gave a human picture of what reconciliation might mean. One woman spoke of her need to do something, to give back after discovering that her grandmother had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan who had saved much of the memorabilia from the years of her membership (which only came to light after her death). Another woman talked of how she had always known her ancestors had been slave owners – but when she first saw the names of some of those who had been enslaved, their lives became real in a way they had never been to her before – and that too prompted her to look for ways to give back.

Giving back, however, is not about charity, not about those with resources telling those without what they need. True equality is about people jointly deciding, people working together, people transforming personal relationships and understandings – an individual process that speaks to a more fundamental way of approaching social change. That is the approach taken by Coming to the Table – a national racial justice organization featured in the film. Their definitions of reparations, as “a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights,” was central to the documentary.

The need for a shared response to past injustices, that remain as injustices today, was highlighted in the film by the example of Georgetown University, which is still run by the Jesuits. Under pressure from advocates, students, and community members, the University established a Board and hired consultants to determine how they could atone for having profited off slavery and the selling of slaves. Descendants of those slaves sold in 1838 contested that process at a public forum. Their intervention was successful, and those descendants became part of the decision-making committee. After years of meetings, the Jesuits, in 2021, committed to hundreds of millions of dollars to be disbursed through the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation with three goals: invest in descendants’ education over the course of their lives, fund programs that support individuals already engaged in anti-racist advocacy, and support elderly descendants. This was not a project to provide for individual payments, it is a project designed as part of a process to overcome the legacy of slavery and structural racism.

Briayna Cuffie, an Annapolis resident and founder of Reparations4Slavery, spoke and answered questions after the film (in which she was featured). She stressed that reparations can take numerous forms, including conversation and advice, noting as a personal example her being mentored on home-buying, becoming thereby the first in her family to own a home. Lois Rosado, chair of the Greenbelt Reparations Committee, followed with a presentation about the Commission’s work and goals. She too stressed that reparations shouldn’t be seen as cash payment, but as equity in resources. Systemic change begins when businesses, churches, and our federal government address their history of profiting from racial slavery and Native dispossession.

Addressing the inequalities that flow from that history is central if we are to find a democratic solution to the social and economic crises of our country. It is a long and difficult path. After all, not everyone – in Greenbelt or elsewhere – appreciates the topic of reparations even being discussed.

An instance of this was expressed in a letter to our community newspaper – Greenbelt News Review. Voicing opposition to reparations, the writer cited the sacrifice of his German-American abolitionist forbearers, some of whom paid with their lives because of their opposition to slavery, as reason to oppose reparations for descendants of slaves. Arguing that suffering and hard times were the lot of his family, but through hard work they were able to make a better life for themselves, he contrasted his heritage to that of people asking for reparations today (falsely assuming they are asking for handouts).

Although no doubt sincere, I question whether anyone or any family succeeds by themselves or that those whose forebearers were in chains, who were denied equal rights and subject to lynching after freedom, and who still face systemic discrimination, are asking for handouts to avoid hard work. Truth be told, if African Americans hadn’t labored long and hard through the years, the community would not exist as it does, and our country would be the poorer.

Understanding Heritage

I grew up in a culture well aware of the legacy of German-Americans who took part in the abolition struggle before and during the Civil War and drew different conclusions from that past. Many were themselves refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, and they took seriously their conviction that democracy and equality are inextricably linked as the pathway for individual dignity and well-being for working people. Amongst them was Carl Schurz, a Republican and advisor to Lincoln, a general in the Union army during the Civil War and supporter of Reconstruction, another was Joseph Wedemeyer, a friend of Karl Marx, an abolitionist, trade unionist and socialist who also served as a Civil War general for the North.

To this, we can add Adolf Cluss, the German-American architect who designed Washington DC’s Eastern Market, an acquaintance of Schurz, a friend of Wedemeyer and a correspondent of Marx. He designed numerous schools in DC, including the still standing Sumner School (named for the abolitionist Senator), built a school for Black students based on the same principles as his buildings for white students. And at Cluss’ insistence, Black craftsmen did the building over the objections of white building-trades workers, who were then in the process of forcing African Americans out of skilled trades.

My parents were both refugees from Germany, my mother arriving here in 1934 at age 10 – her parents were already in the US, having come to escape repression following a defeated miners strike. They had planned to return to Germany but when Hitler came to power that proved impossible. My father arrived in New York in 1938 at age 18, having already been a refugee from Germany, first in Poland and then in Czechoslovakia. They met at Camp Midvale in Ringwood, New Jersey, through Nature Friends, a working-class hiking organization founded before World War I by German-American Socialists – as a branch of "Die Naturfreunde," which had been formed earlier by socialists in Vienna.

Camp Midvale was built in the late 1920s and early 30s by the voluntary work of German immigrant laborers, most socialists or communists – including my grandparents – who would come on weekends or after work to put up the buildings and cabins (and eventually an outdoor swimming pool carved by hand out of the hillside and fed by a mountain stream). The camp they built created a space for people trapped in cities to spend time out in the country, to enable children to swim and hike away from the concrete and crowded streets of urban landscapes. That included myself in the 1950s and 60s. We frequently left our Bronx neighborhood on weekends and over the summer to head to camp where we would run free to our heart’s content on the grounds.

But learning to appreciate nature also meant learning to respect all people. Camp Midvale welcomed refugees from fascism such as my parents, welcomed all who stood against hatred wherever it raised its face, and opposed the anti-Semitism then rampant in Germany and a reality in the United States. Folk songs and folk dances from around the world reinforced that sense of oneness with all people. Solidarity with organized labor and those who organize and strike was in its DNA, as was a firm and unwavering opposition to racism rooted in the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all.

Camp Midvale was the first – and for many years – the only integrated camp in New Jersey, the only public swimming pool that permitted Blacks and whites together. What gave that extra meaning is that Ringwood was a “closed Christian community” – i.e., Jews and Catholics were not permitted to buy homes in the town. African Americans, those descendants of slaves, were not only prohibited from buying a home: They were not welcome to set foot in town. The presence of Blacks at Midvale was viewed with great hostility by many in the surrounding community. For those of us fortunate to be there, on the other hand, it opened us up to the world we lived in. We also saw that the parents of our Black friends worked just as hard as our parents but found greater obstacles to getting by, to getting ahead.

My parents also took part in every year’s Steuben Day parade and picnic as part of the Workmen Benefit Fund's contingent. Like many other immigrant communities, German immigrants created the WBF as a cooperative to provide health and life insurance at low cost as well as old age services to members who lacked resources, who had little to show after a lifetime of work due to bouts of unemployment or low wages. That mutual support, however, did not prevent the fund from advocating for national health insurance or improved Social Security benefits for all people. Helping each other in the community was not exclusive from helping all.

Similarly, my brother and I attended a turnverein in Yorkville (in Manhattan) to learn conversational German – there too, the values imparted were that of a democratic ethos. Those democratic values stood against the militarist and stratified German imperial ethos which laid the groundwork for fascism in the 1930s and is raising its ugly head again today in Germany and in the United States. Reflecting that outlook, in 2017, the Milwaukee Turners (one of the few still remaining) unanimously called for an end to the Muslim ban the Trump Administration had then announced, recognizing in their plight the circumstances that brought many impoverished or politically persecuted Germans to our country in previous times.

We all pick and choose which heritage has meaning to us – like with every culture and community, there are alternative ways of understanding that past, always a choice to be made as to how to see the world. During the 1880s and 1890s (and our first "Red Scare"), German-American communities were targeted by police and vigilantes, following the Haymarket riot. Anti-German sentiment was manifested on a greater scale during World War I, when it was merged into a frenzy of violence directed at any who questioned US participation in the war. Organizations like the Nature Friends were attacked during the years of McCarthyism when the society was put on the list of subversive organizations. Many of those at the camp – including my father – were blacklisted for many years simply because of their Communist convictions.

Camp Midvale was burned down in 1965 by militia style vigilantes stemming from anti-Communist hysteria and hatred of that afore-mentioned “race-mixing.” (Midvale’s legacy is not wholly lost, however, today the grounds are the home of the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts & Recreation). Undergoing those experiences only strengthened a feeling of solidarity with African Americans who have been in this country longer than us but who faced and still face discrimination in jobs, housing and education. Solidarity is another word for mutual support to solve the common problems that our country will only overcome when equality for all is made real in public policy, rather than existing only as an aspiration.

That is how I view my heritage. I’m well aware that others look at the past from a different lens, far too many (even one is one too many) embracing the militarist and chauvinist side of their German roots. For many others, their German culture is embodied by food or drink, or a reference to anecdotal instances of the past that are important pieces of family history. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that, I only question when upholding one’s particular roots is used to pass judgement on other people’s experience and present.

Speaking only for myself, my German-American heritage leads me to uphold the dignity of labor, respect for all and the value of unionism, socialism, cooperation – and hence to value the cooperatives in Greenbelt where we now live. And a wonderful expression of that value can be found in the discussion now taking place in our community about reparations – for without genuine equality for all, the rights of no one is secure. The Nature Friends old socialist motto: Berg Frei, Mensch Frei, Welt Frei – free mountains, free people, free world – still rings true.

Final Reflections

Reparations are not a one-size fits all fix. German reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust is a prime example of the wrong approach – based as it was on isolating one source of oppression while ignoring all others. That especially incensed my father, a German Jew (but no less German for that, no matter what anti-Semites might say) – for those who were victimized as working-class opponents of Hitler, such as my mother’s family, were ignored, reparations were not paid to the people of Poland, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and other countries whose lands were bombed and people killed, and yet whose pain and whose needs were unaddressed. It is a blindness now seen in the racism directed toward Palestinians in Germany, the United States and Israel, a racism akin to still present anti-Semitism, to the racism which still denies African Americans equal protection under the law. We act on the principle of “one for all, all for one,” or we act to divide – that choice remains to each of us.

On the afternoon of last year’s election day, when it was unclear what the outcome would be, Lisa and I went to the national mall to visit the Martin Luther King Memorial and from there walked to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial to reinforce for ourselves where we stand when it comes to our country’s heritage. The quote from King with which we began was inscribed on one of the panels. So too was this basic injunction:

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits."

And at Roosevelt’s Memorial was the quote below which speaks to the vision of the New Deal, reflecting values we are sorely in need of today:

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

Taken together we can see a definition of what “greatness” in our country, in any and every country, entails. They are part of our national heritage which we need to embrace now more than ever.

This article first appeared in the Washington Socialist, Spring 2025 https://washingtonsocialist.mdcdsa.org/ws-articles/25-02-from-past-to-future

Note: On February 7, Trump announced that he was taking over the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Not surprising, controlling the arts that has long been a dream of reaction. This calls to mind the ban Hitler imposed on literary criticism -- an anti-Semitic measure (Jews can “critique but cannot create” was a trope repeated in various forms ad nauseum in those years) to be sure. But it also exemplified the essence of the fascist approach to art: if it is not immediately comprehensible, then it is subversive. Put in other terms, critical thinking is itself subversive. The manifestations of that are visible everywhere today, most vividly in renewed book bannings, rewritten school curricula, repression of sexuality (which fits nicely with permissiveness toward sexual assault) and, of course, suppression of critical race theory (that word, "critical," does it everytime).

By contrast, anti-fascist films, anti-fascist art in all its forms, has one prime purpose: to encourage critical thinking, see beneath the surface, understand life in movement. The recent film about the assassination of Lumumba -- Soundtrack of a Coup d'Etat -- reminds us of the connection between fascism and colonialism and reminds us of the centrality of culture in the fight for freedom. Thoughts to keep in mind while watching the films noted below.

We are entering into a new period of reaction – and though the exact shape things will take in the years ahead are unknown, the immediate picture is indeed bleak. We face the all too real risk of authoritarian reaction, unfettered corporate power, a society rooted in stigmatization, violence, the crumbling of hard-fought rights.

That said, history does not repeat itself, politics doesn't unfold like a movie according to a director's script. People are not sheep, orders given aren’t always followed, can backfire on those in command. And capitalism being what it is, the logic of class antagonisms doesn't vanish just because those in power wills it to be so. Like the silent ghost of Christmas to come visions of the future tell of what may be, not what will be.

Critically, what we do matters. How we live, act, make a life for ourselves without giving in to resignation or bitterness are questions many are asking. Many movies have explored these dimensions for these are questions others have faced in times past – such as the films noted below -- all anti-fascist movies that reveal different aspects of how people have seen the possibility of change in the past during times when hope was hard to grasp. These don’t directly analyze the social or economic basis of fascism – though implied that is better addressed by books and articles. Nor do these dwell on its horrors (though those are never far from the surface) for what is most important is not what people with unbridled power can impose on us, but rather on what we can do as human beings, as political actors.

This list is far from comprehensive. For example, I left out documentaries though some, such as To Die in Madrid, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Battle of Chile, or Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence about Indonesia, are extraordinary works in their own right. Such films would be relevant for a much different kind of listing than that which I propose here. Moreover (and this should be self-evident) the list is limited to films I’ve seen. Many of them I haven’t viewed in decades, and though I admit to doing some fact checking, what mattered to me most in my choices and notes below are what I recall, the ways they remain alive in my mind.

Moreover, my focus is on Germany, Italy and the conflagration that engulfed Europe from through the two World Wars, partly as these provide the basis of current perceptions by fascists and anti-fascists alike and partly, by way of my personal background, as it is an era that informs by own understanding of the world. In particular, I don’t address the third wing of the “Axis” – imperial Japan, though its treatment of internal opposition in Japan, its war on the Chinese, its power over occupied Korea is comparable in key respects to the actions of Germany under Nazi rule. That is, unfortunately, simply a reflection of my sense of the inadequacy of older movies that I know addressing these (often with a racism toward the Japanese and a condescending sympathy toward Chinese, Filipino, and others fighting back). Perhaps, another list another time. That said, some films looking at other times and regions are noted for fascism is a worldwide phenomenon – and pedantic definitions of what fits or doesn’t fit a narrow definition of fascism can obscure more than clarify.

Of course, there are other good films that address these issues (Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator comes to mind), no doubt others could compile different movies of equal value. The point of what follows is simply to provide a starting point for reflection and discussion about the past to perhaps help shed light on our present and possible futures. The list is subdivided into categories that address certain recurring themes that I find of particular importance today. All those movies have been around for years, so I didn’t hesitate to describe plot points in my notes, and so please ignore my commentary if you want to watch each as if new.

And as we engage with these films we should keep in mind always that fascism means war — war abroad, war against its own people, war for profit. That is the message of the John Heratfield montage and is the subtext to all the movies under consideration.

Hope and Fear

To understand fascism, one needs to understand what preceded it. The devastation of World War I, economic uncertainty via inflation and/or massive unemployment, intense exploitation at work, and a sense of society coming apart at the seams were in the background of all the disruptions of the 1920s and 30s. But with that as well was the advance of radical labor, of socialist and communist strength within the working class, of various upsurges that challenged the rule of capital. These, alongside the Russian Revolution which, however evaluated, created awareness that fundamental change is possible for all -- which instilled fear in ruling circles. In Central Europe the strength of revolutionary movements was palpable, but insufficient, hence not strong enough to overcome the attacks that were to come. Four films below touch on that legacy. The different emphasis in each – insurrection and works councils, factory occupations, building a revolutionary movement through mass actions and electoral activity, broad-based electoral engagements and movements rooted in coalitions, all tell a piece of the story, leaving threads that survived defeat, threads that, however frayed, remain perhaps to be rewoven, threads which fascism sought to cut off and burn.

Rosa Luxemburg -- Margarethe Von Trotta’s 1986 West German biographical film about Rosa Luxemburg (performed by Barbara Sukowa) depicts her life alongside the development of a working-class revolt and its defeat by the armed force of incipient fascism. Luxemburg’s life is illuminated through debates within the international socialist movement, her engagement as a revolutionary socialist in Poland/Russia and then within Germany. In doing so, the movie gives a sense of the controversies that would culminate in divisions that influenced subsequent left-wing working-class movements. So too, the film gives a sense of the organizing being done on the ground as in a scene of her campaigning in Polish-speaking parts of Germany for the Social Democratic Party (talking on women’s rights, the need to abolish the family and her smooth transition when a Polish worker with a very pregnant wife wonders about what that means in the immediate present). Her personal life is glimpsed too – especially her connection with Leo Jogiches – a romantic relationship at times, a close political relationship always, and later with Kostia Zetkin (her friend and comrade Clara Zetkin’s son) who was killed during the war.

Disagreements within the socialist movement hardened with the outbreak of World War I. Luxemburg played a central role as a leader of the minority of socialists who rejected militarism and nationalism, opposing the madness of war. Opposition to the war grew over time and that minority became a powerful force culminating in the German Revolution in 1918 -1919. Worker, peasant and soldier councils, analogous to those in Russia, rapidly grew in place of the discredited monarchy and posed a socialist alternative to a parliamentary system that would allow capitalism to stay in place. Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (also on the Socialist left, a member of parliament and the public voice of opposition to the war) founded the Spartacist League as an illegal opposition organization to the war and from there helped found the German Communist Party early in 1919. The film touches on their disagreement – and reconciliation – over the uprising. The revolution was crushed by the “Freikorps,” armed detachments of soldiers, forerunners of Nazi storm troopers, in collaboration with the British and French governments as well as Social Democratic leadership. Luxemburg and Liebknecht had each been arrested many times previously. This was different – they were each brutally murdered (Jogiches was hunted down and murdered by German police a few months later as were numerous other Sparticist/Communist and anarchist workers).

The legacy of a revolution defeated and betrayed was two-fold – a weakened but still powerful revolutionary current rooted in large circles of a militant albeit deeply – and fatally – divided socialist movement up against business forces and reactionary circles fearful of that revolutionary fervor and determined to crush it. That culminated in fascism and Hitler’s ascendancy to power as the “better” alternative not only to socialism but to liberal democracy itself.

The Organizer (I compagni) – A strike in a textile factory at the end of the 19^th century in Turin provides a background for the life and death struggle for the workers, providing a look at the Italian labor movement which was from its origins inextricably bound up with socialism. This 1963 movie, directed by Mario Monicelli, moves from a workplace accident due to exhaustion from overwork, a failed job action, followed by a strike. The workers initial action is spontaneous, driven by anger and desperation. The “organizer” (played by Marcello Mastroianni) – a high school teacher who had lost his job because of his socialist radicalism – helps them prepare for the battle ahead. The leadership, however, comes from the workforce itself as do the debates and arguments over which way forward. After months of intense conflict, including a violent confrontation with scabs, hunger drives the workers to accept defeat and they vote to return to work. The organizer urges them to occupy the factory as an alternative, a deadlock ensues which is broken when the injured worker raises his stump in support of action. The workers march on the plant, soldiers attack them, some are killed, the organizer arrested, others go underground. The film ends almost as it began with the workers trudging back to the factory for work.

But not quite the same, the worker initially most opposed to the strike has himself now become an organizer. The organizer who had had inspired and help prepare them for strike action has been nominated as a Socialist candidate for office – if victorious parliamentary immunity would mean his release from prison. Along the way the conflicts amongst the workers and the process by which they become cohesive is demonstrated through individual encounters. So too is the disparity shown. As harsh as their life is, a scene involving a Southern Italian family shows an even more desperate poverty. The conditions of life are highlighted by the black and white cinematography emphasizing the grayness of factory life.

Although socialism was a factor, one can see in this film how the Italian working-class centered its struggles at factories and at great landed estates, different from the movement in Germany in which political struggles predominated over labor action. The lines were drawn which would make factory occupations after World War I under socialist leadership the center point of struggle – and lead to Turin being the center of subsequent Communist strength (Antonio Gramsci was based there in 1919 and this influenced much of his subsequent thinking). But so too we can see in it the readiness to treat collective action by workers as criminal and to resort to state violence to put them down a precursor to Mussolini’s march on Rome and the support of business leaders and landowners that put him in power.

Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World (Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehort die Welt?) – A 1933 movie set largely in “Kuhle Wampe” – a tent encampment for the unemployed on the outskirts of Berlin. Filmed on the eve of the Nazis takeover, it depicts the misery of mass unemployment in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. In counterpoint, it shows Communist youth trying to create something for themselves through sports, through nature and a sense of beauty, through discussion, as well as through political struggle. Filmed largely on location within the encampment, the film juxtaposes scenes of daily life around a thin plot line centered on a pregnant young woman and her friends, straddling the line between hope and hopelessness.

The first two segments of the film are titled (as might be done in the theatre) One Unemployed Man Less (about a suicide) and The Idyllic Life of a Young Person (eviction). The third segment is the film’s title -- taken from a line from a song written by Bertolt Brecht which asks the question: whose world is it? That anticipates an argument on a subway between middle class riders and the unemployed young militants. There is something tragic in seeing the film now – and thinking of the fate awaiting many of the film’s professionals as well as the non-professional extras who filled out the cast. The film itself was censored by the Weimar authorities, banned altogether by the Nazis.

Brecht wrote the basic script and the film – drawing from the montage films of Eisenstein and other early Soviet film makers as well as some of the radical concepts of theatre that he was then developing. The music was composed by Hans Eisler, a left-wing music composer with roots in the avant-garde. Ernest Busch, who played one of the leads, took part in the Spanish Civil War and, as a singer of workers songs gained wide renown during his lifetime. Another lead, Herta Thiele, was a well-known stage actress had previously starred in the film Madchen in Uniform, a lesbian-themed movie with an all-female cast. The Director, Slatan Dudow, was a Marxist film director, arrested by the Nazis. After his release went to exile in France, when France was occupied went to Switzerland (and then to East Germany after the war – as did Brecht, Eisler, Busch, and Thiele). Class is highlighted – the Nazis are not visible in the film, but the tension of lurking violence is everywhere. It is a glimpse of the world on the brink.

La Vie est a Nous (Life is Us) – This is a film made in 1936, directed by Jean Renoir (the painter Auguste Renoir’s son), for the French Communist Party in support of the Popular Front election campaign. The film is a mixture of acted sequences and documentary, depicting the hardships of daily French life, interspersed with footage of Communist leaders speaking at election rallies in support of the Popular Front. Reflecting the momentary hope of the Popular Front, the film was produced by a film collective organized by Renoir. An outstanding example of the project was the film The Crime of Monsieur Lange (workers taking over a book publishing house with an absent owner and running it as a collective) which also reflected the optimism and vision of the Popular Front. Central to the film is a question similar to that posed by Kuhle Wampe – to whom does France belong: the “200 families” or working people? Newsreel clips of Mussolini, Hitler and French fascists are followed by sequences showing deprivation and collective action – documentary and acted out footage interspersed.

As background, there was an attempted fascist coup in France in 1934. Unlike in Germany, the French Socialist and Communist Parties – together with the center-left Radical Socialist Party – came together to resist in the streets and then formed an electoral alliance which led to Socialist Leon Blum election as Prime minister. At the time, it gave hope that a way forward had been found to stop the rising tide of reaction which was spreading across Europe. That was the logic of the Vichy regime after France’s defeat in World War II, with fascists blocked in 1934 assuming power with the blessings of business circles and military collaborators.

Eve of Destruction

Fascism cannot be separated from the economic and political structures of capitalist society during periods of instability and crisis. But to say that and no more says very little – why such a virulent response at one time and not another, what does it mean to live in a society on the edge? More to the point, how do we understand people and culture who respond to the siren call of authoritarianism, of militarism, of chauvinism and racism? how can we understand the sense of loss such that people look backward not forward as a way out? The following films are attempts at answers.

Der Untertan – Wolfgang Staudte directed this 1951 East German movie based on a novel of the same name by Heinrich Mann (originally published in 1918). was made in East Germany in 1951, based on a novel on a Heinrich Mann published in 1918. The word itself is difficult to translate, the English versions of the film/novel have been variously known as The Loyal Subject, Man of Straw, The Patrioteer. A common translation of Untertan is the “underling,” it is better grasped as the “toady.” Best to think of it as defining those who welcome being kicked by those above them and enjoy kicking those below them – i.e. a personality type that gravitated to the Nazis.

The story is set in early 20^th century Germany, focusing on a middle-class man and small manufacturer who is cowardly and opportunist, hiding his corruption behind worship of the Emperor – a successful strategy as he always manages to get ahead. The novel ends as his speech celebrating the unveiling of a statue of the Kaiser is interrupted by a thunderstorm; in the film that thunderstorm turns into allied bombing at the end of World War II. The satire of German culture was extremely divisive in the 1920s, the novel’s popularity on one side was matched by denunciations on the other (and, of course, it was banned once the Nazis came to power). The film was made in East Germany as part of an effort to understand the mindset that allowed fascism to come to power, it was banned in West Germany until 1957, then only permitted in censored form – the full version not released there until 1971 after the student movement forced questions of the past into the present.

Wolfgang Staudte had been an actor who remained working in film in Germany during the 1930s and 40s – his work on Der Untertan and the 1946 East German film, Murders Among Us, were part of his own process of coming to terms with his past. Mann (Thomas Mann’s brother) also wrote Professor Unrat about the self-degradation of German culture, later made into the film Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich.

The Conformist (Il Conformista) – The 1970 film directed by Bernado Bertolucci examines the personality of someone whose search to “fit in” is an exemplification of the authoritarian personality, a personality that gravitates to fascism’s appeal. Set in the 1930s, the main character (performed by Jean-Louis Trignant, who appeared in several left-wing Italian films of that era) is a mid-level fascist official who is given the task of assassinating his former professor, a leading anti-fascist intellectual living in exile in Paris.

Flashbacks in the film look back to his early life – decaying wealth (and decaying personalities) of his parents, the trauma of being ostracized as a school boy for a gay encounter, the trauma of violence committed against him and by him at a young age. His response is to try and fit in, to be “normal,” the normality of following orders, the normality of suppressing feelings – of suppressed sexuality. It is that normality of repression which leads him to kill without remorse. And it is a mindset which facilitates the brutality of our times, that facilitates fascism. The film ends as the war ends – the “conformist” quickly changing his tune, fitting in, denouncing, unchanging.

The film is based on a novel by Alberto Moravia written at the end of World War II which, in turn, was influenced by the assassination of Carlo and Nello Rosselli in 1937, brothers and anti-fascist leaders of “Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Liberta).”

Ship of Fools – The 1965 film (directed by Stanley Kramer with a screenplay by Abby Mann) is set on an ocean liner enroute from Mexico to 1933 Germany and evokes the sense of oncoming disaster from the interactions of passengers who are – for the most part – unaware of what lies ahead. The characters aboard the ship display the range of attitudes from arrogant Germans who believe in the “master race,” to other Germans who believe that such fools could never take power. Spanish laborers being deported from Cuban to forced labor in Spain, a wealthy woman facing imprisonment upon arrival for daring to help them after learning that her husband earned money from brutal exploitation, provide another lens on what was in the air. The others on the ship, obliviously wealthy, hangers on who grift, pimp or prostitute themselves, the lost and lonely underline the desperation in the air.

The moral center lies in the ship’s doctor, who fears slippage into accepting the unacceptable and discussions with his friend, the ship’s captain whose understanding of what he sees marks a deep cynicism. Two excluded passengers bond – a Jew returning to Germany believing that the worst won’t happen, and a dwarf whose narration begins and ends the film. It is the dwarf who names the other passengers as fools who can’t see what lies in front of them. The cast – for those who follow films – is extraordinary, including Vivian Leigh, Simone Signoret, Oskar Werner, Jose Greco, Jose Ferrer, a young Lee Marvin (as a former baseball player), and a young George Segal (as an aspiring – uncertainly socially conscious – artist) -- none fitting a simple pattern and thus making it more evident that blinkers on them foretold their inability to prevent the oncoming doom.

Katherine Anne Porter spent thirty years writing the novel of the same name, basing it on her observations while living in Germany on the eve of fascism (which she captured at the time in her short story, “The Leaning Tower,” written in 1931).

Cabaret -- Bob Fosse directed this 1972 film set in and around a musical hall in Berlin on the eve of fascism’s triumph. Liza Minelli as the night club singer and Joel Gray as the master of ceremonies perform in an atmosphere of despair and forced gaiety that mirrored the sensibility of a society coming apart at the seams. The poverty all around is hinted at, the growing anti-Semitism frames personal decisions as it is in the air, Nazi violence, though not yet pervasive, is never far away. None of this is depicted via polemic, but rather through the eyes of a gay academic (Michael York) teaching English at a boarding house to earn his keep. The relations between the borders, alongside the performances at the “Kit Kat Club,” provide a view of the contrasting and intersecting realities of the time.

Striking too are the two contrasting moments where we can see the appeal and the true face of fascist rule – a young man singing beautifully in a beer garden that “tomorrow will be our day,” with other patrons joining in all carrying a sense of almost innocence, of a kind of cleanliness (with all the dangerous implications that word carries), and then the night club itself, its performances moving from an ironic commentary to what is going on in society, to the irony becoming a reality. At the start of the film a Nazi is thrown out, by the end, the entire crowd are wearing swastikas – no pretense of innocence or cleanliness about them. Joel Grey recently pointed out the relevance of the night club sequences to the dangers we face today (see: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Joel-Grey-Says-Audiences-Should-Heed-CABARETs-Warning-20241124)

The musical is based on short stories (Berlin Stories) written by Christopher Isherwood in 1939 as a semi-fictional memoir of his time living in the dying Weimar Republic – and is itself well worth reading.

Living Under the Grip

Lives continued to be lived – some much as they had before, some experiencing a slow narrowing of what is possible in life, some turning to action, often reluctantly, when confronted with choices that could not be avoided. These films all depict daily life and the way political commitment and forms of resistance sometimes emerge when the realities of war or repression can no longer be ignored.

Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)– Carlo Levi’s memoir of internal exile in a remote, rural part of Italy after arrest for his opposition political activity was made into a film directed by Francesco Rossi in 1979. A painter and a doctor, Levi observes and comes to know the people of the village where he is sent. The peasants living in unrelieved poverty provide a glimpse of the hollowness of Mussolini’s rule, as well as providing a counterpoint to the local elite and fascist officials, all of whom are themselves without ideology, concerned only with holding onto power.

Beautifully filmed and slowly paced, the movie is faithful to the memoir in giving a sense of the slow-moving nature of time. The movie begins as does Levi’s memoirs – the inhabitants of Eboli say that Christ stopped there, for it was too forlorn even for him. Although the community is isolated, the wider world impinges when some are sent to fight in fascist Italy’s war of conquest against independent Ethiopia (one of the opening acts of the Second World War).

What is depicted in the lives of the individuals he lives with is a kind of internal colonization, posing problems far different from those he experienced in the North (and thus questions of what to do after fascism that Levi was to explore in his political engagement and books in the years thereafter). Levi, a painter and doctor, was friends with the assassinated Roselli brothers and a member too of “Justice and Liberty.”). Three years after his release from exile Levi was rearrested and remained in prison until the overthrow of Mussolini.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis ( Il giardino dei Finzi Contini)– This 1970 film by Vittori DeSica follows the daily lives of a family of Italian Jews in a prosperous northern city, Ferrara, as Mussolini’s evolving policies show the cost of complacency. The wealthy family, part of a small Jewish community, finds its world closing in as anti-Semitic laws are gradually passed. The film gives the texture of daily life as it becomes ever more constricted, the claustrophobia of an oppressive environment even as people continue to live out their daily lives of relationships, friendships, desires. Wealth and privilege protect them only for so long and then no more.

In the initial years of Mussolini’s rule, there were no restrictions on the Jewish community. That began to change as the power relationship between Germany and Italy changed. The story starts in 1938, when Italy first began to impose anti-Semitic laws, as Italy began to tighten restrictions on the Jewish community, then at the start of World War II with the disruption of everyone’s life, then to the middle of the war – as Italian losses mount – and all the Jews of Ferrara became subject to deportation. The combination of repression, war, anti-Semitism, are interwoven as people may having experienced it, step by step, rather than in one fell swoop.

The film is based on Giorgio Bassanti’s semi-autobiographical novel based on his own experience – he was one of the only Jews of Ferra to survive.

The Seventh Cross – this 1944 film directed by Fred Zinneman is based on a novel by Anna Seghers, an anti-fascist who lived in Mexico during the war (Mexico had a better record than most countries – a far better record than the United States – in accepting Jewish and political refugees fleeing the Nazis). She later became East Germany’s most prominent novelist. The premise of novel and film is that seven people escape from a concentration camp. Seven crosses are erected where their bodies are hung when caught – yet one “the seventh cross” remains empty. The film then tells the story of the remaining prisoner (Spencer Tracy) – a factory worker (and Communist – explicitly in the novel, implied in the film) – as he attempts to escape.

What motivates this film is that every encounter Spencer Tracy has confronts people with a choice – to remain passive in the face of Nazi repression or to act in ways to regain their own humanity. Doing so illuminates how the connection between people is the foundation of any form of resistance. All this takes place as the Tracy character slowly regains his humanity which he had almost forgotten as a concentration camp inmate – but throughout he remains largely passive, serving, however, as a catalyst for others to act. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy play particularly critical roles as the link between personal morality and political action.

Zinneman was an Austrian Jew; both his parents were murdered at Dachau. Many of the smaller rolls in the film were played by other German refugees – including Helene Weigel, a leading German stage actress and Brecht’s wife, who plays a small role as a janitor and informer. Seghers was from Mainz (in Southwestern Germany) so much of the action in her novel (and in the movie) are set there. After the war she become East Germany’s most prominent novelist.

Alone in Berlin – This 2016 film is based on the true story of an apolitical working-class couple (Otto and Elise Hempel, portrayed, respectively, by Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson) living in Berlin who first begin to question fascism after their son is killed in battle in 1940. A scene in a factory and discussion sets the tone of anger that never leaves. Following that, they observe the mistreatment of an older Jewish neighbor who faces one restriction after another, making daily living almost impossible. After her suicide, the couple begin writing leaflets exhorting people to resist the Nazis in every way they can. Their actions are wholly personal, unconnected to any movement or organization. Moreover, there is never any suggestion that the leaflets have any practical effect. Yet the Nazis take the leaflets seriously, for any crack in their projection of invincibility and omniscience is danger. Eventually they are caught – by accident – and are both executed.

The story was memorialized by Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, which was published in Berlin in 1946, a few weeks after he died. Fallada, a writer who, like most, didn’t emigrate – newspaper reporters, journalists, popular novelists and story tellers, wrote in German had little chance to earn a living abroad, so leaving was not an option – even people who were prominent and/or with strong connections with anti-fascist or refugee support organization, had a difficult time earning a living in exile. Such writers and journalists however uncomfortable or horrified by what was taking place could do little beyond an inner-emigration and, to the extent possible sticking to innocuous, apolitical themes, but that wasn’t always possible. Fallada, amongst such writers, at times felt compelled to do work commissioned by the propaganda ministry. Reading about the Hempels after their arrest – their resistance contrasting with his personal sense of complicity - he novelized the story while in a mental hospital, instead of writing a book Goebbels demanded of him. Every Man Dies Alone was published in 1946 some weeks before Fallada died. His early work, What Now, Little Man, written in 1932, had been a perfect evocation of Weimar on the eve of fascism – providing a similar look from a different perspective, as Kuhle Wampe.

And, quite unusual, a television production of the novel was produced, separately, in both West and East Germany. Alone in Berlin is a British production, directed by Vincent Perez.

Resistance to Fascism’s Wars

War brought out the full brutality of fascism. Beginning with Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and Italy’s of Ethiopia, aggression was accompanied by greater levels of internal repression. These movies, all made during or just after the war, address the Spanish Civil War, France and Czechoslovakia under occupation, resistance in Italy, the impact of the war in the Soviet Union and on wartime U.S. (and British) citizens -- the quality of the films vary, but they all touch on conflicting urges to ignore, collaborate or resist, and with that the personal choice to give in to loneliness or despair or to search for human connection.

Blockade – Made in 1938 while the Spanish Civil War was still raging (though nearing its conclusion with the fascist defeat of the Republican government but a year away). The film stars Henry Fonda as a Spanish farmer defending his land and the Popular Front Spanish government alongside British actress Madeline Carroll caught between spying for the fascists or supporting the Republicans. Carrol’s character is what moves the movie as her values change over the course of the film -- and curiously in life. A few years later, after her sister was killed in the London blitz, she stopped acting for the war’s duration, joined the Red Cross, working on the frontlines with wounded soldiers.

By way of background, Spain elected a Popular Front government (Socialist-Communist-Center Left liberal with some Anarchist support/tolerance) in 1936. A military coup backed by Italy and Germany was launched soon thereafter; while the US, Britain and France supported a non-intervention policy that only helped the fascists. The politics of the film were therefore not only centered on Spain – it was also and directly a plea to get the Roosevelt Administration to end its non-intervention policy – a policy that essentially gave Germany and Italy a free hand to support Franco’s overthrow of Spanish democracy. The film may be a bit melodramatic, itself a product of the times, though the film was nominated for an academy award for “Best Story”. Fonda’s portrayal is a precursor to his role as Tom Joad in Grapes of Wrath; the speech he gives at the end of the Blockade striking the same tone and sentiment as that of the Oakie migrant Steinbeck created – reflecting the connection between defense of Republican Spain and supporting the New Deal.

Notably, it was directed by William Dieterle, a German film director who left his country in 1930, seeing the writing on the wall. While in Hollywood, he helped get anti-Nazi Germans papers needed to enter the U.S. The screenplay was by John Howard Lawson, later one of the Hollywood 10 – arrested and imprisoned in 1949 at the start of the anti-Communist witchhunt, then blacklisted, this film was considered a prime example of his Communist “subversion.” Ironically (or perhaps that was the point of what was going on) Lawson had been a founder of the Screenwriters Guild. Dieterle, though with leftist sympathies, was not a Communist nor a political activist. Nonetheless, the attacks on Blockade at HUAC hearings meant that he found it increasing hard to get work in Hollywood and he eventually returned to Munich in West Germany.

This Land is Mine – Jean Renoir directed this movie in 1943 when living in exile in the U.S. The film focuses on two schoolteachers, living in the part of France under German occupation – Maureen O’Hara who embodies the spirit of resistance, and Charles Laughton whose character begins as an ineffectual coward who tries to close his eyes to the world around him. Laughton’s transformation – not by way of dramatic gestures, but by simple decency is at the core of the story. A third character (George Sanders) a railroad manager, shows the rationalizations, contradictions, costs of collaboration.

What is interesting about this film is that evil is not cartoonish, occupation politics are nuanced. The Germans want acquiescence by closing off the possibility of an alternative. Thus it is a defeat when they are compelled to resort to force (as with the execution of hostages), for it reflects their inability to gain acceptance – a truism reflected in the Laughton character. Anti-fascism during war involved arms, but in war or peace, key is gaining popular support. But even here, how people act, how they transform, has a great deal to do with class – a lens Renoir uses carefully to help give perspective on the choices people make.

The movie ends with a moving recitation of the “Rights of Man” by Laughton and then by O’Hara to school children. This has a particular meaning in the context of France as the French right-wing was never reconciled to the legacy of the French Revolution. Curiously, though not much remembered today, this film was one of the most popular of the wartime political films.

Hangmen Also Die – The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most brutal Nazis, second in command of the SS to Himmler, was the subject of this film, directed in in 1943 by Fritz Lang. Although the details of the assassination and subsequent repression were not fully known at the time the film was made ((virtually all the inhabitants of the village of Lidice were executed by the Nazis as retaliation), it does provide a close-eyed look at the nature of the personal and political choices people make as life or death decisions: to protect one’s family or one’s belief, to appeal to authorities or trust those opposed, saving someone in the underground at the expense of the lives of others – all are questions honestly posed within the framework of the film’s plot.

The complexity contained within the story reflects the influence of Bertolt Brecht who wrote the story and contributed to the screenplay (his only Hollywood credit during his years of exile in the US). The original screenplay was developed by John Wexley who was later to write one of the first books challenging the US government’s prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Composer Hans Eisler, another exile from Germany, won an academy award for the musical score. Lang was an Austrian who had been a prominent filmmaker during the Weimar Republic (Metropolis perhaps today his most famous) who left Germany after rejecting an offer by Goebbels to head up the film industry after the Nazis reorganized it. Instead, he organized an anti-Nazi film league in California (important as German influence in filmmaking and distribution had, before the war, led to self-censorship by Hollywood studios). The film is also interesting as showing the nature of German oppression in Czechoslovakia – which was a key industrial center – with the goal of exploiting labor and destroying Czech culture in an area they sought to fully “Germanize.”

Walter Brennan – later a character actor in countless Westerns -- plays a Czech university professor who had been a key figure in the nationalist movement that gained the country’s independence after World War I. His daughter’s (Anna Lee) movement from a simple act of opposition to attempted collaboration to determined resistance drives the film. A Communist underground is also depicted – trying to rescue the shooter, and, pointedly, trying to adjust policies as German measures begin to weaken the unity of the Czech people.

Open City (Roma città aperta) – Filmed on location in Rome in 1945, after the city had been liberated but before the end of the war Open City reflects the tension, anger and hope still in the air. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, this was the first of his “neo-realist” films that seek to recreate an atmosphere directly from experience to give authenticity to the story being told. The story is set a year prior, in 1944, when the Italian resistance was in the midst of a bitter last phase struggle against Italian fascists. Mussolini, who had been overthrown, was returned to power by the Nazis, the German army having occupied Rome to ensure his survival.

The film depicts the actions and arrest of a Communist resistance leader, a priest’s solidarity with him (and his own subsequent arrest/execution), the interplay between the two reflecting an attempt at the war’s conclusion to build the kind of popular unity that was lacking at the time of fascism’s rise. That search for unity has its counterpart in daily life and culture reflected by a priest officiating a marriage ceremony with an already pregnant woman (unthinkable in the Catholic hierarchy at the time – and unthinkable at any level in the U.S. in the 1940s) which a Communist militant prefers than having a government – i.e. fascist – official officiate.

Counterposed to that are the German officers and their Italian collaborators – for with the war almost lost there is no more pretense of an ideology, no more attempt to convince, only the decadence of those for whom power is about grabbing what you can today, to hold off a tomorrow for one further day.

The Fate of a Man – Based on a short story by Mikhail Sholokhov, the 1959 film depicts the losses suffered by the war through the story of personal loss. The movie chronicles the journey of a Soviet soldier, captured in battle in 1942, followed by brutal imprisonment, escape, return to battle and then a brief trip home where he learns that his wife and daughter and most towns people he knew were killed by German bombers. The story continues onto 1945 and the end of the war, when he learns that his son was killed in battle on the final day of the war. He returns home and bonds with an orphaned child who he adopts as his own.

The description seems melodramatic, but the telling is matter of fact, reflecting the experience of a country which lost over 20 million people in five years. Unlike Soviet productions in the years immediately after the war, this doesn’t stress huge battle scenes or the election of triumph – rather it is a statement of the horrors of war and of the necessity of human connection. His search is to overcome the loneliness and loss the fascist advance entailed and as such the story and film were extremely popular. German fascism was anti-Slavic, anti-Russian, anti-Communist so the war was a war of survival. The fight therefore was not only on the battlefield but also a fight to retain a sense of humanity. The 1957 Soviet movie – The Cranes are Flying – similarly and movingly focuses on individual loss and connection to survive the cruelty of war.

Sholokhov was one of the most significant Soviet writer during his lifetime. His public positions and activities within the Writers Union were always were in support of the Soviet leadership, while his fiction always reflected nuance and difficulties in everyday life that people faced; portraying the times with a realism that went along with his support of the system. The director, Sergei Bonarchul, later directed a remarkably well-done Soviet TV mini-series of War and Peace, a British film production of Waterloo as well as other films that depicted battle scenes never glossing over the horrors of war.

Lifeboat – Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 movie explored the struggle against fascism via a contest between a heterogeneous group of British and American survivors on a lifeboat after their ship was destroyed by a U-Boat which was destroyed in turn. A German survivor from the U-Boat is also rescued setting up a conflict between a confirmed Nazi whose single-mindedness and ease of deception initially appear to give him greater strength than the other eight who have different perspectives and needs, frequently argue and thus fail to recognize the danger the German poses to them and their safety.

Yet they do – their differences, which also stem from illness, injury that they tend to (unlike the German U-boat officer who sees opportunity in the weakness of others) contributes to their seeming ineffectiveness. But their strength lies in that. The metaphor of democracy vs. fascism, resistance vs. occupation is present but not overdrawn, the strength of the film lies in its characterizations of people under extreme duress striving to survive.

To that end, the entire movie is set on the lifeboat, in black and white, with no background music, all reinforcing the claustrophobic atmosphere. There are women as well as men on board – including Tallulah Bankhead -- several are merchant seamen while others are wealthy passengers, reinforcing the theme of multiple voices in the closed setting. Canada Lee – one of the few African American stage and movie actors given substantive roles at the time – plays a significant role on the lifeboat (though the film can’t escape some stereotypes of the era). A protégé of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, Lee was later blacklisted when he refused to testify against Robeson before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

Coming to Grips With the Past

After the war comes the battle for understanding – what happened, how did people behave. A coming to terms with history is, ultimately about coming to grips with the present. What do we remember, how does that inform choices we are making here and now so that other, better, choices may be possible later.

Judgement at Nuremberg – Based on actual transcripts, this fictionalized account of the Nuremberg Trials recreates in a courtroom setting the dynamic between complicity, silence, resistance. There were several rounds of Nuremberg trials to hold Nazis accountable for war crimes – all part of the same initiatives that led to the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a foundational document of the United Nations. The movie focuses on trials condemning the complicity of judges in corrupting the legal system by their rulings after Hitler assumed power. Directed by Stanley Kramer, the 1961 movie (and, like Ship of Fools, written by Abby Mann) starred Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Montgomery Cliff, and Maximilian Schell at a time when memories of World War II were still alive. Dietrich, a popular actress in Germany before Nazis ruled, rejected their offers to stay and came to the United States (and was later condemned in the post-World War II era by neo-Nazi groups for entertaining U.S. troops during the war). Like all the Nuremberg court cases, two forms of guilt are examined – the systemic guilt of fascism in power, the personal guilt of those who went along and were thus complicit in the system’s horrors.

The film presents, in grim detail, testimony of two cases (based on actual Nazi-era trials) in which judges ruled in accordance with “racial defilement” laws contrary to human decency and contrary to the actual facts (for opportunism was central to the fascist state) – a Jew executed for allegedly having sexual relations with his “Aryan” maid, a peasant (whose father was a Communist) ruled mentally incompetent and sterilized. Intense courtroom scenes reproduce the trauma of judicial replaying of malpractice. Footage of concentration camp victims, shown during the actual trials, is shown in the film.

The defense is given its due as their lawyer argues that the victorious allies all were complicit at various times as acting in concert with Hitler; defendants argue that they were simply following the laws on the state at the time as judges should, or that Germany was a bulwark defending Western civilization and culture against Bolshevism. And in the background, moving to the foreground, is the emerging Cold War, the US/Britian/Soviet alliance coming apart and with that western leniency toward former Nazis. Political acts, moral choice, legal ethics – everything we face and may face are on display.

The Nasty Girl – A 1990 West German film directed by Michael Verhoeven is based on the true story of a high school student (Played by Lena Stolze) who, as a research project, looked at her small Bavarian town’s history and its story of resistance to the Third Reich. What she discovered, instead, was evidence of overwhelming collaboration with the Nazis; a collaboration which had been written out of the town’s past. She continues her studies at university and discovers even deeper layers of complicity including the fact that her town’s elite had almost all joined the Nazis prior to Hitler taking power, that there were several concentration camps in and around the town and that all the local Jews had been expelled and had their property confiscated.

Additionally, the film depicts the increasing hostility in the town directed at her – from personal insults to physical assault to a bombing and death threats. All this puts pressure on her

marriage and personal life. The movie’s story is told both as part of a narrative and with jumps aside to her comments on what she is experiencing and observing – a kind of detachment that keeps the focus on the fact of the hypocrisy within the town (and by implication, more widely in Germany) rather than the narrative about “the nasty girl.” In a supreme irony, the town tries to silence her by honoring her truth-telling, an “honor” she rejects. It is thus not only a story of accepting fascism, but the story of conformity with the established order that is at the heart of the film.

Verhoeven had previously directed The White Rose – a 1982 West German film about Hans and Sophie Scholl (also performed by Stolze) – teenagers who opposed the Nazis and were executed for their resistance. The actions of the Scholls (and their fate) similar to that of the Hempels (depicted in Alone in Berlin), remind us that not everyone chose the path of silence or complicity. On the other hand, distribution of the film was delayed because West German law still recognized the “legality” of the Scholl’s execution – which had to be addressed before the film could be shown.

The Music Box – A 1989 film directed by Costas-Gravas is about a Hungarian (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) living in Chicago accused of war crimes committed during the closing days of World War II. Jessica Lange plays his daughter, a defense lawyer, who wants to believe in her father’s innocence and comes by the end of the film to discover his guilt. What gives the story weight is that almost up until the end, she is able to legally “disprove” evidence against him be it the unreliability of witnesses’ years after the fact, implications that Hungary’s then existing Communist government wanted to frame anti-Communists, the lack of absolute proof. Yet, even as she is winning her case, each piece of evidence increases her own doubts. For the longest time, she resists drawing the obvious conclusions.

The crimes of which he is accused are not trivial – a leader of Hungary’s Arrow Cross fascist organization which supported collaboration with Germany during the war, he is accused of overseeing and participating in murders – committed with great brutality – of Jews, Roma, anti-fascists, the murders extending to children. A trip to Hungary reveals the depths of the crimes, a return brings the long-awaited proof. In consequence, she wants nothing to do with her father, will not allow her son to have anything to do with his grandfather. The personal decision to pursue the truth, however, whatever the familial consequences, is itself a critical component of resistance.

The screenplay was written by Hungarian-American Joe Eszterhas before he discovered that his father too had been in the Arrow Cross and participated in book burnings and anti-Semitic actions. He too broke off all relations with his father thereafter.

Playing for Time – A TV movie made in 1980 based on Fania Fenelon’s memoir, directed by Daniel Mann. A French Jew, active in the resistance during the war, she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where a storm trooper recognized her as a well-known classical pianist. She, along with other classically trained women inmates were brought together to perform for the prison guard officers – the SS officers reveling in the culture, the women trying to maintain a precarious existence and survive.

Fenelon worked with Arthur Miller to bring the story to the screen. The film focuses on the moral guilt she felt, surviving by performing while other prisoners were being gassed or worked to death – survival which could feel like collaboration. Conflict and tension exists to amongst the orchestra members over who is and who is not permitted to be among the “performers” – a decision which is tantamount to life or death. The sense of guilt was in no way alleviated by the fact that they were themselves mistreated by the Nazis and their survival was never guaranteed. The camp was run by Josef Mengele – infamous for his brutal “medical experimentation” on women prisoners.

Vanessa Redgrave – a vocal opponent of Zionism and supporter of Palestinian rights – played Fenelon (a controversial decision when made, and an organized attempt was made to replace her. The other cast members as well as Miller all rallied to Redgrave’s defense). Jane Alexander played an imprisoned conductor. Progressive, multi-lingual folk singer Martha Schlamme – a Viennese born Orthodox Jew who managed to get out of Austria just before it was annexed by Germany – played as a small role in the film Apart from giving an unflinching look at their circumstances, it is a rare example of a film the about fascism with the focus on women.

Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) – In 1997, Italian comedic actor Roberto Benigni directed and starred in a film about a Jewish waiter deported along with his son to Auschwitz in 1944. He strives to keep the boy alive by way of fantasy, pretending that imprisonment is a puzzle, a game the child must solve. The storytelling needed to help his son survive the camp, in its own way, speaks to the horrors if one puts oneself in the impossible shoes Benigini’s character adopts. So too it speaks in its own way to the nature of popular resistance. Moreover, the film’s beginning – the story of Benigni’s improbable love with a schoolteacher, his “robin hood” escapade taking her (Dora played by Niccoletta Braschi) away from an unloved fiancé, then their life together running a bookstore esn tablishes its theme – the beauty of life lies in human connection and love, not in striving not for wealth or power. The Benigni character is working-class as were most Jews in life, though not in films and especially not in films depicting Holocaust victims. Dora (she’s not Jewish) allows herself to be on the transport to Auschwitz as well and survives. Improbable too yet consistent with the film’s contrast between gentleness that belies strength and the blindness of oppressive power.

Some people were critical of the film insofar as the very nature of the plot presented a scenario incompatible with the grimness, the harshness of Auschwitz. Such, of course, is true but that hardly distinguishes it from other films or works of art that of necessity pick and choose aspects of the reality depicted. Moreover, films that revel in horror are neither enlightening nor necessarily truthful either. What gives this film meaning is the importance of imagination, of art in any form in times of suffering, for that is what gives individuals the ability to survive, to resist. Anyone who thinks that a correct political program in that circumstance would be sufficient to overcome the beast of unhindered violent repression fails to grasp the nature of fascism and resistance.

As to the truth of the film – Bruno Apitz in his book Naked Among Wolves novelizes a true story of prisoners at Buchenwald keeping a child alive and thereby keeping up their morale and their resistance which takes on a political character.

Jacob the Liar (Jakob der Lügner)– The GDR’s only academy award nomination was for this 1975 film is the story of a Polish Jew trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto who overhears a radio report that Soviet troops are advancing and Warsaw (and thus the Ghetto) might soon be liberated. The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Jurek Becker. Conditions in the ghetto were overcrowded, tightly constricted, transports out to death camps a regular feature. Hopelessness leading to suicides or desperate attempts to steal food that could lead to death were commonplace. When he tells the friend about German losses on the battlefield, hope is revived. However, to sustain that hope, he is forced to tell ever more lies thus putting himself at risk as well as the fear of what might happen if the illusions he has been telling are punctured. This includes a child whom he is trying to protect, and whose trust in him – and thus in his stories -- is absolute.

To continue he pretends he has a radio – punishable by death. Words spread, the Nazis hear about the nonexistent radio and search the Ghetto for it, adding a new risk for all trapped there. Jakob tells a friend that – apart from the first tale – all his stories are made up, and he decides to confess all. But his friend counsels him that his lies enable people to see beyond the moment and those encourages resistance in the form of personal survival – and reinforces attempts at survival that becomes communal. Yet, all the while, the number of transports to the extermination camps continue, eventually Jacob himself amongst those on the train.

A 1999 remake with Robin Williams sticks to the outlines of the story and is worth seeing in its own right, though it doesn’t quite depict the bleakness of the Ghetto to the extent of the East German film. As a side note – Armin Mueller-Stahl appeared in both the East German and U.S. versions.

Fascism: Other Times, Other Places

We focus on fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1930s-40s because that is the main reference point for fascists in our own country. But fascism has existed at other times, in other places and these too should be noted. None of these look the same, definitions do vary and while definitions are important to understanding what we experience and developing a political strategy, definitions can distort when used to undermine people’s understanding of the reality they are experiencing. For me, fascism means the protection of the power of capital and landowners through unrelieved suppression of democratic rights, civil liberties and free expression. Another criteria is that those struggling for freedom came to define their struggle as anti-fascist. Using that guideline, below are just a very few of the many possible films that serve to remind that the dangers facing the world now are part of a continuum that someday needs to be overcome at its roots.

Europe after the war: Following a military coup in Greece in 1967, it joined Spain and Portugal – all NATO members, all part of the “free world – ruled by fascist dictatorships.

Z – A 1969 film directed by Costa-Gravas was based on the 1963 assassination of an independent left-wing member or the Greek parliament, Giorgios Lambrakis (played by Yves Montand as the “Deputy”), focusing on the investigation of military and police officials who orchestrated his murder. The film proceeds in documentary style, showing the use of right-wing, impoverished vigilantes by the police to kill the “Deputy” and to make it look like an accident – at the site of a public peace rally attacked by vigilantes. A scrupulous prosecutor, an honest journalist, working-class witnesses willing to put their lives on the line come forward, revealing the conspiracy behind his death, implicating high-level military and police officers. And then the response: a military coup and fascist repression – mirroring the fate of Greece which fell under the heel of oppression from 1967 – 1974.

The movie begins the same way the Vassillis Vassilikos novel upon which it is based: with a high level military officer (the “General”) giving a talk to officers on germs: meaning the “disease” of communism, reflecting the extreme anti-Communism of the Greek establishment – reflecting divisions that broke out in a civil war after liberation from the Nazis and served as the first step of Cold War militarism by Britain and the U.S. Lambrakis’ assassination polarized an already polarized society, the massive popular anger at his death created the possibility of a center-left government which the coup was meant to forestall. The film ends with a list of the cultural expressions the military banned ranging from ancient Greek tragedy to modern pop music and including the word “Z” which means “He Lives.”

Costa-Gravas, was born in Greece but left to live in France after his father was arrested in 1946 as a Communist for his participation in the Greek resistance during and after the war and as part of the left during the civil war. The screenplay was written by Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard exiled in France after the defeat of the Spanish Republic. He later took part in the French resistance was captured and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Irene Pappas, who plays the “Deputy’s Wife” was exiled by the regime for her political activism and organized a cultural boycott of Greece. Mikis Theodorakis, who wrote the music for the film, had been arrested during the Greek Civil War as a member of the Communist-led partisans, was placed under house arrest immediately after the coup and then subsequently exiled. The film was co-produced by Algerian film director, Ahmed Rachedi.

South America – mid-1970s- 80s: Chile’s Popular Front government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup in 1973, Uruguay suffered a coup in 1974, Argentina in 1976, which together with the Brazilian and Argentinian military dictatorships made the entire Southern Cone of Latin America a field of repression – all linked to the imposition of neo-liberalism, all aided and abetted by the U.S. government, all designed to forestall any process of radicalism and social justice throughout Latin America. A “worthy” successor to the fascism which plagued Europe in the 1930s.

Burning Patience (Ardiente paciente) – The period of Popular Unity in Chile from 1970-73 was – like the Popular Unity government in Spain – rooted in working people finding a moment to express themselves in the context of a process seeking to transform economic and political structures of the country. From the first moment, the process was contested by all means possible and in Chile that meant a fascist coup in 1973. Burning patience, a 1985 film directed by Antonio Skarmeta (who also wrote the screenplay and the novel of that name) captures the hope and the pain in that process in the story of a postman in a small village where Pablo Neruda was living. The postman is in love, unable to find words to express himself, he asks Neruda – whose poetry about love, about beauty in nature, was as expressive as was his political poetry, helps him find his way – teaching him about metaphors, about the importance of naming.

All this in the background of the impending coup – the economic sabotage, the struggles to get supplies, yet the hopes which carry people forward. Those hopes, rooted in the simple things in life, built on naming what you see, understanding relations between what you know – that is poetry, that is what happens when two people fall in love, that is the basis for the striving for a better world. And that last is what fascism seeks to destroy.the coup which takes place at the end of the film, with Neruda dying then dead, with Mario (the postman) married to Beatriz being taken away everything gone – but not gone.

Neruda had been the Communist Party’s candidate for president in 1970, he withdrew in facor of the Socialist Party’s Allende. During the years of Popular Unity he served as ambassador to France, won the Nobel Prize, and remained a steadfast supporter of the new government. In 1994 an Italian version of the film – Il Postino was made – set in Italy in the 1950s when the Chilean Communist Party was outlawed and when workers struggles in Italy were being bitterly fought. Beyond that the plot follows the same outlines – and the relationship between words, poems, relationships between people, within society remains. Skarmeta had been forced into exile (in West Germany) after the coup, only returning to his homeland more than a decade later. Netflix remade Burning Patience in 2022 – though, from reviews, its focus on the love story seems to completely overshadow the politics – whereas in the original film and novel they are mixed as inextricably as is any of our personal life’s with the surrounding world at times of momentous change.

Argentina, 1985 –This 2022 film, directed by Santiago Mitre, recounts the trial of military junta leaders for the extra-legal murders and tortures that took place during the “dirty war,” in Argentina, in which tens of thousands were murdered by government decree. The film is based on an actual trial in which prosecutors called witnesses who testified to the outrages that took place and placed responsibility for them going up to the top of the chain of command.

The fascist government collapsed in 1983, the movie depicts the trials that took place two years later, uncovering secret prisons and torture sites around the country.

The film itself – based on actual prosecutions that took place after the Junta’s collapse -- shows the process by which people kept their eyes closed to what was clearly going on all around them, the way in which people learn to accept, the way in which the process of asking questions leads to more questions and that, in and of itself, to questioning. The courtroom testimonies also show the nature of unchecked repression and how once caught in its grip, there is no way out. And with that unchecked power as well comes sexual predadation – the abuse of women by prison guards a necessary complement to the human degradation entailed in the system. The contrast between the military’s leaders holding themselves up as guardians of the state, of law and order, of a superior morality are exposed in light of the lawless depradations inherent in the repressive system they installed.

The key in this film is that process, the rigid turning away from the truth, the opening up the truth and the ways differing individuals come to understand the nature of the society and system in which they lived. Argentina, far more quickly than other countries in Latin America suffering under the yoke of military fascism in the 1970s-80s, investigated and prosecuted – an outcome not unrelated to the strength of “Mothers of the Disappeared” – mothers and grandmothers whose children, arrested and murdered but not “officially,” so no bodies recovered – let alone the babies and small childred on the arrested “adopted” by military families and denied knowledge of who their actual parents were. Their weekly rallies began in 1977 at the height of the dictatorship. Although the film focuses on the prosecutor and his legal team, their role is noted. Fascism’s demise requires an accounting for without that, the human cost softens in memory.

Note 3: Fascism is, on one level, an outgrowth of colonialism – and in its later stages, colonial rule and fascism were virtually indistinguishable – as was evident in French treatment of Algerians, British of Kenyans, Portugal’s of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau. The clearest example of that process was South Africa under apartheid – apartheid’s foes not hesitating to refer to the system as fascist.

Cry, The Beloved Country – A 1951 movie based on a novel written by Alan Paton in 1948 is a look at South Africa as apartheid was being imposed. The story focuses on a rural black minister (played by Canada Lee in his last film appearance) searching in the city for his sister – who has become a prostitute and his son – about to be executed for murder. Guiding him through urban pathways is a local minister (played by Sydney Poitier in one of his early roles). Their journey intersects with a racist white farmer, whose son – an anti-racist activist – was murdered by Lee’s son in a street crime. Though they lived in the same small district, the minister and farmer had never met prior to their coming to the city because of the realities of South Africa’s racial policies. They each learn and change from their experience but the hardships of South Africa’s racial policies are seen as the ultimate crime that imprisons all.

Paton was a political liberal, whose Christianity defined his politics, and he remained so throughout his life, even after the struggle intensified in the 1970s. Although South Africa under British rule was deeply racist and segregated, the legal imposition of apartheid after 1948 (a result of Afrikaners dominating the whites only elections that year) formalized a separate legal code for black and white meant that even moderate reforms became impossible – radicalizing opposition, intensifying repression. The movie was filmed in South Africa – and so Director Zoltan Korda had to tell immigration authorities that Lee and Poitier were his indentured servants.

The screenplay was uncredited as it was written by blacklisted John Howard Lawson, uncredited due to the blacklist. It was his next to last film, he remained blacklisted from Holywood the rest of his life. There was a subsequent remake of the film in 1995, starring James Earl Jones, one of the first made post-apartheid films (but the immediacy and passion in the 1951 version couldn’t be reproduced).

A Dry White Season – South Africa’s apartheid as its own form of fascism is best seen in this 1989 film. The movie is set in Soweto in 1976 when a rebellion by high school students renewed mass protest and set the stage for the continuous, escalating popular struggles that would culminate in the system’s defeat nearly 20 years later. The movie touches on how living a life of decency with eyes closed in a system where racial suppression is the absolute law becomes an impossibility. The plot centers on an escalating series of transformative events when a white school teacher’s gardener ‘s son and then the gardener himself are brutalized and killed by a system that allows for no recourse for blacks. The school teacher (Donald Sutherland) is transformed as realizes that the system he believed was based on lies. The ramifications for his family, his life are also damning when he discovers that those he loves resent him, hate him, for disrupting their secure life.

Euzhan Palcy, a French filmmaker originally from Martinique, was a pioneering black woman in the industry. Moreover, the film depicted scenes of life in Soweto (a center of black poverty and a seedbed of rebellion) and did not shy away from depicted the brutality of South African policy. It featured several South African actors (then in exile) who are shown as actors in the struggle not just recipients of outside support. Zakes Mokae (the school teacher’s driver) and Winston Ntshona (the gardener’s son) had acted in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid theatre. Ntshona was arrested by South African police and spent a year in solitary confinement.

Sutherland, Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando (who came out of retirement to participate) all worked for far less than their usual pay to ensure the project made it to the screen. The film itself was based on a novel by Andre Brink – one of the very few Afrikaner (Descendants of Dutch-speaking Boers) writers supportive of the anti-apartheid movement.

Facing an Unknown Future

The example of South Africa might be the most relevant for our time. Certainly the system with its ordinary legal and parliamentary structures for a part of the population whereas other populations lack representation are subject to different laws and rules, and lack rights when those rules are suspended or non-existent has many parallels with Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. We can also see its relevance to the United States which has two significant populations that lack rights and legal protections afforded to others: undocumented immigrants, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals – that is to say, millions of people. Legal discrimination, along with systemic discrimination leads to structural inequalities within the United States that exist within inequality that cuts like a knife between a small stratum on top (like those French 200 families) and everyone else. Precarity, insecurity, perpetual war, a moral vacuum in political leadership and a deep abiding alienation that runs through society (the world of those who live in Kuhle Wampe) – there too we see precursors of fascism in times gone by. Capitalism without restraint, capitalism fearful of egalitarian democracy, fearful of working people acting in concert that could impose restraint, that could call in the entire system into question can seize upon the fears generated in a society of disequilibrium to further reduce popular rights won in the past.

Looking back, however, doesn’t tell us what will be – the current wave of reaction will pose different challenges than what went before. Viewing these films, though, ought to remind us that what seems permanent – like the Nazi’s thousand-year Reich – fascist dictatorships can collapse like a house of cards. The reason: force alone can never keep any political or economic system in place indefinitely. The reason: people are capable of changing. While silence, acquiescence or collaboration may entice far too many, tides turn, experience and understanding create new awareness, action brings about new possibilities. As all these films, in their distinctive ways, affirm.

Perhaps in today’s world – in which dystopian nightmares seem more realistic than utopian dreams of the past -- fantasy becomes a way of addressing the challenges of overcoming fascism’s irrationality and violence than the more realistic movies noted above. Guillermo del Toro – Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Pinnochio (2022) -- fantasy’s set in Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy perhaps speak more fully to today’s world than the more realistic films noted above. The meaning is everywhere the same: how to stand up for oneself and others when the outlook is bleakest, when one feels most alone.

This is the questions these movies pose – the answer well expressed toward the end of The Seventh Cross. One of the many people, many unknown to each other, helping the concentration camp escapee explains how each small action creates something bigger. He tells how he noticed that ants had gotten into a sugar bowl at the delicatessen where he works and had moved all the sugar, each one taking one grain, each simply doing their part and eventually, the bowl is empty. And then concludes: they can’t kill all the ants.

Each of these films provide pieces of a larger picture that includes all of us, each serves to underscore the simple fact -- what we do matters.

Power and Imagination

(2002)

When we forget, what we forget loses its present; absent a remembered presence it also loses its future.  But very little is ever completely forgotten and lost, bits and pieces continue to exist in our understandings, behaviors, fears, longings; it is these fragments which can be recaptured by the imagination, imagination defined as recasting the old into something new and different, something which, even if partly thought of, has never been perceived.  But what is imagined can become sterile, can drift into illusion, unless that reality is brought into being so it can be experienced, experience that may transform the thought but still keep faith with the desire behind the original idea.  For such a transformation to happen, however, the physical, material, spiritual capability must exist to make the dream real along with the effort to bring the requisite changes into effect.  Which last just so happens to be one of the definitions of power.

Therefore power need be given to the imagination if the dreams of what could be are ever to become what is; it is this to which the slogan, “all power to the imagination,” so identified with movements of 1968, speaks.  It is a concept that ought to be recaptured from the margins of triviality in which it has been imprisoned in order to better challenge the resigned realism that lies within the alternative notion that what is always will be, the commonplace “truisms” that we live in a world bred of inequality, that no matter how much wealth abounds, some, many, will be born in hunger to lives of poverty; a world similarly bred in violence in which war is inevitable, peace at best an intermittent luxury.  It is but a short step from these assertions of human society’s incapacities to the often-present if unstated conviction that genuine democracy—defined by popular participation in the direction and administration of government, of the economy—is a pipe dream and a recipe for inefficiency, totalitarianism, or both.

Assumptions by which we tell ourselves to settle for what is and give up dreaming, cousin to the belief that love is a childhood fairytale not to be taken seriously if one wants to avoid inevitable disappointment, they serve only to make the intolerable, tolerable.  Excuses that close off what could be beautiful in life by running away to the comfort of familiar prisons paradoxically serve as shields to block the sight of our world’s tragedies.  Floating through time willfully ignoring the danger of drowning in the ever-rising sea of tears and blood -- our own as well as that of others -- is to give up or give in because it becomes easier, safer to accept the unpleasant rather than to challenge and change, to risk the price that might have to be paid when suppressed dreams are allowed to live.  Restricting the imagination to a tiny corner of nearly forgotten hopes due to the illusion of a pessimistic realism restricts us in both intimate and social relationships, making our imagination subject to the limits imposed by existing power.

Most of us do, most of the time, nonetheless, get by, living life as fully as possible within those allowed limits, but can’t eliminate a lingering dissatisfaction, the quiet desperation Thoreau once noted, passively waiting for the opportunity to allow their hopes to shed the skin of resignation, spread wings and fly.  But when social pessimism becomes personal and that transformation ceases to exist even in the imagination, then hope may become despair; emotions denied expression turned within, accommodation to inequity swallowed, can only be taken so far before exploding upon itself or others.

Certainly this is an aspect of what lay behind the motivations of the intolerant cruelty in the acts of those who attacked New York City and Washington, DC on September 11 -- unable or unwilling to see the humanity of those killed for reasons of misplaced symbolism, those actions can also be seen as a triumph of the denial of imagination, bespeaking an inability to conceive a life of freedom in contrast to the oppression in which our post-Cold War “New World Order” locks the vast majority.  Unable to envision a world of social justice and equality, the only answer to the veiled authoritarianism of neo-liberal economics and one-sided armed might exercised from afar becomes to those blinded by their hatreds the adoption of a visible authoritarianism that is no alternative at all—accommodating the lack of democratic and personal rights at the heart of our world’s despair by denying them even more blatantly.  All that results: an intensification of what is rather than the creation of anything new.  Powerless despite its violent explosions, nothing is thereby done to bind bleeding wounds or dry tearful eyes; such destructiveness only helps serve those who seek to legitimate the use of greater force to hold meaningful change at bay.

The greater use of force has been much in evidence, the wanton attack on the World Trade Center is, after all, but a small-scale replica of our government’s armed might, which destroys buildings and kills people on a much grander scale.  Current Bush administration policy also demonstrates a similar, if greater, lack of imagination, unwilling to concede any way of living or other principle of organizing society or international relations other than those which currently prevail and lock into place divisions of rulers and ruled, haves and have-nots, victors and vanquished.  The bombs our government has ordered dropped since September 11 are similar as well with the attacks on that day in their essential powerlessness—all the weapons in the world can’t disguise the failure of this any more than any of our other recent wars, to solve anything at all. 

To avoid dealing with the hopelessness implied by the nature of its current policies, the administration hides a philosophy of unfeeling thoughtlessness in a denial of individuality; the faceless and nameless of Afghanistan or Iraq, whether seen as objects to be killed or to be given charity, are paralleled by the rapid shift in treating the lives lost on September 11 away from the personal sorrow felt to empty national symbol (or marketing opportunity).  Contesting this reduction of life as lived to slogans means challenging the aforementioned realism of what is by restoring the possibilities upon which dreams live, the realism of what can be imagined and brought into being.

Doing this it may be helpful to look at and try to recapture some of those fragments of the past, not as myth the way 12^th century Islam or 19^th century rural America are misappropriated with flags of religion and nationalism draped over the complexity of the conflicts that defined those eras, but rather to look to see how people have at other times sought to overcome the limitations that social structures appeared to make permanent.  Examining previous attempts to bring into being alternative ways in which we might live can help us today picture how we might wage such a struggle for tomorrow.

A beginning to that end may be taken by looking at a time shortly before September 11, but not that date in 2001 but rather in 1973.  Many have noted the sad coincidence between last year’s terror and the terror of not-so-long-ago which marked the US-backed military coup in Chile.  If, however, all we remember about those who died is the manner of their deaths and not the content of the lives they led, we give into the destructiveness of violence -- if all we remember about the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende is the brutality used to overthrow it, we concede too much to socialism’s opponents.  The question we ought to ask is what was overthrown?

To answer simply, it represented an attempt to overcome injustice and poverty by a movement dedicated to expanding democracy in all aspects of life, building a socialism based on constitutional means relying on the participation and solidarity of Chile’s working people (and of people abroad).  But a simple answer is not sufficient, fraught with the difficulty of reducing the years 1970 to 1973 to a single image, for to draw from that experience one lesson is to deny the reality of what was being built.  Especially insofar as Popular Unity, the Chilean left in and out of government, spoke with a multiplicity of voices, understanding the scope, pace, and means of bringing about proposed changes in different terms.  But then again, that is essential to what should be recalled, for in their diversity those supporting Allende were true to the goal of democratizing society and the economy, relying not on one leader, one organization, one “line,” but many.  In consequence the impact of individual involvement in social activity became all the more important, public debate, discussion, political engagement, vital in practice, not just rhetoric.

Such involvement depended on people feeling free to speak their minds, act on their convictions, and have what they do make a difference in practice (this last all too lacking in our society), attributes of democracy that rely on civil liberties being respected.  This Allende’s government did, promoting openness, refusing to coerce dissident voices within Popular Unity nor to suppress the speech, press, assembly, of opponents seeking his ouster.  Refusing to be drawn into a policy of general repression, he also refused to draw a line to repress some and not others -- a line easy to draw in the abstract, impossible to maintain in practice, a process which once begun is hard to undo, a process which stifles creativity and personal engagement, reducing activism into ever narrower tests of loyalty.

Many anguished by the coup, recalling the tortured bodies alongside the crushed dreams, understandably wonder if the unwillingness to repress those who used public liberties to prepare a climate for the destruction of all liberty was a weakness, a factor in Popular Unity’s fall.  Impossible to know for certain, though it does seem unlikely that such a path would have prevented the coup.  More relevantly, it clearly would have been an admission that Allende’s foes were right, that fundamental change cannot be brought into being democratically, that social transformation which empowers those who have been without cannot also be a means to protect and extend individual rights.  It would have been then—and would remain now—a sign of helplessness, a giving up of the possibility of giving power to the imagination, of recasting the old as something new, different, free.

The attempt to create a democratic, peaceful path to socialism in Chile was an attempt to give power to the imagination, to picture a world in which human values preceded those of property, and then taking steps to achieve it by building the solidarity and the individual participation of all members of society that pre-figured as means the ends sought.  The Popular Unity government and the movement which gave birth to and sustained it never abandoned extra-parliamentary forms of mass activism, yet also never wavered from a commitment to work within existing structures—a combination which meant that commitment didn’t serve as an excuse to cease pressing for fundamental change and structural transformation.  Devolving power to those long excluded is to make democracy real in daily life, and the belief that people can shape public institutions was at the core of what was fought for, to reassert popular sovereignty over the country’s natural resources on behalf of the goals of justice and equity.

The path taken was one that we should recall today because it stands in contrast to the current political void, which leads to the all-too-evident hopelessness and the militarization of politics resulting when privatization makes politics appear irrelevant to the quality of life.  By fighting for change through participatory democratic means, the movement in Chile was forced to become always more expansive, more outward-looking, reaching out to people throughout the world.  And by encouraging autonomous local participation in the midst of social and cultural upheavals that accompanied the challenge to inequality in society at large, it also allowed people to become more inward-looking, opened up the question of personal relationships, of how each chooses to live.  All this in practice was more successful than our memory generally allows, Allende’s support deepened and grew despite the violence, dislocations, disruptions, caused by those inside and outside Chile who sought to defeat him and so in the end the plotters knew that he could never be defeated by votes or by an appeal to the public but only by what came: the tanks, guns, prison, exile, death of people, of dreams.

History can be read as a path of defeat for the hopes of the world’s poor, but such a reading is as one-sided as views picturing the path of humanity proceeding in a straight line of unimpeded progress.  Popular Unity in Chile’s accomplishments were as real as its subsequent defeat, what its meaning over time becomes depends on what is made of its legacy.  The fact of its short-lived success should be testament to the notion that longer more sustaining success on that road can be built in the future.  And this can be, although not by blind copying, nor by romanticizing what was.  The Chilean people, the activists in the movement, were real people with all the usual faults found everywhere, experiencing the normal tension in life with the added tension that accompanied that time of conflict and struggle.  The failures, divisions, mistakes, and illusions that they suffered should also be remembered. 

That legacy is what is contested today.  The coup was aimed at destroying the material gains the Chilean people had made over the three years of Allende’s tenure in office, the decades of painfully won gains which preceded it, and the dreams of the future which had inspired such efforts -- to wipe out at one blow past, present, and future.  Though far more subtly done, there is a way in which the years of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did the same ushering in our current climate where what cannot be created is all too visible and attempts at democratic change too easily accepting of self-abnegating compromise, leaving current inequalities untouched, trying too little, accomplishing less.

Witnessing this, many may give up in withdrawal to private life, others, like alchemists of old, seeking an elusive short cut to freedom that is all but guaranteed to fail.  Lacking a voice which works for freedom through a struggle of solidarity and engagement, voices rise that can speak and act only through the anger of a few, becoming culpable in maintaining the system as is for the repression that follows in the wake of selfish violence cuts a wide swath, hitting most heavily on working people organizing and students questioning.

Peace, justice, work that is meaningful, leisure that is restful, a voice that is heard in deciding what happens close to home and far away, all goals we can imagine, but goals too many despair of ever finding.  Our current president who treats the earth’s environment as cavalierly as he treats foreign lives, domestic liberties, or, for that matter, election results, is the embodiment of the result of such despair and represents what needs to be challenged if we are to find a way free out of our world’s current sorrows.

As in the Chile of 1970, this will mean, above all else, the active involvement of people in building their own alternative, in patient organizing on little issues, the immediate problems that fill the life of each of us, without ever allowing such concerns to become separated from the more fundamental challenge to how our society is structured, from how our deeper needs and aspirations can be met.  In this there is only one means, a solidarity that extends from my neighbor with whom I may bicker to those across the sea whom I may never see.  Therein lies the popular power able to withstand the custom, the divisions, the pressures, and the violence upon which the power of privilege and property rely.  Uniting means and ends, we can give power to our imagination and bring back to life all our visions of how we might act to bring us closer to what should be, what can be.

Remembrances

(2023)

Prison thrives on creating a sense of powerlessness amongst those in the system’s grasp, cutting people off from experience outside a narrowly defined routine, compressing the physical space inhabited. I wrote the above while still at the Allenwood Federal prison (a “medium high” facility for those who don’t mind being categorized like laundry detergent or boxes of cereal). 

I was in the prison library when a fellow prisoner (and fellow New Yorker) walked over and told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.  My first thought was that it was an accident – I recalled my mother having told me of a plane that crashed into the Empire State building in the late 1930s; as the account became more gruesome, I thought the stories I was hearing were exaggerated, not an uncommon feature of prison life.  I was soon disabused of both ideas; the TV’s were on and we all watched in grim horror as the buildings went down, watched as people leapt from the flames into the abyss.

September 11, 2001, as it turned out, was one of the exceedingly rare days in which the impact of outside events temporarily broke down some of the normal barriers between guard and inmate.  Allenwood is in western Pennsylvania, many of us imprisoned there were from New York or Washington DC, many of the guards were from Central Pennsylvania near where the third plane went down.  There was confusion all around us; uncertainty as to what was happening, what would happen next, the “normal” uncertainty of a caged life briefly entering into an unknown dimension.  For those of us locked up, it was a reminder of our distance from home and loved ones – we weren’t present at a moment when we should have been present, the difficulties reaching out to people compounded by our immobility.  Although the World Trade Center was a symbol of capital, the Pentagon of military power, the reality is that corporate heads and military administrators rely on labor – many poor and working people, including family members and friends of Allenwood “residents”, worked in or around those buildings.  And some of the guards were in a similar position.  Whether momentary empathy, or simply distraction, for a day different rules applied with TV and phone time extended more than usual.

Of course, such didn’t last long – over the following days, all Pakistanis, anyone who in their free life was known to have been in or in contact with anyone from Pakistan, anyone who had been involved with or connected to someone in a bombing, were sent to isolation, held for some weeks, and interrogated by the FBI.  The absurdity of such blind sweeps tells a lot about the blindness of excessive power – on the face of it, no one caught in that round up (and those which simultaneously took place in federal prisons across the country) was even remotely connected with what took place of September 11.  Never having been involved with a bombing nor with Pakistan, I was spared that indignity.  A few months later, after being transferred to Petersburg, Virginia (now in a “low” security prison), my payment came due: my letters were held for a week, sometimes more -- until they piled up to some number – then were  delivered to me in a bundle.  My outgoing mail went out normally, so it took a minute for us to figure out what was going on.  In true prison style, there was no announcement, and neither I nor anyone in my family was notified.  This went on for several months until the practice was stopped – also without notice or explanation.  An absurdity that we later discovered was due to some order by then Attorney General John Ashcroft directed at people held on national security charges though the exact parameters of who and how many were impacted by the policy remains a mystery.   A painful absurdity, I’ll add, that hurt not just me, but loved ones on the outside as it disrupted our means of staying in touch with each other’s lives -- clearly an intended purpose.   Trivial harassment? Perhaps –but nothing seems or feels trivial to those inside. 

For those abroad, there was nothing trivial about the U.S. government response.  Power was exercised in the cruel, terror-laden invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, utterly horrific treatment was meted out by U.S. soldiers under CIA direction to people held in captivity at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and sites our imperial government maintains in all too many other countries that allegedly respect civil liberties and democratic processes.   A common thread ran through this; treating people as objects, dividing the world into friends and enemies, enemies all the more magnified, the weaker they become.  Maha Hilal, a cofounder of Justice for Muslims Collective, the child of immigrants, 18 and living in New York City when the Towers collapsed, recalls in her Innocent Until Proven Muslim, that she had a sense at the time that if the perpetrators were Muslim, her life and the life of her community would soon change for the worse.  Those fears proved justified as repressive legislation and war abroad formed our government’s response marking an ideology of collective responsibility that flows from the deep wells of an imperial mindset that pretends David was the terrorist for using that slingshot, pretends that Goliath should be pitied, that Goliath’s “family” should have been allowed to wreak vengeance without mercy.  It flows from the culture of American exceptionalism that makes the unacceptable not only acceptable, but a positive good.  Examining Islamophobia, the “War on Terror,” in the aftermath of 9/11, she writes,

            “Any and all harm to Muslims … is justified on the basis of the claimed superiority of America’s moral position, which rests largely on the characterization of Muslims as the faceless, menacing enemy confronting all that is good in the world.  Underlying this entire circular structure is one fundamental fact about the maintenance of state power: to retain legitimacy, and therefore the consent of the governed, the government needs to create a monopoly on what is considered ‘acceptable’ violence.  To do this it leverages its inherent position of discursive power to shape narrative so as to gain a monopoly on the underlying script about morality and ethics.”

And that discursive power has consequences felt by living, breathing, feeling human beings whose lives those in power, lacking the ability to imagine a reality other than what exists, neither can, nor desires to picture:

            “Muslims and Muslim Americans have been dehumanized in the government’s story, reduced to the role of shadowy villain.  A direct real-world result of this is that the post-9/11 legal and policy landscape has been characterized by the constant scapegoating, demonization, and criminalization of Muslims and Muslim Americans.  Even the most egregious abuses on the part of the state have been presented by both the state and its allies as justified.”

This flowed from those accused to their family members.  In Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, Victoria Brittain documents the humanity of those locked up, imprisoned, tortured, without any reference to guilt or innocence, those two words losing meaning when the guilt or innocence of those who gave the order for indefinite detention, waterboarding all the tools of existing power remain unnamed, uncharged, or promoted to ever higher office.  She quotes a public letter written by several detainees arrested in Britain in 2001:

            “Why did no one ever speak to us?  Why were we never asked a single question before being locked up as terrorists?  We have never had a trial.  We were found guilty without one.  We are imprisoned indefinitely and probably forever.  We have no idea why.”

Women who were accused of nothing, had to try and hold their families together, maintain contact and relations with their imprisoned husbands or sons, navigate a byzantine legal system designed to confuse, play a public role and engage with lawyers, the press, and authorities, while seeking to maintain a sense of identity amidst conflicting pressures of religion, secularization, national politics, which themselves were ever evolving and internally complex and differentiated.  And all the while living in a “shadow world” of not knowing.  Brittain quotes from the daughter of a detainee held at the Guantanamo Bay prison touches on the lived reality of repression:

“It’s not like a death, you don’t grieve, and then finish, because this is not in the past, in fact it’s not even in the back of my mind – it is always there … this is chronic, after nine years, and it is not going to end.”

The ideological and cultural weight of anti-Muslim and anti-Arabic sentiment that allowed (and still allows) indefinite detention to be largely unquestioned in the public sphere, gives the lie to the nominally rational and democratic civilization US and British military and police were allegedly protecting.  Or rather, what they are protecting are given sets of relationships that define the proverbial “West,” relationships that have nothing to do with geography, everything to do with the totalizing ideology of capitalist society as it has evolved.

Any attempt to upset that order, therefore, becomes “disorder” and so is to be crushed – crushed here, crushed abroad.  Perhaps all the more so when those at the bottom play by the rules of the system, win, create change therefore all the more feared and hated.  As happened in Chile where the exercise of democratic rights was demonized once use of those rights was put to re-ordering power relations in society.  At that point, pretense of public rights vanishes as tanks roll in, torture because the norm, the “rightful” order is returned.

September 11, 1973, I was in the student union at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee talking with friends when we heard the news about the coup in Chile. There had been threats of violence, of a coup, ever since Salvador Allende had been elected president.  Hope that this latest attempt to thwart the will of the people would be quickly put down, hope that the strength of Popular Unity’s million supporters would turn the tide on military reaction held sway ever so briefly, but the grim reality soon sank in.  Allende dead, Victor Jara dead, Pablo Neruda dead, countless other men and women arrested, tortured, “disappeared,” as well -- nameless to us, named and known to their loved ones, friends, comrades, neighbors.  And it was clear that this would not end swiftly, easily, painlessly, as thoughts of the defeat of the Spanish Republic came to my mind as I’m certain it was in the thoughts of so many others.

Thus this too was a day that lives in my memory too.  I had followed closely the emergence of Popular Unity and Allende’s election, had attended forums and meetings in New York City and Milwaukee talking about the process of transformation then taking place.  I heard Communist Party members and New Left radicals return from trips to Chile reporting on what was taking place; attended a Cuba-Chile-Puerto Rico solidarity exhibit and program held at the 1199 hospital workers union building in New York tying together struggles for socialism and independence in each.  It was inspiring and it seemed to stand for the hopes many of us had that the radical movements of the late 1960s could become transformative and bring about the better world we pictured on the horizon.  That was not to be.  In a time of so many tragedies this stood out because it was so clearly designed to extinguish possibility, to lead people away from collective action, to push people, to push us, back into the container of limited dreams of narrowed hopes.

Either on September 11 or the next day there was a rally was held at the federal building in downtown Milwaukee – for no one amongst us had any doubt that the overthrow of Allende, and the brutality of repression that followed, was instigated and celebrated by our government, our military establishment.  Former Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler spoke, as did others, all of us trying to process the news as it was coming out.  Solidarity rallies, concerts, petitions, confrontations, in the months and years thereafter, followed.  So too, many of us tried to learn what happened, what could have been done differently, what could we do.  It is a question that itself is still open as we search for ways and means to build and create.  Many of my own choices – how I sought to participate in working for democracy and socialism at home, how I sought to oppose our government’s hostility to popular rights and justice abroad, grew slowly out of my attempts to make sense of what happened that day.

Shortly after moving to Washington DC in 1980s, I attended a memorial for Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit who had been assassinated in 1976 by Chile’s secret police (with U.S. government connivance) not far from where I was then working.  Coincidently, later that day I discovered at a local bookshop a volume of short novels written by Chilean exiles which I purchased quickly, read slowly, not wanting to rush through the pain being depicted.  Re-reading them today, I am struck at the assertions of hope belied by overpowering despair.  I find the same anger at the torture of prison, the alienation and sense of loss in exile, the courage of resistance, alongside a perhaps deeper insight of what the nexus between the two might mean – as this excerpt from a story set at the funeral of Neruda – days after the coup -- expresses:

“The boy had the sensation of stepping across a threshold into a strange territory, a voluntary prisoner of unforeseen facts which sent a shudder through him. … He remembered this was the poet’s city, but even though he was walking the same streets the poet once walked, he was starting to feel the abyss between love and the world and he knew that sooner or later the separation would come.  Abandoned like the docks at twilight / It’s the hour of departure, oh abandoned one!

“He noticed his compañero had gone ahead to the next row, exchanging a few words with another person and then returned to his place with a hard, pensive look on his face.  He fell into step without looking at him, with no need to talk, looking only for closeness, the new intimacy that could be felt in the group like a necessary discovery.

“I don’t have time for my own pain / nothing makes me suffer but these lives / that gave me their pure trust / and that a traitor turned under / into a dead hole, out of which / the rose will raise itself again.

“Were you at the poet’s house? They say they destroyed everything …

“No, I couldn’t look.  But some other compañeros were there.  The floor was flooded, the windows broken, his things trampled.  As if they were trying to sink the house.

            “In you the wars and flights piled up / From you the songbirds; wings went up / from tomb to tomb you still flamed upand sang / Standing like a sailor at the prow of a ship.

“It's a leave taking all right, but it’s also a demonstration,” his compañero whispered, “the first demonstration after the coup.

“When the hangman imprisoned the judges / so they could condemn my heart, my determined swarm/ the people opened their vast labyrinth / the cellar where their loves were sleeping / and there they kept a close watch over me / until the arrival of the light and air.”

New Beginnings

(September 11, 2023)

“Recalled to Life” is a phrase from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the signal for Dr. Manette’s freedom, which finally comes after 18-years in the Bastille.  Dr. Manette, however, is never fully freed from his imprisonment, the madness which took hold during his long years of isolation never far from the surface of his character, old wounds never fully healed, always in danger of being re-opened by current swirls of oppressions, of vengeance and revenge. 

Manette steps out, steps forward, loses his way.  Ultimately he is unable to understand the new present, unable to act because unable to imagine a different future when his past statements are used against him.  Unable to find the power to convert dreams into possibility he reverts to the stupor of his years in chains.  Prison’s purpose is thus revealed – to “disappear” people from the world they inhabited, the people they knew, from their own sense of being.  Disappear them – and their loved ones.  For removing people from the life of society also means removing family members who must cope in a world shown to be hostile and unforgiving. In the process, people lose power over the smaller aspects of their daily life, and with that, the danger of losing the ability to imagine recapturing such power – to ensure that existing structures of power remain unchallenged.  Such the purpose of torture – for it is rarely about gaining information, it is always about destroying human beings, instilling fear in others, inhibiting the ability to act outside proscribed limits. Imaginative dreams can then turn into nightmares.

Chile from 1970 until 1973 exemplified the process of building transformative change through a popular movement that remained creative, alive, engaged as it walked a tightrope pushing forward, holding back, trying constantly to overcome the obstacles littered everywhere.  Such a movement could only be possible where the belief in social justice, in socialism, has developed deep roots.  The violence that accompanied the suppression of that hope aimed not only at instilling fear but also at disorientation, confusion, grief, to create a world of uncertainty, to turn dreams into nightmares.  How do you imagine the life of those being tortured, how do you imagine what goes through the mind of those doing the torturing – and how do you imagine a future alternative to the one being lived, find the ability, exercise the power, needed to change what is to what could be?

In 1984 one of Chile’s torturers, Andrés Valenzuela, a soldier no longer able to live with himself, walked to a magazine editorial office and, in graphic detail, spoke about what he had observed, what he had done and to whom – the grim details of his account, the precision of each operation from arrest to death and the horror in-between paints a picture of the nature of terror as a system from arrest to execution.  Nona Fernández, in a work that is part novel, part memoir, part reportage, looks back at that testimony, at the lives the torturers snuffed out.  Her book is aptly named, The Twilight Zone, referring to the TV show that looked beneath the surface of reality to see what loneliness, longings, fears, lay underneath.  Writing with extraordinary empathy mixed with a sense of horror and pain, she lays bare the process that turned

Chilean citizens into outsiders, into “prisoners of war,” in their own country, the process that stripped the humanity of those charged with doing the torturing and killing as she tries to get inside the thoughts of “the man who tortured,”  

“I cried slowly, secretly, so that no one would notice.

              Some time later I felt grief, a knot in my throat.

              Some time later I was able to control my tears.

              Some time later I stopped crying.

              Whether I wanted to or not, I had gotten used to it.

              In the end I felt nothing.

            I had become someone else.

              Someone who gets up and goes to be with the smell of death.”

Alongside that she recreates the moment of arrest, the banal details of a day in the life of someone making breakfast for children, riding the bus, pulled out of the bus, taken to a secret prison, a sequence repeated with variations again and again, touching on wider circles of family members, communities, society at large.  Those arrested were, to be sure, targeted, yet there was a randomness in the execution that aimed to put everyone on notice to not question, to not look back.  The goal was to try to wipe out of consciousness the hope for a just world that had inspired Chile’s working people for decades if not longer, people who glimpsed their social yearnings being realized during those three years of the Popular Unity government.

Yet while much was destroyed, aspirations persisted.  Those people named by the torturer, named in Fernandez’ book, were Communists, Socialists, members of the revolutionary left, individuals of conscience independent of parties or movements, all playing a role in keeping a dream alive, yet like the cat who always comes back, ensured that fascism’s victory would not be the final word, that a nightmare wasn’t the final answer to the dream.  As she recalls,

“we didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”

Resistance never abated, bounds of human empathy and community could not be wholly broken, historical memory not wholly erased, the sea of blood could not be the final word, the horizon beyond remained still beckoning with hope.  In the years that followed, resistance took all forms, from holding onto and passing along knowledge of what was, to rebuilding unions and political parties of the left, from holding conversations in small groups, from actions by individuals, to armed actions aimed at those in power, to mass demonstrations, to creating new organizations and movements, rebuilding a fragile unity even with those where sharp oppositions remain.  Ultimately, young people took to the streets in numbers that could not be overcome, creating new possibilities, challenging the system installed by Pinochet that outlasted him.   Recounting protests of the 1980s that were to recur again and again, Fernández writes:

            “We were kids.  Not even fifteen.  An army of kiddie aliens with painted-on charcoal mustaches, Lilliputians taking over the streets and the schools, shouting in shrill voices, clamoring, demanding the right to an independent student union, calling for school fees to be lowered, for our detained friends to be released, for the tyrant to be removed, for democracy to return, for the world to be more reasonable, for the future to arrive with no dark rooms, no screaming, no rats.”

Eventually the weight of resistance proved victorious and a new popular government was elected in Chile that sits in office today, seeking to undo the damage done in the past, seeking a new way forward in circumstances far from easy.  The road ahead is and will be rocky, the path forward never direct; those who profit from poverty never willing to fade away in the quiet of the night.  Yet the fact that the striving that gave birth to the Popular Unity government has been reborn with is a tribute to those who never gave up or gave in.  The dream lives on.

As I write, I think about all those I have known blacklisted or locked up, those who lost jobs or hope after broken strikes or lockouts, those struggling to make ends meet after release from prison or after a lifetime of work, those searching for a foothold in a life of exile.  We can take heed as we confront the everyday injustices and inequities of capitalism in our imperial citadel without losing sight of the immediate need to confront and prevent incipient fascism in our own land by not losing confidence and trust in the people whose labor makes our world possible.

Doing so we recall to life words Allende directed to us back in 1971:

            “I invite the North American reader to overcome all prejudice and listen to us with an open mind.  To fully grasp what Chilean socialism proposes … the true character of our people, whose aspirations, so often passed over or betrayed, are manifestly just. … Reformism in Chile has not been able to eradicate the endemic evil of a society which has permitted a life of leisure for a few and deprivation for the majority.  … We believe in the justness of popular aspirations, for we identify with the peasant, bowed down by his task of providing our daily bread; with the worker who gives us the wealth he has created with his hands; with the white-collar worker, the soldier, the intellectual, the student, and all those who have the inalienable right to enjoy the wealth they produce by their effort and sacrifice.”

Sources:

Maha Hilal, Innocent Until Proven Muslim, Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis, 2021.  Quotes are from p. 28 and p. 29.

Victoria Brittain, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, Pluto Press, London, 2013, p 52.

Juan Armando Epple, Of Flights and Abidings (translated from Spanish by Stephen Kessler), from Chilean Writers in Exile: Short Novels edited by Fernando Alegria, The Crossings Press, Trumansburg, NY, 1982 pp 42 – 43.

Nona Fernández, The Twilight Zone (translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer), Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2016, p 213, p 105 and p 173.

Regis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende, Vintage Books, New York, 1971, pp 164-165.

Preface: In 1975 I was a college student studying at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an AIM—American Indian Movement—caravan from Chicago of warriors en-route to the Menominee Indian Reservation to support the takeover of Alexian Bros. religious order property by the Menominee Warriors Society stopped at Rhubarb Bookstore on the west side of Milwaukee. Neil Hawpetos—Spokesman of the Menominee Warriors Society—spoke. I asked Neil Hawpetos that evening if I could “join” and he said “yes” and introduced me into a caravan vehicle that dropped us at The Drop-In Ctr. in Keshena on the reservation. That was the end of my formal secondary or college education and the beginning of understanding the vital importance of Indigenous history and thought within the new-left and de-colonization movement. Add the existential threat of climate change—capitalism worldwide ravaging war of exploitation for sheer greed, profits, and expansion—today, and one has a 21st century picture of planet earth in dire peril. The earth does not need human life to be a mass of iron in the universe; human life needs a bio-diversified ecosystem, earth—with uncontaminated freshwater—capable of maintaining plant and animal life to avoid extinction. “For the earth to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.” -The Red Nation. 

Remembrance: To have lived in the time of Mike Sturdevant, John Waubanascum, Neil Hawpetos and other American Indian Movement tribal leaders and warriors. Specifically, Menominee Warriors Society warriors, who were willing to suffer personal injury, death, and incarceration for Indigenous tribal treaty rights and self-determination. 

Brief History: In 1954, the middle years of the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR, many in Washington D.C. saw Indians' tribal governments as fostering communal ownership and values that were just one step removed from communism. Following the 1954 U.S. Congress act that officially called for “Termination” and “Assimilation” of American Indians into U.S. white society and culture the Menominee, as a federally recognized Indian tribe or sovereign nation, was terminated. After years of internal Menominee strife to restore Menominee Indian tribal status and its reservation the Indian “Restoration” act was passed and signed into law by U.S. President Richard M. Nixon on December 22, 1973. But not before Menominee Indian Reservation tribal land had been sold to real estate developers, and the creation of “Legend Lake” recreational and non-Indian community. Under treaty rights the former Alexian Bros. novitiate was legally mandated to be returned to Menominee Indian tribal and reservation sovereignty. The crimes of the U.S. government—European settler-colonialism of Native American lands, violation of signed treaties, the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous nations, Indian boarding schools and the sterilization of Menominee women—all constitute crimes against humanity. New Year’s Day, 1975, 44 armed Menominee warriors stormed the former Alexian Bros. novitiate, located adjacent to the Menominee Indian Reservation, taking the caretaker and his family hostage before allowing them to leave unharmed. The National Guard formed a perimeter around the novitiate with state and local police, supported by federal law enforcement agencies, and armed local vigilantes funded through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. LEAA was a product of the U.S. Department of Justice, created by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration “War On Crime” crusade with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in 1968 and followed its Counter Intelligence Program: COINTELPO. A crusade that originally targeted the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement and Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, American Indian Movement, an African-American U.S. insurrection, and middle-class white college student opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War spearheaded by the Students for a Democratic Society and its offspring the Weather Underground Organization. The Menominee Warriors Society occupation of the Alexian Bros. novitiate followed the American Indian Movement armed standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973.

We can’t turn back now.

A group of six stood, a tight circle,
shadows, inside barren woods, a border,
a flat frozen field, directly ahead,
each investigated.

A demon, piercing wind, howled, plagued, dared, the desperate ones,
filling the waxing moon sky with penetrating ice shards, from the field’s surface. 
Whipping them violently then suddenly dissipating them, before the tornadoes of ice 
crystals flying off the field would loft again.

In the black night,
brilliant white light-beams shown,
star-light, through the broken layer of clouds,
reflected off the swirling ice crystals shapes.

“We have to cross that field."
“Can't see across."
“We could stay to the woods, walk around."
“No, take too long."

“National Guard, sheriff, police, will be everywhere, soon sunup."
“Storm passing, wind dying."
“They'll fly their helicopters."
"No choice."

“Vigilantes find us out there, we’ll be dead meat, nowhere to hide."
Each women carried a heavy burlap bag with a rope tied across each corner.
The three men large backpacks, a side arm, a rifle, walking towards the former 
Alexian Bros. novitiate.

At the break of dawn, near the west edge of the field, another thirty feet
they would climb a low ridge back into the woods. Each member of the group
was exhausted, then their feet broke through the surface crust into 
ankle-deep water.

The water had collected after the 
ground froze, protected from frost 
under a layer of thin ice, snow,
at the ridge line.

We can’t turn back now.

Gresham, Wisconsin, 1975

FUNDACION VICTOR JARA

FUNDACTION VICTOR JARA
Huerfanos 2146 Plaza Brazil
Santiago, Chile

March 16, 2023

Dear Compañeros,

     Forty-seven years ago, in 1976, I was a National Maritime Union, AFL-CIO, merchant mariner and an unlicensed crew member of United States Lines M/V Pioneer Crusader that carried U.S. military cargo to Santiago, Chile. I wanted to honor those who had been imprisoned, tortured, and executed inside the National Stadium in 1973. Today I think again of Victor Jara’s last poem—and what instead could have been accomplished by Unidad Popular, UP, opposed to the fascist military dictatorship supported by the U.S. and headed by General Agusto Pinochet. 

Estadio Chile:

There are five thousand of us here.
In this small part of the city.
Five thousand.
How many of us are there in all
In the cities and in all the country?
Here we are, ten thousand hands
Who plant the seeds and keep the factories running. So much humanity,
hungry, cold, panicked, in pain,
Under moral duress, terrified out of their minds!
Six of ours lost themselves
In the space of the stars.
One man dead, one man beaten worse than I ever thought
It was possible to beat a human being.
The other four wanted to free themselves of all their fear.
One jumped into the void.
Another beat his head against the wall.
But all had the fixed look of death in their eyes.
What fear is provoked by the face of fascism!
They carry out their plans with the utmost precision, not giving a damn about anything.
For them, blood is a medal.
Killing is an act of heroism.
My God, is this the world You created?
Is this the product of Your seven days of wonders and labour?
In these four walls, there is nothing but a number that does not move forward.
That, gradually, will grow to want death.
But my conscience suddenly awakens me
And I see this tide without a pulse
And I see the pulse of the machines
And the soldiers, showing their matronly faces, full of tenderness.
And Mexico, Cuba, and the world?
Let them cry out of this ignominy! 
We are ten thousand fewer hands that do not produce. 
How many of us are there throughout our homeland?
The blood of our comrade the President pulses with more strength than bombs and machine guns.
And so, too, will our fist again beat. 
Song, how hard it is sing you when I have to sing in fear! 
Fear like that in which I live, and from which I am dying, fear.
Of seeing myself amidst so much, and so many endless moments 
In which silence and outcry are the targets of this song. 
What have never seen before, what I have felt and what I feel now 
Will make the moment break out ...[1]

     I was one of a generation of North American New Leftists who saw themselves connected to the worldwide movement for Socialism. The ascension of the Popular Unity coalition and the election of Salvador Allende in 1970 in Chile was watched carefully by my generation. The repression of democratically elected President Allende resulting in the overthrow of the Popular Unity government paralleled an era of political repression by the FBI and law enforcement agencies inside the U.S.

     I have one voice and do not intend to speak for my generation. I, as many of my generation, came to political consciousness as the Irish revolutionary and socialist James Connelly described: “Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude."[2] The emergence of the New (American) Song Movement —Nueva Canción— propelled by Victor Jara took many of my generation and me along: side by side, stride by stride, arm in arm, in solidarity and in the struggle for an equitable, just, and sustainable world.

     I dedicate “Lest We Forget, Lest We Forgive, A Personal Remembrance - Woe The Hour Of Vengeance” to commemorate the life and spirit of Victor Jara and all victims of the CIA sponsored Chilean coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and to all victims of U.S. Democracy across the Southern Cone of South America 1975 – 1985.

In solidarity,

K.G. Jack Muzzy
U.S.A. 
2023

Lest We Forget, Lest We Forgive, A Personal Remembrance - 
Woe The Hour Of Vengeance

Lest We Forget

September 11, 2023, will mark 50 years—over a half century to date—since the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown[3]. 

To victims of the CIA sponsored Chilean coup d'état September 11, 1973[4]:

Harbor Grudge

a crossing along a southern horse latitude—

as twilight falls
stern hopping noise 
suspended pungent heat 
subsiding stagnant air fill your lungs 
screw churning black pigmented swirling white water 
woe the hour of vengeance - vengeance the stadium’s cadavers beseech
a single glow of man-made light now joins my life to the land of your deaths 
to still unearthed graves I heard your mothers demanding their children 
ship to city disappearing and never the eternal shall rise 
my country employed the hands that murdered you 
unraveling night falls upon placid waters 
steaming into the starlight filtered 
immersed starkness 
vast open water
compañeros

Santiago de Chile 1976

Lest We Forgive

To victims of U.S. Democracy across the Southern Cone of South America 1975-1985[5]:

In memory of a generation imprisoned, tortured, raped, robbed of life, children, the pursuit of happiness, by the government of the United States of America and its South American fascist allies.

The Disappeared and The Missing: 

There is no relenting when you know your friends—mother, father, child, wife, husband, brother, sister—and comrades have been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered by the tens of thousands across eight countries directed by Operation Condor[5] and their children kidnapped with the full knowledge and support of the government of the U.S. What is instigation and support of mass murder and human trafficking: crimes against humanity.

A Personal Remembrance

For successive generations to understand the generation of the 1970s of left-wing political activists and revolutionaries and the purpose of Victor Jara “scribbling” the lines of his last poem “Estadio Chile"[6] before his death: that fascism will ultimately fail. The voices of a generation who struggled for an equitable land have not been silenced or written out of history.

Lest We Forget – Lest We Forgive – A Personal Remembrance 


Woe The Hour Of Vengeance

We will one day take power, exercise stewardship, over Earth’s resources and create an equitable and sustainable world. Imagine!

Woe The Hour Of Vengeance


Translation credit: March 16, 2023, letter Fundacion Victor Jara, Santiago, Chile, and Lest We Forget - Lest We Forgive - A Personal Remembrance, translated into Spanish by Leyre Alegre.


Endnotes:
 1 https://allpoetry.com/Chile-Stadium
 2 https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1907/xx/revsong.htm
 3 https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-15/extreme-option-overthrow-allende.
 4 Kornbluh, Peter, “Declassifying U.S. Intervention in Chile,” North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), September 25, 2007. https://nacla.org/article/declassifying-us-intervention-chile
 5 Rohter, Larry, “Exposing the Legacy of Operation Condor,” New York Times, January 24, 2014.
 6 Jara, Joan, An Unfinished Song: The life of Victor Jara, Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

Three years on, resistance to the coup continues. In Myanmar, this has taken the form of student activism, union organizing, and armed communal defense. Abroad, the exile community has focused on building support in solidarity and human rights organizations to isolate the military regime from global bodies, to gain recognition of a national unity government as the legitimate government, and to organize in order to force corporations to disinvest.

Some progress has been made. On April 8, Chevron announced that it is disinvesting from the country. A California-based multinational oil and gas company, Chevron is notorious for environmental destruction and contempt for the rights of indigenous peoples as was evident in Ecuador where it spilled tons of toxic waste on native land. Previously in Myanmar, Chevron supported the junta through payments made to the military for exploitation from the Yadan gas project (natural gas fields off Myanmar’s coast), the company using forced labour to complete the work.

Popular Pressure

Previously, in October 2023, Congress passed legislation to impose sanctions on Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) after years of delays, overcoming corporate lobbying to defeat the measure. Neither the sanctions nor Chevron’s announcement of its withdrawal took place in a vacuum; it required persistent agitation, shareholder action, and popular pressure – including over 250,00 signatures on a petition to Chevron as well as demonstrations at its California and Washington DC headquarters.

The combination of intensified opposition to the Burmese military inside and outside the country may explain the military government’s April 17, 2024, announcement of an amnesty releasing 3,000 prisoners and its decision to move deposed President Aung Su Ky from prison (“due to the heat”) and return her to house arrest. Now 78 years old, she has been subject to several trials since the 2001 coup, resulting in sentences that total over 25 years. But those concessions are more apparent than real. In fact, only about 100 or so political prisoners were amongst those amnestied (of an estimated 25,000 – 30,000), and some have already been rearrested, while Aung Su Ky is currently in an “undisclosed location.”¹

Therefore, more pressure needs to be built. As Khaing Zar Aung, a textile worker from the age 16 and today a leader of the Industrial Workers’ Federation of Myanmar as well as of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar, expressed when she received an award (the Arthur Svennsson prize) from the International Trade Union Confederation:

“The award is recognition of the relentless struggles and sacrifices of the Myanmar trade unions and people for justice, democracy and human rights. But still there are many people who can do much more to help remove the illegitimate military regime in Myanmar.

“I urge the EU, international governments, the ASEAN, trade unionists, and democracy lovers across the world to use all of your influence to stop the trade preferences, arms and financial flow to the military junta now.”²

This struggle is not new. A look back indicates what is at stake, the course Burmese resistance and solidarity has taken in past decades, and the kinds of initiatives still needed today.

Background: The Coup and Popular Protest

The documentary film The Purple Thanaka of the Angels, by French director Borit Yannick, released in early 2022, showed the defiant youthful protest of “generation Z” – radicalized youth born between 1996 and 2015 – expressed in music and poetry that emerged in the streets alongside rallies and a strike movement. The film begins wordlessly with beautiful still photos that lead into real-time news footage, narrative, and interviews, depicting the line of division between people and rulers.

Violence quelled the initial round of non-violent protest, but the military has been unable to either silence opposition or win public acceptance. The Junta’s answer was made crystal clear on July 23, 2023, when the regime executed four well-known activists who had been imprisoned on charges of treason because of their participation in street protests demanding a return to parliamentary rule.³

Those executions, however, are a sign of weakness, not strength, for in their individual backgrounds the executed reflect the broad base and deep roots of the protest movement. Kyaw Min Yu (popularly known as Ko Jimmy) was a student leader of the 1988 uprising – the 888 Movement, so named because it was launched at August 8, 1988 at 8:08 am, a seminal event in recent Burmese history that was part of a wider outburst of radicalism throughout East and South Asia.⁴ He then spent many years as a political prisoner, but once fully freed in 2007, resuming his political activism. Phyo Zeya Thaw was a founding member of Generation Wave, young people central to the 2007 “Saffron Revolution,” which sought renewed freedom in society. A former rapper, he became a member of parliament as part of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) when democratic rights were partially restored in 2012. Aung Thura Zaw had also been a member of Generation Wave and remained thereafter an activist for justice outside of government office, while Hla Myo Aung’s activism began after the 2021 coup. A cruel twist, reflective of the mindset of Myanmar’s rulers, is that the four had been allowed visits by family members days prior, without themselves or those who came to see them aware that their execution was already planned and imminent. After they were hung, the four bodies were buried in secret.

Although previous iterations of dictatorial repression have been brutal with lethal force used to quell protests, it has been more than 30 years since anyone was executed. Likely that was a sign of frustration with the resistance that has persisted for decades.

Recalling 1990s Solidarity

Afterall, a decades long popular movement overcame a previous iteration of military rule, beginning with the aforementioned 888 movement – a mass uprising and general strike against the dictatorial rule of U Ne Win, who had seized power in 1962. The military responded with force, but though that force could suppress, it too could not gain consent. The “888” movement forced Win’s resignation, and in the elections that followed in 1990, the then newly founded NLD won 81% of the vote, and Aung Suu Kyi was slated to became head of the government. Instead, the armed forces nullified the result, placed her under house arrest (where she was held for most of the next 21 years) and installed itself to rule as the aptly named State Law and Order Restoration Committee – SLORC.

The subsequent violent repression, directed at students and workers, forced many into exile, forming the roots of a global solidarity movement centered on a call for corporate disinvestment from Myanmar until the restoration of democracy. Doing so, the activists built upon successful tactics that the then recently victorious anti-apartheid movement employed in its global campaign for divestment from South Africa. Over 200 campus groups in the United States were formed, calling on their respective administrators to stop purchasing consumer products made by companies doing business that profited by the denial of labour rights and basic civic justice under SLORC rule.

Organized local “Friends of Burma”⁵ coalitions introduced resolutions to preclude local governments from patronizing any corporation doing business in Myanmar. Over 20 municipalities passed such “selective purchasing measures,” including Ann Arbor, MI; Boulder, Co; Chapel Hill, NC; and Takoma Park, MD. Critically, this did not take place in isolation. For example, Takoma Park also declared itself a nuclear weapons-free zone and a sanctuary city for Central American exiles, reflective of widespread initiatives to link locally-based movements for progressive change with global concerns. This movement was strongest in California, where six cities passed such resolutions, and in Massachusetts, where success was gained in five.

In an attempt to give teeth to these bills, many included provisions to deny tax concessions or to otherwise penalize companies that violated the ban. When those proved unenforceable, a stronger state-wide measure was passed in Massachusetts with the significant help of Franklin Research & Development, now Trillium Asset Management (under the leadership of Simon Billenness, currently executive director of Campaign for a New Mynamar) and the Massachusetts Burma Roundtable. Potential penalties imposed by a state government – with other state governments considering similar action – did lead some corporations to pull out of Myanmar or halt planned investments in its wake. Similar corporate responsibility measures were being considered directed toward businesses investing in Indonesia (then still under military rule following a CIA-backed 1965 coup). That brought out growing opposition from transnational corporations and the global business community. The European Union and Japan issued protests and threatened to file charges with the World Trade Organization, calling such selective purchasing measures as illegal violations of global free trade agreements. Before the WTO could issue a ruling, a District Court overturned the Massachusetts law, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.⁶

Under pressure from popular movements and following passage of legislation in the Senate, the Clinton Administration did impose limited sanctions against Myanmar, banning new investments by US based corporations, although grandfathering in companies that already had major investments or production facilities there. Just prior to the announcement, Unocal – a major energy firm and a notorious violator of human rights and environmental regulations (subsequently bought by none other than Chevron) – increased its investments in the country. Those meaningful but limited sanctions, put in place only because of the strength of the solidarity movement, were later repealed by the Obama Administration, in favor of backdoor negotiations.

Taking another path, the International Labour Rights Fund, the Center for Constitutional Rights, EarthRights International, and others filed suit in 1996, in a US court, on behalf of Burmese villagers, against Unocal, under the Alien Torts Act – a 1798 law that had been unused for 200 years – which enables people outside of the United States to sue US corporations for civil damages for gross violations of their rights. In this instance, Unocal oversaw the Burmese military use of rape, torture, and murder in a community where one of its operations was located, the corporation turning a blind eye because it profited from forced labour made possible by that brutality. The aim of the lawsuit was to establish corporate responsibility overseas for violations of labour and human rights as well as environmental protection. The suit was settled out of court in 2005 with the villagers receiving monetary compensation. The Department of Justice agreed in order to avoid a possible court ruling that might have established enforceable guidelines for US corporate behavior overseas.⁷

Organized labour kept up the fight as well. The Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (today part of the Steelworkers) and the United Mine Workers of America took up the fight against mining companies that had major investments in Myanmar, submitting a resolution approved by the AFL-CIO that called for sanctions. They were also part of a global effort led by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers’ Unions. This took place within a deeper challenge to corporate globalization that undermined labour protections and allowed companies to hide behind free trade rules in order to continue to profit from the anti-union practices and workplace oppression such as that imposed by SLORC upon Burmese workers.

A similar initiative emerged in the food and beverage industry, led by the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), as multiple companies had facilities for production or distribution in the country, operating without concern for labour or human rights. Dutch-based Heineken, under pressure from unionists and “Free Burma” activists, pulled out of a planned investment in a Rangoon-based brewery and halted all export sales to Burma in 1996, a similar step being taken by the Belgian multinational Interbrew (then on its way to become the world’s largest brewing company). The depth of worker-based solidarity was expressed most dramatically in the campaign to prevent Carlsberg (the largest Danish brewery) from entering into a joint venture to build a plant in Burma. The Danish Food and Allied Workers Union – which represented Carlsberg workers – announced plans to organize a European-wide consumer boycott of the company if it didn’t back out of the deal, a threat backed by the IUF’s European regional organization. By 1996, Carlsberg had pulled out of the deal. Other corporations that disinvested under pressure from solidarity activists included Motorola, Kodak, Apple, Amoco, Liz Claiborne, Rebook, and Eddie Bauer, amongst others.⁸

PepsiCo, vehemently anti-union in the United States and globally, and quite comfortable investing where friendly repressive governments ruled, was the last holdout in the food and drink industry. In response, pressure was brought to bear from multiple sources – unions, human rights and consumer activists, and, of course, the Burmese exile community. As part of that initiative, Khin Ohmar, a student activist who took part in the 888 movement (and currently chair of Progressive Voice Myanmar’s Advisory Board), spoke to unionists affiliated with the IUF in North America about the need to boycott Pepsi, telling those assembled of her arrest, of the harsh treatment she and other activists received at the hands of soldiers, and thus, of the necessity for her to flee her own country to seek refuge abroad.

She gave a special talk at IUF’s Pepsi Council, composed of local union officers and active rank-and file members from PepsiCo-owned plants from across the country (and Canada too, if memory serves). These workers knew of Pepsi’s hostility to organized labour, but the depth of what working people were undergoing in Myanmar was far deeper and more profound than what these unionists were experiencing and touched a chord that came up again and again in conversation after her formal presentation was over. At the same time, it put into context the anti-union offensive that workers were experiencing. The Pepsi labour council members responded without hesitation to the appeal for solidarity with support for the boycott. The action itself was symbolic, but nonetheless, meaningful. When actions, no matter how small, multiply the impact can be powerful. In 1997, Pepsi withdrew from Myanmar.

The combination of international pressure with activism amongst Burmese workers, resistance amongst the country’s ethnic minorities, and the ever-recurring student movement led to SLORC’s decision to permit elections in 2012. Fooling themselves into thinking they had broad support, the military was unprepared for the massive defeat it suffered that year and again in 2015 – leading to its collapse. Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD Party, with its deep roots in the country’s Buddhist majority, swept to overwhelming victory. Victory, however, was partial, based on acceptance of a continued role of the military in government, which inhibited the ability of the parliamentary government to address social and economic need, creating space for continued corporate exploitation from overseas. Moreover, the NLD government embraced a narrow Burmese nationalism that excluded “outsiders” and so, accepted the army’s subsequent genocidal attacks on the Muslim Rohingya minority. Taken together, the stage was set for the 2021 coup that brought the current regime to power.

A Glance at the Past

To understand the outsized role of the military in Burmese society and the persistence, intensity, and difficulties of resistance to it, a brief look at its history can provide some context. Burma had long been a center of Buddhist teaching and learning, reflected in the high level of literacy and education the country had achieved by the 19th century. Existing at a crossroads in Southeast Asia – today, it borders India, Bangladesh, China, Laos, and Thailand – it has numerous ethnicities within its population as well as Muslim and Christian minorities. Its historical development, however, was disrupted by British colonialism. Great Britain launched three wars against Burma – 1824-26, 1852-53, 1885-86 – until finally imposing its rule over the whole country. A large part of the purpose of that conquest was to protect its hold on India, and, in fact, Burma was incorporated into “British” India, subjecting its people into a kind of double colonialism and double suppression.⁹

Doing so meant that many civil servants and administrators were Indian and Muslim or Hindu, not Burmese and Buddhist. Moreover, typical of British colonial rule, the Karen minority (especially those who had adopted Christianity) were used as administrators and as staff of the colonial army, thereby precipitating ethnic disputes that remain to this day. And standing on top of this was the unconcealed racism of British colonialists so well described by George Orwell. Born in colonial Burma, his service there as a police officer contributed to his subsequent radicalism, the colonist’s mindset depicted in his first novel:

“Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whiskey to right of you, Pink’un to the left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called ‘greasy little babus,’ and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen…”¹⁰

A reflection of that racism was British insistence that they be addressed as “Thankin” – which means “master.” The nationalist movement, repressed but never fully repressed, persisted throughout the years of colonialism, turned that meaning around in the 1930s, calling themselves the “Thankin Movement,” reflecting the desire of the Burmese people to be masters of their own destiny.

Under the leadership of Aung San – the long-time leader of Burma’s revolutionary movement and of Burma’s Communist Party (and Aung Su Kyi’s father) – Burma declared independence from Britain in August 1945, shortly after Japan’s surrender. The same week, Sukarno declared Indonesian independence from the Netherlands, and Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence from France, reflecting the interconnection of nationalist movements throughout the region.

Aung San’s announcement was followed by a supportive mass walkout that began to take shape as a general strike. In 1947, on the eve of Britain’s recognition of Burma’s independence, the Anti-Fascist Peoples League won parliamentary elections, with Aung San slated to be prime minister. Their aim was to create a federated state that would give autonomy and representation to all minorities within the country. That program was never implemented, for Aung San was assassinated, along with six other cabinet members, just prior to taking office. In the vacuum that those deaths created, the parliamentary system became unstable, riven with disputes and insurgencies, both ethnic (particularly from the Karen people) and political (by Burmese Communists who objected to the path of development being taken) that the post-colonial government was unable to resolve.

Nonetheless, under the leadership of independent Burma’s first prime minister – U Nu, a Burmese Buddhist scholar and socialist who had collaborated with Aung San – some progressive reforms were implemented, and some attempt was made to rebuild infrastructure and the civil society that had been undermined by British rule. U Nu’s government played an important role in the non-aligned movement that emerged in the 1950s, and prospects for a different and better future seemed graspable. U Thant, a close ally of U Nu (and later Secretary-General of the United Nations, where he was a principled advocate for peace), outlined the government’s goals in 1956:

“Today a whole new nation is being built in Burma — politically, socially, and economically. Part of the task is physical: to repair war damage and create enough industrial capacity to improve living standards and make out country self-sustaining; an even greater part is social and psychological: to educate a people long held down by colonialism in the ways of democracy and self-development. Because there is very little private capital in Burma, the major responsibility has inevitably fallen upon the Government. Its greatest efforts are now being applied to such fields as these.”¹¹

Yet lack of capital and foreign investment limited economic growth and inhibited the flowering of the programs the government has hoped to implement. The inability to resolve economic difficulties and political conflict was the background for Ne We’s 1962 coup (simultaneously anti-Western and anti-Communist) who sought to resolve the country’s problem through isolation, autocratic self-sufficiency, and narrow Burmese nationalism. This laid the groundwork for continuing conflicts with the Karen and Rohingya and the insertion of the military into the center of political and economic life.

Unresolved contradictions pointed to two possible but contradictory directions – either renewed and revitalized democratic engagement demanded by the student movement or, alternatively, modernized military rule, politically neutral, friendly to capital whatever the source. In the conflict between the two, the military gained the upper hand. Economic life henceforth centered on overseas corporate investment as the economic irrationalities of Ne We’s rule were replaced by the “rational” economics of contemporary global capitalism.

Labour rights and Corporate Responsibility

Lack of labour rights and the order maintained by the military has made Myanmar an attractive place for business. Maung Zarni, a Burmese human rights activist and co-founder of FORSEA (Forces of Renewal for Southeast Asia) explained the consequences:

“…high street fashion brands, Zara and others, and … textile apparel industries, they are still producing and sourcing their materials in Burma, in a country that has zero or no labour rights protections, labour laws in place or enforced. … And, you know, there is a long list of European, Japan, Australian, the Americans and even Canadian corporate interests operating on the ground, while the politicians and the foreign affairs or State Department officials come up with these grandiose condemnations, grandstanding that they are doing something moral, ethical, in principle.”¹²

In this, Myanmar was part of a development touching virtually every region of the globe. By the late 1980s up to the early 1990s, cross-border corporate mergers, the concentration of industrial giants to take advantage of global markets, led to increased power of business relative to national governments, relative to organized labour, relative to the communities in which they operate. This trend was first apparent in auto, steel, and other manufacturing industries but had become ubiquitous as the century neared its close. For example, the food and beverage industry, which had been relatively decentralized and rooted in regional and national markets, had become highly concentrated with even large corporations being bought out by ever larger ones – different parts of the industry dominated by a handful of corporations such as Unilever, Nestle, Cargill, and others. That, in turn, contributed to changes in food consumption habits (at the expense of the income and health of the already poor), and to the concentration and centralization of retail industry (precursor to our Walmart, Amazon-dominated world), leading to an increased exploitation of land and labour, all with a particularly devastating impact on former colonial countries in Asia and Africa where these corporate fortunes had been originally made. Corporate power that had become expressed through “branding”, i.e., spending on advertising, took on an ever-greater share of corporate expenditure at the expense of workers and national/local cultures.¹³

The same process was underway in the textile industry – and global corporations, either directly or through sub-contractors, in food, beverage, and clothing industries which were the ones that set up shop in Myanmar. Alongside this came growing indebtedness across the Third World, which increased structural disparities between wealthy and poorer nations, and facilitated the creation of a shadow economy fueled by illegal drug sales. Myanmar, because of the enormous market for heroin amongst US servicemen in Vietnam, also suffered from that phenomenon. Oil and gas industries, in their own way, operated as a drug as well, as a source of quick cash, albeit in a form that benefitted neither the local population, nor national industrial development. As developed capitalist countries deindustrialized to undermine domestic labour countries, Myanmar became ever more attractive for investment.¹⁴

In microcosm, the country’s direction post-1988 coincided with the emergence of neoliberalism and the financialization of the global economy – and hit upon the rock upon which both liberal and authoritarian market-based national development plans failed. One sign of this was a decision in 1988 for the United Nations to abandon plans to establish a code of conduct for transnational corporations, a code long sought by labour and socialist organizations as well as by third world governments. This decision spelled the doom of the radical proposals contained within the Socialist International’s Brandt-Manley Commission. Its report, released in 1985, sought to create alternative structures of development at a time when popular and radical movements globally seemed to allow space for them.

Corporate power and the willingness to exercise that power directly received a dramatic boost with the end of the Cold War. With the Soviet Union’s demise, the threat of an alternative that provided basic economic security (no matter how the Soviet system was otherwise judged) was lost, an absence that employers were quick to use to their advantage. An example of the change could be seen at the International Labour Organization. When the IUF in 1993 attempted to use a tripartite (business, labour, government) agreement on minimum standards of corporate conduct from 1976, to compel PepsiCo to cease doing business in Burma because of Burma’s repressive actions, business representatives, backed by the US and British governments, refused to go along. Their argument was that they would never have signed on to the corporate conduct agreement had they thought that it could stop them from doing business in a country where human rights were not respected. Tripartism, in other words, was a dead letter. The gloves were off.¹⁵

On both sides. Burmese unions were banned in the 1960s, yet labour has played a critical role in every outbreak of popular resistance, re-emerging in organized form at the Thai-Burma border in the 1990s, growing dramatically when unions were legalized in 2011. The Confederation of Trade Unions – Myanmar (CTUM) – alongside other small federations and individual unions, represented tens of thousands of workers, largely in export-oriented industries.¹⁶

In those circumstances, the international Burma solidarity movement in the 1990s was all the more important, for it demonstrated that concerted action across borders could crack through corporate strength to force concessions that companies thought they no longer needed to make. Moreover, within Myanmar, it contributed to the intimate links between demands for democracy and demands for economic justice, and is the reason Burmese trade unions, alongside students, remain central to the struggle today. Myra Dahgaypaw, a Karen refugee serving as International Justice and Accountability Officer at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, explained:

“Profits should never be put above human lives, and the world will need to transition away from fossil fuels entirely by the end of the decade if we are to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Why not start with the oil and gas projects that are being used to enable one of the worst dictatorial regimes on the planet?

“Taken together, the arguments to hold off on sanction any longer don’t hold water. The people of Myanmar have waited too long already for the justice and democracy they deserve. The United States should go after the junta in a way that it will notice: by cutting off the billion-plus dollars it rakes in each year off the backs of the people of Myanmar.”¹⁷

Hope and New Beginnings

Corporate power does not exist in a vacuum; it is sustained by government power. The plan originally charted by Burma and other founding members of the non-aligned movement in the 1950s constituted a search for a path of development that would put people ahead of profits. The desire for such an outcome was frustrated by international institutions, which narrowed choices and ultimately inhibited the flowering of alternative models of economic and political development. So it is that today, in addition to putting pressure on corporations to disinvest, the resistance movement in Myanmar is seeking targeted sanctions to prevent foreign governments from selling weapons to the Junta and to discourage trade and investment. Many countries, in particular China, Singapore, and Thailand, for pragmatic reasons, have pursed economic and arms policies that have helped prop up the current regime, as has, increasingly, Russia. Japan, too, has been unresponsive to solidarity demands.

This is sometimes justified by the legitimate rejection of interference in the internal affairs of other societies (for such is inherently anti-democratic), yet it can constitute a false neutrality that accepts and reinforces illegal government rule. Fear of border instability due to the massive influx of refugees into Bangladesh and Thailand and concern over border instability elsewhere in the region will only be overcome when military rule is overcome. The Burmese people’s movement has not called for foreign intervention – but it has called for the United Nations, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nation comprised of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malayasia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar), and other international bodies to reject the legitimacy of the coup’s representatives in international bodies and to isolate the government diplomatically.

The UN and ASEAN have made some positive statements – as has the US government – and Thailand and China have helped broker some negotiations, but as yet, it is far too little; as of yet, words have failed to translate into meaningful actions. As is the case with Palestine, there is a long path to move from recognizing the legitimacy of national rights and the reality of genocide, to getting international governments to act – in part, today, because of the intricacy of amoral corporate power and the narrow tit-for-tat of global politics that define progress and national security in terms of security of investment. Yet popular struggle matters – the continued resistance on the ground has begun to bear fruit.¹⁸

For its part, the popular movement in Myanmar, learning from the past, has created a National Unity Government – comprising NLD members of parliament ousted by the Junta, but also comprising representatives from the Rohyinga, Karen, and other peoples not justly represented before. So, too, the NUG includes organizations participating in building a social protest movement within the country. This broader conception of Myanmar as a country that belongs to all its peoples is evident in the political perspective that has come to the fore within the NLD and in the wider popular movement of resistance. This is expressed in an article Khin Ohmar and Thinzar Shunlei wrote in the exile paper Myanmar Now, roundly criticizing past treatment of the Rohyinga:

“The formation of Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) by elected members of parliament, ethnic and civil society leaders, and representatives of the Civil Disobedience Movement and General Strike Committees of the Spring Revolution was a historic moment. For the country’s diverse communities, it offered real hope that a genuine federal democracy — one that guarantees and protects their rights — can be established. As a moral as well as a political guide, the NUG must therefore transparently communicate to the people of Myanmar what and who it stands for.”¹⁹

Such unity is hard to sustain the longer the fighting continues, making it all the more urgent for solidarity movements to gain strength. As democratic rights and social justice are imperiled everywhere by unrestrained corporate capital; as the resulting instability has turned into war; as environmental destruction, racism, and division sow authoritarian politics, we all the more need to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar. Their quest for justice should be recognized as well as our own. •

Endnotes

1. “Chevron Exits Myanmar With Withdrawal From Natural Gas Project, Kimberly Kao and Ben Otto,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2024; “New Year, Old Tactics: Myanmar’s Junta’s Amnesty Skips Political Prisoners,” The Irrawaddy, April 18, 2024; “New US Sanctions on MOGE: Hitting the generals where it hurts?” Mike Haack, Frontier Myanmar, December 21, 2023.

2. International Trade Union Confederation, “Khaing Zar Aung expresses ‘honour and sadness’ for global rights prize,” 4/22/2024.

3. “Burma Executes Four Activists as Resistance to Military Government Grows Since 2021,” Maung Zarni interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now.

4. George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Vol. 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, 1947 – 2009, PM Press, Oakland, 2013

5. According to Progressive Voice Myanmar “One year following the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the former military junta changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar overnight. Progressive Voice uses the term ‘Myanmar’ in acknowledgement that most people of the country use this term. However, the deception of inclusiveness and the historical process of coercion by the former State Peace and Development Council military regime into usage of ‘Myanmar’ rather than ‘Burma’ without the consent of the people is recognized and not forgotten. Thus, under certain circumstances, ‘Burma’ is used.” [I have followed the usage of my sources – ks.]

6. Labor Link: A Publication of IUF North America, May-Nov. 1996, # 8, p15; Dec. 1996 – May 1997, # 9 pp 6-7; “Trade War Over Burma, In These Times, June 13 [or Feb. 17] 1997; Linda Greenhouse, The Supreme Court: The Foreign Policy Issue; Justices Overturn a State Law on Myanmar, New York Times, June 20, 2000.

7. “Historic Advance for Universal Human Rights: Unocal to Compensate Burmese Villagers,” Center for Constitutional Rights, October 23, 2007.

8. Labor Link, op cit.

9. For a thumbnail sketch of Burma/Myanmar’s history see: Dinyar Godrej, A Short History of Burma, New Internationalist, April 18, 2008. Background for developments since the 1960s are discussed in Reading Myanmar: U Nu and His Prison Novel, Tony Waters, Irrawaddy, June 5, 2024, and Thant-Myint U: What Next for Burma?, London Review of Books, March 18, 2021. For a fuller history see also his The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, Norton Books, 2019.

10. George Orwell, Burmese Days, a Harvest/HJB Book, 1962, p 69.

11. Building a Nation: Goals for the Future, U Thant, Atlantic Magazine, February 1958.

12. Maung Zarni, op. cit.

13. See Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Knopf Canada, 1999.

14. Frederick Clairmonte and John Cavanagh, Merchants of Drink: Transnational Control of World Beverages, Third World Network (Malaysia), 1988 and Susan George, The Debt Boomerang: How Third World Debt Harms Us All, Pluto Press with the Transnational Institute, London, 1992 are books that reported and analyzed these developments as they were taking shape. Kevin Watkins, “GATT and the Third World: fixing the rules.” Race and Class Vol 14 # 1, July – September 1992 appeared in an issue of the journal focused on how financial institutions were undermining economic decolonization initiatives.

15. Michael Manley, Up the Down Escalator: Development and the International Economy – A Jamaican Case Study, Howard University Press, Washington DC, 1987; Global Challenge: From Crisis to Co-operation: Breaking the North-South Stalemate, Report of the Socialist International Committee on Economic Policy, chaired by Michael Manley; President Willy Brandt, Pan Books, London and Sydney, 1985; Mike Allen and Kurt Stand, “Comment,” Global Labour, Issue 1, May 1993.

16. Myanmar Labour Market Profile 2019, Danish Trade Union Development Agency.

17. “Want to stop Myanmar military atrocities? Sanction oil and gas,” Myra Dahgaypaw, Myanmar Now, August 26, 2022.

18. Articles touching on these issues include: “The End of Myanmar’s Resource Boom Could Doom the Junta,” Guillaume De Langre, Frontier Myanmar, December 19, 2023; “Inverting ASEAN’s Diplomatic Inertia on Myanmar,” David Scott Mathieson, Myanmar Now, June 12, 2024; “Escalating Violence and Civilian Attacks in Myanmar, UN, Progressive Voice Myanmar, June 6, 2024; “United in Inaction,” Progressive Voice, Progressive Voice Myanmar, April 12, 2024; “Open Letter Calling on the UN General Assembly to Show Strong Leadership in Response to Deepening Crisis in Myanmar, 427 Myanmar Civil Society Organizations, Progressive Voice Myanmar, October 25, 2021.

19. The National Unity Government Cannot Ignore Past Injustices if it Truly Seeks to Free Myanmar from Military Rule, by Khin Ohmar and Thinzar Shunlei, Myanmar Now, August 24, 2021.

This article was first posted by Socialist Project, July 7, 2024 (https://socialistproject.ca/2024/07/myanmar-coup-resistance-global-solidarity/)

“You know, Mister Gomes, I keep thinking about something that Carlotti said to me after Pires died.  He said to me, ‘Agnes, I swear I can’t figure out how the hell Pires would’ve fallen.’ He said that he would’ve had to have been really off balance and looking down the hole to have fallen because there really were enough boards for them to walk around and do the welding.”

            With this begins the mystery at the heart of Bill Fletcher Jr.’s The Man Who Changed Colors – a mystery set in 1978 which revolves around a death of a Cape Verdean immigrant at the Quincy Shipyard in Massachusetts.  It is a setting that enables Fletcher to talk about dangerous working conditions, about union corruption, about a union reform movement.  Yet not that alone.  Some pages later, we learn this:

            “When I was called about the accident I went over right away.  There were some welders and cleaners standing near the hatch.  I climbed in and saw the body.  I checked quickly and determined that he was quite dead, with no chance of resuscitation.  There were a few workers standing around me, but I told them to move away and give me some breathing space. …

            “Pires had clearly fallen, but his injuries were more complicated than a simple fall.  Someone had broken his neck and made it look like it was an accident.”  (pp 86-87)

            Now the conversation changes – is this a murder of a black worker by local racists?  Or is there something more involved?  How many threads will need to be unraveled to get to the truth?  And so the mystery unfolds in which journalist David Gomes finds himself entangled.  Mysteries are a staple of popular fiction, emerging alongside the rise of capitalist industrialization and growing as atomization and isolation deepen in our neo-liberal era.  That is perfectly natural in a society in which the connection between work and final product, between my work and your profit, is unclear, in which success or failure seem to depend more on happenstance or circumstance than anything one does as an individual.  Democracy doesn’t make most of us feel in control of the society we live in, equality is a word that describes an aspiration at best, but certainly not the reality people experience.  And when the marketplace invades every form of community life, uncertainty over whom or what to trust results.  The reason for any of those realities which mark our world remain a mystery to most – for what should be clear becomes obscured when one’s vision is clouded by details that consistently point in the wrong direction. 

Perhaps something akin to a good murder mystery – someone is killed, there are lots of possible suspects, there are lots of details many of which, important in and of themselves, point in wrong directions.  And so a good detective (or perhaps reporter) has to see through attempts to misdirect, reject irrelevant details, see connections between apparently unrelated events, all in order to catch the perpetrator.  Or to indict a system.

            And we get both in Fletcher’s novel.  The story takes us from that Quincy shipyard to working-class communities in New Bedford, and then into enclaves of Cape Verdean immigrants.  It depicts working class life in conflict with bosses for whom life is cheap, the racism which inhabits everyday existence, with its perpetual threat of violence.  And a violence that serves as an even deeper threat to those Cape Verdeans.  The story is told from the standpoint of a journalist trying to do journalism while the small local, independent newspaper he works for is threatened with a takeover and thus at risk of losing its character and vaunted independence.

            Fletcher is able to draw these connections together with a perspective rooted in his lifelong work within labor and racial justice and left-wing movement, for organizing necessitates linking injustices individuals experience with systemic injustice – something possible only by staying focused on the big picture without ever ignoring the details that fill the canvass.  This is evident in his non-fiction book: “They’re Bankrupting Us” And 20 Other Myths About Unions, which serves as a primer for new union members and union activists on how to challenge the common sense of received wisdom and think critically about the world around them. 

            In the context of the The Man Who Changed Colors, getting at the truth means being able to understand the wider ramifications of what at first glance was an instance of purely local intrigue – in this telling touching on the successful revolutionary movement in Guinea-Bissau, the defeat of the Portuguese military dictatorship as part of the anti-colonial liberation struggle.  The connection between defeated Portuguese (and Greek) fascists with organized crime and the never distant presence of the CIA links the local with the global. Many threads to unravel – but like a union organizer or socialist militant, the challenge is to keep an eye on the main goal without losing sight of all the way each strand surrounding the story is linked.  That Fletcher does in this book, which serves as a prequel to his previous volume, The Man Who Fell from the Sky,set in 2004 though taking readers back to World War 11 and the ubiquitous, oppressive color line.

            Both novels are available from Hardball Press an independent publisher which exists to help working class people to write and tell their own stories.  Such writing is serves to build rank-and-file solidarity, fight anti-union assaults, and connect labor struggles to social and racial justices.  Bill Fletcher’s books do all three.

Note: Quotes are from The Man Who Changed Colors by Bill Fletcher Jr., Hardball Press, Brooklyn 2023, pp 75-76 and pp 86-87 respectively.

This article was originally posted by The Washington Socialist in December 2023.

Two recent books, Labor Power and Strategy and Power Concedes Nothing, speak to the urgency of our times – the sense of danger, the sense of possibility, the need to grasp the moment. The fact that these are each collective efforts with multiple authors providing perspectives based on different realms of engagement is a reminder that only by drawing broadly from all streams of activism will we be able to defeat the fascist danger which threatens us all, be able to overcome the fragmentation and destruction which capitalism in its neoliberal phase is imposing on working people, on society at large. Yet the two books reflect strikingly different frameworks as the following quotes make clear.

The overarching perspective informing the essays in Labor Power and Strategy is put forward in an introduction by Glenn Perušek, faculty member at the Building Trades Academy at Michigan State University and former director of the Center for Strategic Research at the national AFL-CIO:

“The labor left sees building workers’ power as starting with existing organizations – mobilizing union members in contract and organizing campaigns. This activism needs to blend into broader solidarities – with other unionists, other workers, and other popular interests. Organizing the unorganized must be a top priority. Building active, member-controlled and member-mobilizing unions, integrally connected with their communities, striving for good-paying jobs for all amounts to movement unionism. … Building strong, active unions also requires a comprehensive research and planning process. … Finally, some conception of aspirational goals – politics in the broadest and most positive sense – must infuse labor. A revitalized labor movement needs to be part of an overall multiform movement for social justice.”1

The discussion which follows focuses on how to bring about that revitalization and realize in practice the potential power workers hold. The contrasting emphasis of Power Concedes Nothing is expressed by Alicia Garza, principal at Black Futures Lab and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, in her essay concluding the volume:

“For the last two decades, the US left has been forced to reckon with race in a new way; none more salient than the push to address and engage with the impacts of racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. … Marginalized communities largely led this push and moved the US left to a reckoning that is transforming the left itself. With respect to electoral organizing, segments of the US left are pushing beyond a strategy of nonengagement to using electoral organizing as defense, with an eye on long-term power-building. While still certainly uneven, the engagement of leftists of color in the fight to claim the country’s politics is a significant development, one that must become more than a trend. It must become a lifestyle. In order to build and seize power and transform how power operates, we must take electoral engagement even further to incorporate electoral strategies that shape our larger fights and help us win.”2

Although the core anti-capitalist, racial and social justice outlook informing both books overlap, the divergence between them is palpable. Perhaps having the two books “talk to each other,” we can uncover paths to a convergence.

Strategic Power at the Workplace

Labor Power is built around an extensive interview with John Womack Jr. (a retired professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard) conducted by Peter Olney (former director of organizing for the International Labor and Warehouse Union) in which the work’s key point is made: Workers need to understand the structure of business in order to locate management’s vulnerabilities and then attack those in order to win a particular strike or organizing campaign. Being strategic in this sense – and not being sidetracked by non-strategic struggles notwithstanding the moral importance and social meaning these might have – is of particular importance because the weakening of organized labor in the United States (and globally) the past four decades has led to the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands, growth of massive inequality, and a loss of popular democratic power. The current upsurge of union organizing and strikes raises the possibility of overcoming that weakness, but, Womack posits, militancy without direction will be unable to shift power relationships.

Weakness and decline did not occur because of happenstance. Capital reshaped industrial production through sets of policies imposed under the rubric of neoliberalism, in part to overcome limitations imposed on management “freedom” that union organizing had previously established by way of a post-World War II “social contract.” The success of that restructuring was due to a long-term strategic approach largely absent from organized labor. Globalization combined with “just-in-time production” has meant that production is scattered in multiple smaller units – quite unlike the enormous factories of the past where manufacturing was integrated at central locations and large inventories were maintained to weather downturns and strikes. That means shutting down any one site may not have the impact such an action might have had during the time of the rise of industrial unionism. On the other hand, production is far more dependent than in the past on regional, national, international supply chain links – and it is at the point of those links where worker power can be best exercised to leverage far-reaching change. As Womack explains:

“Let us set aside labor’s political, legal, and other kinds of struggles. These all take their own kinds of strategic analysis, planning, and action. If we focus here on campaigns of struggle along supply chains, I think there is only one kind of study for them, to find the industrially and technically strategic weaknesses in the chains.”3

The logic here applies whether the conflict is restricted to a contract dispute or a demand for recognition, or whether the conflict takes place as part of a wider confrontation over working-class rights. And while this directly highlights the importance of workers in transport industries, a granular analysis can show how workers in tech or services, manufacturing or agriculture, can similarly find points of vulnerability at the heart of capital’s power. Organizing at Amazon, for example, rather than being aimed at every site where the company does business, is better focused on warehouse hubs that can disrupt a whole distribution chain. Finding the particular “choke point” is not only a political question, it’s also a technical question; Womack argues that the ability to do strategic research is vital to labor organization. Yet that is one side of the equation – workers equally need to cultivate a spirit of resistance and defiance, that is essential to any strategy to exercise power. Womack explains:

“Those teachers [striking in West Virginia] confirmed to me yet again that over the last forty-odd years pro-labor liberals have gone wrong in constant appeals to indignation or pity for workers, appeals for feelings to help victims. What works with working people is courage in action, the brave display of power. Once they see somebody acting forcefully in justice, they’re more likely to follow. You see solidarity;”4 adding, “ … their public display of independent power and their public proof of the merits of their cause are the main lessons for labor in general now.”5

The strength of this understanding is that it redirects labor thinking to being concrete rather than relying on sentiment or unfocused militancy. Management’s view of “labor problems” relies on a realistic assessment of what is needed to maximize profits (i.e. how to maximize control over the workforce) within prevailing conditions; labor can do no less by way of response if it is to regain the initiative. Key to doing so means recentering unionism back at the point of production, contrary to the drift over past decades in which comprehensive campaigns focusing on consumers, students, stockholders, the media, the general public) have taken center stage. Important as these are, they tend to remove leadership away from the involved workers and instead give greater importance to those organizing in peripheral spheres, with strikers or organizing workers playing a secondary role. For Womack, the center of any challenge to existing power has to come from people who are impacted, to those workers defending their rights. That is where the intersection between strategic knowledge and strategic action can lie.

There is a danger, however, in the way Womack poses the issue of organizing and power, for by focusing on those sections of the labor force who hold power based on their location in the production process, there is a failure to fully appreciate the necessity to engage all workers irrespective of whether or not they are at a choke point. Moreover, a conception of organizing that over-relies on expert research can underestimate the initiatives working people take on their own – as, for example, treating “hot shops” where workers show a readiness and willingness to organize as a distraction if it isn’t “strategic” as if strategy could be developed that ignores or overrides decisions working people make on their own behalf. Finally, management isn’t passive; the very factors that can enhance labor power can also make capital more determined to undermine the basis of that strength.

This is a critique a number of the commentators in Labor Power make; as a collective enterprise, the book provides a look at class struggle from differing perspectives. A particularly cogent example can be found in a response by Katy Fox-Hodess (lecturer in Work, Employment, People and Organizations at the University of Sheffield) in which she examines the power of dockworkers – as strategic a workforce as one can find in world of globalized production chains. Citing examples from Portugal and Chile, she notes that whenever victory was attained, it was dependent on alliances with “non-strategic” workers be they students, be they the unemployed. Fox-Hodess writes:

“ … Power flows in multiple directions across multiple dimensions – economic, social, and political – in conflicts between capital and labor. The more strategic the industry, the more likely it is that the capitalist state will intervene. As a result, labor movement revitalization will require understanding not only how to find and take advantages of vulnerabilities in the technical division of labor but also how to find and take advantage of economic, social, and political vulnerabilities within the capitalist totality. This will by necessity require a clear understanding of the forms of power each group of workers may offer and a clear understanding that success will come through articulating and combining powers across multiple dimensions, suggesting the need to rethink hierarchies that privilege the technical over the social and political.”6

Strategic Power in the Electoral Arena

The subtitle of Power Concedes Nothing – “How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections” – serves notice that virtually all (if not all) the essays maintain a clear focus on the danger of authoritarian reaction and the need to build a multi-racial alliance that contests for political office around maintenance and extension of democratic rights. Each of the book’s contributors see the necessity of making the defeat of the Trump (and Trump-inspired) fascist danger a priority through electoral activity and the complementary necessity of building power through mobilizing heretofore excluded communities. Unity built within and between communities subjected to systemic oppression is thus at the core of any strategy to build wider unity around democratic rights and social justice within our country as a whole. Union struggles are part of the picture but there is little about workplace mobilization, labor-management conflict or internal union divides – nor, for that matter is social justice organizing unconnected to the electoral arena given much attention. Rather, the priority is consistently on how to win elections and gain strength in government sufficient to implement public policy changes that attack poverty and inequity.



Doing so, the authors of the book contest the view that voter mobilization is not foundational for systemic change (a possible implication of Womack’s conception of organizing). Addressing that outlook directly, National Domestic Workers Alliance Executive Director Ai-jen Poo and National Research Director Linda Burnham in an essay on the “get out the vote” mobilization of domestic workers during the 2020 elections, contest misconceptions that minimize the radicalizing impact election campaigns can have:

“There is debate within the social justice left about whether electoral organizing is ‘transformative’ or not. The logic of on-going issue-based and constituency-based organizing is very different from that of electoral organizing … When done well, it engenders a transformation in consciousness from apathy to concern about particular grievances to an understanding of the dynamics of broader social and economic inequities…

“… [On the other hand] to get millions to flip the switch from non-voting to voting – isn’t that transformative? The domestic worker movement mobilized thousands of canvassers and phone bankers in active defense of democracy – isn’t that transformative? … Their work centered the political power of women of color in a system designed to minimize and negate that power. The rhythm and metrics and subjective feel of the work are different from grassroots organizing. But that too can be transformative.”7

What gives salience to this connection is that existing political and legal institutions (let alone ideological and cultural narratives) have undermined the ability of popular movements to move beyond resistance toward implementation of alternatives that people can see and feel in daily life. Focusing on governing office provides a means to overcome limitations that inhibit the ability to shift public policy toward economic and racial justice, a means to create alternative structures of power in the moment when challenges of environmental destruction, violence, poverty, inequality and declining quality of life are everywhere apparent.

Most of the essays and interviews that comprise Power Concedes Nothing provide a close-eyed view of how the authors engaged various communities to put such an electoral orientation into practice. Initiatives such as these do not take place in isolation, rather, they share an overarching conception of systemic change. Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party, expressed the underlying aim of left engagement in mainstream politics in an article reviewing the course of the 2020 presidential primaries and general election:

“Neither of the progressive candidates won the Democratic presidential primary, but we were clear-eyed going into the general election. Joe Biden became the standard-bearer and pick to take on Trump, and progressives knew we had to push the Democratic nominee as far to the left as possible. Donald Trump was an existential threat, a global leader of the far right, and we had to defeat him at all costs. The campaigns run by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were instrumental in injecting progressive ideas into mainstream discourse. Canceling student debt, a wealth tax, and health care for all were no longer fringe ideas. Even candidates closer to the center were talking about the need for transformative changes. Our picks were not victorious, but our policies were front and center.”

Mitchell, then quotes from an interview he gave to the Nation in 2021,

“Making Donald Trump a one-term president is our moral mandate and a necessary step to building the world we want to see. Our plan is to beat Trump while organizing a multiracial movement powerful enough to turn our demands into policy. Electing Joe Biden is a door, not a destination.”8

Yet a door that doesn’t open may lead some to draw different conclusions. The impetus for left engagement in mainstream politics flowed from the way mass movements that drew millions into the streets – be it anti-war protests in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, the “Day Without Immigrants” boycott of work, school, shopping on May Day in 2006, the Womens March to protest Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the on-going demonstrations, rallies and street actions following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 – were unable, on any significant level, to win legislation that met the demands of those mobilizations. When powerful movements of resistance are unable to create vehicles for positive actions, then space opens up for reaction to take the offensive. It is a recognition of that need to build tangible change out of mass action, not as an end in itself, but as a step toward further change, that inspires the contributors to Power Concedes Nothing.

This danger exists when it comes to electoral engagement too; political success can and often is turned around – recall how victory soon thereafter turned to defeat (as in Virginia), how a narrow loss by Democrats allowed reaction to tighten its grips on power (as in Florida), or, going back a minute, Republican congressional and state-wide gains two years after Obama was elected President in 2008. If electoral mobilization isn’t connected to local membership organizations, gains made can be fleeting – the exercise of power needs to be rooted in on-going engagement if communities are able to find chokepoints equivalent to those sought in labor struggles. Mondale Robinson of the Black Male Voter Project, in one of the several roundtable conversations included in Power Concedes Nothing, noted how talk of reparations gained traction during the 2020 presidential campaign, without sufficient means to turn words of promise into tangible, meaningful policies:

“ … I think what frightens me is what happens to the Black people that came out because of the energy you are talking about – those possibilities of what could happen with an administration that’s willing to hear this conversation about reparations – but then nothing is delivered. … for those of us who knock on Black people’s doors, they’re going to say, we’re still dealing with this, they didn’t do this …”9

Overcoming Obstacles

No form of action, no campaign, no organizing drive can guarantee victory, and no gain – be it electing a progressive to office or winning a union contract – can guarantee that what was won might not be hollowed out. Campaigns don’t take place in a vacuum; existing power is always looking for ways to reassert its dominance.

Robinson makes the critical point: “If you are organizing the communities, please be of the community …” adding “… we need to figure out how we provide services beyond a ballot for Black people, if we want them to vote for our candidates and issues.”10 Organizations, networks, activists need to come from or be deeply rooted amongst people being mobilized so that decisions to orient in one direction or the other, decisions as to how to address immediate material needs, are community decisions where the people impacted take ownership of the process, including evaluation and reevaluation of the tactics and strategic orientation.

It is only when organizing is genuinely rooted that the political clarity of Mitchell’s assertion that Biden’s election was “a door not a destination,” can be made real and continue over the inevitable flow of successes and setbacks. The 15-year UFCW unionizing drive (1994 – 2009) of 5,000 workers at the Smithfield Meatpacking plant in North Carolina exemplifies what that can look like and provides a bridge leading to an intersection of the themes in each of these books. Gene Bruskin, a long-time union activist who served as UFCW campaign director from 2006-2008, recalls a perfect example of a choke point writing in Labor Power about the moment when workers struck the livestock department: “trucks were lining up and thousands of pigs were either squealing frantically in the trucks or stuck outside the gates heading toward the plant, with no workers to tend them. Once hogs get out of a truck, it’s difficult to get them back in.”11 Ninety workers had shut down the entire plant and “within six months they signed a union contract with raises, safety and line-speed clauses, a good grievance procedure, and, most important, respect and dignity.”12

Yet as Bruskin adds, prior to that was a walkout of Latino immigrant workers to protest deportations – an action they organized on their own initiative through their own networks. So too, African American workers petitioned Smithfield to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday. Although the union drive began largely in response to abysmal working conditions, those galvanizing demands arose from community opposition to discrimination broader than the workplace. UFCW utilized the NLRB (without which the worker who organized the job action at the livestock department would not have regained his job) and OSHA (providing the legal basis for the safety complaint), and sympathetic elected politicians, wherever possible. Maintaining consistent pressure from multiple places without ever losing sight of the need to constantly build and rebuild support amongst Smithfield’s workers, is the reason why the numerous setbacks during the campaign never translated into the demoralization of defeat. And it was why that choke point action was able to prove decisive whereas previous disruptions in production never got past simply being disruptive.

Successful organizing to gain elective office can follow an analogous path as happened over the course of a decade in Arizona beginning in 2010 with a campaign initiated by LUCHA (Living United for Change Arizona) to overturn a “show me your papers law”13 which sought to install fear throughout the state’s Spanish-speaking population. Following that came successful organizing for public school funding, state-wide paid sick leave/living wage increases, and to defeat Sherriff Joe Arpaio (a national hero to the racist right for his brutal treatment of prisoners). This went hand in hand with massive voter registration, rebuilding a Democratic Party infrastructure that Democratic leadership had left to atrophy, and election victories for municipal, county and state office. This led to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 elections in a state that has been a bastion of right-wing power since the days of Barry Goldwater.

César Fierros Mendoza (LUCHA’s communications manager) explained the linkages that made this possible:

“It is incumbent that we engage in the electoral process to oust politicians who stand against us and elect those who stand with us, but elections cannot be the only tactic we engage in. Often our people are disheartened by what feels like wasted energy spent on elections for people who will ultimately betray us, but that is only because we usually fail to make explicit the larger strategy that elections are a small part of. At the end of the day, we’re trying to build political power to reshape our communities into places where we can thrive, and electoral power is essential to that project.”14

Long-term strategy and engagement in the moment need flow one into the other – when social change and immediate needs become divided, organizing (be it electoral or workplace) becomes divorced from popular participation. When pre-conceived ideas are imposed, politics becomes sterile. Any particular approach or direction needs to be constantly tested, reevaluated and altered both by deeper insight in the changing nature of the environment and the initiatives, attitudes, perspectives of the wider community (be those outlooks ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’).

Failure to do so has consequence in labor organizing – a prime example was the United Farm Workers ill-fated strawberry campaign in the mid-1990s which was based on intensive research on the industry without equivalent engagement with the workforce. That is a cul-de-sac those engaged in political campaigns based on programs divorced from people often become trapped. A prime example took place at DSA’s convention in 2019, when delegates passed a “Bernie or Bust” resolution mandating that Sanders was the only candidate the organization would support in the 2020 presidential election. David Duhalde (DSA’s former youth director and current vice chair of Democratic Socialists of America Fund) notes in an essay in Power Concedes Nothing, that the decision “hurt DSA’s ability to work with other mass organizations during the general election, and paralyzed the organization around the general presidential election as the COVID-19 pandemic, surging mobilizations against police violence, and growing right-wing violence changed the landscape in unforeseen ways.”15

This is contrary to the responsiveness to immediate circumstances that led to DSA’s massive growth in 2016, contrary to the kind of organizing others were doing that prevented Trump’s bid to hold onto office in 2020. Or, as Duhalde concludes, “Socialists should avoid solutions and blanket decisions that are devoid of an analysis of the particular conditions and scenarios at play.”16 Sanders himself recognized this, endorsing Biden after the primaries had run their course, based on the same logic as Mitchell articulated – his presidency would be a “door not a destination.”

Organizationally, DSA has moved away from such blanket statements, but a strong undercurrent continues to advocate artificial straightjackets for elected socialists, uphold narrow criteria for supporting candidates or evaluating them after elections. What makes the perspective of those who pretend that they could and should control elected officials so problematic is that it echoes the anti-democratic ethos that calls all politics and politicians corrupt. That leads all too many to seek solutions outside the social sphere, to abstain from voting, it leads others to turn to the authoritarianism of Trump and his ilk, it leaves corporate power unscathed. Forgotten is a simple truth: political leaders are kept honest by organizations and movements strong enough to support them.

Bringing it All Together

The United Auto Workers strike, embodying much of the approach Womack put forth,17 exemplifies the importance of linkages. The victorious strike was built upon the expression of power through mutual support by walking out simultaneously at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis; it was built upon a strategic use of power by striking selectively at each. The UAW also built solidarity within and outside the union by seeing the development of electric vehicles as a potential source of union jobs rather than as a competition between two sets of workers – similarly, the union rejected attempts by Trump and other MAGA Republicans to pose US and Chinese workers in opposition to each other by keeping the focus on corporate greed. Flowing from this, the union displayed genuine political independence, denouncing Trump yet holding off on endorsing Biden until he addressed specific needs of the workforce.

Another example of strategic solidarity was the successful strike undertaken by multiple unions working in tandem by health care workers at Kaiser Permanente. The strike was selective and episodic, mobilizing members that impacted the corporation’s bottom line, while minimizing disruption to patients – so the company could not pose workers against the community as frequently happened during management’s anti-labor offensive in the 1980s and 90s. Moreover, the unions involved were able to connect their grievances due to nursing shortages, their demands around pay, hours and staffing into a community issue of public health and patient need. Coordinated actions by unionists combined with public outreach forced Kaiser Permanente to accept the unions’ basic demands.

A third, more challenging example of a strategic approach to building working class unity against corporate power is seen in the rank-and-file movements within railroad worker unions which was able to gain a critical demand for paid sick leave that had appeared lost when the unions, under pressure from corporations and the Biden Administration, initially agreed to inadequate contracts. But two rank-and-file movements (one a multi-union movement, the other located within the largest rail union) developed a strategy working in cooperation with progressive caucus members of Congress, were able to win through pressure what had been lost at the bargaining table. Railroad accidents, in particular the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, reinforced the connection workers were making: demands for increased staffing are also a demand for community safety.

As with the UAW and the Coalition of Unions at Kaiser Permanente, the rail workers won because of combining solidarity with a strategy rooted in understand where the corporations were vulnerable.18 But many outsiders failed to see that victory for what it was, failing in a sense to understand how political action and worker organizing can combine from the standpoint of organizing, when the organizing takes place from a position of relative weakness. More to the point, it is rooted in failing to understand the mutual dependence of workplace action and political mobilization in the wider public sphere. And this is crucial, for whatever gains are made in the current upsurge of labor action will prove ephemeral unless accompanied by a direct connection to political organizing rooted in mass mobilization and electoral action. The same holds true in reverse, elected officials and mass movements of protest will be unable to consolidate and move beyond protest without the structural power of organized labor acting to overcome the structural power of capital in defining and limiting social and economic rights.

After all union solidarity doesn’t automatically translate into solidarity around public education, affordable housing, criminal justice reform, universal health care, abortion rights (let alone opposition to war or support for environmental justice); that requires a fuller understanding of class. As Bill Fletcher (racial justice, labor and international activist, scholar and author) puts it in Labor Power, “Race and gender are not identity questions. They speak to a specific set of contradictions and forms of oppression that are central to actually existing capitalism.”19 Stresses that inhere in our social structures and within the capitalist system obscure that understanding.

This is where the need to create – both within labor and within political and social justice organizations, structures that are truly controlled and strategically directed by members, by impacted communities. A crucial component of that lies in education – not in the form of trainings or lectures (important as these can be in some contexts), but rather through participatory education, an underutilized form of organizing that expands mutual support by personalizing linkages that grow out of the experience and knowledge of those being engaged.

Melissa Shetler, from the Climate Jobs National Resource Center and Cornell’s Labor Leading on Climate Initiative, puts it in one of the most incisive essays from Labor Power:

“If we want an activated membership, we must practice a participatory democracy, and a participatory pedagogy, that will engage them. To develop leaders, or even better recognize and support already existing ones, we must engage workers in collective action in which they are valued, heard, and able to leverage their power. While identifying strategic choke points can indeed be effective, what was strategic today may not be strategic tomorrow. Without a broad analysis, organizers can spend all their time building power around a position that, in a swiftly evolving global economy, suddenly no longer exists. But if we build broader power, learn to be adaptive, and practice participatory democracy, we can construct new ways of being within the old structures that may ultimately generate momentum,” concluding, “successful pedagogy – and successful labor organizing – is community building.”20

Community building in this sense means forging a new sense of community as a political project that grounds multiracial democratic politics within the anti-corporate class politics of labor action; making multiracial politics a “lifestyle,” as Garza put it, bringing together social justice and economic justice organizing as distinct yet also intertwined spheres of engagement.21 Building union power also involves autonomous action to expand democratic rights; fighting to expand democratic rights means not only fighting the racist, fascist right, but fighting corporate power that structurally inhibits the exercise of popular power anywhere in society.

Such linkages need to be institutionalized, in a form that brings the insights – and the organizing upon which those insights have been developed – together in practice. With a final turn toward Power Concedes Nothing, we conclude with a passage by Maria Poblet, executive director of Grassroots Power Project, charting how those connections can be made.

“To win governing power, state-power-building groups need the capacities to design, drive the demand for, legislate, enact, and defend agendas for progressive reforms that serve the needs of low-income, working-class, and historically marginalized communities. In doing so, these power-building groups will not only help hold electeds accountable through their terms in office, but fundamentally reshape the structure of the government itself, creating the conditions for more authentic and multiracial democracy…

“… pathways to gaining governing power may be circuitous, with setbacks and side steps as well as opportunities to make forward leaps, along the way. We will continue to oppose bad government policies, and to fight the advance of authoritarianism and white nationalism. We show up, mobilize our bases, and defend our communities. At the same time, we want to see ourselves as, and start acting like, we can run things, we can co-govern, and beyond this, we can ultimately reshape governance, in our communities, in our states, and in our nation.

“With the goal of governing power as our compass, we use each arena of contestation as an opportunity to shift power, change the political climate, and take steps that get us closer to transforming governance. Electoral engagement is one of many arenas where we make these shifts, over time. This is the essence of what it means to build power in the states, through better aligned, coordinated work. This is what we are talking about when we talk about governing power.”22 •

Endnotes
“Situating Womack,” by Glenn Perušek in John Womack Jr., Labor Power and Strategy, edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek, PM Press, Oakland, 2023, pp 8-9.
“Building and Transforming Power: Lessons from the 2020 Elections,” by Alicia Garza, Power Concedes Nothing, edited by Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, Maria Poblet, editors, OR Books, New York/London, 2022, p 394.
“The Foundry Interviews,” John Womack Jr. with Peter Olney in Womack Jr., op. cit., p 33.
Ibid p 54.
Ibid p 55.
“No Magic Bullet: Technically Alone Strategic Power is Not Enough” by Katy Fox-Hodess, Ibid p 87. See also Jack Metzgar, “Associational Power, Too,” especially pp 95-96.
“Domestic Workers Enter the Electoral Arena” by Linda Burnham and Ai-jen Poo, Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op. cit., pp 254-255.
“Protest, Politics, and (Electoral) Power” by Maurice Mitchell, ibid. p 319.
“Black Voters in 2020: A Roundtable Discussion,” with Sendolo Diaminah, Arisha Hatch, Thenjiwe McHarris and Mondale Robinson, moderated by Karl Kumodzi, Ibid. pp 147 – 148.
Ibid, p 150. Bill Fletcher, in his contribution to Labor Power, uses Spartacus’ slave rebellion as a metaphor: “While he and his uprising failed, he placed himself within the people who were in motion,” and thus his near success, thus his legacy. Womack Jr, op. cit. p 75.
“Thirty-Two Thousand Hogs and Not a Drop to Drink, by Gene Bruskin, Ibid. p, 126. See also Hog Wild by Lynn Waltz, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2018 for a fuller description of the Smithfield campaign, especially pp 183 – 201.
Bruskin, Ibid. p 127.
The law referred to is SB 1070. See “LUCHA’s 10-Year Road Map to Victory,” by César Fierros Mendoza, in Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op cit. 49.
Ibid. p 60.
“Democratic Socialists and Presidential elections,” by David Duhalde, Ibid, p. 297. See also Duhalde’s “U.S. Elected Socialists Just Held their Largest Gathering in Nearly Forty Years,” In These Times.
Ibid, p. 303.
See Womack’s analysis of the strike “The UAW Strike, as of October 9, 2023,” in Stansbury Forum.
See “Despite Controversy, Rail Workers are Winning Paid Sick Leave” by Paul Garver and Eli Gerzon, Working Mass, June 29, 2023. For an extended look at the power and limitation of rank-and-file upsurges in the absence of political space (and a strong organized left) see New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks by William J. Mello, University Press of Florida, Gainsville, 2010, especially pp 197 – 202.
“Should Spartacus Have Organized the Roman Citizenry Rather Than the Slaves,” by Bill Fletcher Jr., in Womack Jr. op. cit. p 74.
“Abandon the Banking Method!” by Melissa Shetler, in Womack Jr. op cit, p 117, p 118. For an example of that kind of leadership see Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain, Beacon Press, Boston, 2021, especially the description of her role at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and immediately thereafter in 1964, pp 53 – 57.
Desmond Serrette notes that “We must develop a more sustained pro-democracy infrastructure that doesn’t depend on stridently racist and extremist opponents to make the case for a well-resourced, accessible election system” in “To Deepen Democracy Give Workers More Say,” Convergence Magazine, May 12, 2023.
“States of Solidarity: How State Alignment Builds Multiracial Working-Class Power,” by Maria Poblet, Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op. cit. p 127.

This article was first posted at Socialist Project on January 16, 2024.