United States/Iranian Relations: Some History

background on united state/iranian Relations

Saturday, March 24, 2012

MEASURING TARGETS OF US IMPERIALISM: HISTORY, ECONOMICS, GEOPOLITICS, CULTURE AND IRAN

Harry Targ

U.S. Imperialism in the Beginning

Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority. The rise of the United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel, textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge concentrations of cash.

Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines. The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day. While U.S. expansion occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.

Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism

To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that relate to the relative importance policy-makers give to some countries compared to others.

First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural resources.

Second, geopolitics and military hegemony matter. Empires require ready access to regions and trouble spots all around the world. When Teddy Roosevelt, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice President, and President of the United States, articulated the first warning of the need for global power he spoke of the development of a “two-ocean” navy. The U.S., he said, must become an Atlantic and a Pacific power; thus prioritizing the projection of military power in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. If the achievement of global power was dependent upon resources drawn from everywhere, military and political hegemony in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and parts of Africa also required attention.

Third, as the imperial project grows, certain political regimes and cultures take on particular importance for policy-makers and the American people. Foreign policy elites claim that the U.S. has a special responsibility for them. If these roles are rejected by the targeted country, the experience burns itself into the consciousness of the people. For example, Cuba was seen by U.S. rulers as far back as Thomas Jefferson as soon to be part of the United States. Cuba’s rejection of this presumption of U.S. tutelage has been a scar on the U.S. sense of itself ever since the spread of revolutionary ferment on the island.

The Danger of War With Iran Today

Reflecting on the SSUSI adds to the discussion about current United States foreign policy toward Iran. The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In 1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil.

After World War II, with a young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh became Prime Minister and asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The British government enlisted the United States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40 percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent, and the rest would be given to rich Iranians.

Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the bulwark of US power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the 1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world.

To the great surprise of left critics of the Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil workers against the regime. In January, 1979 secretly organized massive street protests led by the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected by Carter.

After jockeying for power in the post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980 Carter authorized a military rescue effort that failed. The bungled military operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny.

In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the end of the Iraq/Iran war U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing 290 people aboard.

Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations. U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large and justifiable internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement, more or less, for growing Israeli threats against Iran. Given this troubled history of US/Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.

Returning to SSUSI and Iranian Relations

As an emerging global power, United States needs for natural resources, customers for consumer and military products, investment opportunities, and outlets for energy companies grew throughout the twentieth century. One of the significant historical junctures in the transfer of economic and geopolitical power in the world from the declining British empire and the rising U.S. empire was the agreement to redistribute control of Iranian oil in 1954. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was obliged to share Iranian oil with the then five U.S. oil giants.

As U.S. oil needs and those of its friends in Europe increased, control of the Persian Gulf region and access to its oil became more vital. Furthermore, since a hostile Iran could control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian revolution of 1979 posed an increasing geopolitical problem for American dominance.

The impulse in 1979 to send U.S. troops to save the Shah’s regime was driven by both economics and geopolitics. It was only because other Carter advisers disagreed with the National Security Advisor on the possibility of saving the Shah that a U.S. intervention stalled in 1979. But in 1980 an Iraq/Iran war provided an opportunity, it was hoped, to weaken Iran’s potential control of the region.

Finally, the U.S. decision-makers since 1953 saw a special relationship between this country and Iran. The U.S. put the Shah in power, plied him with enormous military power, encouraged and facilitated significant cultural exchanges, and defined his regime as a junior partner in policing the region.

The rapidity of the Shah’s overthrow and the anger expressed by the Iranian people about its historic relationship to the American people communicated to the world declining U.S. power. Consequently, U.S. hostility to Iran in subsequent decades using a variety of issues including processing uranium is not surprising.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

IT IS NOT A YOU TUBE TRAILER: IT IS IMPERIALISM

Harry Targ

It is almost unfathomable for the media to explain the protests against the United States in seventeen countries as primarily the result of a trailer to an obnoxious anti-Muslim You Tube video. This view is consistent with the historic Western understanding of Islamic people, people of color, the “other,” as ignorant, subject to manipulation, and, finally, less than human. The reality is the peoples of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Asia have a sense of their history and the world and most Americans do not.

Just to review the U.S. role in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf since World War II tells us much more about this week’s protests than the You Tube video. As Michael Klare has written, President Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, a week after the famous Yalta Conference aboard the USS Quincy. The President and the King made an agreement that the United States would provide protection for the Saudi regime in exchange for perpetual access to its oil.  

Mohammed Mossadegh the Iranian Prime Minister who negotiated with his parliament the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was overthrown in a CIA engineered coup in 1953. For the next 26 years the Shah ruled Iran as a brutal dictator, crushing secular and religious dissent.

In 1957 President Eisenhower declared that the United States was prepared to send troops to the Middle East to protect the region from international communism. Two years later, claiming the Eisenhower Doctrine, the president sent thousands of marines to Lebanon on false pretenses. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson worked to undermine the influence of secular Arab leaders, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Syrian leaders, who were pursuing autonomy from former colonial overlords. During the 1960s, U.S. support, financial and military, tilted dramatically toward Israel in its war on the Palestinian people and neighboring Arab states.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979  the Carter Doctrine proclaimed the right of the United States to intervene if any attack on the Persian Gulf occurs because  it would “be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America….”  Carter created a Rapid Deployment Force of 100,000 specially trained troops to engage in instant responses to events such as had occurred in Iran and he created what became the U.S. Central Command to govern all forces in the region. Carter and then Reagan embarked on a massive covert war against the government of Afghanistan in the 1980s, supporting fundamentalists such as Osama Bin Laden in the war on communism.

George Herbert Walker Bush launched Gulf War One with a coalition of nations to extricate Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Over the decade of the 1990s, the Iraqi people were smothered by an economic embargo and regular bombing campaign.

Then the wars on Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were launched as well as attacks on military targets in Pakistan. The “war on terrorism” included violence against Muslim populations in several countries, including Yemen and Somalia, with hundreds of forward bases in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Asia.

Stephen Walt, Harvard political scientist, estimated that from 1988 to 2009 about 10,000 Americans died in military encounters with Muslims. However, 288,000 Muslims died at the hands of American troops or bombs.  He wrote that Americans killed 30 Muslims for every United States citizen who was killed and if one includes the over one million non-combat deaths from economic sanctions (in Iraq for example) the ratio of Muslims who died in interaction with Americans would be 100 to one.

Walt reported that Muslim deaths were the direct result of United States foreign policy, whereas American deaths were largely at the hands of non-state actors, i.e. terrorist groups. In addition, the United States has funded and supports allies who also engage in the slaughter of Muslims.

He concluded: “Some degree of anti-Americanism may reflect ideology, distorted history, or a foreign government’s attempt to shift blame onto others (a practice that all governments indulge in), but a lot of it is the inevitable result of policies that the American people have supported in the past. When you kill tens of thousands of people in other countries-and sometimes for no good reason-you shouldn’t be surprised when people in those countries are enraged by this behavior and interested in revenge. After all, how did we react after September 11?” (“Why They Hate Us (II): How Many Muslims Has the U.S. Killed in the Past 30 Years?” November 30, 2009, reposted on the blog site of Foreign Policy on September 15, 2012).

The new reliance on drone warfare, while increasing the scope of war on Muslims, decreases the risk to U.S. troops in the short run. However, the question for the future is whether this war will continue to cause the violent attacks on United States targets that have been experienced over the last week.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

SIXTY YEARS OF BLOWBACK: IRAN

Harry Targ

Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2001 about “blowback” that it “is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded.…. This misguided ‘covert operation’ of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.” (The Nation, October 15, 2001).

The CIA initiated overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh sixty years ago on August 19, 1953 was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East and the fourth largest in the world and it was geographically close to the former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the CIA covert war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.

The immediate background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian government received only ten percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil. Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.

Ironically, Mossadegh assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy. But, in Washington, the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”

After the nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a military intervention but the Truman Administration feared such an action would work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party. 

The boycott led to economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition, Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

As a result of the plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department official put it:

“When the crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis….The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program…. Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be in power.” (Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, 1972).

The Shah, who had fled Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free” world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).

In August, 1954, a new oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of forty percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million, which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was accorded fifty percent of profits from future oil sales. President Eisenhower declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of “economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an independent country in “the family of free nations.”

In brief, the United States overthrew a popularly elected and overwhelmingly endorsed regime in Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s, 70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary overthrow of his military state.

As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United States role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.

Friday, August 7, 2015

IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND/OR DIPLOMACY: WHERE SHOULD THE PEACE MOVEMENT STAND?

Harry Targ

Not every conflict was averted, but the world avoided nuclear catastrophe, and we created the time and the space to win the Cold War without firing a shot at the Soviets.

….Now, when I ran for president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn’t just have to end that war. We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported. (Barack Obama, “Full text: Obama gives a speech about the Iran nuclear deal,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2015).

The peace movement has often been faced with a dilemma. Should it channel its energies in opposition to imperialism, including economic expansion and covert operations, or should it mobilize against war, or both. The problem was reflected in President Obama’s August 5, 2015 speech defending the anti-nuclear proliferation agreement with Iran.  On the one hand he defended diplomacy as the first tool of a nation’s foreign policy and on the other hand his defense included the argument that through diplomacy the United States “won” the Cold War, and thereby defeated a bloc of states that opposed capitalist expansion. The implication of his argument was that pursuing imperialism remained basic to United States foreign policy but achieving it through peace was better than through war.

The speech was presented at American University 52 years after President Kennedy called for peaceful competition with the former Soviet Union. In June, 1963, nine months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which nearly led to nuclear war, and weeks after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s call for “peaceful coexistence,” President Kennedy responded by urging the use of diplomacy rather than war in the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union. 

A small but growing number of scholars and activists at that time had begun to articulate the view that the threat of nuclear war, growing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and repeated covert interventions in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, and the Congo, had to do with U.S. imperialism. The dilemma for the peace movement in 1963 then as it is in 2015 is how to respond to United States imperialism at the same time as supporting the use of diplomacy to forestall wars.

In the context of political discourse in 2015, dominated by “neoconservative” and “humanitarian interventionist” factions of the foreign policy elite, the danger of war always exists. Therefore, any foreign policy initiative that reduces the possibility of war and arguments about its necessity must be supported. The agreement with Iran supported by virtually every country except Israel constitutes an effort to satisfy the interests of Iran and the international community and without the shedding of blood and creating the danger of escalation to global war. 

Neoconservatives, celebrants of war, have had a long and growing presence in the machinery of United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate for developing a militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. As historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of the Truman administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He was, in Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II “semi-warriors.”

Subsequent to the initiation of the imperial response to the “Soviet threat”--the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms race--other semi-warriors continued the crusade. These included the Dulles brothers (John and Alan), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and prominent Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow, architect of the “noncommunist path to development,” in Vietnam.

Key semi-warriors of our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others who formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s, gained their first experience in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the United States should participate in world affairs is to use military superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The key failure of Clinton foreign policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use force to transform the world. For starters, he should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The neoconservative policy recommendations prevailed during the eight years of the George Walker Bush administration. International organizations were belittled, allies were ignored, arms control agreements with Russia were rescinded and discourse on the future prioritized planning for the next war. And concretely the United States launched long, bloody, immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Humanitarian interventionists, more liberals than conservatives, argued that the United States should use force, but more selectively, to achieve various goals. These goals included interventions that allegedly defended the quest for human rights. Advocates of humanitarian interventionism argued that the United States must use all means available, military and diplomatic, to maximize interests and values. And force need not be the first or only instrument of policy. 

But in the end the humanitarian interventionists encouraged bombing Serbia, intervening in a civil war in Libya, funding rebels perpetuating war in Syria, expanding military training and a U.S. presence in Africa, and funding opposition elements against the government in Venezuela. In addition, with advice from humanitarian interventionists, the United States increased the use of drones to target enemies of U.S. interests in East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East.

Neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists (and in earlier times anti-communists) have led the charge for war-making in the United States since World War II. Between the end of the war and the 1990s, 10 million people died in wars in which the United States had a presence. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women serving in the armed forces of the United States have died or been permanently scarred by U.S. wars. And the physical landscape of Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Central America, and the Middle East has been devastated by war. And in the United States, foreign policy elites, politicians, and think tank experts still advocate violence to address international problems. 

Therefore, in the context of a huge arms industry and global economic and political interests, any presidential initiative that uses diplomacy rather than force, declares its opposition to unilateral action, and challenges the war mindset deserves the support of the peace movement. Given the long and painful United States war system, the battle to secure the agreement between the P5 plus 1 nuclear agreement with Iran is worthy of support.

 

The Wisdom of a Socialist Defector: A Book Review

by Harry Targ

(Jan 01, 2020) Monthly Review

Victor Grossman, A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 352 pages, $23, paperback.

Victor Grossman’s A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee is at once an exciting adventure story, an engaging autobiography of a radical opponent of U.S. imperialism, and a clear-headed assessment of the successes and failures of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) at the onset of the Cold War until 1990, when its citizens voted to merge with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). Most poignantly, Grossman compares the benefits workers gained in the GDR, the FRG, and even the United States during the Cold War.

The story opens with Grossman (formerly Stephen Wechsler) swimming the Danube River from the United States to the Soviet zone of Austria and, after a time, ending up in the sector known as East Germany. Grossman fled the U.S. military in 1952 when he discovered that he might be prosecuted for lying about not being a member of any listed subversive organizations, including the Communist Party of the United States. Punishment could have amounted to a large fine and years in prison. So, he fled, thus beginning a lifelong journey living in, studying, and writing about the GDR, a smaller and weaker sector of Germany that had been demonized by Western journalists, academics, and politicians.

The book in significant detail compares the background to the formation and political and economic circumstances of the two Germanies during the onset of the Cold War (1945–53). At the last wartime conference in Yalta in February 1945 and Potsdam in July 1945, the defeated Germany was divided into so-called temporary zones of occupation, with the United States, Great Britain, France (later), and the Soviet Union controlling sectors of the country. By 1946, the U.S., British, and French zones were combined and, in 1949, created the FRG while the Soviet Union-controlled sector, the poorest and least industrialized area, became the GDR.

Ninety percent of wartime reparations to the Soviet Union for Germany’s destruction during the war were extracted from the East German zone alone. West Germany paid no reparations and instead received a large share of the $14 billion Marshall Plan program. In East Germany, most former Nazis were eliminated from government, educational institutions, industry, and research. Its de-Nazification program meant that most trained scientists and engineers lost their jobs or fled to the West, leaving the GDR with the need to employ relative novices at the pinnacle of educational, scientific, and economic institutions.

In the West, however, most of the leadership in politics, education, and scientific research came from the former Nazi corporate sector, including German corporations such as I. G. Farben, Krupp, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Thyssen, Bayer, and BASF. Central to Grossman’s vivid, concrete, and data-based comparisons of the two Germanies after the Second World War is the fact that the two sectors of Germany were not equally resourced powers but rather one sector that would become the FRG, which recently had the capacity to launch a world war, and a small, underdeveloped agrarian sector of the country. In other words, the Cold War in Central Europe was not a conflict among equals as the Western narrative proclaimed.

Most importantly for Grossman, the GDR, despite its relative poverty and underdevelopment, systematically adopted policies that privileged the German working class. Gaps in wealth and income among the workers of the East were eliminated, education and health care were provided free to all workers, family-leave policies and day care facilities were instituted, and all workers were provided at least one large meal a day at their workplaces. Everyone had a place to live and rent never exceeded 10 percent of workers’ wages. Women were accorded basic rights in the workplace and, at least at the local level and on the factory floor, participated in political and social life more or less as equals.

In short, in the context of underdevelopment, huge war reparations to the Soviet Union, and a largely agrarian society striving to jumpstart economic development, the government of the GDR provided basic but vital provisions for the entire population. In addition, the government and community provided cheap access to the best of German culture: symphonies, operas, ballet, and theater for everyone. And, of course, as the Grossman narrative makes clear, the GDR hosted a small defector population from many countries.

Although the GDR was struggling to build a workers’ state and, to some extent, develop economically, it did achieve part of its vision. The road to success, however, as Grossman suggests, was made increasingly difficult by international forces and domestic flaws. First, the United States and the FRG launched sustained propaganda campaigns so workers would reject East German society, offering the image of a Western capitalism that provided a whole array of goods and services unavailable to the East. Since the Berlin Wall was not constructed until 1961, East Germans visited West Berlin and, if they could afford it, purchased products unavailable at home. Since East Germans paid so little for food, rent, health services, and culture, they saved money. But the consumer goods they desired were not found at home. Thus, East Germans increasingly thought about consumption and decreasingly about the life-sustaining resources they took for granted.

The availability of consumer goods in West Berlin was glowingly described as part of the illustration of Western democracy beamed to the East by Radio Free Europe and other means of electronic propaganda. The new medium of television made it possible for East Germans to experience an image of wealth presumed to be characteristic of the West. Grossman points out that by the 1980s, many East Germans were led to believe that all Americans lived like characters in the television series Dallas, a dramatic show about wealthy Texans.

Enticing images from the West were combined with the political and ideological rigidities of the government and party in the East. Internally, leaders of the GDR and the Socialist Unity Party (a merger of the Communist and Socialist Parties) had engaged in the struggles against fascism since the rise of Adolf Hitler, extending solidarity with the struggle against fascism in Spain and later serving in the resistance or in exile during the Second World War. Grossman felt that this lifetime of struggle led leaders to be skeptical of change, suspicious of artistic experimentation (including the theatrical techniques of Bertolt Brecht, for example), and defensive in the face of criticisms of state and local policies. In the GDR, workers were empowered to challenge policies at the factory level but were discouraged from or punished for confronting leadership of the state and party.

In 1961, relative stagnation in economic growth in the East, increasing demand for consumer goods, encouragement by politicians in the FRG to abandon loyalties to the GDR, and growing hostility and threats of war with the United States led to increased emigration of East Germans to West Berlin. In August, the GDR and Soviet troops built the Berlin Wall, which reinforced divisions among the German people, further singled out the bisected Germany as a possible locale for escalation from cold to hot war, and became the reigning metaphor for a bipolar world divided between freedom and tyranny, capitalist development and socialist underdevelopment. While Grossman’s narrative is not uncritical of the GDR, he suggests that the metaphor, for the most part, was the opposite of the truth. For all its flaws, the GDR represented an attempt, in the face of war’s devastation, sustained pressures from the West, underdevelopment, and leadership inflexibility at home, to build a new kind of society that could meet the material, cultural, and psychological needs of the German working class.

Grossman, drawing from his thirty-eight years in the GDR, reflects on the achievements and shortcomings of the United States at home and in the world. As his criteria for comparison of the East and West, he uses Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 call for the achievement of the “four freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship as one chooses, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “Looking back after more than seventy-five years, I think about the extent of their realization in the different societies in which I have lived” (261).

Drawing on a wealth of data, he suggests that the amazing achievements in economic and technological developments the United States experienced in the post-Second World War period were tempered by the lack of achievement of social and economic justice. In addition, the United States engaged in worldwide exploits, such as its opposition to the GDR, that undermined the efforts of many countries to provide for their citizens on their own terms.

The text provides a rich, detailed analysis of limitations on the achievement of the four freedoms in the United States and argues for the construction of a society based on an egalitarian economy not driven by profit. He warns of the evermore virulent consolidation of capitalist instrumentalities, banks, and corporations on a global scale.

While committed to the electoral process and convincing people to embrace change, Grossman concludes that he is “completely convinced [that] it is necessary to confiscate [the super wealthy’s] factories, banks, and mines, their huge expanses of farm acreage as well as their hoarded billions, in coins, paper, gold, or long columns of numbers. This wealth derives from sacrifices so many of the 99 percent have endured; it was created by the muscles, brains, skills, and dedication of countless millions of ordinary people” (320–21). He proclaims that his lifetime of experiences, including his nearly four decades in the GDR, convince him that we need to “dethrone the kings of wealth! Get rid of them!” (321).

A Socialist Defector is a masterful book that reads like a novel and memoir. It describes a politics of the Cold War in the heart of Europe that is not discussed in most histories of U.S. foreign policy. It details the positive features of East German society while criticizing its failings (for example, there is a long discussion of the negative impacts of the East German secret police, the Stasi). It also presents in depth the drive of the United States for global hegemony. In the last third of the book, Grossman also analyzes the failures of the United States (sometimes in comparison with the achievements of the GDR) with regard to social and economic justice, protecting the environment, and deterring military violence around the world. A Socialist Defector ends with praise for and a call for social movements in the United States to mobilize together to achieve the four freedoms (and along the way to fight the rising currents of twenty-first-century fascism).

Grossman ends his memoir reflecting on his life: “We are all part of the same world. I believe that what I wrote, said, or did was for a good cause, and despite occasional mistakes I have no real regrets. And I still have great hopes for a happier future for everyone, everywhere” (334).

Harry Targ is a retired professor of political science at Purdue University. He has written books and articles on U.S. foreign policy and international political economy, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com. He would like to thank Arthur Heitzer of the National Lawyers Guild for his help with this review.

This Holiday Season These Speeches Still Speak to Our Times: a repost (from December 31, 2010)

Harry Targ

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes…

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research…. a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity….

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/technological elite (Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961).

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Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967).

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In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends (Jimmy Carter, July 15, 1979).

Words Still Matter

We have become so drugged by politicians that we often fail to reflect on the power of their words. Seeing books on library shelves with titles like “Speeches of Great Americans” culls up in our minds Readers Digest, the History Channel, Sunday morning sermons, and all the nonsense that passes for political discourse in the 21st century. Even profound speeches, and the lives of profound political actors, are transformed, debased and normalized, such that the power of words or deeds becomes acceptable to ruling classes and even made to have commercial value.

Every once in a while though a politician or activist says something that is rich with theoretical insight and inspiration and begs for action. The power of the words cannot be demeaned, delegitimized or made palatable to all. And, it behooves progressives to revisit those words and use them for practical political work.

The Military/Industrial Complex

When President Eisenhower gave his final address to the nation on January 17, 1961, 50 years ago, he warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” of a military/industrial complex. He originally included the word “academic” but later eliminated it, probably for reasons of length. He was alerting Americans to the breadth and scope of military power over the world and American society.

The President’s words constituted a shocking challenge to the soon-to-be Kennedy era defense intellectuals who criticized the outgoing president’s reluctance to spend even more than the $40 billion he invested on the military. Even his direct orders to subordinates to overthrow Guatemala’s President Jacob Arbenz and Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and his declaration of the Middle East as a free-world sanctuary was not enough for the 1960s theorists and practitioners of “modernization,” “development,” and “democracy.”

Although Eisenhower warned us of the impacts of the military/industrial complex he could not foresee the magnitude of the controls on America’s public life that soon resulted. First, he only dimly saw the changes that would occur in the techniques of empire. CIA money ensured election outcomes in other countries. American intelligence and military forces engineered brutal military coups. Military advisors revamped armies and repressive police forces in countries threatened by revolutionary change. The United States used “low intensity conflict” to train anti-government reactionaries. And then to mollify domestic critics, the U.S. initiated the privatization and outsourcing of the military as an adjunct to the over 700 U.S. military bases in more than 40 countries. Most recently, high tech weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles, are used to kill people without endangering U.S. soldiers. Technological advances and the globalization of U.S. violence continue.

Eisenhower was inalterably opposed to the militarization of the U.S. economy. While he was willing to allot $40 billion in 1950s currency, he resisted the demands from Beltway liberals and defense contractors to double military spending. By the 1960s, half of the federal budget began to go to the military and one in ten workers derived wages from defense contracts. And that continues, but with less public criticism.

Finally, Eisenhower spoke to the militarization of American culture. The university became a research arm of the complex. Students were taught about the virtues of military “readiness,” “the communist threat,” the problem of “human nature” and perpetual war, and, more recently, the endless danger of “terrorism.” Virtually every large corporation, producing such products as toothpaste, toys, breakfast cereal, medications, automobiles, electronics, or energy, is steeped in military contracts. The public airwaves, the internet, movies, and sports are laced with war, violence, killing, and competition. As Eisenhower put it: “Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved: so is the very structure of our society.”

Making War Overseas and Advancing Hunger At Home

In April, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City and made it crystal clear that wars elsewhere not only kill the designated enemies, but impoverish poor working people at home. Dr. King made a critical contribution to the discussion of the link between war and foreign policy and people’s lives. Killing in other lands is an immoral abomination. While that needs to be critically understood, the unequal distribution of wealth and income within the United States is stark and is intimately connected to foreign adventures. And, in fact, the more resources that are allocated for killing others, the less there are to serve the needs of those at home.

President Lyndon Johnson, who increased the U.S. troop commitment from 16,000 in 1963 to 540,000 in 1968 and who launched daily bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam in 1965 that went unabated until 1968 tried to create a “war” on poverty at home. Dr. King knew that this country could not do both: that there was an inverse relationship between war-making and domestic prosperity. As he put it: “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.” And as the years unfolded and the United States shifted from a military draft to a volunteer army, the percentage increased of those who could not find jobs and earn a decent income and became the foot soldiers for future wars.

Corporate/Financial Elites and the Creation of Self-Indulgence

Perhaps the least known of the prophetic speeches cited above is the one presented on television in July, 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. He was called to speak about the growing energy crisis, dramatic increases in the price of oil, growing dependency on foreign oil, concentrated economic power in Washington, and the celebration of a culture of self-indulgence, consumerism, materialism, and competition.

While this speech did not address foreign and military policy as directly as the other two, it warned the American people about the dangers of war, foreign dependency on oil, and an international system driven by oil giants and oil-rich countries. He linked these to a domestic culture that defined its success on the basis of how much it could consume.

President Carter challenged the basic precept of the corporate culture that evolved out of industrial and monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century; its basic paucity of meaning and purpose. “But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

What Can We Learn From These Famous Speeches

We should bring to our political work the idea that words still matter. In addition, we must reflect upon the possibility that mainstream politicians, presidents for example, may say things that should and could be appropriated to build a progressive agenda. And, perhaps more difficult, we need to cut through the propaganda which often leads political figures to be lionized and thus transformed into everyday icons. Dr. King was a radical, against racism, sexism, and classism. He opposed war. He saw the vital interconnections between massive governmental waste and human suffering. And he saw that the direction U.S. society was heading in was pure “madness.”

Substantively, we should revisit these speeches to raise again our opposition to war and empire and military spending. We need to stand with our brothers and sisters who are demanding jobs and justice. And we must stand with those, whether secular or religious, who argue against a self-indulgent, consumption-based and comp

PURDUE PUBLIC CHARTER HIGH SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO RAISE QUESTIONS

https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/…/experiments-in-stem…

Today the Lafayette Journal and Courier printed a story about a new Purdue University initiated public charter high school in South Bend (the first two in Indianapolis) which was approved by the local school board. Some in the community object to this new STEM-oriented project. As in the older essay below, questions abound about the role of local teachers and their organizations in these projects. The announcements of these projects usually imply the fa...

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EXPERIMENTS IN STEM EDUCATION: TWO HIGH SCHOOL MODELS

Harry Targ Manufacturing Connect represents a partnership between…

Harry Targ Manufacturing Connect represents a partnership between Ch

HUMAN RIGHTS DAY, DECEMBER 10: 2019 THEME: ‘YOUTH STANDING UP FOR HUMAN RIGHTS’

Harry Targ

Youth are Taking the Lead

Young people are standing up for political, economic, social, environmental, and cultural rights all across the globe. Despite the naysayers on the right who claim that young people today are troubled, lack resiliency, need to concentrate on job-seeking behavior or those in the center who advocate for moderation, patience, and compromise with opponents, young people are hitting the streets, organizing politicly, and advocating for candidates for public office who seek fundamental and systemic change. Often they are forced to flee their homelands because of state violence, environmental disasters, brutal slaughter of loved ones, and ongoing “hybrid wars” on governments that powerful nations oppose. In the face of monumental crises, young people everywhere are standing up and declaring in their own way that “Enough is Enough.”

Given these uprisings, the United Nations, on this Human Rights Day, celebrates “…the potential of youth as agents of constructive change.” The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) announced a campaign that “…is designed to encourage, galvanize, and showcase how youth all over the world stand up for rights and against racism, hate speech, bullying, discrimination and climate change” and other problems. The OHCHR believes youth are essential to achieve sustainable development and are central to positive social change.

Also, youth see social, economic, and environmental problems in a global context. https://www.un.org/en/observances/human-rights-day

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The Founding

The massive atrocities of World War II led nations to commit themselves permanently to the protection of basic rights for all human beings. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the wartime President, Franklin Roosevelt, worked diligently with leaders from around the world to develop a document, to articulate a set of principles, which would bind humankind to never carry out acts of mass murder again.

In addition, the document also committed nations to work to end most forms of pain and suffering.

Over 70 years ago, on December 10, 1948, delegates from the United Nations General Assembly signed the document which they called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It consisted of a preamble proclaiming that all signatories recognize "the inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as the "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world."

The preamble declared the commitment of the signatories to the creation of a world “in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want...”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights consists of 30 articles, with varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles refer primarily to civil and political rights. They prohibit discrimination, persecution for the holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention.

Persons have the right to speak their mind, travel, reside anywhere, have a fair trial if charged with crimes, own property, form a family, and in the main to hold the rights of citizenship including universal and equal suffrage in their country.

The remaining nine articles address what may be called social and economic rights. These include rights to basic social security in accordance with the resources of the state in which the persons reside; rights to adequate leisure and holidays with pay; an adequate standard of living so that individuals and families have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and education, free at least at the primary and secondary levels.

In addition, these nine articles would guarantee a vibrant cultural life in the community, the right to enjoy and participate in the arts, and to benefit from scientific achievements.

If the Declaration were written today, concern for the radically deteriorating environment and climate change would be prioritized. In addition, the language of the document would be sensitive to gender neutrality. It would also include the rights of gay. lesbian, and transgender persons and their relationships.

But despite the limitations the list of political, social, economic, and cultural rights embedded in this historic document it can still provide a guide to action.

To illustrate, Article 23,  one of the longer articles, identified four basic principles:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment

Everyone, without discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself (or herself) and his (her) family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (her) interests.

Using the language of our day, the principles embedded in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constitute a bedrock vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from Santiago to Beirut to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world.

Youth and the Future

Youth recognize that the global political economy is broken. The dominant mode of production, capitalism, increasingly cannot provide work, fair remuneration, rights of workers to speak their mind and organize their own associations, and the provision of a comfortable way of life because most of the wealth they create is appropriated by the top 1 percent of global society. They also see a fundamental incompatibility of the global economic system and  environmental sustainability.

Therefore, to finally achieve these rights, including saving the planet, it is fitting that the OHCHR recognizes that if the  human race is going to survive, the mobilization of youth in the world today must be respected and supported. Their impatience is not an indication of immaturity. It is a reflection of the fact that this generation recognizes the severity of the situation in which we live.

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, AGAIN

Book Review
Socialism and Democracy, December, 2019

The Russians are Coming, Again

Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018, 237 pp., $16)

Harry Targ (2019) The Russians are Coming, Again, Socialism and Democracy, DOI: 10.1080/08854300.2019.1658967

The primary purpose of this book is to challenge the popular view that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, represents a challenge to US democracy much as the former Soviet Union was alleged to have been during the Cold War. The authors, taking The New York Times as their prime source, argue that what is called Russiagate, a story about the nefarious use of computer hacking, spying, and bribing and threatening to expose public figures, including President Trump, is being promoted day-after-day as the root cause of the outcome of the 2016 election. In addition, they suggest that those who vigorously embrace the Russiagate explanation of the 2016 election are claiming that Russia’s interference might be part of a longer-term Russian threat to American democracy. This is so because alleged hackers spread misinformation about candidates and issues, thus distorting dialogue and debate.

The authors review the charges of subversion of the elections that have been “proven”, or so The New York Times claims. The “proof” includes statements released by spokespersons from the FBI, the CIA and other national security agencies that Russian operatives, agencies, and private institutions have hacked social media with “fake news” about candidates running for office (especially, Hillary Clinton). Advocates of this view presume that such misinformation influenced the voter choices of the American electorate. These are the same institutions that figured so prominently in presenting distorted views of a Soviet “threat” during the Cold War that justified the arms race and massive US military expenditures.

To illustrate the seriousness of the charges of the impact of Russia’s interference in the election they quote Thomas Friedman who claimed that the Russian hacking of the election was “… a 9/11 scale event. … that goes to the very core of our democracy.” Along with similar opinion pieces by Charles Blow, Timothy Snyder, and other columnists, news stories, Kuzmarov and Marciano say, have been replete with similar claims. The New York Times narrative concludes that the hacking and interference in the US election is designed to promote victories of candidates for public office who would be sympathetic, and subservient to Russia. The long-range goal of Russia, their stories suggest, is to promote Russian expansionism and its restoration to great power status.

After developing their critique of the Russiagate narrative, Kuzmarov and Marciano, make the case that United States foreign policy since 1917 has been motivated by the desire to crush the Russian Revolution and limit the influence and power of the Soviet Union in world affairs. The Russiagate narrative, they suggest, is primarily a continuation of the story each US administration told the American people about a “Soviet threat” to justify the escalation of the arms race and military spending. They argue that proponents of the Russiagate scenario promote the idea of a new “Russian threat.”

In fact, Kuzmarov and Marciano say, Russia’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe today reflects its perception of a threat from the United States and the NATO countries. For example, President George Herbert Walker Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not establish new military installations in Eastern Europe. With new NATO forward bases in Poland and the United States’ support of a coup in Ukraine, the Russians see the United States as having aggressive intent. From Russia’s vantage point United States threats to Soviet/Russian security have been a feature of East/West relations from the Russian Revolution, through the Cold War, to hostile relations with the United States in the twenty-first century.

All too briefly, Kuzmarov and Marciano review the history of the root causes of the United States’ Cold War policy, the lies perpetrated about the Soviet threat, and the enormous damage Cold War policies did to the American people and the victims of war around the world. For those who have not lived through the Cold War and students who are not taught about alternative narratives to “American exceptionalism” this brief volume is very useful. It draws upon the best of historical revisionist scholarship, including the works of William Appleman Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, and Ellen Schrecker. It has chapters on the onset of the Cold War and its causes; the attack by Cold War advocates on democracy; Truman, McCarthy, and anti-communism; and the war against the Global South. In sum, the story begins with the substantial US military intervention during the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik victory and continues to Russiagate today.

The authors effectively develop their two main themes. First, they challenge the argument that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, represents a threat to US democracy much as the former Soviet Union was alleged to have done during the Cold War. They argue that the Russiagate narrative is fraudulent. Second, they briefly revisit the history of United States/Soviet/Russian relations to argue that the one-hundred-year conflict between the two sides was largely caused by United States’ imperial policies and that proponents of the Russiagate thesis seek to rekindle a new Cold War with Russia.

FROM THE RED FOR ED MOBILIZATION TO THE REFOUNDATION OF THE NATIONAL ALLIANCE AGAINST RACIST AND POLITICAL REPRESSION: CONNECTING THE DOTS

Harry Targ

On a cold and cloudy Tuesday, November 19  a diverse group of 15,000 protestors assembled at an unlikely space, the State Capitol building in Indianapolis, Indiana. These were teachers and public school workers (including nurses, secretaries, bus drivers, and janitors) who were demanding that Indiana’s decade of defunding public schools while shifting resources to vouchers and charter schools stop. They were opposing rules changing accreditation and cutting resources vital to the education process and demanding wage increases so education workers do not have to take one or two more jobs to make ends meet. 

Three days later, 1,200 activists, younger and more people of color, rallied at the Chicago Teachers Union hall during the opening of a three-day conference to reconstitute the legendary National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). Representatives of militant groups from 28 states spoke about their struggles against police violence, mass incarceration, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and the brutal treatment of immigrants in the United States. The rally then heard keynote addresses by Angela Davis and Frank Chapman, the chair of the Chicago Alliance. 

The next two days over 800 registrants heard and strategized about the forms of repression experienced by people of color, women and workers in the society. Their immediate call was for the reestablishment of the organization that was created after the successful campaign to free Angela Davis in the 1970s, a campaign that gave hope to many political prisoners. The first task of the reconstituted Alliance would be to work for the community control of police. Ultimately this project would inspire the vision of what Frank Chapman called “All Power to the People.”

Red for Ed and the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression

Comparing the two events, much was different about the participants and their demands, but there was a commonality that should be explored.

As to the Indiana teachers mobilization, demands included compensation (incoming teachers earn just $35,000 in a state where 37 percent of households have earnings below a livable standard); an end to 15 hour professional training for all teachers to keep their accreditation; and an end to evaluating teachers on the basis of questionable quantitative test scores of students (which obliges teachers to teach for the test rather than wholistic learning).

Inside the Capital building teachers from around the state talked about the lack of compensation (many teachers have had to take second and third jobs), inadequate supplies (teachers have to bring pencils, crayons, and paper for their students), and unmanageable class sizes.

Indiana is a leader among the 50 states in shifting resources from public education to vouchers and charter schools  embracing what is called a “Mindtrust” model of education, using a profit/loss market model to evaluate the educational process. Because public education has been underfunded (“starving the beast”), performance has stagnated. Then privatizers have advocated for charter schools. However, charters have often had deleterious effects on teachers, students, and communities. These school policies involving defunding public schools, investing in charter schools, privatizing, defunding, and attacking teachers and communities have spread all across the country.

The Indiana teachers were inspired by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere. And this round of teacher mobilizations has been broadly supported by families, and communities, who see educational institutions as the anchor of society. In addition, teachers increasingly view themselves as workers and trade unionists regard teachers as allies (the Indiana AFL-CIO supported the November 19 mobilization).

The refounding of the National Alliance was animated by its long history defending political prisoners, opposing police repression, and mass incarceration. A multiplicity of criticisms brought the 1,200 people, mostly young, persons of color, and some elder left and progressive activists together. The issues raised in workshops, lectures, and discussions included increasing racial violence and repression against Black and Brown communities; vigilante violence against people of color, Latinx, indigenous people, immigrant, LGBTQ , Muslims, Jews, and others; documented police killings; the “detainment-to-deportation pipeline”; fusing of resources of the military/industrial complex and forces fighting terrorism with local and state police apparatuses; and concentration camps at the southern border of the United States. 

In addition the Alliance Resolution, which was adopted at the end of the conference also declared its “unconditional solidarity with the national liberation movements of Palestine, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as well as the anti-imperialist struggles of South Africa, Venezuela, and all progressive democratic forces against imperialism.” 

Armed with these concerns, the attendees resolved to refound the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Executive Director Frank Chapman pointed out that the work of the alliance would be to fight state repression, thus defending those who seek liberation. The work of the Alliance is therefore inextricably connected to all the other struggles of the day.

Building a People’s Movement: Connecting the Dots

In some ways the mobilization of Indiana teachers and their allies and the participants in the conference of those opposing the repressive state apparatus were different. The Alliance attendees, in the main were younger than the protesting teachers and were more diverse culturally. The Alliance demands were more “radical” including conversations about prison abolition and community control of police. The teachers were concerned about compensation, methods of evaluating school performance, accreditation, funding for public schools, and reversing the flow of state support from these schools to charter schools.

But there were many compatibilities that should be fostered.

Both events were high energy. Participants were angry and frustrated, and seemed to be inspired by the collective actions in which they were engaged.

Both events led participants to endorse a series of demands that would reverse negative policies and allocation of public resources.

Participants at both events saw the interconnections among many issues. As articulated in the many teacher mobilizations around the country, teachers saw themselves as workers. Speakers at the Indiana Statehouse identified the common interests shared by teachers, paraprofessionals, clerical workers, bus drivers and others. At the Alliance conference, solidarity was repeatedly expressed for diverse attendees experiencing common forms of oppression. In addition, not too dissimilar from the teachers rally, Alliance participants saw themselves as part of the working class as a whole.

While not explicitly identifying themselves as an anti-capitalist movement, their demands had much to do with opposing the privatization of education, the accumulation of super-profits with poor outcomes of charter schools, and the efforts of politicians to destroy the labor movement among teachers and the public sector in general. In the case of the Alliance, several speakers identified state and police repression with capitalism and imperialism and police repression as motivated by defense of the system.

And perhaps most significant from a movement building point of view was the fact that the teachers had mobilized one of the biggest rallies in Indiana history three days before the Chicago Teachers Union allied with and hosted the conference  at its union hall to refound the Alliance.

These and other similarities suggest that left/progressive activists should participate in both kinds of mobilizations. Activists can help participants in these movements realize that they are part of the same struggle. It is clear that the same class that seeks to destroy public institutions for a profit will use the resources of the state to crush movements seeking a political economy that serves communities at large. Articulating the commonalities of these disparate mobilizations is a task in which the left should engage.