RACISM ON THE CAMPUS: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES (A revised repost from November 15, 2015 and February 1, 2004)

Black History Month: Some Purdue Remembrances

Harry Targ

                          Journal and Courier photo

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois

What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels

All across the country students, black and white, hit the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday, November 13, 2014 to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at Purdue; a racism that the university president says no longer exists.

Of course, nationally and locally the struggle for social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the country. (A later rendition of the KKK dominated Indiana politics in the 1920s. See for example the powerful book by Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland).

The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also, the “war on poverty” was launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential candidate Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party (and Trump supporting MAGA) rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the federal and state levels. (and Nancy MacLean documents how opposition to the Brown decision evolved into a vast and powerful rightwing network in the United States financed by the Koch Foundation and other wealthy rightwing people and foundations, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radican Right’s Plan for America, 2017).

Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that elected President Obama, there emerged a Third Reconstruction. It featured the mobilization of masses of people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.

The Struggle for Racial Justice at Purdue University

https://youtu.be/lMaQyMyQpDc?si=8OmrAB9LTrLGA5ri

The resurgence of protests on college campuses over the last decade, although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of the kinds of struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked about.  For example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle for racial justice has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth century the African American population was less than one percent of the student body.  The numbers of African American students grew to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction and activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students organized a “Negro History Study Group” (which later became the Black Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism coupled with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of demands including the development of an African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center. 

The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts. 

One year later, after an African American member of the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational, social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator, accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it has become. One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then President Hovde by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.”

History of protests at Purdue shows 'another world is possible' https://www.purdueexponent.org/city_state/history-of-protests-at-purdue-shows-another-world-is-possible/article_51b69386-b15e-11ea-8b76-b31b38228621.html

Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated students rallied together on Friday, November 13, 2014 on the Purdue campus. They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of color throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.

The organizers provided thirteen demands including:

-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue

-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with student involvement in the hiring process

-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness curriculum”

-the establishment of a campus police advisory board

-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020

-greater representatives of minority groups on student government bodies

Frederick Douglass was correct.  Progress requires struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he was about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of protests in 1968, 2015 and today at Purdue recognize  that the struggles are long, the victories sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the twenty-first century are linked in a chain for justice.

The Struggle Continues as the importance of DEI Becomes a Political Tool 

Today, the percentage of underrepresented students continues to be low and various programs of relevance to educating all students, including underrepresented ones, of the mixed history and culture of the United States are being threatened with extinction, But Purdue University continues its commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Programs and principles should be celebrated and supported. And, this month, Black History Month, we should remember and pay homage to those students, faculty, and staff who stood up for programs that have made Purdue University a more comfortable and intellectually vital place for everybody.

https://stories.purdue.edu/vice-provost-gates-aims-to-transform-campus-culture/

https://www.purdue.edu/diversity-inclusion/about-us/what-we-do.html

 

THE BANKS ARE (STILL) MADE OF MARBLE

 I want to thank you all for your kind birthday wishes.

Reflecting on my birthday, metaphorically, I was thinking that

old songs might still have some use (even though times change).

Below are some links to old songs that still make sense.

 

Harry Targ

Pete Seeger, “The Banks Are Made of Marble”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-o3CJytIPE

 

 

·                                                          money.cnn.com

 (from December 17, 2017 but still relevant)

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report written by its representative, Philip Alston, after an extensive visit to the United States. The report was called “A Journey Through a Land of Extreme Poverty; Welcome to America” and was based on personal observations and an examination of longitudinal and comparative data. He found in California, West Virginia, Alabama, Puerto Rico and elsewhere extremes of poverty and inadequate access to housing, health care, education, and other social needs. He noted that along with the increasing economic misery for the many there was a growing concentration of wealth for the few (the guardian.com, December 15, 2017)

In an NPR interview Alston noted that every other wealthy country provides more for its citizenry than the United States and is more equal in wealth and income. China, he said, a newly developed country, has lowered the gaps in wealth, income, and social well-being more effectively than the United States over the last 15 years.

Paradoxically, this damning report appeared at the same time as the Congress and the President are finalizing a new tax bill that will dramatically increase wealth, income, and security for the tiny ruling class at the growing expense of the vast majority of the United States population: workers, women, African Americans, immigrants, and children, youth, and the elderly.

Many economists are systematically analyzing the impacts of these negative economic trends across time and the draconian effect the new tax bill will have on the whole structure of reform programs that were put in place since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But sometimes the analysis, critique, and call for action is most effectively reflected in song. 

Thus the repost below from New Clear Vision, August 10, 2011

Sometimes We Have to Sing and Cry and Hit the Streets…

 Harry Targ

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard the folk group, The Weavers in the 1950s. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

I still listen to the music that makes me angry, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to (and even give) on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization — and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

 

The Doomsday Clock Continues to Tick: 2025

 Harry Targ

https://thebulletin.org/2025/01/press-release-doomsday-clock-set-at-89-seconds-to-midnight-closest-ever-to-human-extinction/

(“The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock to 89 seconds before midnight - the theoretical point of annihilation. That is one second closer than it was set last year. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War Two to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.” Reuters, January 28, 2025)

 

THE "WE MARCH ONWARD" RALLY: Seven Years Ago and the Threat of War Worsens

 

County Courthouse, Lafayette, Indiana, January 27, 2018, posted February 1, 2018

Threats to Peace Today: Remarks at the 2018 Rally

We are here to reflect on movements for social and economic justice one year into the administration of Donald Trump.

What caught my attention a few days ago was a press conference that was organized by science editors of the esteemed journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This journal began publishing shortly after the end of World War II. Among its most visible tasks has been tracking the probability of nuclear war.

Using its metaphoric Doomsday Clock scientific experts estimate each year how close the world is moving toward nuclear war. The scientists last week moved the dials two minutes closer to midnight (to a dangerous two and one-half minutes to midnight). In other words, over the last year the United States and the world, the scientists say, have moved ever closer to nuclear war.

Reflecting on the policies of the last year that have led to this symbolic prediction of increasing possibility of nuclear war, we can reflect on several developments:

The recently issued National Security Strategy document issued by the Trump Administration indicates US policy would shift from the war on terrorism to homeland security. This shift would be complemented by the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons and a strategy based on the primacy of threats from Russia and China.

The Trump Administration in conjunction with Congress (with support from both parties) has approved a military budget for the coming year in excess of $700 billion, 68 percent of federal discretionary spending.

The Trump Administration is continuing the trajectory of maintaining US troops and private contract armies in 1,000 military installations in anywhere from 70 to 170 countries. The US continues to expand its military presence on the African continent.

The Trump Administration over the last several months has been engaged in a rhetorical war with North Korea, while US and South Korean military forces engage in simulated military exercises. The US has constructed a new provocative anti-missile installation in South Korea as well.

The Trump Administration has threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty with Iran, has announced its intention of expanding troop strength in Afghanistan, and has placed thousands of US troops in Syria.

The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, begun to reverse improved relations with Cuba, and continues to escalate its efforts to destabilize governments such as in Venezuela and Bolivia.

And, President Trump announced that the US embassy was moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a position not only condemned by the Palestinian people but by virtually every country in the world.

All of these historical developments in United States foreign policy are occurring in the context of an international system that is shifting away from United States hegemony to a multipolar world. Countries such as China are experiencing economic development that challenges the economic domination that the United States has held over the global political economy for 100 years. To overcome this declining relative economic power, the United States is pursuing greater advances in military power. This combination of economic decline and military advance makes the world a more dangerous place.

The Historic Role of Women in Peace and Justice Movements

As women and men organized politically during 2017, and come together in January, 2018 to celebrate this mobilization, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful world. Campaigns for social and economic justice and women’s movements, and particularly women’s peace movements, are inextricably connected.

In 1915, 1,200 women from diverse backgrounds met in the Hague to create what became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They opposed World War I and would continue to oppose war in the over 100 years of their existence. They also demanded that women play a role in decision-making about all matters of foreign policy, including decisions concerning war and peace.

WILPF, the oldest peace group in the United States was led for many years by Jane Addams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

In 1961 another women’s peace group, Women Strike for Peace, organized a day-long national strike of 50,000 women in 60 cities demanding nuclear disarmament. They opposed nuclear testing, increased radiation in the atmosphere and marched to the slogan, “End the Arms Race: Not the Human Race.” Women Strike for Peace became early opponents of the escalating Vietnam war. Among its prominent spokespersons was soon-to-be Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Code Pink is a grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism. It was organized in 2002 and includes militant activists such as Medea Benjamin and Colonel Ann Wright. Code Pink advocates peace, a human rights agenda, and demands conversion from military spending to spending for health care, green jobs, and the general welfare. They have been active in campaigns for justice for the Palestinian people and in opposition to United States support for violence perpetuated by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.

The writing and activism of Jane Addams has been an important inspiration that runs throughout the educational, advocacy, and militant peace activity of women for the last 100 years. Addams’ classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace” was originally published in 1907 and reissued with an introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clint Fink in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.

In this essay, Carroll and Fink indicate that Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams,  achieving what peace researchers later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds including patriarchy, paternalism, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. Addams wrote that there needed to be a theoretical and practical shift from individualism and property rights to community. The spirit of nationalism must be replaced by internationalism. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars.

We move ahead in these troubled times inspired by the great fighters for racial justice including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.

We are also inspired by those who struggled for workers’ rights: Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, John L. Lewis, and Sidney Hillman.

And, as the Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight, we desperately need to reacquaint ourselves with our foremothers whose ideas and activism have been central to movements for peace and justice throughout the world.

 

 

REMEMBERING HOWARD ZINN (1922-2010) WHEN THE CONTENT OF EDUCATION IS UNDER THREAT

 

THE LARGER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DANIELS/ZINN CONTROVERSY

(Critics of the Israeli war on Gaza, particularly on college campuses, are being erroneously labeled as antisemitic. The campaigns in the media and by politicians such as former Indiana Governor and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels are designed to stifle dissent. The Fox News interview below and the attack on Howard Zinn's work a decade ago suggest the continuing threat to academic freedom in higher education. https://youtu.be/HkelVbykuUk?si=We7nSCA8qbBqWB3d )

Harry Targ

On July 17, 2013 an Associated Press story was published in several newspapers quoting from 2010 e-mails Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana wrote to “top state educational officials.” The e-mails encouraged the suppression of popular historian Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States” in Indiana public education, including university level teacher training courses. Upon the death of popular historian Howard Zinn, Daniels e-mailed that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

When challenged on the seeming threats to academic freedom, Daniels claimed that his directives “only” referred to K through 12 instruction despite the fact that his e-mails made it clear he opposed instruction that used Zinn’s writings as tools for in-service training for teachers. 

Ninety Purdue University faculty (including this author) signed a letter to President Daniels objecting to his implied threat to academic freedom. In addition to defending the university as a place for debate among competing ideas, the faculty objected to the negative characterization of Zinn’s scholarship as an historian. They also objected to Daniels’ claim that although he was not interested in censoring scholarship and teaching at the university, when he was governor he had the responsibility to oversee school curricula from kindergarten through high school.

Faculty pointed out that restricting what was being taught to teachers pursuing advanced credits and restricting the right of teachers to use Zinn’s work in pre-college curricula violated academic freedom. Many Purdue faculty believed that extreme statements damning the substance of Zinn’s work cast a pall on the university and made serious reflection on American history in elementary and high schools more difficult for young people and their teachers.

It is important to note that the Daniels e-mails, and their threat to free discussion and debate in educational institutions in Indiana, reflect the deep struggles being waged in the American political system. Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university. Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others. The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education.  In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for  deciding on their own what interpretations of  subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted. 

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, “A People’s History of the United States,” which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:”

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events have included Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs include lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation, has awarded $400 million over the last decade to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organizations 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobby for restricting academic freedom in higher education include David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS seeks to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

The NAS current president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, entitled “Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn.” Wood wrote that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States”  is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.  

A similar version of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne, Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013.

BOOK REVIEW: "SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY IN CUBA:: FOUNDATIONS AND PRACTICES FOR SOCIALIST DEVELOPMENT

Cubans work to improve their society while President Trump continues The War on the Cuban people . ("Trump put Cuba back on state sponsor of terrorism list — right where it belongs," the Miami Herald editorial board.)

Socialism and Democracy Book Review:

 "SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY IN CUBA: FOUNDATIONS AND PRACTICES FOR SOCIALIST DEVELOPMENT

Rafael J. Betancourt and Jusmary Gớmez Arencibia, editors, (London: Lexington Books, 2023), 342 pp., $120

Harry Targ

 (Professor Emeritus)

Published online: 15 Jan 2025

• https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2024.2435797

Thousands of us have been working in solidarity with Cuba for years, animated by the heroism of the Cuban revolutionaries, who built a guerrilla army to overthrow the US created and backed Batista dictatorship. We have seen a possible better future for all of humankind in the struggles and adaptations of the revolutionary socialism being built in Cuba since 1959.

But sometimes our enthusiasms have led us to ignore the profound difficulties the Cubans face, not only in overcoming the US’s economic blockade, but in creating a just society out of mixed political and economic institutions and the variety of ideological assumptions embedded in Cuban society. This edited collection is designed to address the real complexities that a society like Cuba faces in the task of building a humane socialism or what is referred to in the collection of essays, as the “social and solidarity economy” coupled with “social business responsibility.”

This collection was prepared by the Red Cubana de Economia Social y Solidaria y Responsabilidatad Social Empresarial (ESORSE)–The Cuban Network of Social and Solidarity Economy and Social Business Responsibility. ESORSE is a network composed of Cuban academics, members of Cuban scientific institutions, and activists from communities of cooperatives, communes, businesses and others seeking to advance the project of the Cuban Revolution. The network pursues the building of a social and solidarity economy (ESS) and social responsibility in business (RS). As the editors say, the network, including this collection of essays, is designed to connect stakeholders who are trying to build socialism. They emphasize the need to prioritize human values over market values.

The collection’s nineteen essays address a variety of issues facing the Cuban revolutionary project in the twenty-first century. These include the relationship between the public and private sectors, the role of the state, cooperatives, empowerment of workers, citizen participation in public policies including budgetary matters, worker training, efficiencies and production chains, and issues of gender sensitivity and those involving other “vulnerable groups.”

The essays examine in detail the efforts of the Cubans and the policies they adopted over the last decade to create a socialism that is both humane and productive. In the first essay Enrique Gớmez Cabezas points out that socialism offers the opportunity of building equal and liberatory relationships, even though the task is difficult given the historic role capitalism has played on the collective mindset of the people.

In the second essay, Betancourt addresses two documents endorsed by the Cuban Communist Party over the last decade that aid “to combine innovation and continuity,” given the crises caused by United States foreign policy and the Covid epidemic. He reviews the history of Cuban private enterprises, cooperatives, and the activities of industrial and service workers. As emphasized by all nineteen essays, a socialist economy is supposed to serve the people, not to generate profit for owners. The essay by Ovideo D’Angelo Hernandez grounds the discussion of ESS in the literature and policies practiced throughout Latin America. To this extent the Cuban project, it is suggested, is not unique but part of a larger discussion ensuing in the Global South.

Subsequent chapters deal with the role of the state, not assuming the role of entrepreneur, Cubans participating in budgeting, and “the inclusion of vulnerable groups” both as beneficiaries and participants in ESS. A sophisticated essay, “Population, Value Chains and Social and Solidarity Economy,” addresses the literature on economic development and population, an issue not usually addressed by observers of the Global South.

Other essays address “public-private partnerships,” the social responsibility of businesses, the law of cooperatives, and their significance for building Cuban socialism from the bottom up. Several essays provide data on cooperatives, comparisons between agricultural and industrial co-ops, and their potential for increasing sensitivity to the environment, and equitable gender roles. The volume concludes with an essay on institutional social responsibilities, pointing to “a new global context.” The essay asserts that while these are difficult times they open the door for reflection on the old ways and what needs change.

This volume is dense, filled with useful data about Cuba and raises the very difficult questions about building a humane socialism. The essays can be used to reflect on the multiplicity of changes now going on in the Global South. The Cuban experience addressed in this collection can be seen in the light of the issues that most countries of the Global South face as they debate how to confront the spirit of anti-colonialism. These issues link the present with the past and continue the legacy of the non-aligned movement, the New International Economic Order, and various contemporary experiments at national sovereignty and multilateralism.

The essays in this volume suggest how readers and activists in the US and elsewhere must step up activism to oppose the economic blockade of Cuba and other efforts that impede the serious work of building a Social and Solidarity Economy in Cuba. And, most importantly, the essays use research and lived experiences to address the complex issues the Cubans face.

 

 

THEY STILL ARE CALLED "DEPORTEES" (originally posted December 16, 2011)

 Harry Targ : The United States Violates The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Eleanor Roosevelt viewed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as her greatest achievement. Image from Creative Commons.

Numerous international human rights documents firmly estab­lish the principle that no human being can be “illegal” or outside the protection of the law. Yet despite the clearly established principle that discrimination and abuse based on immigration status are violations of human rights, U.S. government policies continue to sanction human rights violations against migrants and im­migrants.

Federal immigration enforcement policies, including border enforcement measures by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), have led to an increase in racial profiling, border killings, and denial of due process rights. Immigrant workers are often abused, exploited, and have become scapegoats and ictims of racism and stereotyping. (See The American Civil Liberties Union, “Human Rights and Immigration,” aclu.org).

Nameless People

The world is observing a massive violation of human rights being perpetrated at the United States/Mexican border today. And the human tragedy has many historical parallels.

Over sixty years ago Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song “Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”  He wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor.

Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference),  growing income and wealth inequality and poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere,  emigration has increased. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons. Many more people were forced to flee their homes and communities to other locations within their own countries.

One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade, the movement of people has often been defined as “illegal.” The idea of national sovereignty is been used to justify branding some human migrants as “illegal,” while others receive legal status. If capital is and has been global, the movement of people should be respected as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as, Guthrie’s term,  “deportees.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The horrific 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.

In December, 1948, the year Guthrie wrote his song,  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 recognized "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 consisted of 30 articles, with varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles referred primarily to civil and political rights. They prohibited discrimination, persecution for the holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention.

Persons had 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 addressed what may be called social and economic rights. These included 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 had sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and education, free at least at the primary levels.

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

While each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided a rich and vivid portrait of what must be achieved for all humankind, no article speaks to our time more than Article 23. It is one of the longer articles, identifying 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 constituted a bedrock vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from Cairo to Madison, to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world.

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 all because the value of what they produce is expropriated by the top 1 percent of global society.

Data about the world, data about the United States, and right now the experience of emigres from Central America seeking their human rights, make it clear that there has been a 30-year trajectory in the direction opposite to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Global inequality is growing. The rights and abilities of workers to form unions are shrinking. Standards of living of most of humankind are declining. The ability of most workers everywhere to acquire secure jobs is declining. And, in the case of people fleeing their own countries in desperation, they experience incarceration in brutally inhumane camps.

Fundamentally, the world is witnessing a denigration of the vision articulated after World War II that “never again” would sectors of humanity be victimized by economic injustice, political repression, and state violence.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights must now become the standard by which national policies are judged. Anything short of the principles embedded in the Declaration constitute a crime that must be opposed.