The Day is Coming. William Morris.
Come hither, lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell, Of the wonderful days a-coming, when all shall be better than well. And the tale shall be told of a country, a land in the midst of the sea, And folk shall call it England in the days that are going to be. There more than one in a thousand in the days that are yet to come Shall have some hope of the morrow, some joy of the ancient home. For then--laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of mine - All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than swine. Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to stand. Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf anear. I tell you this for a wonder, that no man then shall be glad Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work he had. For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed, Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed. O strange new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain? For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain. Then all Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave. And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold To buy his friend in the market, and pinch and pine the sold? Nay, what save the lovely city, and the little house on the hill, And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy fields we till; And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead; And the wise men seeking out marvels, and the poet's teeming head; And the painter's hand of wonder; and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music: all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair. Ah! such are the days that shall be! But what are the deeds of to-day, In the days of the years we dwell in, that wear our lives away? Why, then, and for what are we waiting? There are three words to speak: WE WILL IT, and what is the foeman but the dream-strong wakened and weak? O why and for what are we waiting? While our brothers droop and die, And on every wind of the heavens a wasted life goes by. How long shall they reproach us where crowd on crowd they dwell, Poor ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell? Through squalid life they laboured, in sordid grief they died, Those sons of a mighty mother, those props of England's pride. They are gone; there is none can undo it, nor save our souls from the curse; But many a million cometh, and shall they be better or worse? It is we must answer and hasten, and open wide the door For the rich man's hurrying terror, and the slow-foot hope of the poor. Yea, the voiceless wrath of the wretched, and their unlearned discontent, We must give it voice and wisdom till the waiting-tide be spent. Come, then, since all things call us, the living and the dead, And o'er the weltering tangle a glimmering light is shed. Come, then, let us cast off fooling, and put by ease and rest, For the CAUSE alone is worthy till the good days bring the best. Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail. Ah! come, cast off all fooling, for this, at least, we know: That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the Banners go. Collectivisation Debate scene (12:21) from Land and Freedom. Ken Loach. 1995. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B3JChcOIQI from "How Churchill Crushed Greece's Anti-Fascist Resistance", by Joelle Fontaine. 2020. On May 8, 1945, Hitler’s successors signed Germany’s capitulation. By that point, Greece had already been liberated for six months. Across more than three years, the Greek people had waged a mass resistance against the fascist occupiers — the Italians, the Bulgarians, and above all the Germans — in which they had shown heroic courage in the face of a boundless terror. Yet a new terror now began to strike the country; for while collaborators preserved their posts at the head of the army, the police, and the organs of state power, the partisans were persecuted, deported, and executed anew. For long years, up until 1974, the Greek resistance was presented as a criminal enterprise by successive governments. While the Resistance was finally recognised in 1982, it is still not the object of any official commemoration. Fear of a Red Greece You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens and for neutralising or destroying all EAM-ELAS [National Liberation Front – Greek People’s Liberation Army] bands approaching the city. You may make any regulations you like for the strict control of the streets or for the rounding up of any number of truculent persons…. It would be well of course if your command were reinforced by the authority of some Greek Government…. Do not, however, hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress…. We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary. The man who wrote these lines was none other than British prime minister Winston Churchill. This was in December 1944: Nazi troops were still resisting the Allies, which were making slow progress in Italy and being pushed back in the Ardennes faced with the Wehrmacht’s final counter-offensive. Yet the “bands” here targeted by Churchill were not groups of collaborators, but the partisans of the great National Liberation Front (EAM), which had for three years mounted mass resistance against the German occupiers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean had been the center of a rivalry between Britain and Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 having put an end to the latter country’s ambitions in the region, in the early 1940s, Greece was under unchallenged British influence. In this context, the country was of some strategic importance. The development of a Resistance allying the Communists with small pro-socialist parties had very quickly caused alarm within the British Foreign Office, which feared “Russian” penetration in the Mediterranean. In disgrace among the population and associated with general Ioannis Metaxas’s 1936-41 fascist dictatorship, the Greek monarchy seemed to Churchill to be the only force capable of assuring the maintenance of British domination. In this context, London’s allies allowed it to act as it pleased. Despite the Wilsonian tradition — which was officially hostile to spheres of influence, above all when they troubled the penetration of US capital and US goods — Franklin D. Roosevelt supported Churchill. As for Joseph Stalin, he aimed above all to put an end to the war, seeking to avoid compromising his fragile “grand alliance” with the United States and the British. Ever since May 1944, Churchill had sought an arrangement over the Balkans; Stalin could accept this all the more easily as his interlocutor left him a free hand in Romania and Bulgaria. Throughout the war, Churchill was subject to the “Greek storm.” As early as March 1941, when the German threat to the Balkans became clear, he had ordered his Near-East HQ to detach fifty thousand men to be sent to Greece. This initiative interrupted the victorious British offensive in Libya, albeit without preventing the Wehrmacht’s advance over Greek territory the following month. The King of Greece, George II, took up exile in London together with his government — which was largely the same as under Metaxas’s dictatorship. His armed forces were partly reconstituted in Egypt and fought by the side of the British, who kept a close watch over them; indeed, the soldiers challenged the fact that most of the officers leading them were royalists. In Greece itself, a mass resistance movement rapidly developed. The National Liberation Front emerged in September 1941. It organised imposing demonstrations in the big cities, and in spring of 1942, it moved to the creation of maquis units under the leadership of its people’s army, ELAS. At the same time, the agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) — created by Churchill in 1940 to carry out sabotage actions behind enemy lines, in collaboration with the resistance movements in the occupied countries — developed their own activities in relative autonomy. The British tried without great success to encourage — or create — organisations competing with the EAM. But the leaders of the other parties were little tempted by active resistance. The EAM-ELAS remained by far the main resistance organisation, indispensable from a military point of view. In exchange for its participation in the operations planned by the British, its representatives were received in Cairo in August 1943, in view of an accord with the exile government. Here the British got a measure of the importance the EAM had taken on, as well as the extent of the desire for change among the population. At the same time, during the Quadrant Conference with Roosevelt in Quebec (August 17-24, 1943), Churchill saw his last hopes of an Allied landing in Greece vanish. Meanwhile, the Red Army’s advance beyond the USSR’s own frontiers was no longer in doubt. Churchill now took matters directly in hand, despite his advisers’ reticence, blocking off any possibility of negotiation and sending the EAM delegates home. At the same time, in a note to his high command, he drafted what would later become the MANNA plan: namely, to send an expeditionary corps to Greece after the German troops’ withdrawal. Henceforth, the British agents’ mission was to damage ELAS by all means available. They tried to poach its partisans by bribing them with gold sovereigns — a convincing argument in these times of hyperinflation, when the British pound had reached 2 million drachma. They financed small competitor organisations, including those who called themselves “nationalist,” but were in fact accomplices of the Germans. They placed their own men within the collaborationist government as well as in the “security battalions” created by Athens. These militias took part in the Nazi troops’ operations, with their procession of massacres and burned-down villages. In the towns, they took part in the bloko of whole neighbourhoods, encircling a district in the middle of the night, picking out the partisans with the aid of masked informers, and then shooting them. The double game of the British — allowing the militias’ leaders to claim to be serving both them and the King — sowed the seeds of the civil war as early as the winter of 1943-44. The EAM-ELAS nonetheless succeeded in liberating a large part of the country. It established popular institutions which formed a counter-state. The worries among the British peaked in March 1944, when a “government of the mountains” was created that organised elections. Conversely, this approach awakened the enthusiasm of the Greek armed forces in Egypt, who immediately demanded that the Resistance be included in the exile government. Churchill replied with pitiless repression. He had “rebellious” elements deported to camps in Africa, and set up a praetorian guard prepared to return to Greece with the King and the British troops upon Liberation. Unable to eliminate the EAM by force within Greece itself, the British resorted to political manoeuvres to which its leaders in the mountains — little experienced in this domain — struggled to respond. Caught between their unity strategy and their consciousness of the danger of a coup coming from the Right and the British, they fell into a trap at the carefully pre-arranged conference held in Lebanon in August 1944. After a great deal of hesitation, they agreed to participate – represented only as a small minority — in a national unity government led by Churchill’s man George Papandreou (grandfather of the Socialist prime minister of the same name). The following month, the EAM leaders went as far as to recognise the authority of a British military governor, Ronald Scobie, who would arrive in Greece upon liberation. After Liberation Everything was set for the application of the MANNA plan, which had been prepared the previous year. The victorious Red Army offensive in Bulgaria in September 1944 forced the Wehrmacht to withdraw from Greece, under attack from ELAS partisans. It was after this retreat that the British expeditionary corps arrived, accompanied by Papandreou and Scobie. Establishing themselves in the capital on October 18, the two men demanded that ELAS lay down its weapons, even as they rejected the disarming of the praetorian guard that had been formed in Egypt and, conveniently enough, transferred to Athens in early November. No trials were mounted against collaborators, and armed militiamen circulated in the capital with impunity, persecuting the resistance fighters. The members of the security battalions were locked away in their barracks, but there they enjoyed good living conditions and regular training. After trying to achieve guarantees throughout November, the EAM ministers ultimately resigned. December 3, 1944, saw a monster demonstration in Syntagma Square to demand Papandreou’s resignation and the constitution of a new government. The massacre that followed — the police opened fire on unarmed civilians, leaving over twenty dead and more than a hundred wounded — triggered the insurrection of the people of Athens. This was the pretext that Churchill had sought in order to be able to break the Resistance. He now ordered Scobie to crush the rebels. Arms, planes and ever more troops (up to 75,000 men) were diverted from the Italian front to Greece. The EAM’s proposals for negotiations were rejected. As Churchill put it, “The clear objective is the defeat of EAM. The ending of the fighting is subsidiary to this…. Firmness and sobriety are what are needed now, and not eager embraces, while the real quarrel is unsettled.” Braving the British and international press — but also the MPs in the Commons, who challenged him in stormy debates — Churchill held firm to his position. Badly armed, badly fed, and for the most part very young, the partisans of the EAM in Athens and Piraeus held out for 33 days under this deluge of fire, faced with both the British troops and the security battalions let out of their barracks and rearmed for this very occasion. Churchill himself came to Athens in late December and resigned himself to forcing King George II — still in London — to accept a regency. But he remained inflexible on the other guarantees demanded by the EAM. While the ELAS was still present across the rest of Greece’s territory, its leaders dreaded imposing new trials on an exhausted and famished population: 1,770 villages had been burned, more than a million people did not have a roof over their heads, and grain production had fallen by 40 percent. Meanwhile, the Allies’ aid only reached those who collaborated with them. With the Varkiza accord signed on February 12, 1945, the ELAS agreed unilaterally to give up its weapons. At the same time at Yalta, Churchill, together with Roosevelt and Stalin, solemnly proclaimed “the right of all peoples in liberated Europe to choose their own form of government.” But the EAM was not yet destroyed. It tried to pursue its goal of major reforms by legal means, and was in a position to win a majority at the elections. Faced with this threat, the British Labour government that took over from Churchill in July 1945 maintained a sizeable occupation force, while also relying on the help of the very men who had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the massacre of resistance fighters — not least a police force and an army reconstituted thanks to the attentions of the British military mission. The EAM partisans were arrested, convicted and subjected to unprecedented terror in the countryside. In this context, honest elections were impossible. Despite that, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin — concerned with giving the country a respectable façade to present to the United Nations — ordered that elections take place in March 1946. The EAM, and democratic forces in general, refused to participate. The undermine majority that inevitably resulted had nothing left to organise but the referendum guaranteeing the King’s return the following September. This time the British had achieved their objective. But in the meantime, many former partisans had returned to the maquis to escape persecution, and the United Kingdom could no longer guarantee the survival — and still less the victory — of a Right that it had itself artificially maintained in power. Seeking to take over this task, on March 12, 1947, US president Harry Truman asked that Congress give him the funds necessary for “helping” Greece on the pretext of “stopping communism.” In breaking the Greek Resistance, the British had precipitated a civil war that would last — in open or latent forms — for some thirty years, with a brief lull between 1963 and 1965. It would only end with the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship in 1974. This “coup in Athens” reminds us that through its history, modern Greece has only enjoyed a very limited sovereignty. This, indeed, is its painful experience once again today.
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"Who Should Ask for Pardon and Who Can Grant It?" by Subcomandante Marcos. 1994.
JANUARY 18, 1994 To the national weekly Proceso To the national newspaper La Jornada To the national newspaper El Financiero To the local newspaper of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Tiempo Sirs: I OUGHT TO START with a few apologies (a bad start, my grandmother would say). Because of a mistake by our press office, we didn’t send my last letter to the weekly Proceso. I hope the people at Proceso will understand this oversight and that they’ll receive this note without rancor, resentment, or re . . . etcetera. First, I’d like to direct your attention to the enclosed communiqués from the EZLN. They refer to the federal army’s repeated violations of the cease-fire, the federal government’s amnesty offer, and Camacho Solis’ appointment as the envoy for peace and reconciliation in Chiapas. I believe you’ve already received the documents we sent on January 13. I don’t know what reaction these documents will provoke or what the federal government’s response to our demands will be, so I don’t refer to them in this letter. Up to today, January 18, 1994, the only thing we’ve heard about is the federal government’s formal offer to pardon our troops. Why do we need to be pardoned? What are they going to pardon us for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting our misery in silence? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy, and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, breakbone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count, with no one saying, “ENOUGH!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask for pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs or our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us for the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it? The president of the nation? Federal ministers, senators, municipal representatives, governors, or mayors? The police? The federal army? The banking, industry, commerce, and land magnates? Political parties? Intellectuals? Galio and Nexus? 3 The mass media? Students? Teachers? People in the neighborhoods? Laborers? Farm workers? Indigenous people? Those who died in vain? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Well, that’s all for now. Health to you and a hug; in this kind of cold climate, you’ll be glad for both, I think, even coming from a “professional of violence.” SUBCOMANDANTE INSURGENTE MARCOS "Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Resistance" by Subcomandante Marcos. 1994. FEBRUARY 1, 1994 To the Council of Guerrero Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico Brothers and sisters: WE WANT TO TELL YOU that we received your letter sent on January 24th of 1994. We are very happy to know that our indigenous brothers Amuzgos, Mixtec, Nahuatl,and Tlapanecos know of our just struggle for dignity and liberty for the indigenous and for all Mexicans. Our heart is made strong with your words, which come from so far away, that come from the history of oppression, death, and misery that all the bad governors have decreed for our peoples, for our persons. Our heart is made big with your message that reaches us skipping mountains and rivers, cities and roads, suspicions and prejudices. In our name, in your name, in the name of all the indigenous of Mexico, and in the name of all good people who walk a good path, we receive your words, brothers and sisters, yesterday kin in exploitation and misery, today and tomorrow brothers and sisters in a dignified and true struggle. Today marks one month since the Zapatista light came to illuminate our night and our people. In our heart there was so much pain, so great was our death and our shame, brothers and sisters, that they no longer fit into this world given to us by our grandfathers. So great was the pain and shame that they no longer fit inside the heart of just a few, and they spilled over and began filling other hearts with pain and shame, the hearts of the eldest and wisest of our peoples, and the hearts of the young men and women, brave ones all of them, and the hearts of the children, even the youngest ones, and filled with pain were the hearts of the animals and plants. The heart filled with stones, and our whole world was filled with pain and shame, and the wind and the sun were also pained and shamed, and the earth had pain and shame. Everything was pain and shame. Everything was silence. The pain that gathered us made us speak, and we recognized that in our words there was truth. We understood that not only pain and shame lived in our tongue; we learned there was still hope in our chests. We spoke to ourselves, we looked inside ourselves, and we looked at our history. We saw our eldest fathers suffer and struggle, we saw our grandfathers struggle, we saw our fathers with fury in their hands, we saw that not all had been taken from us, that we still had what was most valuable, that which made us live, that which made our step rise above plants and animals, that which made the stone stay beneath our feet, and we saw, brothers and sisters, that dignity was everything we had, and we saw that our shame was big for having forgotten it, and we saw that dignity was good so that men would be men once again. And dignity came to reside once again in our heart, and we were renewed. And the dead, our dead, saw that we were renewed, and they called to us again, to dignity and to the struggle. And so in our heart there was no longer just pain and shame. Courage and valor came to us through the mouth of our elders, who were dead but lived again in the dignity that they gave to us. And we saw that it was not good to die of shame and pain, that it was not good to die without having struggled. And we saw that we must gain a dignified death so that all could live one day with the good and with reason. And so our hands searched for liberty and justice, our hands, empty of hope, were filled with the fire to demand and shout our deep desires and our struggle. And so we rose to walk again. Our step became steady once again, our hands and our heart were armed. “For all!” says our heart, not just for some. “For all!” says our step. “For all!” shouts our spilled blood, flowering in the city streets where lies and privation govern. We have left our lands behind, our homes are far away, we left everything and everyone, we lifted our skin to dress ourselves with war and death, we die to live. Nothing for us, everything for all, that which is rightfully ours and our children’s. We have left everything, all of us. Now they want to leave us alone, brothers and sisters, they want that our death be useless, they want that our blood be forgotten among the stones and dung, they want that our voice be hushed, they want that our step become once again distant. Don’t abandon us, brothers and sisters. Take our blood and nourish yourselves, fill the heart that is yours and of all good people in these lands, indigenous and not indigenous, men and women, elders and children. Don’t leave us to ourselves. Let not this have been in vain. Let the voice of the blood that united us when the earth and the skies were not the property of the grandees call to us once again. Let our hearts walk the same path. Let the powerful tremble. Let the heart of the small and miserable be gladdened. Let the dead of always have life. Don’t abandon us. Don’t let us die alone. Don’t leave our struggle in the vacuum of the powerful. Brothers and sisters, let our path be the same, one for all. Liberty! Democracy! Justice! Respectfully, From The Mountains Of The Mexican Southeast CCRI-CG OF THE EZLN SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS Closing Session of the "Democratic Teachers and Zapatista Dream" by Subcomandante Marcos. 1999. Encuentro August 1, 1999. Teachers: Over the last two days, various positions have been taken on the themes of the meeting. All of them, however, have focused on one single point: the need for the word to meet - through it and for it - movements who meet each other and who discover themselves to be moving towards the same destiny, confronting the same obstacles, suffering the same attacks from the same enemies as always. It could be said that the bridge that joins an indigenous education promoter - like those who spoke in front of you here yesterday - with a primary or secondary teacher from Baja California, from Jalisco, from Veracruz, from Guanajuato, from the Mexican State, from Chiapas or from the Federal District, is the same nightmare that the powerful imposes: low salaries, repression as a response to their demands, a lack of union democracy, bad working conditions, absurd and useless curricula, ineffective and oppressive pedagogical methods, students who do not have the minimal conditions that would allow them to devote themselves to school as it is and as needs to be. So many and so many things that you have put forward in your presentations and that have emerged from the formal and informal talks. Yes, one single nightmare unites educators throughout the country. But not alone. Also, as we have discovered at this encuentro, the bridge that joins the democratic teachers has much of dreams. And it is this dream that converts the initial bridge of the democratic teachers into many, and, without trying to, dreams are now being dreamt by workers, electricians, university students, rebel indigenous, campesinos without land, dissident housewives, worried neighbors, base church communities struggling in their commitment to the poor, honest religious persons, artists and intellectuals fed up with the gilded cage in which the Power keeps them, persecuted homosexuals and lesbians, Mexican men and women who say, and who say to each other, who murmur, who by times shout: "Ya basta!" And, if I am talking of bridges now, it is because I wish to remind you that no one in this country has better opportunities, or better tools, for extending bridges than do teachers. In addition to their own demands, teachers are mirror and window to what is happening throughout the country. Through them are seen the contradictions and contrasts of a country put up for sale by a gang of thieves, but which is unwilling to die as a Nation. We, the democratic teachers, can build those bridges. If we have not done so before now, it is because we are still shut up within our own horizons, which, although broad, do not include everyone, or it is because we have forgotten that to be a teacher is also to be a builder of bridges. Did I say "we, the democratic teachers'? Just a minute: Are we not rebel indigenous, zapatistas, transgressors of the law of gravity and of others, stones in the shoes of the powerful, inconvenient witnesses to the antics of the political class, defiant critics of the old politics, soldiers who are fighting so that soldiers will not exist, nocturnal beings without face and without name, shadows of the shadows, talkative fools, dreamers, irredeemable utopians, irreverent ones, and other etceteras that now escape me, but that can be found in any column, magazine, news show or commentator with which the government repeats the lies that not even they believe. Yes, we are all that and more. But we are also democratic teachers and electrical workers and university students and workers in the city and the country and artists and intellectuals and religious men and women and neighbors and homosexuals and lesbians and ordinary women and men and children and old ones, that is, rebels, dissidents, inconvenient ones, dreamers. Because of that, the most important thing we zapatistas want to ask you is to see us as another democratic union section. That you do not see us as someone who must be helped, poor things, out of pity, out of alms, out of charity. We want you to see us as your companeros, as being as willing as anyone to mobilize and to support the teachers struggles. Not only because your demands are just and because you are good and honest persons, but also, and above all, because they are our demands as well. Because nothing will be complete nor finished if teachers continue to be oppressed by pro-management unions, if bad labor conditions continue - and the low salaries - , if education continues to breed oppressed and oppressors, if school continues to be - for millions of Mexicans - as distant as dignified housing, a fair wage, a piece of land, enough food, full health, freedom of thought and association, popular democracy, authentic independence and true peace. Now, taking advantage of the fact that you are here, we want to ask something special of you. We want to ask you to support the student movement at the UNAM and the struggle of the Mexican Electricians Union. The one is against the privatization of education, and the other against the privatization of the electrical industry. Currently, the students are the victims of a fierce offensive by the government and by the electronic media that serves the powerful. The struggle of the students, and their collective head, the General Strike Council, is also the struggle of all of us, and no help should be spared them at all. We are asking you not just to help them, but also to make them feel, to know, that the democratic teachers are supporting their struggle and making it theirs. Democratic teachers: The EZLN is army and zapatista, yes. But it is also of "National Liberation." And that means not just that its struggle takes in the entire country, it also means that its struggle is for all Mexican men and women. It means that our struggle is also for the teachers, but it means, above all, that the teachers struggles are also our struggles. We want you to understand that you have extended a bridge to the zapatistas. And that bridges are made to be crossed, yes, but to be crossed in both directions. And this bridge, that has much of dreams and sleepless reality, was made so that you could come to us, but also for us to go to you. I recall now what the zapatista delegate companeros to the March 21 Consulta commented when they returned. They said: "The teachers received us very well, they are companeros and companeras." For us that is more than a medal, a diploma, a fanfare or a homage. It is a commitment, and, more than anything, it is a commitment by us to you. That is why we are asking you to see us as we see ourselves, as companeros and companeras. That we continue to meet each other directly, without intermediaries. Whether you come or whether we go. Come as union sections, as school groups, as individuals, as affinities, as teacher organizations, as you wish. Keep us informed of your struggles, of your demands, of your problems and of your triumphs. The one and the other are ours. Come to the communities, bring your other companeros and companeras, your families, your students. All of them will be well received. If you also wish to bring your pro-management leaders, they will not be well received, but it would not be a bad idea to get rid of them. Join your schools with those of the communities. Join your union sections with communities and Autonomous Municipalities. Do not allow the bridge to be lost or to only remain in a dream (or a nightmare, depending on the seat each of you get and will get on the return trip). May the powerful above tremble, may they know that the democratic teachers of the greatest union in America and the zapatistas are meeting each other, they are discovering each other, and they are reaching agreement on something dangerously subversive, revolutionary and destabilizing: to struggle together for democracy, liberty and justice for all Mexican men and women. Vale. Salud and bon voyage, and, if you need a more clear reference, from here, foreword, this is Section 1111 of the National Coordinating Group of Education Workers, which is how democratic teachers in Mexico are also known. From the mountains of the Mexican southeast. Subcomandante insurgente Marcos Mexico, August of 1999. EZLN Communique: 6th Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. 2005.
Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Mexico. Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, July 2005. This is our simple word which seeks to touch the hearts of humble and simple people like ourselves, but people who are also, like ourselves, dignified and rebel. This is our simple word for recounting what our path has been and where we are now, in order to explain how we see the world and our country, in order to say what we are thinking of doing and how we are thinking of doing it, and in order to invite other persons to walk with us in something very great which is called Mexico and something greater which is called the world. This is our simple word in order to inform all honest and noble hearts what it is we want in Mexico and the world. This is our simple word, because it is our idea to call on those who are like us and to join together with them, everywhere they are living and struggling. I - What We Are We are the zapatistas of the EZLN, although we are also called "neo-zapatistas." Now, we, the zapatistas of the EZLN, rose up in arms in January of 1994 because we saw how widespread had become the evil wrought by the powerful who only humiliated us, stole from us, imprisoned us and killed us, and no one was saying anything or doing anything. That is why we said "Ya Basta!," that no longer were we going to allow them to make us inferior or to treat us worse than animals. And then we also said we wanted democracy, liberty and justice for all Mexicans although we were concentrated on the Indian peoples. Because it so happened that we, the EZLN, were almost all only indigenous from here in Chiapas, but we did not want to struggle just for own good, or just for the good of the indigenous of Chiapas, or just for the good of the Indian peoples of Mexico. We wanted to fight along with everyone who was humble and simple like ourselves and who was in great need and who suffered from exploitation and thievery by the rich and their bad governments here, in our Mexico, and in other countries in the world. And then our small history was that we grew tired of exploitation by the powerful, and then we organized in order to defend ourselves and to fight for justice. In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going this way and that, talking with and listening to other people like us. We did that for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a stir. In other words, we joined forces in silence. We remained like that for about 10 years, and then we had grown, and then we were many thousands. We trained ourselves quite well in politics and weapons, and, suddenly, when the rich were throwing their New Year's Eve parties, we fell upon their cities and just took them over. And we left a message to everyone that here we are, that they have to take notice of us. And then the rich took off and sent their great armies to do away with us, just like they always do when the exploited rebel - they order them all to be done away with. But we were not done away with at all, because we had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war, and we made ourselves strong in our mountains. And there were the armies, looking for us and throwing their bombs and bullets at us, and then they were making plans to kill off all the indigenous at one time, because they did not know who was a zapatista and who was not. And we were running and fighting, fighting and running, just like our ancestors had done. Without giving up, without surrendering, without being defeated. And then the people from the cities went out into the streets and began shouting for an end to the war. And then we stopped our war, and we listened to those brothers and sisters from the city who were telling us to try to reach an arrangement or an accord with the bad governments, so that the problem could be resolved without a massacre. And so we paid attention to them, because they were what we call "the people," or the Mexican people. And so we set aside the fire and took up the word. And it so happened that the governments said they would indeed be well-behaved, and they would engage in dialogue, and they would make accords, and they would fulfill them. And we said that was good, but we also thought it was good that we knew those people who went out into the streets in order to stop the war. Then, while we were engaging in dialogue with the bad governments, we were also talking with those persons, and we saw that most of them were humble and simple people like us, and both, they and we, understood quite well why we were fighting. And we called those people "civil society" because most of them did not belong to political parties, rather they were common, everyday people, like us, simple and humble people. But it so happened that the bad governments did not want a good agreement, rather it was just their underhanded way of saying they were going to talk and to reach accords, while they were preparing their attacks in order to eliminate us once and for all. And so then they attacked us several times, but they did not defeat us, because we resisted quite well, and many people throughout the world mobilized. And then the bad governments thought that the problem was that many people saw what was happening with the EZLN, and they started their plan of acting as if nothing were going on. Meanwhile they were quick to surround us, they laid siege to us in hopes that, since our mountains are indeed remote, the people would then forget, since zapatista lands were so far away. And every so often the bad governments tested us and tried to deceive us or to attack us, like in February of 1995 when they threw a huge number of armies at us, but they did not defeat us. Because, as they said then, we were not alone, and many people helped us, and we resisted well. And then the bad governments had to make accords with the EZLN, and those accords were called the "San Andrés Accords" because the municipality where those accords were signed was called "San Andrés." And we were not all alone in those dialogues, speaking with people from the bad governments. We invited many people and organizations who were, or are, engaged in the struggle for the Indian peoples of Mexico, and everyone spoke their word, and everyone reached agreement as to how we were going to speak with the bad governments. And that is how that dialogue was, not just the zapatistas on one side and the governments on the other. Instead, the Indian peoples of Mexico, and those who supported them, were with the zapatistas. And then the bad governments said in those accords that they were indeed going to recognize the rights of the Indian peoples of Mexico, and they were going to respect their culture, and they were going to make everything law in the Constitution. But then, once they had signed, the bad governments acted as if they had forgotten about them, and many years passed, and the accords were not fulfilled at all. Quite the opposite, the government attacked the indigenous, in order to make them back out of the struggle, as they did on December 22, 1997, the date on which Zedillo ordered the killing of 45 men, women, old ones and children in the town in Chiapas called ACTEAL. This immense crime was not so easily forgotten, and it was a demonstration of how the bad governments color their hearts in order to attack and assassinate those who rebel against injustices. And, while all of that was going on, we zapatistas were putting our all into the fulfillment of the accords and resisting in the mountains of the Mexican southeast. And then we began speaking with other Indian peoples of Mexico and their organizations, and we made an agreement with them that we were going to struggle together for the same thing, for the recognition of indigenous rights and culture. Now we were also being helped by many people from all over the world and by persons who were well respected and whose word was quite great because they were great intellectuals, artists and scientists from Mexico and from all over the world. And we also held international encuentros. In other words, we joined together to talk with persons from America and from Asia and from Europe and from Africa and from Oceania, and we learned of their struggles and their ways, and we said they were "intergalactic" encuentros, just to be silly and because we had also invited those from other planets, but it appeared as if they had not come, or perhaps they did come, but they did not make it clear. But the bad governments did not keep their word anyway, and then we made a plan to talk with many Mexicans so they would help us. And then, first in 1997, we held a march to Mexico City which was called "of the 1,111" because a compañero or compañera was going to go from each zapatista town, but the bad government did not pay any attention. And then, in 1999, we held a consulta throughout the country, and there it was seen that the majority were indeed in agreement with the demands of the Indian peoples, but again the bad governments did not pay any attention. And then, lastly, in 2001, we held what was called the "march for indigenous dignity" which had much support from millions of Mexicans and people from other countries, and it went to where the deputies and senators were, the Congress of the Union, in order to demand the recognition of the Mexican indigenous. But it happened that no, the politicians from the PRI, the PAN and the PRD reached an agreement among themselves, and they simply did not recognize indigenous rights and culture. That was in April of 2001, and the politicians demonstrated quite clearly there that they had no decency whatsoever, and they were swine who thought only about making their good money as the bad politicians they were. This must be remembered, because you will now be seeing that they are going to say they will indeed recognize indigenous rights, but it is a lie they are telling so we will vote for them. But they already had their chance, and they did not keep their word. And then we saw quite clearly that there was no point to dialogue and negotiation with the bad governments of Mexico. That it was a waste of time for us to be talking with the politicians, because neither their hearts nor their words were honest. They were crooked, and they told lies that they would keep their word, but they did not. In other words, on that day, when the politicians from the PRI, PAN and PRD approved a law that was no good, they killed dialogue once and for all, and they clearly stated that it did not matter what they had agreed to and signed, because they did not keep their word. And then we did not make any contacts with the federal branches. Because we understood that dialogue and negotiation had failed as a result of those political parties. We saw that blood did not matter to them, nor did death, suffering, mobilizations, consultas, efforts, national and international statements, encuentros, accords, signatures, commitments. And so the political class not only closed, one more time, the door to the Indian peoples, they also delivered a mortal blow to the peaceful resolution - through dialogue and negotiation - of the war. It can also no longer be believed that the accords will be fulfilled by someone who comes along with something or other. They should see that there so that they can learn from experience what happened to us. And then we saw all of that, and we wondered in our hearts what we were going to do. And the first thing we saw was that our heart was not the same as before, when we began our struggle. It was larger, because now we had touched the hearts of many good people. And we also saw that our heart was more hurt, it was more wounded. And it was not wounded by the deceits of the bad governments, but because, when we touched the hearts of others, we also touched their sorrows. It was as if we were seeing ourselves in a mirror. II. - Where We Are Now Then, like the zapatistas we are, we thought that it was not enough to stop engaging in dialogue with the government, but it was necessary to continue on ahead in the struggle, in spite of those lazy parasites of politicians. The EZLN then decided to carry out, alone and on their side ("unilateral", in other words, because just one side), the San Andrés Accords regarding indigenous rights and culture. For 4 years, since the middle of 2001 until the middle of 2005, we have devoted ourselves to this and to other things which we are going to tell you about. Fine, we then began encouraging the autonomous rebel zapatista municipalities &; which is how the peoples are organized in order to govern and to govern themselves &; in order to make themselves stronger. This method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the EZLN, but rather it comes from several centuries of indigenous resistance and from the zapatistas' own experience. It is the self-governance of the communities. In other words, no one from outside comes to govern, but the peoples themselves decide, among themselves, who governs and how, and, if they do not obey, they are removed. If the one who governs does not obey the people, they pursue them, they are removed from authority, and another comes in. But then we saw that the Autonomous Municipalities were not level. There were some that were more advanced and which had more support from civil society, and others were more neglected. The organization was lacking to make them more on a par with each other. And we also saw that the EZLN, with its political-military component, was involving itself in decisions which belonged to the democratic authorities, "civilians" as they say. And here the problem is that the political-military component of the EZLN is not democratic, because it is an army. And we saw that the military being above, and the democratic below, was not good, because what is democratic should not be decided militarily, it should be the reverse: the democratic-political governing above, and the military obeying below. Or, perhaps, it would be better with nothing below, just completely level, without any military, and that is why the zapatistas are soldiers so that there will not be any soldiers. Fine, what we then did about this problem was to begin separating the political-military from the autonomous and democratic aspects of organization in the zapatista communities. And so, actions and decisions which had previously been made and taken by the EZLN were being passed, little by little, to the democratically elected authorities in the villages. It is easy to say, of course, but it was very difficult in practice, because many years have passed &; first in the preparation for the war and then the war itself &; and the political-military aspects have become customary. But, regardless, we did so because it is our way to do what we say, because, if not, why should we go around saying things if we do not then do them. That was how the Good Government Juntas were born, in August of 2003, and, through them, self-learning and the exercise of "govern obeying" has continued. From that time and until the middle of 2005, the EZLN leadership has no longer involved itself in giving orders in civil matters, but it has accompanied and helped the authorities who are democratically elected by the peoples. It has also kept watch that the peoples and national and international civil society are kept well informed concerning the aid that is received and how it is used. And now we are passing the work of safeguarding good government to the zapatista support bases, with temporary positions which are rotated, so that everyone learns and carries out this work. Because we believe that a people which does not watch over its leaders is condemned to be enslaved, and we fought to be free, not to change masters every six years. The EZLN, during these 4 years, also handed over to the Good Government Juntas and the Autonomous Municipalities the aid and contacts which they had attained throughout Mexico and the world during these years of war and resistance. The EZLN had also, during that time, been building economic and political support which allowed the zapatista communities to make progress with fewer difficulties in the building of their autonomy and in improving their living conditions. It is not much, but it is far better than what they had prior to the beginning of the uprising in January of 1994. If you look at one of those studies the governments make, you will see that the only indigenous communities which have improved their living conditions &; whether in health, education, food or housing &; were those which are in zapatista territory, which is what we call where our villages are. And all of that has been possible because of the progress made by the zapatista villages and because of the very large support which has been received from good and noble persons, whom we call "civil societies," and from their organizations throughout the world. As if all of these people have made "another world is possible" a reality, but through actions, not just words. And the villages have made good progress. Now there are more compañeros and compañeras who are learning to govern. And &; even though little by little &; there are more women going into this work, but there is still a lack of respect for the compañeras, and they need to participate more in the work of the struggle. And, also through the Good Government Juntas, coordination has been improved between the Autonomous Municipalities and the resolution of problems with other organizations and with the official authorities. There has also been much improvement in the projects in the communities, and the distribution of projects and aid given by civil society from all over the world has become more level. Health and education have improved, although there is still a good deal lacking for it to be what it should be. The same is true for housing and food, and in some areas there has been much improvement with the problem of land, because the lands recovered from the finqueros are being distributed. But there are areas which continue to suffer from a lack of lands to cultivate. And there has been great improvement in the support from national and international civil society, because previously everyone went wherever they wanted, and now the Good Government Juntas are directing them to where the greatest need exists. And, similarly, everywhere there are more compañeros and compañeras who are learning to relate to persons from other parts of Mexico and of the world,. They are learning to respect and to demand respect. They are learning that there are many worlds, and that everyone has their place, their time and their way, and therefore there must be mutual respect between everyone. We, the zapatistas of the EZLN, have devoted this time to our primary force, to the peoples who support us. And the situation has indeed improved some. No one can say that the zapatista organization and struggle has been without point, but rather, even if they were to do away with us completely, our struggle has indeed been of some use. But it is not just the zapatista villages which have grown &; the EZLN has also grown. Because what has happened during this time is that new generations have renewed our entire organization. They have added new strength. The comandantes and comandantas who were in their maturity at the beginning of the uprising in 1994 now have the wisdom they gained in the war and in the 12 years of dialogue with thousands of men and women from throughout the world. The members of the CCRI, the zapatista political-organizational leadership, is now counseling and directing the new ones who are entering our struggle, as well as those who are holding leadership positions. For some time now the "committees" (which is what we call them) have been preparing an entire new generation of comandantes and comandantas who, following a period of instruction and testing, are beginning to learn the work of organizational leadership and to discharge their duties. And it also so happens that our insurgents, insurgentas, militants, local and regional responsables, as well as support bases, who were youngsters at the beginning of the uprising, are now mature men and women, combat veterans and natural leaders in their units and communities. And those who were children in that January of '94 are now young people who have grown up in the resistance, and they have been trained in the rebel dignity lifted up by their elders throughout these 12 years of war. These young people have a political, technical and cultural training that we who began the zapatista movement did not have. This youth is now, more and more, sustaining our troops as well as leadership positions in the organization. And, indeed, all of us have seen the deceits by the Mexican political class and the destruction which their actions have caused in our patria. And we have seen the great injustices and massacres that neoliberal globalization causes throughout the world. But we will speak to you of that later. And so the EZLN has resisted 12 years of war, of military, political, ideological and economic attacks, of siege, of harassment, of persecution, and they have not vanquished us. We have not sold out nor surrendered, and we have made progress. More compañeros from many places have entered into the struggle so that, instead of making us weaker after so many years, we have become stronger. Of course there are problems which can be resolved by more separation of the political-military from the civil-democratic. But there are things, the most important ones, such as our demands for which we struggle, which have not been fully achieved. To our way of thinking, and what we see in our heart, we have reached a point where we cannot go any further, and, in addition, it is possible that we could lose everything we have if we remain as we are and do nothing more in order to move forward. The hour has come to take a risk once again and to take a step which is dangerous but which is worthwhile. Because, perhaps united with other social sectors who suffer from the same wants as we do, it will be possible to achieve what we need and what we deserve. A new step forward in the indigenous struggle is only possible if the indigenous join together with workers, campesinos, students, teachers, employees…the workers of the city and the countryside. III - How We See the World Now we are going to explain to you how we, the zapatistas, see what is going on in the world. We see that capitalism is the strongest right now. Capitalism is a social system, a way in which a society goes about organizing things and people, and who has and who has not, and who gives orders and who obeys. In capitalism, there are some people who have money, or capital, and factories and stores and fields and many things, and there are others who have nothing but their strength and knowledge in order to work. In capitalism, those who have money and things give the orders, and those who only have their ability to work obey. Then capitalism means that there a few who have great wealth, but they did not win a prize, or find a treasure, or inherited from a parent. They obtained that wealth, rather, by exploiting the work of the many. So capitalism is based on the exploitation of the workers, which means they exploit the workers and take out all the profits they can. This is done unjustly, because they do not pay the worker what his work is worth. Instead they give him a salary that barely allows him to eat a little and to rest for a bit, and the next day he goes back to work in exploitation, whether in the countryside or in the city. And capitalism also makes its wealth from plunder, or theft, because they take what they want from others, land, for example, and natural resources. So capitalism is a system where the robbers are free and they are admired and used as examples. And, in addition to exploiting and plundering, capitalism represses because it imprisons and kills those who rebel against injustice. Capitalism is most interested in merchandise, because when it is bought or sold, profits are made. And then capitalism turns everything into merchandise, it makes merchandise of people, of nature, of culture, of history, of conscience. According to capitalism, everything must be able to be bought and sold. And it hides everything behind the merchandise, so we don't see the exploitation that exists. And then the merchandise is bought and sold in a market. And the market, in addition to being used for buying and selling, is also used to hide the exploitation of the workers. In the market, for example, we see coffee in its little package or its pretty little jar, but we do not see the campesino who suffered in order to harvest the coffee, and we do not see the coyote who paid him so cheaply for his work, and we do not see the workers in the large company working their hearts out to package the coffee. Or we see an appliance for listening to music like cumbias, rancheras or corridos, or whatever, and we see that it is very good because it has a good sound, but we do not see the worker in the maquiladora who struggled for many hours, putting the cables and the parts of the appliance together, and they barely paid her a pittance of money, and she lives far away from work and spends a lot on the trip, and, in addition, she runs the risk of being kidnapped, raped and killed as happens in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. So we see merchandise in the market, but we do not see the exploitation with which it was made. And then capitalism needs many markets - or a very large market, a world market. And so the capitalism of today is not the same as before, when the rich were content with exploiting the workers in their own countries, but now they are on a path which is called Neoliberal Globalization. This globalization means that they no longer control the workers in one or several countries, but the capitalists are trying to dominate everything all over the world. And the world, or Planet Earth, is also called the 'globe', and that is why they say 'globalization,' or the entire world. And neoliberalism is the idea that capitalism is free to dominate the entire world, and so tough, you have to resign yourself and conform and not make a fuss, in other words, not rebel. So neoliberalism is like the theory, the plan, of capitalist globalization. And neoliberalism has its economic, political, military and cultural plans. All of those plans have to do with dominating everyone, and they repress or separate anyone who doesn't obey so that his rebellious ideas aren't passed on to others. Then, in neoliberal globalization, the great capitalists who live in the countries which are powerful, like the United States, want the entire world to be made into a big business where merchandise is produced like a great market. A world market for buying and selling the entire world and for hiding all the exploitation from the world. Then the global capitalists insert themselves everywhere, in all the countries, in order to do their big business, their great exploitation. Then they respect nothing, and they meddle wherever they wish. As if they were conquering other countries. That is why we zapatistas say that neoliberal globalization is a war of conquest of the entire world, a world war, a war being waged by capitalism for global domination. Sometimes that conquest is by armies who invade a country and conquer it by force. But sometimes it is with the economy, in other words, the big capitalists put their money into another country or they lend it money, but on the condition that they obey what they tell them to do. And they also insert their ideas, with the capitalist culture which is the culture of merchandise, of profits, of the market. Then the one which wages the conquest, capitalism, does as it wants, it destroys and changes what it does not like and eliminates what gets in its way. For example, those who do not produce nor buy nor sell modern merchandise get in their way, or those who rebel against that order. And they despise those who are of no use to them. That is why the indigenous get in the way of neoliberal capitalism, and that is why they despise them and want to eliminate them. And neoliberal capitalism also gets rid of the laws which do not allow them to exploit and to have a lot of profit. They demand that everything can be bought and sold, and, since capitalism has all the money, it buys everything. Capitalism destroys the countries it conquers with neoliberal globalization, but it also wants to adapt everything, to make it over again, but in its own way, a way which benefits capitalism and which doesn't allow anything to get in its way. Then neoliberal globalization, capitalism, destroys what exists in these countries, it destroys their culture, their language, their economic system, their political system, and it also destroys the ways in which those who live in that country relate to each other. So everything that makes a country a country is left destroyed. Then neoliberal globalization wants to destroy the nations of the world so that only one Nation or country remains, the country of money, of capital. And capitalism wants everything to be as it wants, in its own way, and it doesn't like what is different, and it persecutes it and attacks it, or puts it off in a corner and acts as if it doesn't exist. Then, in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression of those who refuse. The same as before, but now globalized, worldwide. But it is not so easy for neoliberal globalization, because the exploited of each country become discontented, and they will not say well, too bad, instead they rebel. And those who remain and who are in the way resist, and they don't allow themselves to be eliminated. And that is why we see, all over the world, those who are being screwed over making resistances, not putting up with it, in other words, they rebel, and not just in one country but wherever they abound. And so, as there is a neoliberal globalization, there is a globalization of rebellion. And it is not just the workers of the countryside and of the city who appear in this globalization of rebellion, but others also appear who are much persecuted and despised for the same reason, for not letting themselves be dominated, like women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants and many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up, and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from them. And then we see that all those groups of people are fighting against neoliberalism, against the capitalist globalization plan, and they are struggling for humanity. And we are astonished when we see the stupidity of the neoliberals who want to destroy all humanity with their wars and exploitations, but it also makes us quite happy to see resistances and rebellions appearing everywhere, such as ours, which is a bit small, but here we are. And we see this all over the world, and now our heart learns that we are not alone. IV - How We See Our Country Which is Mexico Now we will talk to you about how we see what is going on in our Mexico. What we see is our country being governed by neoliberals. So, as we already explained, our leaders are destroying our nation, our Mexican Patria. And the work of these bad leaders is not to look after the well-being of the people, instead they are only concerned with the well-being of the capitalists. For example, they make laws like the Free Trade Agreement, which end up leaving many Mexicans destitute, like campesinos and small producers, because they are 'gobbled up' by the big agro-industrial companies. As well as workers and small businesspeople, because they cannot compete with the large transnationals who come in without anybody saying anything to them and even thanking them, and they set their low salaries and their high prices. So some of the economic foundations of our Mexico, which were the countryside and industry and national commerce, are being quite destroyed, and just a bit of rubble - which they are certainly going to sell off - remains. And these are great disgraces for our Patria. Because food is no longer being produced in our countryside, just what the big capitalists sell, and the good lands are being stolen through trickery and with the help of the politicians. What is happening in the countryside is the same as Porfirismo, but, instead of hacendados, now there are a few foreign businesses which have well and truly screwed the campesino. And, where before there were credits and price protections, now there is just charity' and sometimes not even that. As for the worker in the city, the factories close, and they are left without work, or they open what are called maquiladoras, which are foreign and which pay a pittance for many hours of work. And then the price of the goods the people need doesn?t matter, whether they are expensive or cheap, since there is no money. And if someone was working in a small or midsize business, now they are not, because it was closed, and it was bought by a big transnational. And if someone had a small business, it disappeared as well, or they went to work clandestinely for big businesses which exploit them terribly, and which even put boys and girls to work. And if the worker belonged to his union in order to demand his legal rights, then no, now the same union tells him he will have to put up with his salary being lowered or his hours or his benefits being taken away, because, if not, the business will close and move to another country. And then there is the 'microchangarro,' which is the government's economic program for putting all the city's workers on street corners selling gum or telephone cards. In other words, absolute economic destruction in the cities as well. And then what happens is that, with the people's economy being totally screwed in the countryside as well as in the city, then many Mexican men and women have to leave their Patria, Mexican lands, and go to seek work in another country, the United States. And they do not treat them well there, instead they exploit them, persecute them and treat them with contempt and even kill them. Under neoliberalism which is being imposed by the bad governments, the economy has not improved. Quite the opposite, the countryside is in great need, and there is no work in the cities. What is happening is that Mexico is being turned into a place where people are working for the wealth of foreigners, mostly rich gringos, a place you are just born into for a little while, and in another little while you die. That is why we say that Mexico is dominated by the United States. Now, it is not just that. Neoliberalism has also changed the Mexican political class, the politicians, because they made them into something like employees in a store, who have to do everything possible to sell everything and to sell it very cheap. You have already seen that they changed the laws in order to remove Article 27 from the Constitution so that ejidal and communal lands could be sold. That was Salinas de Gortari, and he and his gangs said that it was for the good of the countryside and the campesino, and that was how they would prosper and live better. Has it been like that? The Mexican countryside is worse than ever and the campesinos more screwed than under Porfirio Diaz. And they also say they are going to privatize - sell to foreigners - the companies held by the State to help the well-being of the people. Because the companies don't work well and they need to be modernized, and it would be better to sell them. But, instead of improving, the social rights which were won in the revolution of 1910 now make one sad?and courageous. And they also said that the borders must be opened so all the foreign capital can enter, that way all the Mexican businesses will be fixed, and things will be made better. But now we see that there are not any national businesses, the foreigners gobbled them all up, and the things that are sold are worse than the those that were made in Mexico. And now the Mexican politicians also want to sell PEMEX, the oil which belongs to all Mexicans, and the only difference is that some say everything should be sold and others that only a part of it should be sold. And they also want to privatize social security, and electricity and water and the forests and everything, until nothing of Mexico is left, and our country will be a wasteland or a place of entertainment for rich people from all over the world, and we Mexican men and women will be their servants, dependent on what they offer, bad housing, without roots, without culture, without even a Patria. So the neoliberals want to kill Mexico, our Mexican Patria. And the political parties not only do not defend it, they are the first to put themselves at the service of foreigners, especially those from the United States, and they are the ones who are in charge of deceiving us, making us look the other way while everything is sold, and they are left with the money. All the political parties that exist right now, not just some of them. Think about whether anything has been done well, and you will see that no, nothing but theft and scams. And look how all the politicians always have their nice houses and their nice cars and luxuries. And they still want us to thank them and to vote for them again. And it is obvious, as they say, that they are without shame. And they are without it because they do not, in fact, have a Patria, they only have bank accounts. And we also see that drug trafficking and crime has been increasing a lot. And sometimes we think that criminals are like they show them in the songs or movies, and maybe some are like that, but not the real chiefs. The real chiefs go around very well dressed, they study outside the country, they are elegant, they do not go around in hiding, they eat in good restaurants and they appear in the papers, very pretty and well dressed at their parties. They are, as they say, 'good people', and some are even officials, deputies, senators, secretaries of state, prosperous businessmen, police chiefs, generals. Are we saying that politics serves no purpose? No, what we mean is that THAT politics serves no purpose. And it is useless because it does not take the people into account. It does not listen to them, it does not pay any attention to them, it just approaches them when there are elections. And they do not even want votes anymore, the polls are enough to say who wins. And then just promises about what this one is going to do and what the other one is going to do, then it's bye, I'll see you, but you don't see them again, except when they appear in the news when they've just stolen a lot of money and nothing is going to be done to them because the law - which those same politicians made - protects them. Because that's another problem, the Constitution is all warped and changed now. It's no longer the one that had the rights and liberties of working people. Now there are the rights and liberties of the neoliberals so they can have their huge profits. And the judges exist to serve those neoliberals, because they always rule in favor of them, and those who are not rich get injustice, jails and cemeteries. Well, even with all this mess the neoliberals are making, there are Mexican men and women who are organizing and making a resistance struggle. And so we found out that there are indigenous, that their lands are far away from us here in Chiapas, and they are making their autonomy and defending their culture and caring for their land, forests and water. And there are workers in the countryside, campesinos, who are organizing and holding their marches and mobilizations in order to demand credits and aid for the countryside. And there are workers in the city who do not let their rights be taken away or their jobs privatized. They protest and demonstrate so the little they have isn't taken away from them and so they don't take away from the country what is, in fact, its own, like electricity, oil, social security, education. And there are students who don't let education be privatized and who are fighting for it to be free and popular and scientific, so they don't charge, so everyone can learn, and so they don't teach stupid things in schools. And there are women who do not let themselves be treated as an ornament or be humiliated and despised just for being women, but who are organizing and fighting for the respect they deserve as the women they are. And there are young people who don't accept their stultifying them with drugs or persecuting them for their way of being, but who make themselves aware with their music and their culture, their rebellion. And there are homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals and many ways who do not put up with being ridiculed, despised, mistreated and even killed for having another way which is different, with being treated like they are abnormal or criminals, but who make their own organizations in order to defend their right to be different. And there are priests and nuns and those they call laypeople who are not with the rich and who are not resigned, but who are organizing to accompany the struggles of the people. And there are those who are called social activists, who are men and women who have been fighting all their lives for exploited people, and they are the same ones who participated in the great strikes and workers' actions, in the great citizens' mobilizations, in the great campesino movements, and who suffer great repression, and who, even though some are old now, continue on without surrendering, and they go everywhere, looking for the struggle, seeking justice, and making leftist organizations, non-governmental organizations, human rights organizations, organizations in defense of political prisoners and for the disappeared, leftist publications, organizations of teachers or students, social struggle, and even political-military organizations, and they are just not quiet and they know a lot because they have seen a lot and lived and struggled. And so we see in general that in our country, which is called Mexico, there are many people who do not put up with things, who do not surrender, who do not sell out. Who are dignified. And that makes us very pleased and happy, because with all those people it's not going to be so easy for the neoliberals to win, and perhaps it will be possible to save our Patria from the great thefts and destruction they are doing. And we think that perhaps our 'we' will include all those rebellions? V - What We Want To Do We are now going to tell you what we want to do in the world and in Mexico, because we cannot watch everything that is happening on our planet and just remain quiet, as if it were only we were where we are. What we want in the world is to tell all of those who are resisting and fighting in their own ways and in their own countries, that you are not alone, that we, the zapatistas, even though we are very small, are supporting you, and we are going to look at how to help you in your struggles and to speak to you in order to learn, because what we have, in fact, learned is to learn. And we want to tell the Latin American peoples that we are proud to be a part of you, even if it is a small part. We remember quite well how the continent was also illuminated some years ago, and a light was called Che Guevara, as it had previously been called Bolivar, because sometimes the people take up a name in order to say they are taking up a flag. And we want to tell the people of Cuba, who have now been on their path of resistance for many years, that you are not alone, and we do not agree with the blockade they are imposing, and we are going to see how to send you something, even if it is maize, for your resistance. And we want to tell the North American people that we know that the bad governments which you have and which spread harm throughout the world is one thing - and those North Americans who struggle in their country, and who are in solidarity with the struggles of other countries, are a very different thing. And we want to tell the Mapuche brothers and sisters in Chile that we are watching and learning from your struggles. And to the Venezuelans, we see how well you are defending your sovereignty, your nation's right to decide where it is going. And to the indigenous brothers and sisters of Ecuador and Bolivia, we say you are giving a good lesson in history to all of Latin America, because now you are indeed putting a halt to neoliberal globalization. And to the piqueteros and to the young people of Argentina, we want to tell you that, that we love you. And to those in Uruguay who want a better country, we admire you. And to those who are sin tierra in Brazil, that we respect you. And to all the young people of Latin America, that what you are doing is good, and you give us great hope. And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Social Europe, that which is dignified and rebel, that you are not alone. That your great movements against the neoliberal wars bring us joy. That we are attentively watching your forms of organization and your methods of struggle so that we can perhaps learn something. That we are considering how we can help you in your struggles, and we are not going to send euro because then they will be devalued because of the European Union mess. But perhaps we will send you crafts and coffee so you can market them and help you some in the tasks of your struggle. And perhaps we might also send you some pozol, which gives much strength in the resistance, but who knows if we will send it to you, because pozol is more our way, and what if it were to hurt your bellies and weaken your struggles and the neoliberals defeat you. And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Africa, Asia and Oceania that we know that you are fighting also, and we want to learn more of your ideas and practices. And we want to tell the world that we want to make you large, so large that all those worlds will fit, those worlds which are resisting because they want to destroy the neoliberals and because they simply cannot stop fighting for humanity. Now then, what we want to do in Mexico is to make an agreement with persons and organizations just of the left, because we believe that it is in the political left where the idea of resisting neoliberal globalization is, and of making a country where there will be justice, democracy and liberty for everyone. Not as it is right now, where there is justice only for the rich, there is liberty only for their big businesses, and there is democracy only for painting walls with election propaganda. And because we believe that it is only from the left that a plan of struggle can emerge, so that our Patria, which is Mexico, does not die. And, then, what we think is that, with these persons and organizations of the left, we will make a plan for going to all those parts of Mexico where there are humble and simple people like ourselves. And we are not going to tell them what they should do or give them orders. Nor are we going to ask them to vote for a candidate, since we already know that the ones who exist are neoliberals. Nor are we going to tell them to be like us, nor to rise up in arms. What we are going to do is to ask them what their lives are like, their struggle, their thoughts about our country and what we should do so they do not defeat us. What we are going to do is to take heed of the thoughts of the simple and humble people, and perhaps we will find there the same love which we feel for our Patria. And perhaps we will find agreement between those of us who are simple and humble and, together, we will organize all over the country and reach agreement in our struggles, which are alone right now, separated from each other, and we will find something like a program that has what we all want, and a plan for how we are going to achieve the realization of that program, which is called the 'national program of struggle.' And, with the agreement of the majority of those people whom we are going to listen to, we will then engage in a struggle with everyone, with indigenous, workers, campesinos, students, teachers, employees, women, children, old ones, men, and with all of those of good heart and who want to struggle so that our Patria called Mexico does not end up being destroyed and sold, and which still exists between the Rio Grande and the Rio Suchiate and which has the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Atlantic on the other. VI - How We Are Going To Do It And so this is our simple word that goes out to the humble and simple people of Mexico and of the world, and we are calling our word of today: Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona And we are here to say, with our simple word, that ... The EZLN maintains its commitment to an offensive ceasefire, and it will not make any attack against government forces or any offensive military movements. The EZLN still maintains its commitment to insisting on the path of political struggle through this peaceful initiative which we are now undertaking. The EZLN continues, therefore, in its resolve to not establish any kind of secret relations with either national political-military organizations or those from other countries. The EZLN reaffirms its commitment to defend, support and obey the zapatista indigenous communities of which it is composed, and which are its supreme command, and - without interfering in their internal democratic processes - will, to the best of its abilities, contribute to the strengthening of their autonomy, good government and improvement in their living conditions. In other words, what we are going to do in Mexico and in the world, we are going to do without arms, with a civil and peaceful movement, and without neglecting nor ceasing to support our communities. Therefore ... In the World? 1 - We will forge new relationships of mutual respect and support with persons and organizations who are resisting and struggling against neoliberalism and for humanity. 2 - As far as we are able, we will send material aid such as food and handicrafts for those brothers and sisters who are struggling all over the world. In order to begin, we are going to ask the Good Government Junta of La Realidad to loan their truck, which is called 'Chompiras,' and which appears to hold 8 tons, and we are going to fill it with maize and perhaps two 200 liter cans with oil or petrol, as they prefer, and we are going to deliver it to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico for them to send to the Cuban people as aid from the zapatistas for their resistance against the North American blockade. Or perhaps there might be a place closer to here where it could be delivered, because it's always such a long distance to Mexico City, and what if 'Chompiras' were to break down and we'd end up in bad shape. And that will happen when the harvest comes in, which is turning green right now in the fields, and if they don't attack us, because if we were to send it during these next few months, it would be nothing but corncobs, and they don't turn out well even in tamales, better in November or December, it depends. And we are also going to make an agreement with the women's crafts cooperatives in order to send a good number of bordados, embroidered pieces, to the Europes which are perhaps not yet Union, and perhaps we'll also send some organic coffee from the zapatista cooperatives, so that they can sell it and get a little money for their struggle. And, if it isn't sold, then they can always have a little cup of coffee and talk about the anti-neoliberal struggle, and if it's a bit cold then they can cover themselves up with the zapatista bordados, which do indeed resist quite well being laundered by hand and by rocks, and, besides, they don't run in the wash. And we are also going to send the indigenous brothers and sisters of Bolivia and Ecuador some non-transgenic maize, and we just don't know where to send them so they arrive complete, but we are indeed willing to give this little bit of aid. 3 - And to all of those who are resisting throughout the world, we say there must be other intercontinental encuentros held, even if just one other. Perhaps December of this year or next January, we'll have to think about it. We don't want to say just when, because this is about our agreeing equally on everything, on where, on when, on how, on who. But not with a stage where just a few speak and all the rest listen, but without a stage, just level and everyone speaking, but orderly, otherwise it will just be a hubbub and the words won't be understood, and with good organization everyone will hear and jot down in their notebooks the words of resistance from others, so then everyone can go and talk with their compañeros and compañeras in their worlds. And we think it might be in a place that has a very large jail, because what if they were to repress us and incarcerate us, and so that way we wouldn't be all piled up, prisoners, yes, but well organized, and there in the jail we could continue the intercontinental encuentros for humanity and against neoliberalism. Later on we'll tell you what we shall do in order to reach agreement as to how we're going to come to agreement. Now that is how we're thinking of doing what we want to do in the world. Now follows ... In Mexico ... 1 - We are going to continue fighting for the Indian peoples of Mexico, but now not just for them and not with only them, but for all the exploited and dispossessed of Mexico, with all of them and all over the country. And when we say all the exploited of Mexico, we are also talking about the brothers and sisters who have had to go to the United States in search of work in order to survive. 2 - We are going to go to listen to, and talk directly with, without intermediaries or mediation, the simple and humble of the Mexican people, and, according to what we hear and learn, we are going to go about building, along with those people who, like us, are humble and simple, a national program of struggle, but a program which will be clearly of the left, or anti-capitalist, or anti-neoliberal, or for justice, democracy and liberty for the Mexican people. 3 - We are going to try to build, or rebuild, another way of doing politics, one which once again has the spirit of serving others, without material interests, with sacrifice, with dedication, with honesty, which keeps its word, whose only payment is the satisfaction of duty performed, or like the militants of the left did before, when they were not stopped by blows, jail or death, let alone by dollar bills. 4 - We are also going to go about raising a struggle in order to demand that we make a new Constitution, new laws which take into account the demands of the Mexican people, which are: housing, land, work, food, health, education, information, culture, independence, democracy, justice, liberty and peace. A new Constitution which recognizes the rights and liberties of the people, and which defends the weak in the face of the powerful. TO THESE ENDS ... The EZLN will send a delegation of its leadership in order to do this work throughout the national territory and for an indefinite period of time. This zapatista delegation, along with those organizations and persons of the left who join in this Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, will go to those places where they are expressly invited. We are also letting you know that the EZLN will establish a policy of alliances with non-electoral organizations and movements which define themselves, in theory and practice, as being of the left, in accordance with the following conditions: Not to make agreements from above to be imposed below, but to make accords to go together to listen and to organize outrage. Not to raise movements which are later negotiated behind the backs of those who made them, but to always take into account the opinions of those participating. Not to seek gifts, positions, advantages, public positions, from the Power or those who aspire to it, but to go beyond the election calendar. Not to try to resolve from above the problems of our Nation, but to build FROM BELOW AND FOR BELOW an alternative to neoliberal destruction, an alternative of the left for Mexico. Yes to reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations, for their methods of struggle, for their ways of organizing, for their internal decision making processes, for their legitimate representations. And yes to a clear commitment for joint and coordinated defense of national sovereignty, with intransigent opposition to privatization attempts of electricity, oil, water and natural resources. In other words, we are inviting the unregistered political and social organizations of the left, and those persons who lay claim to the left and who do not belong to registered political parties, to meet with us, at the time, place and manner in which we shall propose at the proper time, to organize a national campaign, visiting all possible corners of our Patria, in order to listen to and organize the word of our people. It is like a campaign, then, but very otherly, because it is not electoral. Brothers and sisters: This is our word which we declare: In the world, we are going to join together more with the resistance struggles against neoliberalism and for humanity. And we are going to support, even if it's but little, those struggles. And we are going to exchange, with mutual respect, experiences, histories, ideas, dreams. In Mexico, we are going to travel all over the country, through the ruins left by the neoliberal wars and through those resistances which, entrenched, are flourishing in those ruins. We are going to seek, and to find, those who love these lands and these skies even as much as we do. We are going to seek, from La Realidad to Tijuana, those who want to organize, struggle and build what may perhaps be the last hope this Nation - which has been going on at least since the time when an eagle alighted on a nopal in order to devour a snake - has of not dying. We are going for democracy, liberty and justice for those of us who have been denied it. We are going with another politics, for a program of the left and for a new Constitution. We are inviting all indigenous, workers, campesinos, teachers, students, housewives, neighbors, small businesspersons, small shop owners, micro-businesspersons, pensioners, handicapped persons, religious men and women, scientists, artists, intellectuals, young persons, women, old persons, homosexuals and lesbians, boys and girls - to participate, whether individually or collectively, directly with the zapatistas in this NATIONAL CAMPAIGN for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution. And so this is our word as to what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. You will see whether you want to join. And we are telling those men and women who are of good heart and intent, who are in agreement with this word we are bringing out, and who are not afraid, or who are afraid but who control it, to then state publicly whether they are in agreement with this idea we are presenting, and in that way we will see once and for all who and how and where and when this new step in the struggle is to be made. While you are thinking about it, we say to you that today, in the sixth month of the year 2005, the men, women, children and old ones of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation have now decided, and we have now subscribed to, this Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, and those who know how to sign, signed, and those who did not left their mark, but there are fewer now who do not know how, because education has advanced here in this territory in rebellion for humanity and against neoliberalism, that is in zapatista skies and land. And this was our simple word sent out to the noble hearts of those simple and humble people who resist and rebel against injustices all over the world. Democracy! Liberty! Justice! From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Mexico, in the sixth month, or June, of the year 2005. Our Revolution Failed to Live Up to Its Potential. But the Bernie Movement Needs a Mass Organization Now." by David Duhalde. 2020.
Despite our best hopes and struggle, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign once again ended in second place But while we came up short, it’s more than clear now that 2016 wasn’t a fluke — we do indeed have a mass constituency. And those Bernie supporters deserve a vehicle to advance their political project in the years to come — that means a formal organization capable of representing and galvanizing a mass movement. What form that organization should take, however, is up for debate. Before we lay out a few options, two important caveats. First, I am not considering a new political party because Sanders has rejected such an option. Second, I do not believe Our Revolution, which Sanders created after his first presidential run, can or should be the organization to carry on his legacy. As that group’s former political director, I know firsthand that Our Revolution had tremendous promise to be a gateway to the permanent mass working-class formation this country desperately needs. Unfortunately, Our Revolution no longer truly carries the legacy of Bernie Sanders, especially with the departures of his allies Jeff Weaver, Shannon Jackson, and Nina Turner from the organization. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the experience altogether. To understand where we should go, it is always important to understand where we have been. In this case, it is critical to see how the two different 2016 campaign legacy organizations — the Sanders Institute and Our Revolution — each approached the Trump era and the 2020 presidential contest environment differently. This context provides a window into what possible formation could come out of this year’s campaign infrastructure that includes a donor list of several million people and a staff that peaked at around twelve-hundred. The Twin Births of Our Revolution and the Sanders Institute At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders declared the birth of Our Revolution. The organization shared the name of his book released a few months later, and it truly came together late in a meeting at the Sanders home in Vermont that summer. Like many similar ideological projects, there was a decision to create two entities: the Sanders Institute, a 501c3, and Our Revolution, a 501c4. The latter could educate the public about the legislation and public policies supported by Senator Sanders and his advocates, while Our Revolution would mobilize grassroots organizers into local formations to advance social movement goals, elect candidates backing the Sanders agenda, and reform the Democratic Party. The different nature of these missions required two separate nonprofit classifications. Under the law, a 501c3 may not endorse candidates or lobby in the ways that a 501c4 is allowed. Despite this tax difference, both NGOs received copies of the 2016 campaign contributor and email list, and in turn relied heavily on small donor donations. However, their separate headquarters in Burlington (the Sanders Institute) and District of Columbia (Our Revolution) symbolized the future distance of the operations. Two Different Institutional Roads for Berniecrats Tucked far away from the Beltway up in Vermont, the Sanders Institute never was larger than a close-knit team striving to influence popular discourse with their policy agenda. At times, it was able to punch above its weight by leveraging the network of Sanders campaign supporters and alumni in order to produce videos and publish materials, and most notably, hosted a “Gathering” of hundreds of national and grassroot leaders sympathetic to the Sanders agenda. “The Gathering” in 2018, which was designed to be an annual event, convened progressives, left-wing trade unionists, and pro-Sanders grassroot leaders to showcase the depth and size of the activist coalition that Sanders could bring together. This onetime event in some ways was a microcosm of the People’s Summit’s mass conferences which had occurred each of the previous two years. Those events, spearheaded by the National Nurses United union, convened largely membership-based organizations that backed Sanders’s 2016 run. Thousands of Bernie supporters flocked to the People’s Summit in Chicago to discuss, build, and network. Such organic connections are worthwhile and lead to more than a few candidacies, electoral alliances, and other joint projects. However, as 2019 rolled into the Sanders presidential candidacy, the Sanders Institute was faced with a difficult decision — temporarily shut down or continue its work with the confusing optics of operating and raising money while their founder was campaigning and thus also fundraising. The Sanders Institute opted to cease operations for the time being. Our Revolution, however, took a much different course. At its height, Our Revolution could boast over a quarter-million members, the launch of a handful of statewide organizations, as well as over six hundred individual local groups in nearly every state and territory. However, the truth behind these numbers painted a more complex picture of a grassroots group trying to square its democratic and insurgent narrative with a traditional nonprofit structure and nonuniform separation of power. This nuance was also coupled with the fact that despite being the Bernie 2016 legacy organization, Senator Sanders could play no role within it. Senate ethics rules prohibited Sanders, a sitting senator, from being involved in the day-to-day efforts of the operation because of its 501c4 tax status. This separation provided some benefits and space for creativity, but ultimately led to a real perceived distance between the founder and his putative legacy organization. Success and Failure at the Ballot Box One of the most compelling aspects of Our Revolution’s political work was that nearly 99 percent of the endorsements of ballot measures and candidates came from the local groups, not the national office, creating broad buy-in across the organization. Trust in the grassroots led to the nominations of Squad members such as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before they were global symbols of the Left. In fact, Our Revolution was one of only a handful of national groups to back AOC at all. The ability to support candidates outside of Sanders’s personal approval enabled the organization to be connected to his base’s political wishes in a way he as a politician with his own set of endorsements and legislative priorities sometimes could not. Backing candidates-turned-celebrities and alongside a horse-race obsessed media put Our Revolution’s endorsements front and center over its other work. Yet its political team never made up more than one-tenth of the staff. But the bottom-up, grassroots-led endorsement process meant that for every amazing victory against the establishment like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, there were many more losses. Sanders critics jumped on this fact — often exaggerating the total defeats by lumping local group endorsements in with national ones — to prove that while Sanders could inspire a movement, that movement itself could not win. “Likely victory” was never the top criteria — the mobilization of its ideas via candidates was paramount. But the wins/losses ratio still weakened the image of the political program. Furthermore, Our Revolution’s 501c4 status legally prevented candidates and groups from receiving the national organization’s lists and other data. Federal law prohibited this, and other national and nearly universally local regulations barred “coordination” (such as privately discussing campaign and electioneering strategy) and direct donations to campaign coffers. A PAC could do some, and eventually a federal PAC was established, but those types of structures also face limitation. Did They Make a Dent in the Party? After the 2016 general election, Bernie Sanders publicly called for his supporters to run for public office and for internal posts in the Democratic Party. The “DemEnter” (Democrat + Enter) push offered a venue for many Bernie boosters to channel their frustration productively in changing the party that many blamed for sabotaging his nomination. Sanders’s party-building ethos also ran counter to the narrative that he didn’t care about the Democratic Party — that he was too “independent.” In fact, he and his backers invested significant effort in contesting and winning party offices at all levels. In 2017, the Sanders movement and their allies nearly elected Keith Ellison chair of the Democratic National Committee. Barack Obama though helped thwart Ellison’s election, a harbinger of the former president’s intervention to help Biden three years later. By 2018 though, a handful of state party chairs were Berniecrats with countless more officers sympathetic to the Vermont senator. On the national level, the Sanders camp led by Our Revolution successfully made sure the Unity Reform Commission (URC) recommendations of the 2016 Democratic National Convention were enacted, albeit in a compromised version. For instance, superdelegates were pushed off to the second ballot, a scenario which at the time seemed incredibly unlikely to ever occur. For a moment, a Bernie-wing of the Democratic Party seemed to be on the rise. In fact, some argue that Sanders became a victim of his own success. Without superdelegates on the first ballot for the 2020 convention, centrists coalesced much earlier around Joe Biden than they otherwise may have done if they could have simply counted on the party elite to cast lots at a divided convention. How a Second White House Run Gutted Our Revolution Ninety percent of Our Revolution’s staff exited for jobs with Sanders’s second presidential campaign by early winter 2019. In an effort to quickly replace those staffers, the former executive director of Good Jobs Nation was brought on to lead the organization. Slowly, Our Revolution began taking on the work and even the image of Good Jobs Nation. The Our Revolution logo was changed to align with the branding and aesthetic of Good Jobs Nation. Our Revolution even took on the defunct group’s campaigns, such as trying to stop the General Motors factory shutdown in Lordstown, Ohio among others. While this increased labor activism pleased some in Our Revolution, it caused others to question the utility of suddenly ending all of their original work. The weakness of the triangle was exemplified with how quickly the other work was replaced and remodeled. While we continued to do Medicare for All activism, it was included with a fake ambulance riding around the country for public events in of publicizing our deep organizing. Eventually, all the pre-2019 staff left. Since then, Our Revolution’s staff has never been larger than one-third of its height prior to the launch of the 2020 campaign. Several dozen fellows have been hired, but this is not the same as full-time staff who are completely dedicating their time and work to build an organization. Today, it is best that Our Revolution continues its progressive work, but not as a Sanders legacy organization. This situation has precedent. Both Progressive Democrats of America and Democracy for America have distanced themselves from their original inspirational presidential candidates — Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean, respectively. Our Revolution can indeed be a remodeled Good Jobs Nation. This would allow for a new formation to truly implement Sanders’s vision of a mass grass roots shaping history and making social change. Options for a New Berniecrat Organization Below I outline three different nonprofit structures that a future Sanders legacy organization could adopt. These are a 501c3, a 501c4, and a political action committee. Each option will include an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of such a nonprofit, especially on programming. (see original article for table) The 501c3 Option A tax-exempt nonprofit that exists to promote a social cause that meets public needs including education, philanthropy, and religion. Donations are tax-deductible and can engage in limited forms of lobbying and advocacy. Cannot make endorsements of candidates. Strengths: While not the main vehicle for much of the mass movement energy, a 501c3 nonprofit can do a great deal of good. Advancing educational work — really the primary purpose of these organizations on the left — has necessary value. Such programming are not just publications and other forms of media, but also hosting events such as conferences that bring together people or hosting tours to promote organizing and policy ideas. There is a tremendous amount of room for activity given a good amount of resources and direction. Drawbacks: The primary drawback is the prohibition on endorsing and advancing candidates’ elections. A working-class organization needs to focus on building political power – at least one of the Sanders-inspired type of this formation must engage in electoral politics. This includes, but is not limited to endorsing candidates, training campaign staff and possible electeds, working on campaigns, and making financial contributions. A 501c3 can do none of this. Possible Option: The Sanders Institute can be restarted with a bigger and broader vision and scope. With a renewed energy and larger list, we can formally expand the mission of the Sanders Institute beyond public education into activist mobilization and networking building as well. Previously, the Institute did excellent work to uplift voices that supported and advanced Bernie’s agenda. A new model would view the Sanders Institute as a convener of varying elements of his coalition. Instead of seeking mergers, this role could harness the unique nature of different pro-Bernie formations via points of programmatic unity. With his candidacy over, for example, there is a role for Sanders in such a new entity to facilitate continued collaboration between the groups that backed his 2020 campaign, especially those who are part of — the independent expenditure coalition that included the groups in the chart above and more. This leadership from the Sanders Institute could provide long-term sustainability of the Sanders movement. This could take the form of the Sanders Institute taking on the role of staffing, convening, and organizing a table of these organizations to advance political goals and social justice values that are not being advanced elsewhere. Often what is lacking in movement spaces is a neutral and respected convener to bring together allies that are often stretched for time and money. Regardless of who wins the White House now, such a sustained effort to put pressure and mobilize the grassroots would be invaluable for curtailing the worst elements of right-wing nationalism and decaying neoliberalism. Another and not mutually exclusive way to formalize the Sanders movement is to make the Gathering permanent as was originally planned and expand it closer to a model from the People’s Summit. This kind of annual meeting can cross-pollinate between local grassroots activists and build relationships between organizations. Such interactions will maintain the connection of the Sanders-inspired movement activists and allow for independent organization and cooperation among progressive forces at many different levels. While the Sanders Institute could not do electoral work, these types of events can build networks to advance candidates elsewhere. The 501c4 Option A nonprofit that exists for social welfare. Donations are not tax deductible. By their nature, these NGOs tend to focus more on lobby and political activity than charity and education work. Strengths: Some of the major strengths of a 501c4 are primarily what it can do that a 501c3 must not. First and foremost, it can engage in political activity such as lobbying, advocacy work, and some electoral action. Those freedoms make a 501c4 more equipped to promote a legislative and electoral agenda with many volunteers, organizers, and staffers. This allows it to have a political program that is crucial and popular among the Sanders base. In addition, donations to a 501c4 are not tax deductible unlike those of a 501c3. This means that the revenue is less likely to be tied to big donors seeking tax write-offs. Drawbacks: There are two major limitations that have both optic and real programmatic implications: donor disclosure and candidate coordination. First, while funders will not get tax deductions, 501c4 organizations are not required by law to disclose complete donor information. This difference has long been used by adversaries labeling groups such as Our Revolution as so-called “dark money organizations.” Our Revolution did reveal but did not tied it to an amount the donor gave. While 501c4 are allowed to endorse candidates, in many elections they are directly prohibited or very limited in how they may coordinate with those campaigns. Examples of coordination, include, but are not limited to:
For Our Revolution and many other groups, these legal barriers created both the optics issue and programmatic limitations. People expected much more in terms of donations or electioneering communication than Our Revolution could actually (sometimes legally) deliver. A Membership and Non-Membership Organization: In addition to assessing whether or not to create a new 501c4 nonprofit, one must consider if it should have a membership structure or just be staff-driven. While there are many membership-based collectives already, not everyone is seeking to join them. Some will only want to be in a Sanders-oriented formation. Membership Based Organization There are benefits to a membership-based structure, especially one that has groups. Berniecrats want a space that they can own to continue their political and activism projects. Having groups enables these members to mobilize more effectively to promote the mission and its goals. This is especially true on the local and state level where such collaboration will have a greater impact than outside staff miles away. This organizational ownership creates more buy-in. Groups were highly committed to the candidates and the Our Revolution political program since those endorsements came from the mass membership. Non-membership Based Organization A 501c4 without a membership — or at least group structure — could be more focused. Not needing to service a base, more staff time can be directed at moving a program. Programming decisions would come from the board, as it did at Our Revolution, but would not require the buy-in from members it once did. This would limit some of the healthy feedback and grassroots input, such as the future Squad nominations, but the ability to narrow the mission may be worth it. In fact, even without a membership, it would still be imaginable for future employees to mobilize Bernie supporters in distributed organizing. There could still be volunteers seeking opportunities, but the expectations would be clear that they are just being asked to promote candidates and other issues decided by a board and staff without volunteers’ opinions. Furthermore, not having a membership would make the new group less competitive with groups with members. Possible Outcomes: Membership Based Organization If there was an interest in creating a new membership-based organization, I would recommend several steps to avoid the problems that Our Revolution faced and continues to grapple with:
Non-Membership Organization A non-membership organization would still use points one and four above. Regardless if it was a membership group or not, it would need a clear lane and focus. Possible Sanders Legacy 501c4 Mission Here are appropriate project themes that a Sanders legacy 501c4 nonprofit organization could take on. The critical aspect to this is that it would need staffing for the goals set within each potential area. Advocacy work is one clear mission a 501c4 could adopt. This includes pushing for legislation and public policy work to elected officials and other forms of pressure campaigns around issues such as Medicare for All, Democratic Party reform, and free college education. The PAC Option An organization whose primary purpose is to raise funds to be used for and against candidates, ballot measures, and other electoral projects. While a PAC is often soliciting donations and making contributions, sometimes can also be a membership organization such as Progressive Democrats of America. Strengths: Political Action Committees are an excellent way to advance an electoral agenda both by aggregating grassroot support and working directly with candidates. This is why groups such as Justice Democrats and the Progressive Democrats of America are structured as PACs. In fact, Bernie Sanders has his own leadership PAC called the Progressive Voters of America. Unlike a 501c4, a PAC can coordinate with candidates although there are spending limits depending on the race. In addition, PACs are highly transparent. Using a PAC would make it clear where the money is being raised and how it is being spent. Drawbacks: Some of the strengths are some of the weaknesses too. PAC donations are not tax deductible unlike a 501c3 and there are contribution limits unlike both 501c3 and 501c4 nonprofits. Some PACs, such as unions, Our Revolution, or DSA, can only take donations from their members. This can limit the resources. The term Super PAC has helped soil the reputations of all PACs, even those that cannot spend unlimited amounts of money. This optic would still be an issue that needs to be grappled with. Possible Outcome: Sanders could start a revolutionary PAC. This could be a new legal organization or build off his existing senate leadership PAC Progressive Voters of America This PAC would go beyond fundraising and donations. It could serve as a political center to build coalitions at all levels to advance insurgent candidates. In many races, there are progressive allies with local and national affiliates that lack a convener solely dedicated to coordinating the electioneering. A group that could unite political actors as needed on races could play an invaluable role in advancing progressives and socialists in elections. A staffed organization can track and build coalitions of Bernie-aligned groups as needed to see where there is coherence in certain races. This PAC could help coordinate with candidates supported by a critical mass of allies to see what their needs are. Unlike the Justice Democrats or the Winning Primaries table led by CPD, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party, this PAC would focus solely on drafting and supporting candidates on all levels. Instead, track who the movements are picking at all levels. This would be critical as progressive candidates continue to appear in abundance. A PAC (or 501c4) could also add candidates in not only electioneering via the coordination of volunteers, donations and independent expenditures, but also with candidate training. There is no real space for Berniecrat and democratic socialists to have campaign training tailored to their unique space in the US electoral landscape. Educating candidates on how to build the broad coalitions needed to defeat the establishment and work with other progressives is necessary for the Left to win more races. Absent a maturing electoral strategy, victories will become more elusive as the powers that be are more alert to challengers and their methods. This work is crucial for the long-term sustainability of the Left as a project. Electing downballot candidates is essential to demonstrating that we can govern. Without Mayor Bernie Sanders there would have never been Congressman or Senator Sanders. Certainly, without his time as Burlington’s executive could he have ever dreamed of running for president. Such trainings and endorsements should also prioritize women, immigrants and people of color that make up the rising American electorate. It is imaginable that such a PAC would also do party reform work and other advocacy work if there was staff and funding available. However, the primary focus of such an organization should be training, advancing, and electing candidates that promote Bernie’s vision of a better United States and world. We Need Sanders Himself to Make a Tough Decision The future of Bernie Sanders’s legacy is up to him more than anyone. No option is perfect, but some have more clear advantages, especially if one wants to build a pipeline for progressive electoral candidates or advance educational work around issues and public policy. Regardless, a unique lane that any successor formation to the 2020 campaign could take would be a convening role to unite and coordinate work of pro-Sanders organization. This mobilizing role could serve the Sanders movement and progressives overall quite well. While there are desires for more collaboration, many groups lack the bandwidth in terms of staff and resources to make it happen. A central focus on continually energizing the base, regardless of who is president, with planning among ally organizations can keep the original intentions of the “Not Me, Us” campaign we all backed. Sanders should demonstrate leadership among his supporters while permitting them to remain independent. From this, a future formation can emerge that may build independence from our two major parties. However, we first need to work together before we can even get there. At this exact moment, we need Bernie — not us — to unite his base. Only then can our work truly begin. Julia Cámara: Anticapitalist strategy and the question of organization (part 1). 2020 (No Borders Media).
Six years after helping initiate PODEMOS in the Spanish State, and four months after Pablo Iglesias led that party into a coalition government with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (SPOE), the revolutionary socialist Anticapitalistas have changed course. As Spain suffers one of the highest per capita Covid-19 rates in the world, with 25,613 having died as of May 6, questions facing the left loom large in what has been one of the most tumultuous and creative international sites for socialist strategy and organization in the past decade. Julia Cámara is an historian based in Zaragosa. She helped organize the mass feminist strikes and mobilizations in the Spanish State on March 8 in recent years and is a member of Anticapitalistas. Here, Cámara describes the theoretical and historical concepts that have guided Anticapitalistas in their work. Originally published in Viento Sur, translated by No Borders News. In part 1, Cámara discussed strategic guideposts, part 2 takes up the question of socialist organization. No matter how much times passes, or how often history is declared to have ended, the debate over socialist strategy and organization always returns. This foundational question appeared in embryo at the very start of the workers movement in the nineteenth century and was raised explicitly by Lenin when he described his perspective as “tactics-as-plan” and when revolutionaries split with social-democracyduring World War I. Organizational and strategic questions can be considered separately, but in reality (and inevitably at the theoretical level), they present themselves as mutually related. Therefore, it is necessary to address both in order to systematically explain either. Over the course of the twentieth century, diverse combinations and conjunctural implications have given rise to many debates and concrete formulas, such as what defines revolutionary organization, the much-discussed reform or revolution, Popular Front and United Front formations, vanguard versus mass parties, entryism as a tactic, and the great strategic hypotheses that dominated the past century, of which the Insurrectional General Strike and the Prolonged Peoples’ War are only two. Rather than attempt to review each of these, this text offers some basic tools by which we can orient ourselves theoretically and in our political practice. In these confusing times, when the political horizon has become blurry, we must bring it into focus and consider how to organize ourselves to achieve some clarity of purpose. Some basic concepts Our strategic understanding can be strengthened by considering several concepts developed through hard-won experience that may provide a theoretical base upon which other ideas can be arranged. In 1915, in the Collapse of the Second International, Lenin began to develop the notion a revolutionary crisis. Lenin’s conception has been popularized as “when those above cannot, and those below will not, tolerate the situation, while those in the middle hesitate and lean towards those below,” such a situation supposes a conjunctural crisis of social relations occurring at the same time as a national political crisis. This notion emphasizes that there are particular and relatively exceptional circumstances in which the State and the system as a whole become vulnerable and, thus, can be overturned. Such a constellation of factors does not take place at just any moment and, therefore, there is a rhythm to the class struggle, one that includes ruptures and discontinuities that must be considered in terms of an understanding of crisis as a political phenomena. Lenin’s second concept is the political event.Lenin grasped that a crisis may be detonated by any number of events, that is, the totality of contradictions inherent in the capitalist system may express themselves, in a condensed manner, in what at first glance may appear to be minor conflicts. For instance, we have seen student revolts, democratic demands, women’s mobilizations, and national conflicts set off crises. These moments of compression and eruption define what Lenin calls political events.Knowing how to detect such events, how to exploit contradictions and resolve a crisis victoriously, requires conscious intervention, that is, it requires political organization. Because when we start to discuss strategy, this already implies initiative, decision-making, a clear project, implantation in the working classes, and a certain balance of forces. Political time, accordingly, does not march in linear fashion towards progress, rather, it is broken time, marked by crisis and interruptions of normality, opening possibilities for those who are prepared and know how to approach it. French revolutionary socialist Daniel Bensaïd spoke of empty, homogenous timeand dense time, which is to say that there are periods when nothing happensand periods when, all of a sudden, time accelerates and many things happen all at once. Revolutionary politics implies the mastery of this kind of political time, of knowing how to react in the face of rapidly changing events. To prepare, as Trotsky put it, for the “forcible entrance of the massesinto the realm of rulership over their own destiny.” Concerning strategy One of the recurring debates on the radical left revolves around whether we need a political party or mass movement? Or what is the relationship between political organization (the party) and the social movement?… what a century ago was called the workers’ movement. What is clear – despite bureaucratic and populist attempts to push real-world problems to the margins of political struggle, and the pretensions of the post-autonomy theorists who claim politics can be dissolved into social struggle – is that social and political struggles form two profoundly interrelated aspects of the same endeavor, although they have their own particular rhythms, characteristics, and reality. Political struggle, conceived properly, is not reducible to a prolongation or intensification of social struggle. Political struggle is, strictly speaking, the struggle for power. Not in a crude or “politicking” sense, but in its most profound dimension. Constructing an anticapitalist and revolutionary strategy requires the conviction that the conquest of power by the working class is possible. Otherwise, socialist politics ends up inevitably moving in another direction, limiting itself to the promotion of day-to-day resistance (in the best-case scenario) where all transformative goals are abandoned. A revolutionary strategy implies the actualityof revolution. Not in the sense that the revolution will take place tomorrow, but only that it is possible in our epoch. The actuality of revolution carries with it a sense of anticipation, of an attempt to bring the revolution into present time and to bring present to the revolution. In this sense, the revolution functions like a regulating horizonfor our present-day actions, if the revolution does not form part of our political horizon from the beginning, we are unlikely to approach it. Here we enter the field of politics as a strategic artwhere we must put our collective capacity to developstrategic hypotheses to the test. Political struggle does not operate through imaginaries, nor through improvisations, rather, it must be based on a strong hypothesis, in other words, on a well-founded bet. Yet no matter how vigorously researched and prepared, any hypothesis remains nonetheless a bet. Thus, approaching reality strategically is a precondition for victory, even if it is not a guarantee. Understanding political struggle in this manner (the actuality of revolution, revolution as a regulating horizon, the elaboration of strategic hypotheses checked against reality) brings with it two interrelated virtues. The first is to break free from a stagist view of political struggle, one inherited from a conception of historical time belonging to classical social-democracy that fails, as we have seen, to correspond to the reality of broken political time. The second is that it allows us to respond successfully to the specific rhythms of this broken time, to anticipate crises, and to prepare for forks in the road and sharp turns. Seen in these terms, the future is not simply the inevitable result of a chain of causes. Rather, the future is itself a cause that makes us choose one or the other decision in the present, it is the regulatory horizon of our political practice. And in turn, our ability to imagine the present is conditioned (not determined) by our understanding of the past. Escaping teleological politics – where everything happens inevitably and nothing could have been otherwise, escaping the mechanical rigidity that mistakes conditioning with determination and eliminates the subjective factor of history – is a necessary precondition for strategic thinking. Bensaïd expressed this sense with a phrase that I have always liked: “the past is full of presents that never came to fruition.” In opposition to those who write History as an inevitability after it has already come to pass, we should follow Bensaïd’s suggestion that there is always (and always has been) a range of real possibilities. Whether or not one of them finally ends up being realized depends, fundamentally, on the correlation of forces and the level of class struggle. Typical accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy after the end of the Franco fascist regime and the often-praised Pactos de la Moncloapresent a good example of how the discourse of what happened happened because it was the only thing that could possibly have happenedto obscure political decisions and actions that contributed to the short-circuiting other outcomes which, at a specific moment, were also possible. Here, by organizing to push one way or the other, we enter the field of strategy. Whether or not any hypothesis is correct will depend, among other things, on accumulated historical experience, the correlation of forces, the capacity for analyzing the national situation, the strength of the State, and a socialist organization’s implantation in and connection with the mass movement. And after accounting for all that, it is always possible to err. In the traditions of the revolutionary left, strategy is the basis upon which to gather, organize, and educate militants, it is a project aiming to overthrow bourgeois political power. And if politics is the struggle for power, this implies working to build a majority. In other words, having the will to join in the mass, not just differentiate from it. Breaking with the minoritarian fatalism of always being different (and lamenting that nobody understands us) in order to build, in Gramscian terms, a counter-hegemonic project and not merely an alternative political expression. Trying to reverse the correlation of forces is one of the underlying questions of all strategic thinking, and the only possible method is trial and error infused with the spirit of accumulating experience and correcting mistakes. Here the role of the organization comes into play. Julia Cámara: Anticapitalist strategy and the question of organization (part 2). 2020 (No Borders Media). Concerning organization Returning to Lenin, another of his principle contributions was the delimitation between class and party. Starting with What is to be Done?, Lenin clarified the typical confusion between the two: the party does not equal the class itself, but only a group of individuals with a certain level of consciousness and broadly agreed-upon strategies. Two questions flow from this that have sparked recurring debates on the left over the last century, namely, the debate concerning conceptions of a vanguard party and whether or not there are models for such a party that are more useful than others. We’ll return to this later. The fact is that Lenin never argued that revolutionary organization embodied the class as a whole. Rather, such organization represents a class-based project that may serve as an instrument for the optimization of the working class’ transformative power. One important conclusion that flows from this is that, if the party is delimited with respect to the class, there must be space for more than one party. The defense of pluralism has been a bedrock principle for all revolutionary Marxist movements during the difficult twentieth century. This is true in the first place because socialist democracy can only be learned by practicing it. Secondly, and this is no minor question, pluralism is not inevitable. I’ll try to explain what I mean. Trotsky suggested that parties, besides their well-known ambition to embody particular classes or sections of classes, are also bearers of ideology and strategic orientations. This is necessarily so because working-class ideological homogeneity is impossible – capitalism itself makes certain of this. This reality is not, in the first instance, based on conscious and massive manipulation by the ruling class, but is the direct result of economic and social mechanisms acting on the consciousness of the oppressed. The achievement of a general class consciousness among the masses – and even then not without contradictions – can only occur during a revolutionary process. Pluralism, therefore, is not only desirable in democratic terms, it is also inevitable. If revolutionary organizations, understood as such, express ideological-strategic wagers, then the existence of multiple organizations (and competition between them) is to be expected. With respect to the notion of the vanguard, the Leninist delimitation of the party with respect to the class has often been misunderstood as a total separation, thus isolating the supposed vanguard group of enlightened individuals from the real mass movement. The history of the Bolshevik Party itself demonstrates that there can be no self-proclaimed vanguard. Instead, the historic right to act as such, as Ernest Mandel put it, must be won. And this right can only be won through participation in the heart of mass struggle. No one gets to be a leader, or to play a leading role, unless this position arises from within the struggle of the mass of the working class. In the history of the revolutionary left, the best theoreticians have always been leaders, and many of the best leaders have made important theoretical contributions, for instance, Lenin, Gramsci, and Bensaïd himself, to name a few. The same holds true when consider people known for their practical leadership, such as Che Guevara, where we find that his theoretical production is greater than is often considered. This demonstrates how the party, the political organization, acts as a mediation between theory and praxis. The party is the vehicle through which strategic hypotheses are elaborated, not out of thin air, but based on the combined, accumulated historical experience of its members. This accumulated experience – and its assimilation by party activists who are themselves implanted in, and learning from, different struggles – transforms the organization into a transmission belt in a double sense. The party is, in this way, as much a producer as a product of mass revolutionary action. The second critical aspect in our conception of political organization (after properly conceiving of the party as a mediating force between theory and practice) is political strategy. A strategic party is one that not only educates and accompanies the masses, it is also capable of organizing advances and retreats, making course corrections based on rhythms and moments arising from the struggle. That is, a party that understands how to move in broken, political time. Lastly, the party must play a leading role in an historic bloc composed of a galaxy of diverse forms of organization based on the subaltern classes in what Gramsci called civil society, this operation takes place at the social level that we spoke of earlier, a level that is distinct from the political sphere. When referring to this historic bloc, we use the term coordination (articulación in Spanish) to describe the formation of a collective will that transcends particular interests, one that becomes self-aware and counterposes itself to the dominant powers. The party’s task is to facilitate this process of coordination, generating organizing hubs (centros de anudamiento) that offer a common vision and strategic hypothesis. This does not mean, and this is important to emphasize, establishing a political leadership the realizes a project that is external to the struggle. Remember, Mandel’s affirmation that a vanguard must with the right to lead, that is, it must be recognized as such by the masses. And as there is a plurality of political organizations, we must also understand that ideological debates and competing strategic hypotheses can only be proven in reality, something that is not possible if the contending organizations are not rooted in the mass movements. The party, then, appears as the political leadership of an historic bloc, but it achieves this position because its objective is accepted by the masses, who recognize it as their own. Having arrived at this point, let’s review. We have been talking as if party and political organization are at all times synonymous, however, there are clearly other forms of political organization besides a party. 1) In the debate over party form, what we often find instead are political groups, which also organized on the basis of ideological boundaries and strategic hypotheses, but which do not function as parties but as lobbies. These organizations often lack democracy – both internally (who and how to makes decisions, participation and structures for debate, etc.) and externally – and transparency as no one knows who is a member based on what criteria, many times they even hide their existence, etc. 2) On the other hand, the party (or parties) should not be confused with institutions designed for the political struggle that, at specific historical moments, the workers’ movement as a whole creates. When the class as a whole identifies itself as a revolutionary alternative (when a new historical bloc arises and is articulated) the need for autonomous and unitary forms of organization appears, such institutions take on the dual roles of acting as counter-power organs within capitalist society and as instruments for the training of the masses in socialist self-management. The most recurrent historical example of these sorts of institutions are soviets, which are nothing more than the Russian word for councils. When soviet-like institutions arise, the parties (based on an inevitable and desirable pluralism) intervene in the soviets, but soviets are much more than the sum of these parties: they are the instrument that the class empowers for its own emancipation. They are, at that point, the form of political organization that mediates between the class itself and its own conscience. Taking from Gramsci’s interpretation of Lenin, we might say that the accent should be placed on the direct social agent, on the working class. Only in this way can a dialectic be established between the class and a political leadership that prevents the party from converting itself into a body that is not only delimited with respect to the class, but separated and alien to it. Two caveats must be added here. First, pluralism and democracy are confronted by the constant danger of bureaucratism. Both external pluralism and democracy (that is, a recognition of the legitimacy of class institutions and a commitment to participate honestly and loyally in the movement of the masses) and internal (democratic centralism understood as outlined above, featuring rank-and-file control, the permanent training of activists who are capable of understanding and intervening in debates and in the elaboration of strategy, term limits, publishing organs that are open and comradely, the right to form tendencies, and the absence of leadership by fiat, etc.) are necessary to confront this ever-present danger. Second, strong links and real implantation in living movements – in both the social field and in civil society – can act as a safeguard against bureaucratization, integration into the state apparatus, and capitalist cooptation. Outlines of a proposal So far, I hope it is clear how debates regarding strategy and organization intersect and interlock, in other words, it is not possible to think about what kind of organization we want without thinking at the same time about why we want it. Bensaïd posed the question like this: Is a revolution possible and do you want to fight for it. And, if so, you must determine what political instrument is necessary because, with respect to revolutionary organization, the form is part of the content. The party form is always historically conditioned, but this raises a question about whether there are better, or more revolutionary, models as such, an idea into which many supposedly Marxist groups have repeatedly fallen and which is deeply anti-Leninist at heart. However, if there are no set forms, there are useful criteria, references, and guides as long as we keep in mind that the type of party that we must build today arises from our own concrete global situation and the balance of forces between the classes, the specifics of the crisis in which we find ourselves, and the evolution of the working-class and social movements. The greatest challenge facing the social revolution is that it is the first in history that necessarily implies the prior awareness of one’s goal. Thus, political struggle is essential to make a revolution since it can shape class consciousness, it is a means by which to accumulate experience, and when a revolutionary crisis opens, it can act to alter the balance of forces. Conscious leadership is, therefore, at the center of the conditions of possibility for the success of the social revolution. And in this sense, the main criteria for building the kind of party we need were provided by Lenin are still valid and correct today as long as we keep in mind that they are criteria, not models. 1) A delimited and active party, one which acts as an element of continuity amidst fluctuating collective conscience. This will not always mean the same thing for party members, and it is clear today that it is necessary to allow for a diversity of compromises that fit our lives under late capitalism. But it is essential to maintain a militant nucleus, and not resign ourselves to the dissolution of ties between revolutionaries or to rely on plebiscitary formulas. 2) A party committed to political action across the whole society. The party must not remain passive in the face of injustices, however small they may seem, it must participte in all local and sectoral battles, not merely shutting itself up on the margins of concrete conflicts. And this is true in all areas of work, be it the economic/union struggle or work in elected or other institutions. 3) A nimble party, capable of responding to unforeseen events. One with an internal political culture trained in and accustomed to the democratic debate that is capable of making sharp turns while remaining cohesive. 4) A party capable of presenting an overall vision. In other words, capable of acting with a strategic vision, formulating strategic hypotheses, and contributing to the coordination of the historical bloc through its implantation and work in social movements. 5) Finally, a party capable of thinking about concrete mediations and temporary forms of organization. That is, one that is capable of developing specific tactics so as to not be paralyzed in the absence of a pre-ordained script that brings the revolutionary horizon into focus. The great challenge we face today, the question that must guide our political action, is how to advance towards the coordination of a new historical bloc that, as such, is not a simple sum of its parts but is capable of thinking of itself as a totality, one capable of opposing the dominant classes. For this to be possible, it is essential to build class structures and institutions, not in a merely economistic sense, but to go much further and establish contact and collaboration between them. We must strengthen not only combative unionism (very important in this period of crisis) but also social unionism, housing assemblies, mutual support networks in neighborhoods, social centers, the feminist movement, and all those spaces of self-organization where community ties are built, struggles that expose the system’s contradictions and promote processes of class self-awareness and self-activity. But we must also encourage a pro-party spirit of organization. The party is not simply a participatory space or one more identity on a list, rather, it is the organization through which the political struggle takes place. It is where we come together and organize politically to create organizing and social hubs as we try to construct a new correlation of forces. "The Pessimistic Style in American Politics" by Thomas Frank. 2020.
Just a few short years ago we Americans knew what we were doing: making the world into one big likeness of ourselves. We had the experts; we knew how it was done. Our policy operatives would deradicalize here and regime-change there; our economists would float billions to the good guys and slap sanctions on the bad; and pretty soon the whole place was going to be stately and neat, safe for debt instruments and empowerment seminars, for hors d’oeuvres in the embassy garden and taxis hailed with smartphones. Democracy! Of thee we sang. Now we stand chastened, humiliated, bewildered. Democracy? We tremble to think of what it might do next. Government of the people? When we open the door to ordinary people—let them actually influence what goes on—they insist we make bigotry and persecution into our great national causes. Government by the people? When we let the people have their say—unmanaged, uncurated—they choose the biggest blowhard on TV to be our leader. Then they cheer for him as he destroys the environment and cracks down on immigrant families. Heed the voice of the plain people and all the levees of taste and learning will immediately be swamped. Half of them will demand that minorities be consigned to the back of the bus; the other half will try to confiscate the hard-won wealth of society’s greatest innovators. So goes the wail of the American leadership class as they endure another year of panic. They know on some level that what has happened in Washington isn’t due to majority rule at all, but to money and gerrymandering and the Electoral College and decades of TV programming decisions. But the anxiety cannot be dislodged; it is beyond the reach of reason. The people are out of control. “Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire. Populism is the name they give to the avalanche crashing down on the Alpine wonderland of Davos. Populism is what they call the mutiny that may well turn the supercarrier America into a foundering wreck. Populism, for them, is a one-word evocation of the logic of the mob: it is the people as a great rampaging beast. What has happened, the thinkers of Beltway and C-suite tell us, is that the common folk have declared independence from the experts and, along the way, from reality itself. And so they the learned must come together to rescue civilization: political scientists, policy wonks, economists, technologists, CEOs, joining as one to save our social order. To save it from populism. This struggle has a fundamental, almost biblical flavor. It is a battle of order against chaos, education against ignorance, mind against appetite, enlightenment against bigotry, culture against barbarism. From TED talk to red carpet, the call rings forth: Democracy must be controlled . . . before it ruins our democratic way of life. The aim is not merely to resist President Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times some grand showdown of left and right. No, today’s political face-off pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this conflict, the side of moral right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are agitated—everyone knows this—but our concern must lie with the well-being of the elites whom the people threaten to topple. This is the core assumption of what I call the Democracy Scare: if the people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because something has gone wrong with the people themselves. As Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, put it in the summer of 2016: “Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.” Denunciations of populism have been commonplace for years, but they flowered into a full-blown panic in 2016, when commentators identified it as the secret weapon behind the unlikely presidential bid of the TV billionaire Donald Trump. Populism was also said to be the mysterious force that had permitted the self-identified outsider Bernie Sanders to do so well in the Democratic primaries. Populism was also the name of the mass delusion that was leading the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Indeed, once you started looking, unauthorized troublemakers could be seen trouncing rightful ruling classes in countries all around the world. Populists were misleading people about globalization. Populists were saying mean things about elites. Populists were subverting traditional institutions of government. And populists were winning. In basing our civilization on the consent of the plain people, it suddenly seemed, our ancestors had built on a foundation of sand. democracies end when they are too democratic, blared the title of a much-discussed essay by Andrew Sullivan in which the author applied his grad school reading of Plato to the 2016 campaign. Around the same time, an article in Foreign Policy expressed it more archly: it’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses. Then came the unthinkable: the ignorant demagogue Trump was elected to the most powerful office in the world. His victory that November happened thanks to the Electoral College, an anti-populist instrument from long ago, but this irony quickly receded into the background. Although Trump had not actually won over a majority of the people, the Democracy Scare developed into a kind of hysteria. Across the world panels and convenings and academic projects dedicated themselves to analyzing and theorizing and worrying about this thing called populism. A 2017 global report from Human Rights Watch was titled, bluntly, the dangerous rise of populism. In March of that year, former British prime minister Tony Blair rang the alarm with a New York Times essay titled how to stop populism’s carnage. He also founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, an organization whose website announces that populists “can pose a real threat to democracy itself.” The Democracy Scare has been impressively pan-partisan. The liberal Center for American Progress came together in 2018 with its Beltway nemesis, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, to issue a report on “the threat of authoritarian populism” and to outline “the task facing America’s political elites,” which was to beat it back. Populism works, these authorities assure us, by summoning up the worst features of democracy. It puts the common man on a pedestal; it promises him the strong leaders he craves; and it assaults the multiculturalism he hates. When populists come to power, they ignore norms and attack institutions that protect basic rights like free speech and the presumption of innocence. Simply defined, populism is the ism that goes with mob rule. It’s the headlong collapse into the tyranny of the majority that our Founding Fathers so dreaded. Populist parties are “particularly prone to internal authoritarianism,” writes political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, since they believe there can be only one way of representing the people. For the same reason, populists are said to be suspicious of the media. They are would-be tyrants, claiming “that no action of a populist government can be questioned” because, of course, it’s really the action of the people. And populists are always hinting at a “massive disenfranchisement” of those parts of the population of which they don’t approve. The movement is also said to be unavoidably hostile to intellectuals and ideas; this is said to be its most critical failing. It is a “celebration of ignorance,” as one pundit put it in the Financial Times. It fails because it regards “the voice of ordinary citizens . . . as the only ‘genuine’ form of democratic governance,” as a 2019 book on “Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism” tells us, “even when at odds with expert judgments—including those of elected representatives and judges, scientists, scholars, journalists and commentators.” Thus the tragic flaw in the populist approach: its ideal of government of, by, and for the people doesn’t take into account the ignorance of the actual, existing people. The people can’t find Syria on a map; they think God created humans in one day in their existing form; and if you give them the chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Trump. This is what made the election of 2016 a veritable “dance of the dunces,” according to the Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan’s book Against Democracy, an accounting of the ignorance of the average American that offers hints about how an enlightened modern government might, in effect, disenfranchise the stupid and so deal with the problem of democratic error. There’s something peculiar about all this. The English language provides a great many solid choices for someone wishing to describe a leader who plays on mob psychology or racial intolerance. “Demagogue” is an obvious one, but there are others—“nationalist,” “nativist,” “racist,” or “fascist,” to name a few. They are serviceable words, all of them. In the feverish climate of the Democracy Scare, however, none of those will work: “populist” is the word we are instructed to use. “Populists” are the ones we must suppress. Let’s find out why. Drive the highway between Kansas City and Topeka and you will pass through a landscape of peaceful, rolling hills (and occasional scenes of violent tornado damage). In the fertile valley of the Kansas River, the farms are raising corn and soybeans; through the fields run the tracks of the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. It was somewhere in this bucolic setting that the controversial word “populist” was invented. There are no historical markers to indicate exactly where the blessed event took place, but nevertheless it happened—in this stretch of green countryside, on a train traveling from K.C. to Topeka—one day in May 1891. Could they have peeked into the future, that group of Topeka-bound passengers would have been astonished by the international reach and malign interpretations of their deed. That they were inventing a noun signifying “mob-minded hater of all things decent” would have come as a complete surprise to them. By coining the word “populist,” they intended to christen a movement that was brave and noble and fair—that would stand up to the narrow-minded and the intolerant. The People’s Party was the official moniker of the organization these men nicknamed, and it was one of America’s first great economic-political uprisings, a quintessential mass movement, in which rank-and-file Americans learned to think of the country’s inequitable economic system as a thing they might change by common effort. The party offered a glimpse of how citizens of a democracy, born with a faith in equality, could react when the brutal hierarchy of conventional arrangements was no longer tolerable. It was also our country’s final serious effort at breaking the national duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats. In the 1890s, the two main parties were still largely regional organizations, relics of the Civil War; the People’s Party’s innovation was to make an appeal based on class solidarity, aiming to bring together farmers in the South and the West with factory workers in Northern cities. “The interests of rural and civic labor are the same,” proclaimed the 1892 Omaha Platform of the People’s Party, and “their enemies are identical.” By which the party meant those who prospered while making nothing: bankers, railroad barons, and commodity traders, along with their hirelings—corrupt politicians who served wealth instead of the people. This bid for reform came during a period of unregulated corporate monopolies, in-your-face corruption, and crushing currency deflation—and also during a time when everyone who was anyone agreed that government’s role was to provide a framework conducive to business and otherwise to get out of the way. That was the formal ideal; the execution was uglier—a matter of deception and exploitation, bankruptcy and foreclosure, of cabinet seats for sale and entire state legislatures bought with free-ride railroad passes. At the time, America was still largely an agricultural nation, and in many places farmers made up overwhelming majorities of the population. In the South, they tended to be desperately poor and heavily reliant on bankers, landowners, and shopkeepers. In the West, farmers found themselves at the mercy of a different set of middlemen—local railroad monopolies and far-off commodity speculators. Like their brethren in the South, they worked and borrowed and grew and harvested; they watched as what they produced was sold in Chicago and New York for good prices; and yet what they themselves earned from their labors fell and fell and fell. In the 1880s, these farmers started signing up by the millions for a cooperative movement called the Farmers’ Alliance. To such people the Alliance made a simple proposition: let’s find out why we are being ruined, and then let’s get together and do something about it. Education was the first order of business, and the movement conceived of itself as a sort of national university, employing an army of traveling lecturers. The Alliance also promised real results for farmers, by means of rural cooperatives and political pressure. It demanded the regulation of railroads, federal loans to farmers, and currency reform of a kind that would help debtors. Along the way, something profound took place. The farmers—men and women of society’s commonest rank—figured out that being exploited was not the natural order of things. So they began taking matters into their own hands. In Kansas and a few other Western states, members of the group went into politics directly, and the People’s Party was born. The farmers’ revolt against the existing two-party system quickly spread to other states, and other labor-oriented reform groups began signing on. This brings us to that auspicious day in May of 1891. Early that month, a delegation of Kansans had attended a convention in Cincinnati and formally launched their People’s Party at the national level. By the time those reformers boarded the train home to Topeka, their movement looked to have a promising future: they had a platform, a cause, millions of potential constituents, and the ringing Jeffersonian slogan “Equal rights to all, special privileges to none.” One thing the insurgent party did not have, however, was a catchy word to describe its adherents, and so, on that fateful train ride—and in conversation with a local Democrat who knew some Latin—they came up with one: “populist,” derived from populus, meaning “the people.” The name’s likely debut in print followed immediately. The May 28, 1891, edition of the American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, a radical newspaper out of Winfield, used the new word as part of its excited coverage of the Cincinnati proceedings: There must be some short and easy way of designating a member of the third party. To say, “he is a member of the People’s Party” would take too much time. Henceforth a follower and affiliator of the People’s Party is a “Populist”; for a new party needs and deserves a new term. At the time of its premiere, “populist” was a term without ambiguity. It referred to economic radicals like Leopold and Henry Vincent, the two brothers who ran the American Nonconformist. Populists were those who supported a specific list of reforms designed to take power away from “the plutocrats” while advancing what the Vincent brothers called “the rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the people.” In the same issue of the paper, the Nonconformist spelled out the grievances of the People’s Party: it protested poverty, unbearable debt, monopoly, and corruption, and it looked ahead to the day when these were ended by the political actions of the people themselves. “The industrial forces have made a stand,” the paper declared of the events in Cincinnati. “The demands of the toilers for right and justice were crystallized into a strong new party.” In fact, the Populist revolt against the two major parties would turn out to be even more momentous than that grandiose passage implied. The People’s Party was one of the first in a long line of political efforts by working people to tame the capitalist system. Up until then, mainstream politicians in America had by and large taken the virtues of that system for granted—society’s winners won, those politicians believed, because they were better people, because they had prevailed in a rational and supremely fair contest called free enterprise. The Populists were the ones who blasted those smug assumptions to pieces, forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws. Not everybody thought Populism was such a wonderful invention. Kansas Republicans—whose complacent rule over the state the People’s Party rudely interrupted—insisted that a better term for their foes was “Calamityites,” because they complained all the time. The Kansas City Star, an influential regional paper, surveyed the Cincinnati convention where the party was born and sneered that it “bore a much closer semblance to a mob than to a deliberative assembly.” What’s more, the Star’s editorialist continued, “The conference, from beginning to end, was distinguished for its intolerance and extreme bigotry.” The judgment of the Topeka Daily Capital, the leading voice of Republican rectitude in Kansas, was even harsher. The paper’s lively front-page news story on the gathering in Cincinnati was headed as follows: THIRD PARTY! Cincinnati Rapidly Filling Up With the Disgruntled Ravelings of the Old Parties KANSANS TO THE FORE In Large Numbers and Making Themselves Ridiculously Conspicuous by Their Gab HAYSEED IN THEIR HAIR Kansas Alliancers Proclaim Their Politics by the Uncouthness of Their Personal Attire This is how the Establishment welcomed the Populist revolt into the world, and this is pretty much how the establishment thinks about populism still. From the very beginning, then, “populism” had two meanings. There was Populism as its proponents understood it: a movement in which ordinary working people demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was Populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable. The specific reforms for which the People’s Party campaigned are largely forgotten today, but the insults and accusations with which Populism was received in 1891 are alive and well. You can read them in best-selling books, watch them flashed on PowerPoints at prestigious foundation conferences, hear the long-ago denunciations of the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Daily Capital echoed by people who have never heard of Topeka: Populist movements, they will tell you, are mob actions; reformers are bigots; their leaders are blatherskites; their followers are mentally ill, or ignorant, or uncouth at the very least. They are cranks; they are troublemakers; they are deplorables. And, yes, they still have hayseed in their hair. The name I give to this disdainful reaction is “anti-populism,” and when you investigate its history, you find its adherents using the same rhetoric over and over again. Whether defending the gold standard in 1896 or NAFTA in 2016, anti-populism mobilizes the same sentiments and draws on the same stereotypes; it sometimes even speaks to us from the same prestigious institutions. Its most toxic ingredient—a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans—is as virulent today as it was in the Victorian era. The first item in anti-populism’s bill of charges is that populism is nostalgic or backward-looking in a way that is both futile and unhealthy. Among the many public figures who have seconded this familiar accusation is none other than Barack Obama, who in 2016 criticized unnamed politicians for having “embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore.” Obama’s understanding of “populism” as a politics of pointless pining for bygone glories—exemplified by Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”—is unremarkable, but as a description of the agrarian radicals of the late nineteenth century it would be largely without foundation. As modern historians remind us, the Populists believed in progress and modernity as emphatically as did any big-city architect or engineer of their day. Their newspapers and magazines loved to publicize scientific advances in farming techniques; one of their favorites was a paper called the Progressive Farmer. For all its gloom about the plutocratic 1890s, the Populists’ rhetoric could be surprisingly optimistic about the potential of ordinary people and the society they thought they were building. Anti-populism is similarly misleading on the matter of international trade. In a 2017 paper about the “populist backlash of the late nineteenth century,” the Hoover Institution historian Niall Ferguson tells us flatly that hostility to free trade has always been among the defining features of populism, because populism is always a “backlash against globalization.” Lots of other scholars say the same thing: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, for example, tells us that populism has always been “protectionist in the broad sense of the term” and that all forms of populism stand “against foreign goods, foreign immigrants, and foreign ideas.” Were we to apply these arguments to Gilded Age America, they would be almost entirely upside-down. If you examine where the parties stood on the issue of tariffs, you find that the era’s great champions of protectionism were in fact big business and the Republicans. William McKinley, the man responsible for crushing the People’s Party, first rose to fame as the author of the McKinley Tariff, the very definition of a backlash against free trade. It was William Jennings Bryan’s Democrats who were the true-believing free-traders of the period. And it was Populist leaders who dreamed of building a publicly owned railroad running from the Great Plains to the Texas Gulf Coast so that farmers could export to the world without having to pay the high freight rates imposed by private railways. So it goes time and again with our contemporary anti-populists: when their denunciations are compared with the ideas of the people who invented the P-word, the stereotype of populists in general collapses. It does not describe historical reality. The Pops did not fear government, as we are often told populists do; they wanted it to grow big and strong. The Pops did not hate ideas; they meant to spread knowledge to the farthest corners of the land. The Pops were not socially regressive; they were unique among the major parties of their time in boasting numerous female leaders. Again and again, upon investigation, the hateful tendencies that we are told make up this frightful worldview are either absent from historical Populism or are the opposite of what it stood and stands for, or else far more accurately describe the people who hated Populism and who have opposed it ever since the 1890s. Of course, language is mutable. Merely figuring out the intentions of the people who coined a given word doesn’t tell us a whole lot. But while the People’s Party is no more, the political philosophy that the Populists embodied did not die. The idea of working people coming together against economic privilege lives on; you might say it constitutes one of the main streams of our democratic tradition. The populist impulse has been a presence in American life since the country’s beginning. Populism triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s, when the people overwhelmingly endorsed a regulatory welfare state. Populist uprisings occur all the time in the United States, always against the same enemies—monopolies, banks, elites, and corruption—and always with the same type of salt-of-the-earth heroes. The most obvious embodiment of the populist tradition today is certainly the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, whose principal likes to describe it as a “grassroots movement” rising up against the nation’s grotesque economic inequality. That is the word’s historical meaning, and when we use it as a handy term for demagogues and would-be dictators, we are inverting that definition. Populism in its original formulation was profoundly, achingly democratic; it was also, by the standards of the time, anti-demagogic, pro-enlightenment, and pro-equality. In its heyday, and alone among American political parties of the time, the Populists stood strong for human rights. Populism had prominent female leaders. Populists despised tyrants and imperialism. Although not entirely immune to the racialism of its era, Populism defied the poisonous idea of Southern white solidarity. In these days of feverish anti-populism, my mind often goes back to a 1900 speech by one of the very last Populists in Congress, a Nebraska lawyer named William Neville. His subject was America’s imperial rule over the Philippines, and his party’s opposition to it. But first he denounced both Southern Democrats, for trying to “exclude the black man from the right of suffrage,” and Republicans, for “shooting salvation and submission into the brown man because he wants to be free.” Then Neville said this: Nations should have the same right among nations that men have among men. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is as dear to the black and brown man as to the white; as precious to the poor as to the rich; as just to the ignorant as to the educated; as sacred to the weak as to the strong; and as applicable to nations as to individuals. And the nation which subverts such right by force is no better governed than the man who takes the law in his own hands Of course, scholars and pundits have a right to ignore such statements and to divorce any word they choose from its original meaning. It’s legitimate for them to take the term “populist” back to its Latin root and start all over again from there, to pretend that the train from Kansas City never arrived and the farmers’ revolt never happened. But why do that? Why use such a fine, democratic word to mean “racist,” to mean “dictator,” to mean “anti-intellectual”. The answer is that denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays are part of a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn, rather than populism itself, that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly in our time. Perhaps we should not be surprised to discover that modern-day thinkers who attack what they call populism only rarely bother to consider the movement that invented the word. Far more frequently they attach the term to the deeds of European politicians like the Le Pen family or the rhetoric of certain South American demagogues. Some of these experts seem unaware that the People’s Party of the 1890s existed. Others mention it only in passing. What these present-day thinkers cannot escape are the roots of their own anti-populist tradition. Whether or not they have ever heard of Kansas Populists like “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, they are embracing a political philosophy that was pieced together long ago to stop radicals like him. The anti-populist tradition came into its horrific own during the 1896 Democratic National Convention, when working-class unrest appeared to triumph in the person of William Jennings Bryan, then a young former congressman from Nebraska, who won the presidential nomination on the strength of his oratory against the gold standard. Bryan talked a lot like a Populist, and a short while after the Democratic convention, the Populists nominated him as well. To the Establishment, there could be no doubt about what this signified: one of the nation’s main political parties had been captured by radicalism, and the shock was as great as that of a stock-market crash. Before 1896, the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic questions had been small; the two parties orbited each other within a tight system of limited government, gold-backed money, and friendliness toward big business. Bryan’s nomination signaled this arrangement’s collapse.1 The country was in a recession that year, which was the inescapable theme of the campaign, but the candidates addressed it via the proxy issue of the U.S. dollar. Democrats and their Populist allies blamed the deflationary gold standard for the unhappy fate of farmers. William McKinley and the Republicans believed the gold standard to be the central pillar of civilization itself, and regarded the threat to dismantle it as a deadly peril. The Republicans were wrong on this issue, but nevertheless they prevailed. They contrived to crush Bryan’s challenge and, in so doing, to build a lasting stereotype of reform as folly. The word with which they expressed that stereotype: “populism.” Let us open the Judge magazine of August 8, 1896, to get a glimpse of how respectable Americans regarded the radical threat. Judge was one of the country’s premier humor magazines, with several large, beautifully drawn political cartoons in each issue. The rest of its pages typically featured grotesque caricatures of blacks, Irish, Jews, immigrants, and farmers. Between the jokes at the expense of these subordinate people, one could also catch glimpses of the demographic for whose amusement the chuckles were collected: refined, upper-class whites—people of manners and education and bank accounts—saying witty things about the burdens of good taste. With this particular number of Judge, however, it is clear that something terrible has happened: the usual tone of genial mockery has given way to panic. At the magazine’s center is a foldout illustration of stark American disaster, brought on by a gigantic figure labeled populism. This colossus is rustic and tattered, but we are not meant to laugh at him: he glares with predatory eyes, he is armed with a brace of pistols and knives, he wears a Phrygian cap—the liberty cap of the French Revolution—marked anarchy, he wields the torch of ruin, and he towers terrifyingly over his fellow Americans. From this monster flee the sort of tidy white people who made up Judge magazine’s readership: banker, capitalist, honest citizen, respectable democrat. One of them cowers on the ground beneath Populism’s onslaught; another clutches his head in disbelief. “Has It Come to This!” blubbers the caption. This was the Democracy Scare, 1896 version: our system was unraveling, with society’s worst elements rising up against its best. Similarly frightful images appeared that year wherever people were dignified and accomplished together, always expressed in the vocabulary of hysteria and hyperbole. Populism wasn’t merely menacing “norms”; it was bringing the country face-to-face with anarchy and repudiation. On July 10, the New York Sun declared that the Democratic Party had been given over to “Jefferson’s diametric opposite, the Socialist, or Communist, or, as he is now known here, the Populist.” A lead editorial that ran in the Sun a few days later declared that there was no real Democratic candidate that year. Instead, “there are Populist-Anarchist candidates nominated on a Populistic-Anarchist platform.” Similarly, in a pamphlet distributed by the Republican Party that fall, the novelist and statesman John Hay claimed that the Democrats no longer existed: “The enemy which confronts us is the Populist party,” which had swallowed the Democrats “as a python might swallow an ox.” Then as now, consensus among elites was the primary weapon of the anti-populist resistance. Thanks to William Jennings Bryan and “his new Red Circus,” something miraculous had happened, the Sun proclaimed: “the business interests of the country are all arrayed on one side.” E. L. Godkin, then the conscience of American journalism, clucked in The Nation that “no man has ever yet been elected President whom the business interests of the country . . . distrusted and opposed as unsafe; these interests in the controlling states are substantially unanimous against Bryan.” Godkin was pleased even better by the harmony with which the nation’s press came together against the Democratic challenger. Similar unanimity reigned in fashionable churches and in prestige academia. From the heights of this consensus the men of quality denounced the rabble. Bryan’s campaign aroused “the basest passions of the least worthy members of the community,” announced an editorial in the New–York Tribune that ran on the day after the election. “It has been defeated and destroyed because right is right and God is God.” Populism represented the world turned upside down. It came from a dark place where democracy’s guardrails were gone, where wealth and learning and status counted for nothing. “Populism” was a word used to express the horror of seeing hierarchies collapse and the lowly clamber to places where they did not belong. Populists, John Hay wrote, valued nothing, throwing “their frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization.” They longed to bind the hands of government “where it is inclined to protect order and property.” They appealed “to the openly lawless.” They waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” Their plans for funding the government were “the merest babble of the loafers around a rural livery stable.” For the plumèd knights of the Republican Party, it was, he wrote, “as if a champion at a tourney, awaiting the onset of a chivalrous antagonist, should suddenly find himself attacked by a lunatic in rags.” The familiar identification of populism with demagoguery, a core doctrine of modern-day punditry, is also descended directly from this original Democracy Scare. It began on the very day of Bryan’s surprise nomination. An editorial in the Evening Post declared the Nebraskan to be the Democrats’ “chief demagogue,” a man “who took the mob of repudiators off their feet by a speech of forty-blatherskite power.” It wasn’t so much Bryan’s arguments that won the Democrats over, the editor continued, as it was “his wind power, which is immense.” A favorite trope of the anti-populists of the 1890s was the masquerade or the put-on. Bryan and his followers were not real Democrats, the men of quality agreed; they were “masquerading in the Democratic garb,” as Cornell’s president, Andrew D. White, put it. In a more gothic vein, Leslie’s Weekly depicted Bryan’s face as a mask, behind which lurked a hideous howling anarchy in a boar’s hide and bat wings. This was, as the caption put it, “The New (Not the True) Democracy Unmasked.” One of the monster’s hands held its name tag, a second gripped the throat of a working man, a third used a knife to cut the dollar in half. Who was really in control of the uprising? Was Bryan some kind of mastermind, or was he merely the tool of sinister others? According to the New–York Tribune, Bryan was “not the real leader of that league of hell,” a verdict the paper handed down after the Democrat lost the election. “He was only a puppet in the blood-imbrued hands of Altgeld the Anarchist and Debs the revolutionist and other desperadoes of that stripe.”2 And if he wasn’t a puppet or a demagogue—if Bryan wasn’t fooling when he denounced plutocracy—oh my God, don’t even ask. “He is a dangerous man,” editorialized the New York Sun: “If he is sincere, dangerous even as a fool is dangerous when he raises a false alarm of fire in a crowded theatre; and if a demagogue, as he seems to be, doubly dangerous.” Then as now, faith in the people’s wisdom was thought to be populism’s original sin. Bryan was mocked in The Nation for supposedly starting his speeches with empty salutes to the genius of the common people: “Your wisdom is inexhaustible and infallible,” he was parodied as saying. “I tell you that you are so great that you can ignore the rest of the world.” A cartoon in Puck imagined Bryan on his whistle-stop tour, blowing the same sort of bunkum out of a bellows at a crowd of happy farmers, snaggletoothed idiots wearing long agrarian whiskers. Bryan was driving them to ecstasy by saluting the wisdom of the hayseed: Our people are capable of ruling! They do not need the lessons of history! They have nothing to learn! They do not care for the experience of other nations! They know it all! . . . Study and science are of no account, the popular intuition is better than reasoning and what the people say goes! That populism is at war with intellect, that it is an offense to meritocracy—these lasting axioms are also rooted in the original Democracy Scare, when Populism threatened to level both the hierarchy of money and that of credentialed technique. The institution where these two came together was the gold standard, the bedrock of both classical economics and the nineteenth-century banking system. For the Populists, the elites’ faith in gold was a favorite target for mockery. But for establishment figures like John Hay, the only legitimate way to settle the currency question was “by the investigations of the leading economists of the world,” gathered in solemn contemplation. The conclusion of such a gathering was certain: one couldn’t adopt a silver standard in just one country and hope to succeed. America’s economy was locked in an international system regulated by responsible expertise, Hay insisted, and upon this reasoning everyone who was anyone agreed. “All the intelligent bi-metallists of America . . . ; all those of England . . . ; all the German scholars . . . agree in this.”3 Many years later, the consensus-minded historian Richard Hofstadter would assert in these pages that Populism reflected status anxiety and even a “paranoid style.” His larger insight, which revolutionized social science in the 1950s and which persists in the anti-populism of our own day, was that mass protest movements in general could be understood as a reaction of maladjusted minds to the advance of modernity. In truth, Hofstadter’s discovery had already been made back in 1896, when Populism was repeatedly diagnosed as a mental aberration. In September of that year, as the contentious presidential campaign unfolded, the New York Times announced the alarming discovery: William Jennings Bryan appeared to be clinically insane. It began with a letter to the paper from an anonymous “alienist,” or psychologist, who examined Bryan’s heredity, his heretofore mediocre career, and his behavior on the campaign trail, and concluded “without any bias” that “Mr. Bryan presents in his speech and action striking and alarming evidence of a mind not entirely sound.” Proof: the candidate was “an apostle of an economic theory without ever having a training in economics.” It was a scary situation, the alienist continued. After all, having “a madman in the White House” would not only be dangerous, but would also damage democracy itself, since it “would forever weaken the trust in the soundness of republics and the sanity of the voting masses.” Further examples from the bitter, costly campaign of 1896 can be piled up almost without limit, but you get the point: we are in the grip of a remarkably similar distemper today. To be clear, I believe that President Trump richly deserves nearly any criticism he gets. He is not really a populist, and I have no intention of building sympathy for him. But the danger of anti-populism is that it goes far beyond objecting to one vile politician. This was demonstrated in March as the anti-populist establishment came together to pummel the campaign of Bernie Sanders. Whatever its target, anti-populism is always a brief for elite and even aristocratic power, an attack on the democratic tradition itself. That is ultimately what’s in the crosshairs when commentators tell us that populism is a “threat to liberal democracy”; when they announce that populism “is almost inherently antidemocratic”; when they declare that “all people of goodwill must come together to defend liberal democracy from the populist threat.” These are strong, urgent statements, obviously intended to frighten us away from a particular set of views. Millions of foundation dollars have been invested to put scary pronouncements like these before the public. Media outlets have incorporated them into the thought feeds of the world. Just as in 1896, such ideas are everywhere now: your daily newspaper, if your town still has one, almost certainly throws the word “populist” at racist demagogues and pro-labor liberals alike. Here is David Brooks, making the connection between “populists of left and right” in a New York Times column denouncing Sanders. The Vermont senator, Brooks asserts, embraces the populist values, which are different [from liberal ones]: rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends and incessant hatred for your supposed foes. And here is how The Economist made exactly the same point, whining that Americans may soon be forced to choose between a corrupt, divisive, right-wing populist, who scorns the rule of law and the constitution, and a sanctimonious, divisive, left-wing populist, who blames a cabal of billionaires and businesses for everything that is wrong with the world. All this when the country is as peaceful and prosperous as at any time in its history. It is hard to think of a worse choice. As it happens, the men of quality did their job, and working Americans will not face the ignoble prospect of voting for a candidate who takes their side against billionaires and businesses. The larger message of anti-populism, regardless of where it comes from on the political spectrum, is always one of complacency. Elites rule us because elites should rule us. They are in charge because they are the best. And so we come to understand the real task before us today: to rescue from the enormous condescension of the comfortable the one political tradition that has a chance of reversing our decades-long turn to the right. |