Green Party Adopts Contradictory Definitions of Antisemitism: Future Implications

Written by Les Levidow

How does (or doesn’t) antisemitism relate to anti-Israel criticism?  For this political question, a central focus has been the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism.  Since being adopted by the UK government in 2016, it has become increasingly contentious. 

The IHRA Definition likewise has been the focus of debate in the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) for several years.  Finally its autumn 2021 conference passed a motion on antisemitism guidance. Its text incorporated contradictory definitions of antisemitism, as highlighted by plenary speeches against the motion. Likewise by reports on the plenary debate from within and outside the GPEW.

Why such contradictory elements?  Together these serve the fantasy parallel universe of the motion’s supporters. According to them, there is no conflict between the IHRA Definition and the Palestine solidarity movement. This narrative helped the motion to gain a 2/3 majority vote at the conference plenary.  Yet the motion got a hostile response from pro-Israel groups.  Let us examine why.

On the one hand, the motion promoted the IHRA Definition as the ‘gold standard’ for mainstream Jewish organizations. Indeed it is, because they identify with Israel and seek to limit or restrict anti-racist criticism.  According to the IHRA’s Israel examples, it is antisemitic to characterise the Israeli state as ‘a racist endeavour’.  Deploying this example, pro-Israel groups have stigmatised the phrase ‘apartheid Israel’ as antisemitic. 

The IHRA’s Israel examples underlie some false allegations against Green Party election candidates by pro-Israel groups, especially the so-called ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’.  More generally, the IHRA’s Israel examples have been designed and used for an anti-Palestinian agenda; this role has been well documented for several years (as in the global survey, The IHRA at Work).

On the other hand, the conference motion gives reassurance that its guidance does not conflict with the GPEW’s policies on Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) (in 2008 and 2014 conference motions supporting the 2005 Palestinian call).  The motion’s Appendix 2 includes caveats, e.g. that it would not necessarily be antisemitic to call Israel ‘an apartheid state’.  And it includes the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which distinguishes between antisemitic and anti-Zionist comments, thus explicitly contradicting the IHRA’s Israel examples.  

For those reasons, the motion displeased pro-Israel voices, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and some Jewish newspapers.  Such voices have had a central role in false allegations of antisemitism, thus helping to shield and disguise a wider UK-Israel partnership (see my article).  For such false allegations, the GPEW motion-guidance provides a weaker political weapon than the IHRA Definition per se.  Hence they predictably criticised the motion. 

Those criticisms disappointed the motion’s proponents. Soon after the autumn conference, the Jewish Greens issued a briefing document for any GPEW representatives who may be asked questions about ‘the pushback from the Jewish community’ (more accurately, its pro-Israel sections).  The briefing attributes the pushback to a miscommunication.  It also says that the conference motion was ‘inspired by a model used by the Community Security Trust (CST)’.  Yet the CST’s 2019 report makes allegations of antisemitism against some individuals using the phrase ‘apartheid Israel’.    

The Jewish Greens’ briefing document downplays the motion’s contradictory content and caveats about anti-Israel criticism.  It makes several requests, e.g. ‘Do not: Suggest that the reason we’ve taken this approach is because the IHRA is inadequate or use language which suggests we are caveating the IHRA.’   Indeed, please don't say the obvious. 

For a consistently pro-Palestine politics that also opposes antisemitism,  the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism is the most helpful short guide.  It should be deployed against the IHRA’s Israel examples, as it was explicitly meant to do. Political education should highlight their contrary perspectives. This is crucial for distinguishing between anti-racist Palestine solidarity and antisemitism, as a basis to counter false allegations.

Les Levidow is a member of Green Left within the Green Party of England and Wales. He has been involved in several Palestine solidarity groups since the 1980s, most recently Jewish Network for Palestine (JNP).  He is a member of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), which opposed the IHRA Definition’s precursor when it first appeared publicly in 2006.

The Labour Party's antisemitism crisis: what mistake to avoid in the Green Party?

Written by Les Levidow

Amidst internal conflict over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, some Green Party members have said that we should avoid the Labour Party's mistake on antisemitism.  Indeed, yet ‘the mistake’ has contrary meanings. On the pro-IHRA side, some apparently accept the dominant storyline that the Labour Party tolerated widespread antisemitic behaviour. The anti-IHRA side instead means that the Labour Party pursued many false allegations of antisemitism.  

So, which was the real mistake around ‘the antisemitism crisis’?  And what was its underlying politics?

As this article argues: The socialist anti-imperialist Corbyn leadership posed a threat to the British ruling elite, especially its partnership with the Israeli regime. Hence the leadership’s diverse enemies jointly reinforced false allegations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel lobby. These allegations conveniently displaced the racism problem away from the settler-colonial Israeli regime onto its anti-racist critics. For this racist pro-Israel agenda, the IHRA mis-definition of antisemitism has been a key weapon in the Labour Party and plays a similar role in the Green Party, as promoted by the leadership.  

For the full version of this argument, see my May 2021 journal article, ‘Bad Consciences: projecting Israel’s settler-colonial racist aggression onto Labour Party antisemitism’.

Denying and projecting racism

Like other settler-colonial regimes, the Zionist one has subordinated, dispossessed and expelled the indigenous people. These aims formed the basis of the Israeli state in 1948. It has denied its own racist aggression and projected this onto the Palestinians, increasingly since Israel’s 1967 expansion to the West Bank and Gaza. In recent decades Israel has further promoted itself as a front-line defence against ‘Islamist terrorism’, whereby Israel’s regional counter-insurgency role protects the West from mortal threats. This narrative should be understood as paranoic, i.e. denying unsavoury parts of one’s self or nation, splitting off these parts and projecting them onto one’s victims. 

This paranoic narrative has complemented the securitisation agenda of Western states, supporting allies abroad as ‘counter-terror’ forces against threats to the West. This paranoiac displacement has a long history in UK state-sponsored domestic practices over many years, such as ‘inter-faith’ events suppressing pro-Palestine dissent and the Prevent programme targeting it as ‘extremism’. So-called preventive measures have pursued ‘extremism’ through pervasive surveillance identifying pro-Palestine views. Thus Britain’s domestic practices have internalised Israel’s racist paranoiac projections.

Moreover, state practices have essentialised Jews as a pro-Israel ‘Jewish community’ being victimised by pro-Palestine antisemitism and so needing special protection.  Within the Western elite, this philosemitic narrative has constructed Jews as heroic colonists in the Middle East and pro-Israel model citizens at home. Jews’ essentialization has gained a broad appeal for various reasons. Many Western Jews identify with Israel, while also needing to feel morally special. Their sensibility is offended by reminders of Israel’s institutionally racist practices,  provoking a bad conscience; the offence is projected onto the putative antisemitism of Israel’s critics. 

Elite philosemitism for a UK-Israel partnership

Those practices reinforce a homogeneous social identity, as a basis to demand universal deference to a single pro-Israel ‘Jewish community’, especially as a test of antisemitism. Instrumentalising that narrative, UK politicians justify their pro-Israel commitment along two lines: as crucial for ‘social cohesion’, i.e. reassuring Jews about British support for Israel, as well as ‘national security’, i.e. needing Israel as a front-line defence against the Islamist threat. This elite philosemitism  has helped to shield the UK’s pro-Israel commitment from criticism.

Along similar lines, over several decades the Labour Party leadership has made great efforts to contain and stigmatise pro-Palestine dissent.  The New Labour leadership promoted a more aggressively pro-Israel policy within the ‘war on terror’ securitisation agenda since 2001, complemented by the Prevent programme since 2006. Together these efforts stigmatised Israel’s opponents as security threats, e.g. as ‘extremists’ or ‘radical Islamists’. 

Sponsored by dominant Western states, the IHRA was established in 1998. It has served to sanitise Nazi Germany of its racist colonial legacies and its Western capitalist complicity. This framing helped to legitimise Western states as anti-racist forces and to instrumentalise Holocaust memorial education for this political purpose.

As the IHRA’s next step, its website posted the Working Definition of Antisemitism (with all the examples) from a US pro-Israel lobby group, the American Jewish Committee. This document provided an extra weapon for false allegations of antisemitism by conflating this with anti-Zionism. As the wider context, Palestine solidarity activists had been highlighting how Israel’s institutionally racist character was driving its systematic violations of international law. They could be falsely accused of antisemitism by deploying the so-called IHRA Definition.

False allegations undermining the Corbyn leadership

Together those practices provided a ready-made framework to contain the Corbyn-led Labour Party during 2016-19. When the membership greatly rose to support a pro-Palestine anti-imperialist leadership, this rise jeopardised the Labour Party’s century-long role within the elite pro-Zionist consensus. Members’ pro-Palestine voices aggravated and offended the bad consciences of Jewish Zionist members, who resented the offenders.

Given the Corbyn leadership’s diverse enemies, they jointly mobilised an elite pro-Israel strategy to stigmatise and silence pro-Palestine voices: In the dominant narrative, the Labour Party was tolerating ‘endemic antisemitism’,  creating an ‘unsafe space for Jews’. According to the pro-Israel lobby, moreover, the leadership posed ‘an existential threat to Jewish existence’. The racist aggression of Zionist settler-colonialism was denied, split off and projected onto pro-Palestine critics.   

Antisemitism was more broadly equated with ‘hurt to the Jewish community’ or simply ‘offence to Jews’. Pro-Israel Jewish organisations demanded and gained a monopoly voice to speak for ‘the Jewish community’. The pro-Israel lobby demanded that the Labour Party create a ‘safe space for Jews’, i.e. for a racist Zionist identity beyond debate. 

The Labour Party’s disciplinary procedure increasingly targeted pro-Corbyn anti-racist members (including Jewish ones) who were falsely accused of antisemitism.  The procedure in turn often accused them of ‘behaviour bringing the Labour Party into disrepute’; this euphemistically evaded the political issue. At the same time, the procedure delayed any action against the real antisemitism of other members; hence the pro-Israel lobby could more easily claim that the Party was tolerating antisemitic behaviour.

The British elite strategy conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism as perceived by pro-Israel Jews, thus inverting racism and anti-racism. The inversion has been put sarcastically by Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor: ‘An antisemite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person whom Jews dislike’, especially Israel’s critics.

IHRA mis-definition serves a racist pro-Israel agenda

Given that political context, let us return to the initial question: What mistake of the Labour Party should be avoided?  At recent Green Party of England and Wales conferences the leadership has supported a motion that would incorporate the IHRA Definition into the disciplinary procedure.  According to the motion, it’s irrelevant how the Definition has been used by other organizations. Such a claim is politically naive, disingenuous or both. 

The IHRA mis-definition has already been the basis for external organisations to make false allegations against some pro-Palestine Green Party members, who then had to undergo the disciplinary procedure.  This has ominous analogies with the Labour Party’s procedures. Adopting the IHRA Definition has obvious consequences, namely: to encourage more false allegations of antisemitism, to reinforce them internally and to deter criticisms of Israel’s racist character.

More generally, the IHRA Definition has been widely cited worldwide for false allegations against pro-Palestine events, speakers and comments. In response to such allegations, major institutions have suppressed or severely restricted pro-Palestine events. Such incidents have been well documented, e.g. in a journal paper on the UK, and in the Jewish-led global report, The IHRA Definition at Work. 

In all those ways the IHRA mis-definition helps to protect Israel’s institutional racism from criticism, thus serving the pro-Israel commitment of the British ruling elite. By promoting the mis-definition, the Green Party leadership has shamefully colluded with this racist pro-Israel agenda since 2017. Let’s reject it and so avoid the mistake of the Labour Party. 

Author: Les Levidow is a member of Green Left within the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW). Since the 1980s he has participated in several Jewish pro-Palestine groups, including many Jews who have faced false allegations of antisemitism by the pro-Israel lobby. His current focus is Jewish Network for Palestine (JNP), loosely connected with the US-based Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). 

Social Self-Defense Against the Impending Trump Coup

 

Written by Jeremy Brecher and first published at Labor Network for Sustainability 

President Donald Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power no matter who wins the election. What is to be done if Trump loses the election but refuses to concede? The purpose of this commentary is to stimulate discussion and preparation for how to overcome such a Trump coup. 

Even before the 2016 election, Donald Trump hinted that if he lost he might not accept the outcome. Now, far behind in the polls, Trump is taking action to disrupt the 2020 election and laying obvious groundwork for refusing to leave office if he loses. As this threat has moved from a hypothetical concern to an immediate fear, the media have been filled with stories about Trumpite plans for red state legislatures to overturn popular votes, destroy mail ballots, and send in the military to quell demonstrators defending the vote. 

But reports have also begun appearing about plans to defend the ballot and resist a Trump Coup d’état – an “executive usurpation” sometimes referred to as a “self-coup.”(1) This commentary gives a brief historical background on the effective use of “people power” to contest coups and stolen elections and reviews recent writing and organizing against a Trump Coup. It presents resistance to a Trump Coup not as primarily a matter of Biden vs. Trump or Democrats vs. Republicans, but rather as Social Self-Defense — a defense of society against an attack on the very things that make our life together possible.(2) 

Anti-Coups Have Succeeded 

Tyrannical regimes from Serbia to the Philippines to Brazil and many other places have been brought down by “people power” — nonviolent revolts that made society ungovernable and led to regime change. While the U.S. has a strong tradition of social movements based on people power, it does not have a tradition of using mass action and general strikes for the defense of democracy. However, in other countries where democratic institutions have been so weakened or eliminated that they provide no alternative to tyranny, such methods have emerged and been used effectively. 

There is now an extensive literature analyzing popular resistance to subversion of elections and other forms of coup d’état. The pioneer of such research was theorist and historian of nonviolence Gene Sharp. His Waging Nonviolent Struggle provides extensive analysis and many case studies of effective nonviolent resistance; his The Anti-Coup focuses in on the use of these methods against illegal seizures of government power.(3) It proposes such guidelines as: 

• Repudiate the coup and denounce its leaders as illegitimate 
• Regard all decrees and orders from the coup leaders contradicting established law as illegal and refuse to obey them 
• Keep all resistance strictly nonviolent – refuse to be provoked into violence 
• Noncooperate with the coup leaders in all ways

Steven Zunes’ Civil Resistance Against Coups analyzes the resistance to twelve coups and provides an expanded theoretical framework.(4) Sharp and Zunes provide invaluable background for anyone who contemplates resisting a possible Trump coup. Here are two examples that involve popular resistance to coups that utilized stolen elections: 

In 1988, despite the circumventing of electoral laws, repression of universities and media, and ethnic cleansing, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic was still holding elections of a sort. An activist group called Otpor formed around the goal of driving Milosevic from power and began hundreds of small actions of resistance around the country to counter pervasive fear of the regime. 

Its plan was that activists would compel the regime to call elections; they would create massive turnout around a united opposition candidate; they would join other nongovernmental organizations in carefully monitoring election results so they could document their victory; and they would use mass noncompliance – leading up to a general strike – if and when Milosevic refused to step down. 

In 2000, Otpor pushed 18 of Serbia’s squabbling opposition parties to form a coalition to support a unity candidate, promising to deliver 500,000 votes to the unity candidate but threatening to put 100,000 protesters at the door of any politician who betrayed the coalition. As elections approached, the regime called Otpor an “illegal terrorist organization”; police raided its offices and shut down independent radio and TV stations; each day an average of seven activists were arrested. 

Meanwhile, the opposition organized ten thousand election monitors. They announced exit polls showing Milosevic had been defeated by a 50% to 35% margin. Instead of accepting the results, Milosevic refused to leave office and demanded a run-off election. 

Otpor announced a deadline for Milosevic to concede and 200,000 people demonstrated in Belgrade. The opposition called on the population throughout the country to “perform any acts of civil disobedience they have at their disposal.” Miners struck; TV and radio stations opened their airwaves to opposition voices.  As the deadline approached, cars and trucks filled the highways heading toward Belgrade. 

Police put up roadblocks and were issued orders to shoot, but seeing the size of the convoys they abandoned their barricades. Half-a-million people gathered in Belgrade. Police fired tear gas, but when the crowd stood its ground riot police began running away or joining the crowd. The opposition candidate declared victory and Milosevic accepted his defeat. 

There are many other cases where popular action has forestalled or reversed efforts to subvert the outcome of a democratic election. After the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. in 1983, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos met growing protests. 

Marcos called a presidential election to be held in February, 1986. Aquino’s widow Corazon Aquino was backed by all major opposition parties. Marcos’ campaign included vote-buying and the murder of more than 70 opposition workers. On election day casting of fake ballots and falsification of returns was widely witnessed. 

Marcos claimed victory, but Mrs. Aquino met with opposition leaders and proposed a long nonviolent campaign of what she dubbed “people power.” Top military officers resigned, withdrew support from Marcos, recognized Aquino as the legitimate winner, and fled to military camps in Manilla. The city’s Roman Catholic Church leader appealed on nationwide radio for people to nonviolently protect the officers and prevent bloodshed. 

By midnight 50,000 surrounded the camps; two days later it was more than a million. Marcos ordered tanks and armored transports to attack. Nuns knelt in front of the tanks and priests climbed on them and led a million protesters – plus soldiers – in prayer. The troops turned back. Next day Marcos ordered another assault, but the commanding officer ordered his troops to return to their base. The military rebels announced that ninety percent of the Armed Forces had defected. Large crowds took over the government television station. 

The next day Marcos fled the country and Aquino was inaugurated president. Ever after mass nonviolent direct action has been known around the world as “People power.”(5)

How the Trump Coup Is Unfolding 

This summer a group called the Transition Integrity Project held a series of “war games” with more than 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders and other experts to review possible scenarios for the upcoming election and presidential transition. The result: 

We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. Recent events, including the President’s own unwillingness to commit to abiding by the results of the election, the Attorney General’s embrace of the President’s groundless electoral fraud claims, and the unprecedented deployment of federal agents to put down leftwing protests, underscore the extreme lengths to which President Trump may be willing to go in order to stay in office. 

Their likely scenarios included: Trump’s refusal to concede; Attorney General William Barr opening investigation of vote-by-mail fraud allegations and Democratic ties to antifa; and rival selection of pro-Trump electoral college slates by Republican state legislatures. Meanwhile Trump would call for armed supporters to challenge pro-Biden demonstrators, leading to multiple killings of demonstrators; Trump says he will invoke the Insurrection Act to teach anti-American terrorists a lesson. All this before Thanksgiving. 

Except in the case of a big Biden win, each scenario “reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse.” In two of the scenarios there was no agreement on the winner by Inauguration Day.(6) 

An extended article in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman released in late September presented evidence that Trump and Republican officials are already laying the groundwork for such scenarios. The disruption of the Post Office and the plans to intimidate voters and prevent full vote counting are already under way. Gellman maintains that after election day, “Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede,” and that he may “obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in the Congress.”

Preparations are already being made for red state legislators to replace elected members of the Electoral College with their own appointees. Barton spells out in detail this and many other strategies available and likely to be used to prevent a losing President Trump from being forced to leave office.(7)

 How to Overcome a Trump Coup 

In late September, four movement activists and experts on civil resistance issued a manual called Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy. Reminiscent of the Indivisible manual that helped launch the resistance to Trump in 2016, it presents a detailed plan for locally-based resistance to a Trump Coup.(8) It lays out various scenarios in which Trump refuses to leave office. It calls for forming community-based “election protection” groups. These can start immediately with meetings by a small core group that develops a response plan and recruits others to participate in it. 

These groups will “hold the line” that all votes must be counted; all irregularities must be investigated impartially and remedied; and election results must be respected, regardless of who wins. Public officials can be called on in advance to state their commitment to these principles. Violation of these “Red Lines” by Trump or other officials will trigger these groups into action. 

The guide provides sample meeting agendas, templates for “Power Maps” of forces to influence, tactics “brainstorming sheets,” and other planning tools. It outlines targeted action to “undermine the pillars of support” for an illegal Trump regime. It calls for mass popular mobilization based on disciplined nonviolence because “violence will backfire badly against the side that uses it.” 

It discusses tactics including displaying symbols of protest; engaging in demonstrations, marches, and nonviolent blockades; strikes of all kinds; deliberate work slowdowns; boycotts of all kinds; divestment; refusing to pay certain fees, bills, taxes, or other costs; or refusal to observe certain expected social norms or behaviors. 

Trade unionists Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jose La Luz have made a related proposal for organized labor to establish “pro-democracy volunteer brigades” in preparation for the election. 

We need volunteers who will assist with voter registration; mobilize in large numbers should law enforcement and right-wing militias show up at polling places in order to intimidate voters; block the right-wing from challenging legitimate voters and ballots; and lay the groundwork for massive civil disobedience should the Trump administration attempt to forestall the elections and/or refuse to recognize the results.(9)

Organizing So Far Against a Trump Coup 

The Trump presidency has been an era of mass resistance, an upwelling of direct action that came to be known as the Trump Resistance or simply The Resistance. A social science organization called the Crowd Counting Consortium listed more than eighty-seven hundred protests with six to nine million participants in the first year of the Trump administration, 90 percent opposing Trump’s agenda.(10) The Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd constituted the largest mass uprising in the U.S. in half a century with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants.(11) The base for contesting a Trump Coup is already in motion. 

At the start of September, a coalition of 50 organizations called the Fight Back Table, which includes Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, Color of Change, Indivisible, and MoveOn, established a post-election planning vehicle called the Democracy Defense Nerve Center. Taking off from the Transition Integrity Project war games, they have begun to chart out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as “mass public unrest.” 

They began to struggle with such questions as how do you maintain sustained strikes and occupations and what do you do if armed right-wing militias show up at polling places?(12)

A number of other groups have been mobilizing to forestall or overcome a Trump coup. Protect the Results, a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America supported by 80 other groups, is planning mass mobilization in more than 1,000 locations.(13) Keep Our Republic is organizing to support a “civic creed” to “Let all citizens vote. Let all votes be counted. Let the count stand.” 

The group Peoples Strike has issued a Pledge of Resistance committing to occupy civic squares on Wednesday, November 4th, to occupy state capitols on Saturday, November 7th, and to engage in “strategic rolling strikes” thereafter. No doubt other preparations are under way as well. 

Other sectors of society are also beginning to consider what their responsibilities will be if Trump refuses to concede electoral defeat. On September 25 AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released this statement about the post-election transition: 

The AFL-CIO categorically rejects all threats to the peaceful transition of power. The labor movement simply will not allow any breach of the U.S. Constitution or other effort to deny the will of the people. Union members across the political spectrum are united in our fundamental belief that the votes of the American people must always determine the presidency. America’s workers will continue to be steadfast in defense of our democracy in the face of President Trump’s antics, and we stand ready to do our part to ensure his defeat in this election is followed by his removal from office.(14) 

A recent New York Times article reported that: 

senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Mr. Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism.(15)

Several Pentagon officials said there could be resignations among many of Mr. Trump’s senior generals, starting at the top with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley, should troops be ordered into the streets at the time of the election. As we have seen in the opposition to the Serbian and Philippine electoral coups, the role of various sectors and levels of the military – from the brass to the privates — can be critical. 

But as revealed by the top brass’ second thoughts after the military was called in to provide Trump a photo op confrontation in Lafayette Square during a June Black Lives Matter demonstration, they are most likely to come to a sense of their responsibilities when they are called on to suppress peaceful protestors in the interests of a tyrant. 

Social Self-Defense 

Resisting the rise of tyranny will no doubt require sacrifice. After all, we are dealing with an aspiring tyrant who lionizes someone who shoots down demonstrators in the street. But that sacrifice will not be primarily on behalf of one political party vs. another, of Democrats vs. Republicans. It will be a defense of democracy – defense of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

Beyond that, it is the protection of that which makes our life together on earth possible. It is defense of the human rights of all people; of the conditions of our earth and its climate that make our life possible; of the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; of global cooperation to provide a secure future for our people and planet; and of our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Overcoming a Trump Coup is Social Self-Defense. 

Notes 

1.     From the Spanish autogolpe, used to describe cases in Latin America in the early 1960s. Sharp and Jenkins, Anti-Coup, p. 6. https://novact.org/2012/09/the-anti-coup-bruce-jenkins-and-gene-sharp/?lang=en.

2.     The term “Social Self-Defense” has its origin in the Polish Committee for Social Self-Defense which led to the creation of the Solidarity trade union and ultimately the dissolution of Poland’s Communist dictatorship. I have used it before to characterize the Trump Resistance. Jeremy Brecher, “Social Self-Defense: Protecting People and Planet against Trump and Trumpism,” https://www.labor4sustainability.org/uncategorized/social-self-defense-protecting-people-and-planet-against-trump-and-trumpism/.

3.     Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005).  Gene Sharp & Bruce Jenkins, The Anti-Coup (Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution). Sharp’s magisterial three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent) lays out how and why nonviolent direct action is able to work.

4.     Steven Zunes, Civil Resistance Against Coups: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (ICNC Monograph Series) https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Stephen-Zunes-Monograph_Final.pdf.

5.     Joshua Paulson, “People Power Against the Philippine Dictator – 1986,” in Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005), Ibid.

6.     “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7013152/Preventing-a-Disrupted-Presidential-Election-and.pdf and  Rosa Brooks, “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence – and a constitutional crisis,” Washington Post, September 3, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/?arc404=true.

7.     Barton Gellman, “What If Trump Refuses to Concede?,” The Atlantic, pre-released in late September from November, 2020 issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/ Much of the same material is covered and confirmed with additional details in David Smith, “Recipe for Chaos,” The Guardian, September 27, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/27/recipe-for-chaos-2020-election-threatens-snap-us-already-pushed-limit.

8.     Hardy Merriman, Ankur Asthana, Marium Navid, Kifah Shah. Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy. version 1.1. 2020.  http://holdthelineguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Hold-The-Line_-A-Guide-to-Defending-Democracy.pdf.

9.     Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jose Alejandro La Luz, “Organized Labor and the ‘Cold Civil War,’” Portside, September 17, 2020. https://portside.org/2020-09-17/organized-labor-and-cold-civil-war.

10.  The Trump Resistance and other mass opposition to Trump and Trumpism is recounted in Jeremy Brecher, Strike! Revised, Expanded, and Updated Edition (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2020) Chapter 12, “Harbingers.” https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1085.

11.  Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

12.  Sam Stein, “The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day,” The Daily Beast, September 8, 2020. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-left-secretly-preps-for-violence-after-election-day . Developing efforts against a Trump Coup are also described in Sasha Abramsky, “Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?,” The Nation, September 7, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-coup-elections-gop/.

13.  Sam Stein.

14.  Richard Trumka, “We Will Not Tolerate Any Constitutional Breach,” _AFL-CIO, September 25, 2020.  https://aflcio.org/press/releases/trumka-we-will-not-tolerate-any-constitutional-breach.

15.  Jennifer Steinhauer and Helene Cooper, “At Pentagon, Fears Grow That Trump Will Pull Military into Election Unrest,” New York Times, September 25, 2020. https://portside.org/2020-09-25/pentagon-fears-grow-trump-will-pull-military-election-unrest.

For an Egalitarian, Cooperative Road to an Ecosocialist Future

 

This important Ecosocialist Manifesto, published by the Green Left emerges out of Australia in preparation for the forthcoming conference, Ecosocialism 2020: From rebellion to revolution, supported by the Socialist Alliance. It will be open for further discussion and development through a series of Ecosocialism conferences in several cities across Australia in late October.

We are in the midst of a climate emergency and there is no way out without radically changing the way society is organized. If humanity does not free itself from the capitalist drive for ever greater profits and ever-expanding economic growth, rising global temperatures alone will make the planet uninhabitable for humans and millions of other living species.

We urgently need to find a collective road to a new way of living that is based on human solidarity and ecological sustainability.

1. The Emergency is Now

Catastrophic fires, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and the shocking collapse of biodiversity are a reality after just 1°C of global warming. At current rates of greenhouse gas global emissions we are heading for 2–3°C rise.

Despite numerous warnings from the world’s leading scientists, none of the global climate summits have produced the targets, let alone actions, needed to address the climate emergency.

The governments of a number of rich countries – including the United States and Australia – are defending the profit greed of the giant fossil fuel companies. They are also stubbornly resisting calls for binding and effective greenhouse gas emission cuts and for the richest countries to pay the climate debt owed to the rest of the world that they have ruthlessly exploited and oppressed for generations.

The climate emergency is just part of the historic clash between the capitalist system and nature.

Corporate greed has destroyed entire ecosystems and poisoned land and seas with toxic waste. Land clearing, driven by capitalist agribusiness, has robbed the planet of the forest cover needed to absorb carbon dioxide and provide a home for many species. It has also unleashed deadly new pandemics, such as COVID-19.

The climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic are symptoms of the dangerous rift that capitalism has created with nature and which it continues to exacerbate.

But the COVID-19 pandemic also shows us that the privileged ruling elites and the majority they exploit and oppress cannot carry on in the old way.

The huge death toll from COVID-19 in the US, the world’s richest and most powerful country, demonstrates that even the most privileged will not be spared the impact of the existential crisis that capitalism has created.

2. We Need to Move Beyond Capitalism to Ecosocialism

Just 100 fossil fuel corporations account for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Leading climate activist Greta Thunberg has pointed out that the capitalist class has already contracted out a lot more than the world’s carbon budget, which the Paris Agreement said is needed to keep global warming to 1.5°C.

Attempts by the climate summits to find capitalist-friendly solutions to the climate emergency have not worked. “Market solutions,” such as carbon trading, have failed even in the few capitalist states where they have been implemented. Any “greening” of capitalism, that such market solutions may have encouraged, is too little and too late.

To pull back from catastrophic climate change requires emergency action to democratize the economy. To do this, critical industries such as energy, transport, agribusiness and the financial institutions that invest in them need to be brought under social control – now.

This will be necessary to move rapidly to 100% renewable energy and to reduce net carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible.

This all points to the urgent need to replace capitalism with an ecosocialist society, that could address gross injustices and repair capital’s rift with nature.

The corporate rich, that now rule the world, stole much of their starting capital directly or indirectly through colonial plunder. They destroyed numerous societies around the globe, many of whom were organized for thousands of years around Indigenous social values of egalitarianism, cooperation and co-existence with nature.

An ecosocialist future would require a return to such principles, with the benefit of technological advances used for social good.

Under capitalism, almost every technological advance is used to deepen the exploitation of the majority and nature, or to build dangerous weapons of mass destruction and suppression.

An ecosocialist society would liberate human creativity through translating productivity gains into a radically shorter working week. This is also necessary to free the majority of the population – now exploited to the point of exhaustion or discarded as surplus labour – to exercise direct democratic control of society.

An ecosocialist society will need to be based on grassroots direct democracy that allows communities to have real control over their destinies.

3. Capitalism’s Violent Defense of Power and Privilege

The giant corporations are using all their power and privilege to defend their narrow interests – even as it becomes increasingly clear that humanity cannot carry on as before.

They buy off governments or remove any that challenge their interests. They promote and fund climate denialist, racist, misogynist and nakedly fascist movements.

They have already plunged entire nations into permanent war to protect their right to plunder and exploit the world. Now, they are even supporting violent right-wing forces in the US threatening civil war.

They are prepared to use the disproportionate military power of the US and its rich country allies to preserve a grossly unequal capitalist global division of labour and a presumed “right” to continue passing the costs of the ecological crisis on to the poorest countries.

They are resisting calls for reparations to be paid to those countries they have plundered and poisoned. They are blocking calls for rich countries to adopt sharper and deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and for renewable technologies to be shared across the globe.

4. Building a Movement for Ecosocialist Revolution

A new mass movement for ecosocialist revolution needs to be built from the radicalizing climate emergency movement and other progressive mass movements, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement, that are challenging the capitalist system in the face of rising fascist movements, racism, sexism and attacks on civil liberties.

In all these movements, we hear calls to end capitalism and build a new future based on the collective and ecologically sustainable traditions that capitalism has tried its best to wipe out over the last 400 years.

Ecosocialists seek to unite and amplify those voices for real change.

History teaches us that people’s political consciousness can develop rapidly in the process of sustained collective struggle and that such movements act as schools of direct democracy. They can also give birth to new institutions of popular democracy.

Therefore, it is of critical importance to build mass movements around programs of immediate and transitional measures that the climate emergency demands.

The radical green new deal programs, championed by former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the US Green Party and US Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, are examples for such a program.

But the system change potential of any such transitional program can only be realized by an independent mass movement that goes beyond the limits of electoral campaigns.

The deepening crisis that we are confronting today makes it clear that time is of the essence.

The time to stop capitalism from destroying our common future is running out. The need to build this mass movement for change means we urgently need to build ecosocialist organizations and global networks that can unite their impact.

Book Review – Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today

 

Written by Javier Sethness and first published at Marx and Philosophy

The cover art for Ecology and Revolution, centering Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring, is a fitting representation of Charles Reitz’s concept of the common human essence: “sensuous living labor.” In his development of this idea, Reitz contests masculinist, militarist, and state-apologist accounts of human origins in pre-history, by instead centering cooperation, care, interdependence, partnership, hospitality, communal labor, and humanistic communication as emergent powers that have ensured our survival from our collective birth millions of years ago to our own day.

In this sense, the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were right to observe that “all reification”—all ossification of authority, all dehumanization, “is a forgetting.” Ethically, Reitz counterposes egalitarian partnership power as an institutional-cultural practice that can prefigure a future community characterized by solidarity and difference without inequality, in place of the various hierarchies that dominate the world today.

Furthermore, he recovers Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of labor against reductionist and disingenuous accounts that misinterpret the theorist’s works as being elitist and pessimistic. Dialectically, then, Ecology and Revolution is a fitting testament to Marcuse’s legacy of championing classical education, as based on the hope that the humanities can inspire students to contemplate the meaning of life and mobilize to transform the world.

For Reitz, sensuous living labor has ensured that humanity has endured through the ages, and it portends future global self-emancipation through an anti-racist, feminist, green commonwealth. This proposal for a commonwealth, which for Reitz would amount to a Hegelian “determinate negation,” is the author’s answer to “the challenge and necessity of building an alternate world system today.”

Reitz’s project, like Marcuse’s, is therefore “multi-dimensional, dialectical, realistic, and normative,” as well as politically therapeutic: as Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm did in the past, so Reitz today seeks to wield critical theory to “actually eliminate” the exploitation, “injury[,] and suffering,” “economic want, political unfreedom, and ecological distress” all endemic to capitalist, racist, and sexist domination and the growth fetish (6-11, 37).

Following his collective mentors, the Frankfurters, Reitz avows that the supreme duty of the intellectual is to investigate human (self)destructiveness, and to agitate for a liberated world in which life is to be enjoyed for all, rather than constrained along the existing social gradient. Hence, his proposed Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive against ecological ruin and the “preventative counterrevolution.” (Marcuse anticipated Reaganism before his death, which is now enshrined in Trumpism and global authoritarian-populist reaction.)

This commonwealth as ideal also communicates the Marcusean concept of the Great Refusal, namely, the “activist opposition to needless institutional destructiveness and advocacy for goals connected to utopian practices of human freedom,” defined concretely by Reitz as “a global alliance of transformational forces in pursuit of a life-affirming and humanist future of intercultural solidarity within a new eco-socialist political order” (2, 12).

The struggle to realize such a commonwealth is not without its challenges. Besides the threats of statist-militarist repression or homelessness and premature death with which workers, youth, and oppressed people must grapple when contemplating direct action as redress, proponents of this commonwealth confront the one-dimensionality of capitalist “culture,” which reduces the human experience to a one sidedness that serves the exigencies of profit. Workers and oppressed people thus have their attention diverted by the machinic grinding of a false society (Gesellschaft) and an economic, even libidinal, fixation on “subtle (and harmless) banalities” coordinated by vested interests (7, 83).

As a result of this one-dimensional coordination (Gleichschaltung), which originated with Nazi expectations of socio-political conformity, and which also resemble the Stalinist concept of a “party line,” the second—or aesthetic—dimension is eclipsed, with human consciousness and the possibilities of a new, human community (Gemeinschaft) blunted.

However, even within the “totally administered society” of globalized monopoly capitalism, art still retains the promise of protest against dehumanization, and the specter of liberation, by confidently inspiring a new sensibility, according to Adorno and Marcuse. The depressed and/or protesting artist, youth, worker, and/or racial, gender, or sexual minorities of our day subversively personify the “unhappy consciousness.”

As a central feature of Gleichschaltung, Marcuse identified a tendency toward “repressive desublimation,” by which he meant a process whereby erotic and psychical energies are “satisfied,” and the capitalist system reproduced, through the fetishism of commodities and the reification of social life. (As dysfunctional means of compensating for one’s individual and collective exploitation and alienation, indeed, Facebook and Trumpism provide especially dangerous contemporary examples of this dynamic.)

Through his late engagement with Rudolf Bahro, Marcuse reinterpreted the problem as a struggle between emancipatory and compensatory needs, and a “counter-” or “surplus” versus affirmative consciousness, akin to the Freudian dance of Eros and Thanatos.

In Ecology and Revolution, Reitz rescues the Marcusean philosophy of labor against bad-faith attacks on the critical theorist’s supposed rendering-invisible of workers. Reviewing the record, Reitz shows how Marcuse retained a Marxian faith in socialism, understood as workers’ self-organization for emancipation, while radically deprovincializing post-war U.S. society through cultural critique and political activism. Similarly turning received opinion on its head, Reitz discusses how the world of work should be overhauled, given that employees effectively pay their employers! 

In fact, in 2014, capital was shown to be appropriating three times (75%) as much as labor received (25%) of the total value added in U.S. manufacturing, while the richest one-fifth of U.S. households were found in 2012 to own 85% of all wealth (31-5). As Reitz comments, these brutally oligarchical wealth distributions have persisted almost unchanged since the onset of Reaganism and the neoliberal era.

Thus far, Reitz and I are in full agreement about the critical importance of Marcusean philosophy, partnership power, and the cooperative green commonwealth. However, I would be remiss to avoid discussing some theoretical critiques and disagreements in this review.

First, as regards Reitz’s commitment to racial equality, I question whether Lukács was an anti-racist (9). How so? I appreciate his critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s irrationalism as effectively functioning as apologism for Nazi imperialism, together with his deconstruction of commodity fetishism in History and Class Consciousness.

As with Vladimir Lenin, though, Lukács’ aristocratic and ahistorical view of the limits of workers’ “mere spontaneity” (16), and his attendant prescription for a vanguard party in this early text, are commensurate with the Stalinism he espoused in his later years, after participating in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Reitz’s engagement with Lukács raises the questions of revolutionary strategy and transition: whether these should be libertarian or authoritarian.

In parallel, Reitz presents Marcuse as echoing Nietzsche’s “cultural radicalism” with his affirmation of a transvaluation of values and a new sensibility, but also dismisses Nietzsche along with Max Stirner and Ayn Rand as an egoist (23, 109, 150). Given Marcuse’s commitment to humanism, idealism, and rationalism, such a discrepancy requires further clarification. Nietzsche’s neo-fascist enthusiasts of today, such as Richard Spencer and Alexander Dugin, would likely contest Reitz’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s ostensible call for “the supersession of masters and slaves,” raising difficult questions about the causes of gender and racial equality, the liberation of labor, leisure, abundance, and peace (119-120; Beiner).

Moreover, the author arguably inflates Lenin’s theoretical importance by alluding to “What Is To Be Done?” (1902) without mentioning its 1863 antecedent novel of the same name, written by the anarcho-Populist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Ecology and Revolution too lacks the unambiguous critiques of Leninist despotism, and of the obvious continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, that Marcuse features in Soviet Marxism. In a similar vein, Peter Kropotkin is not mentioned once—this, despite the fact that the Freudo-Marcusean emphasis on Eros, Reitz’s concept of sensuous living labor, and the call for partnership power and commonwealth are entirely consistent with Kropotkin’s account of mutual aid.

Reitz’s enthusiastic citation of Che Guevara’s thoughts on love from “Socialism and Man in Cuba” is puzzling (93, 107-8), considering that Fromm’s humanistic concept of love as a productive character orientation is far superior to Guevara’s own. Whereas Reitz sees Guevara as an advocate of platonic political love and, presumably, a principled revolutionary, the contradiction between expressing affection for one’s fellow guerrilleros and the tactical and strategic advocacy of sadomasochistic hatred, bureaucracy, and militarism should be striking (Fromm; Guevara).

Continuing with the question of revolutionary strategy, it bears noting that Marx summarily expelled the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the First International in 1871, wrecking the organization in the process (Berthier; Graham). That Reitz guards silence over this destructive historical episode, while praising past authoritarian-populist and neo-extractivist “Pink Tide” governments in Ecuador (led by Rafael Correa) and Bolivia (led by Evo Morales), shows the poverty of statist approaches (Tilzey).

Moreover, if it is true that the differences between Marx and Bakunin were not just political and strategic, but also sexual, in that Bakunin may have been expelled at least in part over a rumored gay affair with Sergei Nechaev (Kennedy), this would further undermine the credibility of the stated commitment to sexual diversity made by critical Marxists such as Reitz—beyond the distrust already engendered by idealizing open heterosexists such as Guevara.

In contrast, I consider Marcuse a steadfast LGBT ally, particularly given his avowal of an “Orphic Marxism” in Eros and Civilization. Furthermore, Reitz’s endorsement of Kohei Saito’s attempt at defending Marx against the charge of Prometheanism is unconvincing, as Marcuse himself recognized the “hubris of domination” toward nature evident in Marx’s work in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). Still, the author’s incorporation of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is to be commended as a necessary corrective.

Perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of a collective survival strategy for humanity, Reitz outlines the meaning of his proposal for a Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive through calls for “shared ownership, democratized ownership, common ownership,” and “stewardship,” together with a newfound honoring of treaties with Indigenous peoples, restitution of lands, and reparations, and generalized decommodification through basic incomes (36-9, 69, 160). This is all very much welcome.

My main question is whether the green commonwealth envisions wielding the State to achieve its goals. At one point, Reitz defines commonwealth as “as a governmental and economic power,” and declares that he finds “desirable” Immanuel Wallerstein’s goal of “socialist world government,” but then he praises Marcuse as a council communist and uses the modifier “self-governing” to describe the “cosmopolitan green commonwealth” (31, 40, 46n3, 106, 113, emphasis added).

The resolution of such ambiguities is critical for the actual project of organizing this much-needed Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive, considering that advocacy of a statist strategy—even “transitional”—would contradict the critique of dehumanization and reification, not to mention inevitably undermine the delineated goals, as the historical experiences of social-democrat, Pink-Tide reformists and bureaucratic, state-capitalist regimes like the Soviet Union have shown us.

In conclusion, Reitz in Ecology and Revolution provides readers with convincing arguments for the “ongoing validity of Marcuse’s Great Refusal”; the place of sensuous living labor in sustaining and remaking the world; and the importance of intercultural solidarity, emancipatory needs, the second dimension, and counter-consciousness (180).

The project of creating a liberatory commonwealth will be expansive and multi-faceted, and it can benefit from engagement with proposals like green and community syndicalism, anarchism, social reproduction theory, and artistic movements such as solarpunk. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, upending the normal operation of capitalist exploitation, the “reification of the proletariat” is increasingly less apparent. But will the “global self-conscious subject” succeed in organizing itself to intervene before it is too late? Only future historians will be able to tell.

References

• Ronald Beiner (2018) Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Rene Berthier (2012) Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864-1877. London: Merlin Press.
• Erich Fromm (2006) The Art of Loving New York: HarperCollins
• Ernesto Guevara (1961) Guerrilla Warfare New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Hubert Kennedy (1995) “Johann Baptist von Schweitzer: The Queer Marx Loved to Hate.” Journal of Homosexuality vol. 29, no. 2/3, 69-96.
• Mark Tilzey (2019) “Authoritarian Populism and Neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: The Unresolved Agrarian Question and the Prospects for Food Sovereignty as Counter-Hegemony.” Journal of Peasant Studies 46 (3): 626–652