Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!
As New York's state primary election results come in, it's looking like a strong night for insurgents, with Julia Salazar navigating a host of controversies to knock out state Sen. Martin Dilan in Brooklyn to a number of solid performances by challengers seeking to oust former members of the Independent Democratic Conference, which had drawn attacks for partnering with state Senate Republicans in Albany.
With results still coming in, a number of former IDC senators were trailing, including state Sens. Tony Avella, Marisol Alcantara and even Jeff Klein, the group's former leader. At least two others, state Sens. Jose Peralta and Jesse Hamilton, wereprojected to lose, according to NY1.
Each of the eight former members of the faced challenges. Although the breakaway group of renegade Republicans rejoined mainline Democrats in April, it did little to temper the newly awakened political engagement in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and anger towards the Democrats who shared power with Republicans.
Another challenger, Blake Morris, fell short against state Sen. Simcha Felder, who is not a member of the IDC but has caucused with Republicans since he was first elected and gives them their one seat majority.
Additionally, there are several Assembly elections of note, including the possible first transgender state lawmaker and several vacants seats that need filling. This post will be updated throughout the night, so continue checking back for the latest in each race.
Sept. 13 - 10:15 PM
I was listening to Brian Lehrer and it seems that there are some big wins or close races all around.
Fox News reports (that must be driving them crazy).
Controversial Dem socialist candidate Julia Salazar wins NY state Senate primary
Julia Salazar, a democratic socialist whose campaign for a seat in New York's state Senate was overshadowed by a series of bizarre revelations about her past, unseated a 16-year incumbent in Thursday's Democratic primary.
With 88 percent of precincts reporting, Salazar led state Sen. Martin Dilan by 58 percent to 42 percent. She will not face a Republican opponent in November.
Salazar's victory in the Brooklyn-based 18th Senate District added her to the list of insurgent Empire State Democrats who have knocked out established incumbents this primary season.
Okay -- we knew Cuomo would win. And Tish James seems to be winning. So I am 0 for 2 so far.
If not for that slime Maloney and the Cuomo Stalking horse Eve, Teachout may have won. This is a real victory for the real estate interests who didn't want Teachout.
Jumaane is still neck and neck:
Lieutenant Governor
Democratic Primary
CANDIDATE
VOTE
PCT.
Kathy Hochul*
417,118
50.9%
Jumaane D. Williams
402,605
49.1
819,723 votes,54% reporting(8,196 of 15,083 precincts)
Talking politics with Arthur, Patrick, Moi and Mindy at Labor Day Parade
I Just VOTED NIXON, WILLIAMS, JAMES IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY
James Eterno gives a great reason to
vote for Tish James - she came to the defense of his school when they closed it -- http://iceuftblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/im-voting-nixon-williams-james-in.html
-- but I can't get over the real estate industry's
going nuts against Teachout. She is the best chance to go after real
estate, which benefits from public works that they don't want to
contribute to pay for -- ie. see expensive 2nd Ave subway and how much
property values rose. Or check out Williamsburg which became expensive
due to the L train.
Eve seems to be a stalking horse for Cuomo. Shaun Patrick Maloney is
just that too. (Harry Lirtzman laid him out on FB.) If so many power
brokers don't want Teachout to win she is my gal -- and I, like Eterno,
always liked Tish James. She works for Verizon for Christ's sake. I also don't care for people like her and Cuomo who are political princes and princesses based on parents. It's like they inherit their rights.
The vote for Nixon was easy. Any educator who votes for Cuomo is
nuts. Also consider that Nixon supports our right to strike. Cuomo and
our union leaders don't seem to agree.
In this column, submitted for Sept. 14, 2018 publication to The WAVE www.rockawave.com) I go from pre-civil war slavery to the current situation in the Queens Democratic Party, an example of my irrational response to a looming deadline, where I throw stuff against a wall and see what sticks.
School Scope: Democratic Party Needs Reform – Start Locally with New Queens Dems
By Norm Scott
Slavery was recognized in our original constitution. Remember the good old days when slavery was legal and you could be arrested for protesting the law? I think of that when I hear complaints about protests.
In the pre-civil war mid-19th century, as the anti-slavery movement grew in power in the north from a smallish protest movement in the early part of the century into a moral imperative by the 1850s, the United States Congress became a physical battleground, with canings and duels, as many southern “gentleman” members of Congress took any attack on slavery as a personal and political insult. This story, “The Violence at the Heart of Our Politics” was chronicled in the Sept. 9th Sunday NY Times and talked about the 1830s through the breakout of the Civil War where political debates turned violent. Many of the elected were often packing heat, most from the south where gun culture was embedded more deeply than in the more industrial north. Some things don’t change all that much. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/opinion/sunday/violence-politics-congress.html)
Some of the issues separating people today are similar to then, with race at the top. There were 4 million slaves in 1860 and most southerners felt that was OK. (I think there are still people who lament the end of slavery.) I don’t follow the right or alt-right but I’ve heard fragments of comments saying we were less bad than others. I wonder when the newly encouraged anti-Semites will argue Jews were better off under the Pharaohs and Moses made a mistake when he opened up the Red Sea.
Studying the evolution of both parties over the past 160 years is a fascinating exercise. Two-party system was solidified by the mid-late 1850s, with the newly formed Republican Party standing for anti-slavery. The pro-slavery Democratic Party was shaped in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson, a noted racist.
Switching gears to local Democrats: They say all politics is local and our little sliver of paradise here in Rockaway would certainly make for an interesting study of party politics, especially given the outcomes of the 2016 Presidential election on the peninsula where the west end went overwhelming for Trump while as you move east the vote switched to Democrats.
A couple of things caught my eye recently. A NY Times piece uncovered the seemingly corrupt Queens Democratic Party machine which focused on the Queens County Committee and how membership has been manipulated as progressives seeking to be members were denied entry. How Party Bosses, Not Voters, Pick Candidates in New York – a must read if you are interested in reforming a corrupt system. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-politics-party-bosses.html).
The way party business is done is not the way to take on Trump and the Republicans. Is our county Dem party machine still headed by Joe Crowley whose defeat by a democratic socialist has resulted in international attention? Is the machine shutting out Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez types as a way to keep control? Crowley may be gone from Congress, but the machine he runs seems to live on.
There were two letters in the Sept. 7 WAVE addressing the local Democratic Party situation. Norman Silverman made a plea to the local party clubs to broaden the base. “The party that preaches democracy must actually practice democracy.” The other letter was from the The New Queens Democrats, who describe themselves as “a progressive, grassroots organization advocating for transparency, inclusionary democracy, and accountability within the Queens Democratic Party. NQD serves as an encouraging environment for those looking to become more engaged. NQD hopes to foster a new generation of elected Queens Democratic leaders.” I went to their web site and signed up for their newsletter and hope to do more reporting on them in the future. https://www.newqueensdems.org.
Since you will be reading this after the primary, I won’t get deep into this story but the slime will keep oozing out of the Democratic Party machine and until we see massive reforms, the even slimier Republicans will continue their own oozing.
Norm tosses his own slime at phony ed reformers at ednotesonline.com.
...teachers and other educators were “outraged” last month to see school board member Ref Rodriguez plead guilty to charges of political money laundering. The charges had been brought last year, according to Inouye, yet Rodriguez continued in his school board post while he negotiated a plea deal with local prosecutors. Throughout his career, Rodriguez has consistently voted in favor of the charters—and has been strongly backed by the California Charter School Association and other pro-charter groups... In These Times
An article and a video on the LA upcoming teacher strike. Yes,
Virginia, the ed deformer assault on public ed in LA is one of the
reasons for the strike, the most definitive response yet to the
assaults.
You might also want to check out the NY Sunday Times mag - which finally takes a critical position on ed deform:
We don't know of course how this will all turn out but so far UTLA is doing things right. I know there are people out there, some of them have been colleagues, who believe the union should stick to bread and butter issues. If you don't think fighting off the charter threat and the entire ed deform movement to undermine the teaching profession is not bread and butter you are living in Alice's Wonderland.
I met Arlene Inouye and other UTLA activists in July 2009 when we went out to LA to meet with progressive teacher groups, the earliest stage in the formation of a progressive national teacher network. They held positions in the union at the time but a true coalition didn't win election until just a few years ago.
In 2009 the Chicago CORE people were a new caucus and contemplating a run for union leadership the next year. This was also 3 years before MORE, GEM was a new group and ICE and TJC were still the official opposition caucuses in the UFT while New Action was still in its deal with Unity.
The Real News Network on the looming teachers strike in Los Angeles.
Public school teachers in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly in late August to authorize a strike over stalled contract negotiations, but the issues really energizing the union membership go far beyond a new contract. Instead, say union leaders and rank-and-file members, the teachers are growing increasingly alarmed at a small clique of billionaires that has won considerable sway over the L.A. school board and is aggressively promoting charter schools as a replacement for public education.
In a stunning display of solidarity, 98 percent of some 28,000 union members voted to authorize strike action. Arlene Inouye, co-chair of the contract bargaining committee of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) union, tells In These Times that the vote reflects the dismay of the teachers and other education professionals at the actions of the school board.
For many teachers, the focus right now is on Austin Beutner, the new schools superintendent chosen by the board of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) earlier this year. Beutner is a former investment banker with no experience running public schools who replaced a former teacher as superintendent. The appointment was “a scandal,” says Inouye. One of Beutner’s first moves in his new job was to lead the LAUSD into an impasse with the union over the new contract.
The Beutner appointment is merely the tip of the iceberg as far the union is concerned, Inouye continues, noting that teachers and other educators were “outraged” last month to see school board member Ref Rodriguez plead guilty to charges of political money laundering. The charges had been brought last year, according to Inouye, yet Rodriguez continued in his school board post while he negotiated a plea deal with local prosecutors. Throughout his career, Rodriguez has consistently voted in favor of the charters—and has been strongly backed by the California Charter School Association and other pro-charter groups.
The Beutner and Rodriguez episodes came hard on the heels of a May election that saw unprecedented charter school money pouring into races for two seats on the LAUSD board. In a strategic blow to the union, pro-charter-school forces gained strength. The May victories were a culmination of a long campaign by pro-charter forces to gain board control, and foreshadow “a fight for the very soul of public education in this city,” says Inouye.
Rodriguez resigned in July, reducing the voting power of the pro-charter forces on the board, although they still wield considerable power on many issues, the UTLA leader explains. Attention is already turning to a special election planned for next March to fill the Rodriguez seat. According to Inouye, some UTLA members have already stepped forward with their intentions to run, so a repeat of the expensive and highly contentious elections of earlier this year seems likely.
Much of the funding for these pro-charter elections come from what education reformer Diane Ravitch has called “The Billionaire Boys’ Club” – a clique of rich business owners dedicated to overthrowing public education. Particularly prominent in Los Angeles are Netflix executive Reed Hastings and billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.
That was the background then when union members voted to authorize a strike. The vote was less a declaration of a desire to strike, Inouye says, than a signal flare to LAUSD that teachers are united in their determination to push back against the pro-charter forces. Most teachers hope for a fair and peaceful settlement, but neither are the teachers afraid if LAUSD wants to provoke a strike, she tells In These Times.
Reflecting that fearless spirit, the UTLA held a leadership conference in late July and invited teachers fresh from the picket lines in West Virginia, Arizona and Puerto Rico. The strikers were roundly celebrated at the conference, inspiring the L.A. teachers with their stories of struggle, Inouye says. “They were genuinely inspiring for us," she says, adding that “there is definitely a change in consciousness for teachers” since the West Virginia teachers electrified the teacher unions.
For rank-and-file ULTA member Michael Gearin, the strike vote was an affirmation that the union membership is committed to battling privatization of the public schools.
“The main reason teachers voted yes is they feel disrespected by the school board,” Gearin says.
Gearin describes Beutner as a “corporate hatchet man.” According to Gearin, the push for more charter schools is a statement that the current board wants to replace public education with privatized classrooms.
“As teachers, we are asked to do more with less, over and over again,” Gearin emphasizes. “And then that is turned against us to justify destroying the public school system.”
Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance writer with decades of experience covering labor and business stories for newspapers, magazines and new media. He was a reporter for Bloomberg BNA's Daily Labor Report, covering collective bargaining issues in a wide range of industries, and a maritime industry reporter and editor for the Journal of Commerce, serving both in the newspaper's New York City headquarters and in the Washington, D.C. bureau.
“If the scores are there, why the heck aren’t they releasing them?”
asked Carol Burris, a former Long Island principal and testing critic.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
“Embargo and double talk surrounding the 2018 results are just one
more example of how we are kept in the dark,” said Fred Smith, a former
test specialist for NYC public schools. “One can only speculate that they want to delay the release until after
school has begun and they have figured out how to portray the results in
a positive light,” said education advocate Leonie Haimson. ----- State Education Department under fire for embargoing test scores
Sue Edelman has quotes from three of our favorite people. Her article speculates that the embargo is due to the primary election as a way to possibly protect Cuomo from attacks by Nixon, an educational activist, in case scores are not very good. This point is also made: "The state could also be tinkering with the “cut scores” — where to set
the lines between passing and failing — to shape the overall results." That is always a given -- that they will tinker to make things look the way they want.
Leonie issued this disclaimer about the election speculation:
"I’m quoted here about the fact that I’m suspicious about delay in NYSED releasing student test scores to parents/public but want to make clear I do NOT think it has anything to do with elections or geared to help Cuomo as might be implied by the position of my quote in the article."
I can't figure out why they will be out so late, especially since late September makes them even more useless than usual since the tests were last April and May. I can believe anything about Cuomo, even this.
RTC master builder Tony Homsey and his crew, of which I am a
proud member, completed one of the more complicated sets weeks ahead of the
Sept. 21 opening of Arthur Miller’s A
View From the Bridge, directed by the talented Frank Caiati who has been
with the RTC since he was 17 and is now in his early 30s. Talk about how the
RTC community nurtures talented people. Frank insists on bringing serious
dramas to the Rockaway community. Last year he directed and acted in Elephant Man.
The serious dramas at the RTC are overlooked by some of the
regular audiences who attend musicals. Anything directed by Frank is not to be
missed. Having been around him during construction of the sets at his plays (he
is always part of the construction crew) I can see how his creative mind works
as he makes decisions about the set (Frank is also a very talented set
designer). When he directed Toxic Avengers almost the entire set consisted of
60 oil drums mounted on top of each other. This time Frank wanted the entire
stage to tilt forward at a sharp angle, which meant building a new stage on top
of the current one. Then Frank wanted a ramp running along side and in the
back. Oy, did that present a few complications. Then he wanted a door on top of
the ramp so we had to build a platform and steps going down to the tilted
stage. Oh, and a sidewalk in front of the stage. And a 10 foot telephone pole.
And transoms. And…. Then Frank led the
painting crew to make all that wood, which could fill a forest, look natural.
As usual, Tony did it all without blanching. Tony is not a passive construction
guy just executing the wishes of the director. He puts his 2 cents in on making
things look as perfectly as they can (and he is a perfectionist). Watching Tony
and Frank collaborate is part of the pleasure of working with them – actually,
I often do more watching than working. Also, as part of this creative team is
Cliff Hesse, also a set designer who has a role in the play, in addition to
being a renaissance man who can converse on anything related to the theater and
just about any other topic. Another
regular on the set construction crew, and chief painter, is Frank Verderame, my
political sparring partner. If you stop by and see Tony holding his hands over
his ears, you know that Frank and I are not working but arguing politics.
Here’s the announcement:
You are invited to A
View From the Bridge
The Rockaway Theatre Company Proudly Presents
A Great American Drama
SHOWTIMES
September 21st, 22nd, 28th, 29th, October 5th & 6th at
8pm
Matinees September 23rd, 30th & October 7th at 2pm
Tickets may be purchased on our website
www.rockawaytheatrecompany.org
Ticket Prices:
Adults $20.00
Seniors/Children $15.00
**Please Note: Online ticket purchases close 48 hours prior
to the date of each show, but tickets are still available for purchase, at our
box office, one hour prior to showtime.
The IDC just received a HUGE money dump from the State Independence Campaign Committee (SICC). SICC, the illegal fundraising arm of the IDC,has pumped $345,000 of last-minute cash into the IDC's campaign coffers.
The general guess from many observers has been that a strike is a pretty sure bet though this article doesn't go there. The UTLA demands go deep and look like a perfect combo of issues related to bread and butter and beyond that cover day to day working conditions.
Members of United Teachers Los Angeles — a union
representing more than 30,000 L.A. Unified School District teachers,
librarians, nurses and other school workers — cast strike authorization
votes at Thomas Starr King Middle School in the Silver Lake neighborhood
on Thurs., Aug. 23, 2018. (Photo by Kyle Stokes/KPCC)Teachers in Los Angeles Unified schools have voted overwhelmingly to give leaders of their union permission to call a strike if contentious contract talks with district officials fall apart. Leaders of the union, United Teachers
Los Angeles, still cannot legally call for a strike until completing
state mediation, a process that can take weeks. But if UTLA leaders do
act on their threat, it would be the first teachers strike in LAUSD
since 1989. Roughly a year and a half of contract talks stalled in July. Almost every day since, the already-tattered relationship between UTLA leaders — who represent more than 30,000 teachers, librarians, nurses, social workers and counselors — and LAUSD leadership frays a little more. http://www.laist.com/2018/08/29/why_lausds_30000_teachers_might_go_on_strike.php
Today, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018, is the first day of school for the almost one million children in the New York City public school system. My normally quiet block is crowded with cars jostling for parking spaces as parents unload their kids with their blue school uniforms and cute backpacks.
I live half a block from an elementary school, PS 114Q. I hear the sound of hundreds of nervous kids in the school yard waiting to meet their teachers. Memories are triggered. That first day of school pit-in-the-belly never quite goes away when school begins - actually that feeling came back in milder form every Sunday.
My first experience with back to school nausea began in September, 1950 as a five year old when my mother walked me a block to PS 190 in East New York for my first first day of school.
I threw up in the school yard.
Today, 68 years later, that same feeling was triggered by the kids and parents heading to school.
This time it was my cat that threw up. And she's not going to school until next year.
In a significant show of strength and unity, 98% of UTLA members voting said yes to authorize a strike, should one become necessary. During the week-long vote at school-sites, 81% of members cast ballots. Because of this historic turnout, a small number of ballots are still being counted tonight.
I won't put up Diane's entire post so go read her commentary:
Jacobin, Vivek Chibber --- The long-term result of being isolated from workers is that these organizations become a haven for a kind of lifestyle politics
for morally committed students and professionals. They provide members
with a means to feel like they’re involved in change, but the
involvement is highly individualistic and confined largely to acts of
symbolic solidarity. Since real organizing is typically off the table,
energy tends to be directed inward, toward the culture and
characteristics of the group itself. Anyone who comes to the United
States from countries with more radical political traditions can’t help
but be struck by how shrill, moralistic, but ultimately apolitical
debates are within the Left here. They tend to be about language,
individual identity, body language, consumption habits, and the like.
This is a natural consequence of a “left” that’s in fact small groups of
people in middle-class settings who have no organic way of getting
trained in class politics. It has been this way for so long that even
the idea of being based in the working class is seen as either quaint or
unnecessary
I found this piece by Chibber fascinating as I continue my readings re: the left with this interesting piece.
..... it’s hard to imagine a way for the Left to organize itself as a real force without
some variant of the structure the early socialists hit upon — a mass
cadre-based party with a centralized leadership and internal coherence.
Now, maybe that will turn out to not be true. Maybe we will come up with
organizational forms that are more open, more diffuse, yet which also
manage to get things done. However, given our experience, we don’t
really have a basis to reject our most accomplished model....
Chibber is a Leninist who believes the Lenin concept is the only one that has worked in the past - I have been reading up on Lenin and the basis of cadre parties and I'm sure there are people who do not agree on the left.
Now you may ask what this has to do with the UFT and teacher unions. I believe it has a lot to do with it. Any opposition in the UFT - if there is even on left -- will include people from the left who believe in the concept of a cadre-based party. How these people behave and relate to the overwhelming majority of people in the union they are hoping to organize who do not believe in this concept is related to the ability to organize. Do they see themselves as superior in knowledge and in today's parlance a word Lenin never used -- "awokeness" --- in so many ways would help determine the success.
Let's say, theoretically, there was such a group of people in the UFT who were fundamentally interested in organizing only those who believed in the cadre party concept but then had to translate that belief into effective action and organizing efforts at the school and union-wide level. That they would keep the key organizing force pure and free of dissent and struggle. That they would decide internally what they think is best for the union and organizing efforts and then take those ideas to the rank and file without giving the rank and file access to this decision making process. Could they succeed?
Chibber makes some fascinating points in his critique of the socialist left:
The socialist left is only
tenuously connected to working-class communities, if at all. By and
large, it is structurally separated from workers, and operates mostly as
small groups in middle-class settings — campuses, nonprofits, study
groups, and so on. This has several important consequences. First of
all, unlike the traditional labor left, it cannot actually organize and lead
working-class struggles, because it is physically separated from that
class. The overwhelming bulk of its political engagement is supportive
and reactive — showing up for a spell at a picket line, spreading the
word, trying to drum up sympathy. But this means that it is entirely
dependent on other people’s organizing, since it is not in a position to initiate struggle itself.
Second, its confinement to these environments means that for it to
maintain its socialist commitments, it has to socialize its members into
sympathizing with another class’s interests and another class’s
oppression.
Now I've seen aspects of these points up close and personal within the UFT. More from Chibber that seems so right on given what some of us have observed about attitudes in so-called social justice caucuses:
This is very different from traditional left parties, which
were in working-class settings, were able to recruit from within that
class, and hence trained their members to fight around their own
material interests. Struggle was a necessity for these earlier groups,
because they were fighting for their members’ own livelihoods and their
own well-being.
Today’s groups have to largely imagine what those interests
are, since they can’t learn about them through direct engagement. They
mostly do so by reading about past events and then trying to find
parallels to the current scene. But this makes it hard to develop
strategy. It is almost impossible to be innovative, since most members
are not directly experiencing changes in the workplace, nor are they in a
position to try new initiatives. This naturally leads to a kind of
dogmatism, since the only thing they really know is what worked in the
past.
Yes, yes, yes - struggle, struggle, struggle -- never stop struggling - the essence a good pal and life-long leftist who has studied Marxism extensively tells me -- that is the dialectic most leftists don't want to engage in. They are not interested in struggle over ideas since they start with knowing what they know and feel icky when people want to contend. They enter the room knowing and don't want to hear contradictions to what they know they know.
For the few of you who have been hanging in with me as I wade through this stuff, check out some of his ideas:
NYS Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins lays out a great case against capitalism and for socialism with a good explanation of the differences between hard-core socialists and Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other social democrats who the hard left tosses into the same bin as liberals, a dirty word on the hard left, which brands the FDR New Deal as reformist liberalism. Their explanation is that under the current political system, even hard-won gains in the New Deal can be undermined, as we've seen happening even under neo-liberal Dems like Clinton. On the other hand, the socialist paradise as an alternative does not look like it's around the corner. Is a return to New Deal politics a more realistic option?
A funny thing happened on the way to the 2018 election. Socialism broke out!
Or at least a number of Democratic candidates have declared themselves to be socialists.
On June 26, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat the Democratic machine incumbent, Joe Crowley, in a Queens-Bronx Democratic primary for Congress. She won with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and embraced the socialist label. Within days, the Working Families Party-endorsed Democrats for Governor and Lt. Governor, Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams, were saying we, too, are socialists now. Lots of people and mainstream media were asking, what is this democratic socialism?
As someone who came up in the McCarthy and Cold War eras — when the word socialism stopped rather than started conversations — it is a welcome sight to see socialism coming back into mainstream public discourse.
The significant support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016 as a democratic socialist got the conversation started. The ranks of socialist groups have swelled in Sanders’ wake, with DSA, in particular, growing from about 5,000 to approximately 47,000 members since Sanders launched his campaign in 2015. DSA elected 15 of its members to local offices nationwide in 2017, eight Democrats and seven independents. In 2018 to date, seven women supported by DSA have won Democratic primaries for Congress and state legislatures in Omaha, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York City.
However, something is notably missing in these candidates’ descriptions of socialism. They are leaving out the distinguishing tenet of the traditional socialist program — the definition of socialism you will find in the dictionary — a democratic economic system based on social ownership of the major means of production.
It is a good thing that Sanders and other progressives have put socialism back into mainstream political discourse, but what these new socialist Democrats really advocate is New Deal liberalism. They promote redistributive social programs that partially mitigate the inequalities the capitalist economy generates.
For socialists, social ownership is the basis for economic democracy in both the public and private sectors. Government-owned corporations can be autocratic. They are often set up as “lemon socialism” to cover unprofitable markets or subsidize private profits for privately-owned corporations with below-cost inputs. A cooperative in the private sector is a form of social ownership. Sanders’ “democratic socialism” is indistinguishable from traditional American liberalism. Like liberals, he conflates social ownership with state ownership. Like conservatives, he conflates liberal social programs with socialism.
Liberals contend that their fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies will support better than conservative policies the economic growth and profits that can then be taxed to support social programs. Socialists demand much more. They want to end the dictatorship capitalists exercise over economic resources, workers and work itself. They want to enjoy the full fruits of their labor instead of having owners take a share of the value every worker creates every day at work. With lots of workers and few owners, this wage labor system generates capitalisms’ extreme inequality. Socialists want equitable distribution in the first place, at the point of production, not merely partial redistribution after the fact through social programs.
In an age of environmental crisis and an unfolding climate catastrophe, socialists want to uproot capitalism’s competitive structure because it is driving the blind, relentless growth that is poisoning the environment and depleting natural resources. Socialists want a system of economic democracy and planning to meet the basic economic needs of all on an ecologically sustainable basis.
Socialists also criticize the naive politics of liberalism. Capitalism generates concentrated wealth, which translates into concentrated political power. Liberal social programs are not secure as long as capitalists have the economic and political power. The rollback of New Deal programs in the United States and welfare state programs in Western Europe demonstrate this political reality.
Capitalists buying politicians through campaign contributions is the obvious way they exercise power over the political process. But even if we get full public campaign financing enacted, capitalists’ control over economic resources gives them the power to repeal liberal programs. Capital can strike, too. It can temporarily tank the economy, blame the liberals and force them out of office.
The new socialist Democrats and traditional socialists who want to democratize the economy through social ownership are united behind immediate demands for social programs like single-payer health care and a job guarantee. But these programs are not secure, if they are even achievable in the first place, so long as capitalism prevails and concentrates economic and political power in the hands of the capitalist elite.
What the approach of entering the Democratic Party has meant historically is socialists have ended up doing the grunt work in campaigns to elect liberals, who, in the absence of an independent left political competitor, have moved steadily to the right since the early 1970s. Now, with candidates and politicians who are liberals calling themselves socialists, the very idea of socialism as a new social system could get lost even more.
If socialism is to advance as a radical alternative to capitalism, socialists will need their own distinct party, program, and identity outside and opposed to the two-capitalist-party system.
At the beginning of this year, the state committee of the Green Party of New York decided we would campaign as ecological socialists. In previous campaigns, we have put forward socialistic reforms to address problems like the climate crisis, stagnant wages, the bipartisan test-punish-and-privatize school agenda and skyrocketing rent and medical expenses. Now we are campaigning explicitly as socialists, in part, because socialism has become a conversation starter, thanks to the electoral successes of Sanders, Ocasio and others.
We are promoting public enterprise in several areas:
A public energy system in order to effectively plan the transition to 100 percent clean energy.
Public broadband to universalize access, improve affordability and customer service and ensure net neutrality and privacy.
A public bank to lower the costs of credit for public infrastructure, private businesses and consumers and to target investments to meet public needs.
We call for the public bank to have a division devoted to planning, financing and technically assisting the development of worker cooperatives, as the financial institutions at the center of the successful Mondragon cooperatives in Spain have done.
We also call for a state-owned Social Wealth Fund that over time will progressively transform private wealth into public wealth, in which every New Yorker would own an equal share. This Social Wealth Fund would buy into the securities of private corporations and share the returns across the population as citizens dividends and lower taxes on the earned income of wages.
Our slogan is “Demand more!”
Yet we should not overestimate how far openness to a discussion of socialism has spread. It is still largely confined to the progressive base that found its broadest expression in the 13.2 million votes Sanders received in 2016. Its strongest expression is among millennials, over half of whom view socialism favorably. Even if most of these people view New Deal liberalism as socialism, having a debate on socialism is half the battle. I don’t think capitalism’s defenders can win that debate.
