José LaLuz is currently employed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He is a Vice Chair of DSA. This is a transcription of a presentation given at the Young Democratic Socialists Winter Conference on February 18, 2007.

I wanted to put a number of things on the table for the purposes of our conversation.

This being a nation of immigrants—in fact all of us our ancestors came from different shores—what explains that in a nation of immigrants we are witnessing one of the fiercest anti-immigrant xenophobic offensives in the history of this nation. What explains that?

The other thing is, if in fact the economy of this country is integrating with the economy of other nations in the hemisphere, particularly our neighbor to the south (Mexico), and our neighbor to the north (Canada), making possible the acceleration of the movement of capital, of goods and labor and other resources, how come the question of the movement of people has not been a part of that process? What explains that? This North American Free Trade Agreement or the hemispheric agreement that we know this administration and previous administrations wanted to negotiate. What explains that?

And finally, what explains the vacillations of organized labor and the Democratic Party with regards to the question of immigration, which I dare suggest, next to the question of war and peace, is the single most important issue of justice facing progressive men and women in this country? What explains the vacillation of well-known progressives in the Democratic Party and in the trade union movement with regards to this question? So I wanted to put that on the table and suggest some action.

One has to do with what I call the Lou Dobbs phenomenon. How many of you occasionally watch this man on CNN? I find it repugnant, but I have to watch it, because to me it signals something extremely dangerous. And let me explain what I mean. I decided to go first hand and witness first hand the work of these people that are referred to as “the Minutemen”—you know, you’ve heard of them, right? At the time I was working as a deputy director of organizing for the AFL-CIO, and one of my tasks was in fact to help shape an immigrant organizing strategy. So I figured, you know, why are most unions shy—and I’m being generous actually—when it comes to the question of organizing immigrant men and women. So I figured maybe this had something to do with the climate, the political climate of the nation. So I went to the state of Arizona. I got to Phoenix and drove all the way to the border, and as I was getting closer to the border I began to detect a lot of movement of people that were wearing this military garb, you know, similar to the one you wear in Iraq or Afghanistan. But in addition to wearing the military garb and the camouflage, some of them were actually packing guns. And they were parading back and forth, you know, this thing called the border. Which, if you look at it, it’s hard to figure where the hell is the border. Right? What is in fact the border? So I asked some questions of the folks that were with me, and they said “José, you look like you’re getting a little excited, and we didn’t come here to get into any trouble.” I mean, so I am actually witnessing some of these so-called Minutemen chasing some people, who later turn out to be undocumented immigrants. And things were getting out of hand. Because I was told that all these people were there to do was to monitor things, just to witness things, but they were getting into the action. And so much to my surprise, not far from where this was actually happening, there was a group of cameramen from CNN, and they happened to be from this program called The Lou Dobbs—whatever the hell the name is—Hour, right? And so I said, I have got to see what the hell is going on—what is this? And there was somebody, a young woman actually, interviewing one of the Minutemen that had just been involved in the altercation, in the capturing of some of the undocumented immigrants. And the woman was saying, well, what just happened? “Well, we are defending our nation’s integrity from the threat of terrorism and you know our national security is at risk…” And the interview progressed. I couldn’t help but to feel that this man was made to feel like a hero. And in fact a major network was rewarding the behavior of a vigilante. A vigilante that had decided that he of all people was more patriotic than anybody else and was going to enforce the laws that could not be enforced by the people who are commissioned to enforce them, meaning the Border Patrol.

Had that been an isolated incident, I would have dismissed it. But not far from here in Long Island there were things happening—in fact all over this state, which is nothing but the inheritor of immigrants! I mean, somebody came from Italy, from Poland, from Ireland, right, from Europe, from Southeast Asia, from Africa…I mean, some people came here in chains. They had no option. They were enslaved; they were brought here in chains. And others came here because of wars, because of this phenomenon called colonialism. Because of the phenomenon of empire, which is the other serious challenge that we’re facing in this nation today. The impulse to restore empire. So, then, I’m saying, Oh, my goodness! No wonder Democrats and organized labor are shy about this. The images of the people who are doing the so-called right thing are none other than those of the Minutemen. They are the heroes of this story. The people who are persecuting the immigrants are the heroes. I saw the same thing in Long Island. The TV went there to interview some people, and goodness, what’s going on?

What makes Lou Dobbs so dangerous? Well, Lou Dobbs is particularly dangerous because his discourse, his speech happens to appeal to whom? To the so-called displaced workers and the middle class. It’s right-wing populism. You don’t have to go far in history to discover where this flourished—in a country called Italy, in a country called Germany. Who were the people in the Nazi movement? Who were the people in the Fascist movement? Working men and women. The so-called “trapped middle class.” And so Lou Dobbs has a phenomenal appeal. And even the trade union leaders do not dare take him on. Democrats go to his program, and they don’t dare take this man on. And I think that explains that even politicians that have been ardent advocates of freedom and justice and equality are so afraid of speaking out on this issue. But that’s the explanation. I mean, something is brewing and something is happening in the underground. Right? That is moving people in a very serious and frightening direction.

Remember, it was only two and a half years ago that we could not say a fucking thing against the war. Remember the Dixie Chicks? When they spoke out? I mean it seemed like the whole goddamn world was coming down on them. I mean anybody on the street against the war—Oh my God! A crime has been committed! Frightening, in the country that is supposed to be the most democratic country on the face of the earth, people could not speak their mind on the question of war and peace.

Now things have changed. Dramatically. We have a so-called new majority in Congress, which in fact was elected to do what? To get us out of the god-damned war! And they’re still struggling with that one. So you wonder if they will be able to tackle this question of immigration. I dare suggest that there is a long, hard struggle ahead of us. But you know the most promising thing that happened? That thousands upon thousands upon thousands of the so-called invisible people mobilized themselves, and they said, I am not a criminal. I am a human being. And they showed it with their presence, by taking the streets. And that was one of the most powerful developments in the recent history of this nation, to witness the so-called invisible people coming out from restaurants, off the construction sites, everywhere. You know, in Los Angeles it was almost a million men and women, afraid that they could be rounded up and deported, but they were there with their families. That was so powerful. I’ve not witnessed anything like that. And you know, the response has been a most incredible backlash. Because of all this legislation, Gael García Bernal, the Mexican actor who played Che Guevara, said recently that the wall that was built at the border is a monument to stupidity. He was absolutely right. It does not solve anything. A wall is going to put a stop to immigration? My goodness. Has anybody learned anything from years of history? I mean, the question is: how do we develop trade and development policies that allow people south of the border and in other parts of the world to develop their own economies? And that cannot be done at gunpoint, by pretending that we are going to impose democracy in a country called Iraq.

Democracy at gunpoint? Can you imagine? And the cost. The cost is thousands upon thousands of men and women from working families and poor families in this country. Not to mention the thousands of men and women who are dying in Iraq, and the question is: is the world safer today? I dare suggest absolutely not. I mean, if there is an army of occupation in my country, this country, I will be one of the first people fighting against the occupation army. And that is what’s happening in Iraq. People are fighting against an occupation army. And so I saw Lou Dobbs saying “Oh my god! the Mexicans that are crossing the borders could perhaps be terrorists!” and so they are connected to those people in the Middle East. And those are the connections that are made sometimes in an open way, sometimes in a more sublime sophisticated way. But those are very serious threats that we face, and I do not see anything more important for a young socialist, for an old socialist, and for a middle-aged socialist than fighting against the war and fighting for the rights of men and women who happen to be crossing borders. Thank you.

]]> http://theactivist.org/blog/the-lou-dobbs-phenomenon/feed http://theactivist.org/blog/the-case-for-socialism-part-four http://theactivist.org/blog/the-case-for-socialism-part-four#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2007 05:06:05 +0000 Jason Schulman http://theactivist.org/blog/?p=101 Socialist Politics Here and Now

The struggle for the free, classless society is going to take much longer than we would like and that there’s no guarantee that we’ll be fully successful in reaching it. Fundamentally changing human consciousness and building alternative institutions takes a great deal of time. The fight against capitalism—and the fight to limit the likelihood of violence in defense of capitalism—will have to take place both inside and outside existing states. The effectiveness of elected socialist politicians ultimately depends on the strength and size of the socialist movement outside the halls of government. Our job right now is work to for reforms of every kind—social, economic, and political—that will exist within capitalism but will work against capitalism and for the majority of people. We can’t expect the tiny U.S. socialist movement to jump from minority to majority status any time soon, and we have to work with people more politically moderate than ourselves to achieve even partial goals. But as radicals we embrace not only electoral politics but also industrial struggles, strikes, civil disobedience, and direct action.

Given that many workers, particularly in the U.S., don’t even think of themselves as “working class,” socialists insist on the ideal of class unity in order to distinguish the common interests of people who are otherwise divided into separate interest groups. Sexism, for example, affects women of all classes, but what they can do about it is very much class-related. Similarly, all of humanity currently stands on the verge of ecological disaster, but for the workers of much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the increasing destruction of the environment and biosphere and the day-to-day struggle to survive are aspects of the same immediate experience. Ecologists who embrace primitivist or anti-developmental perspectives fail to see that workers in the “Global South” are very much in need of an “eco-socialist” approach to economic and social development.

Some may say that socialists should hold on to our ideal and our approach to politics but drop the word “socialism” because of its lingering association with unaccountable state bureaucrats. But the truth is that if you believe in consistent democracy and recognize that wealth is a social creation and therefore should be controlled by the whole of society, you can use other labels, but you are going to get called a socialist anyway. And in the U.S. those who defend capitalism invariably demonize proposals for such reforms as a national health care system or public investment in childcare as “socialist.” Since we are stuck with the S word, we ought to wear it proudly.

The days in which socialism seemed inevitable are long since gone, and socialism’s appeal has been tarnished by the authoritarian regimes that falsely ruled in its name. For the foreseeable future, socialism may be only an ideal, as we can’t promise that the emancipated society will ever arrive. But the socialist ideal informs our day-to-day politics, our opposition to class domination and the dictatorship of market forces. As the socialist writer Leo Panitch puts it, “as long as we can muster the strategic creativity and imagination to develop alternative political institutions that will in fact be developmental, we are contributing to making socialism possible.”

A hundred years ago, when socialist parties were becoming enormous and socialism really did seem to be on the historical agenda, there were famous debates about whether it could be accomplished peacefully through the election of socialists to office or if the working class would have to forcibly overthrow the existing capitalist state. The main question was whether or not the capitalist class would respect its own legal order if the socialist movement became popular enough to actually try to legislate capitalism out of existence. Given capitalist support for Hitler in Germany in the 1930s and Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s, we can be certain of the answer to this question: if capitalists feel sufficiently threatened by the socialist movement, they will even support fascists, and accept limits on their own civil and political rights, if that’s what it takes to save their system.

At the same time, there’s no getting around the fact that the majority of workers in the advanced capitalist countries have simply not been interested in revolutionary socialist politics. Part of this is due to authoritarian Communists calling their states “socialist.” Part of it is due to the predominance of market values in popular culture, especially in the U.S. Part of it is that what socialists call “the working class” is in fact very heterogeneous, not just in sex, race, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, etc., but in skill and income level (blue collar, white collar, etc.). But it’s also true that in capitalist democracies workers have been able to meet at least some of their needs via the welfare state, thereby creating a situation in which they no longer have, to quote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “nothing to lose but their chains.”

The truth is that there is no certain road from existing society to the classless society. But in the past, both moderate socialists (known as Social Democrats) and revolutionary socialists (who usually called themselves Leninists and Communists, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 led by V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party) were both very optimistic. Social democrats believed in an electoral road to socialism, and most of them came to believe that a reformed, regulated capitalism was the only “socialism” that was both necessary and possible. The economic achievements of social democracy are undeniable. Germany and the Scandinavian nations, in particular, are probably the most democratic, humane countries in the world, without any real poverty to speak of, with strict health and safety regulation, progressive taxation, and guaranteed health care, child care and housing-all things which Americans are still fighting. At the same time, social democracy both naively equated electoral victory with radical change and fell into a pragmatism that was overwhelmed by the economic power of capital, particularly by the mobility of capital. Social democratic parties have usually been technocratic and purely electoral in their approach to politics, and have had little need for, or interest in (if not active fear of), the development of a militantly class-conscious activist movement. In our age of global capitalist domination, the role of social democracy has been, at best, to polish the sharpest edges of corporate power.

Leninists argued that there was no road to socialism except through the insurrectionary overthrow of the capitalist state. Lenin shared this conviction with socialists who were consistently both democratic and revolutionary, such as the German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg. But Lenin took 20^th century socialism into an authoritarian direction. Although he vaguely described the replacement of the capitalist state with self-governing workers’ councils in his pamphlet The State and Revolution, in practice, Lenin’s Bolshevik Party rapidly supplanted the councils as the main governing institution in the Soviet Union. Despite his claim to Marxist orthodoxy, Lenin’s belief in the privilege of the “vanguard party”—which can do whatever it wants once it takes power because it represents the “true” interests of the working class—contradicts Marx’s belief in the self-emancipation of the working class. Leninism has generally been very unpopular in democratic capitalist societies, perhaps because self-described Leninist parties are usually authoritarian sects.

Democratic socialism is therefore the heir of the best aspects of classical liberalism. There is nothing wrong with the freedoms that classical liberalism holds dear: the freedoms of association, speech, press, assembly, and so on. The problem is that under capitalism these freedoms are greatly restricted and hollowed out. Liberal freedoms can only be fully secured in a socialist society, where property rights no longer take precedence over political, civil, and social rights.

Socialism is, therefore, not about authoritarian central planning or mere state ownership as existed in Russia, Eastern Europe, or China. It is not about replacing the rule of private capitalists with the rule of state bureaucrats. But it does involve replacing the dictatorship of market forces with deliberate, democratic economic coordination. Defenders of capitalism claim that this is technically infeasible, and many people accept their arguments. But there are real precursors and aspects of socialism that exist today, under capitalism.

• In Argentina, workers from Buenos Aires have formed worker-managed co-operatives by taking over factories abandoned by their former owners. Their success proves that workers don’t need bosses-arbitrary, authoritarian work relations are not necessary.
• There are also international “direct trading” networks which develop fair trade links between European consumers and cooperatives of small scale growers of coffee and cocoa in Africa and Latin America. In such a “socialized market” prices are determined by social objectives instead of commercial ones and non-economic values are prioritized.
• Much of the internet now runs on open-source software, written not for profit but for the pure satisfaction of creating a useful product. This anticipates a future in which productive social labor becomes an end in itself. It shows that private corporate property has become a constraint on the development of technology.
• A current capitalist goal is an automated shop floor, with functions such as purchasing, stock, and sales in the retail outlets linked electronically to the factory floor. The real problem is its complexity, which is a result of rivalry in profit making and the business secrecy that this requires. If sales could be predicted and planned in advance, then this would be workable-but it requires the end of the business cycle of “booms” and “busts,” which is impossible under capitalism. Despite the fact that companies spend millions in marketing efforts to discover consumer wants and to improve the usability of their products, the real problem is not what consumers want, but what they can afford to buy, and it is this element that is the most unpredictable of all and lies behind the operation of the business cycle. Fixing this problem requires the overcoming of the contradiction between private consumption and collective production.

The Essence of Capitalism