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“Bar Lev does not understand what the Torah is and what is great in the Torah.”
By World Israel News Staff
Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers called for a boycott of Angel Bakery, Israel’s largest bakery chain, after its chairman, former public security minister Omer Bar Lev, protested outside the home of Ashkenazi scion Rabbi Gershon Edelstein in Bnei Brak on Thursday.
Bar Lev posted a photo of himself with the “Brothers in Arms” protest group on Twitter, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin of bribing the Charedi parties to “vote in favor of the coup d’état,” referring to the government’s plans for judicial reform, in exchange for the the Draft Law, exempting young Charedi men from the army.
Several large yeshivot, or Jewish seminaries, announced they would join the boycott against Angel’s, including the Hevron Yeshiva in Jerusalem, which has over 1000 students and regular orders from the bakery.
United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni tweeted, “Omer Bar Lev and Angel have no respect for the Torah!”
“You should seriously consider whether you can trust their kashrut. Bar Lev does not understand what the Torah is and what is great in the Torah and everyone has to calculate whether it is possible to buy food products from them. I despise him!” wrote Gafni.
Labor Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur (Shas) slammed Bar Lev’s attendance at the protest.
“Freedom of speech isn’t the freedom to disgrace. Omer Bar-Lev and his privileged group, who demonstrated outside the home of Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, disgraced the honor of the Torah, and there is no way to forgive that. I was pained to see Omer Bar-Lev, who contributed so much to Israel’s security, shaming his past and using the IDF as a tool to divide the nation,” he said.
“The contribution of the Charedi community to the state of Israel is tremendous, and no protest can fritter away the work of our hundreds of charity organizations that work for all Israeli citizens,” he added.
Deputy Minister Uri Maklev (UTJ) criticized Bar Lev for expressing “extreme opinions about the Charedi and right-wing public
“As an active participant in the incitement against the Charedi public [he] must pay the price,” Laklev added.
The post Ultra-Orthodox boycott Israel’s largest bakery after chairman protests outside rabbi’s home appeared first on World Israel News.
Moroccan Jews were among those protesting outside Barak’s home in response to his past claims that he could “not find a single” Moroccan or Mizrahi judge to serve on the court.
By World Israel News Staff
Both pro- and anti reform protesters held demonstrations in various locations throughout Israel on Thursday, including outside the homes of former Supreme Court justice Aharon Barak in Tel Aviv and of Justice Minister Yariv Levin.
Thursday’s anti-government protests were under the umbrella of a “Day of Equality” organized by protest leaders.
Protests against Barak, who is viewed by those in favor of reform as having usurped control for the Supreme Court in a 1990s power grab, took place outside his home while counter demonstrations took place across the road.
Pro-reform protesters shouted to the protesters on the other side: “Where were you in Gush Katif?” referencing the right-wing’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s conduct at the time of the disengagement from Gaza in 2005.
A group of Moroccan Jews were among those protesting outside Barak’s home in response to his past claims that he could “not find a single” Moroccan or Mizrahi judge to serve on the court. Demonstrators played Moroccan music and handed out sweets from the traditional Moroccan post-Passover Mimouna party to passers-by.
Anti-reform protests also took place outside of Levin’s house in Modiin.
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Picketers during International Longshoremen’s strike. (Al Fenn / Getty Images)
Review of Comrade: Bill Andersen — A Communist, Working-Class Life by Cybèle Locke (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)
For the first time in a while, socialists in New Zealand’s trade union movement may have reason for optimism. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, while politicians have been unable or unwilling to help, union campaigns have won significant improvements for growing numbers of working people. As a result, after years of slumping membership, there’s modest but real membership growth.
This is why the release of Comrade: Bill Andersen – A Communist, Working-Class Life by Cybèle Locke is potentially very well timed. Bill Andersen was a prominent communist and the secretary of the National Distribution Union (NDU, now FIRST Union), and his biography is a window into the twentieth-century left of New Zealand’s trade union movement. Most importantly, Comrade demonstrates the indispensable role that organized communists can play in building strong, militant, and political trade unionism.
Andersen grew up in Auckland during the depression of the 1930s before becoming a seafarer. His experience of harsh class oppression as a merchant seaman led him to the communist movement, as did the poverty he witnessed at Middle Eastern ports. Consequently, he returned to New Zealand in 1946 a member of the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) and found work on the Auckland waterfront.
In 1951, the employers declared a lockout in response to a campaign over safety and wages led by the Waterfront Workers Union. Although Andersen was then a young man, he played a key role on the union’s lockout committee. Although it was illegal at the time, he took responsibility for producing the union’s publications.
The Waterside Workers Union maintained their strike for 151 days before eventually being defeated. Emboldened by their win, the employers deregistered the dockworkers’ union as its members returned to work. Further, the bosses blacklisted around two thousand Auckland waterside workers, forcing them to take their commitment to unionism and solidarity into other trades.
Andersen was among this number. So, in 1951, he found work as a driver and joined the Northern Drivers Union (NDU), an organization that would go on to be linked closely with his name.
As a rank-and-file member, Andersen campaigned to rejuvenate the union alongside other former watersiders and communists. To aid these efforts, the Communist Party established an Auckland drivers branch in early 1953, drawing on the experience and strategy developed by Chip Bailey, a fellow CPNZ member and leader of the Wellington Drivers Union.
This group of rank-and-file communists aimed to build a left wing in the union that extended beyond party members. It took up industrial matters, for example, mobilizing to assist a dispute of bus drivers in 1953 and pushing the union’s leadership to take a firmer stand on drivers’ pay and hours of work. Or, for another example, during negotiations over nationwide minimum conditions for drivers, the CPNZ Aukland drivers’ branch organized a series of stop-work meetings for drivers. This was a step toward militancy that had not been seen before among Auckland’s drivers.
In recognition of his leading role in initiatives like these, Andersen was elected by NDU members as NDU secretary in 1956, allowing him to push ahead with his left-led strategy for rejuvenating the union. The first step the union took under Andersen’s lead was to implement regular delegate conferences and stop-work meetings. Drivers had traditionally been atomized and isolated as a result of their work. But under Andersen, the industry was becoming well organized, militant, and political.
In the following decades, the NDU waged many battles for its members’ rights, as did the Auckland Trades Council, which Andersen also chaired. In 1968, for example, these two organizations stood at the core of the successful campaign to defeat a 1968 order of the Arbitration Court which attempted to impose a wage freeze across the board. Again in 1980, Andersen was central to the Kinleith Mill strike, which defeated another round of government attempts to keep wages low.
Andersen’s political vision was crucial to this organizing work. Indeed, Andersen remained a steadfast communist his entire life, despite the splits and setbacks that afflicted the movement. He left the CPNZ following the 1960 Sino-Soviet split and helped form the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP). Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the SUP, Andersen remained a leading member of the left of New Zealand’s trade union movement, continuing to explore avenues for rebuilding socialist organization until his death in 2005.
In addition to providing militants with organization, perspectives, and strategies, the communist wing of New Zealand’s trade union movement fought to ensure that union strength would be brought to bear on issues beyond the workplace. For example, in 1977–78, under Andersen’s lead, the NDU organized in solidarity with Māori people occupying land at Bastion Point to prevent a high-end residential development. The NDU imposed work bans on the site to block construction work going ahead, and when police finally cleared the occupation, Andersen was among those arrested.
The NDU’s commitment to solidarity also saw the union join the campaign against apartheid in South Africa at a time when this was a deeply controversial issue. The union printed literature and organized stop-work meetings to educate members on this issue as well as others.
This was possible because Andersen and his comrades made no separation between the union’s political and industrial work — and history vindicated this orientation. The years in which the NDU and New Zealand’s broader union movement contributed the most to political campaigns were also the high-water mark of industrial strength. Building solidarity with victims of racism, war, and other injustices developed a strong rank and file capable of standing up to defend their own union when called upon. NDU members demonstrated this clearly in 1974 when Andersen was briefly jailed for contempt of court for refusing to lift a NDU ban during a dispute over Auckland ferries. Following a strike of twenty thousand workers, the courts quickly ordered his release.
While the 1970s was the decade of greatest union strength in New Zealand, by the late 1980s, the tide had begun to recede. In the early 1980s, National Party prime minister Robert Muldoon led a bitter campaign against the unions, attempting to blame them for growing unemployment. A famous National Party advertisement broadcast across the country depicted trade unionists as dancing Cossacks intent on subverting the state. Then, in 1981, New Zealand employers backed these efforts by sponsoring a series of “Kiwis Care” marches in Auckland, bringing thousands to the streets behind anti-communist slogans.
As a consequence, Andersen started to receive death threats. These became all the more ominous when Wellington Trades Hall was bombed in 1984. Although caretaker Ernie Abbott was killed, his murderer was never charged.
After the New Zealand Labour Party came to government in 1984, the unions expected some reprieve. They were, however, blindsided by the party’s sharp turn toward neoliberalism. Labour prime minister David Lange led a sweeping fire sale of state assets while empowering vicious anti-worker managements in those that remained under public ownership. Lange’s government also abolished many import tariffs and subsidies, leading to the collapse of the textiles and automotive manufacturing industries, among others. For working people, the result was dislocation on a huge scale.
When the USSR began to collapse at the end of the decade, it compounded the these setbacks. The Soviet Union had been a personal inspiration to Andersen and others in the SUP, as well as to the broader union left. Disillusionment and disorientation following its collapse dealt a gut punch to a union movement already under attack.
As a consequence of all these developments, the 1980s saw New Zealand’s union movement on the back foot. When the National Party returned to government in 1990, they sensed weakness and went on the offensive. The Employment Contracts Act of 1991 effectively withdrew any legally mandated role for unions, allowing bosses to sidestep them altogether. For most of the twentieth century, unions had been accustomed to a highly regulated industrial wage bargaining system. Now, they found that infrastructure replaced in large part by an employment system based purely on individual contracts. Tragically, the union movement did not lead a fight against these attacks and failed to adjust to the new reality. Within five years, the trade union movement found its membership reduced by half.
Andersen passed away in 2005. He remained president of the NDU to the end as he tried to grapple with the challenges of rebuilding the union movement from its low point in the 1990s. And while his work has yet to be completed, he’s left us with more than a few lessons.
Andersen didn’t join the union movement when it was strong, but during a moment of defeat. The bosses won the 1951 Auckland waterside lockout, leaving Andersen and his comrades isolated, their union deregistered, and the union’s leading activists blacklisted. Had Andersen given up then, Comrade could instead have been a book about a rugby league enthusiast — Andersen was also a leading figure in New Zealand Rugby League, serving as president of the City Newton Dragons until 1981.
But he didn’t give up. Instead, Andersen and his comrades built strong unions from the ground up. Thanks to their work, by the 1970s and ’80s, New Zealand’s union movement was a force capable of repeatedly beating bosses and the government.
This is why Andersen’s most important gift to the workers’ movement is a political lesson. When the Left is strong, it strengthens the union movement — and vice versa. Today, we need organized spaces where comrades can organize, collaborate, and extend solidarity to each other, spaces like those once provided by the CPNZ and the SUP. We need militants who can lead a strike and build a socialist political vision.
“Nobody can understand what it is like losing a mother and two sisters at once, and to hear my mother’s heartbeat was comforting.”
By Pesach Benson, TPS
In an emotional encounter, the family of Leah (Lucy) Dee met on Tuesday for the first time with the woman who received their slain mother’s heart in a transplant at the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikvah.
“Listening to my mother’s heartbeat made me feel like I am with her. It was moving, meeting Lital and all the recipients, we have lost so much but are comforted that so many families were saved from similar pain,” said 19-year-old Keren Dee.
“Nobody can understand what it is like losing a mother and two sisters at once, and to hear my mother’s heartbeat was comforting,” added 17-year-old Tali.
The recipient was Lital Valenci, a 51-year-oid mother of two who had suffered severe heart failure for the past five years.
“I was so moved when I learned who I was receiving a heart from as I had read about Lucy Dee and what an incredible woman she was with an exemplary family,” Valenci said.
Dee, a 48-year-old British-Israeli national living in Efrat was the third fatality from a Palestinian drive-by shooting in the northern Israel on April 7. Also killed in the attack were her two daughters, Maya and Rina, ages 20 and 16 respectively.
The daughters felt their mother’s heartbeat through Lital’s chest while Rabbi Leo Dee and his son Yehuda stood by their side. Valenci expressed her condolences to the family on the loss of their wife and mother and shared how appreciative she was to both Leah and the family for giving her a new lease on life.
Leah was on life support at the Beilinson Hospital when she died, and doctors were able to immediately remove her organs. In addition to her heart, Dee’s lungs, liver and kidneys were also transplanted into other different people, creating a surge of Israeli interest in organ donations.
The family also met with 51-year-old Mordechai Elkabitz who received a kidney after waiting seven years for a suitable donor, and 25-year-old Daniel Geresh who received Dee’s liver.
Another kidney recipient, 38-year-old Ahmed Suliman was not able to attend the gathering, but sent a plaque inscribed with Biblical verses in Dee’s memory.
“There was not a dry eye in the room as Keren and Tali raised their hands to Lital’s chest to hear their mother’s heartbeat,” said Beilinson Hospital’s Director of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery Prof. Dan Aravot who performed the heart transplant and has been overseeing Valenci’s recovery. Around 70 percent of all organ transplants in Israel take place at Beilinson.
“We often talk about the physical recovery after a transplant but there is an emotional component that comes with it, and it was very important to Lital to meet the Dee family and share her condolences with them and how appreciative she is to have the gift of life and watch her children grow up because of Lucy Dee,” Prof. Aravot said.
The post WATCH: Dee family hears slain mother’s heartbeat in transplant recipient appeared first on World Israel News.
The Isle of Palms mobile home park in Saint Petersburg, Florida. (Karl Mondon / MediaNews Group / the Mercury News via Getty Images)
In the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I work, Jessica and her family come to court in a panic. Jessica contracted COVID-19 and missed several weeks of work, which caused her to fall behind on the rent she owed to a mobile home park. Now she and her elderly mother and a brother living with disabilities, who all live together in the family home, are facing eviction.
The good news: Jessica and her family came to court with several folded and dog-eared money orders they had cobbled together, which together added up to the rent due. The bad news: the landlords say they won’t dismiss the eviction case unless Jessica pays for their attorney’s fees, too. Jessica says okay. Oops, the attorney says, we forgot to add on court filing fees to the list, and you have to pay those as well.
It is more of a shakedown than a negotiation, but Jessica sees no choice but to agree again. “We’ll just have to figure out how to get the money,” she tells me. “We can’t risk getting evicted.”
But even the dismissal of this case won’t eliminate Jessica’s risk. The landlord refuses to let Jessica or any other park resident sign a long-term lease. They insist on keeping everyone on month-to-month terms, meaning the residents can be forced out with as little as thirty-days notice.
For Jessica and her neighbors, that is a disastrous prospect. They own their homes, with Jessica paying $37,000 for her home fifteen years ago and putting thousands of dollars and countless hours into improvements, including an attached deck on the back. But they don’t own the land under their home, the “lot” it sits on. For that space, the landlord charges them $470 per month.
The secret about mobile homes like Jessica’s is that they are really not very mobile at all. It can cost as much as $14,000 to move a mobile home, assuming the home is sturdy enough to move at all and the owner finds another place to site it. Jessica’s home has sat on the lot for more than three decades and she is not at all confident that it can be relocated intact. “If we get evicted, we lose everything we have worked for,” she says.
Her landlords are aware. In court we see mobile home park residents who report that park owners have refused to renew leases by the dozens. That leads mobile home owners to abandon their houses, which the park owners snatch up and then resell or lease.
Jessica and her family are among what the trade group Manufactured Housing Institute says are twenty-two million people — one in every fifteen people in the country — living in mobile homes, also known as manufactured housing. Those homes on average can be purchased for less than one-third the cost of traditional single-family homes, making them the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States, according to the I’m HOME Network, which advocates for policies to protect people living in manufactured housing.
Like Jessica, many of those people are economically vulnerable: the median income of manufactured home owners is less than $58,000, just over half as much as the income of more traditional homeowners. And purchasing a manufactured home does not bring with it the same kind of stability associated with traditional homeownership. If the purchase was financed with a loan, that loan is likely a “chattel” loan, with higher interest rates and a shorter pay-off period more akin to a car loan than a traditional home loan.
The history of capitalism shows us that when low-income persons have a desperate need, exploiters will soon step in. As one mobile home park owner says, being the landlord for people like Jessica provides an enticing “sell to the masses, eat with the classes” opportunity.
These particular masses are all but forced to pay whatever price their landlords decide to charge. Frank Rolfe, whose two hundred fifty mobile home parks make him one of the top five owners in the industry, boasts, “We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.” Rolfe and his partner also operate Mobile Home University, which crows about the benefits of holding a gun to the head of park residents: “The fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy.”
Some of the world’s wealthiest people have noticed. Investment firms like Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, the Carlyle Group, and Stockbridge Capital Group all have bought large interests in mobile home parks. Warren Buffett owns both the largest manufacturer of mobile homes and some of the largest holders of the high-interest mobile home purchase loans. Equity Lifestyle Properties, a real estate investment trust founded by the multibillionaire Sam Zell, accused of “gouging grandma” via rent increases and spending millions to resist rent control, is the largest mobile home park landlord in the country.
Part of the attraction is that mobile home park landlords like Zell have significantly less obligations than landlords of traditional housing. All of the maintenance and upkeep of the actual structures is the sole responsibility of the mobile home owners. Mobile home park investor Michael Torres told NPR in 2022, “It’s just basically resurfacing roads and having a shared community center. You don’t own walls and roofs.” The bottom line, Rolfe claims, is that mobile home parks have the highest yield in real estate.
Remarkably, the federal government is helping contribute to those profits. A 2021 NPR story unsubtly titled “How the government helps investors buy mobile home parks, raise rent and evict people” revealed that the government-backed mortgage finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose mission is to make housing more affordable, provide billions of dollars in low-interest loans that huge investment companies use to buy the parks.
Perversely, a company spiking rent in one set of parks improves its chances to get more government-backed loans since it boosts cash flow. “What’s ironic about it is that one of the missions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is to help preserve affordable housing,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s George McCarthy told NPR. “And they’re doing exactly the opposite by helping investors come in and make the most affordable housing in the United States less affordable all the time.”
We can protect mobile home residents and we should. Residents of mobile homes and advocates like the Lincoln Institute and Mobile Home Action point out that the lower purchase cost for manufactured housing can make it a valuable option for US households — if they are protected from exploitation. Here is how we can provide that protection:
Good cause requirements for lease nonrenewal or eviction. States like Oregon and Delaware recognize the unique vulnerability of mobile home lot renters like Jessica. So they require lot owners to renew leases unless there is good cause, like nonpayment of rent or breaking reasonable rules, not to do so. Investors who own parks know the significance of these protections, which is why Mobile Home University advises prospective landlords to avoid “tenant-friendly” states.
Rent control. Rent control is well-justified in every landlord-tenant relationship, but particularly necessary for mobile home lots, where landlords openly brag about their unfair bargaining position. Communities in California, New Jersey and Massachusetts already have rent control for mobile home lots, and has also been proposed as a statewide law in Colorado.
Protected rights for residents to purchase mobile home parks. Massachusetts is one of the states that provides mobile home park residents with the first opportunity to purchase the park — often called a right of first refusal — if it is up for sale. Selling parks to residents would increase stability and longevity of tenure in those parks.
Funding to support residents’ purchasing of mobile home parks. The same advocates who rightly criticize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for subsidizing big investors’ purchases of mobile home parks are calling for the government-sponsored entities to instead offer those low-interest, low-down-payment options to resident groups who want to buy their parks.
As the existing laws and ongoing campaigns show, resident-led advocacy can make a big impact. In September 2021, Freddie Mac announced it would require all future manufactured housing community borrowers to agree to tenant protections like renewals unless there is good cause, right-to-cure late rent payments, and the right to sell a manufactured home without onerous requirements by lot owners. There are already about a thousand resident-owned communities of mobile homes. If the right financing is made available, residents could buy many more.
With this crisis comes an important opportunity: mostly white, often rural manufactured housing owners share key interests with the mostly urban, often black renters of traditional housing. For example, Louisville Tenants Union leaders come both from historically black neighborhoods in Louisville and Appalachia. Together, these households can build a powerful coalition to reshape housing rights in our nation.
Senator Bernie Sanders during a nomination hearing for labor secretary nominee Julie Su in Washington, DC, on April 20, 2023. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
When Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appeared on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? last Friday, the host confronted Sanders about something in his new book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism.
“You say flatly [that] billionaires should not exist,” Wallace began his question. Does Sanders really want, Wallace demanded to know, to “confiscate” everything entrepreneurs make over $999 million? The Waltons, for example, have tens of billions of dollars but provide jobs to one and a half million Americans. Isn’t that a good thing?
Sanders dryly insisted that it’s “possible to get by” on $999 million dollars — and that, while Walmart pays poverty wages, his critique isn’t of this or that individual billionaire but of a system that enables such grotesque concentrations of wealth.
Bernie is right. In fact, he could have gone even further — calling not just for redistributing more of billionaires’ money through progressive taxation but going to the source of the problem by bringing their businesses under collective ownership.
In It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders writes that billionaires “possess more of the planet’s largesse than they could burn through in a thousand lifetimes.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Some people are really good at burning through money. But it is worth stepping back and thinking about just how damn much money we’re talking about.
Here’s a slight tweak on an illustration I heard years ago:
Imagine that a vampire came to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day from the moment he landed on Hispaniola to the present, the vampire somehow managed to earn or steal the equivalent of a thousand 2023 American dollars. (The vampire just stacks the money in coffins, so he isn’t earning any interest and none of it ever get spent.) Not only would he be nowhere near a billionaire today — he wouldn’t even be a fifth of his way there. Five hundred thirty-one years have passed since 1492. That’s 139,815 days. He’d have less than $140 million.
By comparison, Sam Walton had a net worth of $25 billion when he died. Jeff Bezos’s net worth stands at $167.2 billion today. When you take a minute to ponder numbers like that, spending it all in a thousand lifetimes really does sound like a challenge.
To be fair, the vampire who came over on the Santa Maria would get to $999,000,000 — the amount Wallace thinks it’s outrageous Sanders doesn’t want to let people exceed — by the late 4220s.
In his book, Sanders also compares American billionaires to Russian oligarchs. He says that ours deserve the “oligarch” label because of their immense economic power and the way it’s intertwined with political power in our society.
This, too, Wallace found outrageous. “Russian oligarchs,” he told Sanders, “are close associates of the central government who took over state-run industries. The people you’re talking about — the so-called American oligarch — are self-made entrepreneurs who created big businesses that employ millions of Americans.”
The “self-made” part is a bit rich given that many of the people Wallace is talking about grew up in extreme privilege and benefit from various form of government subsidies, “too big to fail” bailouts, and public-sector-driven technological innovation.
Still, Wallace isn’t wrong that America’s oligarchs aren’t just stacking their money in coffins. They’re engaged in the process of capital accumulation Karl Marx described as “M-C-M’”: they use money (M) to buy commodities (C), which they either resell or use to produce new goods or services that they can sell, converting the commodities into more money (M’). In the process, they employ lots of people.
But so do Russian oligarchs! It’s not like those former state enterprises are now exclusively staffed by robots. Does Wallace think that none of the money generated by these firms was used to start new businesses that employed even more Russians?
Wallace is right to imply that Russian oligarchs are fundamentally unnecessary to the process of production — which existed before they had the keys handed to them by friends in high places. But the allegedly self-made American billionaire are equally superfluous.
At one point in their conversation, Wallace grilled Sanders about whether he thought it would be better if Walmart didn’t exist and hence the million and a half American Walmart employees didn’t have jobs. Sanders’s response, which was correct as far as it went, was to talk about the low wages of Walmart employees — more than a few of whom have to supplement their grocery budgets with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (more commonly known as “food stamps”). If they’d continued on this subject, Bernie undoubtedly would have talked about the ways his social democratic program would help these workers — for example, by making it easier for them to organize labor unions.
But none of this quite gets to the heart of the point Wallace was raising. Isn’t it good that the enterprises owned by billionaires exist and provide all those jobs?
Here’s how Sanders could have answered:
Yes, it’s good for the enterprises to exist and provide people with an income. But there’s no reason they need to be controlled by oligarchs. Walmart, for example, could be nationalized. Or it could be turned into a giant worker-owned cooperative. Either of these options, or some hybrid like converting it into a publicly owned entity whose governing board was split between public appointees and worker representatives, would cut the Walton family out of the picture — which would be all to the good.
The average full-time worker at Walmart makes between $25,000 and $30,000 a year. Jim Walton brings in about $5 billion a year — almost 167,000 times more than the high end of that range. He doesn’t get all that money because he’s 167,000 times smarter or more talented or less replaceable than any of the people actually doing the work to keep Walmart going. He gets it because capitalist ownership relations let him just take it.
If Walmart were organized as a worker co-op, the pay scale wouldn’t necessarily be entirely flat. A majority of worker-owners might be convinced to go along with higher incomes to attract candidates to apply for administrative positions carrying a lot of stress and responsibility — or conversely, to incentivize people to take particularly dirty or dangerous jobs. But good luck to anyone trying to persuade their fellow workers that whatever they did was so essential they deserve to earn 167,000 times more than what everyone else gets.
You only get to pay yourself a billion dollars — never mind five billion a year — if you have immense structural power to decide how a firm’s revenues are divided up. Even in a fully socialist economy, some people might have higher incomes than others for a variety of reasons. But you only get the kind of staggeringly unequal distributions of wealth that make some people billionaires when you have extreme inequality in the distribution of economic power.
Of course billionaires shouldn’t exist.
People participate in a march in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter and to commemorate the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth on June 19, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
At forty-seven million, the African American population in the United States is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Despite the size of one of America’s largest minorities, discussions of black politics tend to be reductive and ahistorical. In cavalier fashion, critics of racism chart a long line of oppression that has its origin in the United States’ earliest days. Similarly, the forces that have, according to the dominant view of American racism, sought to oppose this monolithic racial tyranny have all fought under the single banner of “the black liberation struggle.”
Admittedly, these attempts to examine the history of discrimination offer correctives to right-wing defenses of forms of ascriptive hierarchy. However, they do so at the cost of flattening the complexities of actually existing black politics. This approach ignores, the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr tells Jacobin, that black politics is not immune from the economic and class forces which have and continue to shape American politics more broadly.
Jennifer C. Pan
You’ve been a longtime critic of the notion of a cohesive or transhistorical “black freedom movement,” or the idea that one can trace an unbroken line from the fight to abolish slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Why isn’t this framework helpful for understanding black politics either now or in the past?
Adolph Reed
When people talk about something called the “black freedom movement” or the “black liberation struggle” or the “long civil rights movement,” they’re rehashing an old trope that goes back to the beginnings of the study of black American political history and black American political thought. At that time, that construct was called something like the “Negro’s struggle for freedom” or “Negro’s quest for equality.” Both then and now, the construct presumes, first of all, that black people are a singular collective entity. It also presumes an overarching struggle where black people have always unanimously wanted the same thing, and that whatever disagreements you might encounter if you go through the archives of black politics are just disagreements within a fundamentally shared commitment.
Any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it obscures class differentiation among black Americans.
So the main problem with the idea of a timeless black freedom movement is that it’s a single-thread narrative and a reduction of a much more complex reality. The narrative posits racial unity as the essential foundation for understanding black people and constructs and imposes an anti-historical understanding of black people’s experiences in American political life. It defines black people as being somehow outside of history and collapses differences in historical moments by presuming that people are fighting for the same things in 2020 that they were fighting for in 1860 — or 1619, for God’s sake — which is absurd.
Jennifer C. Pan
Why do you think people find this idea of a singular and cohesive black freedom movement so compelling?
Adolph Reed
I think there are several reasons. One is simply that people have heard it over and over, so it seems to comport with commonsense knowledge. It’s a framework that gives you the familiar dyads of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois versus Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr. That’s convenient for people who don’t think there’s anything complex that goes on among black people.
Then there are people who have an interest in propagating the narrative. The black freedom movement construct has always functioned to obscure real distinctions among black people. Fundamentally, the most aggressive and insistent proponents of this view have been people who are pushing a class program: any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it’s part of a discourse of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call racecraft, which obscures class differentiation among black Americans, with or without conscious intent. If the black freedom movement narrative were even a reasonably accurate account of black American political history, then you could say, okay, well, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it. But it’s not. It’s false and it works for the other side.
The alternative to this kind of simplistic approach is to recognize that black people, like all people, live within historical circumstances. They’re diverse and have different interests and perceptions, not only at different points in time, but also at the same point. That was true in the nineteenth century and even true to some extent in the eighteenth century. It’s certainly true after Emancipation and once black people were able to claim some kind of civic participation, however badly the deck may have been stacked against them. Eric Foner has compiled a list of black people who held elected office in the South by the end of Reconstruction, and there were hundreds of people who had been elected to all kinds of offices. And that suggests that there was a lively culture of political debate and struggle, and that blacks engaged with nonblacks, as they always have and continue to do today.
It really comes down to following an injunction from Ralph Ellison: he cautioned observers of American life against the tendency to believe things about black people that they would not believe about any other human beings.
Jennifer C. Pan
How, then, should we think about black politics now, particularly after the 2020 racial reckoning?
Adolph Reed
I’m probably getting more crotchety by the day, but I would almost argue at this point that the most crucial racial reckoning in US history was at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1864.
Anyway, to answer your question, at the beginning of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Touré [Reed] was talking to a mutual friend and colleague who was part of the campaign’s inner circle and encouraged the campaign not to concentrate on pursuing something called the “black vote” as much as they could possibly avoid it. His argument was that what we think of as “black politics” today is a class-specific interest-group politics that’s rooted entirely in the black professional and managerial strata, whose approach to political life is race reductionist. It’s an elite-driven activity that really has no base at all. And the reality is that once you start catering to the idea of a coherent “black vote” or “black community,” it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
Once you start catering to the idea of a coherent ‘black vote’ or ‘black community,’ it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
And then there’s the Potemkin thing that happens whenever there’s a police atrocity or some other outrage: people respond to the outrage with protest actions, and then somebody who’s articulate and MSNBC-ready jumps out in front of the protest and talks to the media and is declared the new voice of the black youth or the rising wave of the future.
The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.
There’s another tendency in this type of politics that I trace back to the buildup to the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999. There were activists during that moment who complained that the movement was too white and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to affected “communities.” And I’d say to people, look, if there’s some constituency that isn’t involved that you think ought to be — and you purport to have connections to that constituency — then the thing to do is for you to go out and organize them and bring them into the movement.
Well, of course nobody who was complaining actually wanted that; what they wanted was just the opposite. They wanted to represent or embody the amorphous, voiceless masses. And that’s really the only context — that and nineteenth-century race theory — within which it makes sense to assume that the black American population, which is bigger than the entire population of Canada, can be spoken for in the first person plural.
Jennifer C. Pan
You and Walter Benn Michaels have a new book out, No Politics But Class Politics. Over the years you’ve both been sharply critical of the tendency to focus on racial disparities. While there do exist plenty of liberals whose idea of justice is a diverse ruling class, what would you tell leftists who oppose the capitalist order but also want to take racism seriously? What does it mean to fight racism today?
Adolph Reed
Of course we should do what we can to protect and buttress the antidiscrimination apparatus, which includes an affirmative dimension. But this might also be of interest to readers:
In 1945, when the Full Employment Bill was still in play in Congress, the civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray wrote an article in the California Law Review on employment discrimination. In the article, she addresses the argument that you have to fight racism or discrimination before you can win social democracy. She points out that the reality is that racism becomes most politically viable in conditions of scarcity: when jobs are scarce, that’s when people get anxious, and that’s when employers and right-wingers can mobilize the anxiety. And so Murray argues that because of that, the only way to move forward as black workers is to win the social democratic reforms — in particular, at that moment, the struggle for a real political commitment to ground national economic policy on the pursuit and maintenance of a full employment economy — and that those are ultimately even more important than the antidiscrimination measures themselves.
Most people in this country who work for a living need the same things, right? And we don’t necessarily need to have a fight over what happened in 1860, or a fight over what happened in 1890, or even 1920, or even 1960 to recognize that we all need economic security, health care, jobs, and education. And the way for us to get to those things is to articulate our needs and to come together around the things we have in common.
When the anti-racist sensibility now is that making a reference to the working class is somehow conceding to white racism, it’s pretty clear what the class character of this politics is. And this is even before you start counting up all the billions of corporate and investor-class dollars that have gone to Black Lives Matter and other nominal antiracist activist groups since the murder of George Floyd.
So it’s time for us to stop playing around and to be serious and hardheaded about this. Especially for those of us who are professors, part of our job is trying to get the story straight, to demystify the mystifications. That’s what we do for a living, right? Otherwise, we should all just go to church.