Institute for Democracy and Education - Letter to a Young Activist

Letter to a Young Activist

Mi testimonia: Letters to young activists

Mi testimonio.

Learning from my activism. Letters to young activists.

The social sciences and particularly political science has not well described nor analyzed the role of political activism in our society. This recording is to provide some basis for future analysis. My purpose is to record a life of activism. But, activism from the bottom up. I was not a national leader. I was an activist in my own local area. As critical educators we develop a perspective, a class perspective, by participating in activism in local struggles. This activism informs our analysis. Then, I turn, the analysis informs our activism.

See:

Duane Campbell, political history.

This is a recording of recent history of the left. It is composed from various pieces. I intend to edit it and publish it on the web. This is local history of my life. As a historian I have found that local histories are important. Quite often, published history, main stream history, consists of generalizations that claim to be important.

For example, “ the media caused the U.S. people to lose confidence in the war effort in Viet Nam. “ Well these may be approximations of reality. However, life is lived in real locations and real places. Local histories are important corrections of the “accepted” histories. I have observed this problem in numerous historical sites, Monterey, California, San Antionio, Texas, and in each of the movements described below.

Early teaching. I began teaching 7+8^th grade in Pittsburgh,Pa in 1964. I had graduated from UNI ( University of Northern Iowa) and was recruited by a principal for his school in an all Black neighborhood. Since I was raised in a mixed neighborhood and spent most of my school years in mixed racial neighborhoods this was not intimidating to me. On the contrary, I was already participating in Civil Rights struggles and selected to teach in a ghetto school as a part of my political commitment to justice. Only 5 of the faculty at Westinghouse High were African American. Most of the faculty had no interest in the CR movement, and did not pursue a change in the school. I had much to learn as a new teacher. They were teachers but not activists.

During my second year of teaching at Westinghouse there was a race riot in the neighborhood . Although the major issues were the inequality in the society, after a few days the focus became street blacks threatening the middle class blacks including the few African American teachers. It was a tense time. After a week National guard troops were stationed in the neighborhood and in the school. After a couple of weeks they were withdrawn. No real change came to the school.

That summer I was one of a few invited by U. of PIttsburgh for a retreat and an inter racial dialogue on school improvement . There were only a few teachers participating Faculty from Pitt met with community activists and they screamed at each other. The faculty were cowered by both the critique and the anger.

Promises of reform were made but were abandoned soon as the faculty returned to their campus-which was only a few blocks from the ghetto.

As an outsider to the university, I had no standing in this retreat.

Among my observations were that these faculty were so distant from the neighborhoods, they had so few experiences outside of classrooms that they literally were full of fear . The university was essentially a White colonial island providing teachers to the oppressed communities while unable or unwilling to listen and learn.

The South African student leader Steven Biko said,

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. “

During these years a number of romanticized books on education African American experience were written by White authors.

To know more about this dynamic see the history of the Ocean hill v Brownsville conflict in New York City. The union was important to teachers but not always A Progressive force in schools.

A product of this experience was the book, The Americans : A History of the United States. (1969). and The New Social Studies for the Slow Learner. (1969) These were elements of my doctoral dissertation in history.

Lessons learned from the movement to oppose the U.S. war in Vietnam.

1. the U.S. is not a democracy. It is a polycentric oligarchy. Substantive power is held by a network of an elite. Therefore, you cannot change major substantive issues by civic participation alone. You must organize to change the balances of power itself.

See. Domhoff. W. Who Rules America : Power and Politics. 4^th. edition. 2002. And the excellent web site.

See: Carnoy, M. The State and Political Theory. 1984.

http://www.thenation.com/article/197425/why-dont-americans-know-what-really-happened-vietnam

Farmworker Movement. Read Essay by LeRoy Chatfield.

http://www.farmworkermovement.org/essays/essays/008%20Chatfield_LeRoy.pdf

1970’s.

The United Farm Workers in Sacramento 1972-1977

Prior to 1972 our activism had been concentrated on antiwar (Viet Nam) work, and for Dolores Delgado-Campbell,in the Chicano community. We worked together in the 1972 McGovern for President campaign and Proposition 22. The antiwar work was winding down.

In the summer of 1972 the Teamsters union raided the UFW and sought to represent farm workers even though they failed a this; this is the ultimate violation of labor rights. Because of my long history of union activism, I was moved by this betrayal of union solidarity by a corrupt union. Dolores and I discussed the situation and decided to work together to help the United Farm Workers.

Dolores called the UFW headquarters and said we would volunteer. They said there

already was a support committee in Sacramento, headed by Joe Serna. We both knew Joe because he and Iworked in the same union. We contacted Joe and found out what was being done. A boycott committee had existed in Sacramento during the prior boycott.

The existing committee was centered on the Chicano artistas, who eventually become the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF). Jose Montoya was perhaps the best known. They helped the UFW with posters and hosted Cesar when he came to town. They also educated people about the UFW within their circle.

We decided to take a more labor union/ church centered approach, and to not only

concentrate on the Chicano/Mexicano community but to spread the boycott to new

groups. We began by organizing picket lines at local Safeway stores and asking people to not buy grapes. We stayed in touch with Joe Serna. We did not meet regularly with him, but we relied upon Joe for our political front. He handled all political matters, including the Democratic Party. For example, the UFW shared a desk in the Mc Govern campaign for their Proposition 22. One time when we were bill boarding over a freeway overpass he called to tell us to get down from there. He said the call had come in from La Paz.

We began to picket regularly and recruited supporters. This began a four year experience of picketing each week at a local store. At times we would have 10-12 volunteers, at times only 3-4. The Catholic Newman Center served as a place to meet and to plan. A small group of regulars formed, which sustained the effort. Picketing taught us a great deal about political discipline and staying on the subject. The Sacramento effort remained a volunteer effort from 1972-1977. Sacramento can get to 108 degrees in the summer, and it is cold and wet in the winter - but we kept the picket lines going. We did not have any fulltime UFW staff except on brief projects, such as Proposition 14.

I was surprised to picket in Sacramento. I had been raised in a union town, Waterloo, Iowa, and worked in a union town, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Where I was raised, union working people did not cross picket lines. Here in Sacramento the general public and many union members did cross. They seemed to dismiss the farm workers as Mexicans, not really a union issue. Later I got on the Sacramento Central Labor Council and came to understand more about the weak level of union solidarity in California.

In years of picketing I was consistently disturbed and angered to watch White or Anglo union members cross the picket lines and not support us. Their racial attitudes out ranked their union membership and union solidarity. That is just the way it was. Our presence made the challenge of union solidarity concrete.

Basically the UFW boycotts were won or lost in large union cities such as New York,

Chicago, Toronto, and Pittsburgh. In these areas grapes and lettuce were not moving.

Our job in Sacramento was to be certain that the Sacramento market did not grow to

balance out the loss of markets in the East and in Europe. We were able to hold sales

constant, to prevent growth in sales, which was a victory. However, the growers were able to get the U.S. defense department to buy millions and millions of pounds of grapes to send to “our troops in Viet Nam.”

Union and UFW work in California was highly racialized. Many responded or refused to respond to a union appeal based upon the racial nature of the UFW. And, in the Mexican- American community many in the business class and the emerging “Hispanic” professionals actively opposed the UFW. Today many of these same people claim to have supported the UFW. This is similar to the history of M.L. King. He too was opposed often in his own community as too radical. These divisions are one of the several ways that ideological control is exercised.

On a picket line we would at times get more support in African American neighborhoods than in Mexicanneighborhoods.

We even encountered counter picketing by Mexicans flying the Mexican flag. There was a constant attempt to isolate the UFW as radical outsiders, which we were not.

Not all parts of the Mexican community were hostile. Sacramento has thousands of people who work in the fields or have recently worked in the fields. When we held food drives or funding drives for farmworkers, working class Mexican families were generous and supportive. On several occasions small groups of people, or families would collect enormous amounts of food and clothing to send to Delano or other locations to support striking workers.

We encountered a number of issues on the picket lines. Nonviolence was a fundamental issue of the UFW and of Chavez personally. One time a customer purposefully sped up in the parking lot and ran into me with his car. Luckily, I fell backward between two cars and received only minor injuries. We called the police. They came, heard the story, and declined to pursue the matter. They decided that there was no crime. Someone in our group got the

license number. Through a friend, we contacted the Department of Motor Vehicles and located the person.

I went to their home and explained to them that their action was assault with a deadly weapon (a car), but that the injury was minor. I was not going to pursue further action. This event, and others, tested and developed my own commitment to nonviolence.

Our UFW support work had positive and negative repercussions. One spring we helped workers near Yuba City in a strike in the fruit trees. After a day of picketing, Dolores came down with severe asthma. It took months to recover.

In 1972 a group of student volunteers and I did a human billboard outside the graduation ceremonies at American River College where Dolores worked. We only held up signs encouraging support for the boycott. However, the ARC president was so incensed that he prevented the re-hiring of Dolores the following year. It required a four year complaint with EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunities Commission) to win a settlement that

included getting her job back. Later Dolores Huerta spoke at the American River College campus and at the CSU-Sacramento campus a number of times.

Working with the UFW also led us to be more active in our unions. I was active in the California Federation of Teachers where a farmworker support committee was created.

This led me to some support work for Bert Corona at CSU- Los Angeles, where Bert was not being re-hired because of his political work. This work with Bert led to several decades of work in the immigrant rights movement.

At CSU-Sacramento groups of students helped with the picketing and with the electoral campaigns such as Proposition 14. The UFW was an educational and an organizing experience of great value to campus and union politics. We brought Cesar Chavez to speak several times, twice getting large fees for his speech (over $1,000). He also came for a two-day workshop with the Mexican American Education Project students where he taught us community organizing. We also brought Dolores Huerta and Philip Vera Cruz

to speak. We consistently tried to interest students in participating in the UFW projects because such political participation is an excellent educational experience. It develops a critical perspective on U.S. politics. Certainly, the UFW work helped to establish Chicano Studies at American River College and CSU-Sacramento.

The Sacramento efforts were nourished by the consistent volunteer work of a number of people, far too many to list. However, a core group consistently worked with us for months and years. This core group in addition to Dolores Delgado-Campbell and me, included Manny Hernandez, Arturo Fernandez, Rosie and Ernie Calvillo, Luisa and Mike Menchaca, Arturo and Carmen Garcia, and Dan Bacher among others. We would add to

the core by recruiting regularly at the local college campuses. Outstanding student allies included Maria Avila and faculty member, Jose Montoya. The RCAF assisted us with posters.

The large statewide campaigns such as the March on Gallo (Modesto) and the later

Strawberry Workers campaign helped us build our group. When up to 30,000 are in the streets you come to understand that you are a part of a much larger movement.

In the summer of 1975, the new Agricultural Labor Relations Law had been passed and the effort of the boycott was switched to efforts to win certification elections.

I worked throughout the summer with Al Rojas in organizing in the Woodland area trying to organize tomatoworkers. We came within 50 votes of winning a large election at Anderson Ranch, but the election was stolen by cheating at the ballot box. One ballot box

Disappeared for more than three days and was later “found” in the truck of a ranch

foreman. While other ballot boxes were closely contested, this box was mysteriously over 90% against the union. There were so many other elections throughout the state and so many cases of fraud that the UFW did not contest this particular election.

Working for the UFW brought us many friends. One time the UFW brought some100 workers to Sacramento for a demonstration at the capitol. They had no place to sleep. So, over 50 families slept out in our backyard and all used our one bathroom and shower.

The neighbors were quite surprised to see such a line of cars and so many people. They asked if all these people were our relatives in town for some event.

On several occasions we made lasting friends with UFW members and supporters. We particularly got to know Philip Vera Cruz. For decades later in other political and union efforts we encountered former UFW volunteers and we could usually trust them and rely Upon them for some common sense. There was a bond among us that created a community of caring.

The work with the UFW taught me more about the U.S. and California political systems than I could have ever learned from a book or a university. And, it taught us about organizing and working with people. The experiences shaped our lives for the better. I greatly appreciate all that I have learned and most of the people I have met.

DuaneCampbell, Professor, Bilingual/Multicultural Education, CSU–Sacramento.

Author: “Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education.” 2004

Merrill/Prentice Hall. 2010.

César taught us that all organizations have problems, that all organizations are imperfect. But, if you wait for the perfect organization, nothing gets done. Building popular organizations builds people's power, and democracy.

In creating the UFW Chavez organized thousands into a union and inspired millions. Children in school study his life. Many curriculum packages stress his emphasis on service to others. The service side of Cesar’s work was certainly inspiring.

The organizing side changed the Southwest and organized labor. In a 1988 campaign and fast Cesar focused attention on the many dangerous problems of pesticides used in the fields. Artists have captured his image in hundreds of ways. Schools, parks, and highways have been named for him. Establishing Cesar Chavez holiday in California and other states has increased knowledge of his contributions.

The movement led by Cesar created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers. Many people, descendents of earlier generations of farm workers, learned to take a stand for justice. We learned to not accept poor jobs, poor pay, unsafe working conditions as natural or inevitable. Rather, these are social creations which can be changed through organizing for economic and political power. Dolores Huerta continues her important education and organizing work throughout the nation.

Now, thousands of new immigrants harvest the crops and only a small percent are in unions. The new generations of immigrants and migrant labor hardly know Chavez’ name nor his contributions. Yet, in other regions immigrants are being organized into unions such as Justice for Janitors, by activists who learned their organizing skills working with the UFW. And, Latino political leaders often made their first commitments on a UFW picket line.

The generation that created the UFW is passing. A new generation of political activists, mostly within the Democratic Party, have emerged since the Chavez generations. In the 2006 massive immigrant rights movements, several new organizing practices emerged. The organizing of these demonstrations was significantly assisted by persons trained within the UFW. A new, significant Latino union and political base has been created.

Chavez' legacy to popular struggles, to Chicano/Mexicano self determination and to unions for the immigrant workers is beyond measure. The union taught us how to organize for power and for justice. He is present in all of our work. I plan to march on March March 28,2009 in memory of Cesar Chavez' contributions to building a more democratic society for working people. You can find our more about this remarkable leader at www.ufw.org And, www.cesarchavezfoundation.org

Lessons learned:

1. Political work requires hard work, long hours and discipline. Without discipline, little gets done. That is phony organizing.

2.Relationships matter. Building personal relationships while organizing is an important and rewarding process.

3.Don’t take any crap from your opponents. Hit back. Hit back hard.

4. On important matters, fight to win.

1980

Brief history of CFA.

Prior to 1976 university faculty did not have the right to collective bargaining.

There were two associations trying to get the right to bargain.

California Federation of Teachers. ( Al Shanker’s group) Affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

California Faculty Association. A non union group loosely affiliated with CTA. California Teachers Association.

The Rodda Act (Senate Bill 160), which went into effect in 1976 changed this. The act is intended to improve employer-employee relations and personnel management in California public schools and community colleges. This collective bargaining law, which replaces the Winton Act, provides for (1) the creation of an Educational Employment Relations Board; (2) exclusive recognition of a single employee union representing both teachers and classified staff; (3) good faith negotiations, including support of the act's impasse procedures; (4) the arbitration of grievances; (5) the explicit definition of mandatory subjects of negotiations, consultative areas for teachers, and reserved rights of management; and (6) recognition of mediation by both sides.

Once the Rodda Act was passed, the unions could compete for collective bargaining rights. There were vigorous campaign on both sides.

National affiliates of both sides provided money.

In the election ( circa 1978) CFA won by about 54 votes out of 13,000 cast. Notable- part time faculty had full voting rights. Thus, CTA organized among the part time faculty. Many were already CTA members from their public school teaching jobs. CFA also joined as association (affiliated with) CSEA, which at that time was not a union, it was an association.

After the defeat of CFT, many of the leaders of CFT decided to merge into CFA. Merger talks were held.

I was one of several participants. After some time a new, merged CFA emerged. It drew characteristics from both organizations.

After merger, CSEA also joined SEIU ( a union) This affiliation made it impossible to challenge CFA in a decertification election. Since CFA (as a part of SEIU) was in the AFL-CIO, there could be no challenge . De certification was prohibited by section 22 of the AFL-CIO charter. The CFA also affiliated with AAUP.

Currently.

CFA represents the faculty and is affiliated with;

SEIU, CTA, AAUP, and the AFL-CIO. In 2006 SEIU left the AFL-CIO. Either directly or indirectly we send per capita dues to these groups.

Lessons learned.

1. Unions are important. They are one of a few entrance points to progressive politics.

2.Unions require the active participation of progressives. Without this participation they will become staff dominated and serve staff interests rather than the members interests.

3. Even progressive union leadership requires a democratic base to keep it on track.

El Salvador and Central America Solidarity.

By the 1960s El Salvador's failing economy and severe overpopulation drove hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans to cross illegally into Honduras seeking work.

During the 1970s the population suffered from increased landlessness, poverty, unemployment and overpopulation. Political parties became polarized and fought for power largely through coups and electoral fraud. In 1972, the military arrested and exiled the elected president and installed their own candidate in power. Guerrilla activity increased, and the government responded by unleashing 'death squads' who murdered, tortured or kidnapped thousands of Salvadorans.

In 1979, a junta of military and civilians overthrew the president and promised reforms. When these reforms were not met, opposition parties banded together under the party name Federación Democrático Revolucionario, of which the FMLN was the largest group. The successful revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 encouraged many Salvadorans to believe that armed struggle was the only way to secure reforms. When popular archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated saying mass in 1980, his death sparked an armed insurrection.

The Bishop, Catholic Nuns, and Jesuit priests were assassinated by death squads. The leaders of these death squads were trained and prepared at the U.S. army School of the Americas. (SOA)

FMLN guerrillas gained control of areas in the north and east of El Salvador and blew up bridges, destroyed power lines and burned coffee plantations in a bid to stifle the country's economy. The Reagan Administration, unnerved by the success of Nicaragua's socialist revolution, donated huge amounts of money to the Salvadoran government, and the military retaliated by decimating villages, causing 300,000 citizens to flee the country. In 1982, the extreme right ARENA party took power and death squads began targeting trade unionists and agrarian reformers.

In April 1990, United Nations-mediated negotiations began between the government and the FMLN, and finally, on 16 January 1992, a compromise was signed and a ceasefire took effect. The FMLN became an opposition party, and the government agreed to various reforms, including dismantling the death squads and replacing them with a national civil police force. Land was to be distributed to citizens and human rights violations to be investigated. During the course of the 12-year war, an estimated 75,000 people were killed, and the US government donated a staggering US$6 billion to the Salvadoran government's war effort, despite knowledge of atrocities carried out by the military. In March 1994, ARENA member Calderón Sol was voted president, amid allegations of electoral fraud.

While some of the reforms outlined in the peace accords have been implemented (most notably the land-transfer program), many Salvadorans consider the current situation to be no better now than it was before the civil war. Unemployment, poverty, disgruntled ex-combatants and a proliferation of guns in the country has led to high homicide rates - just one of the reasons why approximately 20% of Salvadorans now live abroad. In March 1997, the FMLN won elections in the cities of six of the 14 departments; it now governs a greater percentage of the population than ARENA.

Arena won the recent presidential elections.

I was active in the Salvadoran solidarity work through CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Locally we had a Labor Committee for El Salvador. It became a Labor Committee on Central America.

We worked and educated within our unions and the Sacramento Central Labor Council. We brought speakers from El Salvador, Nicaragua and other countries. Most notably we held a tour of Central American unionists, featuring teachers.

We worked cooperatively with many religious groups.

We held conferences that were well attended. Our conferences were co sponsored by several unions and local Democratic Congresspersons,.\

We raised funds in 1981 and held numerous protests at the local federal building. Each of these actions were cooperative outreach efforts with labor, DSA, religious groups and others.

Sacramento became a Sanctuary City in 1982, and we brought and supported refugee families to the area, mostly with religious organizations.,

We joined with other labor groups to urge a change in AFL-CIO policy and to oppose the viewpoints being advanced by AIFLD.

We convinced the statewide United Professors of California ( then in the AFT) to pass a resolution condemning the work of AIFLD. We sent labor based delegations to Nicaragua to observe their elections,

We worked with others to support the West Coast Mobilization for Peace, Jobs, and Justice , April 20,1984. It included thousands. Speakers from Central America and a keynote by John Henning, Executive Secretary of the California Federation of Labor,. The National AFL-CIO did not endorse this effort.

We held conferences for labor activists in 1983 and 1984. Well attended. Each led to delegations to our Congressional reps,.

In 1987 the Sacramento Central Labor Council received a reprimand letter from Lane Kirkland insisting that the Council repeal its endorsement of the 1987. The reprimand included an implied threat to de certify the council. The letter of the AFL-CIO asserted that the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala were democracies. And, it opposed the presence of pro Sandinista groups in the rally.

The withdrawal of endorsement was issued based upon the constitutional character of the demand.. However, the response by the local council and the public employees council objected to the decision of Kirkland and instructed him on a number of issue on labor in Central America and who solidarity was a a significant part of the U.S. labor movement.

I have a hard copy of all of this in a notebook if there is some interested researcher.

Dolores and I visited revolutionary Nicaragua in 1982. I returned as a DSA delegate to a conference in 1989.

On Democracy and Revolution.

Lessons:

The U.S. is an imperialist power.

It uses military action to assassinate, murder and achieve its ends.

Religious activists played an important role in solidarity movements.

Art and culture are important parts of developing a movement.

Update:

On Sunday, March 15,2009, voters in El Salvador elected the leftist FMLN candidate as President.. Both El Salvador and neighboring Nicaragua are now governed by two former guerrilla fronts against which the Reagan administration spared no efforts in trying to defeat during the entire course of the 1980's. President Funes, comes to power representing the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a Marxist guerrilla group-turned-political –party. From the late 1970's until a negotiated peace settlement in 1992, the FMLN fought a bloody civil war against a series of U.S.-backed right-wing regimes. Those U.S. backed Salvadoran regimes engaged in horrific massacres and deployed savage death squads, taking a massive human toll. The overwhelming majority of the 75,000 who were killed in the war in El Salvador were victims of government-sponsored violence.

In 2007 in Nicaragua, the year-old reborn and duly elected Sandinista administration—returned to power some of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Nicaragua from 1979- 1989. President Ortega remains in power in one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. Using moderately left rhetoric and accepting aid from Venezuela’ Hugo Chavez.

The right-wing governments and militaries which the U.S. funded for the last twenty years failed to resolve the basic economic problems of these counties. They were tied into the U.S. dominated neo- colonialism of Central America and could not raise the standard of living of their people.

I was active in the Salvadoran solidarity work through CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Locally we had a Labor Committee for El Salvador.

Dolores and I visited revolutionary Nicaragua in 1982. I returned as a delegate to a conference in 1989.

Lessons:

The U.S. is an imperialist power.

It uses military action to assassinate, murder and achieve its ends.

Religious activists played an important role in solidarity movements.

Art and culture are important parts of developing a movement.

Bush economics:

Capitalism in U.S. 70’s

Capital’s response to these exigencies has been threefold: (1) a stepped-up class war; (2) an attempt to increase the size and activity of the pump (but, consistent with the class war from above in terms that primarily serve capital); and (3) a growth of imperialism (including economic globalization) and war.

All three methods of confronting the crisis have been used by the Bush White House, which has gone further than any other administration in promoting the class war; has pumped up the economy in every way it can that it is consistent with direct adherence to ruling-class interests; and has launched a global war to back up an imperialist strategy of world domination.

Domestically, the Bush White House has followed a policy first initiated by the Reagan administration of continual pressure on labor and the poor while stimulating the economy by generating massive deficits. These are made more acceptable to the system since associated with military spending and with tax cuts mainly for corporations and the wealthy. Budget deficits as part of a “starve the beast” strategy are then used to justify sharp reductions for social programs that help the poor as well as the working and middle class (Paul Krugman, “Spearing the Beast,” New York Times, Op-Ed, February 8, 2005). The ultimate reactionary goal of this class war is to eliminate or eviscerate the major social programs—not only Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but also housing assistance, nutrition assistance, etc.—that help people cope with the many harsh realities of capitalism.

Lessons learned.

There is a ruling elite. See Domhoff, Who Rules America Now?

The U.S. Government is an oligarchy, not a democracy. See Choosing Democracy,

Development of the Bilingual Dept. at CSUS

A History of the Development of the Department of

Bilingual/Multicultural Education at CSU, Sacramento.

By Duane Campbell, Fall 2001

n 2001, our society and our schools are in rapid transition from the old to the new.

Business and corporations have propelled our nation into a worldwide market, a

place of economic and military instability. Meanwhile our governmental structures and

schools remain pretty much as they were in the 1950's. The gap between the private,

corporate society; growing, dynamic, starkly unequal and the public institutions: under

funded, criticized and under attack grows each day. Yet the private society depends

upon the public sector to provide educated workers, roads, and domestic order.

The history of our efforts begins with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1956–1970

period. The Civil Rights movement from 1954–1970 shook the political and social

structure of the U.S. and produced a reevaluation of the role of racial, ethnic and gender

identity in the country. Although popularly understood as primarily the struggle of

African Americans in the South East of the U.S., the Civil Rights movement also

fundamentally changed the status and participation of Chicano and Mexican American

people in the Southwest. Long ignored and suppressed issues of conquest and

subordination of the Mexican and Mexican American people were raised. Challenges of land ownership, workers rights; student activists renewed language use and

immigration, often.

Multilingual and multicultural education was developed as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement to assist teachers who are trying to solve the diverse problems imposed on their classrooms by the rapidly changing and, at times, decaying society.

Today, teachers in most urban areas face students from a variety of social classes

and cultural and language groups. Often, European American children are a minority

group in rural areas such as the Rio Grande Valley of Texas the central valleys of

California, Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia and Mississippi, and the Appalachian region, the majority of the students do not share the middle-class, European American culture common to college-educated teachers.

Substantial school reforms are needed to give these diverse students an equal

chance in school, in the job market, and in contributing to the building of healthy

communities. We need educational reform to improve the quality of school life for all of our children. Bilingual and multicultural school reform is directly linked to the pursuit of

democratic opportunities. Improving the quality of educational opportunity for students from disenfranchised communities is the central task of multicultural educational reform and is the reason that we created our teacher preparation center and our department.

Lessons;

Most teacher advocates of reform do not understand the political economy , the context, of school failure.

Mexican American Education Project.

The first element that led to the department was the establishment of the Mexican

American Education Project, directed by Clark Taylor, in the Department of

Anthropology on the campus (1968–1973). This was an attempt to prepare educational change agents to overcome the decades of educational neglect suffered by Mexican American students in schools. The U.S. Office of Education first funded the program as an Experienced Teacher Fellowship Program. We recruited Mexican American Teachers to prepare them as change agents. Early students in this program include Olivia Castellano, Jose Montoya, Steve Arvizu, Rene Merino, Dolores Delgado (Campbell), and Armando Ayala.

The program was originally located in the Department of Anthropology. The degree

granted was an MA in Social Science with an emphasis in Anthropology. The project

produced significant funds for the university ($5 million in five years) and led to the

hiring of many new Chicano and Mexicano faculty. At the founding of the program in

1968, the CSU system only had 30 Mexican American graduate students in the entire

system. The effort at Sacramento produced 25 graduate students each year in

Sacramento alone. The mission of this project was to improve the educational

opportunities of Mexican, Chicano and migrant students in California. Duane Campbell was hired in 1969 by the project to develop a curriculum intervention system. We began to work with Dos Rios Elementary School in North Sacramento as a laboratory school site and he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education.

I became the co-director of the MAEP in 1970 for one year.

After three years of focus on school change, the Mexican American Education

Project began to place increased emphasis on the School of Education. Courses were

developed in the School on Teaching English as a Second Language and a reform of

the existing course, "Teaching the Culturally Disadvantaged" was insisted upon. The

School of Education also had a Teacher Corp program from 1972–1974, which brought

many ethnic minority students to the School.

During this period, federal funds were designed for capacity building. A goal of the

program was to develop enough faculty to sustain the program with state funds. In the

1971–1973 period, student activism on the campus, often including the students in the

Mexican American Education Project (MAEP), established the Ethnic Studies and

Chicano Studies programs on campus.

Dr. Tom Carter, an established authority on education of Mexican Americans

became Dean of the School of Education in 1972. In 1973–74, the MAEP completed its

funding. In 1974, Dr. Robert Segura, in Education received a grant for an Experienced

Teacher Fellowship Program (Title VII) and later a future teachers program. Rene

Merino transferred from Anthropology to become the Assistant Director of this program.

Adela Fernandez was the office manager.

The new program prepared Experienced Teachers in Education to work with

Mexican American children. Teachers received up to $5,000 per year to take a year off

and to work on their Masters Degree in Education. By 1976, the funding Title VII

programs were transferred to local school districts and to doctoral programs at

universities. Doctoral programs are far more expensive, and therefore most funds were

used up and few funds remained available for our students. We could usually pay only

tuition and fees. We had developed a graduate program in multicultural education

during the period of Title VII funding.

In the early 70's a group of faculty in the School of Education recognized the growing

crisis in education for students from minority cultures. In about 1973 we began to

develop our own teacher preparation program, starting in West Sacramento, to respond to the school failures of such students. A small component of the West Sacramento Center was dedicated to bilingual preparation: usually about 6 students out of 30.

Duane Campbell and Ed Miller coordinated this Center. We enjoyed a number of

advantages in our early effort. A positive Dean of the School, and the prior program of the Mexican American Education Project helped us to design a program to prepare teachers for the emerging diverse California student population.

By 1974, with the assistance of Title VII funding, new courses in bilingual education

were developed by Dr. Segura to meet the requirements of new California legislation

(Chacone-Muscone) on teacher preparation for language minority children. A severe

shortage of bilingual teachers developed in the state as a result of the implementation of federal and state laws.

Year by year the Center grew to have more of a bilingual emphasis. During this time,

the faculty was usually in the Department of Teacher Education. We worked in a series of schools where language minority children were found including Ethyl Phillips and Washington Elementary in Sacramento City U., Elkhorn Village in Washington Unified

District (West Sacramento) and Smythe and other sites in North Sacramento. At each school we sought to develop laboratory or cooperative schools closely affiliated with the university. The perspective of the Center during this era focused on Civil Rights and equal educational opportunity.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 60's led to changes in US immigration law and a

significant new immigration from Asia. The Lau v. Nichols decision of 1974, provided guidelines for new language programs. Our developing Center sought to respond to these new immigrant groups.

California was heavily impacted by new immigration from China, Hong Kong, and

Vietnam. The response, our Title VII funding included the first of Chinese speaking

students (about 6). These students promptly organized to insist on new faculty. Based upon student demand, Professor Victoria Jew was added to the faculty, initiating our

efforts for Asian Language students. Dennis Mah, Elain Lee, Wanda Chang, Gary

Yung, Ed Lee and Munyen Lew were among the initial students in this program. We began working in William Land School during this time.

From time to time we exited from a school site due to change of public school

administration. Schools became sites where bilingual education was no longer offered,

By 1993, the faculty associated with the Multicultural/Multilingual Center decided that they wished to leave the department of Teacher Education and to become their own department. The growth of bilingual education, and multicultural education at both the graduate and under graduate level had developed to a faculty of over 8 full-time faculty.

Typical departments at the university are B-12 faculty.

By becoming our own department, we gained more local control over our budget,

hiring, and decision-making. While we were in Teacher Education, it would often require 2–3 years of advocacy to achieve a single faculty position. And, faculty outside of our area controlled our tenure and promotion processes.

We proposed to the Dean's Advisory Council that we become a department. Dean

Gregorich placed the issue to a vote of the entire School faculty. Several members of

other departments assisted us in this effort, usually through the Bilingual Core Faculty.

We won the vote. The Dean recommended to the President, and we became our own

department in 1994. Dr. Forrest Davis was interviewed and selected by the committee

in Teacher Education, and became the first new hire in our new department of

Bilingual/Multicultural Education.

Duane Campbell was elected as the first Chair, and Katy Romo was hired as the first

Department Secretary. Rene Merino was elected as the second Chair in 1997. Since

becoming anew department we have added several new faculty. By 1997 we had

prepared over 320 bilingual teachers for the Sacramento region. Dr. Forrest Davis

became the graduate coordinator in 1997. Dr. Pia Wong became the graduate

coordinator in 2001.

Sacramento Bilingual Education department has been re-organized out of existence. 2012.

The Bilingual Multicultural Education Dept. at CSU Sacramento was established in 1994 as one of the first major Bilingual Departments in the CSU system. Since then it has graduated over 800 bilingual teachers, administrations, college professors, and educational leaders. The department at one time had a faculty of 18 tenure track members.

In response to the severe crisis in teacher preparation in California, the department was voted out of existence during the Fall of 2010 . As many as half of the existing faculty members were in favor of a re-organization of the College that would in the process eliminate the department. Few of these faculty were part of the group that established the department. The decision was made by a vote of the entire faculty of the College of Education – not only the faculty of the department. The vote was 65 to 19 to adopt a new organizational form which does not include a department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education. In general many faculty believe that “ we are all multicultural now, and such specifically focused departments are no longer necessary.”

This viewpoint was common in 1994 when the department was created, however deep divisions in the department faculty in 2008 made the department susceptible to elimination.

During the last decades the BMED department prepared thousand of new teachers and educational leaders who made bilingualism and multiculturalism a priority. The programs emphasized Spanish –English, Chinese and more recently Hmong bilingualism. Under the prior School of Education, many of our now graduates would have been screened out . With the strength of our own department we were able to recruit, educate, credential and help organize these students.

Students from the program were active in the campaigns against California propositions 187, 209, and 227, which effectively eliminated most bilingual education in the state.

Note the parallel here in the comments by Chicano Studies professor and author Rudy Acuña, " By and large educators were mute as bilingual programs were wiped out and university based teacher training programs specializing on Mexican Americans were eliminated. At teacher training institutions grade point average was favored over knowledge of the child’s background. Although Latinos comprised 75 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, student teachers were given minimal preparation on how to teach Latino students.

The high dropout rate was one of the major reasons for the development of Chicano Studies in 1969" by Rodolfo Acuña. Here

On the termination of the department

I (Duane Campbell) was the founding chair of the department in 1994. I retired in 2008 and I have not been engaged in the internal discussions about the future of the department and its termination. As in many academic departments there are intense, highly personal conflicts between some members of the department leading a lack of unity of purpose in the face of the extreme budget crisis of the university system.

In 2010 36% of the California population is Latino, and 49 % of k-12 public school students are Latinos or descendents of Latinos. In 2010, 25% of the legislators are Latinos. Certainly these students came from somewhere. They too have a history

We can now observe that most of the minority faculty recruited in the 1970’s have retired. Less than half have been replaced.

Ethnic studies has prospered, but there has been little recognition for a Chicano history, a Chicano political science, etc. This generation of Anglo faculty no longer recognize a need to have faculty with these backgrounds.

Although the student populations has increased in diversity( see charts below), the faculty population has decreased diversity. A similar pattern is developing at other campuses. That is, those of us who stood on the shoulders of giants to create an open, diverse university are now losing what we gained. This development requires further analysis.

In 2010, the Single Subject course work designed in the new credential department ( post BMED) was essentially the same as the Single Subject course work in the early 1970's, plus one course in Introduction to Bilingual Education and English Language Learners. After 40 years of organizing in the College of Education to meet the immediate needs of Chicano/Latino and other diverse students, with a continuing drop out rate of near 50% for Latino students and Hmong students, among others, the College of Education and several members of the former BMED department decided to return to a revised version the dysfunctional curriculum of the 1970's. Adding some 4-8 Latino faculty to BMED, and several to Teacher Education, had the effect of allowing Latino faculty to vote on this issue. It did not effect the outcome of the vote.

This long march through the institutions has ended for the Bilingual /Multicultural faculty and students at CSU Sacramento.

On Sat, May 19,2012, the Bilingual/Multicultural Education Department at CSU-Sacramento graduated its final class. A movement that began in the Mexican American Education Project of 1969-1974 came to a close. See history here: https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project/mexican-american-education-project

I retired in 2008 and had little role to play in the decision to abandon this civil rights project. In the 15 year history of the department we graduated thousands of new bilingual teachers and educational leaders who, under the prior hegemonic system, would have been sorted out. These graduates have gone into teaching and schools and influenced thousands of students. Under the new system, they will again often be discarded. The drop out rate for Chicano students remains near 50%.

We know how to significantly lower the drop out rate- it requires skilled, committed teachers. Many of the teachers – not all- should be from the students’ own culture.

The students are still there. The students of California still need bilingual and multicultural teachers. Students who are descendents of Mexican and Chicano families now make up almost 48% of public school students.

There were state budget cuts, but a united faculty could have retained the department if they so chose. Instead, a new generation of faculty chose to abandon this institutional base that had been created by their predecessors.

While the elimination of the BMED department remains a serious loss, the best measure of the value of the department is to recognize the ongoing contributions of our graduates.There are fine teachers, administrators, and university faculty working every day to continue the contribution to social justice and Chicano empowerment. We assisted these organizers by preparing them and providing them with credentials needed to continue the struggle.

The termination of the BMED ended one of the important collective efforts to provide educational equity for Chicano/Latino students at Sac State. It ended one of the largest and most effective equity efforts in the CSU and in the north of the state and in so doing seriously impaired the College’s effort toward constructing a democratic society.

Change toward social justice almost always occurs as a collective effort, not an individual effort. Individual faculty remain in the College, but the collective effort has been terminated.

The termination of the Bilingual Education Dept. is an example of the termination of public democratic advocacy programs in higher education and other institutions.

The Bilingual Multicultural Education Department program, like the earlier Mexican American Education Project, was a product of the Chicano movement, the influence of the United Farm Workers, and the social justice movement in public education. A goal was to penetrate the institutions ( universities) to create an alternative democratic social justice educational vehicle as a strategy for social change.

A significant organizing vehicle at Sac State was a small changing core group of faculty focused on a series of common goals. Specific organizational and change strategies changed over time.

A major strategy for change was to create a program with majority status for Chicano/Mexicano students and students of color. The experience of being in the majority ( majority status) changed the lives of many, focused the students and faculty on empowerment, and introduced, renewed and continued the positive aspects of the Chicano/social justice movements to students from later generations who were born, reared, and educated after the movement decline. The program kept the dream of educational justice alive for over two decades.

Over the decades of the 1980’s and 90’s, fewer and fewer faculty had themselves participated in the social movements. As a consequence the commitment to educational efforts based upon social movements, empowerment, and participatory democracy declined. By 2006 the political culture of the College of Education regressed to its mean- away from multicultural education goals and toward an increase in the normal, traditional, College of Education culture of faculty seeking personal advancement.

In each generation of students after the 1980’s we had fewer and fewer students who had participated in movements, particularly the Chicano Civil Rights movement. However until 2006 the BMED center was a place where the few students who had experienced movements and had been educated by movements were re-enforced, encouraged, and where they became opinion leaders. Our programs presented multicultural and bilingual teacher preparation as a vocation as a change agent as much as a career. When the student population of conscious students declined, they were less influential. A similar pattern occurred among faculty as the generations changed.

The increased ambivalence toward the need for substantive school reform and teacher preparation reform to achieve multicultural goals and social justice goals along with the changing experiences of faculty and students led to a rupture of the prior faculty unity of purpose to create and extend a multicultural teacher preparation program. The BMED department was terminated by a vote of the entire College faculty in 2010. The great majority of the students did not even know the matter was under consideration. This illustrates how far the engagement and empowerment of students had declined.

There is little doubt that individual faculty and students will continue to create positive projects and efforts. But, an organized, collective effort is always stronger than individual efforts and the organized, collective effort has been terminated.

In August of 2012, California public schools are in crisis- and they are getting worse, particularly the schools serving low income students. This is a direct result of massive budget cuts imposed by the legislature and the governor in the last four years. Total per pupil expenditure is down by over $1,000 per student. The result- massive class size increases. Students are in often classes too large for learning. Supplementary services such as tutoring and art classes have been eliminated. Over 14,000 teachers have been dismissed, and thousands more face lay offs this fall.

Latino descent students now constitute 48% of the total k-12 school population. Schools and teachers promote either equality or they promote inequality. Schools, whether public or private, or university teacher preparation programs can teach and support democratic values or they reinforce authoritarian, anti democratic values and thus increase the hostile divisions in our society.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

This post dedicated to the memory of Hugo Chacon and Dr. Tom Carter.

2005

A brief personal history of the left in the current era

2005

We live in difficult times. A reactionary Republican cabal controls the Presidency and has resumed a policy of imperialism in the name of fighting terrorism, Republicans control the House and the Senate, conservatives in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) mute the Democratic Party,. The U.S. economy is weakened by high debt, and corporate capital dominates the debates on global integration. Programs and policies which were once a part of victories by the Civil Rights and Women’s rights movements are now under assault.

Organized labor, the traditional source of strength for a left, has declined to less than 9% of the work force. And, now the major labor unions have divided into two competing camps.

The organized, conscious left in the U.S. is at its weakest in decades. The African American, Latino and Women’s struggles are widely dispersed and are unable to coordinate national campaigns or even state wide campaigns.

At the same time, there has developed a broad, substantial popular left in the U.S. Most cities have a number of ideological left organizations, an alternative press, and a number of grassroots organizations like ACORN devoted to building political participation. The Gay/ Lesbian/Transgender politics has emerged (some of it liberal and some of it quite conservative), the invasion of Iraq produced the broadest outpouring of opposition in the streets since the 1970s.

Most progressive work is done on a local level with loose networks of organizations such as Peace Action, and United for Peace and Justice trying to bring organizations together for large regional events. In most areas local activists have only a limited experience of working with the major political parties. This tendency has been strengthened with the growth of the Green Party although the G.P. can seldom gain more than 3% of any statewide vote.

While a broad and inclusive popular left has grown in the U.S. in the last two decades, as demonstrated by community groups such as ACORN and church based groups affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the ideological left in the U.S. has significantly declined.

Localism and a concentration on local struggles has its value, however it is unlikely that activist will adequately understand class exploitation and oppression, let alone the global role of imperialism without a more comprehensive theory of social change. Providing this theory, and this history, is an important function for a left.

In the 1980s one part of the active left participated in the struggles for solidarity with the several revolutions in Central America, Nicaragua, El Salvador and to a lesser extent Guatemala. The solidarity efforts were very broad including several organizations and numerous religious groups. This period of solidarity contributed to building and sustaining a left in the U.S.

During the 80s, the organized left in the U.S. was small. Most organizations ranged from 50- 200 activists, although DSA, the largest, had some 10,000 members. Many activists in these small organizations decided to concentrate on building the structures of their own organizations. The organized left was only of marginal assistance to building the Central American solidarity movements and was too weak to contribute significantly to the Anti War movement of 2003, with the exception of the secterian role played by ANSWER and the Workers World Party. At the same time the mainstream media has selected a few persons who they hold up as Left Spokespersons, even though these individuals are not a part of an organized left.

The development of sustainable social movements on a large scale- such as an anti war/anti imperialism movement, do not just come into existence. They are created by hard work. Movements develop when a number of people decide to “make history”, to shape their own destiny. And, the critical mass of activists influence each other, progress in labor leads to progress in elections, which may lead to progress in schools and in social services.

Social movements often teach the participants to analyze the current situations in the society and to cut through the ideological blinders of the U.S. media and education system. Unfortunatly these insights are difficult to pass along to the next movement.

While left scholars and activists have made progress in understanding imperialism, of hegemony, the Democratic Leadership Council, and the role of the two party system in controlling dissent and the current National Security Strategy, these developments largly remain a mystery to activists in the current era. Young activists entered political consciousness at best during the Clinton era. They have no memory of the Central American struggles, NAFTA, and the changes in the AFL-CIO. They are most often not informed of the left traditions.

Since 2003, a broad popular left emerged in opposition to the war in Iraq. This broad left is made of diverse organizations and diverse organizations forms. Most are local. Each group has its own face to face communications. There is relatively little national presence.

Much of the communications among groups is through e mail and the internet. This builds some strengths, however, it also leads increasingly to persons talking primarily within their own networks and not engaging people with differing viewpoints. Both talk radio on the right, and the internet on the left, means that we engage more and more with people who already agree with us, and hear less and talk less with folks from an opposing point of view.

There is at least a possibility that the internet based activism actually disengages people. It is far easier to sign an e mail petition and think that you have done something, than to table an event or to create an educational forum.

Localism also limits our ability to create a serious national effective left organization which could recruite new people and prepare them for the next struggle and the next movement.

Political parties

Large majorities of voters reject a left analysis and reject left activism. They also oppose taxes but support public programs which benefit themselves such as social security and public schooling. They prefer to continue within the present political electoral structure. Class lines are blurred and unclear, and white people, and increasingly some African Americans, Latinos and Asians do have a significant degree of mobility.

The two major parties disguise deep divisions based upon race, ethnicity and to a lesser extent social class. Since the early 1990's, our two major political parties have become more ideological, with the class divisions in the society running down the middle of the Democratic Party, with the Democratic Leadership Council on one side and a potential labor-left on the other side.

The consolidation of a White Republican Party in the South has delivered both the Congress and the White House to the Republicans for some time to come. Republicans have become a consistent conservative party and the Democrats are denounced as a liberal party, even though the left social-democratic portion of that party is small. The Republican party is correctly seen as the party of capitalists of home for evengelical conservatism. The Democratic Party is a long list of candidates and their supporters with little party cohesion- except to oppose Republicans. While both parties seek to mobilize voters, the Democratic Pary does not provide a forum for education, leadership development at its base.

The divisions between the two parties are significant, with complex regional and racial dimensions. But both parties are primarily engaged in rancorous inter party battles for individual candates and for control of the state or national legislatures. They have little of an educational development. And, both parties seek to suppress the vote of their opponents in elections. The difficulty in changing the system, including the development of non competitive seats, along with the partisan rancor has increased voter cynicism and non participation in both the parties and in elections.

.Neither of the major party candidates opposes global capitalism and imperialism. This lack of an opposition party has major consequences. WE know that the last 30- 60 years of inept colonialism has produced a radicalized Islam and associated terrorism in the West. This development, along with the West's dependence upon oil, will create economic and military crises for at least the next 20-30 years. We are living in a time parallel in some ways to the Roman Empire. We just don't know if we are at the start , the middle, or the end of the empire. Any President, operating out of the imperialist paradigm, will involve us in a series of wars of occupation draining resources domestic resources needed for schools, health care, housing and other human needs.

Richard Flacks, in his excellent book, Making History (1988) says, “The U.S. is the only modern industrial society whose working class has not been influenced by a socialist perspective; the only such society without an explicitly working-class based political party playing a central role in the state.” It is also true that progressives have tried for over 40 years to build a left within the Democratic Party and we have to admit that the results have been meager.

Working people have a general distrust of political parties- and the parties deserve this distrust The working people do not have- in most cases- representatives in our government nor a party which fundamentally represents their interests. While the parties divide on some issues, both mainstream parties are dominated by corporate interests, as illustrated by their unity on ‘free trade” and other corporate agendas.

In a sense both parties have failed the people. And, our democracy is weaker for this. In response millions, about half of the eligible voters, do not even vote. They do not believe that their participation matters- and to some frightening degree that are correct.

While the political parties have failed the left, social movements have been the vehicles of social change.

The theme of extending democracy runs through the history of popular movements in the U.S. Some of these movements strengthened democracy; the most dramatic of these have been struggles for the right to vote. Voting was extended to women in 1920 as a result of the over 70 years of struggle by the Women’s suffrage movement , and then voting was extended to Southern Blacks as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s after over 200 years of oppression. (Flacks,1985)

Although often taken for granted today, the establishment of public schooling k-12 and then the expansiion of public higher education since 1945 provide another important example of a social movements working for democracy and social justice in this nation.

Social movements in the U.S. serve in lieu of a left political party to build a left perspective and ideology. Allow me to provide personal examples to illustrate this process. My wife and I worked for years with the United Farmworkers of America. Doing this work taught us the fundamental value of unions to working people in a period when middle class student activists have not learned the important role of labor unions in building a better future. Working along side great organizers we learned organizing skills and discipline. My wife and I worked for about 8 years on immigrants rights efforts. These efforts taught us the stark realities of globalism producing migration as well as the importance of internationalism. Immigrant Rights works taught us to see capitalism from its harsh periphery. We worked for over a decade on Central American solidarity efforts for both El Salvador and Nicragua. These movements taught us to look beyond the narrow perspecives of the U.S. media to recognize the deadly and imperialist nature of U.S. power. We learned that our government was willing to kill at least 30,000 Salvadorans and Nicaraguans to impose U.S. domination.

We re- learned to recognize how our own government lied to us and manipulated the news. (We had previously learned in the anti Vietnamese War movement.) We worked for another decade on anti racism work focusing on electoral campaigns in California where politicians exploited the ignorance and bigotry taught to each generation of young people. These struggles taught us significant insights- albeit troublesome ones- about the extension and preservation of the intellectually dishonest theories of racism within our culture and our schools. We sought for over twenty years to build a conscious left organization (Democratic Socialists of America) and learned a great deal about ideological hegemony and the narrow forms of democracy practiced in the U.S.

Each of these struggles were valuable. Each brought us into dialogue with wonderful organizers, thinkers, and activists. These struggles were not the only struggles in the society. Others worked on similarly valuable campaigns such as divestment in South Africa and second wave feminism. Each campaign, each struggle taught us more about U.S. society and U.S. history and taught us new skills and brought us allies for the next struggle.

1972- Chile; 1989 Nicaragua.

What did I learn.

The U.S. policy in Latin America ( and elsewhere) is a policy of imperialism.

Imperialism corrupts our society and makes democracy here at home improbable.

For details see; Steven Kinzer, Overthrow. America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. 2006.

Global Capitalism 1980-2008

The world is experiencing a major restructuring of the global economy. This restructuring is directed by the transnational corporations to produce profits for the corporate owners. The impoverishment of the vast majority of people in pursuit of profits for the minority has pushed millions to migrant in search of food, jobs, and security. Global capitalism produces global migration. NAFTA produces a new wave of migration.

The economic system now being created by the relentless merging of the world's markets impoverishes the majority of U.S. workers. The average U.S. worker has experienced a decline in their real wages since 1979. Quality industrial jobs have moved to low age, anti union areas in the U.S. and to Mexico, China, Singapore, and other nations. At present the U.S. has no significant controls on capital flight. Indeed, the government subsidizes some corporations to move jobs to Honduras, El Salvador, a and the Caribbean.

Global capitalism produces the immigration crisis in the US and in Europe. The economic restructuring of Asia, Africa, and Latin America has pushed millions to migrate to the industrialized countries in search of a decent standard of living. In the last two decades the U.S. has experienced a major increase in immigration matching the immigration influx of the period from 1890-1910. The large scale immigration is largely from Asia and Latin America, changing the ethnic and cultural make up of the U.S. labor force.

As long as we have a rich country in the North, and severe poverty, repression, and exploitation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, working people are going to flee looking for work to feed their families. Indeed as the world economic becomes more integrated, with companies able to move from country to country to exploit workers, and to force workers to compete with one another, we should anticipate major increases in immigration.

Imperialism

The current U.S. policy is to support globalization under the control of transnational corporation and to seek control of resources and markets. The altrnative to this policy is to work together to feed the hungry, to provide shelter for the homeless, and medicine and education for the children. Imperialism, as practiced by the U.S., or quasi imperialism is a policy choice made by governing elites, it is not an economic necessity and it is not a choice made democratically by a free, self governing people.

The U.S. role in Latin America since the wars in Central America provides an example of the role of subtle imperialism. After the end of the Cold War, Latin America once again came to be dominated by U.S. capital supported by U.S. troops. While several countries have established electoral systems, the governments have weakened organized labor, privatized national industries, and slashed social spending- the policy known as neo-liberalism. The impact of global capitalism under the U.S. control has been to reduce direct investment in the region and to impoverish the majority of people. As was demonstrated in Mexico in 1994, and re-inforced by the NAFTA agreements, government action can take billions from the poor and give these billions to the rich and the commercial classes.

Nation states, led by the U.S., implement and enforce the global econmy through the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and other institutions. When there is a crisis, nation states send in national armies. This has most recently been demonstrated in Iraq where control and transportation of oil was the central issue in the invasion. We are currently occupying Iraq for the economic benefit of a number of corporations. The U.S. remains the world’s super power by spending as much on militiary arms as the rest of the world combined,

At the same time the cost of the war in Iraq ( over $200 Billion per year) along with the massive tax cuts which the Bush Administration gave to its corporate supporters places the U.S. economy and the standard of living of U.S. workers at risk.

Creating a more democratic society. 2004.

The important question remains how to buld a genuine reform movmeent in the U.S. to revitalized our democracy and to restore our basic republican principles.

The 2004 election reveals a political system in which the majority of citizens do not have strong alliegiances to either party. The small margin of Bush’s victory show that more and more citizens vote defensively or from very limited choices presented by our current two party domination. There was, for example, no major party candidate on the November 2004 ballot who opposed continuing imperialism and the war in Iraq even though the policy of imperialism threatens the very fundamentals of our democracy.

The election does reveal a long-term historical trend of the continued decline of both political parties. The Bush Administration’s effort to institutionalized an imperial America is dangerous to the survival of our democratic system. The Bush adminsitration has centralized government power and turned it to the service of corporations at a level never before seen in the U.S. And, the extension of the U.S. empire is economically not feasible for our society.

Electoral strategies and movement strategies are changing. The era of top-down politics – where campaigns and journalism are powered by capital will now be resisted.

See electoral work; 1990's. Campaigns against Prop.187, 209. Covered in piece- Beyond Diversity.

2004

Next Steps: a working paper.

I am the first to admit that we live in difficult times. A reactionary Republican cabal controls the Presidency and has resumed a policy of imperialism in the name of fighting terrorism, Republicans control the House and the Senate, conservatives in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) dominate many issues in the Democratic Party, the U.S. economy is weak, and corporate capital dominates the debates on global integration. Programs and policies which were once a part of victories by the Civil Rights and Women’s rights movements are now under assault.

While organized labor has regained some of its momentum, the organized, conscious left in the U.S. is at its weakest in decades. The African American, Latino and Women’s movements are widely dispersed and only a few have access to the mainstream media. The several communities have developed their own media.

At the same time, there has developed a broad, substantial popular left in the U.S. albeit largely divorced from the youth movements. Most cities have a number of ideological left organizations, an alternative press, and a number of grassroots organizations like ACORN devoted to building political participation. The Gay/ Lesbian/Transgender politics has emerged (some of it liberal and some of it quite conservative), the invasion of Iraq produced the broadest outpouring of opposition in the streets since the 1970s.

While a broad and inclusive left has grown in the U.S. in the last two decades, as demonstrated by community groups such as ACORN and church based groups affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the ideological left in the U.S. has experienced a decline.

During the 80s, the organized left in the U.S. was small. Most organizations ranged from 50- 200 activists, although DSA, the largest, had some 10,000 members. Many activists in these small organizations decided to concentrate on building the structures of their own organizations. The organized left was only of marginal assistance to building the Central American solidarity movements and was too weak to contribute significantly to the Anti War movement of 2003, with the exception of the role played by ANSWER and the Workers World Party. Left critics, like Todd Gitlin andothers continued to claim legitimacy as “spokespeople” of a left, and were recognized as such by the mainstream media even though they had not participated in the popular struggles of the 80’s and the 90’s.

While many of us on the left have made progress in our understanding of imperialism, of hegemony, and of the Democratic Leadership Council and the current National Security Strategy, our strategies and practices must keep in mind that most 18 -22 year olds have not had this history. They entered political consciousness at best during the Clinton era. They have no memory of the Central American struggles, NAFTA, and the changes in the AFL-CIO. We need to be able to talk with and participate with this generation.

The current situation

As mentioned above, we now have a broad, popular left and broad opposition to the war. This broad left is made of diverse organizations and diverse organizations forms. Most are local. Each group has its own face to face communications. There is relatively little national presence.

One consequence is that each coalition requires extensive negotiations and compromise and endless meetings. The processes for education and decision making are not yet developed on the left. While we painstakingly build coalitions, our opponents march the country and the media off to war. The popular left has improved its use of the internet through groups such as Moveon.org.

We live in difficult times. But, the people of Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Africa, and Iraq, among others, live in far more troubled times.

U.S. Political parties

Much has been written about the nature of U.S. parties. Here I will only refer to some of the issues which should guide our decision making.

In the U.S. class ties are particularly weak as are our political parties. Voters and potential voters must be persuaded to support human dignity, solidarity, peace and social justice, as well as democracy as positive values to support, not as ideological possessions of the failed political parties.

The two major parties disguise deep divisions based upon race, ethnicity and to a lesser extent social class.

Large majorities of voters reject a left analysis and reject left activism. They also oppose taxes but support public programs which benefit themselves such as social security. They prefer to continue within the present political electoral structure. Class lines are blurred and unclear, and white people, and increasingly some African Americans, Latinos and Asians do have a significant degree of mobility.

Since the early 1990's, our two political parties have become more ideological, with the class divisions in the society running down the middle of the Democratic Party, with the Democratic Leadership Council on one side and a potential labor-left on the other side.

The divisions between the two parties are significant, with complex regional and racial dimensions. But both parties are primarily engaged in rancorous inter party battles for control of the state or national legislatures. They have little of an educational development. And, both parties seek to suppress the vote of their opponents in elections. The difficulty in changing the system, including the development of non competitive seats, along with the partisan rancor has increased voter cynicism and non participation in both the parties and in elections.

Part of our task is to build a political opposition to imperialism, war, racism, and anti union politics. We do this by working for justice and fairness and to defeat George Bush. It is not enough for a candidate to oppose this war now, he must oppose the war makers- they must oppose imperialism. Neither of the major party candidates opposes global capitalism and imperialism. This has major consequences. WE know that the last 30- 60 years of inept colonialism has produced a radicalized Islam and associated terrorism in the West. This development, along with the West's dependence upon oil, will create economic and military crises for at least the next 20-30 years. We are living in a time parallel in some ways to the Roman Empire. We just don't know if we are at the start , the middle, or the end of the empire. Any President, operating out of the imperialist paradigm, will involve us in a series of wars of occupation draining resources domestic resources needed for schools, health care, housing and other human needs. Our task then is to work to defeat Bush and to build a left opposition for the future.

An electoral part of our strategy for 2004

As a veteran of numerous political campaigns on the national, state and local levels, I am confident that simply working in a political campaign (such as the Kerry campaign) will not in itself advance a left, nor a left agenda. If we enter a campaign and become foot soldiers, at the end of the campaign you have only the next campaign.

It is also clear that we should work to defeat Bush. The left , liberals, and labor are united on this. We have a responsibility to participate in the defeat Bush campaign. Our members expect this of us. To not work hard to defeat Bush would indicate a lack of seriousness on our part.

As Congressman Bernie Sanders puts the issue, " Our challenge this fall is twofold. Job one is to defeat President Bush, the most reactionary President in the modern history of our country, and to end the Republican stranglehold on Congress. But we as progressives understand that we need to go beyond that. We need to create an enduring grassroots activist network that will ensure that the issues we care about are addressed, and not shunted aside by powerful special interests- no matter who is president."

Activists are needed in the campaigns organized by labor, and in the many grass roots efforts to register new voters such as ACORN ,Neighbor to Neighbor and Vote Peace.

DSA should seek to work with others in these campaigns and to weave a fabric of support and skill development among left activists as we work with others to defeat Bush. And, we need to build our own organization as a component of campaigns. This means identifying 1-3 persons in the local DSA who focus on and work on building DSA, while encouraging our members - our periphery- to work in the campaigns. We now have some guides to local building which are available.

The alternative, of course, is to just be an activist in the campaigns. We do not need a DSA to be individual activists. Instead, as a part of our work, we should prioritize identifying new cadre and promoting socialists educational projects. DSA should be a place where skills are developed and where mistakes can be made. In some locals, this will mean working with a labor campaign rather than directly with the Kerry campaign. Working with skilled allies, and funded allies, will provide literature and resources for our campaign work. We will also find that DSA already has members and past members in these unions in both leadership and staff positions.

In keeping with our understanding of the potential left in the U.S., and our own organizational goals, our politics must always be guided by demands for social and economic justice for all. African Americans, Latinos, Women, can not be asked to place their agenda aside while we work on an election. Real politics does not work that way . Active groups in the African American, Latino, and Asian Communities, as well as the Women's movement will be deeply engaged in this campaign. Those groups who do not engage in practice in the electoral effort will demonstrate that they are irrelevant to day to day political life in the U.S.

For DSA, multi-racial coalition building and anti racist politics must be an integral part of all of our activism. We must choose to work in campaigns and efforts where we work side-by-side with activists from communities of color.

It is reasonably certain that the Kerry campaign will campaign and reach out to the moderate middle ground, independent voters, persons not committed to either political party or to the left. Our task, on the other hand, is to build a left. The Kerry campaign will not do that for us.

While we seek to defeat Bush and the Bush regime we have little reason for Democratic Party loyalty except for those working to build democratic clubs such as the Wellstone Democratic Clubs. We have reason to support the work of 3^rd. parties and the development of independent politics

The present condition of numerous new organizational efforts to engage in electoral politics independent of the Democratic Party and the developing broad diversity of the popular left makes our ideological work more important. Participants are engaged in popular campaigns, from Sweatshop watch, democratic media to co-ops. They come and go. Our task is to connect these many popular left organizations and efforts with an organized left and to develop a modern ideology of a left appropriate to the current U.S. political terrain.

What is to be done?

There is no clear evidence that the current political parties serve us well as an organizational form. We do not have a party. And, labor and the left have tried to build a left party dozens of times.

We recognize that at present political parties in the U.S. and electoral campaigns can serve as vehicles for advancing specific social goals, i.e. single payer health, labor law reform, stopping the imperialist adventures in the Middle East.

Sacramento Local DSA

DSA in Sacramento began as a DSOC local in 1978. We participated in electoral, union, and activist campaigns opposing NAFTA, the Wars in Central America, fighting for immigration reform and opposing racism.

In 2006 some Sacramento DSA folks, and former DSA members, were interested in forming a Progressive Alliance, at first working with PDA. Our work with the Progressive Alliance became our primary electoral and anti war work. We maintained a separate process to contact DSA folks per DSA. The Progressive Alliance reaches out to about 2000. The local DSA membership is about 90.

Since the last DSA convention we held a DSA forum on the divisions in labor (Change to Win v. AFL-CIO). We had Cornel West speak at our campus and Dolores Huerta, and we tabled at both events. Both Cornel and Dolores gave us plugs and urged people to visit our tables. The Progressive Alliance holds a monthly film series. We featured DSA at the May Day event with a film on Paul Wellstone.

In the Fall of 2006 we participated in important electoral campaigns through the Progressive Alliance. On May Day 2006 we joined with over 40,000 ( in Sacramento) in the national days of protest for immigrant rights. One million marched nation wide. We participated actively in the planning and the intense conflicts over this march.

I spoke representing DSA at a number of conferences and in university classes.

Our primary work and focus is on a university campus. We did not participate in any significant manner in the Bernie Sanders effort.

In the Fall of 2007 and 2008 we hosted a Progressive forums attended by 250. The DSA part of the forum was to present the draft Economic Justice Agenda. The forum was well attended and served to re introduce DSA from the “shadows”.

In the Fall of 2007 through the present we have worked to promote the Obama campaign.

Here is a brief explanation of our considerations.

What kind of a campaign will it take to win? Which candidate will build the kind of a campaign that will gain the White House, and several seats in the Senate and even more in the House?

A win will require the mobilization of broad new forces in our political system. I propose an in depth discussion of which candidate will be able to mobilize new forces?

The 2008 election of Barack Obama

Sacramento DSA and the Sacramento Progressive Alliance campaigned intensely for Barack Obama in to defeat the Republican machine and in part to make a historic breakthrough on race. Our effort was focused on the campus at Sacramento State.

In the Fall of 2008 we registered voters, tabled, talked to students, and distributed campaign literature and SWAG. ( Note, earlier analysis of this effort was completed within the Progressive Alliance. The recording of that analysis was lost due to a computer theft in February of 2010. This is a re-construction. We have made an analysis of each of the recent campaigns in which we participated )

Duane Campbell was placed as the liason to the Sacramento for Obama campaign to coordinate our work. He met regularly with the SFObama steering committee.

Having attended several SFO meetings and planning sessions, but not the Camp Obamas, the following observations are offered.

Sacramento for Obama did not significantly engage Latino voters in the Sacramento region- and they barely tried to do so. The campaign was focused on being a non racial campaign. Much of the office work and volunteers were White. A small but important segment of the office was African American, and African American political leadership was sought. David Covin, in his book on Sacramento Black leadership, Black Politics After the Civil rights Movement; Activity and Beliefs in Sacramento 1970- 2000, (2009) describes an independent mobilization of African Americans in elections. In a lecture in May, 2010, at CSU Sacramento at the time of the recognition of the 40^th. Anniversary of the Ethnic studies department, Dr. Covin, in response to a question observed that African American mobilization for Obama was organized in a number of dispersed African American organizations, not primarily through the campaign itself.

The lack of Latino participation was noticeable. We brought it up to the steering committee on three occasions. The lead organizer tried to initiate some outreach and made some contacts with local people. She also encouraged us to use our Latino network to outreach.

There was no recognizable Latino outreach effort in Sacramento. This was surprising to us. A basic understanding was that California was going to vote for Obama, so there was not a need for more outreach. Instead, there were efforts to get Sacramento volunteers to travel to Nevada for campaigning.

There was a formal Latino outreach committee of the state campaign. They made a few contacts and had their own web site. In my decades of work in Sacramento politics, this was one of the few times when Latino outreach was not recognized as a necessity and a priority. The following essay provides some data on who Latino and other people of color responded to the national campaign.

Obama, Race and the Future of U.S. Politics. See Essay by Bob Wing.

The Color of Election 2008

Despite the fact that the Republicans had failed miserably, even on their own terms, and run the country virtually into the ground, whites still voted for McCain by 55 to 43. In stark contrast, blacks voted for Obama by 95 to 4, Latinos went for Obama by 66 to 32 and Asians backed Obama by 61 to 35. (1)

In 2008, the white vote was virtually identical to election 2000 and continued to exert a strong conservative pull on the electorate while the votes of peoples of color and young people of all races headed powerfully in a more progressive direction.

The color lines, in life and politics, are alive and well.

Latinos resoundingly put the lie to these cynics by voting for Obama by 66 to 32, a huge sixteen-point swing to the Democrats compared to 2004. Even a 58 percent majority of Cubans in Florida, traditionally solidly Republican, went for Obama.

Latinas led the way toward Obama, casting 68 percent of their votes for him and only 30 percent for McCain. Latino voters under 30 went for Obama by 76 to 24, perhaps indicating the direction of future Latino voting patterns.

Asians swung Democratic by fourteen points over 2004, voting for Obama 61 to 35. The political trajectory of Asian voters has been striking. In 1992, Bill Clinton received only 31 percent of the Asian vote. Since then Asians have steadily moved Democratic, reaching a highpoint this year.

His success was both astonishing and history making. He won the southwestern states of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and the former Confederate slave states of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, as well as former slave states Maryland and Delaware. The Latino vote was decisive for Obama in Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

In all, nine states switched from red to blue from 2004 to 2008: Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa. Obama lost Missouri by the narrowest of margins.

End. Bob Wing excerpts.

Activism and political organizing

Some thoughts on organization.

Activism and political organizing

Some thoughts on organization.

I am doing some reflection on my own activism. In brief, I have been an exemplary activist for over 35 years now in a number of struggles (UFW, El Salvador, labor, etc.) Each of these struggles have taught me important lessons.

However, I am confident a this time that simply more activism will not build a left in the U.S.

To focus my reflection I am carefully reading again;

Making History: The American Left and the American Mind, by Richard Flacks. (1985).

Some of his insights have relevance to the current discussion of where should we- as a democratic socialists organization- go.

“The U.S. is the only industrial society whose working class has not been influenced by a socialist perspective; the only such society without an explicitly working-class based political party playing a central role in the state.”

….”there is a third meaning to the ‘failure of the American left,’ having to do with its adherents inablility to sustain any durable organization. “

“but I think the U.S. left is unparalleled in the degree to which organizations came into being, experienced relatively brief periods of rising strength and impact, only to rapidly decline.”

He then goes on to examine the history of U.S. exceptionalism.

“Thus the tradition of the left is constituted by the interaction between intellectuals (those free to be engaged in history but powerless to make it) and massess (those whose labor makes history possible but are powerless to direct it). Participation in this tradition provides intelletuals with identity, direction, meaning and fulfillment-even if the practical historical results of their efforts are nebulous. For workers, too, such participation may provide spiritual meaning and serve as a secular faith.”

I personally have worked at one juncture between intellectuals and the masses for over 35 yeaers. I have served as a union officer, delegate and activist in a number of unions. And, I have served on our local labor council for 25 years.

I know that specific struggles (UFW, C.A. solidarity,etc) as listed earlier have provided identity, meaning and fulfillment over the years. Even though I have devoted considerable time, money and effort to DSA, in my view, DSA- as a component of a left tradition- provides a very weak identity, no direction, little meaning and little fulfillment.

This is not a failure of any individuals, nor of selecting one direction over another. Something is not here.

Finding sollutions to what we are not doing might be a good focus for the coming convention or extended NPC meeting. And, we should be able to develop and discuss ideas prior to the convention on this e mail list.

1. The Current situation

Broad popular left. Broad, popular opposition to the war.

Diverse organizations. Organizational forms. Mostly local.

Each local group has its own face-to-face communication.

Requires extensive and intense negotiations for coalitions. Endless meetings.

/Good work on the internet. Moveon.org etc.

In the current situtation, perhaps we could be more effective if we could cooperate on issues such as the elections.

History and experience of localism.

2. Changing nature of political engagement

internet broadens communications.

Limits, restricts information. Type only.

Persons increasingly talk with their own networks. And not with persons from alternative viewpoints.

Internet may actually dis engage people. It is easier to sign an e mail petition and think that you have done something., than to table at an event, or to create an educational event.

3. No clear evidence that political parties as an organizational form is working in the U.S.

Certainly this strategy has been tried..

4. Task. Figure out how to select, recruite, and prepare activists in one struggle to become committed to the long range project of creating a left, activism, and organizing.

Fundamental issue in building a new left.

We have a broad and diverse left, demonstrated again in the anti war mobilizations.

Question, How do we assemble and coordinate this broad and diverse left?

While we painstaking build coalitions, our opponents march the country - and the media- off to war.

The decline of the ideological left

There have been efforts to create left organizations, D.S.A. (Democratic Socialists of America) C.C. for D.S. (Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism ) along with the remants of earlier left parties of the Socialists and Communists. Full disclosure: The author was long active at both the national and local level in trying to establish and build DSA.

None of these efforts have achieved even a modest sized organization that could organize for issues, influence national or local politics, or produce significant results. This decline of a left is directly proportional to the decline of organized labor as a political force.

Good people tried to build an ideological left, but we were unable to develop and sustain organizations which served as recruitment, training, preparation and conduits to efffective political action. These nascent organizations, few of which last more than ten years, have been unable to create a left culture where activists find meaning and importance in their lives by struggling to make a difference in our society. Without capacity building organizations, the popular left activism continually recruits new people and burns out veterans rather than building a sustaining culture and organization.

2006

There are at least two alternative views of democracy to consider.

Since the early 1900’s left advocates of democracy, led by John Dewey, argued that what was needed was to educate the children of working people. Universal voting, along with universal education would make our society more democratic. An educated electorate would understand politics and the economy and make wise decisions for the entire society. Later, by the 1960’s, public education advocates argued that educating the common people to a higher level (Such as the G.I. Bill) would complete our transition to a deliberative or participatory democracy. This position is well developed by political philosopher Benjamin R. Barber in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, first published in 1984 and re published in 2003.

The strong democracy position is challenged by the historical record in which millions of voters and non voters who scrimp to put food on the table and to pay for their housing were quite willing in 2004 to re-elect a president who worked night and day to redistribute wealth and income from the poor to the rich. That is, voters, particularly when threatened with international terrorism, often do not vote in their economic self interests. What Is The Matter With Kansas, author Thomas Frank provides a detailed and interesting description of how this is achieved.

An alternative view of democracy is presented by Richard A. Posner, a federal appelate judge, in Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Harvard, 2003). Posner argues that the U.S. political system is not so much self rule (democracy), but “rule by officials who are chosen by the people and who if they don’t perform are fired by the people”.

This latter view is, of course, more subject to control and manipulation by the rich and the corporations as described well in Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-party state (2004) , and in David Cay Johnson’s Perfectly Legal; The covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the rich and the super rich- and to cheat everybody else. (2003)

The failure of the ideological left

Working people are currently faced with having to struggle to defend their lives within our present two party system without the assistance or history carrying institution of a left organization or party. We have failed to build a left.

While the 60’s and 70’s offered an attempt at re-building a left in the U.S., that project has failed since the 1980’s, in the same period when the advance of corporate capitalism has smashed the labor movement in the U.S. Interestingly left organizations have been created and constructed in Brazil, Mexico and El Salvador during the same period.

There have been efforts to create left organizations, D.S.A. (Democratic Socialists of America) C.C. for D.S. (Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism ) along with the remants of earlier left parties of the Socialists and Communists. ( Full disclosure: The author was long active at both the national and local level in trying to establish and build DSA. )

Good people tried to build an ideological left, but to date we have been unable to develop and sustain organizations which served as recruitment, training, preparation and conduits to effective political action. The nascent organizations, few of which last more than ten years, have been unable to create a left culture where activists find meaning and importance in their lives by struggling to make a difference in our society. Without capacity building organizations, the popular left activism continually recruits new people and burns out veterans rather than building a sustaining culture and organization.

Where do we go from here?

The alternative to the growing power of the corporate Right is to create a new, more vibrant democracy- a strong democracy. Electoral strategies and movement strategies are changing. The era of top down politics – where campaigns are powered by consultants and money are changing- at least within the Democratic Party. At present much of the energy and effort for change exists on the local level and in local campaigns. And, as mentioned, it is weakened and persistently endangered without the assistance of a conscious and well informed left political movement and a left national organization.

New networks must be created to advance democracy. In addition to defensive struggles, campaigns should be selected which advance the common good, and they necessarily must advance the long range unity between people. Each small, local, isolated group is vulnerable by itself.

When efforts gain a little power, they need to enter the electoral arena. The demographic reality in most areas of the country is that only a multi racial coalition can win elections. The next left must seek campaigns that bridge the movement's varied sectors including, unions, community based organizations and immigrant rights organizations.

At the state level: 2006

For example, look at the California Governor’s refusal to adequately fund the schools.

The fiscal reality is that California ranks 44 in per-pupil spending, 46^th in pupil teacher ratio, 32 in teacher salaries and 29^th. in education spending as a percentage of personal income.

Last year the Governor took 2 Billion from the school budget to protect the tax breaks of the very rich.

Then, last week he gave back 200 Million.

As a result, California ranks about 37^th. in readng and math, and we have a over 50% drop out rate for Latinos, Blacks, and Hmong.

To under fund the schools, to deprive the children, is a choice our legislature and our governor makes each year in the budget. And, they are making it again this month.

So, if you are not interested in politics, I guess then that you are not interested in your children having quality schools and teachers.

And then, after failing to provide the funds, the elected officials and the public expect you to work even harder to make up for their failure to adequately fund the schools.

As my friend Cornel West says so well in his book, Democracy Matters, the dangers in our democracy are directly connected to our Empire. The War, and empire, will take the lives of some of the students which you teach.

In the last three years we have spent $300 Billion in Iraq. California’s schools are under funded by at least 3 Billion. You figure it out.

And, social justice.

It is not all kids who are failing. It is not all kids who are in a school with a scripted curriculum, bored, alienated. It is not 50% of all kids who will drop out and end up in juvenile hall.

It is kids from poor families, working class families. Our goal has been to prepare you to change that. We want you to bring school success to all of these kids.

We must prepare our students to struggle for justice and to struggle for democracy.

It’s a tough world out there. They need to know how to read, write, and to respect. They need to know how to make democracy work for them. Teaching these things will require a great deal of change.

2009. The California budget crisis caused by the looting of the banks by finance capital.

School budget cuts. $6 billion. The k-12 budget grew from 5, 748 per student in 1998 to $8,603 in 2007. This made California 47th in the nation in per pupil expenditures. In 2009, the per pupil expenditure will drop to $7827. There were $3 B. in cuts to the CSU and the U.C.

2006

We traveled to Ireland and Scotland in 2006, but was unable to make any family history. We have continued to explore this history. In particular I brought some sod back from Roscommon where we stayed briefly.

I regained interest in Ireland after reading Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes.

In our most recent trip we traveled through the North and through Derry or

Londonderry as the Protestants call it. The history is strong.

I am currently reading a book on the Great Hunger of 1847-1849, and the several famines that followed. The book is Irish Hunger : Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine, edited by Tom Hayden.

It seems that Roscommon was a center of the Hunger. There is now a museum to the Hunger there. One author says that this area in the 1847 period was 80% Irish speaking, and that migrants from this area were 70-80% Irish speaking. They were the poor farmers of Ireland. This would have been when Thomas Murray was growing up, prior to his migration

2002

The decline of the Anti Racism and Latino Commissions of DSA.

Organizations usually exist to develop projects and carry out political work. We have had locals and the commissions for the last twenty five years in order to pursue political projects together. Activism organizes. Lack of activism leads to the decline of locals, the commissions and of the organization. ( for the alternative See Jose La Luz, An Organizing Model of Unionism, Labor Research Review. Midwest Center for Labor Research, 1992)

In an era like ours when there are dozens and hundreds of local progressive projects, there are a large number of practical projects to which activists could contribute.

In past years we have carried out political campaigns (such as Propositions 187 & 209), published a newsletter, and advocated for a perspective within DSA.

Since 2003 there has been little DSA organizational participation in the Anti War movement. A number of individuals were active but there was limited and non coordinated organizational participation in the 2004 elections.

Given the low level of political work and the meager level of organizational resources, participation by all groups , including Latinos , in DSA has declined. At the same time Latino participation in Labor unions and Latino organizations continues to grow.

During its time of growth the Latino Commission was able to recruit and organize several leading Chicanos from the Sacramento area into DSA leadership and YDS.

After a few years they each left. Interviews of the people who left give reasons for leaving.

1. Latinos were integrated into the organization, but Latino issues were not central.

2. DSA as an organization did little other than talk. These activists wanted to be part of an organization that advanced political work.

3. DSA did not have an action plan nor the ability to mobilize people, particularly people of color. Nor, did it have the organizational resources.

In response to the declining state of affairs within DSA , the Latino commission has decided to operate as more as a network and less as an organizations. The primary functions of the network would be to share information across movements, organizations, and regions., to continue ideological discussions such as on the nature of imperialism, and to provide a vehicle for engaging and recruiting people of color to democratic socialism as an ideology, not necessarily to a single organization.

Strategy for our network:

The overall strategy is to create a widespread movement for democratic political reform and economic evolution. The politics of change in the U.S.A. require substantial participation by people of color; nothing else will work.

Adopting a network model offers:

1. Moving from hierarchical representative democracy to distributed networked participatory democracy – valuing each activist and each citizen. ( or immigrant worker).

2. A shift away from individualist leadership to recognizing fundamental interdependence in a community. Rather than leaders and members, each of us has a role in the network.

3. A part of our work includes developing the overall philosophy, message, and issues. Its components would include websites/forums structured around developing an intellectual political framework .

4. Communication

The developments of the world wide web now permit us to gather news and information from a variety of sources around the world.

There needs to be an exploration of news sources using the net as medium. (such as Indy Media, ). .As a network we can participate in this new communications revolution.

5. .Participation

All aspects of organization should be designed to be participatory, including development of intellectual foundation and communication. Yet participation needs also to include certain calls to actions. Participation also needs to include the building of local geographic nodes.

Too often progressives are divided into lots of fragmented groups. WE have lots of groups and lots of projects. Our project is to analyze and understand the central role of a Latino agenda and anti racism work in the new political developments. We need to learn how to work together. Serious progressives understand that we need to work together across class, race and gender lines. While there is a growing Latino political presence and union leadership, there is a lack of significant Latino presence in DSA. At present functioning as a network offer us the opportunity to continue to work together.

Social movements in the U.S. serve in lieu of a left political party to build a left perspective and ideology.

The author worked for years with the United Farmworkers of America. Doing this work taught us the fundamental value of unions to working people in a period when most activists have not learned the important role of labor unions in building a better future. We worked for about 8 years on immigrants rights efforts. These efforts taught us the the cruel realities of globalism producing migration and importance of interenationalism. We worked for over a decade on Central American solidarity efforts for both El Salvador and Nicragua. These movements taught us to look beyond the narrow perspecives of the U.S. media to recognize the deadly and imperialist nature of U.S. power. We worked for another decade on anti racism work focusing on electoral campaigns in California which exploited the ignorance and bigotry taught to each generation of young people. We sought for over twenty years to build a conscious left organization (Democratic Socialists of America) and learned a great deal about ideological hegemony and the narrow forms of democracy practiced in the U.S.

Each of these struggles were valuable. Each brought us into dialogue with wonderful organizers, thinkers, and activists. Each campaign, each struggle taught us more about U.S. society and U.S. history and taught us skills and brought us allies for the next struggle.

2007

I think the primary issue for the democratic left in the U.S., and for DSA, is support for a non intervention policy by our own government. Many parts of the left have a tragic history of supporting this movement or that from afar. Usually we do not know the situation on the ground and the complexity of movements and struggles. We should – usually- not be picking from among competing factions.

This applies to Venezuela, to Brazil, to Peru, Chile, Mexico, etc.

Now, we can read about and inform ourselves but the real question is how do we support non-intervention. As in Non Intervention in Chile .

Clearly we have learned since the invasion of the Dominican Republic, and since Chile (1973) that intervention comes in several forms. At times there are direct military interventions by U.S. forces. At times proxy forces are created ( Nicaraguan Contras, Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads. )

And, most often the intervention is by the IMF, the World Bank, and other agencies which the U.S. is very capable of steering in one direction. For a long time in Latin America the intervention was aided and abetted by AIFLD, and we need to keep an eye on current foreign policy implements of our labor movement. There were resolutions on this at the last AFL-CIO convention.

2008

Economic Crisis

Political actions taken and not taken in the next 12 -18 months may well determine the structure of our economy, our health care system, and our unions for the next two decades. The left may be losing the current policy battles on the bank bailouts, the looting of the economy, on health care, and apparently on NAFTA and the Employee Free Choice Act. The banks, the insurance companies, and finance capital corporations , having taken over $1.2 trillion out of the economy and over $800 billion from U. S. taxpayers while plunging the world into an economic crisis, are already consolidating their power in Congress and in the Obama Administration.

For the purposes of this essay I will continue the use of the term left as defined by Bill Fletcher in What’s a Left to Do? In the Spring issue of Democratic Left. “The left needs to be understood as the various social forces which advocate a process of political transformation going beyond capitalism.” This definition would include many labor activists, social service activists, and often cadre in the various social movements.

While we recognize the limits of presidential politics and elections in our restricted two party system where money dominates, yet many people contest elections to have a vehicle for effecting policy. The mobilization of millions in the Obama campaign was their effort to effect policy. The campaign demonstrated the progressive potential for creating a grass roots campaign. The Obama campaign excelled at grassroots fundraising and mobilization and was purposely weak on political education.

The vigor and emotion of the Obama campaign and the Obama victory have now passed. The Obama victory importantly shifted politics from the center-right to the center -left. Obama’s positions on Iraq, health care, on the stimulus, and on the Bush tax cuts are victories for the left . His positions on the bank bail outs, Afghanistan, on NAFTA, are from the center and less than desirable. As one who worked endless hours in the campaign, I now think that the possibility of creating a renewed left from the campaign, of recruiting a new generation of activists has largely passed.

Left groups, both those who participated in the election campaign and those who did not are currently discussing future directions. What remains is a new balance of forces in the political economy and the need for the left to analyze and to operate within this new balance of forces.

The severity of the national and international economic collapse has created budget shortfalls for national, state and local governments. States, cities and local governments are cutting police and fire protection, closing health clinics, laying off teachers , reversing school reform efforts and cutting back on basic health care and human services. These state and local cutbacks significantly reduce the positive effects of the federal stimulus. A left program would stop the bail out of the banking and insurance robber barons, restore Glass-Steagall Act, take ownership of some major banks, provide labor law reform, establish a single payer national health care system and would provide direct aid to the states to avoid draconian cuts in schools and other human services. Note: the proposed new regulations on finance capital proposed by the Obama Administration in June do not go nearly far enough to provide structural economic reform and to re-establish the 1933 rules under Glass-Steagall. Without structural reform we will be back in this crisis again within a decade.

The Obama administration is compromising to the right—in part because corporate power is placing pressure on the Administration through the banking collapse, and centrists policy advocates are in place and have appointments in the administration. Labor and the left have received few appointments. The labor movement is deeply divided and spending too much of its resources fighting destructive internal battles as well as responding to massive job losses.

Make no mistake about it – the right wing is waging all out war on the Administration. On the left we need to be able to both pressure the Obama Administration on our issues while supporting the Administration on areas of agreement such as the budget, the stimulus, EFCA, and Supreme Court nominees. Unless we can support him on our issues, we lose our issues. We only gain political ground when we can bring some additional forces to the table.

Progressive forces in the U.S. have won a major victory with the defeat of the Bush/McCain administration and the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. Victory was created by an unprecedented mobilization of Black, Latino, White, Asian , union members, youth and other progressive forces- some of whom participated in elections for the first time. The election victory was a result of many forces including well organized volunteers, organized labor, systematic mobilizations in the Black community ( including its churches), the Latino community and other progressive forces.

The Obama campaign was a broad coalition of forces uniting progressives and middle groups (moderates) to win a clear and decisive victory. This coalition includes major conservative and financial establishment forces. The campaign won in part by expanding the electorate. Obama won among all major demographic group except White men, and even there the organized union vote reduced the usual preference of white males for Republican candidates.

The campaign began with a focus on the anti war sentiment in the country, organized a youth vote, and grew into a well financed campaign of over 3 million participants.

The Obama economic and foreign policy team is compromised largely of global capitalists U.S. capitalists. The old capitalist power centers are still very powerful and are securing important policy positions throughout the Obama administration.

There are many campaign innovations to be studied, include the community organizing training and focus, the systematic efforts to include rather than exclude volunteers, and the use of technology both for fundraising and for organizing. In spite of the divisions in organized labor during the primaries, the two sides funded and mobilized a significant pro Obama effort in the general election.

The Obama campaign, and we can anticipate an Obama Administration, will be disciplined, concerned about message control, and inclusive. Pushed by the unprecedented economic crisis, the Obama Administration has close connection to the powers of finance capital and corporate liberalism.

DSA and the left.

The National Political Committee (NPC) speaking for DSA offered “critical support” for Obama campaign in late August. There was no significant mobilization of DSA members nor its very limited resources for the election.

As a consequence, the size, strength, organizational abilities of DSA remains essentially what it was prior to the Obama campaign and similar to prior analyses. Not much changed.

Our neighborhood of political work has changed.

Since early 2000 the on-line progressive group Moveon.org has grown to over a million and regularly initiates campaigns and fundraising. They ran their own closely aligned campaigns with the Obama campaign and are currently consolidated their members with follow up events.

Progressive Democrats of America was born in the 2004 campaign of Dennis Kuchinic. They have grown to thousands of members and hundreds of activists. In large part they use an inside-outside strategy and operate within the Democratic Party. They were very active in the 2008 campaign and gained members and recognition for their work. In 2008 they focused on electing progressive members of Congress. They now have some significant Congressional allies.

A new organization, Progressives for Obama emerged in this campaign with many participants also participants with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. There web site and e mail list engaged hundreds as did their speakers bureau. One of the writers for Progressives for Obama has completed a major summing up of the campaign. It appears that they will continue to organize although it is not clear what their name will be. The trajectory of Progressives for Obama is similar to a plan produced over two years ago for a Neo Rainbow coalition creating a new, membership based, activists political force in the U.S.

And, the Obama campaign itself plans to continue to engage the over 3 million volunteers which it recruited. The nature of their effort is still developing. However clearly they will have access, organization, and significant funding. Like the campaign, they can be predicted to be less ideological, more disciplined, controlled from the top, and innovative in their use of technology.

The above brief review of organizations in our neighborhood illustrates different approaches to organizing in an electoral season and allows us to evaluate competing strategies for organizing.

To: Bill Fletcher.

2009

Re: one of your major points. The left , the White Left, still does not understand the role of race, racism in our society. And, their strategy reflects this lack.

On this I think your are completely correct.

Let me give some context.

I teach courses on Multicultural Education. Since the early 1990’s, teacher preparation had a substantive study and substantive responses to the role of race and racism in the U.S. educational system. Today this is called the Achievement gap.

Since about 2004/2006, most multicultural education efforts have declined substantially. Courses are eliminated, watered. Racism is no longer on the agenda of most discussions. See the efforts to change California textbooks.

In parallel.

The left, the part I know, DSA, had a period in which it took some recognition of racism and sexism in our society. From 1983- 1996, there was an effort.

I was the Chair of the Anti Racism Commission. My wife was co-chair of the Latino Commission. Our basic goal was self determination.

By about 2000, this effort had collapsed. Race, and the struggle against racism, and sexism, do not play a major role in the organization, for a number of reasons.

By 2004 the Anti racism Commission, the Latino Commission, and the African American Commission declined to no presence.

The time of attention to these issues in DSA have passed.

You can see this in endorsements. In 1984 and 1988 we endorsed Jackson and the Rainbow, in 1988 we allocated staff.

In 2008, DSA would not endorse Obama until it was over. They did not see the effect of the candidacy of an African American as an important issue.

That is precisely why I worked on the Obama campaign, to advance the anti racism agenda.

This is also why I think your essay is so valuable. It raises the correct issues.

When we had an Anti racism Commission it was de facto the left of the organization.

The eclipse of the anti racism struggle ( beyond diversity) is a strategic decline of the Left.

DSA itself.

Three issues should be noted. During the last year DSA has improved its outreach and participation within labor through the blog Talking Union. We now have some experience with using technology to overcome our geographic dispersal.

Second: DSA west of the Missouri river has continued to atrophy. We do not have a significant presence in Los Angeles. There PDA and other groups ( MAPA, others) have filled the space. In the San Francisco Bay area a wide range of groups are active. CCD-S maintains a regional office there but no one group seems significant. We have members but not groups in Portland and Seattle.

Third: The continual development of the DSA local in Atlanta is encouraging. Like the breaking of the formerly solid South by the Obama campaign, southern organizing is positive and hopeful.

We will continue to face resistance and war in the third world. The corporate expansion of trade, enforced by U.S. troops, will produce increased poverty for some and resistance.

Two forms of resistance.

War (including terrorism)

Migration.

Why do 1 million Pakistanis live in England? Why do over 4 million Mexicans live in the U.S.? Because life here is better. You can live in a house and eat. After twenty years you can even have health care and schooling for your children.

Given this, it is unlikely that these populatiions will be revolutionary. Yes, there is marginality and frustration among a minority. But, few would go back. Those who would – do. The remainder want to keep this system, although they may want some improvements.

2008

White Privilege:

On the idea of White skin privilege.

I am the former chair of DSA's Anti Racism commission. I teach courses on anti racism. From this perspective I have substantive problems with White Privilege argument. I encourage all to not consider these arguments as uncontested.

It is not that it is wrong. It is that it is not very useful. See my piece Beyond Diversity on the site. I won't repeat it http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2006/02/beyond-diversity-to-justice.html all. ( Its not that dramatic).

What I think it really is ;

White/ upper class privilege.

Or White supremacy in a class system.

But, that is another discussion.

Antiracism work.

2001. Latino Commission immigration policy paper.

2002 Beyond Diversity :The Struggle for Justice and Solidarity

"Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflict."

- Mary "Mother" Jones

We need to understand our society, both the positives and the negatives, in order to work for more democracy. In 1903 W.E.B. Dubois stated, " For the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." And now, at the start of the Twenty First Century our nation and our movements continue to struggle with racism. We believe that the danger to our democracy is not race-- it is racism; the oppression of a group of people based upon their perceived race. Racism is both a belief system and the domination of a people based upon these beliefs.

Racism is a great and dangerous falsehood: i.e., that one "race" is inherently superior in the biological sense and, conversely, that other races are inherently "inferior." Racism grew out of an effort to justify such self-serving economic thrusts as genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the seizure of much of Mexico by the United States, and much more -- and has continued as a means through which oppressors exploit labor and maintain their political power. The mythology of racism is deeply rooted and extremely tenacious.

Racial prejudice is a negative attitude toward a person or group of people. Racial discrimination encompasses the actions taken to further oppress the target -- the victim -- group. In our time, racism has remained a central characteristic of modern capitalism and contributes to the extreme inequalities in our world.

Although racial definitions, and ethnic definitions are often vague and imprecise, racism continues to divide our communities and our movements. For a racist: defining race is easy. A race is "them", those people, the other, the not you. Any group which the racist hates or fears. Often it is a group that shares certain characteristics with the racist. The racist seldom speaks of the great myriad of basic human similarities, but instead the differences are emphasized to a high degree as to draw distinction and justify intolerance and oppression.

Institutional racism is the use of power and authority of a dominant group, working through the social structures of society, to enforce prejudices and to prevent the subjugated group from gaining access to public services such as good schools, effective health care, decent housing, and equal opportunity, particularly in meaningful employment.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point

is to change it. Karl Marx

DSA presents itself as a democratic, socialist, feminist, and anti-racist organization. Since its founding in 1982, the Anti Racism Commission of DSA has defined itself as pursuing an anti-racism agenda. This agenda includes participating in the dialogue and intellectual efforts of DSA to advocate for a pluralist, anti-racist society and to advance the democratic socialist project within this society.

Racism has produced a tortuous history in the U.S. intellectual community even among socialists and progressives. Socialism has often had a troubled relationship with anti racism struggles. Marxism has contributed significantly to the understanding of social and economic relationships, but has proven inadequate to explain the origin, development and institutional role of racism in our society. ( See Toward a Socialist's Theory of Racism, Cornel West)

Since our 1983 publication of Third World Socialist, we have defined the anti racism project beyond the white-black paradigm to include a multi-polar understanding of the role of race and the connected role of class oppression in the US society. While the issue of African American slavery and oppression is central and important, to only focus on Black-White issues is to ignore the objective reality of U.S. race relations.

In 1985 the organization adopted this language in its priorities document, " In our society there are few problems more urgent than the effects of racism and sexism. While rooted in the history of slavery, invasions, and the early development of the Americas, racism has remained a central characteristic of modern capitalism. Racism and sexism are brutal and oppressive system of institutions and ideologies which we must be committed to resisting as a fundamental part of the struggle for new economic relationships."

In 2001, DSA adopted a new political priorities document which stated that, "The politics of DSA will be guided by a demand for social and economic justice for all - - now! In pursuit of justice, multi racial and anti-racism politics shall become a priority in our work. Agendas in our organizations should consistently include the issues of communities of color. This calls for an immediate re-orientation of our practice toward multi racial coalition building. We will consistently look for opportunities to work with activists in communities of color."

As Democratic Socialists we propose to create a multi racial class-based movement for social change. Only a movement with such an anti-racist, pro-justice viewpoint at its core has a possibility of success in the U.S. To build a multi racial movement, we need to have a conversation about race, oppression, class, language, and culture.

Generally people are willing to consider race and class oppression when they see the specific effects of these oppressions on their own lives. We recognize class as a relationship between two or more groups of people who have specific roles and power relationships in the economic system. Business owners and employees are the most obvious examples. The racial stratification of our nation has promoted and extended the class domination. Racial oppression is such an integral part of economic and political domination that the struggle against racism is necessary for all working class progress.

Our movement cannot exclude the white working class from the dialogue about race. And, working class unity is necessary part of any realistic strategy for positive structural change.

Some in the white working class remain influenced by the racist ideology still dominant in the institutions of our society. While rejecting white supremacist ideology, we also need to explore the oppression that these working class whites experience.

First, we choose to briefly deconstruct whiteness. Many have been influenced by the currently popular arguments of identity and white privilege. We acknowledge that white is a socially constructed category with both positive AND negative connotations.

Identities are constructed by the individual defining and interpreting their own experiences and their interactions with others. A person becomes Chicano, or Latino, or White, or Asian American. They learn and accept this identity. And, their identity is potentially constantly changing.

We propose that the same mechanisms that bestow privilege upon those who self-identify as "white" also rob many of the other associations that people of color are forced to use (for positive and negative ends). Being classified as white prevents one from choosing another identity ( e.g., Irish, or progressive) or a combination of identities that more accurately and usefully describes oneself. THIS INCLUDES CLASS IDENTITY. We recognize that many people accept and respond to multiple identities.

Studies of identity have led to a focus on White Privilege. This privilege is substantive, damaging, and we resist it in our work. The white privilege argument, while a useful scholarly endeavor, often does not help much within class based popular movements because , in part, the critique of white privilege has often been misguided and misappropriated to cloud class. Yes, a Black man in Manhattan may encounter a problem getting a cab, even from a Black cab driver. And so would a white person who is obviously homeless. Yes, a Black or Latina college professor may encounter prejudice while shopping in a boutique clothing store- as would a poor white, or working class white woman who entered the store in her work clothes or even the Salvadoran sister who sewed the clothes.

This argument about white privilege, in part because it derived from studies in psychology, is complex and often distorts the issues of class. Most writings, most intellectuals, and certainly the popular media refuse to talk about economic class. There are reasons for this. A black factory worker and a white factory worker have a lot more in common with each other than either has with the CEO, no matter what the color of the CEO. To be accurate, we should really discuss white /upper class privilege, Please read Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickeled and Dimed.: On (Not) Getting By in America. (2001) The subjects in this book are not privileged. They are oppressed. While they do not have major privileges, they do live and work within an economy organized based upon White Supremacy. Some have argued that this delivers privileges, because they are white. But, does not the organization of White Supremacy keep in power the very class which is oppressing working people?

Beyond Diversity: Some allies , good folks, from a liberal persuasion avoid recognition class issues and class oppression by arguing for diversity. They argue that we need to develop a more representative group of teachers, faculty, etc. As socialists, we find diversity to be a weak, timid, corporate, commodified goal. Instead, we seek justice!

Let us suggest what we regard as a more useful response.

Some people learned their anti-racism by going to diversity workshops. Workshops are valuable. Some in a younger generation have learned anti-racism by not learning racism in the first place. This group has learned anti-racism first hand from their advantage of growing up in a less racially stratified society than that of their parents. While frequently not experiencing racism directly, these young people do live and work in a society organized on the basis of White Supremacy. We must recognize this progress as well as the changes in realities of working class life in the United States as important variables in building the anti-racist movement.

Still others learn anti racism by working with social movements. We encourage all to work against racism within popular movements. Within the many struggles for justice we learn anti-racism and unlearn class bias on a practical level.

It helps us to move beyond the white privilege argument by recognizing the difference between guilt and responsibility. The white privilege argument is usually about guilt. (not a very useful emotion). We prefer to deal with responsibility. ie. what are we going to do differently? Focusing on white privilege usually does not build movements, while focusing on anti racism and class solidarity will.

Rather than assign guilt we find it more useful to work in solidarity with people of color in opposition to real oppression and in favor of real change. The important task is to do something about oppression and White Supremacy. We recognize that we are each either sustaining the current social order-including its racial injustice and white/upper class privilege, or we are engaged in resisting this social order. We choose to resist. The goal of the Anti Racism Commission of DSA is to help build a movement for social justice. We are not satisfied with calls for diversity, instead we demand Justice NOW!

WE MUST BUILD MOVEMENTS.

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass.

Our goal is to build a movement to change the nation. To do this, we need unity- - unity with justice.

Socialists point out that one of our difficulties in seeing class in our society is that we look at poverty (class) and we see race. We racialize class. As a consequence we seldom accurately see race or poverty or class oppression.

Lets talk about the working class. If we are going to do class politics, we need to look at our own attitudes toward both race and class. Class refers to the economic and social differences between groups in our society. (poor, working class, middle and upper class). As socialists we recognize the working class as a potential agent for change. The U.S. has a multi racial working class. Workers of color make up the majority of workers in many cities and industries. And whites of the working class make up at least 40% of the potential voters in the nation.

Working class politics is most frequently expressed in the organizing efforts of labor unions. U. S. unions have historically been divided over racism. Some have perpetuated racism and discrimination and social inequality and others fight against racism. Left organizations have a similar history. Overcoming the divisions of race is central to our struggle in building a progressive working class majority. Are we going to support racism, and divisions, or are we going to build a unified social movement to change this society?

At present the working class all over the world is losing ground. If you are interested in doing something enduringly effective about this -- working to reverse this trend and moving forward -- then please join us.

Our experience tells us that many in the working class are ready for an alternative. They are looking for something beyond the choice between Republicans and Democrats. We believe that that alternative is socialism and a socialist analysis. African Americans, Latino, Native Americans, Asians, and Anglos in the working class are ready for socialism because they think it is wrong for some people to live in mansions while others live in public housing that looks like a war zone. We think it is wrong for some people to live in luxury while others cannot adequately feed their children. We do not accept a social order in which one in five children live in poverty and the U.S. has one of the highest infant death rates in the modern world. We do not accept a social order in which one group has quality schools in safe neighborhoods, and the working poor have inadequate and unsafe schools. We do not accept a world economic system where over 1 billion are without safe water, and 149 million children are malnourished.

Only a vigorously committed multi racial movement with multi racial leadership -- and the vision of full socio-economic equality -- can organize the necessary power and carry it through to the full development of the genuinely democratic, egalitarian society. That is the kind of movement that will be strong, enduring, vital -- and successful. We invite you to join us.

A working paper of the Anti Racism Commission of DSA. 2002. Suggestions are welcome.

Chief Oren Lyons [Onondaga] presenting the statement of the Grand Council of

the Iroquois to the United States Government, 1973:

"We have not asked you to give up your religions for ours. We have not

asked you to give up your ways of life for ours. We have not asked you to

give up your government for ours. We have not asked you to give up your

territories. Why can you not accord us with the same respect? For your

children learn from watching their elders, and if you want your children to

do what is right, then it is up to you to set the example. That is all we

have to say at this moment. Oneh."

A working paper of the Anti Racism Commission of Democratic Socialists of America.

2002

Suggestions welcome

Desription of the end of the Latino Commission/anti racism

2007 In response to the declining state of affairs within DSA , the Anti Racism commission has decided to operate as more as a network and less as an organizations. The primary functions of the network would be to share information across movements, organizations, and regions., to continue ideological discussions such as on the nature of imperialism, and to provide a vehicle for engaging and recruiting people of color to democratic socialism as an ideology, not necessarily to a single organization.

Assumptions:

many people in our society are not joining formal organizations.
Our prior strategy was based upon building a membership base within DSA.
It is important to set up a system of intercommunications and interaction between activists across progressive organizations and encourage them to work cooperatively toward broad common goals.
It is important to reach out to new people of color who are not members of DSA or other progressive organizations.
Many people are members of informal and latent networks. We need to identify these links.
At this time in the U.S. political scene, it is more important to develop and to spread progressive ideas than to try to get people to join a specific socialist organization.

2006

Positives of electoral work. Your essential task is to encourage people to participate in elections. This is a practical assertion that politics matter. That the political can shape, drive the economic. This idea is essential to our long range task and we need millions who believe it based upon their experiences. Electoral work opens the door to discussing this basic idea. If we are well informed and take a pro immigrant, pro labor view, we can advocate for this position in our work. It is a small but vital opening. For example, I have worked for decades with the Sacramento Central labor council voter work. In my union the vast majority do not want to take an active political role, and they do not want their union taking an active role. In my work I am saying loud and clearly that unions need to be political to survive. At the Labor Council we have had some major conflicts. For example, in 1996 Labor wanted to work on Prop. 186 (Single Payer Health ) It lost . I and others wanted to also work on Prop. 187 anti anti immigrant. We debated and fought it out in the labor council. That is we argued and advanced a pro immigrant agen! da. ( an d lost that election also). There have been a number of cases like this where we lefties brought racial and immigrant issues to the table through electoral work. And, slowly, the AFL-CIO has changed. This work is well documented in some important histories on how the AFL-CIO changed its positions on immigration. They did not change because some one wrote articles in magazines read by a handful. they changed because people organized to change the policies, step by step. In California, and several other states, we have the opportunity to work on propositions. Although precarious, it is not our decision. This allows us to do political work on an issue; immigration, affirmative action, bilingual education, minimum wage, health care, without having to work too closely with a problematic candidate. WE can do our work, gain our ground, without being tied to a candidate. ( Negative; We often lose. the Right wing has used the intiatives for their benefit) Major issues will eventually be settled at the ballot box, such as the war. I am dedicated to the anti war efforts. (And I worked in the solidarity and anti war efforts about Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua). Politicians will withdraw from each specific imperial effort when the political opposition, including electoral work, gets strong enough to force the change. Look at what Moveon and PDA, etc. are doing. If we only write letters and put on bumper stickers, not much changes. This role for electoral work is well recognized in UFPJ. ( Not so in ANSWER)

The Obama campaign

Jan. 2008.

Should Barack Obama win the nomination, race and racism will be on the agenda. Important in this effort will be to divide the stone cold racists from those in the majority communities who are not actively participating in oppression but who deny the importance of racism in our society.

As a candidate he represents a new generation of Black leaders, yes, a post Civil Rights generation. Barack is skilled at organizing and reaching out to new people. And his campaign will take us this one step forward.

I am confident that another aspect of racism will be strong in the November election- the anti immigration efforts. If you listen to Lou Dobbs, or read the newspapers, you can see the extensive preparation already being prepared by the Republicans to run an anti immigrant campaign. The Republicans will seek to consolidate their long use of race as a wedge issue by running an anti immigrant effort. They will claim they are not opposed to immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But, they will mobilize a racist vote. We on the left will need to prepare for a difficult anti immigrant campaign with which ever Democrat candidate who emerges.

The campaign began with a focus on the anti war sentiment in the country, organized a youth vote, and grew into a well financed campaign of over 3 million participants.

There are many campaign innovations to be studied, but paramount ones include the community organizing training and focus, the systematic efforts to include rather than exclude volunteers, and the use of technology both for fundraising and for organizing. In spite of the divisions in organized labor during the primaries, the two sides funded and mobilized a significant pro Obama effort in the general election.

DSA and the left.

As a consequence, the size, strength, organizational abilities of DSA remains essentially what it was prior to the Obama campaign and similar to prior analyses. Not much changed.

Our neighborhood of political work has changed.

The above brief review of organizations in our neighborhood illustrates different approaches to organizing in an electoral season and allows us to evaluate competing strategies for organizing.

My history of blogging.

My first blog began in about 2004, named Choosing Democracy., the same as the book which I wrote. This blog is designed with a specific purpose. It is to intervene in the debates on schooling and on democracy in general. I keep it relatively free of left jargon. One of my purposes is to be able to critique the press for its failures in covering school reform. To make the blog accessible, I need to keep out the left rhetoric.

The second blog in 2004, http://www.antiracismdsa.blogspot.com. This blog was to replace the newsletter Our Struggle which I had produced for some 23 years. It was the newsletter of the Anti Racism commission and the Latino Commission of DSA. The decline of these commissions made a hard copy newsletter less useful.

After the 2007 convention of the DSA, a group of us decided to create a blog on labor issues. Labor has long been an important topic, but under organized in DSA. Stuart Elliot is the lead moderator of this blog and I participate as a committee member.

http://talkingunion.worpress.com

Also following the 2007 convention I joined the editorial committee of Democratic Left, a hard copy small journal of DSA.

Notes on being Irish in America. Aug. 2008

I again returned to interest in Ireland’s history after reading Frank McCort’s book, Angela’s Ashes.

I am finishing reading Tom Hayden’s Irish on the Inside: In search of the Soul of the Irish in America.

In response, I want to begin to record what being Irish means to mean.

I was born in Waterloo, Iowa of a mother who was Irish American and a father who was Scots-Irish.

My family experiences were drawn mostly from my mother’s side. There were few members of my father’s family in the region.

My mothers family are significant. I have researched my family from that side and visited Ireland.

My mother’s family were Murrays. My grandmother was an Lawrence and an O’Rourke. They are descendents of immigrants from Roscommon, Ireland.

Thomas Murray was born in 1834 in county Roscommon. He came to the U.S, in 1851 (at age 17). He lived in New Jersey for two years, and married Mary Byrne ( age 17) of Carrowkeel, Elphin, in County Roscommon. They moved to Pennsylvania, and then on to Illinois. They moved to Iowa in 1869.

I assume that they were immigrants in response to the great hunger.

Most of the migrants from Ireland were rural farming people. They Great Hunger killed one fourth of the people on the Ireland, and another fourth fled to all parts of of the world including the U.S. As recorded in many places, the starvation was the result of British colonialism and the enclosure of the good lands. Ireland produced sufficient food to feed its people throughout the Hunger. But, food was horded and shipped to England to pay the gambling debts of the over lords – Normans. The Irish were left to starve- and they did.

Famines re-occurred in 1854-55 and continued in Ireland well into the 1870’s. My own family from Roscommon was from one of the hard hit areas of famine. There presently is a museum to the Great Hunger in Roscommon, one of the few in the world. We need to understand that this was the poorer, Irish speaking parts of the country. Over 90% of the deaths came from these areas, as did over 70% of those who emigrated to places such as Canada and the U.S. (Dhomhnaill, 1997)

The Hunger produced a trauma in the Irish immigrant community. Having watched their sisters, brothers, and family dying, left the Irish community silenced, in mourning. There was little discussion of the Hunger.

From Illinois, the Murrays moved to Lawler, Iowa. Near Waucoma. They helped to create a small, Irish farming community. Irish immigrants and family members came to Lawler from various routes including arriving from Minnessota and Ohio. This community stayed together and overwhelmingly Irish until World War II and was the community of my family. My mother, my uncles and my grandparents were the first generation to leave an all Irish farming community. Irish culture- as developed in the U.S, was central to their lives.

My grandmothers side of the family, the Lawrences, were from Derry and were Presbyterians. I have no record of their travels, but by the time my grandmother Sadie Lawrence was raising me, she was a devout Catholic.

My parents and grandparents left the small farming communities to come to Waterloo to work in the John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works and other supporting factories.

I was born on Feb. 23, 1941, the second son of Lois Murray- Campbell and Edd H. Campbell. At birth and for the next 10 years I lived with my parents in the home of my maternal grandparents, Frank and Sadie (Lawrence) Murray. My father worked in John Deere’s and my mother worked in a local factory Chamberlain’s.

Given my parents work, I was significantly reared by my grandparents , particularly my grandmother Sadie Murray.

My grandparents had me baptized in the Catholic church – which in Waterloo was significantly Irish. I was reared in an extended family of Irish relatives. My aunts, and particularly my Uncle Hugh Francis Murray was active in guiding me in my early years.

I learned Irish legends , Irish customs, and Irish family unity from my Murray family.

What does it mean to me to be Irish?

I learned more than a little rebelliousness. I have often found myself on the side of the oppressed. My Irishness is closely related to Catholic church teachings.

I have spent my life in labor unions. Labor solidarity is a basic Irish pattern. I learned the pro-labor positions from both sides of my family, both Irish and Scots-Irish. I joined unions, served as union leaders, and union delegates, helped to found a union, and worked long hours in support of other unions, notably the United Farmworkers of America.

Being Irish has taught me to value family and to support my family. This, of course, is both Irish and Catholic.

In another section of this history you can read of the walk out strike at Deeres when I worked there. My Irish heritage taught me, that when you face a fight you don’t have to walk away. Many times I have faced major conflicts. At times, clearly my side was going to lose. But, as I see my Irish heritage, it taught me to face tough fights directly. If the fight is tough- you take your hits. You stand and fight. Even if you won’t win this time, you take your shots. And, if you lose, at least your hurt your opponent enough that they will be careful before coming back at you.

My strongest guide in my early years was my mother, Lois Murray Campbell. She taught me how to live and how to love. Her support was deep and supportive at all times. Life in our home was surrounded by Irish culture, including my grandfathers frequent visits.

When my wife first talked with my mother, she commented that she had a brogue.

I smiled and said she did not- you must be mistaken. You see the way my mother talked, and my grandfather, and the family, that was just normal, that wasn’t a brogue. But, when heard from outside, it was an Irish brogue.

Being Catholic was not very important to me from age 14 until about 30. When I returned to the Church, I was pleased to rejoin a church included liberation theology and the struggles for justice in Latin America.

I am proud of my Irish heritage, and proud of the San Patricio brigade which sided with Mexico against the U.S. invasion.

Irish workers have been important in the struggles for union justice in the U.S.

I was able to write a brief intro to Irish American history in my recent books,

Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. ( 1994,2004).

The Molly Maguires were not crazy radicals, they were simply Irish workers fighting back.

Mother Jones,

Thomas Murray. Born Roscommon, Ireland. 1834---- Married Mary Byrne in New Jersey.

Son, Andrew Murray, Born Warren Illinois, 1855.

Son, Frank Murray, born. July 13, 1891. Lawler Iowa.

Daughter. Lois Murray (Campbell)

Son. Duane Campbell. Born, Feb.23,1941. Waterloo, Iowa.

Lessons. We learn lessons for activism by analyzing specific movements in specific political spectrums. Large generalizations usually do not work. Decisions must be made based on the concrete, real conditions of the project.

Reflections upon the United Farmworkers in California history. a book review

Bardacke – draft- two

A dissident’s view of the rise and the fall of the United Farmworkers union.

Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (2011, Verso) is the view of a well informed observer who worked in the lettuce fields near Salinas for over a decade and then spent another 25 years teaching English to farm workers in the Watsonville area. The conflicting views on the growth and decline of the UFW in the book offer important points of history and of reflection for the current issues of unions working with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Trampling Out the Vintage, provides several insights not previously developed in well informed books on the UFW including important differences between grape workers and workers in row crops such as lettuce; the length of time workers were in the UFW, the more settled family nature of grape workers, the strength of each type of ranch committees, the leadership of ranch crews ( and thus the potential differences in creating democratic accountability), and the differing histories of worker militancy in the crops. The author correctly argues that each of these led to somewhat different organizing environment in building the union. He also details problems of administrative mismanagement in the hiring halls in the grape areas and alleged mismanagement of organizing within the union sponsored health care insurance and clinic systems.

Based upon his own experiences and the histories of workers in the Salinas valley, Bardacke makes the case well that farm workers- not Cesar Chavez – created the union. They built their union on a long history of previous collective work stoppages and strikes. The union was created on the ground in Salinas, Watsonville, and surrounding towns- not in La Paz. The author reveals his strong viewpoint in the title apparently referring to Chavez “Trampling out the Vintage” where a union had been created.

In 1962 Cesar Chavez made the decision to organize the settled mostly Mexican American workforce in and around Delano - a grape growing region in California’s Central Valley. Based upon his prior work with CSO and his training by Fred Ross, he decided to organize entire families into an association, not just the workers into a union. This required, for example, organizing women in families and women as workers. Most of the working families had settled in the area, they had roots, they stayed year around rather than migrate from place to place. Chavez saw this population as potential for building a permanent organization for power.

The decision to focus in Delano on semi permanent grape workers was a decision to not focus on the recently arrived Mexican workers in the vegetables and row crops – those who Bardacke worked among in the Salinas valley. Bardacke criticizes this decision. Chavez and Huerta set out to organize the more family established Mexican Americans rather than the more migrant Mexican workers in the vegetable and row crops.

Several of the central arguments of the book are well established elsewhere- labor writer Steve Early asserts in a review of Randy Shaw’s book, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21^st. Century,

Chavez was not accountable to anyone within the UFW. Rank-and-file critics of his charismatic leadership were purged, then black-listed, and driven from the fields in truly disgraceful fashion.

Over time, Chávez further stifled "creative internal deliberation" by replacing "experienced UFW leaders with a new, younger cadre, for whom loyalty was the essential qualification,” Shaw reports. The result was a dysfunctional personality cult. (Steve Early, http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/a-union-of-their-dreams-becomes-a-nightmarehas-ufw-history-been-replayed-in-seiu/)

Part of the problem in responding to Trampling Out the Vintage, is that supporters of the Farmworkers Movement have spent so much time and energy defending the UFW and its members from growers, from capitalists, and from politicians. Recall that the UFW’s major growth occurred while Ronald Reagan was governor of California. In this difficult time it was difficult to step back to recognize the problems internal to the union as described in the Bardacke book. He describes real issues of developing workers control of their own union, of lack of democratic leadership, problems of personalism of the leader Chavez.

Berdacke provides details of authoritarian control of the union and the Executive Board as a result of individual psychological manifestations of Cesar Chavez’ power. For evidence of this abuse and failure Bardacke , like Miriam Pawell before him, uses the recorded meetings of the UFW Executive Board.

The Bardacke claims are somewhat supported by other sources. Marshall Ganz in his excellent book, Why David Sometimes Wins; Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, (2009) says, “Between 1977 and 1981, Chavez undid the UFW’s strategic capacity. The changes irrevocably altered the character of the UFW leadership. Instead of a diverse team with both strong and weak ties to multiple constituencies, it became a narrow circle of people with strong ties, often Chavez family members or dependents.” ( p.247)

We can agree that a consolidation of power occurred without agreeing to the psychological interpretation Bardacke gives for why this consolidation was successful.

The author tells the stories well of centralizing recognition and power in the person of Cesar Chavez. As always, the author selects what to tell. His selections in deciding what to say about 1962 lead to his conclusions about what happened in 1984. If you are going to create a historical record to argue your viewpoint, you need to present your evidence in the context of the historical period. In most cases Bardacke does this. At times, however, he argues for what could have been rather than what actually existed. For example, he tells the story of Henry Anderson’s focus in the 1962 on building local leadership and union locals. He uses this to claim that centralized power got out of hand in the nascent farm worker movement. That is he is telling the story backward after arriving at his conclusions. There is nothing wrong with reasoning from history, but it does make the issue of union democracy or lacks of democracy seem more determined that it necessarily was.

The author could have told other stories of other events to emphasize a different conclusion. For example the author makes the case that Chavez and Huerta, among others, had a strong critique of how many unions were operating such as focusing only on the worker and not on the family; Mexican American workers always led by Anglo leaders, etc. That is an alternative perspective on worker participation that is not developed in Trampling Out the Vintage.

Among the more contested issues raised by Bardacke is his view of the UFW’s relationships with undocumented workers in 1975 period, the so called “Wet Line. Bardacke makes the case that the UFW used violence and terror against “Wet Backs.” This is the same argument being made today by various militia groups, Tea Party advocates and posted on Wikipedia.

It is difficult today to determined what actually happened in the dessert near Yuma Arizona in 1975. Was there violence? How much violence? Who was hurt? Barnacle takes one side, and the official UFW histories say the union was stopping strike breakers- who happened to be undocumented.

Having worked up close with the issue of immigration for decades I have a different view. The one memo cited by Bardacke as evidence, a confidential one, is not definitive proof that violence was union policy. ( P.492) Note, the other memo on the same page takes the opposite position. We can agree that Chavez made some high handed, perhaps opportunistic mistakes. Bardacke reports the worst-case reports of violence, knifings, even murder in Arizona. He admits that these charges cannot be independently verified.

Rather than take Bardacke’s view on the role of the Wet Line, I will prefer the Bert Corona description of differences on the subject. Bert was a friend of mine. We worked together on immigration issues. Bert was a leading voice on immigration issues and organized undocumented workers in the Hemandad Mexicana. Although critical of the UFW policy, Bert never took the highly destructive view that Bardacke adopts. There were issues, disputes, and errors were made. Basically, the UFW was losing the strike as undocumented workers crossing into the U.S replaced strikers. Lets not romanticize this issue. They were workers crossing a picket line and a border to go to work in struck fields. They knew little or nothing about neither the UFW nor the long, violent, bitter and costly strike they were breaking. They were not a part of a political movement for justice nor equality.

Ultimately in 1975 the UFW convention took a formal position to organize the undocumented and to allow them to vote in elections as a part of the California Agricultural Relations Act. That is, the official UFW position on the undocumented. Note here. I am not taking a position on Bardacke’s second title for the book, Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. Readers should consider this assertion with care.

Bardacke uses records of who won union representation elections and where to argue that the pro undocumented position was the better position, that strike breakers should have been reasoned with and treated with respect. The UFW lost elections to Teamsters in the grape fields of Delano but split the vote in Salinas. Bardacke argues that the UFW won elections in the Salinas Valley because they had supported successful strikes in Salinas, had not imposed troublesome hiring halls, and had not campaigned against undocumented workers.

In addition to pages of fascinating local histories on various campaigns and strikes, Trampling Out the Vintagemakes a major contribution in arguing that the issues that defeated the UFW in elections and in the fields included the anti democratic structures of the UFW created and honed by Cesar Chavez himself, along with no established locals and the divisions that grew up between the staff, veteran union members and new workers.

In the midst of several life and death struggles over power against corporate agriculture and the political power of the state, the UFW executive committee did not develop democratic union structures. They often responded to conspiracies with conspiracies weakening the union and preventing it from organizing.

The author spends a great deal of time on the purges of UFW activists, organizers, and volunteers in 1977 -1981 period. While often presented as anti communist decisions by Chavez, many of the dismissals were for lack of loyalty to Chavez and his decisions as the final arbiter of all issues in the union. Some of the “purges” were based upon left politics, and some of the dismissals were based upon other differences, including differing views of the best direction for the union. There were dismissals and staff leavings for a variety of reasons. Some of the most significant dismissals were not about left nor right, but were about issues of both policy differences and personal loyalties.

In my view Bardacke under analyzes the nature of the racial state and the interaction of racial and economic oppression in the fields of California and in the U.S. . While he makes some brief references to a role of Chicano or Mexican nationalism within the UFW, these are not analyzed in depth. Specific incidents of police and political repression, are treated as abuses of power rather than a part of a racially constructed system of oppression. After all, the previous attempts to organize farm workers were broken with violence along racial lines.

The role of racism, and the individual reactions to systemic structural racial oppression are complex and vary in part based upon the differences in experiences of the participants. As the Chicano movement argued at its core- the experiences of U.S. born and reared Mexican Americans and Chicanos were different than the experiences and the perceptions of racism of Mexican immigrant, both legal and illegal. There are a diversity of racisms and diversity in the manner in which workers learn to respond to oppression. Chicanos and Mexican Americans grew up, were educated, and worked in an internalized colony. Their schools, their unions, and their political experiences were structured along racialized lines. They learned colonized structures. Bardacke recognizes this structural oppression in the lives of several UFW leaders including specific descriptions of the early lives of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The struggle of the UFW and the Chicano Movement broke this colonial legacy. The breaking of the colonized legacy changed the political landscape of much of the nation. Today Mexican American, and Latino political and union leadership is common in our major cities and in several industries.

Mexican migrants had a very difficult life and an oppressive one party state at home, but usually did not suffer this internalized colonialism. Bardacke reports on these differences in his descriptions of the early lives of Mario Bustamante, Hermilo Mojica, Marcos Munoz and others. Their struggle in the fields was initially primarily a worker’s struggle of for economic justice.

As an example of the importance of this issue, Bardacke reports on the sharp differences in views those who thought that the struggles in Salinas could be won by strikes and work stoppages (paros) and the Chavez, Huerta, Executive Board position to depend more upon building a boycott. These differences led to sharp divisions in the union. The two groups had learned different lessons from their different experiences in the fields. The Chavez, Huerta group insisted upon the strength of the boycott. That is what their experiences had taught them. The Mario Bustamante, Mojica, side, and author Bardacke, wanted to push for extensive strikes and work stoppages, perhaps a general strike, including preventing strikebreakers from harvesting enough crops. This direct workplace action approach is what their experience had taught them. The two groups of union activists had learned different lessons from their different experiences of confronting corporate –grower and racist power.

Marshall Ganz in Why David Sometimes Wins, does a better job than Bardacke of describing some of the racial fault lines of farm worker organizing. Ganz was the Director of Organizing of the UFW in Salinas and a long time member of the UFW Executive Board. He notes that the unions were organized along ethnic lines-, as were the growers and the political power of dominant political forces. ( Ganz P.161) Since the organizations were structured along racial, ethnic and lines, it is peculiar then to have Bardacke describe conflicts between the UFW and its opponents as if they were primarily economic in nature. Barnacle discusses the volatile issues of racism as essentially about Chavez’s liberal supporters – by which he means largely White or Anglo supporters.

As the author chronicles, Chavez knew well some of the failings of unions in the 1960’s including the problems of a growing internal bureaucracy, but the UF W was not able to create a viable democratic alternative. Chavez’ own history and personality structure, and his almost paranoid manipulation and dismissal of activists occurred in part because the Executive Board was unable to free itself from the dynamics of a group under constant siege.

Marshall Ganz argues that Chavez de constructed the organizational strength of the UFW in the 1979 -1981 period in an effort to keep personal control of the union. (Ganz, p. 247) Today the UFW has about 5,000 members and few contracts. The lack of unions in the fields, and the declining strengths of unions in our society indicate that we do not yet know how to build a progressive union movement. These problems are overwhelming- even more so when added to the problems of trying to build a union for poor people in a racialized state such as rural California in the 1970’s- 1990’s.

The UFW was overwhelmed by the negative forces against it, including capitalists, growers, racist cops and politicians, liberal Democrats, union bureaucrats, and more. Union democracy did not grow and anti democratic forces flourished. The UFW leadership failed to build a competent administrative structure to deal with union contracts, and failed to expand the organizing structure and union culture rapidly enough to bring in the thousands of new farm worker members to create an active, democratic union life.

The failure to gain strength is not surprising. Compare the period of decline of 1977-1986 in the UFW to the complex battles of the Reuther Brothers to gain control and to keep control of the United Auto Workers, including the UAW’s relationship with the AFL-CIO. (1949- 1970). The UAW went from 1.5 million members in 1979 to 390,000 in 2010, and the United Steelworkers and other unions suffered similar declines. Is it any wonder that the smaller, less established, less well funded UFW suffered dramatic declines in this anti union era from the racial oppression and the brutal assault on the union in the fields of Texas, Arizona and California?

Shorthand for this debate is how do working people combine the strengths of civil rights movements with the institutionalization of unions? How does organizing social movements differ from organizing in a union? What can organizers in each learn from one another?

Did the UFW decline? Yes. Did farm workers lose the substantial gains in wages and working conditions they had won in the 1970’s- absolutely. How do unions build a movement when undocumented workers can replace strikers? This issue has continued to divide and defeat unions in the U.S.

We know that social movements emerge, are organized, grow and then are institutionalized – or they decline. Are there some iron laws of bureaucracy for unions that grow out of social movements?

Few unions have been able to create democratic internal culture. Few social movements have been able to maintain their momentum for more than a decade and they leave behind little of institutional power except small advocacy groups. Where are the examples of unions building a democratic process that fights for their jobs? Certainly it was not the rival Teamsters Union in the fields of California.

How do we build an activist, democratic union with democratic leadership and locals? How do we build a union that contributes to the liberation of a people? How do we build a union that educates its members on the politics of their own struggle and develops and promotes its members to become its future leadership?

Trampling out the Vintage gives one writers view of how the UFW effort failed, but we have yet to learn how create a powerful democratic organizational vehicle. Bardacke, and other left critics of the UFW experience argue that the destruction of the UFW was a result of the personal control of Chavez and his allies and their failure to build a democratic union. Well, Cesar Chavez has now been dead for over 17 years. Why has no vital, democratic union grown up in the fields to continue the effort to build a union for some of the most exploited workers in the U.S.?

There are numerous other important issues raised in this valuable history including the role of Catholicism and Catholic symbols, the problems of working with Jerry Brown and the Democratic Party, and much more not considered in this review.

I recommend reading this book in conjunction with other sources on the UFW including Marshal Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, and the extensive sources available on the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project http://www.farmworkermovement.us/

1. “Bert Corona, Labor Radical.” Socialists Review. 1989, P. 51. by Duane Campbell, See also. Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields; Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21^st. Century. P. 196.

My bio is relevant to this post.

I worked on with the UFW as a volunteer from 1972-1976 in Sacramento. After leaving working with the UFW, I went on to work on immigrants rights efforts with Bert Corona.

My most recent book is Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. ( 2010).

After 35 years of teaching at a university and union activism, I retired in 2009. Now I am the chair of Sacramento Democratic Socialists of America and the Chair of the Chicano/Mexican American Digital History Project (for the Sacramento region).

Here. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project

This is recorded to provide the reader with some context and some ideas. Clearly the next left will need to develop its own analysis and its own strategies. Tactics and strategies from the 60’s and 70’s will not work. Hopefully this record will provide a vehicle to consider some important issues and to make your own decisions.

Best of luck.

Carry it on.

2012.

What do I wish to be remembered for?

I am fortunate to have participated in, created, and seen school change first hand and to have participated in this struggle. I have taught classes from 7-12 and at the university level.

The Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s produced the Chicana/o middle class and marked advances in education. Before the 60’s inferior schools were accepted by the political class and taken for granted. We struggled to correct this inequality and we improved many of the de facto and de jure injustices. Critically important we prepared generations of new Chicano teachers and Anglo teachers dedicated to improving education for all.

An important victory for Mexican Americans was the change in the mindset of students. Through struggle, and with teachers that believed in them, they came to believe that they could and should pursue a higher education.

My life for the last 50 years has been about developing a passion for democracy and fears for democracy’s future. We know that democracy is learned, not inherited. Each new generation must learn it again.

We know that educational success is closely tied to economic opportunity. How we structure our schools is vital to creating and recreating a democratic society. Education and public schooling are vital to democratic societies.

Understanding and developing a public responsibility to ourselves, to our communities, and to our society is essential. Teachers perform a central role in the struggle for justice, for community building – to model critical thinking and to guide students toward self confidence and democratic decision making.

I was fortunate to have a position within a community of scholars who worked together to create the Department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at California State U-Sacramento. I wasn’t just fortunate. I and others created this positive environment where we could pursue the “long march through the institutions”. The collective efforts and the integrity of this group sustained and guided me to resist the individualism of many university departments.

I was particularly fortunate to have excellent students many of whom remain my friends today. They taught me so much. Beginning with the Mexican American Education Project (1969-1973) and culminating with the Department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education, we prepared thousands of new teachers and educational leaders who would have been sorted out under the prior Anglo dominated system. These graduates have gone on to teach and to positively influence thousands more students. The department was abolished in 2012 ending one chapter in the continuing struggle for educational justice.

Change toward social justice almost always occurs as a collective effort, not an individual effort. Individual faculty remain in the College, but the collective effort has been terminated.

Politics. 2012.

Bernie Sanders argues, lets fight for a progressive agenda. O.K. but what is the distinct role of a socialist organization?

I think that we have two basic tasks as socialists.

One is to rescue socialism from its crisis and decline and to bring it into the current debates as a renewed force.

This would include internal education and skill training. And, it includes working closely with working class struggles ( unions and others such as workers’ centers) to learn from them. A good example would be the recent teachers’ strike in Chicago. Socialists need to understand the neoliberal agenda in public education. Frankly, having spent 40 years in the field and publishing two blogs on the topic, I do not see significant socialist comprehension of the basic issues. If you wish to see examples of the debate go to www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com. This is one of several dividing lines in our society. We need to develop beyond slogans and solidarity to policy alternatives and strategic alternatives that shape the current debate and provide points of departure for a socialist future.

Second, we- along with other left forces- need to become a vehicle for renewing socialism and making it a relevant part of everyday struggles. If indeed socialism is a vehicle for building a democratic future, we need to share this secret with the rest of the society. Although there has been a positive shift in public perception of socialism, particularly among those under 40, the left needs to grow beyond its current marginal status.

I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen any serious discussion within DSA of how we move from less than 1% of the public, to influence with 20-30% of the public.

If you would like to see what that looks like in Spain, go here

Faced with Police Violence, Thousands return to Spanish Parliament,

This would be a continuation of the discussion, why in the face of the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930’s, has the U.S. public turned right instead of left ?

Of course part of the response is because we have a political duopoly of parties, but then, what do we do about that?

Duane Campbell

Politics. 2014.

Democracy is essential to socialism. You can't have socialism without democracy. But, socialists are not the only people who advocate for democracy. We have to work with others who support democracy, but are not socialists, in order to create a more complete democracy. And, it appears that controlling corporate capitalism is essential to preserving our democracy. See Wollin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the specter of inverted Totalitarianism.

I have been in several organizations and movements. Some had capable leaders, some dedicated to dispersed or shared leadership and consensus. Ultimately, each of these organizations and movements declined due in significant part to individual and personal issues ( divorce, sex, death, etc) not to failure of leadership.

Change is not always uni directional. Change can go in negative directions.

The campaign to Defeat Trump

Trump and the Left in California Sept. 2016.

Duane Campbell

There is an argument being made in much of the Anglo left in California and around the nation that Trump may be dangerous, but he will be defeated in California. So, we don't have to organize and mobilize to defeat him here.

This is the argument of that makes sense to some on the white left. As before, they have failed to recognize the reality of the terrorism imposed on the Mexican and immigrant communities by Trump's proposals and the Trump campaign. And, they fail to recognize that they can not win their various projects and proposals without the support and growth of the Latino vote.

While Trump may well be defeated at the ballot box, Trumpism-- the organization and mobilization of an anti immigrant Right Wing, will grow. Even a modest vote gain by Trump in California will foster the growth of naked racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. This kind of populist right wing White nationalism is what passed Proposition 187 ( and re-elected Peter Wilson), passed Proposition 209, and similar right wing mobilization led to the deportation of over a one million Mexicans ( including U.S. Citizens) in 1932, and over one million Mexican workers in 1952.

As in the case of California proposition 187, a surge of right wing voters will doom all efforts on immigration reform for at least a decade.

None of the favored progressive initiatives can be passed without the active participation of Latino voters. Together we can build a better society.

Divided- we all loose.

More to follow.

You can find acknowledgements to my many guides, mentors and friends in the Acknowledgments section of my most recent book.

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