https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXxshEn0k6Q
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
TENANT ORGANIZERS PROTEST THE RE-OPENING OF HOUSING COURT
https://popularresistance.org/tenant-organizers-protest-the-re-opening-of-housing-court/
New York City – Eviction proceedings resumed Monday at the NYC Housing Courts. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been unable to cover rent due to the pandemic and the economic crisis it has caused. Members of a variety of tenants’ organizations — including Crown Heights Tenant Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, Cosecha, DSA Housing Working Group, Met Council on Housing and and the PSL — rallied at Brooklyn Housing Court calling for cancellation of the rents.
Although the demonstrators tried to enter both Brooklyn Housing Court and Brooklyn Borough Hall, they were barred from doing so by a phalanx of police officers.
“Direct action is the only thing we’ve seen that does anything. Getting arrested, making a scene, is apparently the only thing that moves our legislators so in terms of the moratorium, it was absolutely essential. Unfortunately, in terms of providing any sort of relief, the state legislature hasn’t done anything for us,” said Esteban Giron, an organizer with Crown Heights Tenant Union who left a copy of legislation that would cancel rent on the door of Brooklyn Borough Hall.
They decried the proposed legislation of Brian Kavanagh, the chair of the Senate Housing Committee, who has devised a bill that would distribute the $1.3 billion in federal funding doled out to the State for rent relief. It would work very much like the rent relief program that was rolled out over the summer. Only 40% of $100,000,000 allotted for this program was distributed to tenants. Sixteen percent of tenants who applied for relief were accepted, some of whom received $100 or $200 checks.
While housing activists accuse Kavanagh’s bill of being a bill for the landlords, housing activists widely support a bill co-sponsored by State Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Yuh Line Niou that would cancel rent and end mortgage payments.
“We want rent cancellation for all tenants. We want mortgage relief for homeowners. We want relief for small landlords. We do not want relief for Blackstone. We do not want relief for Pinnacle. We do not want relief for Akelius. And we do not want relief for the banks. The working people of New York, that’s who we want relief for. That’s what this [bill] does,” said Esteban Giron to the demonstrators, clutching the Salazar/Niou bill in his hand before putting it on the door of Borough Hall.
A note to our readers: Although the housing court has reopened, tenants can file hardship forms through May 1st and likely won’t have to pay rent until then. You can access the form here.
DIGITAL COLONIALISM: THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
By Michael Kwet, ROAR Magazine.
March 6, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/digital-colonialism-the-evolution-of-american-empire/
American “Big Tech” Corporations Are Gaining Massive Profits Through Their Control Over Business, Labor, Social Media And Entertainment In The Global South.
In 2020, billionaires made out like bandits. Jeff Bezos’s personal holdings surged from $113 to $184 billion. Elon Musk briefly eclipsed Bezos, with a net worth rise from $27 billion to over $185 billion.
For the bourgeoisie presiding over “Big Tech” corporations, life is grand.
Yet, while the expanded dominance of these corporations in their domestic markets is the subject of numerous critical analyses, their global reach is a fact seldom discussed, especially by dominant intellectuals in the American empire.
In fact, once we investigate the mechanics and numbers, it becomes apparent that Big Tech is not only global in scope, it is fundamentally colonial in character and dominated by the United States. This phenomenon is called “digital colonialism.”
We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries. Sharp increases in inequality, the rise of state-corporate surveillance and sophisticated police and military technologies are just a few of the consequences of this new world order. The phenomenon may sound new to some, but over the course of the past decades, it has become entrenched in the global status quo. Without a considerably strong counter-power movement, the situation will get much worse.
What Is Digital Colonialism?
Digital colonialism is the use of digital technology for political, economic and social domination of another nation or territory.
Under classic colonialism, Europeans seized and settled foreign land; installed infrastructure like military forts, sea ports and railways; deployed gunboats for economic penetration and military conquest; constructed heavy machinery and exploited labor to extract raw materials; erected panoptic structures to police workers; marshaled the engineers needed for advanced economic exploitation (e.g. chemists for extracting minerals); siphoned out Indigenous knowledge for manufacturing processes; shipped the raw materials back to the mother country for the production of manufactured goods; undermined Global South markets with cheap manufactured goods; perpetuated dependency of peoples and nations in the Global South in an unequal global division of labor; and expanded market, diplomatic and military domination for profit and plunder.
In other words, colonialism depended upon ownership and control of territory and infrastructure, the extraction of labor, knowledge and commodities and the exercise of state power.
This process evolved over centuries, with new technologies added into the mix as they were developed. By the late nineteenth century, submarine cables facilitated telegraphic communications in service of the British empire. New developments in recording, archiving and organizing information were exploited by US military intelligence first used in the conquest of the Philippines.
Today, Eduardo Galeano’s “open veins” of the Global South are the “digital veins” crossing the oceans, wiring up a tech ecosystem owned and controlled by a handful of mostly US-based corporations. Some of the transoceanic fiber-optic cables are fitted with strands owned or leased by the likes of Google and Facebook to further their data extraction and monopolization. Today’s heavy machinery are the cloud server farms dominated by Amazon and Microsoft that are used to store, pool and process big data, proliferating like military bases for US empire. The engineers are the corporate armies of elite programmers with generous salaries of $250,000 or more. The exploited laborers are the people of color extracting the minerals in the Congo and Latin America, the armies of cheap labor annotating artificial intelligence data in China and Africa and the Asian workers suffering from PTSD after cleansing social media platforms of disturbing content. The platforms and spy centers (like the NSA) are the panopticons, and data is the raw material processed for artificial intelligence-based services.
More broadly, digital colonialism is about entrenching an unequal division of labor, where the dominant powers have used their ownership of digital infrastructure, knowledge and their control of the means of computation to keep the South in a situation of permanent dependency. This unequal division of labor has evolved. Economically, manufacturing has moved down the hierarchy of value, displaced by an advanced high-tech economy in which the Big Tech firms are firmly in charge.
The Architecture Of Digital Colonialism
Digital colonialism is rooted in the domination of the “stuff” of the digital world that forms the means of computation — software, hardware and network connectivity.
It includes the platforms acting as gatekeepers, the data extracted by intermediary service providers and the industry standards, as well as private ownership of “intellectual property” and “digital intelligence.” Digital colonialism has become highly integrated with conventional tools of capitalism and authoritarian governance, from labor exploitation, policy capture and economic planning to intelligence services, ruling class hegemony and propaganda.
Looking first at software, we can see a process where code which was once freely and widely shared by programmers became increasingly privatized and subject to copyrights. In 1970s and 80s, the US Congress began strengthening software copyrights. There was a counter-trend to this in the form of “Free and Open Source Software” (FOSS) licenses which granted users the right to use, study, modify and share software. This had inherent benefits for countries in the Global South as it created a “digital commons,” free of corporate control and the drive for profit. Yet, as the Free Software movement spread to the South, it prompted a corporate backlash. Microsoft scorned Peru when its government tried to shift away from Microsoft’s proprietary software. It also tried to prevent African governments from using the GNU/Linux FOSS operating system in government ministries and schools.
Alongside the privatization of software came the rapid centralization of the Internet into the hands of intermediary service providers like Facebook and Google. Crucially, the shift to cloud services nullified the freedoms FOSS licenses had granted to users because the software is executed on the computers of the Big Tech corporations. Corporate clouds dispossess the people of the ability to control their computers. Cloud services provide petabytes of information to corporations, who use the data to train their artificial intelligence systems. AI uses Big Data to “learn” — it requires millions of pictures to recognize, say, the letter “A” in its different fonts and forms. When applied to humans, the sensitive details of peoples’ personal lives become an incredibly valuable resource that tech giants are incessantly trying to extract.
In the South, the majority of the people are essentially stuck with low-level feature phones or smartphones with little data to spare. As a result, many millions of people experience platforms like Facebook as “the internet,” and data about them is consumed by foreign imperialists.
“Feedback effects” of Big Data make the situation worse: those who have more and better data can create the best artificial intelligence services, which attracts more users, which gives them even more data to make the service better and so on. Much like classic colonialism, data has been ingested as raw materials for the imperialist powers, who process the data and manufacture the services back to the global public, which further strengthens their domination and puts everyone else in a subordinate situation of dependency.
Cecilia Rikap, in her forthcoming book, Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered, shows how the US tech giants base their market power on their intellectual monopolies, commanding a complex commodity chain of subordinate firms in order to extract rents and exploit labor. This has given them the ability to accumulate the “know-who” and “know-how” to plan and organize global value chains, as well as to privatize knowledge and expropriate the knowledge commons and public research outputs.
Apple, for example, extracts rents from the IP and branding for its smartphones, and it coordinates production along the commodity chain. The lower level producers, such as the phone assemblers at manufacturing plants hosted by Taiwan-owned Foxconn, the minerals extracted for the batteries in the Congo and the chipmakers supplying processors, are all subordinate to the demands and whims of Apple.
In other words, the tech giants control business relationships across the commodity chain, profiting from their knowledge, accumulated capital and dominance of core functional components. This allows them to bargain down or dispense with even relatively large corporations who mass-produce their products as subordinates. Universities are complicit. The most prestigious ones in the core imperialist countries are the most dominant actors in the academic production space, while the most vulnerable universities in the periphery or semi-periphery are the most exploited, often lacking the funds for research and development, the knowledge or capacity to patent findings and the resources to fight back when their work is expropriated.
Colonization Of Education
One example of how digital colonization plays out is in the education sector.
As I detail at length in my doctoral dissertation on education technology in South Africa, Microsoft, Google, Pearson, IBM and other tech giants are flexing their muscles in educational systems across the Global South. For Microsoft, this is nothing new. As mentioned above, Microsoft attempted to strongarm African governments to replace Free Software with Microsoft Windows, including in schools.
In South Africa, Microsoft has an army of teacher trainers on the ground who train teachers in how to use Microsoft software in the education system. It also provided Windows tablets and Microsoft software to universities such as the University of Venda, a partnership that it advertised extensively. More recently, it partnered with mobile provider Vodacom (majority owned by British multinational Vodafone) to provide digital education to South African learners.
While Microsoft is the top supplier, with contracts in at least five of the nine provincial education departments in South Africa, Google is also seeking market share. In partnership with South African startup CloudEd, they are seeking to strike the first Google contract with a provincial department.
The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has also joined the mix, offering a Data Driven District (DDD) platform to provincial governments. The DDD software is designed to collect data which tracks and monitors teachers and students, including grades, attendance and “social issues.” While schools upload the collected data weekly rather than in real-time, the ultimate goal is to provide real-time monitoring of student’s behavior and performance for bureaucratic management and “longitudinal data analytics” (analysis of data collected about the same group of individuals over time).
The South African government is also expanding Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) Cloud, which may be eventually used for invasive technocratic surveillance. Microsoft approached the DBE with a proposal to collect data “for the lifecycle of the user,” starting from school and, for those who keep Microsoft Office 365 accounts, into adulthood, so that the government can conduct longitudinal analytics on things like the connection between education and employment.
The digital colonialism of Big Tech is spreading rapidly throughout education systems in the South. Writing from Brazil, Giselle Ferreira and her co-authors state, “The resemblance between what happens in Brazil and Kwet’s (2019) analysis of the South African case (and likely other countries in the ‘global South’) is striking. In particular, when GAFA [Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple] companies generously offer technologies to disadvantaged students, data is unimpededly extracted and subsequently treated in a manner that renders local specificities devoid of importance.”
Schools make great sites for Big Tech to expand their control over digital markets. Poor persons in the South are often reliant upon governments or corporations to provide them with a device at no cost, making them dependent upon others to decide which software they use. What better way to capture market share than to preload Big Tech software on devices offered to children — who may have little other access to tech than a feature phone? This has the added benefit of capturing future software developers, who may come to prefer, say, Google or Microsoft (instead of people’s tech solutions based on Free Software) after spending years using their software and becoming accustomed to their interface and features.
Labor Exploitation
Digital colonialism is also evident in the way the countries across the Global South are heavily exploited for menial labor to provide the critical inputs for digital technologies. It has long been noted that the Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, an essential mineral for batteries used in cars, smartphones and computers. Fourteen families in the Democratic Republic are currently suing Apple, Tesla, Alphabet, Dell and Microsoft, accusing them of benefiting from child labor in the cobalt mining industry. The process of mining for minerals itself often adversely impacts the health of workers and their surrounding habitats.
As for lithium, top reserves are located in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Australia. Wages for workers in all Latin American countries are low by wealthy country’s standards, especially considering the working conditions they endure. While the availability of data varies, in Chile, those employed by the mines earn somewhere between about $1,430 and $3,000 per month, whereas in Argentina monthly wages can be as low as between $300 and $1,800. In 2016, the monthly minimum wage of miners in Bolivia was increased to $250. In contrast, Australian miners earn around $9,000 per month and can reach $200,000 per year.
Countries in the South also offer an abundance of cheap labor for tech giants. This includes data annotation for artificial intelligence datasets, call-center workers and content moderators for social media giants like Facebook. Content moderators cleanse social media feeds of disturbing content, such as gore and sexually explicit material, often leaving them psychologically damaged. Yet, a content moderator in a country like India can make as little as $3,500 per year — and that is after a pay increase from $1,400.
A Chinese Or US Digital Empire?
In the West, there is a lot of chatter about “a new Cold War,” with the US and China battling it out for global technological supremacy. Yet, a close look at the tech ecosystem shows that US corporations are overwhelmingly dominant in the global economy.
China, after decades of high growth, generates around 17 percent of global GDP and is predicted to overtake the US by 2028, feeding into claims that American empire is on the decline (a narrative that was previously popular with the rise of Japan). When measuring the Chinese economy by purchasing power parity, it is already larger than the US. However, as economist Sean Starrs points out in the New Left Review, this wrongly treats states as self-contained units, “interacting as billiard balls on a table.” In reality, Starrs contends, American economic dominance “hasn’t declined, it globalized.” This is particularly true when looking at Big Tech.
In the post-WWII period, corporate production was spread across transnational production networks. For instance, in the 1990s, companies like Apple began outsourcing electronics manufacturing from the US to China and Taiwan, exploiting sweatshop workers employed by companies like Foxconn. US tech transnationals often design the IP for, say, high-performance router switches (e.g. Cisco) while outsourcing manufacturing capacity to hardware manufacturers in the South.
Starrs profiled the world’s top 2,000 publicly traded companies, as ranked by Forbes Global 2000, and organized them according to 25 sectors, showing the dominance of US transnationals. As of 2013, they dominated in terms of profit shares in 18 of the top 25 sectors. In his forthcoming book American Power Globalized: Rethinking National Power in the Age of Globalization, Starrs shows that the US remains dominant. For IT Software & Services, US profit share is 76 percent versus China’s 10 percent; for Technology Hardware & Equipment, it is 63 percent for the US versus 6 percent for China, and for Electronics, it is 43 and 10 percent, respectively. Other countries, such as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, often fare better than China in these categories as well.
Portraying the US and China as equal contenders in the battle for global tech supremacy, as is often done, is therefore highly misleading. For example, a 2019 United Nations “Digital Economy” report states that: “Geography of the digital economy is highly concentrated in two countries” — the United States and China. But the report not only ignores factors identified by authors like Starrs it also fails to account for the fact that most of China’s tech industry is dominant inside China, save a handful of major products and services, such as 5G (Huawei), CCTV cameras (Hikvision, Dahua) and social media (TikTok), which also hold large market shares abroad. China also has substantial investments in some foreign tech firms, but this hardly suggests a genuine threat to the dominance of the US, which has a much larger share of foreign investments as well.
In reality, the US is the supreme tech empire. Outside of US and Chinese borders, the US leads in the categories of search engines (Google); web browsers (Google Chrome, Apple Safari); smartphone and tablet operating systems (Google Android, Apple iOS); desktop and laptop operating systems (Microsoft Windows, macOS); office software (Microsoft Office, Google G Suite, Apple iWork); cloud infrastructure and services (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM); social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter); transportation (Uber, Lyft); business networking (Microsoft LinkedIn); streaming entertainment (Google, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu) and online advertising (Google, Facebook) — among others.
The upshot is, whether you are an individual or a business, if you are using a computer, American companies benefit the most. They own the digital ecosystem.
Political Domination And The Means Of Violence
The economic power of US tech giants goes hand-in-hand with their influence in the political and social spheres. As with other industries, there is a revolving door between tech executives and the US government, and tech corporations and business alliances spend a great deal lobbying regulators for policies favorable to their specific interests — and digital capitalism in general.
Governments and law enforcement agencies, in turn, form partnerships with tech giants to do their dirty work. In 2013, Edward Snowden famously revealed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple all shared information with the National Security Agency via the PRISM program. More revelations followed, and the world learned that data stored by corporations and transmitted over the internet is sucked into enormous government databases for exploitation by states. Countries in the South have been targets of NSA surveillance, from the Middle East to Africa and Latin America.
Police and the military also work with tech corporations, who are happy to cash fat checks as providers of surveillance products and services, including in countries across the South. For example, through its little-known Public Safety and Justice Division, Microsoft has built an extensive partnership ecosystem with “law enforcement” surveillance vendors, who run their tech on Microsoft cloud infrastructure. This includes a city-wide command-and-control surveillance platform called “Microsoft Aware” that was purchased by police in Brazil and Singapore and a police vehicle solution with facial recognition cameras that has been rolled out in Cape Town and Durban, South Africa.
Microsoft is also deeply involved with the prison industry. It offers a variety of prison software solutions that cover the entire correctional pipeline, from juvenile “offenders” to pretrial and probation, through jail and prison, as well as those released from prison and put on parole. In Africa, they partnered with a company called Netopia Solutions, which offers a Prison Management Software (PMS) platform that includes “escape management” and prisoner analytics.
While it is not clear where exactly Netopia’s Prison Management Solution is deployed, Microsoft stated that “Netopia is [a Microsoft partner/vendor] in Morocco with a deep focus on transforming digitally, government services in North and Central Africa.” Morocco has a track record of brutalizing dissidents and torturing prisoners, and the US recently recognized its annexation of Western Sahara, in contravention of international law.
For centuries, imperial powers tested technologies to police and control their citizens on foreign populations first, from Sir Francis Galton’s pioneering work on fingerprinting applied in India and South Africa, to America’s combination of biometrics and innovations in managing statistics and data management that formed the first modern surveillance apparatus to pacify the Philippines. As historian Alfred McCoy has shown, the collection of surveillance technologies deployed in the Philippines offered a testing ground for a model which was eventually brought back to the United States for use against domestic dissidents. Microsoft and its partners’ high-tech surveillance projects suggest that Africans continue to serve as a laboratory for carceral experimentation.
Pushing Back
Digital technology and information plays a central role in politics, economy and social life everywhere. As part of the American empire project, US transnational corporations are reinventing colonialism in the South through their ownership and control of intellectual property, digital intelligence and the means of computation. Most of the core infrastructure, industries and functions performed by computers are the private property of American transnational corporations, who are overwhelmingly dominant outside US borders. The largest firms, such as Microsoft and Apple, dominate global supply chains as intellectual monopolies.
An unequal exchange and division of labor ensues, reinforcing dependency in the periphery while perpetuating mass immiseration and global poverty.
Instead of sharing knowledge, transferring technology and providing the building blocks for shared global prosperity on equal terms, the rich countries and their corporations aim to protect their advantage and shake down the South for cheap labor and rent extraction. By monopolizing the core components of the digital ecosystem, pushing their tech in schools and skills training programs and partnering with corporate and state elites in the South, Big Tech is capturing emerging markets. They will even profit from surveillance services provided to police departments and prisons, all to make a buck.
Yet against the forces of concentrated power, there are always those who push back. Resistance to Big Tech in the South has a long history, dating back to the days of international protests against IBM, Hewlett Packard and others doing business in apartheid South Africa. In the early 2000s, Global South countries embraced Free Software and the global commons as a means to resist digital colonialism for a while, even if many of those initiatives have since faded. In the last few years, new movements against digital colonialism are emerging.
There is much more going in this picture. An ecological crisis created by capitalism is rapidly threatening to permanently destroy life on Earth, and solutions for the digital economy must intersect with environmental justice and broader struggles for equality.
To stamp out digital colonialism, we need a different conceptual framework that challenge root causes and major actors, in connection with grassroots movements willing to confront capitalism and authoritarianism, American empire, and its intellectual supporters.
THE RADICAL PRACTICALITY OF COMMUNITY CONTROL OVER POLICING
https://popularresistance.org/the-radical-practicality-of-community-control-over-policing/
By Pan African Community Action, Black Agenda Report.
March 6, 2021
A Reply To Our Critics.
Once we are able to secure Community Control over Police and ensure that entire communities are empowered to exercise such control, we will be free to re-imagine and re-envision the very nature of policing itself.
“Our goal is ‘community control, whether over public safety, land, budgets, or housing.”
In response to the persistent problem of state-sponsored violence against working class Black communities and the futility of police reforms, the contemporary calls for community control over police (CCOP) have garnered significant attention and support in Black communities. Consequently, the growing grassroots support for the concept of Black communities controlling their own security and safety has come under fire by a number of individuals and organizations advocating for the defunding and abolishing of police.
Pan-African Community Action (PACA), an organization operating in the DC-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area, supports CCOP, as does the National Alliance Against Racists & Political Repression (NAARPR) and a number of other organizations. PACA’s formation in November 2015 was in response to the killing of DC resident and educator Alonzo Smith at the hands of “special police.” Among PACA’s demands for the #Justice4Zo campaign has been a call for CCOP. The call for CCOP was first made by the Black Panther Party in 1969, and some have consistently advocated for it since, though it is only now getting the attention it deserves.
PACA believes in the positive role of good faith argument in movement-building, and we write this article to participate in this process. Moreover, criticisms of CCOP have highlighted potential dangers in our approach at this crucial political moment.
That said, a number of the arguments against CCOP involved significant mischaracterizations of our position. The core mischaracterization of our positions across most of the responses is that CCOP somehow competes with demands to defund and abolish police. These mischaracterizations tend to describe our goal as the takeover of current police departments through the installation of community control at the top, while preserving the structure, goals, personnel, and priorities of police departments in their current form.
“The core mischaracterization of our positions across most of the responses is that CCOP somehow competes with demands to defund and abolish police.”
This is wholly incorrect, both as a description of our goals and the actual campaigns for CCOP. Historically, Chicago coalitions have pushed a vision of CCOP that Black history scholar Simon Balto explains is something we would “today identify as defunding the police.” That coalition continues today, led by groups like the Chicago Alliance Against Racist Police Repression and Black Lives Matter Chicago. In Minneapolis, organizations pushed for CCOP alongside Defund after the defund demand alone was met with political sleight of hand by policymakers. Organizers in Seattle won not just a $30 million budget cut to the police department but public control of it through participatory budgeting: this is, simultaneously, a major victory from a defund the police perspective and a community control perspective, in contrast to the cuts to the police budgets in other cities that keep the reins of control firmly in the hands of politicians.
PACA’s own tools of analysis assert that Black communities are a domestic colony in the US and the police service as the occupying army. Further, in multiple position papers, as well as in an upcoming book on the subject, PACA explicitly states that we do not want to take over the occupying army and our proposal for CCOP calls for the creation of new departments, on the District level, that are entirely distinct from the existing police and controlled by the community. PACA has never called for control over an existing police department:
“The fight for Community Control Over Police has the potential to remove us from the indignity of having to manage the public relations aspects of colonial occupation. A Community Police Control Board holds the potential to not only shift power into the hands of the Black community, but to transform the very definition of power…Once we are able to secure Community Control over Police and ensure that entire communities are empowered to exercise such control, we will be free to re-imagine and re-envision the very nature of policing itself.”
PACA works towards “community control over police.” The term “police,” however, has been central to the many mischaracterizations of our position. For some, the word is inextricably linked not only to the particular history of American police departments but to the current people, unions, culture, and politics around it. They remind us, correctly, that “the police do not keep us safe.” But we will need the power and resources to not only figure out what does keep us safe, but to make it happen in our communities.
“So let me get this straight: You are telling me I can vote out the police?”
Even if we got rid of the departments known by the name “police” tomorrow, we would still have all of the social problems that police departments currently claim to address, prevent, or constrain. This includes social problems that are poorly addressed by armed responders: those related to substance addiction, untreated mental health issues, and poverty, which should be the basis of our long-term thinking about community safety. But it also includes social problems in the short term that may require armed community self-defense: violence between community residents, violence imported by (often reactionary) underworld organizations and predatory right-wing fascist groups. Community self-defense requires the capacity to respond to all and any of these, which requires the resources now gobbled up by police departments.
What we mean is clear: the budget and responsibilities that are now granted to police departments should be surrendered to communities. This would allow us to restructure around public safety as we define it, not as the colonial, capitalist power structures do. We need control over the resources: not “civilian oversight” or “community policing” public relations strategies, which keep control in the hands of the current structure. We believe this goal should be achieved by organizing communities rather than by petition to city councils or mayors, and so we aim to use the ballot initiative process to advance this.
PACA’s preferred version of CCOP is explained in our position paper : a civilian control board chosen by sortition (random selection) and supported with professional staff. But this is just one way to put these commitments into practice; there are of course other models, and Seattle shows another way forward.
CCOP is not an alternative to abolition. Abolition requires community control: the power to implement or enact the abolishment of anything – that is, unless we trust the very same institutions that our critics claim will inevitably subvert CCOP with the task of police abolition.
“The budget and responsibilities that are now granted to police departments should be surrendered to communities.”
At this point, it might be useful to distinguish between what might be called police and policing. The police are a modern social institution of the state whose officers wear badges and uniforms. Many are aware that the precursor to the police were the slave patrols that rode through the US South in search of Black people escaping bondage. We have visceral reactions to the term “police” because of the way we have experienced them in our lifetimes.
But if the police began after 1865, how did the Roman Empire collect taxes in the year 100? How did China’s Song Dynasty ensure a transfer of power in the 900s? How were English serfs kept under control in the 1100s? How did the French quell insurrectionists in the 1700s? How did Queen Nzinga prevent the Portuguese from enslaving the Ndongo in southern Africa in the 1600s? How did the mocambos of Brazil prevent the recapture of Africans who escaped from slavery there in the 1700s?
Even when there were no police as we know them today, anytime there are social classes there must be policing to enforce the dominance of one class over the other. While we affirm that the modern police protect the rich and attack Black people, many continental Africans employed policing before they knew what white people even were. When the Black Panther Party protected residents of Oakland from state violence, they were not the police, but they were policing the police.
We need control over the resources: not “civilian oversight” or “community policing” public relations strategies, which keep control in the hands of the current structure. Today, many protests and marches feature marshals to keep the crowd safe. Marshals are not the police, but they do engage in policing that benefits and protects the participants from the police, as well as right-wing agitators. PACA does not want to control the police, but we assert the right of every community to self-defense, which is often a form of policing.
Reply To Our Critics
Now that we’re clear on what CCOP is and isn’t, we answer our critics.
Hood Communist has featured a number of articles addressing CCOP, including an article by Dubian Ade entitled “The Argument Against Community Control of the Police ” and another by Nnennaya Amuchie called “Community Control of Police v Defunding Police: Addressing the Patriarchal Roots of Policing .” Both give well thought out critiques in the spirit of serious debate.
Ade says, accurately, that proponents of community control over police (CCOP) “do not understand their position as inherently against the projects of defunding or abolition.” But Ade nevertheless suggests that CCOP activists “tend to pit their position against calls for defunding, often linking them to corporate opportunism, non-profit schemes, and Black Lives Matter.”
But in Chicago, as we mentioned before, movements pushed both defund and CCOP together. In Minneapolis, the movement added CCOP to Defund after the defund demand. For the record, PACA has never accused Defund advocates of corporate opportunism or non-profit schemes. There are important differences in emphasis and tactics between CCOP and Defund, but we can, and do, defend them on their merits – not on baseless accusations about other organizations.
In the second critique, Amuchie argues against CCOP by saying “policing is inherently violent and always patriarchal,” adding later that this is so “even if the people who make up the policing or accountability board represent marginalized genders.” In the same essay, Amuchie writes, “I believe in revolutionary violence…We must build a mass movement and organizations to see the success of revolutionary violence.” Amuchie then asserts, “we should push towards community self-determination and defense, particularly for those along the margins of the Black community. Our communities need skills and resources to prevent, intervene, and heal from violence. The more skills, resources, and relationships we have, the more Black communities will divest from policing and invest in community networks of care.”
Yet Amuchie simultaneously argues against CCOP because it is violent and patriarchal (even when it is representative) – before proceeding to offer an alternative that is violent and must be representative. Amuchie also argues that given skills and resources, Black communities will redefine policing itself, which is precisely PACA’s central point. Amuchie argues against Community Control Over Police by arguing forcefully for what one might call Community Control Over Violent Defense, all while deploying the language and imagery of CCOP.
“Amuchie also argues that given skills and resources, Black communities will redefine policing itself, which is precisely PACA’s central point.”
Ade makes two similar charges as well: first, that “the function of property protection by law enforcement since its inception has always been a classed and racialized antagonism. It is not merely property police are tasked to protect, but white property”; and second, that “[c]ommunity control proponents make a strange assumption that the police can be made accountable to Black people, can serve Black people, and somehow cede control to Black people. Yet police fail the Black community every day.”
PACA contends that who is in control of policing determines the behavior of the police. We agree with Ade and Amuchie that this system is working as designed to protect who and what it was designed to protect. But that is a function of who is in control. As Ade puts it: “The white settler exercises control over police.” Unless and until actions to secure public safety are guided by our goals and definitions of it, rather than the white settler state’s command structure, this will continue to be the reality.
Another criticism by Ricardo Levins Morales, Zola Richardson, Jonathan Stegall, and Woods Ervin ran in Forge Organizing entitled “The Fantasy of Community Control Of The Police .” Their essay begins with a litany of accusations, ranging from the view that community control is “ahistorical” and premised on a “misunderstanding of the structure and nature of modern policing” to the accusation that CCOP is “bureaucratic.”
The authors claim that “instead of struggling to take over and redirect the master’s tool, we call for investing the resources now poured into policing directly into community initiatives whose core missions are about helping, healing, and sustaining people, not controlling them.” The authors have resisted the “fantasy” of CCOP by adopting it! We invite readers to simply compare this claim to the previous section of this article, which is just an elaboration CCOP’s program: a community initiative whose mission is about helping, healing, and empowering Black people. The progress made in Seattle shows us a model for pursuing CCOP goals in concert with Defund goals.
“The authors have resisted the “fantasy” of CCOP by adopting it!”
While rejecting CCOP, the authors claim major victories for efforts to defund the police, such as cuts to police budgets in multiple cities. Upon closer examination, however, the celebration appears misplaced. The defunding of the $559 million budget for the Washington, DC Metro Police Department was “accomplished” by transferring the public school security contract from the DC police to the DC Public School System police , with zero dollars reprogrammed for social services. We strongly suspect similar schemes were used in most, if not all, of the examples lauded as successful Defund campaigns. To reiterate: defunding the police will only move those in power to change the definition of, or privatize, the police.
To be perfectly clear, we fully support the development of a People’s Budget because that process should be identical to that of instituting Community Control. We are, however, somewhat confused by the notion that a mere change in terminology qualifies as a difference of underlying democratic principles. The mischaracterizations in the article continue. First, “[s]upporters of community control expect these elected (or selected) bodies to be inherently progressive, a questionable assumption.” But it is no assumption at all. Our position paper explains that this would have to be an achievement of the organizing in which community control is embedded rather than some preordained result. To quote our own proposal:
Equally as important, the job of “qualifying” community members for board service will fall to social justice organizations. Building robust and wide reaching political education and leadership development programs will make community organizing relevant like never before as we attempt to reach the next board member before their appointment. The person with the deciding vote on the priorities of the police might be the undereducated high school dropout who hangs out near the corner store most of the day. In order to get justice, we would have to politically educate and organize our entire community.
“The job of “qualifying” community members for board service will fall to social justice organizations.”
By contrast, the authors highlighted their own successful efforts in Minneapolis in spearheading a “People’s Budget, calling for investments in housing, public health, mutual aid groups, and harm reduction,” which was the result of the work of over 80 community groups. Interestingly, the authors declined to share how they ensured the participants of the budgetary process would be “inherently progressive,” though we suspect they utilized one of two organizing options: either they employed the same methods of political education and leadership development that we propose, or else the participants were carefully selected based on their pre-existing “progressive” political positions. Of course, if participation in the process was limited to a few hand-selected organizations, and the endorsement or “sign-on” option was only available after the budget was drafted, then the process was not democratic, and it was not a “People’s Budget” in any meaningful sense.
To be perfectly clear, we fully support the development of a People’s Budget because that process should be identical to that of instituting Community Control. We are, however, somewhat confused by the notion that a mere change in terminology qualifies as a difference of underlying democratic principles.
We maintain that there is no route to addressing the roots of violence in our communities – whether CCOP, defund, or abolish – that does not require us to take addressing the material and cultural roots of harm in our communities seriously. This focus is something the Defund and Abolish movements have gotten right, given the imprint of transformative justice and restorative justice in those sections of the movement.
However, what is inherently more progressive than the politicians who otherwise are expected to defund and abolish the police they support are the Black and Brown low-income working-class communities organized into People’s Assemblies and community councils making decisions for themselves. This is part of the fuller vision for Community Control beyond boards that has dominated the debate about CCOP.
As Amuchie rightly warns us, “Suppose people are not educated about their current conditions and don’t have political alignment around what we are trying to build. In that case, this leaves room for repression, co-optation, and demobilization of the masses.” Mass community political education around the Black Radical Tradition, including education pushing back against patriarchy, transphobia, and other reactionary forms of oppression is a necessary part of any confrontation with the colonial power structure with any hope of success at resisting oppression rather than reorganizing it. We unite with any effort to enhance this aspect of empowering the people.
Both the criticisms in Hood Communist and Forge Organizing raise practical obstacles to destroying the current structure of policing through CCOP. Ade reminds us that “community review boards” – which, we remind you, are not at all what CCOP proposes – “can be ignored, worked around, and generally rendered useless through individual officers, police chiefs, and police unions.” The authors at Forge Organizing remind us that, if you are taking over an existing institution, “you can’t just fire its entire workforce without cause.” We remind you, CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce.
Finally, Omedi Ochieng in Spectre reminds us of the ways that national and state level government can discipline local movements, writing, “city, state, and federal governments would not only starve that district of funding, but its agencies, claiming overlapping jurisdiction over those districts, would subject its political leaders and residents to savage reprisals .”
These are all practical implications that any movement against police must grapple with seriously. But they are the practical implications of trying to remove the entrenched and resisting institution of colonial police from power for whatever purpose and to whatever practical end. That means that these are problems that will also plague Defund and Abolition, for identical reasons.
We remind you, CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce. Bringing these complications up as reasons to prefer Defund or Abolition is, then, politically incoherent. If it’s supposedly impossible to either suddenly or gradually remove police officers and departments trained by and working for the colonial state, and the barriers to challenging such entrenched powers are insurmountable, then how are defunding demands made at city councils transitional demands towards abolition? If it is possible to remove these officers, then why do our critics prefer the version of this where community members are less empowered in the process of doing so? Why do our critics trust a version of these processes entirely controlled by elected officials (and their corporate backers) more than they trust the possibility of building with and appealing to their neighbors? Why is it the demand for community control that encourages the sudden seriousness of the same “practicalities” that liberals use to dismiss Defund and Abolition demands entirely, in favor of more practically “sensible” demands like police reform?
“CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce.”
Omedi Ochieng’s ”Defeat the Police” article includes a useful global radical history of challenges to the police and community self-defense, including examples taken from the South African anti-apartheid movement. Ochieng invokes the history of extreme state repression against the Black Panther Party and Young Lords in response to CCOP – though, since his essay stops short of endorsing a particular approach that goes “beyond” defund or community control, it is unclear what he wants us to take from this history.
The lessons he does draw from these stories, it seems to us, are the wrong ones. He points out that “[t]he perennial raids on the party’s chapter offices, violent attacks on its coalition allies (such as the firebombing of the offices of the Young Lords Party when they began to organize for community control of the police) “are precisely what the police in a settler colony are designed to do.” We agree: they are designed to protect settler interests as such, and the violence of the state response demonstrates the existential danger to those interests posed by the kind of demand we are making.
Ochieng argues that we have failed to learn from history, that “advocates for community control have offered little indication of what lessons the left should glean from the defeat of movements that sought democratic control of the police.” But it is precisely because they lost by ballot initiative that we are advocating for the idea. The idea is very simple: it is a contest of votes, and we need to win more of them than the Panthers and Young Lords did. This is the most ordinary stuff of democracy.
Ochieng insists that we should “no more seek control of such an institution than one should want to control the U.S. military.” But this argument simply repeats the base mischaracterization of most of our critics. It portrays our demand as perpetuating the reactionary actions taken by these institutions rather than relcaiming control of the resources they have taken from us. Shutting down AFRICOM and redirecting the resources of a “national defense” budget of world conquest proportions towards reparations and community-controlled projects would be the actual military analogue of CCOP.
Is that a frightening vision of the world? Because to us, helping to set the stage for African liberation and self-determination sounds like a plan.
Conclusion
Pan-African Community Action also believes that we need to build organization and power, but we understand the difference between power and influence. Our position paper includes measures directed at exactly this nexus. Our approach involves using the ballot initiative process to force the state to recognize formal community power over an institution rather than persuading or influencing state bureaucrats to vote against their own interests.
Alongside this political contest to build dual power inside of contested and liberated zones, PACA proposes a rigorous political education program designed to convince our neighbors on the ground – not the political elites on the other side of the negotiating table or a “shaming” campaign – of the merits of community control over policing, of the merits of fighting for power. Alongside those first two must run a rigorous leadership development program designed to prepare our neighbors to wield their newfound power justly and wisely.
Community Control Over Police as a framing demand keeps our eyes on the ball whether or not it is achieved in the immediate future: power over our lives, not cuddlier treatment from those who jealously hoard that power. Our goal is “community control,” whether over public safety, land, budgets, or housing. Our goal is to have power and wield it justly ourselves, not to demand that the boot on our neck be swapped out for slippers instead.
Even a long-term, negotiation-focused approach would be better with a clear overall goal that correctly articulates the real political problem. Key to preventing our campaigns from diluting political consciousness is preventing confusion about what we’re fighting for: this is why it is important to differentiate between “reformist reforms” from radical ones. Community control over police is a principled commitment to a part of what liberation would look like, what tomorrow’s struggle should be trying to use today’s possibilities to achieve. Why do our critics oppose communities deciding for themselves what crucial aspects of their lives are going to be like: if that isn’t self-determination, then what is? And if self-determination is not what we want, then what is?
A Reply To Our Critics.
Once we are able to secure Community Control over Police and ensure that entire communities are empowered to exercise such control, we will be free to re-imagine and re-envision the very nature of policing itself.
“Our goal is ‘community control, whether over public safety, land, budgets, or housing.”
In response to the persistent problem of state-sponsored violence against working class Black communities and the futility of police reforms, the contemporary calls for community control over police (CCOP) have garnered significant attention and support in Black communities. Consequently, the growing grassroots support for the concept of Black communities controlling their own security and safety has come under fire by a number of individuals and organizations advocating for the defunding and abolishing of police.
Pan-African Community Action (PACA), an organization operating in the DC-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area, supports CCOP, as does the National Alliance Against Racists & Political Repression (NAARPR) and a number of other organizations. PACA’s formation in November 2015 was in response to the killing of DC resident and educator Alonzo Smith at the hands of “special police.” Among PACA’s demands for the #Justice4Zo campaign has been a call for CCOP. The call for CCOP was first made by the Black Panther Party in 1969, and some have consistently advocated for it since, though it is only now getting the attention it deserves.
PACA believes in the positive role of good faith argument in movement-building, and we write this article to participate in this process. Moreover, criticisms of CCOP have highlighted potential dangers in our approach at this crucial political moment.
That said, a number of the arguments against CCOP involved significant mischaracterizations of our position. The core mischaracterization of our positions across most of the responses is that CCOP somehow competes with demands to defund and abolish police. These mischaracterizations tend to describe our goal as the takeover of current police departments through the installation of community control at the top, while preserving the structure, goals, personnel, and priorities of police departments in their current form.
“The core mischaracterization of our positions across most of the responses is that CCOP somehow competes with demands to defund and abolish police.”
This is wholly incorrect, both as a description of our goals and the actual campaigns for CCOP. Historically, Chicago coalitions have pushed a vision of CCOP that Black history scholar Simon Balto explains is something we would “today identify as defunding the police.” That coalition continues today, led by groups like the Chicago Alliance Against Racist Police Repression and Black Lives Matter Chicago. In Minneapolis, organizations pushed for CCOP alongside Defund after the defund demand alone was met with political sleight of hand by policymakers. Organizers in Seattle won not just a $30 million budget cut to the police department but public control of it through participatory budgeting: this is, simultaneously, a major victory from a defund the police perspective and a community control perspective, in contrast to the cuts to the police budgets in other cities that keep the reins of control firmly in the hands of politicians.
PACA’s own tools of analysis assert that Black communities are a domestic colony in the US and the police service as the occupying army. Further, in multiple position papers, as well as in an upcoming book on the subject, PACA explicitly states that we do not want to take over the occupying army and our proposal for CCOP calls for the creation of new departments, on the District level, that are entirely distinct from the existing police and controlled by the community. PACA has never called for control over an existing police department:
“The fight for Community Control Over Police has the potential to remove us from the indignity of having to manage the public relations aspects of colonial occupation. A Community Police Control Board holds the potential to not only shift power into the hands of the Black community, but to transform the very definition of power…Once we are able to secure Community Control over Police and ensure that entire communities are empowered to exercise such control, we will be free to re-imagine and re-envision the very nature of policing itself.”
PACA works towards “community control over police.” The term “police,” however, has been central to the many mischaracterizations of our position. For some, the word is inextricably linked not only to the particular history of American police departments but to the current people, unions, culture, and politics around it. They remind us, correctly, that “the police do not keep us safe.” But we will need the power and resources to not only figure out what does keep us safe, but to make it happen in our communities.
“So let me get this straight: You are telling me I can vote out the police?”
Even if we got rid of the departments known by the name “police” tomorrow, we would still have all of the social problems that police departments currently claim to address, prevent, or constrain. This includes social problems that are poorly addressed by armed responders: those related to substance addiction, untreated mental health issues, and poverty, which should be the basis of our long-term thinking about community safety. But it also includes social problems in the short term that may require armed community self-defense: violence between community residents, violence imported by (often reactionary) underworld organizations and predatory right-wing fascist groups. Community self-defense requires the capacity to respond to all and any of these, which requires the resources now gobbled up by police departments.
What we mean is clear: the budget and responsibilities that are now granted to police departments should be surrendered to communities. This would allow us to restructure around public safety as we define it, not as the colonial, capitalist power structures do. We need control over the resources: not “civilian oversight” or “community policing” public relations strategies, which keep control in the hands of the current structure. We believe this goal should be achieved by organizing communities rather than by petition to city councils or mayors, and so we aim to use the ballot initiative process to advance this.
PACA’s preferred version of CCOP is explained in our position paper : a civilian control board chosen by sortition (random selection) and supported with professional staff. But this is just one way to put these commitments into practice; there are of course other models, and Seattle shows another way forward.
CCOP is not an alternative to abolition. Abolition requires community control: the power to implement or enact the abolishment of anything – that is, unless we trust the very same institutions that our critics claim will inevitably subvert CCOP with the task of police abolition.
“The budget and responsibilities that are now granted to police departments should be surrendered to communities.”
At this point, it might be useful to distinguish between what might be called police and policing. The police are a modern social institution of the state whose officers wear badges and uniforms. Many are aware that the precursor to the police were the slave patrols that rode through the US South in search of Black people escaping bondage. We have visceral reactions to the term “police” because of the way we have experienced them in our lifetimes.
But if the police began after 1865, how did the Roman Empire collect taxes in the year 100? How did China’s Song Dynasty ensure a transfer of power in the 900s? How were English serfs kept under control in the 1100s? How did the French quell insurrectionists in the 1700s? How did Queen Nzinga prevent the Portuguese from enslaving the Ndongo in southern Africa in the 1600s? How did the mocambos of Brazil prevent the recapture of Africans who escaped from slavery there in the 1700s?
Even when there were no police as we know them today, anytime there are social classes there must be policing to enforce the dominance of one class over the other. While we affirm that the modern police protect the rich and attack Black people, many continental Africans employed policing before they knew what white people even were. When the Black Panther Party protected residents of Oakland from state violence, they were not the police, but they were policing the police.
We need control over the resources: not “civilian oversight” or “community policing” public relations strategies, which keep control in the hands of the current structure. Today, many protests and marches feature marshals to keep the crowd safe. Marshals are not the police, but they do engage in policing that benefits and protects the participants from the police, as well as right-wing agitators. PACA does not want to control the police, but we assert the right of every community to self-defense, which is often a form of policing.
Reply To Our Critics
Now that we’re clear on what CCOP is and isn’t, we answer our critics.
Hood Communist has featured a number of articles addressing CCOP, including an article by Dubian Ade entitled “The Argument Against Community Control of the Police ” and another by Nnennaya Amuchie called “Community Control of Police v Defunding Police: Addressing the Patriarchal Roots of Policing .” Both give well thought out critiques in the spirit of serious debate.
Ade says, accurately, that proponents of community control over police (CCOP) “do not understand their position as inherently against the projects of defunding or abolition.” But Ade nevertheless suggests that CCOP activists “tend to pit their position against calls for defunding, often linking them to corporate opportunism, non-profit schemes, and Black Lives Matter.”
But in Chicago, as we mentioned before, movements pushed both defund and CCOP together. In Minneapolis, the movement added CCOP to Defund after the defund demand. For the record, PACA has never accused Defund advocates of corporate opportunism or non-profit schemes. There are important differences in emphasis and tactics between CCOP and Defund, but we can, and do, defend them on their merits – not on baseless accusations about other organizations.
In the second critique, Amuchie argues against CCOP by saying “policing is inherently violent and always patriarchal,” adding later that this is so “even if the people who make up the policing or accountability board represent marginalized genders.” In the same essay, Amuchie writes, “I believe in revolutionary violence…We must build a mass movement and organizations to see the success of revolutionary violence.” Amuchie then asserts, “we should push towards community self-determination and defense, particularly for those along the margins of the Black community. Our communities need skills and resources to prevent, intervene, and heal from violence. The more skills, resources, and relationships we have, the more Black communities will divest from policing and invest in community networks of care.”
Yet Amuchie simultaneously argues against CCOP because it is violent and patriarchal (even when it is representative) – before proceeding to offer an alternative that is violent and must be representative. Amuchie also argues that given skills and resources, Black communities will redefine policing itself, which is precisely PACA’s central point. Amuchie argues against Community Control Over Police by arguing forcefully for what one might call Community Control Over Violent Defense, all while deploying the language and imagery of CCOP.
“Amuchie also argues that given skills and resources, Black communities will redefine policing itself, which is precisely PACA’s central point.”
Ade makes two similar charges as well: first, that “the function of property protection by law enforcement since its inception has always been a classed and racialized antagonism. It is not merely property police are tasked to protect, but white property”; and second, that “[c]ommunity control proponents make a strange assumption that the police can be made accountable to Black people, can serve Black people, and somehow cede control to Black people. Yet police fail the Black community every day.”
PACA contends that who is in control of policing determines the behavior of the police. We agree with Ade and Amuchie that this system is working as designed to protect who and what it was designed to protect. But that is a function of who is in control. As Ade puts it: “The white settler exercises control over police.” Unless and until actions to secure public safety are guided by our goals and definitions of it, rather than the white settler state’s command structure, this will continue to be the reality.
Another criticism by Ricardo Levins Morales, Zola Richardson, Jonathan Stegall, and Woods Ervin ran in Forge Organizing entitled “The Fantasy of Community Control Of The Police .” Their essay begins with a litany of accusations, ranging from the view that community control is “ahistorical” and premised on a “misunderstanding of the structure and nature of modern policing” to the accusation that CCOP is “bureaucratic.”
The authors claim that “instead of struggling to take over and redirect the master’s tool, we call for investing the resources now poured into policing directly into community initiatives whose core missions are about helping, healing, and sustaining people, not controlling them.” The authors have resisted the “fantasy” of CCOP by adopting it! We invite readers to simply compare this claim to the previous section of this article, which is just an elaboration CCOP’s program: a community initiative whose mission is about helping, healing, and empowering Black people. The progress made in Seattle shows us a model for pursuing CCOP goals in concert with Defund goals.
“The authors have resisted the “fantasy” of CCOP by adopting it!”
While rejecting CCOP, the authors claim major victories for efforts to defund the police, such as cuts to police budgets in multiple cities. Upon closer examination, however, the celebration appears misplaced. The defunding of the $559 million budget for the Washington, DC Metro Police Department was “accomplished” by transferring the public school security contract from the DC police to the DC Public School System police , with zero dollars reprogrammed for social services. We strongly suspect similar schemes were used in most, if not all, of the examples lauded as successful Defund campaigns. To reiterate: defunding the police will only move those in power to change the definition of, or privatize, the police.
To be perfectly clear, we fully support the development of a People’s Budget because that process should be identical to that of instituting Community Control. We are, however, somewhat confused by the notion that a mere change in terminology qualifies as a difference of underlying democratic principles. The mischaracterizations in the article continue. First, “[s]upporters of community control expect these elected (or selected) bodies to be inherently progressive, a questionable assumption.” But it is no assumption at all. Our position paper explains that this would have to be an achievement of the organizing in which community control is embedded rather than some preordained result. To quote our own proposal:
Equally as important, the job of “qualifying” community members for board service will fall to social justice organizations. Building robust and wide reaching political education and leadership development programs will make community organizing relevant like never before as we attempt to reach the next board member before their appointment. The person with the deciding vote on the priorities of the police might be the undereducated high school dropout who hangs out near the corner store most of the day. In order to get justice, we would have to politically educate and organize our entire community.
“The job of “qualifying” community members for board service will fall to social justice organizations.”
By contrast, the authors highlighted their own successful efforts in Minneapolis in spearheading a “People’s Budget, calling for investments in housing, public health, mutual aid groups, and harm reduction,” which was the result of the work of over 80 community groups. Interestingly, the authors declined to share how they ensured the participants of the budgetary process would be “inherently progressive,” though we suspect they utilized one of two organizing options: either they employed the same methods of political education and leadership development that we propose, or else the participants were carefully selected based on their pre-existing “progressive” political positions. Of course, if participation in the process was limited to a few hand-selected organizations, and the endorsement or “sign-on” option was only available after the budget was drafted, then the process was not democratic, and it was not a “People’s Budget” in any meaningful sense.
To be perfectly clear, we fully support the development of a People’s Budget because that process should be identical to that of instituting Community Control. We are, however, somewhat confused by the notion that a mere change in terminology qualifies as a difference of underlying democratic principles.
We maintain that there is no route to addressing the roots of violence in our communities – whether CCOP, defund, or abolish – that does not require us to take addressing the material and cultural roots of harm in our communities seriously. This focus is something the Defund and Abolish movements have gotten right, given the imprint of transformative justice and restorative justice in those sections of the movement.
However, what is inherently more progressive than the politicians who otherwise are expected to defund and abolish the police they support are the Black and Brown low-income working-class communities organized into People’s Assemblies and community councils making decisions for themselves. This is part of the fuller vision for Community Control beyond boards that has dominated the debate about CCOP.
As Amuchie rightly warns us, “Suppose people are not educated about their current conditions and don’t have political alignment around what we are trying to build. In that case, this leaves room for repression, co-optation, and demobilization of the masses.” Mass community political education around the Black Radical Tradition, including education pushing back against patriarchy, transphobia, and other reactionary forms of oppression is a necessary part of any confrontation with the colonial power structure with any hope of success at resisting oppression rather than reorganizing it. We unite with any effort to enhance this aspect of empowering the people.
Both the criticisms in Hood Communist and Forge Organizing raise practical obstacles to destroying the current structure of policing through CCOP. Ade reminds us that “community review boards” – which, we remind you, are not at all what CCOP proposes – “can be ignored, worked around, and generally rendered useless through individual officers, police chiefs, and police unions.” The authors at Forge Organizing remind us that, if you are taking over an existing institution, “you can’t just fire its entire workforce without cause.” We remind you, CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce.
Finally, Omedi Ochieng in Spectre reminds us of the ways that national and state level government can discipline local movements, writing, “city, state, and federal governments would not only starve that district of funding, but its agencies, claiming overlapping jurisdiction over those districts, would subject its political leaders and residents to savage reprisals .”
These are all practical implications that any movement against police must grapple with seriously. But they are the practical implications of trying to remove the entrenched and resisting institution of colonial police from power for whatever purpose and to whatever practical end. That means that these are problems that will also plague Defund and Abolition, for identical reasons.
We remind you, CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce. Bringing these complications up as reasons to prefer Defund or Abolition is, then, politically incoherent. If it’s supposedly impossible to either suddenly or gradually remove police officers and departments trained by and working for the colonial state, and the barriers to challenging such entrenched powers are insurmountable, then how are defunding demands made at city councils transitional demands towards abolition? If it is possible to remove these officers, then why do our critics prefer the version of this where community members are less empowered in the process of doing so? Why do our critics trust a version of these processes entirely controlled by elected officials (and their corporate backers) more than they trust the possibility of building with and appealing to their neighbors? Why is it the demand for community control that encourages the sudden seriousness of the same “practicalities” that liberals use to dismiss Defund and Abolition demands entirely, in favor of more practically “sensible” demands like police reform?
“CCOP does not seek to take over an existing institution, and we do not want their workforce.”
Omedi Ochieng’s ”Defeat the Police” article includes a useful global radical history of challenges to the police and community self-defense, including examples taken from the South African anti-apartheid movement. Ochieng invokes the history of extreme state repression against the Black Panther Party and Young Lords in response to CCOP – though, since his essay stops short of endorsing a particular approach that goes “beyond” defund or community control, it is unclear what he wants us to take from this history.
The lessons he does draw from these stories, it seems to us, are the wrong ones. He points out that “[t]he perennial raids on the party’s chapter offices, violent attacks on its coalition allies (such as the firebombing of the offices of the Young Lords Party when they began to organize for community control of the police) “are precisely what the police in a settler colony are designed to do.” We agree: they are designed to protect settler interests as such, and the violence of the state response demonstrates the existential danger to those interests posed by the kind of demand we are making.
Ochieng argues that we have failed to learn from history, that “advocates for community control have offered little indication of what lessons the left should glean from the defeat of movements that sought democratic control of the police.” But it is precisely because they lost by ballot initiative that we are advocating for the idea. The idea is very simple: it is a contest of votes, and we need to win more of them than the Panthers and Young Lords did. This is the most ordinary stuff of democracy.
Ochieng insists that we should “no more seek control of such an institution than one should want to control the U.S. military.” But this argument simply repeats the base mischaracterization of most of our critics. It portrays our demand as perpetuating the reactionary actions taken by these institutions rather than relcaiming control of the resources they have taken from us. Shutting down AFRICOM and redirecting the resources of a “national defense” budget of world conquest proportions towards reparations and community-controlled projects would be the actual military analogue of CCOP.
Is that a frightening vision of the world? Because to us, helping to set the stage for African liberation and self-determination sounds like a plan.
Conclusion
Pan-African Community Action also believes that we need to build organization and power, but we understand the difference between power and influence. Our position paper includes measures directed at exactly this nexus. Our approach involves using the ballot initiative process to force the state to recognize formal community power over an institution rather than persuading or influencing state bureaucrats to vote against their own interests.
Alongside this political contest to build dual power inside of contested and liberated zones, PACA proposes a rigorous political education program designed to convince our neighbors on the ground – not the political elites on the other side of the negotiating table or a “shaming” campaign – of the merits of community control over policing, of the merits of fighting for power. Alongside those first two must run a rigorous leadership development program designed to prepare our neighbors to wield their newfound power justly and wisely.
Community Control Over Police as a framing demand keeps our eyes on the ball whether or not it is achieved in the immediate future: power over our lives, not cuddlier treatment from those who jealously hoard that power. Our goal is “community control,” whether over public safety, land, budgets, or housing. Our goal is to have power and wield it justly ourselves, not to demand that the boot on our neck be swapped out for slippers instead.
Even a long-term, negotiation-focused approach would be better with a clear overall goal that correctly articulates the real political problem. Key to preventing our campaigns from diluting political consciousness is preventing confusion about what we’re fighting for: this is why it is important to differentiate between “reformist reforms” from radical ones. Community control over police is a principled commitment to a part of what liberation would look like, what tomorrow’s struggle should be trying to use today’s possibilities to achieve. Why do our critics oppose communities deciding for themselves what crucial aspects of their lives are going to be like: if that isn’t self-determination, then what is? And if self-determination is not what we want, then what is?
THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS IS A FIGHT AGAINST CAPITALISM
https://popularresistance.org/the-fight-for-womens-rights-is-a-fight-against-capitalism/
By Rachel Hagan, Tribune Magazine.March 8, 2021
| EDUCATE!
Around The World, Women – More Likely To Be In Insecure And Underpaid Jobs – Are Facing The Worst Of The Covid Fallout.
It’s a reminder that the fight for women’s liberation is a fight for workers’ rights.
International Women’s Day was founded after 15,000 women marched through New York City in 1908 to demand three things: better hours, better pay, and voting rights. In most of the world, the last of these has been cemented – but the pandemic has thrown the former two into jeopardy.
In summer 2020, the McKinsey Global Institute that around the world, women were at 1.8 times the risk of Covid redundancy compared to the risk facing men. Research from the University of Exeter also found that women in the UK were twice as likely to have lost their job during the first wave of the pandemic.
Around 133,000 more women were furloughed during the first wave, too, meaning more are likely in line for redundancies when the scheme ends. In the UK, as redundancies have proliferated, men’s employment has now fallen more than women’s – but that women were often first in the firing line indicates qualitative divisions in work.
These divisions take various forms. Women (and BAME women, particularly) are considerably more likely to be employed part-time, and on insecure or zero-hour contracts. They’re also more likely to be employed in industries that were shut down by Covid, like retail and hospitality, which likely accounts for a big chunk of job losses – as well as in the public sector, which will represent many of the jobs retained.
Disproportionate childcaring duties have also put women in the firing line. Research from UCL in July 2020 found that women spent twice as much time as men homeschooling children during lockdown, leaving work time limited; the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that mothers are 47 percent more likely to have lost their jobs or quit during lockdown compared to fathers.
Pregnant Then Screwed, a charity which campaigns against employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy or parenthood, surveyed close to 20,000 mothers and pregnant women and found that 15 percent of them had either been made redundant or expected to be over the course of the pandemic. 72 percent of those said that they had been forced to work fewer hours as a result of childcare duties.
32-year-old Jessica*, who works in customer experience for a start-up, was told that her company needed to cut costs at the start of the pandemic. ‘They felt that because I was part-time and because I had children—they literally used these words—that I should go on furlough,’ she says.
Jessica was still made to work throughout her furlough, and has now had her hours cut to ten per week, with the lion’s share of her role given over to a younger member of staff.
Then there are rising concerns about conditions, pay, and quality of work among women who have kept their jobs. Women are more likely to have a consistently low income, and key workers out on the frontline of the virus are also more likely to be women (in the NHS alone, women comprised 77 percent of the workforce in 2019).
Data from the Resolution Foundation published early in the outbreak last year showed that only one in 10 low earners were able to work from home, and that 69 percent of those low earners were women.
Siobhan Endean, a national officer with Unite the Union, notes that there is a widespread problem with governmental ignorance about the day-to-day machinations of work done predominantly by women.
‘The government had absolutely no idea that women who worked in social care went from care home to care home,’ she says. ‘The fact that they didn’t even have any concept that the health and social care workforce was structured in that way just demonstrates contempt.’
Labour issues have developed against a backdrop of other dangers, including the well-documented shadow pandemic of rising domestic abuse. Unsurprisingly, they’ve also had a huge impact on mental health.
‘Women have told us about their experiences, and I have to say it’s probably the most heartrendingly sad material that I’ve gone through in a while,’ says UNISON’s National Women’s Officer Josie Irwin.
A survey by UNISON, which recorded responses from nearly 47,000 women workers—including teaching assistants, nurses, and council staff, among others—found that 65 percent were not sleeping well, and 57 percent felt stressed ‘most of the time’. According to research from UCL, between March and September 2020, women consistently reported higher levels of depression, loneliness, and major stress than men.
Sally, an ambulance care assistant, can attest to these numbers, adding that the low pay common in sectors dominated by women—like healthcare—is a major contributor. ‘I was in the military and got paid “danger money”,’ she says. ‘In this job I’m risking my life every day for £10.94 an hour.’
Endean argues that the government should take a gendered approach to the economy in order to recognise the disproportionate effect pandemic measures are having on women. ‘The sort of inequalities that were bubbling beneath the surface before Covid have just run riot,’ she says, and is echoed by Ronan, who adds: ‘This is all just symptomatic of unaddressed inequality that has existed in the labour market for a really long time.’
Last week’s Budget did little to address these problems. Many were hoping for a U-turn on the public sector pay freeze, and for the £20 uplift to Universal Credit to become a permanent measure. There could have been further help for working mothers, help for the childcare and health and social care sectors, and an increase in rate and accessibility of statutory sick pay, which is vital to low-paid workers. Put simply, the policies that could transform women’s lives are the policies that would help all workers.
Rishi Sunak himself acknowledged that ‘the economic impact of restrictions has not been felt equally,’ and that ‘staff in the hardest-hit sectors are more likely to be young, female, from ethnic minorities, and lower paid’ – but no measures were offered to combat that iniquity. On top of all this, companies have just been given another six-month postponement on gender pay gap enforcement, after enforcement was postponed for the entirety of 2020.
At its most serious, the consequences of Covid could mean the future for women looks less like science fiction and more like history. Researchers, campaigners, and journalists alike have spoken about a risk of ‘regression’ to a society in which women are either confined to the home, or forced into precarious work which goes undervalued and underpaid.
‘The government need to stop the slide back to the 1950s,’ says Irwin, ‘which is what this feels like.’ This is not a problem confined to individual households: it’s a political problem—one of exploitation, of casualisation, and of a system that fails to value work that doesn’t revolve around profit—and must be tackled on a political level.
SUPPORT KEEPS BUILDING FOR #BAMAZON UNION DRIVE
By Martha Grevatt, Workers.org.
March 8, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/support-keeps-building-for-bamazon-union-drive/
Biden Feels Pressure.
A people’s movement against an anti-people corporation has intensified, backing the union drive at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse. The courageous Southern union warriors are finally starting to get the support they need and deserve.
Some three dozen organizations loaned their names to a letter urging President Joe Biden to come out on the side of the Amazon workers fighting for a union. Biden had angered unionists and progressives for publicly taking a “neutral” stance on the representation election taking place now through March 29. Signers included UNITE HERE and Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) unions, Maine AFL-CIO, the National Employment Law Project and the Working Families Party.
Feeling the pressure, on Feb. 28 Biden came out against Amazon’s union busting, affirming the right of every worker to choose union representation.
Solidarity has been growing since the Feb. 20 National Day of Solidarity. Renowned actor and activist Danny Glover stood outside the Bessemer facility Feb. 22, holding a sign that read “Remember Mail Your Yes Ballot.” Glover waved, gave “thumbs up” and said, “Stay strong!” to the workers coming into and leaving work. His presence drew widespread media attention to the union effort.
“It’s about justice,” Glover said. “The union is about looking out for the welfare of workers and is willing to stand up and fight for justice . . . It’s just one step, among the many steps, that are being taken around the country, in the service of justice.” (tinyurl.com/yd3xdv7h)
Glover, along with Representative Ilhan Omar, Senator Bernie Sanders and Georgia voting rights leader Stacey Abrams, is featured in a support video created by More Perfect Union. A letter to Amazon criticizing its union-busting campaign was signed by 13 U.S. senators. Birmingham, Ala., Mayor Randall Woodfin, Ohio Congressional candidate Nina Turner and actor and activist Susan Sarandon tweeted their support. Turner plans to attend a solidarity rally outside a Cleveland Whole Foods March 13.
Labor Solidarity Expands
The 1.6 million-strong AFSCME issued a solidarity statement Feb. 23 declaring, “It’s time for Amazon workers to have a voice on the job.”
On Feb. 26, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tina Fey, Shaka King and over 1,760 members of Writers Guild of America East and WGA West signed a public statement urging Amazon workers to “Vote Union Yes.” Over 30 of the signers have produced films and programs for Amazon Prime.
Southern Workers Assembly, Workers Assembly Against Racism, Democratic Socialists of America, Our Revolution and People’s Organization for Progress, along with the newly formed Support Alabama Amazon Union campaign, are among the groups that continue to organize demonstrations outside sites for Amazon, Whole Foods and Amazon’s union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis.
Support Alabama Amazon Union has called for a “virtual week of action” March 1-5, culminating in a zoom organizing meeting March 6 to build for an International Day of Action March 20. For more info visit supportamazonworkers.org.
REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS MOUNT ELECTION CAMPAIGN IN CHILE
By Left Voice.
March 8, 2021
An Interview With Two Socialist Candidates For The Elections To The Constitutional Convention In Chile On April 11.
https://popularresistance.org/revolutionary-workers-mount-election-campaign-in-chile/
On April 11, Chile will elect a convention to write a new constitution, which will replace the constitution of 1980, written by the far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet. Left Voice spoke with two candidates running to join the Constitutional Convention, Joseffe Cáceres and Daniel Vargas, both from the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PTR).
Joseffe Cáceres is a leader of the union of cleaning workers at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences near Santiago. She is a member of the national leadership of the PTR and a spokesperson of the women’s group Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses). She is a candidate in one of the districts on the periphery of Santiago made up of slums. She is 33 years old and a mother. She joined the PTR when she was a young hip-hop activist.
Daniel Vargas is a lawyer who, during Chile’s October 2019 rebellion, became well known for defending people who had been arrested. He was an organizer of the Human Rights Commission of the Emergency and Protection Committee of Antofagasta. This organization coordinated unions, poor residents, student groups, and human rights organizations during the rebellion — it was the principal organizing body of the rebellion in this mining town in northern Chile, one of the main port and industrial centers of the country. He is 34 years old.
One month remains before the Constitutional Convention is elected. How is the situation in Chile?
Daniel Vargas: I think there is a mix of feelings. On the one hand, lots of people hope that the Constitutional Convention will be able to make major changes to the country. The constitution of 1980 represents the legacy of the dictatorship and enshrines precarious living conditions, as well as the privatization of education, health care, pensions, etc. This is why the day the referendum for a new constitution passed turned into a mass celebration.
On the other hand, many people have a deep distrust in the constituent process, which was designed behind our backs by the same parties that for years administered the legacy of the dictatorship. The mobilizations of October 2019 began as a revolt against a price hike for public transportation. The government responded with repression, and this radicalized the movement, transforming it into a nationwide rebellion lasting several months. It reached its peak on November 12, when the main unions called for a general strike. This was the biggest strike since the end of the dictatorship.
The president, the right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, was left on the ropes. In this situation, the main parties signed an “Agreement for Peace and a New Constitution.” This agreement defined the current process. The truth is that the regime aimed to contain the crisis and prevent the mobilizations in the streets from toppling Piñera. Senators and deputies who participated in the agreement have had to acknowledge that at the time the Piñera government was at risk of becoming unsustainable.
Many people see this as an agreement for impunity. We should not forget that since the agreement was signed, police brutality has killed a dozen people, and there are still hundreds of prisoners from the revolt. This generates outrage in broad sectors.
There is also a feeling of uncertainty because of the pandemic. Like most countries, Chile is going through a period of economic and social crisis, as millions of people have lost their jobs. There has been an increase in poverty and in precarious working conditions. It is very probable that the hope being placed in the process will conflict with the limitations of the convention, and with the economic and social situation generally.
How will voting take place?
Joseffe Cáceres: To give you an idea, the day they signed the “Peace Agreement,” there was no celebrating on the streets. The right-wing government, the social democratic opposition, and even the reformist Left sat down to work out an agreement to save the government — not something that generates much confidence. Quickly people began to discover the “fine print.”
I‘ll give you a few examples: the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention will be according to the same rules as elections to congress. This implies a whole series of advantages for the traditional parties. So of the total financing granted by the state to all the campaigns, 42 percent is going to the Right and 31 percent to the social democratic opposition. The independent campaigns — representing the majority of the candidates — will have less than 3.5 percent. Also, new parties and independents will get less than one second of advertising time on television. Less than one second!
So the Right campaigned to keep Pinochet’s constitution. They lost the vote, with almost 80 percent voting in favor of a new constitution. Only the wealthiest areas in the country voted against. Yet this same Right will now be guaranteed overrepresentation in the convention. There will be a “two-thirds quorum,” meaning that just a third of candidates will be able to block any measure. In other words, every single thing will need to be negotiated with the Right, who have already announced that they will defend the fundamental pillars of the dictatorship’s legacy.
The convention will guarantee impunity for Piñera, and the state apparatus will continue to function under the government’s control. The youth, the vanguard of the social explosion, will not have the right to vote or be elected. For these reasons, different intellectuals, activists of the rebellion, and sectors of the Left have declared that this is not a free and sovereign constituent assembly, as we had demanded.
That’s why we shouldn’t be deceived by the large number of candidates and proposals offered in the campaign. This is the same illusion the owners of Chile have always offered: I’ll allow you to participate, but I will make sure to control the process.
The convention has 17 seats reserved for Chile’s indigenous peoples, whose demands and struggles were an important aspect of the October rebellion. Is the convention a step forward for them?
Joseffe Cáceres: The flag of the Mapuche people was one of the main emblems of the rebellion. The Chilean state has historically criminalized the struggles of indigenous peoples. This represents the xenophobia of the ruling elite. But when millions of Chileans took to the streets spontaneously, they waved the Mapuche flag — a flag of a people who fought back against the Chilean state for centuries.
I cannot imagine that these 17 seats will be enough to placate this struggle, which has only intensified since the October rebellion. The south of Chile, which is the area with the greatest concentration of indigenous peoples, is currently in a state of extreme tension. After the rebellion, many Mapuche communities intensified their land occupations, confronting large landowners and logging companies that have stolen their lands. In this context, racist murders against Mapuche continue, alongside raids against communities and further militarization of the area. The government is currently debating whether to decree a state of siege, which would mean a new kind of repression.
There is a lot at stake, because the ancestral and territorial demands of the Mapuche people are in direct conflict with the property claims of the big logging companies in the south. Pinochet gave huge subsidies to these companies to exploit the forests at the expense of indigenous communities. Today logging is in the hands of Chile’s biggest corporations.
That is why it is virtually impossible for this convention to resolve the demands of indigenous peoples peacefully, including the return of stolen lands, and end to militarization, the release of political prisoners, and the right to self-determination. For us, the only way to win these demands is to coordinate joint struggles of indigenous communities together with the working class and the millions of people who support the Mapuche cause.
For 30 years, Chile has been administered by two political blocs: the Right, represented by the current president Sebastián Piñera; and the Center Left, whose most well-known figure internationally is the former president Michelle Bachelet. How are these two forces presenting themselves in these elections?
Daniel Vargas: The Right is running for the Constitutional Convention with a single slate, including the racist far-right party of José Antonio Kast. (Kast is trying to become a kind of Chilean Trump, but he is not very popular.) This is Piñera’s coalition, and he is one of the most hated presidents in the history of Chile. His hands are stained with blood. The Right is campaigning for the defense of private property, the free market, and fiscal austerity. In other words, they seek to maintain the legacy of the dictatorship.
The Center Left is made up of the former Concertación coalition. These parties are running as the slate Constituent Unity. Besides Bachlet’s Socialist Party, one of the main pillars of this coalition is the Christian Democracy party, which initially supported the military coup of 1973. It then led the so-called “transition to democracy,” following the plans of U.S. imperialism for the region. Today the party’s chairman says that his main international model is Angela Merkel, and they will campaign to support governability and responsibility.
One of the main slogans of the rebellion was “It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years” [i.e., not about a fare hike of 30 pesos, but about 30 years of neoliberalism]. Of those 30 years, the center-left Concertación coalition was governing for more than 20 of them. These governments defended the fundamental economic pillars of the dictatorship, with Chile as a paradise for neoliberalism. But they were also responsible for innovations in this field. For example, they created the private student loan system that today keeps hundreds of thousands of young people in debt for life just for attending college.
What about Chile’s reformist Left, including the Communist Party and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front)?
Daniel Vargas: The Frente Amplio was a signatory to the “Peace Agreement” that allowed Piñera to remain in power, while millions of people were shouting on the streets: “Piñera must resign!” For a couple of years, the Frente Amplio represented the “new Left,” aligned with projects like Podemos in the Spanish State. This did not last long, however, because the party was delegitimized during the rebellion and suffered an important internal crisis. Of the 20 deputies they got elected at the last election, only 12 are aligned with the Frente Amplio today. A number of the parties and organizations have since broken with the front.
The Communist Party took part in the negotiations to sign this agreement, but it ultimately withdrew. Despite publicly criticizing the agreement, the Communist Party did not call for mobilizations. The CP plays a leading role in the main trade union federation, the CUT. Just days before the agreement was signed, the CUT had called a general strike. Yet even though masses of people wanted to continue the struggle and recognized that a trap was being laid, the union bureaucracy led by the CP decided to sit down with the government to negotiate. They never called a strike again.
The Communist Party has criticized the Frente Amplio harshly for the latter’s role in the rebellion. But now they are campaigning on a joint slate. Their programs are not very different. They want the new constitution to incorporate social rights such as health care, education, pensions, etc. They want this to be financed by the redistribution of wealth. But they want such measures to be taken in isolation, relying on the letter of the constitution and the institutions of the regime. And in that way, it will be impossible to resolve structural issues such as precarious working conditions, poverty, and the country’s dependence on multinational corporations and monopolies. The big capitalists will resist fundamental measures, and only the struggle of the working class and the poor masses can confront them. This is one of the lessons learned from the experience of “progressive” governments in Latin America [the so-called “Pink Tide”].
The Trotskyists of the PTR are also running in the elections. What are your main proposals?
Joseffe Cáceres: We have slates in eight districts, and more than 70 candidates in different cities across the country. Our candidates are workers, young people, and women who actively participated in the rebellion. The list includes Dauno Totoro, who was persecuted by the government for saying what thousands of people were saying: we have to get rid of the government through a general strike in order to establish a free and sovereign constituent assembly. Also Suely Arancibia, who was part of the First Line, the group of militant youth who took the lead in defending the mobilizations from police repression. Our candidates were organizers of the Emergency and Protection Committee in Antofagasta, including the teachers Galia Aguilera and Patricia Aguilera, the workers’ leader Lester Calderón, and Daniel here. That committee coordinated unions, neighborhood organizations, human rights groups, healthcare activists, and Front Line fighters. Our candidates include healthcare workers’ leaders from different cities.
We want to put an end to the neoliberal plunder of the last 30 years. These have been decades of looting, not only of natural resources but also of our rights, our working conditions, and even our lives. We are running in these elections to raise the banners of the October rebellion high: the struggle to get rid of this government with a general strike and a free and sovereign constituent assembly. In other words, we want to put an end to the legacy of the dictatorship via mass mobilizations. This is the only way to take fundamental measures, such as the nationalization of natural resources like copper and the strategic sectors of the economy that are in the hands of imperialist and national monopolies. This is the only way to really solve the urgent problems of the people, such as quality education and public health care, and end to the private pension system, and a minimum wage in line with the cost of feeding a family.
There is money for all this. The price of copper is at a historic high. Big capitalists have increased their wealth severalfold during the pandemic. Meanwhile, unemployment, poverty, and precarity increase.
There are many people who are mobilizing for demands like this. Because many people were opposed to the “Peace Agreement” and have fought the bureaucrats’ truce with the government. And many see how the big capitalists continue to make profits at the expense of our lives and health.
How has the election campaign been going?
Joseffe Cáceres: Our campaign is intense. Workers, students, precariously employed young people, activists, and professionals are organizing around the ideas of our campaign. So far, about 500 volunteers have joined the campaign. Most of them are workers in health care, education, and industry. This is in addition to the hundreds of the PTR’s militants across the country, who are organizing the campaign day by day.
Besides handing out hundreds of thousands of leaflets on the streets, we are also organizing open meetings. We did a meeting of healthcare workers where more than 100 people from different hospitals got together. There they voted to support our candidates and to use the elections to campaign to defend the public healthcare system against privatization and to improve working conditions in hospitals.
The media have profiled our candidates, such as an extensive interview CNN Chile did with Ignacio Cortés. He is not only the youngest candidate anywhere in the country for the Constitutional Convention, but he was president of the students’ union in a technical school and now has a precarious job at the Antofagasta Hospital. The press have also profiled our candidates who are LGBTQ+ and teachers.
Some socialists argue that the demand for a constituent assembly was always a trap to divert the movement and that revolutionaries should have argued against it.1 How do you as revolutionary socialists relate to an institution of bourgeois democracy like the Constitutional Convention, which the ruling class hopes will reestablish the legitimacy of its regime?
Daniel Vargas: We were among the thousands of activists across the country who opposed the “Peace Agreement” and systematically denounced the pitfalls of the Constitutional Convention. We do this with the conviction that only the mobilization of the working class and the poor masses can put an end to the legacy of the dictatorship. We saw the enormous power of the class struggle, which proved to the whole world that neoliberalism in Chile never benefited us — it only helped a handful of billionaires.
But at the same time, there are millions of people who are putting their hope in this process. We must accompany this experience so that a revolutionary program can become a material force, not just words. To accomplish this, we use all the tools that can amplify our voice, including elections.
We managed to register as a political party in Chile’s principal cities. We are the only group on the revolutionary socialist Left that has managed to win a party status like this. We put this tool at the disposal of everyone who wants to fight for a revolutionary, working-class program and denounce all the traps that are designed to stop our mobilizations.
Note:
Examples of socialists who oppose the demand for a constituent assembly include the Spartacist League and the International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods.
Interview and translation: Nathaniel Flakin
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