Thursday, March 28, 2024

Dr. King Speaks: Economic Consequences of the Capitalist/War System

Some Remembrances of Dr. King Who Was Killed 56 Years Ago

Harry Targ


    Veterans for Peace

Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.

Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures.

Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current. And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists 

“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

See a description of the 2024 military budget- https://www.peaceaction.org/what-we-do/campaigns/pentagon-spending/

Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.

 

Dr. King marches against the Vietnam War in Chicago on March 27, 1967

https://www.jofreeman.com/photos/KingAtChicago.html#:~:text=On%20March%2025%201967%2C%20civil,anti%2Dwar%20march%20that%20Dr.


Monday, March 25, 2024

Renewed Assaults on Higher Education

 

Harry Targ



Recently, with the rise of the far-rightwing forces around former President Trump, combining corporate elites, religious fundamentalists, extreme free market advocates, and military contractors, the attacks on education have become fierce.

Now politicians close to such powerful groups launch attacks on education in state houses and the halls of Congress. Critical Race Theory, rather than being a short-hand description for a body of legal scholarship, has been redefined as ideology. Politicians running for office talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery as a root cause. Charges of antisemitism are being used to challenge expressions of intellectual and political points of view on campuses. Presidents at our most prestigious universities, women and persons of color, have been attacked for defending academic freedom.

Further, Professor William Robinson  recently reported that the government of Israel has organized campaigns to interfere with discussion and debate in US universities about Israel’s war on Gaza. ”Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities.”

 https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=f95149460d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_11_16_07_58_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-e6daf26d84-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

The whole edifice of what used to be regarded as central to education- discussion, debate, reflection, and criticism of every subject- has now come under assault.

Purdue University

A prominent Big Ten university, Purdue, has led the process of transforming itself into a model neoliberal university, in keeping with the Koch Brothers/ ALEC model of education. The transformation of Purdue University has involved significant changes including privatization of public control of the institution; moving into the increasingly competitive online education market; shifting programs away from an educational mix of science, technology, the social sciences, and humanities to more STEM and less liberal arts; currying the favor of huge corporations and enlarged Department of Defense contracts; establishing programs whereby wealthy alumni fund students’ education with contractual guarantees by which students pay back the alums; and the establishment at the university of a “country club” ambience to attract students.

The Beginnings of Civic Literacy at Purdue University: Round One in the Fight to Control Curricula

No one can dispute the value of education about the nation, the world, and the issues that have and will affect peoples’ lives in the short-and long-term future. Schools and universities, of course, have historically been primary venues for disseminating such information. However, most often politicians have preferred narratives about themselves and others that they wish to inculcate in the young. But a more desirable form of information and analysis is one that is diverse, sensitive to one’s own past and present, and shows respect for narratives and experiences of other peoples and nations. This kind of “civics” education is complicated and not achieved by learning isolated facts.

President Mitch Daniels, Purdue University, in the spring, 2019, proposed that the university require that each graduating senior at the university demonstrate a knowledge of what he called “civics.” The members of the Board of Trustees  endorsed the idea and implicitly castigated faculty for not moving expeditiously to establish a civics certification process for graduating seniors. But faculty questioned the need for such a certification, what civics education is, and how to provide for it. Specifically, they asked whether claims about civics ignorance at Purdue and elsewhere were true. They also asked whether taking a short-answer test really demonstrated knowledge of the United States government, its constitution, and the political process. Some faculty argued that such a need could only be satisfied by at least one course, perhaps in Political Science or History, that would provide a richer knowledge, raise competing understandings of the development of the United States government, and would allow for serious discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the American political experience. A ten or twenty item short answer test, they argued, would not reflect the more subtle and sophisticated needs of civics education.

Some faculty were puzzled by why, in the context of the existence of a set of university core requirements already in existence, this idea of a civics certification emerged. One possible source of the idea of some kind of civics education was seen in a January 2016 report published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization founded by the State Policy Network, which is tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Charles and David Koch Foundation. The report called “A Crisis in Civic Education,” described a survey it sponsored in 2015 that demonstrated that college graduates and the public in general lacked knowledge of “our free institutions of government.” It listed examples of some basic facts about government and history that respondents failed to answer correctly. These included a lack of understanding of how the constitution could be amended, which institution had the power to declare war, and who was “the father of the constitution.”

Perhaps ACTA’s underlying concern was suggested by a quote in the preface of the document attributed to Louise Mirrer, President of the New York Historical Society, who received an ACTA award in 2014 “for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education.” She said that in the contemporary world of conflicts between religious, ethnic and racial groups, Americans need to be reminded of US history “…especially as that history conveys our nation’s stunning successful recipe, based on the documents of our founding, for an inclusive and tolerant society.” (Apparently, she forgot the limitations on the rights of Blacks, women and those without property to vote in “the documents of our founding.”)   In addition, the report took aim at community service programs, which it asserted “…give students little insight into how our system of government works and what roles they must fill as citizens of a democratic republic.”

It is clear, therefore, that what the ACTA report (and one could reasonably assume what motivated the recommendation of former President Daniels, himself an award recipient from ACTA), and the Purdue Board of Trustees regards as civics education was a narrative that celebrates the American experience. These sources presumed that specific facts about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and basic truisms about the United States as a “melting pot” constituted civics education. Although civics education is surely a desirable goal of education at every level, K through college, it requires moving beyond memorizing basic facts to more subtle examinations about the American experience, including exposing students to debates about how and why that experience has unfolded in the way that it has.

Now the State of Indiana Has Passed  Senate Bill SB 202: Continuing Efforts to Control University Curricula

It is interesting to note that Indiana State Senator Spencer Deery who introduced Senate Bill 202 in January 2024 which is now law defended the bill by suggesting that distrust in higher education has increased. While this claim is of dubious merit and has come from politically conservative places such as ALEC and so-called “think tanks,” many citizens on and off campus are skeptical of ill-placed and self-interested investments in the privatization of higher education, collaborating with real estate and military contractors, and working to expunge from curricula any courses that promote critical thinking.

To minimize debates, discussion, and critical thinking about the great issues of our time in public universities SB 202 was introduced. It includes a number of provisions that are designed to eliminate discussions of controversial subjects on college campuses by threatening the job security, or tenure, of faculty. The provisions of SB 202, signed and approved by Governor Eric Holcomb include the following:

1.Establish a process where university trustees evaluate faculty up for tenure

2.Require trustees to review a faculty member’s tenure status every five years.

3.Require state universities to establish procedures that allow students and employees to submit complaints that a faculty member isn’t meeting certain criteria related to free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity.

4. Require trustees to adopt a “policy of neutrality” that limits universities from taking official positions on “political, moral or ideological issues.”

5.Allow the Indiana House Speaker and Indiana Senate president to appoint a trustee to a university’s board.

6.Make universities account for spending on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus and add to those programs to include “intellectual diversity.

Dave Bangert, Deery defends tenure reform bill as blowback grows at Purdue, IU (basedinlafayette.com)

https://www.basedinlafayette.com/p/deery-defends-tenure-reform-bill

https://www.purdueexponent.org/image_1b2c8288-d6a0-11ee-b632-17cddb79ab71.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share

Conclusion




Just as academic critics of child labor, anti-union policies, World War I, and financial speculation a hundred years ago faced censure and unemployment, universities are being pressured to circumscribe accepted debates. While the higher-education system has extended academic freedom and provided job security for some through tenure, attacks on these provisions are spreading as the twenty-first century reconstruction of American higher education proceeds.  From Florida to Indiana SB 202 bill, (now law) circumscribes tenure and what is taught in the classroom. Politicians and many university administrators, and perhaps foreign governments,  are committed to destroying the academic freedom, and the free exchange of ideas, that has made universities in recent times a haven for the pursuit of knowledge useful for the advancement of society.

 




 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/harry-targ-and-daniel-morris/from-upton-sinclairs-goose-step-to-the-neoliberal-university/paperback/product-vzdwyk.html?page=1&pageSize=4

 

 

 

Thursday, March 21, 2024

REVISITING THE POPULAR FRONT: CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF ANNE BRADEN

Harry Targ (a revised version of an original post on Tuesday, March 23, 2010)



…there are no heroes in this story…no villains…only people, the product of their environment, urged on by forces of history they often do not understand. Anne Braden, 1958.

https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/anne-braden-southern-patriot A film by Anne Lewis “Anne Braden: Southern Patriot”

Biographies can tell us about ourselves, where we came from, and where we might go. I recently read a narrative of the life of an extraordinary activist and her time. I think her history is relevant for us today.

Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Catherine Fosl, tells the story of a militant Southern woman who rejected the political culture of her day to fight for the liberation of African Americans, always insisting that Southern whites had to play a significant role in that struggle.

Anne Braden was born in 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky to a traditional Southern family. Schooled in the values of Southern womanhood, she increasingly saw the white supremacist south as an evil that not only repressed African Americans but served as an impediment to the achievement of human liberation of people everywhere. She pursued a career as political organizer and journalist, publishing the invaluable periodical, The Southern Patriot. She, with her husband Carl Braden, spent years organizing against racial segregation. Her struggle repeatedly encountered racists who opportunistically used anti-communism to protect their white privilege.

The biography of Braden suggests several historical lessons for us today. First, Braden was raised in a political culture that was hostile to social justice, although in a supportive, though sometimes stern family. In the society at large Braden experienced racism and was expected to accept and endorse it.

Second, through a multiplicity of associations and experiences she came to realize that racism was not only an impediment to her own development as a full human being but was also an impediment to the development of all humanity. Consequently, at relatively young ages, Braden came to the view that she must devote her life to the struggle against racism.

Third, Braden realized in her struggles that capitalism as an economic system stood in the way of human liberation. She understood that the capitalist mode of production was built on the backs of workers. Racism was used by capitalists to divide workers who together could organize to create a more humane society.

Fourth, Braden accepted as a basic premise of her political work the proposition that human solidarity was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the creation of a humane society. Anne Braden, saw human beings as shaped by their environments. Her own upbringing in a segregated society shaped her consciousness, but circumstances made her realize that people can liberate themselves by organizing resistance to that society. Racism had its roots in economic and political structures, and people were “urged on by forces of history they often do not understand.” But they can come to recognize and oppose those institutions that oppress others and by extension, themselves.

Fifth, Braden committed her life to organizing against capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. This meant crossing racial lines, participating in union struggles, linking struggles for civil rights with struggles for civil liberties, and unabashedly working with the Left to bring about social change.

Finally, Anne Braden became one of the most despised political activists in Cold War America. Anne and Carl Braden purchased a home in Louisville in the 1950s and sold it to an African American family. The property was in an all-white neighborhood. This generated a massive campaign to keep the family from occupying their house. The campaign was leveled at the Bradens for their work against segregation as much as against the African American family. After an extended public trial characterized by charges of Communist subversion Carl Braden was sentenced to prison for “sedition” based on an arcane Kentucky law. Subsequent to the trial and incarceration, virulent anti-communism dogged most organizing campaigns embraced by the Bradens.

The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), which the Bradens led, was always viewed with suspicion. Anti-communism even crept into the politics of the civil rights movement as it blossomed in the late 1950s. Despite the virulence of it, which usually was linked with racism, Anne Braden became an inspirational force among the young SNCC organizers in the South in the early 1960s, along with Ella Baker. Anne Braden took particular responsibility for building white activism around civil rights.

In the end, anti-communist campaigns, such as those against the Bradens, were used as tools by racist forces to demean, delegitimize, and split the working class and youth and to defeat progressive forces. Anti-communism and the defense of white supremacy became inseparable.

How do we assess the role of  Anne Braden in historical perspective, particularly during Women’s History Month? She participated as a leader, as intellectual and moral inspiration at a time when the working class was on the move in the 1930s and 1940s, and civil rights activism spread in the 1950s. Braden committed her life to the struggle against racism and she saw Black/white unity as basic to victory.

She participated in struggles with allies from the organized Left, particularly with members of the Communist Party USA.

Finally, and most critically, Braden participated in and advanced a politics of the Popular Front. Popular Front politics began with a commitment to class struggle. It was based on the presumption that racism was the central barrier to social change. And Popular Front politics prioritized commitments to broad-based networking among people and groups who engaged in a whole array of peace and justice issues.

Are there lessons from these lives for us today? I believe so. Braden taught us that the pursuit of social change was a lifetime activity. And ehe demonstrated to us that our political work must engage the broadest range of issues and the greatest numbers of people in our struggles for a humane future. The Braden biography tells an insightful and inspiring story that everyone interested in social change should read.






 

Friday, March 15, 2024

United States/Chinese Economic Relations: a radio program

 

https://radio.cgtn.com/podcast/news/1/Panel-Will-a-US-election-year-see-more-turbulence-in-China-US-economic-relations/472255


Sunday, August 2, 2020

"PLAYING THE CHINA CARD" (Differently)

Harry Targ

(It is time to change from confrontation to cooperation. End the New Cold War now. 11/15/2021)

Beginning in 1969 President Richard Nixon, guided by his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, fashioned a new policy toward China; what became known as “playing the China card.” It was motivated by a desire to push back and ultimately create regime change in the  Soviet Union. Cognizant of growing hostilities between the two large communist states, Nixon and Kissinger developed this plan to play one off against the other. Central to this policy was launching a diplomatic process that led to the1979 US formal diplomatic recognition of China. During the 1970s, the United States and China supported the same political allies in various parts of the world, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia for example. The split in the socialist world between the Soviet Union and China significantly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of socialism, for a time, on the world stage. Thus, from a US imperial point of view “playing the China card” worked.

In a speech on Thursday July 23 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Nixon opening to China was a mistake. “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come: that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.” (Edward Wong, Steven Lee Myers, “Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return,” The New York Times, July 25, 2020). If it is true that the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy toward China did in fact facilitate the weakening of socialism as a world force, why is the Secretary of State now calling “playing the China card” a mistake?

The answer to this question, or more broadly why is United States foreign policy returning to a policy hostile to China, perhaps creating a “New Cold War,” has several parts. First, as Alfred McCoy has described (In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books, 2017), the United States, relatively speaking, is a declining power. As to economic growth, scientific and technological developments, productivity, and trade, the US, compared to China particularly, is experiencing stagnation or decline. China has engaged in massive global projects in transportation, trade, and scientific advances and by 2030 based on many measures will advance beyond the US.

According to McCoy, the United States has embarked on a path to overcome its declining relative economic hegemony by increasingly investing in military advances: a space force, a new generation of nuclear weapons, cyber security, biometrics, and maintaining or enhancing a global military presence particularly in the Pacific (what Obama spokespersons called “the Asian pivot”). In other words, rather than accommodating to a new multipolar world in the 21st century, the United States is seeking to reestablish its global hegemony through military means.

Second, the United States is desperately seeking to overcome the end of its monopoly on technological advances. In computerization, transportation, pharmaceuticals, it is challenging Chinese innovations, claiming that China’s advances are derived not from its domestic creativity but from “pirating” from United States companies. For example, the prestigious and influential Council on Foreign Relations issued a report last year entitled “Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge.” The report warned that “…the United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.” China is investing significantly in new technologies, CFR claims, which they predict will make China the biggest inventor by 2030. Also, to achieve this goal they are “exploiting” the openness of the US by violating intellectual property rights and spying. Therefore, the CFR concluded, since technological innovation is linked to economic and military advantage and since US leadership in technology and science is at risk, the nation must recommit to rebuilding its scientific prowess.

Third, while the United States is engaged in efforts at regime change around the world and is using brutal economic sanctions to starve people into submission (such as in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and 36 other countries victimized by economic sanctions), China is increasing its economic ties to these countries through investments, trade, and assistance. And China opposes these US policies in international organizations. In broad terms Chinese policy stands with the majority of countries in the Global South while the United States seeks to control developments there.

Fourth, although Trump foreign policy is designed to recreate a Cold War, with China as the target, a policy also embraced by most Democrats, there is at the same time counter-pressure from  sectors of the capitalist class who have ties to the Chinese economy: investment, global supply chains, and financial speculation. Moreover, sectors of Chinese capital own or have substantial control over many US corporations and banks. In addition, the Chinese government controls over $1 trillion of US debt. For these sectors of US capital, economic ties with China remain economically critical. In addition some writers, such as Jerry Harris, point to the emergence of a “transnational capitalist class” whose interests are not tied to any nation-state (Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).

Consequently, while the trajectory of US policy is toward a return to cold war, there is some push back by economic and political elites as well. As the New York Times article above put it, “In the United States, tycoons and business executives, who exercise enormous sway among politicians of both parties, will continue to push for a more moderate approach, as members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet who represent Wall Street interests have done.”

Fifth, American domestic politics provide the immediate cause of the transformation of US/China policy. Candidate Donald Trump’s popularity is declining dramatically because of the spread of the covid pandemic, its impacts on the US economy, and the rise of racial tensions in the country. A classic antidote for politicians experiencing declining popularity is to construct an external enemy, “an other,” which can redirect the attention of the public from their personal troubles. President Trump has sought to deflect the cause of the spreading pandemic onto the Chinese. It is this external enemy that is the source of our domestic problems. In this context the President is talking tough with the “enemy” of the United States, and, as Secretary of State Pompeo suggests, it is about time that the US government gives up illusions about working with China. Only a Trump administration, he suggested, would be capable of doing this (forget President Obama’s “Asian pivot”).

Finally, the ideological package of racism, white supremacy, and American Exceptionalism so prevalent in United States history has resurfaced in dramatic ways as the Trump administration and its allies have opposed nationwide protests against police violence and structural racism. White supremacy at home is inextricably connected with American Exceptionalism abroad. For example President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 claimed that the white race has been critical to civilization.  Years later Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration (and more recently President Barack Obama) spoke about the  United States as the “indispensable nation,”a model of economics and politics for the world. Pompeo continues this tradition claiming that the United States stands for a “free 21st century.” This sense of omniscience has been basic to the ideological justification of United States imperial rule.

Each of these elements, from the changing shape of economic and military capabilities, to political exigencies, to the pathologies of culture, require a peace and justice movement that stands for peaceful coexistence, demilitarization, building a world of economic justice and the rights of people to determine their own destiny, and inalterable opposition to racism, white supremacy, and exceptionalisms of all kinds.

Panel: China-US relations at turning point? http://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/detail/1/232452                                                    

 

Friday, March 8, 2024

THE VIETNAM WOMEN'S UNION: AN EFFECTIVE MASS ORGANIZATION

Harry Targ

(Originally posted Sunday, April 17, 2011)



 Vietnamese Women’s Club. Photo by Paul Krehbiel

We arrived in time to be ushered into a meeting of a rural Vietnamese women’s club, just outside of Hue. Discussion among the 75 single women was animated, self-assured, and clearly engaged. Members listened to each other, respected what each had to say, and evidenced not one iota of shyness even though their discussion of women’s health, environmental, and other immediate issues was being observed by eight American guests and a Vietnam Women’s Union official from Hanoi.

We had already been to a briefing at the Center for Women and Development’s new building, and the Women’s Museum in Hanoi. We had visited Peace House, a shelter for Vietnamese women victimized by sexual trafficking, part of the CWD project to provide shelter, training, and advocacy for women victimized by domestic violence or sexual trafficking. All of these venues-- the CWD, the Women’s Museum, the rural single women’s club, the Peace House shelter project-- were part of the national activities of the Vietnam Women’s Union. The VWU was clearly well- organized at the center, clear of purpose and commitment, and connected to regional and local bodies of women throughout the country.

Our introduction to the VWU was part of a 14-day educational tour of Vietnam in March, 2011 organized by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and hosted by the Vietnam Women’s Union. In addition to our request to receive information about the VWU, we expressed interest in briefings on the Vietnamese policy known as Doi Moi, or the social market economy, and the lingering long-term impacts on the Vietnamese people of the 10-year use of Agent Orange during the American war. These issues and more were covered on our travels, briefings, museum visits, and conversations with Vietnamese people. The focus of this essay is the VWU.

The Vietnam Women’s Union, one of six major mass organizations in the country, was founded in 1930 just before the Indochinese Communist Party. In socialist theory and practice, mass organizations are designed to mobilize major populations who require and are committed to social change in their societies. While their ideas and programs parallel those of local Communist parties, they are committed to meeting the needs of workers, women, youth, farmers, war veterans, and others whether they are members of political parties or not. Also effective mass organizations require both leadership and authentic and active participation from the grassroots.

As far as we could tell, the VWU is a model mass organization. It has levels of activity and participation at the national and provincial levels as well as in districts and small village communes. There are an estimated 13 million VWU members. As indicated in a VWU pamphlet: “Since its foundation, VWU has transformed itself fully into a women’s social-political and developmental organization, which is mandated to protect women’s legitimate rights and strive for gender equality.”

Levels of organization of the Vietnamese Women’s Union consist of a National Congress, a Central Executive Committee, a Presidium and provincial, district, and communal organizations. The VWU has 16 departments including communication and education, family and social affairs, international relations, ethnic and religious affairs, law and policy, and departments overseeing museums, a newspaper, and publishing. Our tour was organized by one of the departments, Peace Tours.

The VWU emphasizes organizational tasks ranging from supporting and building women’s skills and autonomy at the local level to greater political influence at the national level. The commitment to goals which were identified as critical for the recent period, 2007-2012, were reflected in what we saw. These included raising women’s consciousness, knowledge, and capacity, promoting gender equality at all levels of society, promoting economic development, building the VWU as a national organization, and building networks of relationships with progressive organizations around the world.

VWU short-term goals, identified in their literature seemed plausible based on our brief observation. These included targeting 70% of poor women for support “… to reduce poverty and eliminate hunger,” and “supporting more than 90% of female-headed poor households, with the goal of 40 to 50% escaping from poverty.”

One of the VWU departments, the Center for Women and Development, concentrates particularly on giving support to victims and overcoming violence and sexual trafficking of women. Peace House, with aid from overseas NGOs, was opened in March, 2007, to construct a model shelter for abused Vietnamese women. A CWD report indicated that “The Peace House has supported women and children who suffered from domestic violence from all over the country. The numbers of women and children receiving the services of the Peace House are increasing and after leaving the Peace House they are new persons, more independent and able to protect themselves and their children.”

Reflecting on guided tours such as the CCDS visit to Vietnam can have profound long-term impacts on participants, even though it is recognized that such tours are designed to show host successes while minimizing problems or organizational deficits. However, among the indisputable strengths of the VWU are the following:

1.VWU is truly a mass organization in the best sense of that term. It carries out policies representing the interests of a large percentage of women in Vietnamese society at all levels--from the rural commune to the nation.

2.A fundamental component of all VWU work is the belief that there is dignity in each member. Each Vietnamese woman has the right to fulfill her life to the full limit of societal resources and to be an active agent in that fulfillment.

3.Government, party, and mass organization, all have as their uppermost obligation serving the people. This means that these entities continue to struggle to overcome class exploitation, gender oppression, and racial and ethnic discrimination.

Several of the tour participants only partially in jest wondered if progressives in the United States could hire Vietnam Women’s Union organizers to help us reorder institutions and policies in the United States.



Vietnamese Doctors. Photo by Paul Krehbiel

 

 

Vietnam Women's Union website: http://hoilhpn.org.vn

 

 

Thursday, March 7, 2024

WORKING CLASS SOCIALIST, GRASSROOTS LABOR ORGANIZER, FEMINIST,FILM STAR: Thoughts on the Life of Vicky Starr

Originally posted on Sunday, January 10, 2010

Harry Targ


https://youtu.be/74gvcvXlgnM?si=aoS6iNk6i46oGvth


I read recently that Vicky Starr died on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009. She was 93 years old. Thinking about Vicky Starr (or for fans of the film Union Maids Stella Nowicki) reminded me about how her life, which many of us learned of through the film, was so inspirational.

As a teenager, Vicky Starr left the family farm in Michigan and arrived on the Southside of Chicago in 1933. She stayed in the home of Herb and Jane March, Communist activists who had come to Chicago to organize the packing house workers in the huge Stockyards. Under March’s tutelage she sought employment in the Yards and almost immediately began to network with workers to build a union of workers in the days leading up to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The processing of meat from the 1880s until the late 1950s was centered in Chicago. The Stockyards, housing the Big Four packers (Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson), employed thousands of workers. Because the work was so dangerous and unpleasant, it was largely carried out by the most marginalized sectors of the working class.

In the era of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, workers were primarily immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. After World War 1 and the “the Great Migration,” African Americans secured the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the Yards. Historic union organizing drives in 1904, and 1921 faltered because of racism and ethnic conflict among workers. Communist and socialist organizers in the Yards, such as March, realized that combating racism was central to organizing industrial unionism in the meat packing industry.

And it was rank-and-file activists like Vicky Starr who tirelessly met with workers, helped write leaflets and newsletters, interacted with the radical students from the University of Chicago who had offered their assistance to union organizing drives, and communicated with sympathetic members of the influential Catholic Church in the city.

As a member of the Young Communist League, Starr and her comrades would read classic Marxist and Leninist texts. Since Starr would be identified with organizing campaigns by her bosses, she often lost her job in the yards. When that occurred she would apply for work at another packing house company using a different name.

She told Alice and Staughton Lynd (Rank and File, 1973) many years later: “When I look back now, I really think we had a lot of guts. But I didn’t even stop to think about it at the time. It was something that had to be done. We had a goal. That’s what we felt had to be done and we did it.”

In 1937, workers established the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). Despite resistance by the major meat packers, state violence, red-baiting against union organizers by the state and the American Federation of Labor’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) was constituted in 1943. Until its merger with other unions, it remained a militant trade union that fought racism and red-baiting and publicly opposed United States foreign policies such as participation in the Korean War. And during its formative years in the mid-1940s Vicky Starr served for a time as Education Director for District 1 of UPWA.

Central to Starr’s contribution to the working class from the time she was a member of the Young Communist League, to the budding labor movement, the formation of the UPWA, and later as an organizer of clerical workers at the University of Chicago was her constant struggle against racism and sexism. After the formation of UPWA Starr said “We tried to make sure that there were both Negroes and whites as officers, stewards…in all the locals.” She fought residential segregation and participated in building the Back of the Yards Council on Chicago’s south side and worked to end the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports. And in the end she recalled that the most militant trade unionists on the shop floor, the beef kill, were African Americans.

As an organizer in the 30s and a UPWA staffer in the 40s she combated sexism as well. “Women had an awfully tough time in the union because the men brought their prejudices there.” Women often had the most demeaning jobs in the Yards, wage rates discriminated against them, their special needs, such as child care received no attention, and they often were fearful of demanding their rights on the shop floor and in the union.

As a socialist, Starr reflected on those halcyon days of UPWA-CIO organizing. She said that there was a sense that workers were ready to come together. There was a growing feeling of working class solidarity. Union organizers would show up at the Stockyards with literature and speeches. And at the grassroots she and others were on the shop floor spreading the word informally about the union.

And socialism needed to be addressed in terms of the concrete benefits of people’s lives. “You had to talk about it in terms of what it would mean for that person. We learned that you can’t manipulate people but that you really had to be concerned with the interests and needs of the people. However, you also had to have a platform--a projection of where you were going.”

Starr left the Yards in 1945, was forced underground for a time in the McCarthy period, raised four children and returned to work as a secretary at the prestigious University of Chicago. She still had “a platform” at the university, organizing all non-professional staff. Despite predictable resistance from the bastion of liberalism in higher education she applied the grassroots organizing skills she learned as a teenager in the stockyards to achieve victory for clerical workers. Teamsters Local 743 was recognized in 1978. Vicky Starr became the first shop steward of the new local.

But Starr’s contribution to the American working class, Black and White, male and female did not remain unnoticed beyond the shop/office. Alice and Staughton Lynd captured her remembrances of CIO organizing in the 1973 book Rank and File and the clerical workers struggle in the 2000 book New Rank and File. And especially, “Stella Nowicki” was one of three stars (the others were Sylvia Woods and Kate Hyndman) in the wonderful documentary (Union Maids, 1977) about women organizing in the CIO in the 1930s.

This last project made Vicky Starr a major celebrity. It brought to the attention of new generations of activists the fighting spirit of the 1930s, the central role Communists played in the battles, and the absolute centrality to organizing the working class of fighting racism and sexism.

Still relevant today, Union Maids (and the Lynds collections of interviews), can help inspire, educate, and inform activists about tactics, strategy, and basic principles of organizing.

Vicky Starr concluded her 1973 interview saying: “It was a privilege and a wonderful experience to participate in the excitement of those times.”

It is important to remember Vicky Starr for what she did for the working class, particularly industrial and clerical workers. And reflections on her life and work can still inform activists as they struggle for economic justice today.



 

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

A SUMMARY OF REMARKS SUPPORTING A GAZA CEASE FIRE RESOLUTION: THE WEST LAFAYETTE CITY COUNCIL

(March 4, 2024)

Harry Targ

    


       Purdue Exponent Photo

Peace activists, and many Americans generally, are frustrated viewing the daily images of bombing, bodies, destruction of buildings, starvation, and fear engendered by the genocidal war of the Israeli government on the Palestinian people. We feel the anguish of Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy on February 25, 2024. Those of us who lived through the Vietnam era remember Norman Morrison, a Hoosier, who self-immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in 1965. Before that, Buddhist Monks had also made the ultimate sacrifice in the streets of what was then called Saigon in the former South Vietnam.

We know that the United States has great influence over Israel. It has provided $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel since 1979. Currently the Biden Administration has introduced to Congress a proposal for military supplemental support, totaling an additional $14 billion to Israel (78 percent of which Israel would be obliged to be used in purchases from US arms manufacturers).

Military contracts with arms manufacturers often involve universities. Purdue University is a case in point. For example, on October 6, 2020 Purdue Today reproduced an article from a Department of Homeland Security Journal, Homeland Security Today, announcing a Purdue/Homeland Security research project involving research on drones for use in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capitol. (The article has been since been removed from Purdue Today).

The article reported that “a group of Purdue University researchers have been tasked to make sure drones and their systems could operate securely, safely and efficiently in the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi.” It named Purdue professors in Aeronautical and Astronautics, Computer Science, and Purdue’s “cybersecurity research and education center” as project participants. (“Purdue University and Abu Dhabi Work Together on Cybersecure Drone Swarms”

 https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2023/12/from-middle-east-to-purdue-university.html

To avoid the sense of desperation felt by Aaron Bushnell, Norman Morrison and others we need to find ways to give voice to our frustration with the ongoing war on the Gazan people. And it is to our political institutions that our energies must turn: both to influence public policy and to be able to express our sense of outrage.

As a political body closest to us, we look to the City Council, and other local governmental institutions, to reflect our concerns, even though they have little direct contact with foreign policy decisions.

Along with satisfying our need to speak out we cannot know what impact our voices can have. Referring to the Vietnam analogy, hundreds of thousands of voices articulated in different ways did impact on United States foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. And it was through articulation of opposition to that war that we discovered that our friends and neighbors shared the same views.

In addition, as has been reported many city councils have already expressed their outrage at the war against the war in Gaza and have called for a cease fire:

“Reuters compiled data from 70 cities that have passed Israel-Gaza resolutions or proclamations since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. They range from major cities like San Francisco to smaller cities such as Carrboro, North Carolina, and Biden's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-city-councils-increasingly-call-israel-gaza-ceasefire-analysis-shows-2024-01-31/

In my view the West Lafayette City Council needs to endorse a resolution that includes an immediate permanent cease fire in Gaza, international efforts to provide social and economic justice for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and frees all hostages held by combatants in the current war.

 

 

 

 

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.