Delving into Chicago Municipal Politics

English:

After three months of election campaigning for the AFL-CIO-backed community organization Working America, I am now beginning research of progressive politics at the municipal level. City politics are influenced by various political, economic, cultural, and social interests (like all politics in capitalist society), but in the U.S., unlike other avenues of involvement with the state, municipal politics is an avenue for ideologies and movements outside of mainstream politics to create spaces of resistance against unregulated market forces and one which allows for new visions of political and economic governance to come into the mainstream. Whether it is the "Sewer Socialists" of Wisconsin who dominated Milwaukee politics during the early 20th century or recent victories of socialists and left-activists like Kshama Sawant in Seattle or Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi municipal socialism and progressivism remains a valid and vital avenue for political and economic change that the socialist left must study and engage with.

The difficulty with this engagement of municipal politics for many on the socialist left is the engagement with mainstream progressive movements that continue to play major roles in city politics. Many large cities are governed by administrations that claim to be ideologically progressive but in reality implement pro-business austerity policies that benefit market forces more than citizens, as has been the case under Rahm Emanuel's administration in Chicago selling off public schools to private companies and closing down mental health clinics. The key for the socialist left in engaging with mainstream progressives at the city level is finding those who share more egalitarian economic visions, not simply the labor movement but (in the case of Chicago) cultural organizations like the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park or Enlace Chicago in Little Village that engage in political battles against market forces that encourage gentrification.

With the Chicago city elections coming in February it is important for local socialists to start engaging with these groups as soon as possible. While it is encouraging to see labor and progressive-backed rallies that want to take on Rahm's pro-business administration such as Take Back Chicago's rally on Nov. 11th, the divisions amongst progressives lie under the surface of these actions. The most apparent divisions are between potential mayoral candidates, already we have two major progressive players in 2nd Ward Alderman Bob Fioretti and Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy"Garcia, the latter of which has gained the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and its former head Karen Lewis. Beyond the mayor's race the Teachers Union has endorsed three aldermanic candidates: Sue Sadlowski Garza in the 10th Ward, Tim Meegan in the 33rd Ward and Tara Stamps in the 37th Ward, all of whom are Teachers Union members. Meanwhile Jorge Mujica, a labor and immigrant rights activist in Pilsen, is running as an independent socialist to unseat Alderman Danny Solis in the 25th Ward (full disclosure, I have worked on this campaign); the campaign has garnered some community support in the Ward but it has not gained any support from mainstream progressive or labor organizations. The Mujica campaign symbolizes the desire of many on the left to see an alternative form of governance at the muncipal level, but for it to succeed it needs to make the appeals to labor and cultural groups to gain some electoral legitimacy while simultaneously doing so without compromising its socialist goals. While the process of municipal political organizing may be difficult, the socialist left needs to be engaged in these fights for local power in order to show people that there is a left alternative out there and ready to make a more egalitarian society starting at the local level. 

Français: 

Après trois mois de campagne électorale pour l'organisation de la communauté AFL-CIO soutenu par l'Amérique de travail, je commence maintenant la recherche de politiques progressistes au niveau municipal. La politique de la ville sont influencés par divers intérêts politiques, économiques, culturels et sociaux (comme toute politique dans la société capitaliste), mais aux États-Unis, contrairement à d'autres avenues de participation avec l'Etat, la politique municipale est une avenue pour les idéologies et les mouvements à l'extérieur du grand public politique de créer des espaces de résistance contre les forces du marché non réglementé et qui permet de nouvelles visions de la gouvernance politique et économique à venir dans le courant dominant. Que ce soit les «égouts socialistes» de Wisconsin qui a dominé la politique de Milwaukee au début du 20e siècle ou récentes victoires des socialistes et de gauche militants comme Kshama Sawant à Seattle ou Chokwe Lumumba à Jackson, Mississippi socialisme municipal et progressisme reste une avenue valable et vital pour le changement politique et économique que la gauche socialiste doit étudier et engager.

La difficulté avec cet engagement de la politique municipale pour beaucoup sur la gauche socialiste est l'engagement avec les mouvements progressistes traditionnels qui continuent à jouer un rôle majeur dans la politique de la ville. Beaucoup de grandes villes sont régies par les administrations qui prétendent être idéologiquement progressiste, mais en réalité, mettre en œuvre des politiques d'austérité pro-commerciales qui profitent les forces du marché plus que les citoyens, comme cela a été le cas sous l'administration de Rahm Emanuel à Chicago vendant les écoles publiques à des entreprises privées et fermeture bas cliniques de santé mentale. La clé pour la gauche socialiste dans le dialogue avec les progressistes traditionnels au niveau de la ville est de trouver ceux qui partagent les visions économiques plus égalitaires, non seulement le mouvement ouvrier mais (dans le cas de Chicago) organismes culturels comme le Centre culturel de Porto Rico dans Humboldt Park ou Enlace Chicago dans Little Village qui se livrent à des batailles politiques contre les forces du marché qui encouragent la gentrification.

Avec les élections de la ville de Chicago à venir en Février, il est important pour les socialistes locaux pour commencer engager avec ces groupes dès que possible. Bien qu'il soit encourageant de voir le travail par des  progressistes rassemblements qui veulent battre contre de l'administration pro-business de Rahm (comme le rallye Take Back Chicago en nov. 11th) il y a les divisions entre progressistes se trouvent sous la surface de ces actions. Les divisions les plus apparentes sont entre candidats à la mairie potentiels, nous avons déjà deux grands acteurs progressistes dans la 2e conseiller municipal Bob Fioretti et Cook commissaire du comté de Jésus "Chuy" Garcia, dont le dernier a obtenu le soutien de l'Union des enseignants de Chicago et son ancien chef Karen Lewis. Au-delà de la course du maire du syndicat des enseignants a approuvé trois candidats pour alderman: Sue Sadlowski Garza dans le 10e Ward, Tim Meegan dans la paroisse et Tara Timbres 33e à la 37e Ward, qui sont tous membres du Syndicat des enseignants. Pendant ce temps Jorge Mujica, un activiste du travail et droits des immigrants à Pilsen, fonctionne comme un socialiste indépendant de renverser Alderman Danny Solis dans la 25e Ward (divulgation complète, je travaille sur cette campagne); la campagne a recueilli un certain soutien de la communauté dans le quartier, mais il n'a pas obtenu tout le soutien d'organisations progressistes ou travail ordinaire. La campagne Mujica symbolise le désir de beaucoup sur la gauche pour voir une autre forme de gouvernance au niveau municipale, mais pour qu'elle réussisse, il doit faire des appels à des groupes de travail et culturelles à acquérir une certaine légitimité électorale tout en faisant simultanément sans compromettre ses objectifs socialistes. Alors que le processus de l'organisation politique municipale peut être difficile, la gauche socialiste doit être engagés dans ces luttes pour le pouvoir local afin de montrer qu'il existe une alternative de gauche là-bas et prêt à faire une société plus égalitaire départ au niveau local .  

The Louisville Labor Bait-and-Switch

From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16929/louisville_labor_greg_fischer

Angelina Justice has been working as a youth services librarian assistant at the Free Public Library (LFPL) in Louisville, Kentucky since 2004. Though she says she loves helping the children who visit the library, she and other unionized city workers have faced a series of cutbacks and declining work conditions since Mayor Greg Fischer took office in 2011.

Like her co-workers at LFPL, Justice is a member of AFSCME Local 3425—and she says the Fischer administration’s current contract with the union makes it almost impossible for her and her family to survive.

“If my household didn't have a second income, we wouldn't make it as a family of five,” she tells In These Times.

When Mayor Fischer ran in 2010, he had the city’s many public-sector unions on his side. His first campaign promised a plan for an “open, honest and transparent metro government,” which called upon local businesses to ally with labor to create jobs for Louisville residents. Though Fischer’s pro-labor rhetoric was often vague, workers viewed his statements as a heartening sign for the largest city in Kentucky, one of the last states in the South with no notorious “right-to-work” laws.

“It was labor that got him elected,” says John Stovall, president of Teamsters Local 783, which represents around 1,000 public workers, including Emergency Medical Services responders, mechanics, carpenters and street cleaners. “It wasn’t the [mostly white and affluent] East End, it wasn’t the rich people; it was labor. All of labor came behind him, supported him and endorsed him.”

Now, as Fischer makes his bid for reelection, that support may be waning. Rather than uniting labor and local businesses, workers say Fischer’s administration has been unresponsive to the needs of city employees around Louisville. They claim that the mayor failed to give unions their promised input on his choice of a labor liaison; they also note the administration’s refusal to use binding arbitration, which has severely slowed down many contract negotiations.

Because the local public unions have a total of 29 different contracts with the city government, the effect of the now-shaky relationship between Fischer and labor has varied among industries. First responders, for example, say that although management has been slow to hire new personnel to fill vacated positions, their department has been relatively untouched by cutbacks overall.

Others, however, haven’t been so lucky.

Stephanie Croft, president of AFSCME Local 3425, says the nearly 230 Louisville Free Public Library employees her union represents have been continually shunted aside by the city during contract negotiations.

“We’re currently in mediation—and may possibly take court action in the bargaining agreement—for the loss of full-time workers and their replacement with part-time workers,” she says.

In addition to the reductions in available full-time positions, Croft says, the city is also trying to gut benefits for any new hires.

“They’re trying to bring in the two-tier system, where those who are [already working] will keep the benefits that they have, but then newer people coming in will get less benefits,” she says.

Mayor Fischer, whose office did not wish to comment on the matter further, claimed in a column for Louisville’s progressive alt-weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer, that the metropolitan government “has to make changes that affect the employees’ jobs when those changes are considered in the best qualitative or economic interest of our citizens.”

He also argued that the city had the right to hire subcontractors and freeze wages under the existing contracts—which union leaders “negotiated and agreed to.”

Wesley Stover is the president of AFSCME Local 2629, which represents 800 employees of city parks, technology services and the Louisville Zoo. In another LEO guest column, he countered that Fischer’s claims are false; though the contracts do allow the hiring of subcontractors, Stover pointed out that the ones with his particular local don’t “allow for subcontracting to reduce or replace members.”

Overall, Stover tells In These Times, the city has been too willing to manipulate the system to undercut the rights of workers. In one particular instance, he points out, the Air Pollution Control District altered the job descriptions of unionized employees in their new contracts, increasing the education requirements for the positions beyond the workers’ qualifications.

These changes were made in response to state and federal audits of the department, which highlighted “multiple deficiencies”. Stover thinks that these shortcomings, which included improper safety training and out-of-date policy materials, should have been the management’s responsibility to fix. Instead, he says, the department made it harder for workers to keep their jobs, regardless of their years of experience.

“[The plan] seemed like a way to cut the budget by getting rid of higher-paid, older workers and use the workforce as a scapegoat,” he hypothesizes.

For Stover, this single incident is reflective of a growing trend among city administrators of allowing public employees to suffer the brunt of economic hardship, rather than trying to attain solutions that will benefit Louisville as a whole, workers included.

Ultimately, the strain of the last few years may hurt Fischer’s chances in the upcoming election. The Greater Louisville Central Labor Council (GLCLC), an AFL-CIO-affiliated coalition of local unions both in the public and private sectors, has refused to endorse him this November. In an interview with LEO, GLCLC President Ken Koch argued that the decision was justified, claiming that Fischer “has not kept any promises.”

Fischer’s labor liaison O’Dell Henderson, who is directly involved in contracts with city workers’ unions, is “about as far from labor as I am from a Wall Street banker,” Koch continued.

The GLCLC’s decision was fueled in part by lobbying from unions like AFSCME, whose members continue to suspect that their efforts on the job go unappreciated by local leaders. While many major cities have faced budget constraints, workers point out, not all of those administrations slash public services without regard to the people being affected.

“It is business, but it’s also personal,” says Croft. “Because you have [workers] who have to make car payments, house payments, and they have to take care of their children and they need money to do that.”

Justice, too, acknowledges that the economy has squeezed the job market as a whole; she argues that the city’s cuts help neither workers nor the public.

“In hard times, the public doesn't use government services less, it uses them more,” she points out. “Unfortunately, libraries have less staff than ever, while the need for services like resume instruction, technology assistance, homework help, public outreach, ELL programs and individual assistance has grown exponentially. When an adequate level of service is not provided because there are not enough employees, how does that problem correct itself via supply and demand?”

In the long term, municipal employees say, this affair is making them question just how much their hard work matters to Louisville’s elected officials.

“This city is run off of the backs of workers in these different departments,” says Croft. “If you say that you value those people and what they bring, then [you should] show it. … How can you turn around and take benefits away if you say that you care about somebody? You know, we have to live too.” 

Marx's Capital: Intro

My advisor Dr. Christopher Paskewich and I have decided to use this, my last undergraduate semester, to read Karl Marx's Capital and use Dr. David Harvey's online course to analyze the work and relate it to our modern world. As daunting as it, we want to try and get at the heart of Marx's understanding of the nature of the market system and see how his model fares up today. We have started on the Ernest Mandel introduction, and all I can say is that it does a decent job packing Marx's argument into an entire intro. It's dense, but he manages to get across the key divisions of the text and defend the historical materialist argument. What makes this intro interesting to me was that it was referred to me specifically early-on when I started looking into leftist politics as a teenager, when I was talking to a small orthodox Trotskyist sect called the International Bolshevik Tendency around 2006. In my conversations with the group, they mentioned the Mandel intro because of Mandel's Trotskyist background and thus viewed his intro as an appropiate starting point for the understanding of Capital. But to look at Capital simply from an orthodox Marxist viewpoint would be to miss many of the cultural and literary qualities of the text that Mandel does not always eloquently depict. Thus, the Mandel intro seems to me to be useful only insofar as it shows the orthodox view of Capital, beyond that it isn't very insightful. But next, I shall get into the meat of the text.

Violence as an alienating tactic/La Violence comme une tactique aliénant

English:

The Left has a precarious position regarding violence as a tool for social change, there are those who totally reject any sort of violence in favor of committed, non-violent action to enact change while many on the anarchist and Marxist Left still favor armed insurrection. For my part I do not reject all forms of political violence in the right context, there are instances where an uncompromising state can only be met with brute force to protect oppressed or marginalized people. However, I keep on thinking back to a conversation I had with a friend of mine here in Kentucky; she told me essentially that violence is in itself an alienating action, and she made a good case. Violent action requires people who are physically and mentally capable of engaging in armed combat, sabotage, and espionage, thus it excludes many people who are incapable of such action. The elderly, the mentally and terminally ill, children, pregnant women, and many others can't be expected by a democratic and anti-capitalist Left to partake in such actions. Further, in a scenario of  violent insurrection, there is further increase of this division between the "combat-ready" and those who can't participate, a division I fear would result in a militaristic division of idolizing those who are capable of engaging in violence and putting them ahead socially of those incapable of violence. Thus, if the Left is to seriously consider tactics that are broadly inclusive such that all people can participate in social change violence cannot be the primary tactic. We already live in a neoliberal capitalist society that idolizes militarism and coercion to get its way, so if we want to make a society of collective liberation where people live their lives free from market and state coercion we have to make a revolution that all can be a part of, and violence cannot give us that.

Français:

La gauche a une position précaire en ce qui concerne la violence comme un outil de changement social, il y a ceux qui rejettent totalement toute sorte de violence en faveur de l'action engagée, non-violente à adopter des changements alors que beaucoup sur l'anarchiste et gauche marxiste favorisent encore l'insurrection armée. Pour ma part je ne rejette pas toutes les formes de violence politique dans le bon contexte, il y a des cas où un Etat sans compromis ne peut être atteint par la force brute pour protéger les gens opprimés ou marginalisés. Cependant, je continue à penser revenir à une conversation que j'ai eue avec un de mes amis ici, dans le Kentucky, elle m'a dit essentiellement que la violence est en soi une action aliénante, et elle a fait une bonne affaire. L'action violente exige que les gens qui sont physiquement et mentalement capables de s'engager dans la lutte armée, le sabotage, et d'espionnage, ainsi qu'il exclut de nombreuses personnes qui sont incapables d'une telle action. Les personnes âgées, les malades mentaux, les malades en phase terminale, les enfants, les femmes enceintes, et bien d'autres ne peut pas s'attendre à une société démocratique et anti-capitaliste de gauche à participer à de telles actions. En outre, dans un scénario de l'insurrection violente, il existe une majoration de cette division entre le « prêt au combat » et ceux qui ne peuvent pas participer, une division je crains entraînerait une division militariste de l'idolâtrie de ceux qui sont capables de s'engager dans la violence et les mettre de l'avant le plan social de ceux qui sont incapables de violence. Ainsi, si la gauche est à envisager sérieusement des tactiques qui sont largement inclusive de sorte que toutes les personnes peuvent participer au changement social violence ne peuvent pas être la tactique primaire. Nous vivons déjà dans une société capitaliste néolibérale qui idolâtre le militarisme et la coercition pour arriver à ses fins, si nous voulons faire une société de libération collective où les gens vivent leur vie sans marché et coercition de l'État, nous devons faire une révolution que tout le monde peut être une partie de, et la violence ne peuvent pas nous donner cela.