WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
|
Homepages: | |
|
Activist Reviews GREED
AND ENERGY By Chris Ney In the immediate aftermath of Communism’s collapse, apologists for capitalism proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy and the free market; some even announced the end of history. Policymakers created a new era of corporate deregulation and promised the benefits of “the new economy.” A decade later—after global justice protests, the dot-com implosion and the collapse of corporate giants, the prospects for deregulated global capitalism are not so sanguine. Public attitudes changed quickly; people ask questions today that once seemed heretical or foolish. A growing chorus of critics from the global South has had an inestimable impact on First World attitudes toward the reigning economic model. To the task of revealing the impact of unfettered capital on people and the planet, Arundhati Roy brings the same lyrical use of language that won her England’s Booker Prize for her first novel The God of Small Things. Her words are very convincing. Not driven by ideology, she grounds her work in her ethical and aesthetic responsibility as an artist and writer. She asks rhetorically, “Is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn’t it true that there have been fearful episodes of human history when prudence and discretion would have been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice?” Her words, her art, are also grounded in a thorough understanding of how business and politics interact, particularly in the Third World. The two systems, theoretically distinct, become so intertwined that they seem to defend identical interests—elite interests. Notions of common good or public interest are consumed by the corrupt malignancy of greed, cash, and power. In a place like India, the consequences are devastating. Long before Enron became synonymous with corporate mismanagement and greed, Roy and other activists fixed their sights on the energy behemoth. The details of the Power Purchase Agreement between Enron and successive state and national government are more byzantine than the arrangements that cheated thousands of Enron’s U.S. employees out of their retirement accounts. Roy writes, “Enron made no secret of the fact that, in order to secure the deal, it had paid out millions of dollars to ‘educate’ the politicians and the bureaucrats involved in the deal,” leading one Indian opposition leader to call it “looting through liberalization.” The last Congress Party (the party of India’s independence) government may have taken as much as $13 million in bribe money from Enron—all for a project that produces energy at higher cost with less efficiency than existing producers. No wonder Roy attacks these projects with such ferocity that some have accused her of treason. She brings similar passion to the struggles against big dams. Dams were first promoted as a development dream; India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru himself, praised their ability to manage water supply and increase crop yield. Like many other development projects, they have become a nightmare. Crop yields have not grown; villages, forests, and sacred sites have been lost forever; thousands of people—mostly from the low castes and ethnic minorities—have been displaced without compensation. Dams like the Sardar Sarovar project that Roy dissects continue to grow in the Third World, largely because the multi-billion dam construction industry needs a market. Neither the United States nor the nations of Europe are building more dams, to the contrary, those countries are considering demolishing them. As Roy explains the impact, “The Sardar Sarovar Dam will displace close to half a million people. More than half of them do not officially qualify as ‘project-affected’ and are not entitled to rehabilitation. It will submerge 32,000 acres of deciduous forest.” Still, Roy does not limit her critique to corrupt Indian politicians. She unravels the rhetoric of globalization’s apologists, including President Bill Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. At every opportunity, those leaders have argued that a global economy will work for the common good, if (as Roy writes), “we have the right institutions of governance in place—effective courts, good laws, honest politicians, participatory democracy, a transparent administration that respects human rights and gives people a say in decisions that affect their lives.” She exposes the big lie with satiric wit: “The point is, if all this were in place, almost anything would succeed: socialism, capitalism, you name it. Everything works in paradise, a Communist state as well as a Military Dictatorship.” This slender collection of essays—only 100 pages with an additional 20 pages of notes—is well worth the read. Unfortunately, its hardcover price of $40 may keep it out of the hands of many activists. It deserves more than an academic audience, so if you can’t afford to buy it, get your local library to carry it. VOICES
OF STRUGGLE By John Trinkl It was a time of war hysteria. The U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing the President to deport aliens “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” A related law allowed the wartime arrest, imprisonment and deportation of any alien subject to an enemy power. A third law, passed at the same time, declared that any treasonable activity—including the publication of “any false, scandalous and malicious writing”—was a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment. The year was 1798; the laws were the Alien and Sedition Acts. The foreign government that was feared in this case was that of the new French republic. It was just seven years after the Bill of Rights had been ratified, guaranteeing the rights of free speech and of due process of law and the right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Throughout U.S. history, there has been a tension—often a contradiction—between the Constitution’s guarantee of the right of free expression and the government’s suppression of unpopular opinions. This book by Bud and Ruth Schultz recounts the “price of dissent” paid by participants in three of the great social movements of the 20th century: the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. It doesn’t pretend to be an overview of repression in the United States; other books, notably Robert Justin Goldstein’s Political Repression in Modern America, have provided that. Neither does it specifically focus on repression against radicals and communists, victims of two of the great waves of 20th-century U.S. repression: the Red Scares after World War I and Cold War McCarthyism after World War II. What The Price of Dissent does offer is firsthand accounts of those involved in the labor, civil rights and antiwar struggles. Like the Schultzes’ 1990 book, It Did Happen Here, which focused on activists from a wide variety of movements, sectors and backgrounds, this book consists almost entirely of the words of activists telling their own struggles. Some have famous names; other voices are those of relatively unknown, “everyday” activists. In the labor section, Fred Thompson, the longtime member and chronicler of the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies, as they’ve been known for almost a century—talks about the free speech battles of the IWW in the early part of the century. When local towns passed ordinances forbidding speech-making, hundreds of IWW members would gather to speak, one after the other, until they filled up the jails. United Electrical Workers organizer Peg Stasik describes helping build the union at the giant Westinghouse plant in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, but then being fired when the union was smashed and having to turn to raising chickens. And one of Stasik’s nemeses of the time, the once virulently anti-Communist Catholic priest, Father Charles Owen Rice, talks about making a 180-degree political turn. Rice, who was a driving force of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists that fought against the UE leadership at the Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, later became involved in the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements. Now, he says, “I very much regret that I wasted so much time and energy on it [anti- Communism]. … I wish there was a stronger Communist presence in the trade unions today.” He adds, “In the 1960s, the shoe was on the other foot. I was red-baited to a fare-thee-well because of my stand on Blacks and on the Vietnam War. To tell you the truth, it felt great.” Civil Rights
Paul Robeson Jr. describes his father’s “thundering denunciation of America’s treatment of Black people and his refusal to bend before the force of the Cold War.” John Lewis—once a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, now a congressperson from Georgia—talks about the impact of the Montgomery bus boycott. “There was a great sense of hopelessness, a great sense of despair in those days,” he recalls. “You couldn’t see a way out. It was the … boycott … that provided the instrument, the philosophy, and a way to protest, a way to say no.” And the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth depicts the violent response to the movement. “My church was bombed twice,” he says. “I was beaten bloody and knocked unconscious with a fire hose. … I went to jail so many times, I quit counting.” He concludes, “I would do the very same thing over and over again, just like I did then, without any difference.” Even in the bitterest of struggles, there are moments of humor. Anne Braden remembers, “They raided our house and took all of our files,” she recalls. “They took anything with a Russian name: books by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev from a Russian literature course I had in college … It would have been funny except that it was such a hysterical time.” The Antiwar
Movement Dagmar Wilson talks about founding one of the first post-World War II antiwar groups in the 1950s. “Women Strike for Peace started out of my own personal anger,” she says. “It began with the Berlin Wall and the cavalier way newscasters were saying that this could mean war between the [United States] and the [Soviet Union]. Of course, it would be a nuclear war.” WRL’s Norma Becker says organizing the first big anti-Vietnam war march in New York City in 1965 involved “every known antiwar group in New York City.” She recalls that the first meeting was “mind-boggling. Except for the neighborhood committees and the campus groups, all the others had a history of conflict, distrust, betrayal and mutual recriminations. … .These people couldn’t agree on the time of day, let alone what slogans to use.” Yet, finally, the groups agreed on one slogan, Stop the War in Vietnam Now, and the Fifth Avenue Parade Committee was born. Daniel Ellsberg started at the far opposite political extreme: He was a researcher for the Rand Corporation, a conservative think-tank, and later a Pentagon official. He describes his motivation for releasing the Pentagon Papers, which revealed much of the background of the Vietnam War that the government was trying to hide—even if it had landed him in prison for life. He says he had “an urgent feeling that [the American people] had to be alerted to this secret past in order to recognize it in what was going on at the moment and act to avert further escalations in that same war.” One of the most striking personal testimonies in the book is that of Jack Ryan. Ryan was a committed FBI agent. One of his responsibilities in the 1980s was investigation of domestic security and terrorism issues. He performed his job without question until, as a Catholic, he read and was moved by the U.S. Bishops’ Peace Pastoral in 1983 that declared, “Peacemaking is not an optional commitment … It is a requirement of our faith.” Ryan’s job was investigating activists who were opposing Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. “This investigation,” he says, “was carried out under the domestic security/terrorism guidelines. It was, in effect, calling these people terrorists. Well, who controls the definition of terrorism? I thought it was obvious that they were not terrorists but were speaking out in a nonviolent way against terrorism on the part of our government. … It appeared evident that the FBI was again being used to quell dissent.” He refused to participate and was fired. The book cites a number of instances where the activists are victorious; a strong court victory against the notorious Chicago Red Squad is just one example. But there is inspiration even in cases where the dissenters are beaten back. The old Wobbly, Fred Thompson recalls, “On a San Quentin cell wall, I saw a line from the Aeneid: ‘Haex olim meminisse iuvabit’ (‘Perhaps it will give pleasure to remember even these things.’) Yes, it is more pleasant to remember that we resisted than that we didn’t.” John Trinkl is an editor and writer in San Francisco. He covered the U.S. Left for the (National) Guardian newsweekly from 1976 to 1985. |
WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
