Banning an Anti-Racist & Anti-Fascist Film is the Last Straw - Our Branch SE/6246 Has Just Passed a Motion of No Confidence in Unite’s Racist General Secretary Sharon Graham

 It’s time for the SWP, Socialist Party & Counterfire to break with Graham’s Social Imperialism & Stop Apologising for Her

ON RESISTANCE STREET (2023) Trailer

Unite 4 Palestine Activists Meeting

Wednesday 17 April 6.30 p.m.

Please register here

https://tinyurl.com/mpc6h77t

 

On Monday I learnt that Sharon Graham had banned On Resistance Street an anti-fascist and anti-racist  film that looks at the role music has played in the fight against fascism and racism.

The reasons for the ban were explained by Graham’s sycophantic bag carrier, Sarah Carpenter, who, as Regional Secretary for the South-East, banned another film, Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie. Carpenter quoted an Executive Committee resolution of September 2023 that:

‘Unite should not use its premises or resources to show or promote any external films or other content that does not relate to our industrial agenda to support the pay, terms and conditions of our members and/or support existing Unite policies.

Leave aside the ‘explanation’ of Carpenter, a bureaucrat without an original idea in her head, or the tunnel vision of Sharon Graham whose ‘industrial agenda’ poses no threat to British capitalism. Graham is either so politically illiterate that she does not understand that historically racism and fascism have been used to divide and weaken, if not destroy the trade union and socialist movement. Or else she does not care.

Carpenter’s suggestion that anti-racism and anti-fascism is not part of ‘existing Unite policies’ testifies to her stupidity. Even more worrying, Carpenter also wrote that:

In this context the Union should be especially careful to avoid appearing to endorse any material which causes unnecessary offence to members.’

Is she really saying that Unite should not offend racists and fascists? This is very similar to the ‘reason’ that Gail Cartmail gave for the banning of Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie when she said that:

The General Secretary... is also clear that the Unite position must be that we do not stoke division through anti-semitism and anti-Muslim racism

On Resistance Street was shot on location in England, Belfast and New York.  It carries an original soundtrack of 20 songs.

The film revisits the ‘Rock Against Racism’ movement of the late 70s, noting its influence on future waves of radical artists and political activists.  It also shines a light – for the very first time in a film – on a 1950s organisation, ‘The Stars Campaign For Inter-Racial Friendship’ which was founded by a group of famous British jazz musicians and entertainers in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill riots. It provided venues in West London for black and white youth to socialise together.  The film also highlights the crucial role played by punk rock in uniting young people in 1970s’ sectarian Belfast.

On Resistance Street tracks contemporary drifts to the right in the West, the weaponization of Black grammatical history, right wing musical cultural appropriation and the role of anti-racist social media groups today.  It looks at grime music and the historic role played by Black musicians in British music.

This decision is nothing less than shocking. For a trade union to ban an anti-fascist and anti-racist film is a sign of how the Sharon Graham leadership has degenerated politically.

I therefore moved a resolution at my own branch last night ‘noting with dismay’ all the lies of Graham and her flunkeys. For the first time that I can remember I was criticised for my moderation! Another member promptly moved an amendment that said the branch had no confidence in Graham. Just 2 out of 11 members abstained, the rest voted in favour.

Graham is the most right-wing boss of Unite and its predecessor unions since Arthur Deakin in the 50s. Graham stood on a platform that rejected Len McCluskey’s support for the Corbyn Project. She passed herself off as apolitical but in reality she is firmly on the right. Her objection to anti-racist education is matched by her support for Zionism and the Israeli state.

It is no accident that Graham has done nothing to support Palestinians in Gaza besides writing a solitary letter to the PGFTU, nearly 3 weeks after its headquarters in Gaza were bombed. The very next day she made it clear that she favoured continuing to send arms to Israel to continue the bombing, the more the merrier since to her all that matters is British jobs.

Yet despite her appalling record when it comes to international solidarity, anti-racism and anti-imperialism, the ‘revolutionary’ sects of the British left, have supported her through thick and thin. Both the SWP and the Socialist Party supported Graham in the election for General Secretary and Counterfire welcomed her victory.

Richard Allday's rant on WhatsApp in defence of Graham

Richard Allday, a Counterfire supporter and member of Unite’s Executive only last Friday chose to attack me on the Unite 4 Palestine WhatsApp group for my ‘obsession with Sharon Graham’ and my ‘unsubstantiated abuse.’ i.e. criticism of Graham.

To support strikes whilst rejecting their political implications, as Graham does, is to reject class politics. It is to treat the state as neutral and capitalism as a fair and equitable system rather than one based on exploitation. This is called economism.

Unfortunately the ruling class is not so stupid as Graham. It knows that even if Unite wins a few individual strikes, they still have all the cards. The rich and powerful can easily adjust the rules of the game through their tame puppets in parliament. They have the Police to reign in workers who get unruly and of course, if the worst comes to the worst, they can make going on strike itself harder and harder.

The Establishment is more than capable of winning back through legislation that which they lose industrially. Being ‘apolitical’ means accepting privatisation of public services and austerity in order to fund increased expenditure on the military. Graham supports increasing ‘defence’ expenditure even though it means cutting the NHS, education and social services where Unite also has members.

Concentrating solely on strikes means abandoning the fight against racism, global warming, war and imperialism. It is to define class oppression as solely economic without seeing that capitalism doesn’t just oppress people in the workplace but during their lives outside the workplace. There is little advantage in gaining higher wages if the Welfare State is under attack, the NHS is in decline, schools are privatised as academies and housing becomes harder to get.

Graham is fighting for a larger share of the imperialist pie not its abolition. Graham is an avid supporter of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and supported dockers refusing to handle Russian oil. There is some solidarity action that Graham does support, the problem is that it doesn’t involve genocide against the Palestinians.

When it came to Ukraine Graham didn’t mince her words:

“There is overwhelming support being expressed throughout Unite to support the people of Ukraine. It is not only the struggle for democracy that concerns us but also the struggle for people’s rights to work and build their future in peace.”

Yet when it comes to Gaza, getting Graham to condemn anything Israel does is like drawing teeth. In her letter condemning the bombing of the PGFTU headquarters in Gaza City Graham fails even to mention the word ‘Israel’. It is as if the bombing of the Trade union HQ happened by itself. Likewise Graham did not once let the word ‘genocide’ slip from her lips.

These things have not gone unnoticed by the Zionists. Writing in the anti-Palestinian Jewish News ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin described how,

In a further put down on far-left foreign policy dogma Graham also wrote “Similarly, we cannot be expected to affiliate to organisations that actively work against our members and their jobs.

“Examples include groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS.”

Under Graham’s leadership Unite has also taken great strides in attempting to combat antisemitism within the movement. Despite early claims that the left-wing leader would seek to move the union away from Labour and disaffiliate, Unite now appears to be opting to become a “critical friend” of the Starmer led Labour Party.

Unfortunately Britain’s far-left sects are unable to see beyond their own noses. They are so pleased that a union leader supports strikes that they are unable to understand that you can support strikes and still be a racist, warmongering reactionary like Sharon Graham.

In an effusive pro-Graham article in Dissent Olly Haynes observed that Unite refused to support the Enough is Enough coalition with the RMT and CWU because

two of the coalition’s five demands—building affordable housing and imposing heavier taxes on the rich—could only be enacted directly through state power. ...

The first indication that Sharon Graham was a Zionist cuckoo in the trade union nest was when Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie was banned.

On 23 July 2023 the far-right Campaign Against Antisemitism claimed credit for the ban on Corbyn The Big Lie. They wrote:

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Unite union has cancelled the screening of a propaganda film about the antisemitic former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn....

However, following contact from Campaign Against Antisemitism in which we pointed out that the scheduling of the event appeared to be contradictory to the reports that the film has been banned in all of Unite’s buildings, it was cancelled....

Campaign Against Antisemitism commends Unite for its swift and decisive action to cancel the screening as soon as we brought it to its attention.

Graham’s apolitical election stance was a cover for very right-wing politics. To her capitalism and imperialism are perfectly normal and therefore not political. Is it any surprise that she refused to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide? But if Britain’s far-left organisations displayed their typically blinkered approach, engaging in a bout of wishful thinking, then the Zionist organisations were not fooled. Indeed it is highly likely that Graham signalled to them that Len McCluskey’s support for the Palestinians would be jettisoned.

Euan Philips (David Gordstein) of Labour Against Antisemitism, welcomed the election of Graham as General Secretary.

The SWP, SP and Countefire simply refused to accept that the Skwawkbox’s allegations of Graham’s nepotism, turning a blind eye to racism and despotism amounted to anything. Despite Skawkbox being vilified at no time has Graham disputed their allegations.

At her first Executive Committee meeting as General Secretary (September 2021) Graham ‘Pledged to make our Union the most democratic and transparent it has ever been.’ Actions however speak louder than words as her banning of films demonstrates.

Graham promised to ‘Take the lead or provide practical support to other groups tackling wider societal issues such as; climate change, the housing crisis and racism.’ Under Len McCluskey Unite’s Community branches were established. It is no secret that Graham is hostile to them as she sees them as naturally political.

Graham pledged ‘there will be no blank cheques’ for the Labour Party. The cutting of affiliation fees by McLuskey, has been reversed without protest. Graham also promised to

·               Introduce a Member Hotline in my Office.

·               Make sure that my expenses are accessible to members online.

·               Introduce ‘General Secretary Live’ online Q&A

Below is a time line of Graham’s record as General Secretary:

i.              On the 8 June Sarah Carpenter banned Corbyn – The Big Lie from being shown at Unite’s premises in Portsmouth on Graham’s ‘advice’.

ii.            From 7 October to 3 November, Graham delayed calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

iii.         In her statement of 26 June to staff and officers Graham claimed that Unite ‘was the first major union to publicly and unambiguously call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.’ This was a lie. UNISON called for an immediate ceasefire on October 26 and it also condemned Israel for its attacks on civilians unlike the even handed Unite statement a week later.

iv.         Graham has not only refused to attend the national Palestinian demonstrations but she has refused to allow Unite’s national banner to be present.

v.            Graham tried to pressurise Unite official Simon Dubbins to calling off a Unite Palestinian event at Labour Party conference. She has now suspended him.

vi.         Graham also tried to persuade Pete Kavanagh, Regional Secretary for London & Eastern Region, from speaking at the Palestinian demonstration in London on January 13.

vii.       Graham’s Chief of Staff, Sarah Carpenter, appointed without any reference to the Executive, threatened Kavanagh with loss of a pension bonus if he continued to support the Palestinians.

viii.    Graham said nothing about genocide in Gaza until March 25,over two weeks after, when she wrote a letter of ‘solidarity’ to the Palestinian trade union PGFTU after the bombing of their HQ in Gaza City.

ix.         One day later, March 26, Graham issued a letter condemning attempts to stop the manufacture of arms for Israel. Graham attacked ‘groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS’.

In her letter Graham said ‘there is no contradiction for a trade union to hold a position of solidarity with Palestinian workers’ whilst making arms intended to murder those same workers. She held that ‘it is a core principle of Unite that as a trade union the 'first claim' on our priorities’ is to support the right of Unite members to produce arms to kill other workers.

Clearly the words ‘international solidarity’ are alien to Graham. It is shameful that the left sects have failed to call her so far. There are indications, judging by a letter critical of Graham in Socialist Worker that the SWP is revising its attitude. Let us hope that Counterfire and the Socialist Party do likewise.

Graham could have told Unite workers that she would support them refusing to handle arms destined for Israel’s murder machine in Gaza in the same way as happened with Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride in 1973 when they refused to service engines destined for Pinochet’s airforce.

According to Graham’s logic the right of workers at IG Farben to produce Zyklon B for the gas chambers trumped the rights of Jews not to be murdered.

x.           On 11 April the Officers National Committee submitted a collective grievance concerning the flouting of grievance procedures and the victimisation of workers who challenged Graham’s repressive regime. They wrote:

The length of time that grievances and investigations are taking to reach a conclusion is not acceptable in a modern workplace... employees are waiting months after submitting a grievance due to a refusal of some to participate in the process, being banned from your workplace when not even suspended, and an application of “special measures

Using legal privilege to justify enforcing a refusal to allow an employee to present their grievance is disgraceful and anti-trade union... part of our role is to challenge power in the workplace where that power is used to suppress workers seeking transparency, expressing their genuinely held views or seeking protection from abuse.

Threats of legal action for raising a grievance... is... a denial of natural justice.... In seeking to declare a grievance invalid the employer has cited the issues of trust and confidence.... Loss of trust and confidence is a legitimate reason for dismissal by an employer so to reference it is to further intimidate the worker.’

The time has come for the left to stop making excuses for Graham. Richard Allday told me that ‘she has not spoken out on the current atrocity in Palestine’ but he failed to ask why this is. The time has come for the left groups to put clear red water between them and Graham.

Tony Greenstein

Why is Joe Biden stealing $14 billion from Afghanistan and deliberately creating a famine?

 Those Who Profess Concern over Ukraine Have A Duty to Speak Out NOW about what is happening in Afghanistan

You can see here Clare Daly’s brilliant speech to the European Parliament. The Biden Administration in the United States is deliberately creating famine in Afghanistan. Instead of paying reparations to Afghanistan for the damage caused by the US invasion and occupation since 2001, Joe Biden has just gone and stolen what little money they had, some $14 Billion.

The money was deposited in the US Federal Reserve by the corrupt regime that the US imposed on Afghanistan. ‘President’ Ashraf Ghani fled the country with hundreds of million dollars stuffed into cars. It was literally spilling on the runway as the helicopter took off.

The US Drone Strike in Kabul which killed a family of 10, including 7 children. It was a ‘tragic’ mistake, just like all the other US mistakes in the region

The US’s parting gift to Afghanistan was a missile which destroyed a car in Kabul murdering 10 people including 7 children. According to the US army it was a ‘mistake’. No one has been charged and the International Criminal Court which was so hot off the mark in Ukraine has said nothing.

What happened with the drone missile in Kabul has happened all over Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The United States acts with impunity and yet racists like Paul Mason look to the ‘civilised’ West for salvation.

As Clare Daly said, the only crime of Afghanis and the other victims of US aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere is not to be White or European.

All those who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their war crimes have a duty to speak out about the United States deliberately creating a famine in order to get their revenge on the Taliban. If they do not then they are simply hypocrites.

Clare Daly is a good illustration of what happens when genuine socialists get elected to Parliament. Clare was a member of Militant and the Socialist party but she is now a member of Independents 4 Change, part of The Left in the European Parliament – GUE/NGL. At the 2016 general election, Clare stood as an Independents 4 Change candidate in the Dublin Fingal constituency, and was elected  to the Dáil Éireann. At the 2019 European Parliament elections, she was elected for the Dublin constituency.

Contrast Clare and her fellow MP Mick Wallace with the Irish Green Party who are propping up the present Fine Gael and Fianna Fail Coalition. Two corrupt Conservative parties propped up by Greens, who pose as an alternative to the mainstream parties.

Tony Greenstein 

Left Sectarianism Splits the Vote in UNISON and Allows Starmer Candidate Christine McAnea To Win

 The Decision of the Socialist Party to Stand a Candidate, Knowing They Had no Chance of Winning was Sheer Madness

Useless right-winger Christine McAnea is narrowly elected thanks to the self-destructive sectarianism of the left

UNISON has been controlled by the right-wing ever since it was founded.  First Rodney Bickerstaffe and then the insipid Blairite clone Dave Prentis were General Secretary.  Under Prentis UNISON became a byword for political corruption when he was found to have cheated, enlisting paid union officials in London as part of his campaign.

A genuine working class activist who would have turned UNISON into the fighting union it should be

Christine McAnea, a former assistant general secretary, was narrowly backed by the National Executive polling 63,900 votes, 47.7 per cent of the vote. Paul Holmes, a genuine working class candidate who promised to do the job on a workers’ wage, received the nomination of both the South East and North West regions. Paul received 45,220 votes.

This useless lump of lard is the Regional official who investigated me - the only time I ever saw him before that was when Prentis sent him to our union meeting to argue in favour of calling off strike action

Roger McKenzie, the soft left candidate who was supported by Jeremy Corbyn, came third with 14,450 votes and Hugo Pierre of the Socialist Party was last with 10,382 votes.

It is clear that a single left candidate could have won. A combined left campaign could have made the difference. If Hugo Pierre had pulled out pressure could have been put on McKenzie to do the same. It was sheer sectarian madness, a classic case of building the party at the expense of the class, which led to Pierre to stubbornly refusing to quit despite having no chance whatsoever.

For 10 years, throughout the years of austerity of Cameron, May and Johnson, Prentis did all he could to damp down action against the Tories/Lib Dems savage cuts in local government. Workers in Southampton Council having been betrayed simply switched to Unite.

I was suspended for 3 years from UNISON for publicly criticising Steve Terry, a London regional official who scabbed on Stan Keable who was sacked when on a demonstration he argued, quite correctly, that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis during the war. A clear case of free speech but Terry, being a right-wing  Progress councillor on Walthamstow Council, refused to give Stan any support and even acted to prevent me representing him at an appeal hearing at Fulham and Hammersmith Council.

Despite failing to give Stan any support he easily won his Employment Tribunal case, the appeal for which is currently being heard before the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Dave Prentis - in a competition with Keir Starmer, its difficult to know who is the more charismatic - his only talent was for running the union like a mafia boss

UNISON is a rich union with at least £100 million in reserve. It is in an excellent position to mount a fightback against the cuts in local government yet its only achievements have been to feather the nest of its unelected, unaccountable officials. When disciplinary action was first taken against me who did I deal with but a Beth Bickerstaffe, the Executive Secretary. 

It was I thought a strange coincidence that she shared the same unusual surname with the first General Secretary, Rodney Bickerstaffe.  But having inquired of her, without success, whether she was any relation, I later learnt that she was his daughter-in-law! 

I am sure that her interview was one of those equal opportunities interviews, except that she seems to have been more equal than the rest!

Either way the General Secretary election was a golden opportunity to sweep the right-wing out of the union and transform UNISON into a fighting union. Careerism and left sectarianism have ensured that the right-wing narrowly retains their hold.

There will be fresh elections in 5 years time.  I just hope that the Socialist Party has learnt its lesson and doesn’t split the vote again for narrow sectarian party building purposes. The purpose of left groups it to increase the fighting capacity of the working class not to let the right-wing of the trade union movement retain their grip.

Tony Greenstein

See

Holmes streets ahead to win endorsement of another Unison region – this time union’s biggest – in general secretary contest

Christina McAnea elected as Unison's first female leader

Socialism in the United States – Is it making a Come Back?

Focus on Milwaukee and Chicago – Can the United States put the Cold War and McCarthyism behind it?

Bernie Sander’s challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016 was unique for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that he was the first mainstream Presidential contender to openly call himself a socialist. The fact that he nearly won the contest was remarkable, especially given that ‘Crooked’ Hilary and her friends openly cheated.

Whereas Europe has had a tradition of strong socialist and communist parties in the United States such parties have always been confronted with a virulent anti-communism. Attacks against labour unions and the right to organise have been particularly vicious in the USA.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Frank Little of the Industrial Workers of the World was lynched in August 1917 by six thugs who pulled him out of his bed and Joe Hill was judicially murdered in Utah in 1915. Twelve years later two Italian born anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were again judicially murdered on trumped up charges in Massachussetts.

Nonetheless the United States has had a rich socialist history of class struggle such as in the car factories of Detroit in the 1930’s. In 1912 when Eugene Debbs stood for President he got nearly a million votes and 6% of the vote.  In 1920 he stood again and got nearly a million votes but just 3.4%.

The first Red Scare was in the first World War when Debb’s Socialist Party opposed the draft. A speech in Canton Ohio on June 16 1918 at the end of the war when Debs declared that:

“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”

led to a prosecution under the Sedition Act and Debs being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, of which he served 32 months before being pardoned.

Debs campaigning for President in 1912

In the post-war period McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria led to a witch-hunt of supporters of all progressive and radical politics.  This was depicted by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, which was ostensibly about the Salem Witchhunt. People like Pete Seeger and Charlie Chaplin were victims of the determination of the American Right to root out anyone who was seen as an opponent of US imperialism and its war machine.

It was only with the movement against the Vietnam War that radical and socialist organisations began to resurface and grow. Nonetheless the American political environment is very different from that in Britain or Europe.  There is no equivalent to a mass social democratic or Labour Party.  Instead there are two capitalist parties – Republican and Democrat.

The Democrats were originally the party of Dixieland, the KKK and White Supremacy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it became the party of civil rights and an end to segregation and the Big Society.  This caused a rupture in its southern base with the Democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, running an independent campaign for US President in 1968 having coined the slogan 5 years earlier ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. Wallace won 5 states in the Deep South.

Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes

In the Congressional elections last year, Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator for Vermont was joined in Congress by two members of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It has to be said that the DSA are a social democratic not a Marxist party. Class struggle is not to the fore in their politics.

Nonetheless this has provoked a backlash. In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump railed against the advance of socialism. when he warned that

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. ... Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”

Not only Congressional Republicans but Nancy Pelosi joined in the applause!

An article in The Hill by Paris Dennard, a CNN political commentator and former Bush official explained:

‘The Democratic Party continues to go further to the extreme left. Their latest clarion call is the idea of "Democratic Socialism." Socialism by any other name is still socialism, and trying to infiltrate it into our modern political process and system of government is dangerous. 

There is no doubt that this new rise of socialism found in the base of the Democratic Party is a flawed economic ideology that must be challenged by all Americans who support free enterprise....

This is, of course, what the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign and the launch of Chuka Ummuna’s now failed TIG was all about.  Making the Labour Party into a safe party of capitalism.

Below are two interesting articles on socialism in Milwaukee and the Democratic stronghold of Chicago, home to the infamous Mayor Daley.

Tony Greenstein

When Socialism Was Tried in America—and Was a Smashing Success

For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

April 6, 2019 John Nichols The Nation

Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection), (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection)

“If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.

Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner who became the party’s presidential nominee that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan, Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday come true.”

“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections. The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.

Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly discovered its history. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” griped Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”

Apart from the fact that Wisconsin’s top Republicans don’t seem to like the state—or its history—very much, the GOP response is comic. Many Wisconsinites know that their state has a long, rich socialist tradition, and that Milwaukee’s association with it is one of the coolest things about the city. It even earned a mention in the movie Wayne’s World, when rocker Alice Cooper explains, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, but the delegates to its 2020 convention might nominate a democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for president. And when they convene in Wisconsin’s largest city next summer, they shouldn’t hesitate to take the Republicans up on their call to highlight lessons from Milwaukee’s Socialist past. Doing so will strengthen the hand of the party’s eventual nominee, whether it’s Sanders or another of the contenders, all of whom will surely be labeled “socialist” by Donald Trump and his troll army.

Instead of fearing mention of the S-word, Democrats can and should approach it as smart Republicans have the L-word—“libertarian.” Republicans frequently borrow from the libertarian lexicon and toolbox, and acknowledge as much, without abandoning their essential partisanship. Democrats ought to be similarly limber. It’s great that the party now has a strong democratic-socialist wing, which includes Sanders and members of Congress like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. But Democrats who do not identify as socialists can still follow the lead of FDR and the late senator Edward Kennedy, who worked closely with and celebrated the ideas and ideals of democratic socialist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, a groundbreaking study on poverty. Another 2020 Democratic presidential contender—Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gets it right when he says that the old Republican strategy of attaching a “socialist” label to every progressive idea is just that: old. “Today, I think a word like that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of the debate,” explains the most millennial of the Democrats’ presidential prospects.

Buttigieg says that the S-word has “lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” arguing: “If someone my age or younger is weighing a policy idea, and somebody comes along and says, ‘You can’t do that—it’s socialist,’ I think our answer is going to be, ‘OK, is it a good idea or is it not?’”

Polling tells us that young voters are more comfortable with socialism than capitalism. Older voters may still be susceptible to Republican appeals rooted in Cold War hysteria, but the challenges posed by the existential crisis of climate change and the radical transformation of our economy in an age of AI-driven automation are going to make everyone far more open to radical responses. And many of the best of these—especially those that call for expanding the social-welfare state—will draw from historic and contemporary socialist thinking.

Democrats can get ahead of the curve and disarm Trump and the trolls by embracing the opportunity that Milwaukee offers to talk about socialism as it has existed and succeeded in the United States. For American socialists in the 20th century, Milwaukee was a political mecca, a city that tested and confirmed the validity of their ideas. Vladeck, then the manager of The Jewish Daily Forward (these days known simply as The Forward), called it an example of “the America of tomorrow.”

Socialists were proud to point to Milwaukee, which had a Socialist mayor for most of the period from 1910 to 1960, as a model of sound and equitable governance. And they were not alone: During Hoan’s 24-year tenure, Time magazine reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

Hoan also took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the violent racists as they extended their reach from the South to northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist in than Hades itself,” the mayor declared in 1921.

Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American history. In The American Mayor, his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country, Melvin Holli wrote: 

“Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.” 

Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, the mayors who served before and after Hoan, were Socialists as well. And Milwaukee voters elected dozens of Socialists to the city council, county board, school board, state legislature, and Congress. Milwaukee’s Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form of democratic socialism. Zeidler once explained to me, 

“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for the common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.” 

That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century—so much so that “socialism” ceased to be a scare word for the city’s residents. What frightens Republicans today is that “socialism” is ceasing to be a scare word in our contemporary national discourse.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

America's Socialist Surge is Going Well in Chicago

Tuesday night’s elections saw the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history

April 3, 2019 Micah Uetricht

The United States is experiencing a socialist surge right now. That surge came to Chicago last night, where democratic socialists won big in the second, final round of municipal elections.

Three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won their city council races in runoff elections on Tuesday: Byron Sigcho-Lopez in the 25th ward, Jeanette Taylor in the 20th and Andre Vasquez in the 40th. The fourth candidate, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, is locked in a race in the 33rd ward that is too close to call and will await the counting of mail-in ballots, but was up by 64 votes once all precincts’ votes were counted.

They will join two other socialists who handily won the first round of elections outright in February: Carlos Rosa, an incumbent in the 35th ward, and Daniel La Spata, who defeated an incumbent in the first ward.

Add them up and you’ve got at least five, maybe six democratic socialists who will be on the 50-member Chicago city council. Few major American cities have seen even a single socialist councilor in generations; the third-largest city in the US could soon have half a dozen. It’s the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history.

The socialists won by strong, straightforward campaigning on working-class issues. Rosa, for example, made his race a referendum on affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, painting big real estate developers as the enemy and demanding rent control in the city.

Taylor, a longtime neighborhood and education activist on the city’s South Side, demanded the forthcoming Barack Obama presidential library in her ward include a community benefits agreement to fight displacement of working-class residents. In 2015, she participated in a 34-day hunger strike to demand the reopening of Walter H Dyett high school; her website homepage reads: “Send a Dyett hunger strike to city hall.”

And Rodriguez campaigned on a history of activism for affordable housing and immigrant rights in a gentrifying, working-class immigrant neighborhood and against privatization of public services and expansion of police power in the city.

In other words, these democratic socialists ran as unabashed fighters against corporate greed and austerity and for the city’s working class.

Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.

Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.

Since its 2012 strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has served as the anchor of the city’s labor left. The CTU, along with community groups and other progressive unions such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, formed a political organization called United Working Families (UWF) in 2015. Many union leaders, in Chicago and elsewhere, are skittish about backing openly socialist candidates.

UWF appears to be, endorsing most of the DSA’s city council candidates (and in many cases expended significant resources on them). Another progressive electoral group, Reclaim Chicago, was the principal backer of two of the victorious DSA members, Vasquez and La Spata.

That coalition of left unions and community groups will be crucial in the years to come. Last night also saw the election of the Chicago’s first black woman mayor, as well as its first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer.

Lightfoot claimed to be a progressive, but her record has been scrutinized by criminal justice activists and the CTU (which backed Lightfoot’s opponent, Cook county board president Toni Preckwinkle); she drew a large donation from a murky “dark money” group that uses vague pro-austerity rhetoric as well as support from Emanuel’s personal lawyer. The city’s labor movement and left will probably find themselves joining together to fight Lightfoot in office.

Chicago’s socialist victories last night weren’t a fluke. Throughout the country, people are tired of low wages, soaring housing costs, privatization of public goods, budget cuts and corporate giveaways of public money. They have tried austerity and found it miserable.

If Chicago’s elections are any indication, maybe they’re ready to try socialism.

• Micah Uetricht is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014) and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America