2767. The Women of 1917

By Megan Trudell, Jacobin, May 2017 

Women textile workers march in Petrograd on the International Women's Day (Feb. 23 old calendar) in 1917

On International Women’s Day in 1917, women textile workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd went on strike, left the mills, and moved in their hundreds from factory to factory, calling out other workers on strike and engaging in violent clashes with police and troops.

Unskilled, low paid, working twelve- or thirteen-hour days in dirty, unhealthy conditions, the women demanded solidarity and insisted on action from men, especially those working in skilled engineering and metal factories who were regarded as the most politically conscious and socially powerful of the city’s workforce. Women threw sticks, stones, and snowballs at factory windows and forced their way into the workplaces, calling for an end to war and the return of their men from the front.

According to many contemporaries and historians, these women rioting for bread — using time-honoured and “primitive” methods of protest in pursuit of purely economic demands, acting from emotion rather than theoretical preparation — inadvertently set in motion the storm that swept tsarism aside, before they disappeared behind the big battalions of male workers and male-dominated political parties.

Yet from the beginning of the February strikes, political slogans against the war were woven into the protests. Women’s audacity, determination, and methods made clear that they understood the root of their problems, the need for workers’ unity, and for winning soldiers away from protecting the tsarist state to support the revolt. Trotsky later recorded:

A great role is played by women workers in relationship between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us.” The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd.

By the end of February 23, soldiers who had been guarding tram depots had been convinced by women tram workers to join them inside, and trams were overturned to be used as barricades against police. Winning over soldiers was not simply a result of the growing burden of the war on troops or of the infectious “spontaneity” of the protests. Women textile workers had related to the large numbers of mainly peasant soldiers in Petrograd since 1914. Men in barracks and women in factories who had come to the city from the same areas talked and formed relationships, blurring the lines between worker and soldier and giving women workers a clear grasp of the necessity of armed support.

Women workers were firmly in the forefront of the February Revolution that culminated in the destruction of tsarism. They were not merely its “spark,” but the motor that drove it forward — despite the initial misgivings of many male workers and revolutionaries.

The February Revolution is commonly described as “spontaneous,” and in a sense this is true: it was not planned and executed by revolutionaries. But spontaneity did not equate to a lack of political consciousness. The experiences of the women who stormed Petrograd’s factories as both workers and the head of households forced to queue for hours to feed their families collapsed the distinction between the “economic” demand for bread and the political demand to end the war. Material circumstances led to the blame for hunger and poverty being directed where it belonged — on the war and the politicians conducting it. Such demands could not be met without seismic political change.

In addition, Bolshevik women were central to the strike, having worked hard to organize unskilled women workers for years, despite attitudes among men in their own party that organizing women was at the least a distraction from the fight against tsarism and at worst playing into the hands of upper-class feminists who would lead women away from class struggle.

Many men in the revolutionary movement felt that the International Women’s Day protests were premature and that women workers should be restrained until skilled workers were ready to take decisive action. It was women members, a minority in the party, who argued for a meeting in the Vyborg district for women workers to discuss the war and inflation and women activists who called for an antiwar demonstration for International Women’s Day. One of these was Anastasia Deviatkina, a Bolshevik and factory worker who set up a union for soldiers’ wives after the February Revolution.

After February, in most accounts women largely disappear as part of the revolution’s development over the course of 1917 — apart from a few outstanding women revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Inessa Armand, who are often discussed as much for their private lives as wives and lovers as for their practical activity and theoretical contributions.

Women were mainly absent from administrative bodies that emerged from the ashes of tsarism. Few were represented on village councils, as delegates for the Constituent Assembly, or as soviet deputies.­ Elections to factory committees were dominated by men, who were even deputized in industries where women workers were in the majority. The reasons for this were twofold and related: women still had the task of feeding their families in straitened circumstances and lacked the confidence and education, as well as the time, to put themselves forward or to sustain high levels of political activity. The ways in which working women had lived in Russia for centuries, the material reality of their oppression, conditioned their ability to match the unquestionable rise in political consciousness with political engagement.

Russia before 1917 was a predominantly peasant society; the tsar’s total authority was enshrined and reinforced by the church and was reflected in the institution of the family. Marriage and divorce were under religious control; women were legally subordinate, considered as property and less than human. Common Russian proverbs included sentiments like: “I thought I saw two people but it was just a man and his wife.”

Male power in the household was total and women were expected to be passive in brutal conditions, passed from father to husband and frequently the recipients of sanctioned violence. Peasant and working women faced punishing, arduous work in the fields and factories with the considerable added burden of child care and domestic responsibilities at a time when childbirth was difficult and dangerous, contraception nonexistent, and infant mortality high.

Yet women’s political involvement in 1917 did not come out of nowhere. Russia was a contradiction: alongside the profound poverty, oppression, and tyranny endured by most of its people, the Russian economy boomed in the decades before 1905. Enormous modern factories produced weapons and cloth, railways connected fast-growing towns, and investment and techniques from Europe led to huge increases in iron and oil output.

These dramatic economic changes generated immense social transformation in the years before World War I: increasing numbers of peasant women were drawn into urban factories, impelled by poverty and encouraged by employers whose use of mechanization generated more unskilled jobs and whose preference for “compliant” workers led to a huge growth in women working in linen, silk, cotton, wool, ceramics, and paper production.

Women had been involved in the textile factory strikes in 1896, in protests against conscription before the Russo-Japanese war and — crucially — in the 1905 revolution, during which unskilled women workers in textile, tobacco, and sweet factories, along with domestic workers and laundry workers, struck and tried to form their own unions as part of the massive revolt.

The impact of World War I was decisive in increasing women’s economic and political weight. The war shattered families and upended women’s lives. Millions of men were absent at the front, wounded or killed, forcing women to work the land by themselves, head households, and enter the urban workforce. Women were 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. Even in skilled areas, women’s participation increased dramatically. In 1914 women had made up only 3 percent of metal workers; by 1917 the number had risen to 18 percent.

In the dual power situation following the February Revolution, women’s protests did not disappear but became part of the process that saw workers’ support flow from the government to the Soviet and, within the Soviet, from the moderate socialist Menshevik-Social Revolutionary leadership to the Bolsheviks by September.

The expectations of working women and men that their lives would improve with the fall of the tsar were dashed by the government and Soviet leadership’s continued prosecution of the war. By May, antiwar protests had forced the dissolution of the first Provisional Government and Menshevik-SR Soviet leaders had formed a coalition government with liberals — still dedicated to the war. Workers’ disillusionment led to further strikes, again led by women. Some forty thousand women laundry workers, members of a union led by the Bolshevik Sofia Goncharskaia, struck for more pay, an eight-hour day, and improved working conditions: better hygiene at work, maternity benefits (it was common for women workers to hide pregnancies until they gave birth on the factory floor), and an end to sexual harassment. As historians Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyer describe:

With other female activists from the union, Goncharskaia had gone from one laundry to another persuading the women to join the strike. They would fill buckets with cold water to douse the ovens. In one laundry, the owner attacked Goncharskaia with a crowbar; she was saved by the laundresses grabbing him from behind.

In August, faced with General Kornilov’s attempts to crush the revolution, women rallied to the defense of Petrograd, building barricades and organizing medical aid; in October, women in the Bolshevik party were involved in the provision of medical aid and crucial communications between localities, some had responsibility for coordinating the rising in different areas of Petrograd, and there were women members of the Red Guard. McDermid and Hillyer describe another Bolshevik woman’s involvement in October:

The tram conductor, A.E. Rodionova, had hidden 42 rifles and other weapons in her depot when the Provisional government had tried to disarm the workers after the July days. In October, she was responsible for making sure that two trams with machine guns left the depot for the storming of the Winter Palace. She had to ensure that the tram service operated during the night of 25 to 26 October, to assist the seizure of power, and to check the Red Guard posts throughout the city.

The trajectory of the revolution widened the gap between working women for whom the war was the cause of their hardship, whose calls for peace grew louder as the year went on, and the feminists who continued to support the bloodshed. For most liberal upper-class feminists who advocated equality in law and education and for social reform, those gains would be won through proving themselves loyal to the new government and to the war effort. Proving patriotism was part of winning a seat at the table.

The February Revolution had led to renewed campaigning by feminists for universal suffrage, a significant step forward when it was granted in July. But for most women, voting rights made little difference to their lives, which were still dominated by shortages, long working hours, and battling to keep their families together. As Kollontai had written in 1908:

However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete.For most working-class and peasant women, questions of oppression and equality were not posed in the abstract, but emerged concretely from the process of fighting to improve their lives and those of their men and children. Those who became overtly political and more confident, often as members of the Bolshevik Party, did so as a result of their own collective action against the war and politicians — action that centered on opposition to hunger, war, and for land ownership. Robert Service argues:

The Bolshevik political programme proved steadily more appealing to the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants as social turmoil and economic ruin reached a climax in late autumn. But for that there could have been no October revolution.

This was experienced as fully for women workers, peasants, and soldiers’ wives as for their male counterparts. Without the support of the mass of unskilled working people in Petrograd, most of them women, the October insurrection would not have succeeded.

Support for the Bolsheviks was not blind but the result of, in Trotsky’s words, “a cautious and painful development of consciousness” by millions of workers, men and women. By October, everything else had been tried: the Provisional Government and the Mensheviks had betrayed them, demonstrations had brought repression or limited gains which no longer satisfied their hopes for a better life, and, crucially, the Kornilov coup attempt had made the stakes clear — go forward or be smashed. One worker put it like this: “The Bolsheviks have always said, ‘It is not we who will persuade you, but life itself.’ And now the Bolsheviks have triumphed because life has proved their tactics right.”

It was to the Bolsheviks’ credit that they took the woman question as seriously as they did. Although from today’s standpoint women were sorely underrepresented, serious effort went into organizing and developing women workers. The fact that the Bolsheviks did more than other socialist parties to relate to women workers was not necessarily because of a greater commitment to women’s rights.

Mensheviks and Bolsheviks both understood the need to engage with women as part of the working class, but the Bolsheviks could integrate the fight for equality between men and women into a strategy based on class activity against the government and the war, while the parties that were implicated in the continuation of war and deals with the privileged and employers could do little more than report on women’s strikes and talk about political rights, with no concrete solution for the material pressures of women’s lives.

The Bolsheviks increasingly took on the organization and politicization of women — in part learning from February’s explosive beginnings and in part because of the tenacity of their own women members.

Leading Bolshevik women such as Kollontai, Krupskaia, Armand, Konkordiia Samoilova, and Vera Slutskaia, among others, had long argued that the party should make special efforts to organize women workers and develop their political education. They fought to convince their male comrades that unskilled women workers were centrally important and not a passive, conservative, “backward” obstacle to revolution. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), first issued in 1914 and relaunched in May 1917, carried articles on the importance of crèches, nurseries, and protective workplace legislation for women, and repeatedly underlined the need for equality and for “women’s issues” to be taken up by all workers.

The role of women workers in February and their continued importance as part of the Petrograd working class helped to change the view among many Bolshevik men that concentrating on women’s issues gave ground to feminism and that revolution would be led by the most skilled and politically conscious (male) workers. Nonetheless, it was an uphill battle; when Kollontai proposed a women’s department for the party in April she was largely isolated, although she had support from Lenin, whose April Theses weren’t received with much more enthusiasm by the Bolshevik leadership — similarly, Kollontai was Lenin’s only supporter on the central committee.

In following months, however, it became clear that both Lenin’s argument about carrying the revolution through to Soviet power and Kollontai’s grasp of the importance of women workers flowed from the dynamic of the revolution and could propel it forwards. Bolshevik papers beyond Rabotnitsanow argued that entrenched sexist attitudes endangered class unity, and the party worked to get women represented on factory committees, challenging attitudes among men who regarded women workers as a threat and arguing with male workers to vote for women — especially in industries where the latter were a majority — and to show them respect as fellow workers, representatives, and comrades.

Six weeks after the October Revolution, marriage was replaced with civil registration and divorce became available at the request of either partner. These measures were elaborated a year later in the Family Code, which made women equal before the law. Religious control was abolished, removing centuries of institutionalized oppression at a stroke; divorce could be obtained by either partner with no reason given; women had the right to their own money and neither partner had rights over the other’s property. The concept of illegitimacy was eradicated — if a woman did not know who the father was, all her previous sexual partners were given collective responsibility for the child. In 1920, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion on request.

The 1917 revolution was initiated and shaped by women and over the course of the year, many ancient conceptions of women as inferior, as property, as passive, backward, conservative, unconfident, and weak were challenged, if not obliterated, by women’s actions and political commitment.

But the Russian Revolution did not abolish male domination or liberate women — the catastrophic privations of the civil war and the subsequent distortions of the Soviet government made that an impossibility. Inequalities remained. Few women occupied positions of authority, few were elected to administrative bodies, and sexist ideas could not simply disappear in the extreme adversity that followed October.

During the revolution, women did not participate equally with men or contribute as significantly to the higher levels of the political process, but within the constraints of their lives they defied expectations and shaped the course of the revolution. As McDermid and Hillyer say:

True, the division of labour between women and men remained, but rather than conclude that women had failed to challenge male domination, we might consider how they manoeuvred within their traditional sphere and what that meant for the revolutionary process.

Women were integral to the 1917 revolution, making history alongside men — not as passive spectators or apolitical ciphers but as courageous participants whose engagement was more meaningful for the rejection of entrenched oppression it represented. Seeing the revolution through the eyes of women gives us a richer reading of what remains the most transformative historical moment for women’s lives.

2762. A Report: The Big Bad Fix – The Case Against Climate Geoengineering

By Biofuelwatch, November 2017

“The Big Bad Fix – The Case Against Climate Geoengineering,” a report released today by ETC Group, Biofuelwatch and Heinrich Böll Foundation, warns that geoengineering (the large-scale manipulation of the climate) is gaining acceptance as a would-be technological fix for climate change in key emitting countries, as these countries refuse to break away from their fossil-fueled economies. Geoengineering research programs and projects planned by industry and state-funded and private research institutions are proliferating, primarily in high-emitting countries such as the US, the UK and China. “The Big Bad Fix” analyses the context and risks of geoengineering, and reveals the actors, vested interests and political developments underway to advance the large-scale technological schemes to manipulate the Earth’s natural systems.

Although considered reckless and unacceptable by many scientific and political experts, geoengineering is now increasingly being pushed into the mainstream of climate policy debates, where it creates the illusion of a technological shortcut to manage the symptoms of climate change without addressing its root causes.

However, as the report details, geoengineering poses many risks for people, ecosystems and security. It relies on excessive land, water and resource consumption, threatens food security, and undermines democratic control over the world’s commons because its untested technologies are also developed by patent-holders for profit. Therefore, the report states, irreversible harm to biodiversity and ecosystem integrity is highly probable. There are also serious concerns about geoengineering governance, including the potential for unilateral deployment, the risk of conflict in the event of adverse regional impacts and side effects, and the risk of weaponization of geoengineering technologies.

“Geoengineering is a dangerous defence of the failed status quo, not a technical or scientific necessity. In fact, the technologies put forward for geoengineering will most likely worsen rather than solve the multifaceted problems created by climate change. Claiming that we ‘must’ deploy geoengineering is saying that we would sooner do irreparable harm to our planet than alter our economic system that benefits only the very few at the top,” says Dr. Rachel Smolker, Co-director of Biofuelwatch.

The “Big Bad Fix” is being launched today in Nairobi during the 3^rd United Nations Environmental Assembly and in the run-up to a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal. Geoengineering is subject to a de facto moratorium under the CBD, and marine geoengineering is prohibited by the London Protocol of the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. The authors of the report argue that these decisions must be upheld and must be the starting point of any legitimate, international and democratic discussion of geoengineering governance.

“Geoengineering would exacerbate the global power imbalance, creating winners and losers. It would be foolish to allow a group of countries to take control of the global thermostat,” states Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America Director of ETC Group. “Governance must not be mistaken to mean establishing regulations to legalize and permit the development of such technologies. Banning exceedingly risky and dangerous technologies is a legitimate and prudent approach to governance, as put in practice with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the UN’s adoption of a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in July 2017,” adds Ribeiro.

Instead of resorting to unproven, risky technofixes, the report calls for the rapid implementation of a climate-just vision for limiting global warming to under 1.5°C.

“Proponents of geoengineering are feeding the illusion that we can escape our climate crises without having to adjust our emission-heavy lifestyles. But reality is not that simple. Not only do geoengineering technologies come with new risks and side effects, they also distract from the only proven solution for climate change: a radical reduction of climate changing emissions. Before geoengineering is put into action, we need clear and binding regulations for these technologies. An international framework of regulation must be grounded in the precautionary principle, and technologies with associated risks that are not predictable, justifiable or manageable must be prohibited outright,” says Barbara Unmüßig, Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

The report concludes that the numerous high-impact risks of geoengineering, and the political, social, cultural, economic, ethical, moral, intergenerational and rights-based problems it implies, render geoengineering unacceptable. Further, the authors argue that it is a dangerous distraction from the urgent need to support viable alternatives: making deep emission cuts in the near-term and rapidly transforming our economies to allow for a socially and ecologically sustainable and just future, rather than locking the world into a long-term dependence on non-existent, high-risk technologies.

2766. Dismantling the Nuclear Beast

By Kay Matthews, La Jicarita, December 5, 2017

Verna Teller, former governor of Isleta Pueblo, who gave the keynote speech on Friday night. Photo by Robin Collier.

To see what “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are in action you should have attended the “Dismantling the Nuclear Beast Symposium” at the University of New Mexico last weekend. When I walked into the conference room on Saturday the attendees introducing themselves ranged from the Navajo Nation, Jemez Pueblo, Laguna Pueblo, Acoma Pueblo, Alaska, Utah, Arizona, Española, California, Tularosa, Albuquerque, White Mountain (Ute Mountain Utes), Santa Clara Pueblo, Isleta Pueblo, and Taos. They represent organizations that are fighting to dismantle the nuclear beast from uranium mining and enrichment to weapons production and nuclear waste storage: The Nuclear Issues Study Group; Diné No Nukes; Citizen Action New Mexico; Laguna/Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment; Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety; Nuclear Watch New Mexico; Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment; Tewa Women United; Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium; Alliance for Environmental Strategies; Haul No!; and Southwest Research and Information Center.

The mining and milling of uranium has hit New Mexico particularly hard. Along what is referred to as the Grants mineral belt and on the Navajo Reservation are the remnants of underground such as La Jara Mesa, Roca Honda Mine, Mount Taylor Mine, Marquez Canyon Mine, four proposed surface mines in the Churchrock/Crown Point area, and 13 abandoned mines within a five mile radius of Churchrock. The open pit Jackpile Mine at Paguate, on Laguna Pueblo, sends radioactive dust into the air, and the former mill sites of Ambrosia Lake, Kerrmac, and Homestake near Milan have contaminated the groundwater and plumes are heading towards Grants and Bluewater. On July 16, 1979, 14 weeks after the Three Mile Island radiation release, the Church Rock uranium mill tailings disposal pond breached its dam and 1,100 tons of radioactive mill waste and approximately 93 million gallons of mine effluent flowed into the Rio Puerco, through the town of Gallup, and into Arizona. The contaminated water left residues of radioactive uranium, thorium, radium, and polonium, as well as traces of metals such as cadmium, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, sodium, vanadium, zinc, iron, lead and high concentrations of sulfates.

A precipitous drop in uranium prices in the 1980s squelched the mining and milling boom that created this development, but the panelists at the Saturday morning symposium are still dealing with its residue and anticipating its possible rebirth if the price of uranium once again increases. Klee Benally, a Diné activist who lives in Flagstaff, told the audience that 10 million people live in close proximity to abandoned uranium mines that have yet to be cleaned up; 3,272 of those mines are located in five western states. Because uranium is classified a “hard rock” mineral, it falls under the auspices of the 1872 General Mining Act that allows mining companies to avoid responsibility for clean-up (several bills to reform the Mining Act were introduced in the 2000s but were defeated by the mining lobby).

Chris Shuey of the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) explained that the Superfund program is the only law with oversight over these clean-up sites and it’s sorely inadequate; only the Environmental Protection Agency and the corporations responsible for the contamination have a seat at the table to determine the clean-up operation. The billion dollars that has been spent on settlement negotiations has addressed only 40 percent of identified mines.

Yolanda Badback, of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe of Utah, lives in a community called White Mesa that lies five miles north of the White Mesa uranium mill, the only conventional uranium mill operating in the United States today. While the mill is currently undergoing a licensing renewal, there are plans to ship clean-up waste from mines and mills that are no longer in operation to the White Mesa mill. Badback wants the mine closed: her community has to drink bottled water because of aquifer contamination.

. . . . .

The afternoon panel consisted of activists who are engaged in the second phase of the nuclear beast: the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear waste storage. Beata Tsosie-Peña and Kathy Sanchez of Tewa Women United spoke about the impacts of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which sits on the Pajarito Plateau directly above their pueblos, on the environment, on their cultural connections, their art, and their personal lives. Myrriah Gomez, who is a UNM professor in the Honors College, spoke of her grandparents, who were part of the homesteaders community on the Pajarito Plateau forcibly removed when the Army took over the area to establish the Lab during World War II. Born and raised in El Rancho, where her family relocated, Gomez now works with both Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS), and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

These two groups are led by powerful New Mexico women, Joni Arends and Tina Córdova. Córdova, born and raised in the small Hispano village of Tularosa, founded the Consortium in 2005 to force the U.S. government to acknowledge the impact on downwinders of the first nuclear blast test detonation at the Trinity Site near Tularosa in 1945. These “unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated, innocent victims” have suffered debilitating health defects from the radioactivity released during the bomb test. Her group has been pushing for a bill in Congress to include the Tularosa Downwinders in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) that covers uranium miners and workers exposed to atmospheric nuclear testing (according to Córdova, $2 billion has thus far been paid in compensation). The bill has been held up in Congress for seven years, and a recent hearing on the bill was postponed.

Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety.  Photo by Robin Collier

Joni Arends has been demanding accountability at LANL for 30 years as an opponent of the Waste Isolation Pilot Program and director of CCNS. More than 21 million cubic feet of toxic waste has been buried at LANL since 1943. Joni has done the due diligence necessary to monitor the Lab’s adherence to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) that deals with the disposal of hazardous waste at LANL. Numerous violations have occurred over the years: monitoring wells designed to measure underground contamination were inadequately designed and built; chromium plumes extend from the Lab’s boundaries towards the Rio Grande. Since 2010 Joni has been working with Tina Córdova and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to prepare a Health Impact Assessment on the downwinders.

While the moderators of the symposium, Leona Morgan (Diné) and Eileen Shaughnessy (UNM professor), co-founders of the Nuclear Issues Study Group, stressed throughout the day that the gathering was not only a report on the history of the nuclear industry and the battles currently being waged to dismantle it, but also a pledge of resistance with innovative ideas on how to proceed. But the last panelist on Saturday’s schedule, Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, acknowledged the difficulties of this fight in his discussion of current political realities. LANL currently spends $1.7 billion dollars a year on nuclear weapons production; Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque spends $1.8 billion. Kirtland Air Force Base stores 2,500 warheads on the outskirts of Albuquerque. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages all things nuclear under the Department of Energy, has requested a $10.2 billion budge for 2018. Our congressional delegation continues to support pit production (the plutonium core of a nuclear weapon) at LANL, development of the so-called smart weapons, the stockpile stewardship program—in other words, all things nuclear. In the meantime, poverty listings by state (including Washington D.C.) rank New anywhere from 47th to 51st.

Eileen Shaughnessy and Leona Morgan.  Photo by Robin Collier

Politically, our resistance has to debunk their rationale that these nuclear industries are the engines that drive the economy of New Mexico; all nuclear conductors should be fired and replaced with alternative energy drivers. A billion dollars spent on clean-up at both Labs and at Kirtland could provide thousands of jobs and perhaps save us from the chromium plume headed towards the Rio Grande, contamination from Sandia’s mixed waste landfill, and Kirtland’s jet fuel plume flowing beneath the streets of Albuquerque.

Signing the U.N Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons would be a huge step towards this goal. The indigenous people of the world, those who “have been most negatively impacted by nuclear colonialism,” are taking a leading role in the work necessary to dismantle this nuclear beast. They are the resistance.

2765. Remembering James Richard O’Connor (Apr 20, 1930 – Nov 12, 2017)

By Center for Political Ecology, November 2017

James Richard O'Connor

Michael Goldman

Jim was an intensely driven, passionate, and creative human, friend, scholar-activist, and intellectual who lived each day based on deeply held principles of social justice and revolution.  His contributions to the understanding of the workings of capitalism and the state have been monumental. His work has been translated and debated in dozens of languages all over the world, and remain essential for social movement activists and teachers fighting against the catastrophe called capitalism.  Before retiring as professor of Sociology at UCSC due to severe chronic back pain, he started an international journal, published a series of books, and kicked off an international discussion on capitalism and the environment in ways that still thrive in universities and public spaces everywhere.   His ideas live on and remain sustenance for young students everywhere navigating their way into the world of scholar-activism.
Besides the idea of revolution, his greatest love was his companion for many decades, the lovely Barbara Laurence, who kept Jim grounded in love, in the world, and with friends and music and good cooking.  Barbara gave her all to Jim, giving angelic care, especially in his last years, when Jim’s illness overtook him.  Jim will be missed sorely by family, friends, and comrades the world over. (Michael Goldman)

Giovanna Ricoveri

James O’Connor’s intellectual and political contribution to social sciences has been important, although not enough recognized. His formulation of the second contradiction of capitalism – that between capital and nature– has been crucial to understand the crisis of mature capitalism in the last decades of the XX century and that of the European social democracy to deal with it. For me, he has been a long time loyal friend and “a master”.(Giovanna Ricoveri)

John Gulick

http://www.centerforpoliticalecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Jim1.jpg

Stuart Rosewarne

Vale James O’Connor

The passing of James O’Connor marks a significant moment in the history of Marxist scholarship and politics. Born in 1930 and growing up in Boston, a short stint in the merchant marine introduced him to a world beyond the oppressive cultural and political environment of Cold War America. This aroused his interest in a more critical engagement in understanding the world beyond capitalist America. He completed studies in economics and sociology before working on a doctoral thesis exploring the forces that had resulted in the Cuban revolution, a study, which was subsequently published under the title of The Origin of Socialism in Cuba in 1970

This set him on the path as a warrior, along with others such as Joel Kovel, as a radical in the face of the cultural wars that were unfolding with the civil rights movement, feminism and student movements. He joined an emerging group of young intellectuals interested in drawing on the writings of Marx and other radicals intent on critiquing capitalist hegemony. He was intent on reinvigorating debate within Marxism and investigating established interpretations of this tradition to forge an invigorated Marxist analysis of capitalism, first publishing a series of reflections that contributed to exposing the nature of American imperialism and the unfolding contradictions with global capitalism.

After some teaching positions on the east coast, Jim took up academic positions in San Francisco where he joined a cohort of other radical thinkers in the early 1970s, and where he began to really make his mark on radical thinking and politics and particularly Marxist discourse. His particular focus concentrated on interrogating the role of the state in contemporary capitalism, and he drew together similar thinking colleagues to debate and develop critique. He led the way in setting up the journal Kapitalistate in 1973. The journal brought together comrades from the San Francisco Bay Area and from across North America and the world, including Italy, Germany and the U.K. His own thinking was developed in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, a pathbreaking analysis of the fundamental contradictions inherent in the role of the state’s inability to reconcile all of the claims for resources being made on the state. The Fiscal Crisis firmly established his standing as one of the foremost Marxist critics of the era.

The originality of The Fiscal Crisis lay in the innovative approach to drawing on Marxian categories to rethink how we should analyse the state. This capacity to revisit Marx’s concerns was also demonstrated in subsequent publications that concentrated on the multiple crises of capitalism, with the publication of Accumulation Crisis in 1986, followed by The Meaning of Crisis in 1987.

Settled in Santa Cruz at UCSC, and drawing on Barbara Laurence’s enthusiasm for protecting the red wood forests on the Californian coast, Jim turned his attention to the environmental destruction being wrought by the capitalist system. Indicative of his longstanding efforts to encourage others to join in and develop critiques of contemporary capitalism, he, Barbara and others, fostered a coterie of graduate students to contribute to this developing critique. He reconnected many of his old comrades to focus on the environmental question and established the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism as a global enterprise and the Center for Political Ecology.

Once again, Jim returned to exploring ways of creatively building on Marxian categories to reformulate how we might go about interrogating capitalism’s destructive force.  Incorporating insights from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Jim posited the notion of ‘the Second Contradiction’ of capitalism, the inherent tendency for the process of capital accumulation to undermine the natural (environmental) conditions of its existence.  This concept contributed, if not spearheaded, a dramatic engagement of Marxists and other radicals in recasting their critical focus on the environment.

The formulation of ‘the Second Contradiction’ was posed in opposition to the shift in radical discourse that had been influenced by post-structuralist thought and which had jettisoned Marxist theory to privilege the place of social forces, other than class. Jim was determined to re-establish the import of the working class in the forging of a progressive politics, and this prompted some intense and often acrimonious debate, not always confined to the battle for intellectual primacy in understanding the force of social struggle. But the significance of the notion of ‘the Second Contradiction’ lies in the extent to which it has become a foundation, or reference point, for the extraordinary growth in radical analysis of the array of environmental problems across the global.

Jim will be remembered by friends and foes alike, as well as those who he encouraged to join the cause, as an iconic figure in our efforts over the last fifty or so years to rebuild the force radical discourse and to take control of our political future. Over the last decade or more, he was working on extending this project by developing a critique of the many contradictions embedded in the processes of globalisation and neoliberalism, a project that remained frustrated by ill-health. However, he leaves behind a remarkable legacy that will continue to frame and inform radical analyses of capitalism’s many contributions well into the future. (Stuart Rosewarne)

2764. Trump’s War on Science

By Cliff Conner, Socialist Action, November 27, 2017

The Big Three: (From left) Scott Pruit, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke.

How loathsome is the Trump administration? Let me count the ways. On second thought, let me not—it would take too long. But one important threat it poses to the United States and the world is to the integrity of American science. Earlier this year, on Earth Day, April 22, hundreds of thousands of people responded to that danger by participating in the March for Science in Washington, D.C., and 600 other cities and towns across the country. How has American science fared since then?

Many right-wing politicians and public intellectuals are torn between repugnance for Donald Trump’s truculent ignorance and exuberance at the prospect that he can help them accomplish their goal of “dismantling the administrative state.” Trump’s first year in office helped advance their strategy of destroying public faith in “big government” by discrediting it. Not only are the Trump administration’s various agencies and cabinet offices laughably incompetent and ethically compromised; the office of the presidency itself has forfeited all claim to the respect of intelligent citizens.

The offensive against “big government” is driven by billionaire donors who finance right-wing think tanks, political campaigns, and media outlets. Their single-minded goal is to reduce their taxes and roll back governmental regulation of their businesses, especially with regard to environmental and public health protection. Their crusade against federal regulatory powers entails going to battle against empirical reality, rationality, knowledge, and expertise—in short, they have declared war against science.

The deregulation of corporate activities that have compromised the credibility of American science did not begin with Trump. Nor was it exclusively a Republican political project; the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations all likewise furthered the deregulation agenda.

It should not be forgotten that many of the environmental rules and regulations Trump’s team has rescinded were only put in place by Obama in the closing days of his eight-year tenure as president. All they accomplished was to provide easy targets for Trump to knock over. The tawdry assemblage of antiscience policymakers appointed by Trump, however, amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of the whole process.

The Big Three: Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke

If Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the war against science, its field commanders are those he has appointed to key scientific posts. A few examples, beginning with the Big Three of environmental and energy policy—Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke—make that clear:

• Scott Pruitt is the very model of an administrator appointed to undermine the agency he administers. Trump has on numerous occasions called for the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, had sued the EPA thirteen times, challenging regulations protecting air and water quality. In choosing Pruitt to lead the agency, Trump’s motives were transparent.

As an opening gambit, Trump instructed Pruitt to rescind the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated CO2 emissions from coal-burning power plants. Pruitt, an outspoken climate change denier with close ties to the fossil-fuel industries, was just the man for the job.

Pruitt systematically weakened the EPA’s scientific capabilities by purging dozens of members of its scientific advisory committees. In May 2017 he dismissed five of the 18 members of its Board of Scientific Counsellors and suggested that he might replace them with representatives of the industries the EPA regulates—for “balance,” of course. A spokesman for Pruitt declared, “We should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” In June the agency’s 47-member Science Advisory Board was likewise vitiated.

• Rick Perry publically proclaimed that he would dismantle the Department of Energy if he had the authority to do so. He made that declaration in 2012 while campaigning for a presidential nomination. In March 2017 he became the Trump administration’s Secretary of Energy, making him head of the department he had vowed to eliminate.

When he accepted the position, he did not understand what it entailed. He thought, “he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry.” Only later was he made aware that as Secretary of Energy, “he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal” (The New York Times, Jan. 18, 2017).

Among this buffoon’s responsibilities with regard to the nuclear stockpile, he would be in charge of national laboratories that have been called the “crown jewels of government science.” The two previous Secretaries of Energy had been legitimate scientists: Ernest J. Monitz, chairman of MIT’s physics department, and Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics.

Perry’s record as a major political voice of climate change denial stems from his extensive connections to the fossil-fuels industries, from which as governor of Texas he took more than $14.3 million in campaign donations. Big Oil and Big Gas were also the primary financial backers of his two presidential campaigns. At the time of his nomination, Perry was a member of the board of directors of Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

• Ryan Zinke began his tenure as Secretary of the Interior by rolling back a federal regulation reducing the amount of methane that vents from natural gas wells. This was the opening shot in a campaign against what he called “job-killing regulation that is not based on sound science”—Orwellian doublespeak for the science-based rules that underpin federal climate policy.Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke tours the Bears Ears National Monument while deciding how much to decrease the size of its protected lands.

He followed that up with an order to cancel a study of the health risks of an environmentally destructive coal-mining practice in which the tops of mountains are blown off. The study was being conducted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The cancellation was condemned by public-interest environmental groups but cheered by the National Mining Association.

Zinke proclaimed his intention to oversee “probably the greatest restructuring in the history of the Department of the Interior.” His plan would reduce the DOI budget by $1.6 billion and eliminate 4000 jobs in the department. It also included transferring leading scientists to positions where their climate-related research would not conflict with the denialist mantra. Among them were Virginia Burkett and Joel Clement.

Dr. Burkett was reassigned from a position in which she had contributed to a Nobel Peace Prize–winning report on climate change to an office under the control of Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, who, as a former lobbyist, had sued the DOI. Joel Clement, who had been the DOI’s chief climate policy expert, was also reassigned, but he did not go quietly. Instead, he resigned and publicly challenged Zinke’s attempt to silence and intimidate him, invoking the protections of the whistleblower law. In his letter of resignation, Clement declared, “If the Trump administration continues to try to silence experts in science, health and other fields, many more Americans, and the natural ecosystems upon which they depend, will be put at risk.”

Pruitt, Perry, and Zinke top the list of industry hacks and global warming deniers appointed by Trump to positions of influence over science policy, but several more are worth noting:

• Kathleen Hartnett White was named head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, making her Trump’s senior advisor on environmental policy. She has no scientific credentials but was a “Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence” at a crackpot libertarian think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She once characterized the scientific consensus on global warming as a “kind of paganism” for “secular elites,” and denied that CO2 is a pollutant, calling it “the gas of life on this planet.” She has also called renewable energy “unreliable and parasitic.”

• William Wehrum—a man who had spent his career challenging the EPA’s clean air protections—has been chosen to head the EPA office in charge of ensuring clean air in the United States. As a lawyer and lobbyist representing polluting industries, Wehrum has sued the EPA at least 77 timeson behalf of clients such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Gas Processors Association, and the American Chemistry Council.

It would be a major task to list all of the potential conflicts of interests the new director of the Office of Air and Radiation will face as he rules on matters involving his former clients. One timely example will have to suffice. One week before his Nov. 9 confirmation by the Senate, Wehrum was in federal court arguing against Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards protecting workers from airborne silica dust. In his oral arguments, he declared: “People are designed to deal with dust. People are in dusty environments all the time and it doesn’t kill them.”

• Michael Dourson, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA’s chemical safety office, would be an ideal poster boy for the corporatization of American science. The New York Times editorial board explained why his nomination should be opposed: “Mr. Dourson is a scientist for hire. A toxicologist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, he has a long history of consulting for chemical companies and conducting studies paid for with industry money. He frequently decided that the compounds he was evaluating were safe at exposure levels that are far more dangerous to public health than levels recommended by the E.P.A., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. His nomination is enthusiastically endorsed by the chemical industry” (The New York Times, Oct. 17. 2017).

The EPA triumvirate of Pruitt, Wehrum, and Dourson constitutes a clear and present danger to public health.

• Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who became head of the Food and Drug Administration in May 2017, is yet another scientist-for-hire in charge of a science-based agency. Having made millions of dollars consulting for and investing in Big Pharma, he is now responsible for regulating that industry and overseeing the research into the safety of its products.

Gottlieb is a career wheeler-dealer in the drug and health-care industries, where he has held seats on numerous corporate boards. GlaxoSmithKline paid him $87,153 as a consultant from January 2016 through February 2017, a period in which he received $3 million in consulting and retainer fees. At the time of his nomination, he was CEO of a biotech company named Cell Biotherapy, a partner at a large venture capital firm, New Enterprise Associates, which speculates on medical research start-ups, and managing director of banking and brokerage firm T.R. Wilson & Co.

On top of all that, Gottlieb found time to ideologically justify his policies as a Resident Fellow at a venerable right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. In his writings, he has criticized the agency he now runs for being too worried about drug safety, complaining that FDA regulators “prioritize safety over speed” and demand research studies that “take too long and cost too much.”

As FDA director, Gottlieb will be in a position to facilitate rushing highly profitable drugs to market. One way he aims to accomplish that is by cutting back critical Phase III drug safety testing, the clinical trials large enough to provide trustworthy results.

• Sam Clovis will not be the Department of Agriculture’s top scientist after all. After accepting the nomination, he withdrew to avoid further scrutiny of his involvement with Russian agents on behalf of Trump’s presidential campaign. But the fact that a right-wing talk radio host and Tea Party activist with no scientific credentials could even be considered as the chief scientist overseeing the country’s food production, food safety, and nutrition shows the disdain with which the Trump administration regards science. It also reveals its disregard for the law, because the position for which Clovis was nominated is legally required to be filled by someone chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics” (U.S. Congress, H.R.2419, §6971).

• Rebeckah Adcock heads a clandestine “deregulation team” at the Department of Agriculture. In February 2017, Trump ordered a number of federal agencies to set up such teams, but has resolutely refused to identify their members. Investigative reporters for The New York Times andProPublica, however, were able to confirm that, as suspected, many of them are “former employees of industry-financed organizations that oppose environmental regulations” (The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2017).

Adcock herself was found to be among the worst of the conflict-of-interest offenders. From 2010 to April 2017, Adcock had been a lobbyist for the pesticide industry’s main trade group, CropLife America, which represents agro-giants Syngenta and Monsanto, among others. By the end of April, she was a top official at the Department of Agriculture, and by May she was meeting behind closed doors with CropLife and Syngenta representatives. Their joint mission was to overturn science-based regulations previously imposed by the Department of Agriculture to protect farm families, farmworkers, and the public from the well-established dangers of pesticide use.

• Jim Bridenstine has been nominated to be the top official at one of the premier scientific agencies of the United States, the National Aerospace and Space Administration. Although best known for space exploration, NASA has also played a major role in climate change research. The agency’s budget request for 2018 projected $1.8 billion for its Earth Science program.

NASA launches the satellites that measure changes in the Earth’s climate and ocean temperatures. The data they gather are used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other climate researchers all over the world. Although an estimated one-third of the American economy relies on such data, Trump has called for deep cuts in funding for climate research while demagogically dismissing global warming as a “hoax.”

Unlike previous NASA directors, Bridenstine has no qualifications, educational or otherwise, as a scientist. As a member of the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus, however, he has sterling credentials as a climate change denier. Bridenstine is purely a political hatchet man selected to oversee the reduction of NASA’s research mission.

• Barry Lee Myers, a wealthy businessman, has been chosen to run the country’s number-one climate research agency, the aforementioned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In addition to satellite climate data, the NOAA also oversees fisheries, marine sanctuaries, and endangered species. Its directors have traditionally had strong science backgrounds.

Myers’ experience, however, has been corporate rather than scientific; he is CEO of AccuWeather, a for-profit weather forecasting company. That creates an obvious conflict of interest because the NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, which provides high-quality weather forecasts free of charge.

Myers has clashed with the federal agency in the past, complaining that it represents “unfair competition” to his company. He supported a bill sponsored by Senator Rick Santorum that would have barred the National Weather Service from offering a service “that is or could be provided by the private sector.”

The unionized National Weather Service employees have vigorously protested Myers’ appointment. A union rep charged Myers with wanting “to turn the Weather Service into a taxpayer-funded corporate subsidy of AccuWeather.”

Myers, like many of Trump’s choices, will oversee a shrinking agency. The White House’s projected national budget for 2018 slashes NOAA’s funding by 17%, with particular emphasis on reducing climate and ocean research.

• Betsy DeVos, a libertarian opponent of public schools, was the Trump administration’s ideal candidate for Secretary of Education. Her hostility to public education aligned perfectly with Trump’s belittling of what he demagogically calls “failing government schools.” In his book “Great Again, How To Fix Our Crippled America,” he wrote: “A lot of people believe the department of education should just be eliminated. Get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”

Although holding no qualifications in the field of education, DeVos is eminently qualified to fulfill Trump’s expectations. Being in charge of the Department of Education gives her, among other things, a bully pulpit from which to further demoralize American science education.

For at least the past two decades, DeVos has campaigned for charter schools as alternatives to public schools, and for publicly funded voucher schemes to fund private schools. Success in those endeavors would result in federal taxpayer dollars supporting the anti-Darwinist and climate-change-denial curricula of religious academies.

The Secretary of Education and her family have furthered that agenda by donating millions of dollars to organizations like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which promote creationism and intelligent design. The Family Research Council, it should be noted, has been designated as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

DeVos and her husband funnel their philanthropy through their personal tax shelter, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, which gave Focus on the Family $275,000 from 1999 to 2001. From 2001 to 2013 her parents’ Elsa and Edgar Prince Foundation (of which Betsy was a vice president) gave Focus on the Family $5.2 million and the Family Research Council $6.2 million. Since the 1970s, the DeVos clan has donated at least $200 million to extreme right-wing think tanks (like the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty) and political action groups (like the Foundation for Traditional Values) that seek to destroy public education and undermine the separation of church and state.

Science education in the United States was not in admirable shape before Trump took office. In 2015 rankings by country of student performance in mathematics and science, the United States placed 40th in math and 25th in science on the list of 72 countries. (Source: OECD.) With Betsy DeVos at the helm of the federal agency responsible for education policy, the future of American scientific education appears bleak indeed.

The preceding rogue’s gallery depicts a cast of characters in positions of authority devoted to undermining the integrity of American science. Their purpose is Robin Hood’s in reverse—to transfer the vast wealth of the American economy from the households of the many to the coffers of the few. Already the greatest heist in human history—a robbery of trillions upon trillions of dollars—its perpetrators are not yet satisfied. And they are still at large.