3044. A War on Wildlife

By Dominic Jermey, The Guardian, October 4, 2018

Around 100 million sharks are killed a year, mostly for their fins.
Above shark fins on the rooftop to keep them out of sight. 

Civil war is devastating. Until the Taliban booted me out of Afghanistan in 1998 – I was the last western diplomat to go – I had a front-row seat on the impact that sustained war has on a people and an economy. I returned to work in Afghanistan twice in the years after that expulsion, and by the time I left Kabul last year, after a stretch as the British ambassador to Afghanistan, I had seen change for the better.

Coming to the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), I have a front-row seat on a different kind of war: the war on wildlife. The illegal wildlife trade has catastrophic impacts on people and animals. The annihilation of wildlife by organised criminal gangs is violent, bloody, corrupt and insidious. It robs communities of their resources, their independence, their opportunities and their dignity. It strips their homes of beauty and diversity. It may even cost some people their lives. And we are all losers as the creatures with which we share this planet are pillaged to extinction.

While war and terrorist atrocities make daily headlines, the horrors being waged on wildlife slide under the radar: 100 million sharks killed every year, mostly for their fins; 20,000 African elephants slaughtered annually for their ivory; more than 1,000 rhinos poached every year from South Africa alone. And there has been a huge decline in the size of wildlife populations since 1970. In human terms, that’s like losing the entire population of Asia from the world. Wildlife crime is a key factor in those losses, sharing blame with overpopulation, deforestation and agriculture, to name but a few.

Perhaps the illegal wildlife trade lacks the visceral fear factor of novichok or terrorism to wake the world up to the harm being perpetrated. But while we dither, more species are being wiped out – an elephant is killed for its tusks every 25 minutes. The growth of the illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest causes of extinction. It is driven by well-armed and resourced criminal gangs operating on an industrial scale.

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Next week the government is convening an international conference on the illegal wildlife trade in London. It is a critical opportunity to shine another spotlight on the atrocity of wildlife crime and to ensure the international community works together on collective solutions.

What we don’t need is to negotiate more treaties or agreements. We have already got the mechanisms we need to halt the trade. We need political will and action to implement the laws that are already in place and to address demand. China’s closure of its domestic ivory market is welcome, but only a first step. We also need to support the people on the frontline – the rangers who risk their lives to protect wildlife, and the communities reliant on wildlife to survive. This is a war that, together, we can win.

3043. We Need to Talk About Technology: A Response to Leigh Phillips Techno-Fix "Solutions"

By Simon Pirani, The Ecologist, October 5, 2018

Low-Energy Housing

Housing for working people is becoming as central an issue for labour and social movements in the twenty first century as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth. And not just decent housing, but housing that is comfortable, aesthetically pleasing – and, crucially, low energy, zero energy or even energy positive. 

Here is a wonderful opportunity for our movement to get a grip on technology. We can and should find ways to bring the experience of architects and energy conservation engineers into discussions about housing among community activists and building workers.

A good example of how not to do this is the call for mass installation of air conditioners, made by Leigh Phillips in his article, In Defense of Air Conditioning published by Jacobin. 

Improved design

The problem that Phillips purports to address – the cruel effect of heat on millions of urban residents, during summers such as 2018’s – is real enough.

The need to provide ourselves with homes that shelter us from extreme heat as well as colder weather – something ruling classes down the ages have never done for working people – is indisputable. 

But Phillips’s techno-fix – mass AC installation, supported by a grand expansion of nuclear and hydro power – is not the answer. He sounds like someone proposing the state-funded distribution of armour-plated BMWs to parents demanding safe cycle routes to school for their children.

Better temperature control can and should be achieved not in the first place by AC, but mainly by better building design, better insulation and better urban planning, in the context of better ways of living generally.

This ABC of AC is widely understood by three groups of people, ignored in Phillips’s article, who spend time thinking about our homes: community groups organising on housing issues; building workers and architects; and energy conservation researchers. 

Radical municipalism

Community groups in London, where I live, are battling against right-wing Labour councils that neglect social housing for working people and strike deals with profiteering property developers.

A grass roots alliance last year defeated such a deal in Haringey and reprioritised social housing: the potential for 'radical municipalism', to renew cities for their people in ecologically sustainable ways, was spelled out by Gordon Peters, one of the group’s organisers. 

Owen Hatherley, a socialist writer on architecture, in a recent call for the Labour Party to get its act together on housing, argued that Labour “ought to look at scaling up the small-scale experiments made in low-energy and zero-carbon construction” by community groups in Leeds and Bristol. 

This potential for low-energy and zero-carbon building seems to have passed Phillips by.

Low-energy housing

Building workers and architects, by contrast, are well aware of these potentialities.

In the UK labour movement, the example of City Building in Glasgow, a union-linked co-operative that builds low-energy housing stock, is often mentioned. It uses site-appropriate combinations of solar thermal, photovoltaic, combined heat and power, ground and air source heat pumps and optimisation technologies. 

Architects understand perfectly that while AC may sometimes help to cool buildings, it is usually the wrong answer.

When The Economist, that bible of neoliberalism, last month gave qualified support to expanding AC, Richard Lorch of Building Research & Information responded, in a letter to the magazine, that “cities often exacerbate high temperatures” by the heat-island effect; that the micro-climate of streets had to be taken into account; that “it is far better to create cities and buildings that can provide thermal comfort with little energy demand”; and that “the capabilities and technologies exist to provide an alternative to AC”. 

Passive techniques 

Energy conservation researchers have been writing about those capabilities for at least 40 years.

Amory Lovins, in his classic 1977 pamphlet Soft Energy Paths, estimated – relying partly on analysis by the American Institute of Architects – that design improvements could save 50 percent or more of energy use in offices and 80 percent in some new houses.

The passage of time, and the ballooning of the property development and construction industries, has only amplified this point. 

Researchers have repeatedly argued that good insulation, high-reflective materials, shading, windows with low solar heat gain, and “passive” techniques such as underground earth pipe cooling can be combined, in most conditions, to give as good temperature control as energy-intensive heating and cooling systems.

Engineers have proposed that, where AC is essential, oversize systems be avoided and solar power be used.

A research group at Cambridge University synthesised years of advances in building and materials use and reached similar conclusions. 'Passivhaus' techniques could reduce energy consumption in buildings, mostly for heating and cooling, by 83 percent, they showed. 

Electricity networks

The Global Energy Assessment (2012) summarised dozens of academic publications on building design, and concluded that they can achieve reductions in gross energy requirements of upwards of 75 percent in new buildings, and upwards of 50 percent in existing buildings.

It is not that that labour and social movements might never want AC fitted anywhere. But it is a myopic and outdated place to start.

Phillips's approach to electricity generation is little better. He acknowledges that AC is very energy-intensive, but claims that nuclear and hydro – and, as he specifies in another article, with a co-author, “a vast build-out of dependable base-load electricity” from those sources – can easily provide the necessary non-fossil energy.

He seems unaware of, or uninterested in, the last 30-plus years of changes in electricity networks, towards decentralised renewable generation and better-integrated distribution.

The trend towards ever-bigger, more centralised, generation started to reverse in the 1980s, with combined-cycle gas turbines (which can easily be used in power stations smaller than earlier coal- or gas-fired ones), and cogeneration (i.e. plants that produce electricity and heat).

Decentralised generation 

Since the turn of the century, a much greater degree of decentralisation in generation, and better ways of integrating intermittent renewable sources (i.e. wind that doesn’t always blow and sun that doesn’t always shine), have become possible, thanks to networked computing. 

Phillips objects to what he calls “a return to the small and local”, and portrays it as an approach by “greens”, who want to replace multinationals with small businesses.

This is a misrepresentation of where electricity technology is at. The discussion among electrical engineers has, for several years now, focused on further step-changes in computing (so called “smart grids”), that pave the way for systems dominated by renewables and help deal with the always knotty problem of storing electrical energy. For a summary, see Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley; for details see e.g. the multiple volumes edited by Fereidoon Sioshansi.

There is potential both in decentralised generation and in more integrated – and in that sense, centralised – networks. The main obstruction to this potential is the corporations that control the systems.

Why, then, should socialists focus on nuclear power - almost always, and everywhere, linked to militarism - and centralised hydro - which has time and time again been fought against by people in the global south, and indigenous people in Canada, for example, whose communities have been threatened, or wrecked, by it?

Fighting back 

As many people who think about electricity – from social democratic enthusiasts for energy cooperatives, to engineers working on off-grid systems in the global south – are well aware, the danger is not decentralised generation technologies, or integrated (centralised) networks, but that the multinationals will find ways of enclosing it and commodifying these.

How to fight back against them? That is the discussion that matters. 

Phillips’s arguments on AC are underpinned by four ideological fixations about technology that can only obstruct the development of socialist thinking. 

First, Phillips identifies an element of good living – being able to keep cool in the summer – with a consumer product, AC. A convincing riposte to Phillips, by Aaron Vansintjan in The Ecologist, deals with this point.

Vansintjan wrote: “Let’s not confuse ‘the right to be cool’ with the right to a consumer good [...] There are plenty of cool alternatives, involving rethinking urban design and how we use public space.” The way towards these alternatives, Vansintjan argued, is “a political movement that links people’s needs to their capacity to have more control over their own lives”.

Capitalist control 

Second, Phillips falsely paints each and every expression of doubt about the efficacy of AC as part of a pro-austerity, anti-worker environmentalism. People who advocate passive cooling systems, or suggest that some rich world citizens could turn the AC down a little, are lumped together with Pope Francis, who cited AC as a “harmful habit of consumption”.

Having a go at the Pope is an easy crowd-pleaser in a socialist publication. And of course there are strands of environmentalism that focus on moralistic appeals to reduce individual consumption, rather than the technological, social and economic systems through which fossil fuels are consumed.

But the discussions among community housing activists, building workers, architects and energy researchers are streets ahead of this, i.e. they almost always assume that both improving living standards, and harmonising the relationship between human society and nature, are desirable aims.

One essential contribution socialists could make to this discussion is to underline that, as long as technologies are controlled by capital, they will primarily be directed neither at making people’s lives better, nor at overcoming the rupture between human society and the natural world, of which global warming caused by fossil fuel use is a key element.

The potential of progressive trends in urban planning and building design, or decentralised renewables-based electricity networks, can never be fully realised, or even understood, as long as these processes are controlled by the now-dominant centres of wealth and power.

Superior alternatives 

Third, rather than questioning technologies that have been shaped by urban development under capitalism, and thinking about why alternatives have been squashed or sidelined, Phillips appears to see technologies as socially neutral.

He claimed that AC is an “essential, life-saving part of public health” – as though it is the only way to keep cool (it isn’t), and as though its absence is the main reason that people die in heat waves (the research Phillips himself cites shows that AC is a minor issue among many, including the effects of poverty and ill health).

AC, like other technologies, has been shaped by the capitalist social relations in which it emerged. It took off in the USA from the 1920s, and was diffused across the rich world in the post-war boom, not only because it was a way of keeping people cool, but thanks to the profiteering of corporations who produced it. I wrote about this in History Today recently.

Just as car manufacturers lobbied against rail networks and public transport, so AC makers lost no opportunity to favour their product over less energy-intensive alternatives.

We can’t know what a socially just society would have done with AC, but we know that the architects’ superior alternatives have for decades been pushed aside by property and construction companies.

Imaginative optimism 

Fourth, Phillips is ideologically committed (a) to action through the state, rather than by society independently of the state, and (b) to economic expansion as a prerequisite of “progress”. He advocated these principles in his book Austerity Ecology (2015). 

In the case of AC, this means action through the currently dominant capitalist state. Phillips wrote: “New buildings must come with AC as part of any ‘Green New Deal’”. 

His declaration that “we [who?] are capable right now” of producing more electricity is telling. The really urgent thing, in fighting for a socially just society, is not to produce more electricity, but to take electricity out of the corporations’ hands, and transform the way it is distributed and used.

I am very optimistic that, by using it rationally, society as a whole could manage with less, not more. But this will only become clear as and when society takes hold of technological systems.

Phillips said: “Nothing’s too good for the working class”. Too right. So leave your dogmatically contrived techno-fixes at home!

Building on what community groups, building workers, architects and energy researchers have done, give us a serious discussion about technology. Then we can aim at a good life, in cities so wonderful we can only begin to imagine them, built and supplied in ways that don’t deepen the horrible rupture between humanity and the natural world.  

3042. Beyond the Pale: The Earliest Agrarian States and “their Barbarians”

By James C. Scott, SOAS University of London, May 31, 2016

3041. Cuban President Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel Supports Same-Sex Marriage

By John Walsh, Business Insider, September 17, 2018

Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel became the country's first leader to publicly express support same-sex marriage.

Diaz-Canel, who replaced Raul Castro in April, said that he is in favor of recognizing  "marriage between people, without limitation" in order to eliminate "all types of discrimination in society."

"We've been going through a massive thought evolution and many taboos have been broken," Diaz-Canel said.

Cuban citizens will vote on the issue in a national referendum in February 2019.

Cuba currently operates under its 1976 national charter, which defines marriage as a "voluntary union of a man and a woman." In the proposed constitution, which was approved by the Cuban parliament in June, new language was added to define marriage as a union between "two people."

The shift in the Cuban leadership's attitude toward same-sex marriage is largely attributed to the efforts of Mariela Castro, the daughter of former Cuban president Raul Castro.

As the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, the younger Castro received international support for condemning homophobic attacks in Cuba and advocating for same-sex marriage.

3040. Clean Meat Anyone?

By Nathaniel Popper, The New York Times, September 30, 2018 

Clean meat is laboratory grown meat from stem cells of animals

BERKELEY, Calif. — Rabbi Gavriel Price has thousands of years of Jewish religious law to draw on when he is on the job, determining whether a new food item can get a kosher certification from his organization, the Orthodox Union.

But all the rules about meat and milk, and the prohibitions on eating pork and sciatic nerves, are of limited use for Rabbi Price’s latest assignment.

The rabbi is in charge of figuring out how the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifying organization in the world, should deal with what is known as clean meat — meat that is grown in laboratories from animal cells. This brings him in touch with a possibility for Jewish cuisine that had previously seemed impossible: kosher bacon.

Clean meat is still not available in stores, but start-ups working on it say it could be by next year. When it is, they want a kosher stamp on their product, which indicates it adheres to quality and preparation standards and follows a set of biblical laws. That brought Rabbi Price, a tall, lanky father of eight, to Berkeley recently, to meet with companies in the business.

Clean meat, also known by names like cell-based agriculture, begins with cells taken from an animal, often stem cells that are primed to grow. Once these cells are isolated, they are put into a solution that mimics blood and encourages the cells to replicate.

This process is very new. The first hamburger produced in a lab was served with great fanfare in 2013 and cost $325,000. But the number of companies competing to create the first commercially available product is growing rapidly.

Rabbi Price’s investigation touches on questions that anyone might have when confronted with clean meat. What exactly is it? And should we want to eat it someday?

His first stop was a lab operated by Mission Barns, a start-up with six employees and millions of dollars in funding. It is growing duck, chicken and pig meat in clear flasks, lined up inside temperature-controlled incubators.

He looked through a microscope at a dish of long, pointy duck cells and peppered the scientists with basic questions about where the cells had come from, and what was in the red liquid that was helping the cells to replicate and grow.

“I’d like to spend more time, because I think it’s an important process to understand in a deep way, and there’s no precedent for it really,” Rabbi Price said after the tour.

The issue he is addressing is much more complicated than the kosher designation of plant-based meat substitutes already available in grocery stores.

Perhaps the best-known company of its kind, Impossible Foods, has created a burger that is made from all-vegetarian ingredients but tastes more like meat thanks to a chemical process involving yeast and soy. Like most vegetarian foods, these burgers have received a kosher stamp.

Mission Barns, the start-up in Berkeley, is focused on creating animal fat, where much of the distinctive flavor of meat resides. It recently mixed the fat with other ingredients to create duck sausages that it served to investors and employees. Creating more structured meat products, like a duck breast or a steak, is expected to take much longer.

Environmentalists and animal activists are proponents of the technology because it could produce the flavor of hamburgers and sausages without the greenhouse gases and animal suffering of the factory farming system.

Saam Shahrokhi, left and Mr. Maciag in the Mission Barns lab in Berkeley, Calif. Mission Barns is focused on creating animal fat, where much of the distinctive flavor of meat resides.

“I’m extremely excited about it,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, who leads the kosher certifying division of the Orthodox Union. “The impact for us will be very profound, in terms of the economics of kosher meat.”

There are polls that show that many Americans are turned off by the prospect of lab-grown meat. And the technology has already generated questions far beyond the Jewish community.

The United States Cattlemen’s Association requested this year that American authorities allow the meat label only on products that come from slaughtered animals. While large meat companies have pushed back against the cattle ranchers, in part because they are developing their own clean meat products, it is unclear if regulators will handle lab-grown meat with the same rules they use for traditional meat.

Jewish authorities have been studying this because several synthetic meat start-ups are based in Israel.

A number of Israeli rabbis told one start-up, SuperMeat, that previous rulings in religious law might allow clean meat to be categorized as pareve, a religious label that is applied to things that are kosher but not derived from animals.

A pareve label would mean that observant Jews could eat it with dairy products, like cheese, which cannot be eaten with traditional meat. In other words, a kosher cheeseburger might be possible.

Rabbi Genack, Rabbi Price’s boss at the Orthodox Union, initially thought clean meat could be pareve, based on his belief that clean meat was created from an animal’s genetic code. But because the process involves an animal cell, replicating itself millions of times, he now believes the product should be thought of as meat.

When Rabbi Price visited the Mission Barns labs, he asked questions specific to kosher certification. He wanted to be sure, for instance, that the pork cells growing in one incubator never come into contact with the duck cells in the incubator next to it, and that the centrifuge where the meat cells are processed is cleaned thoroughly between processing.

He also wanted to know if the cells in the flasks changed as they replicated, to be sure that they do not morph into something that no longer resembles the original animal cells.

“The identity of a given cell, and ensuring that its identity is preserved and verifiable, would be crucial to our being able to certify a product,” the rabbi said.

The day after his visit to Mission Barns, Rabbi Price attended a conference held by the Good Food Institute, an organization that is encouraging the move away from animal meat.

He dived into long conversations with people working for the food start-ups. They discussed topics as diverse as the kosher status of gelatin, the religious rulings of venerated medieval rabbis and the ingredients of the solution that encourages lab-grown meat to grow.

“Does that cell need to consume all kosher ingredients for it to be kosher?” the rabbi was asked by Aryé Elfenbein, the founder of Wild Type, a start-up in San Francisco that is focused on lab-grown salmon.

The rabbi explained that just as kosher cows can eat non-kosher insects, he is working from the assumption that the growth solution will not have to be certified as kosher as long as it is cleaned from the surface of the final cells.

Flasks of cell culture media at the Mission Barns lab. When Rabbi Price visited the lab, he wanted to know if the cells in the flasks changed as they replicated, to be sure that they don’t morph into something that no longer resembles the original animal cells.

Many of the questions came back to the original cells that go into the solution. The rabbi said those cells would have to be kosher, from an animal that was properly slaughtered and not scraped off a live animal. (There is a Jewish law against eating live animals.)

This was not well received by some of the clean meat companies, which want to produce something that does not involve killing any animals.

The liveliest conversation grew out of research that is looking into whether clean meat might be derived from cells in animal saliva or hair.

The rabbi said those substances are not meat, so they might be used to produce clean meat that would not be categorized as meat by Jewish law.

Eitan Fischer, the chief executive of Mission Barns, said he was hopeful that through some creative chemistry, his company could grow pork that would get a kosher designation.

3039. Baobab Trees in Senegal Are Threatened by Climate Change, Urbanization, and Human Population Growth

By Dionne Searcey, The New York Times, September 30, 2018

Baobab trees can live to 2,000 years.

DAKAR, Senegal — Wide, awkward baobab trees blend into the cityscape of Dakar, the busy capital of Senegal, almost without notice.

Drivers wash a fleet of taxis parked beneath one giant tree near a freeway on ramp. Rusting cars with open hoods are parked in a mechanic’s shop under the shade of another. A leathery trunk is a community billboard, with ads nailed to it for a plumber and an apartment for rent.

Aliou Ndour stood on a crowded corner, pulled out his phone and scrolled past the pictures of friends and family to another precious photo: the baobab in his home village.

Fat baobabs, some more than half a millennium old, have endured across Senegal, passed over for lumber largely because their wood is too brittle and spongy for use in furniture. Baobab leaves are mixed with couscous and eaten, the trees’ bark stripped to make rope, their fruit and seeds used for drinks and oils.

“This,” said Adama Dieme, craning his neck to look up at the spread of branches of the baobab on his block, “is the pride of the neighborhood.”

But baobabs, like many of the region’s trees, are in jeopardy, threatened by the same forces upending numerous facets of society — climate change, urbanization and population growth.

West Africa has lost much of the natural resources once tied so closely to its cultural identity. Poaching has stolen most of its wildlife; lions, giraffes and desert elephants are sorely endangered.

Huge swaths of forest are being razed to clear space for palm oil and cocoa plantations. Mangroves are being killed off by pollution. Even wispy acacias are hacked away for use in cooking fires to feed growing families.

One of the largest baobab trees in Senegal is in the Fatick region, southwest of the capital.

In recent years, rainy season has started later than usual. But a welcome shower arrived last month near the coastal community of Joal, Senegal.

A recent study said climate change might be blamed for the deaths of some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobabs. In Senegal, local researchers estimate the nation has lost half its baobabs in the past 50 years to drought and development.

One of the biggest developments in the country is outside Dakar, where Senegal’s president is building an entirely new city, in the middle of a baobab forest. Officials have pledged to replant any trees they raze.

On the far edges of the development, construction workers were building new homes. The corpse of one baobab lay on the ground, a musty smell lingering at its exposed hollow interior. The smooth marks of an ax scarred its trunk.

Other charred carcasses of baobabs lay nearby. A worker said those had been torched with gasoline.

“Whenever you see a baobab that has fallen down, you’re sad,” said Gorgui Kebbe, the worker. “It’s a symbol of our country. But having a house to live in takes priority.”

In Senegal an image of a baobab is on the presidential seal. Baobabs are painted on the sides of buildings and on billboards. A fancy seaside hotel is named after them. So is a famous wrestler.

One baobab, which locals say is 850 years old with a 100-foot-circumference trunk, is a tourist attraction. You can sleep in a baobab tree house hotel or ride a zip-line course from baobab to baobab.

Senegal has few rivers and no mountains so baobabs sprout from the scrubby landscape as majestic way points. Throughout history, entire communities were constructed around these trees.

Baobabs serve as town halls — gathering places where municipal decisions are made, babies named and scores settled. Their bulging, python-like roots serve as La-Z-Boys for the tired. Their branches offer refuge for the overheated.

The trunks of some trees are covered in trinkets — a rooster’s claws, a bracelet, a plastic flip-flop, all for good luck. Pilgrims come to a stubby baobab on Île de Madeleine, a small island off Dakar, to insert money into the folds of its trunk or nail a message there, as a prayer of last resort.

The rainy season here has been starting later in recent years, and the downpours are fewer. As drought becomes a new way of life, the baobab in many communities is where people gather to pray for rain.

In Diock, a village about three hours outside the capital, the rainy season should be in full swing by now, but by early August it had rained only four times. The millet plants in the surrounding fields were only ankle high.

“We watch on television what is going on in Europe and in the world,” said Mamadou Diop, the village chief. “We know what’s coming.”

To fight climate change, residents are using fewer gas-gulping machines and not cutting down smaller trees for firewood.

But harvests have been so poor that many of the village’s 600 residents have abandoned farming and moved to the city, where they find work as teachers or soldiers.

“We’re trying to reduce greenhouse gases,” Mr. Diop said, “but it’s as if we are powerless.”

In towns and villages that dot the countryside, each community has its own tradition entwined with its local baobab.

In Diock, a new bride and groom circle the baobab seven times after they are married. On Fadiouth, an island on the southwest coast made entirely of seashells, funeral processions pause at the base of the village baobab, before carrying on to a Catholic shrine and the cemetery.

Seydou Kane, who works in Senegal’s Ministry of Culture, was circumcised under a baobab in the city of Thiès when he was about 4. Grown-ups had told him the trees were filled with spirits who grew angry if you touched the trunk. After the ceremony, he was told to nick the trunk of the tree with a knife. He gathered his courage and ran toward the baobab, marking it with his blade.

“You’re a man now,” he recalled the adults telling him. “You don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

He passed by the tree not long ago and it was dead.

An ancient baobab on Île de Madeleine, off the coast of Dakar, is both tourist and spiritual attraction. Some people leave trinkets and money in the folds of its trunk and offer a prayer.

Baobab leaves have been a regular part of the diet of Selbe Dione and her sister, who one afternoon used a long wooden pole with a hook at the end to pluck leaves from a baobab in the middle of a neighbor’s field in the Fatick region. The tree was tilted, as though it was bending to help them.

“Everything from the baobab is beautiful,” Ms. Dione said, looking at the green oval-shaped fruit and large white dangling blossoms, “from its leaves to its roots.”

The tissue inside some of Senegal’s oldest baobabs has died, leaving giant, cavelike holes. The hollow of one baobab in the coastal city of Nianing is big enough for a dozen people to stand in comfortably.

Once these hollows were mausoleums for griots, or storytellers, who were buried inside, standing up.

These men were considered walking libraries, the power of their words so strong their energy should radiate throughout the baobab for eternity. The practice was outlawed in the 1960s but locals still refer to the trees that were once tombs as sacred baobabs.

Many of the trees mark cemeteries. In Kaolack, 49 kings of the Guelewar Dynasty are buried under a baobab.

On a recent morning Aminita Ba, 72, stood tending goats in the middle of a wide field in rural Samba Dia that was punctuated by a single, towering baobab.

When Ms. Ba arrived on the farm 50 years ago, she built her small house near the tree, knowing it would be a guidepost for visitors.

“I’m very proud of this baobab,” she said. “From far away you can see this big tree and next to this big tree is a home, and it’s my home.”

3038. Not Learning From the New Communist Movement

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, October 1, 2018

Max Elbaum, author of “Revolution in the Air”

There’s an interview with Max Elbaum on Jacobin today titled “Learning from the New Communist Movement” that is mostly unobjectionable. As I pointed out in a review of Max’s “Revolution in the Air” in 2002, “I strongly recommend this recently published Verso book to anybody trying to make sense of the state of the left today. While focused on the "New Communist Movement" of the 70s and 80s (that I prefer to call Maoist), the lessons Elbaum draws are applicable to all vanguard party-building projects including those of the Trotskyist movement that I participated in.”

Clearly, there is an affinity between Jacobin/DSA and the Maoist movement that Elbaum belonged to and chronicled in this book. With both the DSA and the “New Communist Movement” of yore recycling the politics of the Popular Front, you might even wonder why it took so long for them to have a friendly chat. Max was a leader of the Line of March (LOM) in the 1970s, a Maoist group founded by Irwin Silber, the film critic of the now-defunct American radical newsweekly The Guardian.

The LOM had a most peculiar political agenda. They wanted to either convince the CPUSA to return to its glorious past or carry out that task themselves. Whatever complaints they had about the CPUSA, being embedded in the Democratic Party was not one of them.

In the early 80s, I was active in the New York chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES_ that was mostly made up of political independents like me but had some LOM and Communist Workers Party (CWP) playing an important role as well. The is best known for its ultraleft strategy in North Carolina that played into the hands of the KKK. As two important trends in the New Communist Movement, they both were very active in Democratic Party campaigns involving Black progressives who were the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the day: Harold Washington, who would be elected mayor of Chicago, and Jesse Jackson.

In 1984, CISPES passed a motion that its members would work closely with Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Still allergic to anything connected to the Democratic Party, I began to wind my CISPES activism down. Micah Uetricht, the Jacobin assistant editor who conducted the interview with Elbaum, uses his words to stigmatize people like me: “Planting the banners and waiting in a left-wing stronghold for people to come to us will not cut it.” The full exchange appears below:

Micah Uetricht: In the book, you quote Vladimir Lenin: “Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions.”  Then you write that revolutionaries must not “accept marginal status as a permanent fact of life — much less a mindset that glorifies marginality as a sign of true revolutionary faith. … Planting the banners and waiting in a left-wing stronghold for people to come to us will not cut it.”

When I read that, I think of the critiques of mass campaigns like Medicare for All or for politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which have shown that they can bring the idea of socialism to mass numbers of people who have never heard this term before. Some of those critiques are valid, like the worry that engaging too heavily in electoral politics will water down DSA’s radical politics to the point that the organization ceases to advance a bold socialist vision. But most of them seem more rooted in people clinging to that “pure” marginality — at a moment when socialism has an opportunity to become a truly mass movement. The opportunity to reach the “millions” that Lenin references is here, but orienting a leftist organization in that direction involves ditching some of the habits of glorifying marginality.

Max Elbaum: I think the Bernie campaign, the insurgent campaigns, the way people are learning to speak to large numbers who are envisioning moving the country as a whole — all of that is extremely positive. Politics is a matter of looking at the balance of forces and where the masses are at and intervening in a way that moves the needle. We have to speak to the majority and build a majoritarian movement.

We’re obviously a long way from a majority of the United States not just supporting fundamental change and an alternative to capitalism but taking steps and risks to make that happen. That’s not going to come about by offering only a maximalist program and trying to move in one leap from where we are now to that maximalist program.

It’s certainly legitimate and necessary to realize there’s uneven development in society — you’re going to have an advanced guard, what Lenin called the “conscious element.” That’s the point of having a socialist organization where people are united on the long-range goal. But it works in different layers. It has its immediate base and its periphery, and it works in coalition with outside forces.

So, I think that the purist tendencies, the ones that are critical of anything that is less than their total vision of what a revolutionary socialist program would be, are self-defeating. Because you never break out of the margins.

The idea that you just plant the flag and everyone will come to you if you have the correct line has never worked. That’s not how politics works. Politics is addition — you need to get more people on your team.

The Left has been marginal for a long time in the United States. For some people, that’s their comfort zone. When you mix it up in broad mass politics, there’s always a danger that you compromise some key principle and fall down a slippery slope. Those are real dangers. But every successful movement for radical reform or revolution has to engage in those broad mass politics. There’s no other way to build a majoritarian movement from where we are now to a majoritarian movement for socialism.

With all due respect to Max and Micah, it appears that the words “Politics begin where the masses are” do not appear in the Marxist Internet Archives. It seems to have about the same provenance as “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” None. In fact, the words attributed to Lenin could justify practically anything, including urging a vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, as Max did.

The exchange between the hardened social democrat (or democratic socialist, whatever) and the hardened Eurocommunist is notable for leaving the words “Democratic Party” out. Instead, it frames the differences between “glorifying marginality” by “purist tendencies” and those who are involved with “electoral politics” like the DSA, the Communist Party and the Committees of Correspondence. You might even say that articles written for the People’s World and Jacobin in support of working to elect Democrats are virtually indistinguishable except for the fact that Jacobin articles tend to use the language of the graduate school rather than the AFL-CIO media bureau.

If Jacobin had decided to ask tough questions rather than the kind that Charlie Rose would feed to Henry Kissinger or Bill Gates, they would have brought up Jesse Jackson’s campaigns. For all practical purposes, the Rainbow Coalition was the Sandernista movement of its day with volunteers being drawn from various Maoist sects rather than the social democracy, which was pretty marginal at the time.

Just as Jacobin authors kid themselves into believing that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez et al might eventually break with the Democrats as Lincoln did with the Whigs, you heard the same thing in 1984 and 1988. Most leftists thought there was a realistic possibility that the Rainbow Coalition could turn into a new third party when Jackson had as much of an intention of leading such a break as Sanders does today. You can understand how this would be even more unlikely this would be for Sanders since he enjoys the perks of being an elected Senator.

Thirty years ago, Joanna Misnik wrote a pamphlet for Solidarity titled “The Rainbow and the Democratic Party— New Politics or Old?: A Socialist Perspective” that I highly recommend. It is written from the perspective of Lenin’s electoral strategy that has nothing in common with the exchange between Uetricht and Elbaum above. Instead of quoting non-existent words, they might have tried to grapple with Lenin’s polemics against the Mensheviks who advocating blocs with the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), the Democratic Party of Czarist Russia.

Here is Misnik on the “Inside-Outside” strategy defended by the DSA:

The Rainbow includes a number of socialist and left organizations that hope the Coalition can ultimately precipitate a break from the Democrats in favor of a new anticapitalist political party. Groups such as the National Committee for Independent Political Action (NCIPA) typify the "inside-outside" strategy of the not-really Democrats in the Rainbow. They hold the position that the way to break the Democratic Party apart is to join it. They are urging people to register and vote Democrat!

"Inside-out" Rainbow activists are concerned about the decline of the movements for change during the past decade. They mistakenly identified the shift to the right of establishment politics as a rightward drift in the population at large. Sectors of the movement, buying into the idea that Reagan had a mandate, became fearful and hesitant. This timidity was fed by the collapse of the Black movement into the Democratic Party and the failure of the labor movement to mount a defense against concessions, plant closings, unemployment and the general effects of the recessionary economy.

The difficult political climate led to conclusions of the type offered by Rainbow leader Sheila Collins in her recently published The Rain­bow Challenge: the Jackson Campaign and the Future of U. S. Politics. Collins explains:

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked many left activists into discovering the dialectical relationship between social movements and electoral institutions…. Electoral politics was no longer seen as a substitute for movement-building, but as a necessary complement. Although it was difficult to do both simultaneously, there was a growing realization that the two forms of political activity were dialectically related. (105-108)

This new "dialectic" for the ’80s is a high-toned way of sounding a retreat from what history has already taught. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support the idea that the Democratic Party, in or out of power, offers fundamental concessions to the locked-out when they loyally lock-in their votes in massive numbers. All successes in shifting the social relation of forces—from the rise of the CIO to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war victories—have been the direct results of unruly mass movements playing outside the acceptable channels of U.S. two-party politics.

In the case of both labor in the 1930s and the social movements of the 1960s, it was precisely at the point when major sectors of these movements decided it was time to move "from protest to politics" and act as a pressure group within and around the Democratic Party than reforms began to slack off and eventually disappear. In fact, the brevity of these two periods of major change is due to this very co-optation. Unable to defeat capitalist control of the party from the inside and claim it as their own, the reformers were themselves beaten and became the reformed.

Left Rainbow advocates may argue that all this does not apply. After all, they have an organization separate and apart from the Democratic Party that enables them to resist absorption while they use the "tactic" of Jackson’s candidacy to build a new, integral progressive force. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The Rainbow has only one tactic, one focus that glues all its components together: Jackson’s race for the Democratic Party nomination. No other goals were established at the Raleigh convention. By definition, this subsumes the Rainbow into the Democratic Party and hands it over to those who want it to be nothing more than an army of foot soldiers for the Jackson Campaign Committee.

This problem is not something only those outside the Rainbow can perceive. The powerful New Jersey delegation to the Rainbow Con­vention led a well-received fight to democratize the notoriously top-down Rainbow structure. They were motivated by the fear that the Rainbow will be dictated to by official campaign structures, stunting its growth and threatening its ability to exist beyond `88. Some structural changes were made, such as adding state chairs to the all-powerful Board of Directors and halving the minimum number of members required to receive a local charter.

However, the Rainbow chartering system still requires a minimum membership in a third of a state’s congressional districts. Using the districts as its basic unit shapes the vote-getting operation. It is a foreign and unwieldy organizational structure for activists accustomed to city-wide mobilizing.