Views in brief

A long, slow awakening

IN RESPONSE to "Signed up for Changing the World 101": "It's been a long, long time coming / But I know, a change gonna come, oh yes it will." --Sam Cooke

In 1968, at the zenith of those famous years of upsurge, the cities were burning, the campuses were exploding with discontent and revolution seemed to be in the air. Yet even then, even with millions of young people ready to take on the task of changing the world, there was a deep, underlying optimism about the future.

It was a rock-solid certainty, part of the DNA of my generation, the post-Second World War baby boom generation, that the material conditions of our lives were destined to be better than that of our parents. That despite racism and wars, science and technology would somehow deliver the goods. That decent jobs and prosperity were part of our birthright.

This unquestioned confidence wasn't without a material basis. Marxist economist Richard Wolff points out the astounding fact that at the end of each decade from the 1820s through the 1960s--16 straight decades!--the average take home pay (of those with jobs) was higher at the end of each decade than it was at the beginning of the decade.

Despite depressions and recessions, wars and invasions, the future would always be brighter than the past. It was a given.

That upward trend came to a screeching halt in the 1970s. Still, this positive mindset was so deeply engrained that it took 40-plus years to dislodge it. Since that time, although decade after decade mitigated against the illusion of unbroken progress, the illusion held on.

Around 15 years ago, the time of the World Trade Organization confrontation in Seattle, there began what I call the long, slow awakening. Awakenings happen gradually at first; old paradigms die slowly. Then, suddenly, there are quantum leaps. Occupy Wall Street was such a leap. However, Occupy was limited by its lack of coherence and its inability to put a name to what it was actually opposing: capitalism.

The key to understanding the Bernie Sanders phenomenon lies in understanding that the old belief in a better future under capitalism is either gone or fading fast. Young people get it. They realize that not only are their futures constrained by debt and crappy jobs, but that they are also facing the ticking time bomb of climate change.

The next question is: What to do about it? The uninspiring Trump versus Clinton campaign is a sure sign that the two capitalist parties have no solutions to offer.

Sanders may have lit the fuse by raising socialism as the answer, but he had no intention of letting that fuse burn very far. The future does not belong there, in the Democratic Party. It lies in becoming an organized socialist. Now is the time to sign up for the course named Changing the World 101.
Guy Miller, Chicago

Austin turns out for Standing Rock

IN AUSTIN, Texas, approximately 300 people demonstrated on September 13 in solidarity with those fighting to stop construction on the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota.

They stood sardine-style on the sidewalks of a busy downtown intersection surrounding the Austin office of Energy Transfers Partners (ETP), the company responsible for the standoff in Standing Rock. Headquartered in Dallas, ETP is the natural gas pipeline monster gobbling up private and public lands and sucking up and polluting water rights along its routes.

The protest was organized by Austin Environmental Justice and included several local environmental groups including the American Indian Movement of Central Texas (AIMCTX).

Water issues were central to the sidewalk speakers, the majority of whom were local Native Americans. Their chants and drumbeats were a haunting reminder of centuries of dispossession of Native populations to serve the profit motives of the colonial settler state. "This is about life; water is life for all," said one speaker. "You don't need to drink all the water in the world like Coca-Cola."

ETP's plan to build a 150-mile natural gas pipeline, the Trans Pecos pipeline (TPP), through the Big Bend region of West Texas was also a focus of the protest. ETP has followed the familiar pattern of using eminent domain to take land from farmers and ranchers at ridiculously low prices and bulldoze archaeologic sites in the process.

The Trap Spring Archaeological Site, a designated archeological landmark in West Texas, is in imminent danger of being bulldozed by the TPP. Repeated requests to reroute the pipeline to save historical landmarks have been denied.

On the evening of the Austin protest, the Palestine Solidarity Committee at the University of Texas at Austin issued a solidarity statement to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Sacred Stone Camp. "We do so," read the statement, "as Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike, because we recognize that justice is indivisible--that a threat to indigenous communities and their right to their land and water in Sacred Stone Camp is a threat to indigenous communities in Palestine and elsewhere."

Activists in Texas--the state often referred to as the "belly of the beast" when it comes to fossil fuel production, in addition to its precarious handling of natural resources--appears to be in this fight for the long haul.
Cindy Beringer, Austin, Texas

Why can't Stein debate?

IN RESPONSE to "It was like shooting Trump in a barrel": If permitted to debate her, Dr. Jill Stein would wipe the floor with Hillary Clinton and would call her out on all of her corporate ties, interventionist and murderous wars, and decades of lies.

What a joke that the field was reduced to those two widely despised candidates, in order to make the establishment/corporatist darling Hillary Clinton look passably good.
Elizabeth Maynard, Yadkinville, North Carolina

Voting versus the movements

IN RESPONSE to "Can Clinton stop Trumpism?": I read your article this morning. This afternoon, as I was preparing new lessons, I read this passage from "The Late Election" by Frederick Douglass from December 1860. I couldn't help but notice the parallels:

Nevertheless, this very victory threatens and may be the death of the modern Abolition movement, and finally bring back the country to the same, or a worse state, than Benj. Lundy and Wm. Lloyd Garrison found it 30 years ago.

The Republican Party does not propose to abolish slavery anywhere, and is decidedly opposed to abolition agitation. It is not even, by the confession of its president elect, in favor of the repeal of that thrice-accursed and flagrantly unconstitutional Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. It is plain to see, that once in power, the policy of the Party will be only to seem a little less yielding to the demands of slavery than the Democratic or Fusion Party, and thus render ineffective and pointless the whole abolition movement of the North.

The safety of our movement will be found only by a return to all the agencies and appliances, such as writing, publishing, organizing, lecturing, holding meetings, with the earnest aim not to prevent the extension of slavery, but to abolish the system altogether.

Tom Crehore, Green Bay, Wisconsin