Author: alexisbdsa

This year, members of Boston DSA have participated in the #DonateYourVote campaign through Emancipation Initiative‘s Ballots Over Bars campaign. The #DonateYourVote campaign partners an incarcerated person who has had their voting rights stripped away by the state, and a freeworld volunteer who will vote as their partner would. This year, 165 people volunteered to donate their vote, and 143 incarcerated participants were paired. The African American Coalition Committee at MCI-Norfolk has also produced a list of endorsements. If you were not paired but would still like to participate, consider voting in solidarity along the AACC endorsements where you are able. The AACC 2018 Endorsements are as follows:

State Elections: Tuesday, November 6th
Voter Registration Deadline: Wednesday October 17th
For more information: www.wheredoivotema.com

Statewide
1. Lt. Governor
Quentin Palfrey (D) – “We imprison too many people, for too long, for doing too little, and race has way too much to do with who ends up in the criminal justice system.” (EI Voter Guide 2018)

2. Attorney General
Maura Healey (D) – “We cannot incarcerate our way to a healthier, more productive state.” (EI Voter Guide 2018)

3. Treasurer
Jamie Guerin (G-R) – “We must eliminate mandatory sentencing and reduce the use of incarceration as punishment.” (EI Voter Guide 2018)

4. Auditor
James Stamas (G-R) “I fully support ending life without parole & full voting rights for all incarcerated people.” (Twitter)

5. U. S. Senator
Elizabeth Warren (D) – “We need criminal justice reform…we need reform of the whole system.” (EI Voter Guide 2018)

Regional
County District Attorney
Rachael Rollins (D) for Suffolk County – ”Black people are dying in the streets. That is why I’m running. It’s not a joke.” (Bay State Banner 2018)

Please have family and friends visit the Emancipation Initiative Facebook page and click the LIKE button under AACC’s Endorsements to show they’re voting in solidarity with us this election. Our goal is to reach 10,000 LIKES.

For any questions or comments about AACC’s 2018 endorsements please call: 617-869-2773, or email: emancipationinitiative@gmail.com
THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE AACC!

By Frank Little

Whenever I get angry about some particular strain of left-wing thought or discourse, I’ve found it’s helpful to remember that I live in a country where a decent chunk of the population have been bombarded with the idea that politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are socialists. I think it’s good for people to know what their political beliefs are and even argue about them a little bit, but the internet is perfect for arguing and bad for every other part of organizing so it’s important to keep a level head when it comes to discussing political ideologies.

That being said, if socialism really is as “on the rise,” as various opinion columnists would have us believe, it’s important to consider what socialism would mean in an American context. To that end, I’d like to offer a response to a policy paper published by Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project outlining the case for establishing a social wealth fund. In the paper, Bruenig makes the case for a social wealth fund in America along the style of the Alaska Permanent Fund or those managed by the Norwegian state as a means of tackling wealth inequality. While Bruenig doesn’t explicitly call his proposal a socialist one, he traces the history of the idea back to market socialist ideas whereby a sovereign fund could serve as a way “to collectively own, control, and benefit from the wealth of the nation.” The idea of a social wealth fund was also outlined in a column by Ryan Cooper entitled “The Dawn of American Socialism.” Since Cooper also wrote the script for a video for Bruenig’s policy paper detailing the Alaska Permanent Fund,it seems safe to assume that establishing a sovereign wealth fund is to play a major part in creating in “an economic system for the many, not the few,” the goal of the People’s Policy Project .

The central problem with the sovereign wealth fund described in Bruenig’s paper is that it fails to contend with the fact that capitalism is a dynamic system of producing and distributing commodities. That is to say, it does more than dictate the distribution of wealth in society. Of course, capitalism does create an ever-widening gap between rich and poor and between owners and laborers. But making the distribution of wealth generated from the circulation of commodities more equitable doesn’t necessarily upend commodity production, distribution, and consumption.

Why does this matter? Well, for me it matters because understanding the ways that commodities are produced, exchanged, and consumed is central to understanding how capitalism operates and to creating something that could actually replace it. That’s why Marx begins his three volume critique of capitalism and bourgeois political economy with a long discussion of the nature of the various kinds of value which, under capitalism, are inevitably turned into commodities. Much to the chagrin of many people who begin reading the book, it’s something he spends much more time talking about than he ever does outlining what socialism is really meant to look like.

Identifying and carrying out the steps needed to get from a capitalist mode of production to a socialist mode of production is probably the defining disagreement between the various ideologies typically grouped together as “the left.” For proponents of sovereign wealth funds, the fact that they seem to offer a smoother transition from capitalism to socialism with less disruption of existing systems is a positive. Financial instruments like index funds and sovereign wealth funds are proof of concepts for market socialism and would address what seems to be  the main problem with capitalism: private ownership of capital and the inequality and exploitation it brings. If the dividends of capital were socialized, as Bruenig has previously argued, it would spread the benefits of rallying financial markets to all people rather than the small group of very wealthy people who get the benefits now.

It’s certainly true that this kind of system would redistribute wealth in this country and go along way towards reducing inequality in the U.S. Making citizenship a requirement for collecting benefits means that the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country wouldn’t see much benefit, despite facing many additional obstacles to building wealth and particularly egregious working conditions. However, the problems with this proposal run deeper than just who is included within the US population.

The problem with this view is that it ignores the aspects of capitalism today that are fundamentally opposed to socialism. Because I want anybody reading to understand where I am coming from, I’ll lay out how I understand socialism, albeit in broad terms. Under socialism, the goods that any society — capitalist or otherwise — has to produce to sustain itself would be made and distributed in a way that provides a stable and fulfilling life to all, and one that doesn’t result in further irreversible destruction of our natural environment. A socialist system would distribute goods according to need rather than ability to exchange for them, and that production would be done in concert with nature rather than in opposition to it. It also would entail an end to the wage system, or at the very least the recognition that labor by people is what creates value, and that they should not have that value taken from them by the owners of businesses. Finally, there would be an end to the imperial power, exercised through corporate, military, and financial organizations, that the United States has tried to wield as the superpower left standing after the Cold War.

Marx is careful to distinguish between the production of different goods by different people (“the division of labor”) and the production of those things as commodities (“commodity production”). The former is necessary for all society unless we are to revert to a chaotic “grab-what-you-can” existence, while the latter is essential for capitalism specifically. This distinction is important to keep in mind when we examine the potential of current modes of production as potentially useful under socialism.  

In his paper, Bruenig discusses the two Norwegian social wealth funds: Government Pension Fund-Norway, which holds investments in Norwegian companies, and Government Pension Fund-Global, which exclusively invests outside of Norway. These two funds do hold a substantial portion of wealth in Norway. As Bruenig puts it, “gpf-Norway controlled assets equal to 7 percent of Norway’s gdp [and] gpf-Global owned assets equal to 241 percent of gdp.”¹ Between these two and the enterprises owned by the Norwegian state outright, the Norwegian government owns 59% of the country’s wealth (76% if you exclude private home ownership). In 2017 gpf-Norway generated a return of 26 billion kroner in 2017  while gpf-Global garnered about 1.3 trillion kroner, which using current exchange rates comes to about $3,100,799,000 USD and $122,600,822,000 respectively. If that wealth had been paid out as a dividend to Norwegians, it would come to about $25,500 per person.

Bruenig is right to conclude that “the idea that a society could collectively own three-fourths of its non-home wealth through social wealth funds administered by a democratically-elected government without any negative economic consequences would be rejected as preposterous by most political and economic commentators in America today.” While this may be true,  I’d like to hold a proposal for a sovereign wealth fund to a slightly higher standard than that if it is to be a means of transitioning from the destructive and outdated capitalist system to socialism.

Below are some of the companies that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund invested in during 2017 along with their investment in U.S. dollars. ² Ask yourself: does the continued financial success of these companies have any place in whatever your idea of socialism is?

These represent about 18% of the U.S equities that gpf-Global has in its portfolio. I would guess that any American fund would be more heavily invested in these companies since they are large American firms which have consistently generated mostly positive returns over time. Even if they weren’t, I don’t think its controversial to say that the profits and dividends generated by the firms I’ve listed above are some of the most oft-cited examples of capitalist exploitation, of both workers and the environment, and rent-seeking behavior. As such, many of them have a vested interest in preventing moves towards more sustainable or equitable systems of production. That exploitation leads to their increased profitability, which is why for many of the companies shown here, the fund has maintained or increased its investment in them year after year.

Conditions set by both the executive branch and federal reserve following the recession in 2008 have led to particularly high returns for U.S. equities. Low borrowing costs set by the Federal Reserve have allowed these and many other corporations to borrow money cheaply. Cheap credit, combined with the bonanza from the recent tax cuts, have led many corporations to buy back large amounts of their own shares to reduce the number of shares available and, thus, drive share prices higher, further inflating a corporate debt bubble. This has been good news for the fund in terms of dividends, since their equity investments are concentrated in the U.S., but it is likely bad news for most working people, who have seen little of the benefit of this stock market rally, and the environment, which is heating up in ways that are quickly outpacing existing models.

The only way that this sort of policy can offer liberation is if your version of socialism is predicated on the idea that current levels of consumption in America are fine, it’s just that not enough people can get in on the feeding frenzy. I believe providing adequate food, shelter, and security to most if not all people on Earth is feasible. That is a grandiose goal and probably the hardest thing in the world to accomplish, but I wouldn’t bother with politics at all if I didn’t think it was possible. But if it is to become reality, it will be at the expense of the consumer culture in which I was raised and that I currently participate in, along with many others. As the late Samir Amin wrote in his 2004 book The Liberal Virus, “the idea that capitalism could adapt itself to liberating transformations, that is, could produce them, without wanting to, as well as socialism could, is at the heart of the American liberal ideology. Its function is to deceive us and cause us to forget the extent of the true challenges and of the struggles required to respond to them.”³

Certainly wealth inequality is a key challenge, though it is one among many. A report from Oxfam entitled Reward Work, Not Wealth, published in January 2018, elucidates another one of those challenges: the immiseration of the global working class. As they state at the very beginning of the report:

All over the world, our economy of the 1% is built on the backs of low paid workers, often women, who are paid poverty wages and denied basic rights. It is being built on the backs of workers like Fatima in Bangladesh, who works sewing clothes for export. She is regularly abused if she fails to meet targets and gets sick because she is unable to go to the toilet. It is being built on the backs of workers like Dolores in chicken factories in the US, suffering permanent disability and unable to hold their children’s hands. It is being built on the backs of immigrant hotel cleaners like Myint in Thailand, sexually harassed by male guests and yet often being told to put up with it or lose their jobs. ⁴

Though the report doesn’t say for sure, Dolores could very well be working in a chicken factory for Tyson Foods. Fatima could very well be making clothing for Target or Gap. Crackdowns on immigrants both here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the imperial core make an already precarious workforce all the more likely to be exploited. While capitalism has continued to develop and expand since Marx published Volume 1 of Capital in 1867, stories like those laid out in the Oxfam report show that its expansion and development have been fueled by its oldest and most reliable source of energy: extracted labor power from immiserated workers.

Some might say I’m singling out the wealth fund when plenty of workers saving for retirement or who are receiving a pension are likely also invested in these companies. Of course that is true. But pensions are not socialism, nor do they claim to be. What I’m saying is that building a welfare state or distributing a straight dividend to citizens that is built on the continued success of these companies as capital investments is not really a model for socialism either.

Since Bruenig’s paper is primarily aimed at an American audience, it’s understandable that global inequality isn’t really addressed, but as a socialist in America I think it’s important to keep a global perspective. Pew Research found that about 56% of the world’s population is considered low income, meaning they live on between $2 and $10 a day. 15% of the world’s population is considered poor, living on less than $2 a day. Nearly all the countries with a majority of their population either poor or low income can be found in Africa, South America, and Asia. Sub-saharan Africa has more of these poor countries than any other continent, likely because of global capital’s consistent and rapacious interest in seizing the continent’s mineral wealth for itself.

By contrast, about 56% of people in America are considered high income, meaning they live on more than $50 a day. Norway’s percentage is even higher, coming in at 77%. Globally about 7% of the world’s population is considered high income, with most of the majority high income countries concentrated in Western Europe and the British Commonwealth, along with the U.S.

There are problems with these kind of income designations. Moving from  poor to low income is often used as a measure of global improvement, but this seems specious at best. Similarly, grouping everyone above $50/day as high income seems to miss a key aspect of the world economy, which is characterized by astronomical wealth concentrated in the hands of an absurdly small group of individuals and corporations, something Bruenig has written on extensively. Nevertheless, this kind of disparity reinforces the need for addressing global inequality, not redistributing imperial plunder more broadly within the core.

I would suggest the Cuban system, at least in terms of its organizational structure, is at the very least much closer to the ideal I have laid out than Norwegian-style market socialism. According to the mathematician and ecologist Richard Levins, Cuba emerged from the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment and Development determined to take the resolutions of that conference and put them into practice without sacrificing developmental progress. These resolutions included a mandate to systematically examine patterns of production, encourage the development of alternatives to fossil fuels, and address the imminent shortages of water. Writing in ReVista in 2000, Levins asserts that integrating these resolutions into their development plans “represents the final recognition that despite society’s commitment to a rising standard of living, natural limitations will not allow a world-wide consumer society with consumption of energy and materials at Euro-North American levels.” Instead of expanding the scale and scope of that consumer society, development should instead be focused on “quality of life, cultural development, education, and people taking care of people.”

Cuba has injected this ecological thinking into their model for development in spite of near-constant attempts to undermine the communist government there. As someone living in the center of the empire behind that aggression, it is important not to whitewash the tremendous pressure this has put on Cuba to forgo an ecological focus in development. Adding ecological factors into decision-making was and is the subject of fierce debate, especially given the many challenges to survival which face a favorite imperial target. However, Levins describes one local Communist Party nucleo as presenting the case in one such formal debate that “far from ecology being ‘idealist,’ it was the height of idealism to suppose that we could pass resolutions and have nature obey.”

The  sovereign wealth fund described in the PPP paper suggests a kind of “one weird trick” path to socialism, as if simply redirecting the flow of capitalism’s spoils will change where they came from. It’s a seductive idea, but calling it socialism does a disservice both to the history of radical left action, such as the struggle for independence by formerly colonized people, and to the ongoing realities of imperialism and settler colonialism that built this country and maintain its hegemony today. I am willing to admit that I can’t conclusively lay out the path to socialism, but I think that socializing the benefits of investment in the global economy as it exists today is more likely to further entrench the most egregious abuses of capitalism rather than eliminate them.

It may well be that establishing a public stake in the private wealth currently being directed almost straight upwards could play a part in the transition from capitalism to socialism, perhaps as a means of ensuring liberation for those who have difficulty working. But it is important not to forget that the returns to an American sovereign wealth fund, without significant and concurrent changes to global supply chains,management structures, and reliance on fossil fuels, would continue to come at the expense of the people whose extracted labor power creates value in the first place.

In 2017, the wealth of world billionaires increased by $762 billion, which Oxfam estimated would be enough to end extreme poverty seven times over. This suggests that wealth redistribution, in addition to greater labor protections and higher wages globally, might not be mutually exclusive. However, steps taken to mitigate even just the most extreme abuses, like slave and child labor, in global supply chains of companies like Nestle or Kellogg would have a direct and negative impact on the returns that any sovereign wealth fund would get on investing in those companies. What about if we wanted to focus on not just ending slave and child labor and extreme poverty but also help those considered “low-income”?

Even if a sovereign wealth fund was committed to using its voting power as a shareholder to influence corporate policy, enacting changes that go against the fundamental incentives of capitalism would require enough voting power to overrule every other large investor who isn’t burdened by any such scruples about where their returns come from. Where would that number of shares come from? If they would have to be purchased rather than created by the firm, where would the money come from?

I want socialism because I want a different and better world, not just for me but for people in Haiti, El Salvador, India, Congo, and Palestine too. Building that different world means reckoning with how the one we have was created. It means recognizing that America’s consumer-driven capitalism, supported as it is by dollar hegemony and a massive, seemingly constant military mobilization, robs oppressed working people both here and abroad of the things they create and, more importantly, their lives. But in addition to these more pressing concerns, it robs even the wealthy capitalist of their connections to the natural world and to each other, replacing them with competitive consumption, social entropy, and ecological collapse.

To return to the mandate of the People’s Policy Project, if we want to build an economic system for the many not the few, who constitutes the few? Who constitutes the many? The scale of wealth inequality globally does not mean that inequality in the U.S. can’t or shouldn’t be addressed. What it does require, however, is a more nuanced understanding of not only wealth inequality, but how the wealth was created in the first place.

Bruenig would have US citizens turn into socialists by becoming shareholders in Uncle Sam’s index fund. If that’s what “American socialism” is, I guess I’m gonna have to find something else to call myself.

Frank is a member of the IWW in the Midwest active in the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. Unlike his namesake, he is not a tough guy, just a humble librarian.

Footnotes:
<sup>1. Side note: I’m not sure why it’s supposed to be staggering that the much larger fund that exclusively invests outside the country would hold assets greater than the GDP of just that country.↩
2. Find the portfolio of gpf-Global here: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/holdings/holdings-as-at-31.12.2017/↩
3. P. 27.↩
4. https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/reward-work-not-wealth↩</sup>

By Chris E. and Mike L., Boston Refoundation

Like nearly every other American city, Boston is facing a housing crisis. Rents are on the rise across the Greater Boston area, and processes of development and redevelopment displace longtime residents and restrict the population of ever-growing parts of the city to an ever-shrinking class of bourgeois and petty bourgeois residents. The brunt of this violence falls on working-class people of color in communities like Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan, East Boston, as well as towns outside the city, such as Brockton, Randolph, and Lawrence.

In these communities, landlords take advantage of speculation in the real estate market to extract increasingly exorbitant rents, sometimes with increases of hundreds of dollars at once. At the same time, they neglect their buildings—often on purpose, with an eye toward selling to investors—and evict tenants freely for minor offenses or capricious reasons. Worse, developers, landlords, and investors weaponize mass eviction to clear out a building before or after a sale, usually in preparation for redevelopment or another sale, evicting dozens of people at once with little to no notice without any regard for the human impact and with concern only for the profit they can make. In this environment, precarity in housing is the norm, and homelessness is the devastating result for thousands of people who do not have the resources to pay rent or find housing on short notice after an eviction.

As socialists, we must understand the local, national, and international housing crisis as the natural result of a system of housing-for-profit, housing as a commodity, housing under a capitalist mode of production. The rapidity with which Boston has developed, with whole neighborhood blocks being evicted and demolished sometimes in the span of months—for example, CLVU organizers have encountered this horrifying phenomenon in East Boston—is indicative of capital’s insatiable drive to exploit new markets for greater profit. Landlords, developers, and property managers do not perform their functions for any reason other than profit. The unfairness of landlordism is incredibly glaring, as buildings are often inherited directly, and in many cases the upkeep of the buildings falls to the tenants themselves.

A profound illustration of the relationship between capitalism and the housing crisis is that luxury housing continues to be built and remain empty, held as commodities by developers, investors, or absentee owners, while homelessness is rampant and working-class people struggle to find housing. As socialists, it is our duty to end this system of commodified housing and  instead assert that housing is a human right, in practice as well as in words. We cannot achieve the momentous goal of building a system of housing that meets the needs of all by collaborating with capitalists—the landlords, developers, and property managers who exploit tenants and communities for profit.

We understand that the relationship between landlords and working-class people, tenants and homeless, is one of class conflict: a zero-sum game between workers’ need for housing and capital’s desire for profit. While this conflict may not have the special place at the site of production as the conflict between labor and bosses, it is a site for militant class struggle. We in Boston Refoundation believe that Boston DSA should pursue the formation of tenant unions as a strategy for building working-class struggle around housing, reducing isolation among community members, and creating new socialists in the long term.

Since July 2017, the Boston DSA Housing Working Group (HWG) has been working with City Life/Vida Urbana (CLVU), a tenant organization comprised of working-class people across Greater Boston. CLVU organizes tenants, as well as foreclosed homeowners, against eviction, rent increases, and terrible building conditions using what they call the sword and shield: the shield for legal defense, and the sword for direct action. Their base comes primarily from the working-class communities of color most affected by eviction and rent increases. CLVU intentionally cultivates a sense of ownership among tenants from the first time they show up to a meeting, encouraging them to see themselves as members of the organization rather than people helped by it, telling them “if you fight, we’ll fight with you.”

Many of the organization’s strongest leaders, both members and staff organizers, first came to it as tenants facing eviction and stayed to fight with others. Some tenants currently fighting with CLVU are people who had organized a union and won a contract with CLVU five or ten years before, received evictions or rent increases after the expiration of the contract or after a sale, and returned to CLVU to organize again. Others have been resisting rent increases or evictions for years—some for nearly a decade. This type of militant struggle is made possible because CLVU brings tenants out of the shame and isolation of eviction and into community and solidarity with other people fighting the same injustices. CLVU intentionally develops their political leadership and their willingness to see themselves as capable of fighting, and shows them that through fighting they can achieve the material victory of staying in their homes. We view this model as one that Boston DSA should learn from and emulate as we attempt to develop our capacity to organize tenants. Essentially, CLVU already accomplishes what we and many other DSA chapters would like to do in our housing work: build a base of working-class leaders ready and able to fight capital and win.

Since we began working with CLVU last July, our work has consisted mostly of canvassing buildings identified by CLVU—both less organized buildings in existing struggles and new buildings we’re exploring for the first time. The Housing Working Group has grown a small team of people who engage in this work regularly, with several other members who may have been once or twice. We’ve learned a lot about how to talk to tenants about their material issues, while also being respectful of the sensitivity of those conversations and tenants’ agency in responding to them. In the immediate future, we should work to improve our follow-up with tenants, getting them interested in coming to a Tuesday CLVU meeting or helping them organize a building meeting with their neighbors. In February, we took a first step in this direction by providing ride support for a disabled tenant we’d met canvassing to CLVU’s weekly meeting. We should expand this sort of work wherever we find tenants willing to organize with us.

We can and should work toward this goal by continuing our existing work with CLVU and by exploring new opportunities that we discover on our own. For the former, we can continue our regular canvassing at places CLVU is looking to organize and actively work to improve our follow-up with tenants, finding ways to connect with tenants around material issues and coming to shared understandings about how we can work together. For the latter, we can explore a variety of strategies to identify targets where people may be experiencing material conditions that threaten their housing—eviction, rent increases, and gentrification, among others—and figure out how to organize with tenants around those problems. Both approaches will include a continued close relationship with CLVU while also allowing us to develop our skills as socialist organizers and become more capable and independent in our tenant organizing. Very few DSA chapters have an already-existing tenant organization like City Life in their regions; we are lucky to have them as a coalition partner and owe them a great deal for our progress so far. Our organizing, whether initiated by CLVU or by us, should bring tenants into CLVU’s movement. We do not have the capacity to immediately create the kind of solidarity and social support among tenants that CLVU provides, nor do we have the same roots they do in the communities most affected by eviction and displacement. Furthermore, CLVU has legal resources that we cannot provide tenants on our own. As we organize more effectively over time and begin to help tenants win their fights, we will increase our capacity to build these types of social and political organization among tenants in the long term.

There are a number of routes we could explore to developing our own tenant organizing project, but our adaptation of Metro DC DSA’s Stomp Out Slumlords project (SOS) currently stands out as one of the most promising. Stomp Out Slumlords has provided an inspiring example of a DSA chapter trying a creative, politically informed strategy to organize with tenants against eviction. HWG members have been developing an approach based on insights from the Stomp Out Slumlords project—namely, the idea of using publicly available information from the court system to reach tenants facing eviction—to expand our current work within the context of CLVU. Our approach merges our current tenant unionizing effort within Stomp Out Slumlords’s novel approach to finding and identifying tenants willing to organize. Interestingly, our DC comrades reported in their April update that their work on Stomp Out Slumlords has naturally gravitated toward building-level organizing with a focus on base building, much more similar to our approach and CLVU’s than to the initial SOS program. The Housing Working Group has now used this method twice since we started on May 5, and we are working to evaluate and improve it going forward. We invite any interested comrades to reach out to HWG to get involved.

We should also be on the lookout for housing issues around evictions, such as rent increases, or development around the Boston area in general, especially in regions that may not already be organized by CLVU or a similar organization. We should develop class consciousness among our own membership around their class position as tenants, encourage them to organize their own buildings if they wish to do so, and support them in those efforts by offering organizing trainings and labor.

For all of this work, and especially the last point, we must consider robust political education a necessary component of our work and meaningfully implement that commitment in practice. We must approach all of it with a clearly socialist understanding of what we mean when we say housing is a human right. We will not succeed in organizing with tenants if we are not clear that we are for tenants and against landlords and developers.

We need to take care not to fall prey to working toward capitalist reforms, an ever-present trap especially in the arena of housing. Even the most radical orgs can become co-opted by the Massachusetts Democratic establishment machine, and given the nature of the systems we work in, it may be tempting to make concessions to capital to obtain short-term gains. In particular, the framework of “affordable housing” dominates the progressive housing discourse, but this framework does nothing to strengthen the working class. “Affordable” is never accurately defined within any reasonable understanding of the word, and landlords frequently receive some benefit in return for meeting very low numbers of these units. Affordable housing assumes both that rent will always be extracted from workers’ wages and that the vast majority of housing units will be, by definition, unaffordable. Without a socialist vision and strategy that is grounded in not just a Marxist understanding of the capital and class conflict surrounding housing, but also in a knowledge of successfully implemented socialist housing throughout history, or in promising theoretical models from other Marxist groups and thinkers, we will only be temporarily stemming the tide of late-stage capitalist exterminism.

The proposed PEWG/HWG collaboration, a four-part series aimed at combining theory and praxis for socialist housing, is an exciting first step toward a broader conversation around what socialist housing means and how we can organize with and as tenants. This series, and subsequent events like it, should contribute to the development of class consciousness as tenants among our membership and open new possibilities for organizing from within DSA. In the medium to long term, as we improve our own skills as tenant organizers, we should offer deeper and more robust training for our members to organize their buildings.

Political education events, like the PEWG/HWG collaboration, will introduce more members to the basic ideas of socialist housing and tenant organizing and give them an accessible way to approach that work themselves. If done well, these projects will increase our capacity both by improving the quality of our work and by drawing more of our members to tenant organizing projects. Our political education must give us space to reflect critically on our organizing methods to ensure that they are effective. We must examine our external organizing to ensure that we do not take paternalistic attitudes into our work with tenants or choose methods of struggle for them, especially when tenants are more exploited than our organizers along lines of race, gender, class, or disability. Our internal organizing must value the contributions and labor of all our comrades and not overly rely on methods like canvassing that systematically exclude some of our comrades.

Boston Refoundation believes that tenant unionizing is a promising site for militant class struggle in our area. By applying and expanding the lessons the Housing Working Group has learned so far in our work with CLVU, we can increase our capacity to organize around tenant issues and support tenants in their struggles for our shared goal: housing as a human right. If we can help tenants win material victories in these fights, we will create relationships with working-class leaders across the Greater Boston area—people with whom we can organize in the future around issues other than housing. Building those relationships through the work of tenant unionizing in the long term will make projects like the Mass Against HP BDS campaign and the proposed Prison Abolition project to get police out of Boston public schools more imminently possible for Boston DSA to organize around. It will open up new frontiers for direct service and mutual aid projects that are useful and possibly reciprocal. We believe that we must pursue these projects of organizing and unionizing tenants both because it is right to stand in solidarity with tenants in their fights and because it is necessary to achieve our ultimate goal: uniting the working class to win socialism.

By Nafis H.

The recent opinion piece by prominent geneticist David Reich has once again fanned the flames of the debate on race, genetics, and intelligence. This is not a new debate — after eugenics was supposedly put to rest, it appeared that this ideology had taken refuge in the shadows of evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics. It is not surprising that the latter field, built on the nature vs. nurture duality, is a hotbed of debate and sensationalism, given the sociopolitical implications and our collective obsession with genetic determinism. Over the years, the question of whether differences in intelligence is due to environmental factors or genetic factors has been repeatedly raised. In 1994, Charles Murray co-wrote the notorious book, The Bell Curve, in which he argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites because of genetic differences. While the book was criticized by the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould in his summary analysis & rebuttal The Mismeasure of Man (revised ed., 1996), the idea that there is an inherent, genetic differences in intelligence across races, stuck around in other forms. Once the human genome was sequenced, and genetic determinism again became fashionable with its technological reincarnation, billions of dollars of public money was funneled into studying the genetic basis of complex traits, including behavioral and psychological ones, and their differences across racial and ethnic boundaries. The belief that the answer lay in the genes nurtured the idea of eugenics along with it.

Current day eugenics, Eugenics 2.0, takes the form of hyper-rationalism, scientific racism, race realism, and the misleading idea of “human biodiversity.” It is not surprising, then, that the alt-right and white supremacists have taken up Eugenics 2.0 behind the shield of “Science”, just as they espouse their bigoted views from behind the mask of Free Speech. For example, earlier this year, a secret conference on eugenics and intelligence was hosted at University College, London, and featured white supremacist speakers like Toby Young. Sam Harris recently hosted Charles Murray on his podcast under the title “Forbidden Knowledge”, after Murray was protested when invited to deliver a lecture at Middlebury College, under the premise that Murray’s ideas were being restricted due to the college PC culture (Murray was recently awarded a hefty prize from the Bradley Foundation and is regularly invited to give talks on conservative platforms). Reich’s op-ed is naive at best, and to be fair he does precaution against weaponizing any of the scientific findings. However, as geneticist Razib Khan’s case shows, white supremacists can use such studies as evidence for racial superiority, and they are increasingly leaning towards genetic testing for validation.

This is not to say that Eugenics 2.0 hasn’t faced its own share of resistance in academia — much has been written against the idea that inherent genetic differences explain the variable performances in IQ tests along racial lines. The scientists that championed the environmental causes of such differences in IQ test outcomes have put forth socioeconomic status (SES) as the primary cause. A seminal study by Turkheimer et al in 2003 showed that genetic differences could only explain differences in intelligence among kids from high SES background. For the kids from lower SES, environmental factors were the primary cause for variation observed in IQ. A more recent critique of the paper showed that the differences observed between the two SES groups were not significant along racial lines. A paper by Figlio et al published in 2017, the largest study to test the idea that “genetic influences on cognitive abilities are larger for children raised in more advantaged environments”, found on no evidence to support their hypothesis. However, they do admit that “articulating gene-environment interactions for cognition is more complex and elusive than previously supposed.”

Other scientists have already denounced Reich’s op-ed — a host of scientists across disciplines have accused Reich of conflating the implications of modern behavior genetics research, and one scientist even questioned Reich’s expertise in understanding evolutionary biology and whether he is a racist. Academia is not without rebuttals, as evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen took to Twitter to criticize above-mentioned rebuttal op-ed to Reich, asking whether social scientists understand genetics themselves. Beyond the discussion of study design and other scientific details of contradictory results, the question has attracted other meta-analyses. Some of these include a sociological perspective on whether race is a biological or social construct, the limitations of IQ tests, whether the term “Race” should be used in the context of genetic differences between population groups, and whether this debate belongs in the realm of Free Speech.

This endless debate, however, is spurred on by a major epistemic flaw in understanding the nature and nurture equation. In his detailed analysis of the behavior genetics field in the post-genome sequencing era, sociologist Aaron Panofsky writes, “Behavior geneticists’ focus on environmental factors and interactionism has involved looking at different parts of the nature versus nurture equation, not a rethinking of the presumptions of that equation or the notion of the analytic separability of genes and environment.” What was perceived to be a change in paradigm, ended up being just a shift towards one variable or the other. The individual focus on genes or environment as separate entities have resulted in much contradictory evidence so far, allowing the white supremacists to weaponize scientific evidence to their favor and change public perception (for years, Nicholas Wade misrepresented scientific data to make racist claims as a science writer for the New York Times). However, Panofsky doesn’t provide an avenue to escape the quagmire that behavior geneticists find themselves in.

The promised paradigm shift can be achieved through a shift in how we view the relationship between us and our environment. And turns out, Marxist ideas can help us do exactly that. Engels first proposed the idea of using Marx’s dialectical materialism to examine this relationship is his unfinished book Dialectics of Nature (1883). Marx, in his revision of Hegel’s dialectics, asserted that dialectics should deal with the “material world” of human history and activity rather than the metaphysical world or the world of ideas. As Ernest Mandel describes in his introduction to Capital (Penguin edition, 1976), “when the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality”, dialectical materialism allows for studying the interactions between phenomena in an empirical manner. Engels’ intention in his unfinished book was to employ this philosophy to understand the ever-changing relationship between Man and Nature.

Biologists such as J.B.S. Haldane and others had tried to keep this tradition alive through their writings over the years. But the pseudoscience practiced by Trofim Lysenko and the misuse of dialectical materialism by Stalinists resulted in shunning of this approach in Western philosophy and scientific understanding. However, in its unadulterated form, dialectical materialism can provide a solution to the nature vs nurture debate, as Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin have outlined in their book The Dialectical Biologist (1985). Levins & Lewontin write, “an organism does not compute itself from its DNA. The organism is the consequence of a historical process that goes on from the moment of conception until the moment of death; at every moment gene, environment, chance, and the organism as a whole are all participating….Natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organism actively codetermine each other.”

The central premise of Levins & Lewontin’s argument is that because the relationship between an organism and an environment are reciprocal, and hence dialectical, it is the relationship that should be the subject of empirical study rather than either the environment or the organism individually. Additionally, they argue that this relationship cannot be studied outside the context of evolution, echoing both Marx and the famous biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky who proclaimed “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Lewontin went on to further solidify the necessity of using a dialectical approach to studying evolution and development of an organism. In his book The Triple Helix (2002), he writes “that the ontogeny [development] of an organism is the consequence of a unique interaction between the genes it carries, the temporal sequence of external environments through which it passes during its life, and random events of molecular interactions within individual cells. It is these interactions that must be incorporated into any proper account of how an organism is formed”, thus establishing the organism as a site of interaction between the environment and genes. Therefore, under dialectical materialism, the nature vs. nurture debate is replaced by how nature AND nurture contribute to the development of an organism.

Current scientific rationale employs the capitalist ideology of individualism to champion the cause of genetic determinism, and in turn, scientific racism. While scientists, both geneticists and sociologists, have acknowledged that both the environment AND genes play a role in development of cognitive functions, their study designs are flawed because of this reductionist, individualistic approach. Modern technological advances have done little to end the debate despite promises; scientific evidence generated using a reductionist view will only continue to be co-opted by oppressors and white supremacists, and scientists cannot afford to not care about the sociopolitical impact of their work. It is definitely time for a more encompassing understanding of our biology and our relationship with the environment, and dialectical materialism, as Marx and Engels had intended, and Levins & Lewontin have applied theoretically, is poised to do so.

Claudia B. and Hannah K. are Boston University YDSA co-chairs. For the past few months, they’ve been working on a campaign to get the tour guides of Boston University paid a fair wage. In honor of May Day, we’d like to kick off the first post on Boston DSA’s Political Education Working Group blog with an interview about their organizing work.

First off, could you tell us about the background on the tour guides campaign you’re working on?

Claudia: Tour guides at BU are not paid, but they do receive a hoodie. I was a tour guide last year and quit as I started to recognize the how exploitative the program was. Our members in Boston University YDSA were super into labor organizing so we were trying to find a campaign that had the potential for political education and a feasible goal, as well as one that allowed our members to practice organizing conversations and that wasn’t too risky.

Hannah: I’ve never been a tour guide, but I have a lot of close friends who are/have been and talking to them about their working conditions I definitely sensed dissatisfaction—which, of course, is the seed of any productive organizing conversation because it means you can get them pissed. In addition, it was a good starting point to get students at BU to start thinking about labor—because BU is such a bourgeois, “career-oriented” (yuck) school most people think it is fine to work for free for resume-building purposes (“paid in experience and connections”), so I think both of us recognized that a smaller campaign would have the potential to open people up to re-examine the work they do in their own lives. Because so much of the way a university operates depends on unpaid or underpaid labor: teaching assistants, student research, learning assistants, tour guides, etc, etc—we’ve actually heard a lot of people tell us that they didn’t think about the work they did that they weren’t paid for as “work” until now.

What has it been like organizing the tour guides? Are most receptive, or are some interested in maintaining the unpaid status of BU tour guides?

C: We have gotten a lot of support! We have over half of the current tour guides to sign the list of demands and a large number of past tour guides. There are some tour guides that are hesitant about the demand of a $15/hour wage. The largest backlash is from student employees in the office who are currently—there are some students who answer phone calls and check in parents who are paid less than $15/hour, and then there’s some that get a stipend to do more oversight of the tour guides. They’re opposed to them getting paid because they think it’ll lower their pay or make their positions less valuable. It’s been important in our organizing conversations to explain that it’s a “boss” problem not an “other workers” problem.

H: And also with the $15 thing we often ask: well, why isn’t everyone paid $15 an hour? And if they agree with that (and most do): aren’t the tour guides a good place to start? We have also gotten a few scab/cop types who argue that tour guides should remain volunteer because if they’re paid the position will attract the “wrong kind of people.” To which, a) wow, there’s a lot to unpack there but, b) you should be paid for work regardless of whether you like doing it or not.

What are your demands, and what has BU’s response been so far? How would you respond to statements that the tour guides would prefer to work for free?

C: The main demands include a $15/hour wage, the option to use work study awards to be paid, transparency about the requirements of the position, and a more thorough hiring practice, because currently the student workers in charge of hiring tend to just hire friends.

The biggest proponents of continuing this system are people who claim that making the position paid would attract the “wrong kind” of candidate. We argue this will attract the same, if not better, candidates. People who were already willing to do this for free will continue to be interested, and they will be more able to prioritize it as a job and keep it. Admissions has an issue with turnover with this current system. Additionally, admissions boasts of having diverse tour guides, yet a system of unpaid workers fundamentally seeks to exclude working class students. Another argument we sometimes hear is “if people ‘consented’ to work for free, it is entitled to change and ask for compensation now.” To this, we say that it is well within a worker’s rights to advocate for better working conditions at any time. Specifically, in such cases, students are fed lies about how such unpaid positions affect their later employability. As students come to realize these falsehoods, it is quite reasonable for them to change their expectations.

Hannah, you’ve written before about how BU has a long history of labor organizing. Are there any events in BU labor history that you’ve drawn from in this campaign?

H: When we first started BU YDS, I got really into researching BU’s history of student activism. The fact is BU used to be way more radical than it is now—you can find old pictures from BU in 60s and 70s online and they seem like another world. There are photos of BU undergrads protesting US involvement in Iran and protesting Robert McNamara speaking at BU! That would never happen here today! And while BU is very different today, there’s definitely been value in looking at our campaign as part of BU’s larger labor history. While I don’t think what we’re doing is anywhere near the scale of the ‘79 strike, I do think that looking at what we’re doing as part of a much greater movement allows us to look ahead in terms what we’re doing with our campaign—how can we try to transform the momentum we have with the tour guide campaign into something greater, and something that has the potential to energize the campus in the way it was back in the 70s? That I think is the bigger project, and something we’re thinking about a lot.

What are some challenges you’ve faced in your organizing campaign and how have you responded to them?

C: While I think all of BU YDSA is proud of the work we’ve done, I think we would’ve liked to center large groups of workers more than we were able to. The admissions office work is very isolated and makes organizing very difficult. All of the demands were crafted following one on ones with current and past tour guides. We were able to mobilize around 6-7 really amazing leaders to try to combat this. We are hopeful that the tour guides have been empowered to further advocate for their rights in the workplace despite these challenges.

H: I think—and this relates to what Claudia said about our issues centering workers—a big part of this is just that we’ve been so time-crunched in pulling this together. We had to spend the first half of the year building our YDS chapter so that essentially we’ve only had a semester to organize around this issue. If we had more time, I have no doubt we would have a stronger worker base, but the fact is we’re up against the university calendar and also Admissions’ calendar, as they are most vulnerable when turnover is high at the end of semesters.

It seems like the labor movement has grown from traditional unionizing campaigns to organizing more types of workers and different types of employment. Can you speak to how your campaign fits into that?

C: Hell yeah! We’re very excited about this. Unions rule but the fetishization of union workers takes away from all other labor struggles. This concern with only union labor also takes the focus away from marginalized workers as certain privileges and infrastructure are inherent to union organizing. That’s something I’m very proud of with regards to our campaign; there’s power in a union but ultimately it boils down to the people—

H: —also unions involve a lot of structure and regulation that ultimately isn’t workable in organizing all workplaces—

C: —definitely, and women of color are a huge exploited labor sector in terms of care work and people often ignore their organizing efforts because they can’t picket. While we obviously want the workers to see their demands realized and see BU respect its students’ requests, this campaign has had definite success. Whether in the mind of the tour guides themselves or their peers, a conversation has started about what it means to be a worker. There has definitely been increase in dialogue about how students are coerced into working for free. I think this lays a nice foundation to organize around internships, gig economy jobs, and other sources of precarious work or exploitation we have been told is necessary to attain success.

Anything else you’d like to add?

C: We are hoping to use the momentum from this campaign toward something like a campus wide $15 minimum wage—

H:—which is something that other student activists have started working towards. For example Virginia Tech’s YDSA is campaigning for campus-wide $15 now, and in addition, Rutgers has a very strong group of student activists fighting for $15 as well. Rutgers is also notable because it’s a state school, so winning $15 there actually helps to push New Jersey to make the state-wide minimum wage $15. We also think that $15 campus-wide minimum wage is achievable because it will benefit ALL BU workers, and not just student workers—it’s an easy sell: who doesn’t wanna be paid more?

For more information on the tour guides campaign, check out Hannah’s piece about BU’s labor history , or this piece from BU’s Daily Free Press about this specific campaign. To support this campaign, you can read their list of demands or sign their petition here. On May 4th at 3pm, a small group (per admission’s request) will be meeting with John McEachern and Kelly Walters. You can also show your support by walking with the organizers to this meeting. They will be meeting at 2:30pm at Marsh Chapel. Supporters are encouraged to wear BU colors or apparel to show this is really about creating a better community. Please click GOING on the Facebook event if you are going so they can keep track of numbers!