Local progressive organizing: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2024

I’ve been taking the demise of socialism pretty hard. I detailed the rise and fall of socialism last month, and particularly the collapse of socialism’s project for human liberation. I’ve been left unhappy, bereft and forlorn. Yet I’m not without political options even today, ones that are not nearly as sexy as the idea of socialism. So let’s talk about local grassroots politics.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for some twenty years. The City (and congruent county) is considered a bastion of liberalism, with registered Democratic voters substantially outnumbering Republicans (approx. 45% to 30%). Even the number of registered “decline to state” Independent voters is oversized at 20%. When it comes to actual election figures 85.26% voted Democratic, 12.72% voted Republican, with 2.02% voting third party in 2020.

Which means that San Francisco’s overwhelming democratic majority further subdivides into moderate, liberal and progressive factions. Whether there are conservative Democrats in San Francisco is debatable. That factions of Democrats often battle each more fiercely than do progressive Democrats versus MAGA Republicans on the national stage has been evident in the last few years. Reminds me of the old saw that when the Left forms a firing squad it forms a circle with guns turned inward.San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón announced in October 2018 he wouldn’t seek a third term. A leading progressive prosecutor, Gascón suddenly resigned in October 2019 and went on to be elected Los Angeles District Attorney. This move forced Mayor London Breed to appoint an interim DA (Suzy Loftus) and a general election followed that Chesa Boudin entered on a platform opposing mass incarceration, police misconduct and immigrant detention. Boudin won even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association (SFPOA) and other law enforcement groups spent $650,000 on TV advertising and hundreds of thousands of mailers to try to defeat him, essentially intending to buy the DA’s office.

The SFPOA called Boudin and his election “dangerous for our children,” “putting our families at risk,” “would make neighborhood safety worse,” whose “reckless policies will cost lives.” By December Trump’s Attorney General William Barr openly criticized the newly elected Boudin and fellow progressive DAs, accusing them of subverting the police, letting criminals off without punishment, and jeopardizing public safety. It was the waning days of the Trump administration after it had released every manner of rightwing reaction—from MAGA to neo-Nazism. Lindsay Danae Grathwohl went ballistic when Boudin declared for the DA’s office. Lindsay was the daughter of Larry Grathwohl, the FBI informer who infiltrated the Weather Underground and wrote a book about his experiences. She took particular offense that Chesa Boudin was the son of Weather Underground (WU) / May 19th Communist Organization members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. Chesa was adopted by fellow WU members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn when his parents went to prison for the infamous 1981 Brink’s robbery and related murders. That’s in addition to Chesa’s storied left-wing family lineage and his own Marxist sympathies. A far-right supporter of Trump chummy with the Proud Boys and white supremacist gangs like the American Guard and Golden State Skinheads, Lindsay despised Chesa as a “Cultural Marxist” (Cultural Marxism being a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory.) She continues her crusade against Boudin to this day.Traditionally, Americans believe crime is caused by human nature—“the evil that men do”—and requires punishment—from punitive fines to penal incarceration and capital punishment. In other words a fairly biblical “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” approach that amounts to old-fashioned revenge in most cases. The United State has the largest number of prisoners worldwide (1.8 million) and is sixth in the world in the number of prisoners per 100,000 of the population (531). A more nuanced approach contends that crime is caused by social, economic, psychological, cultural, and environmental factors that argues for a multifaceted solution at the very least. I agree with the progressive prosecutors movement (Gascón, Boudin, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, Chicago State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, Boston DA Rachael Rollins, Florida State Attorneys Andrew Warren and Monique Worrell, et al.) that the underlying cause of most crime is poverty and racism so I wholeheartedly supported Chesa Boudin’s fraught tenure as San Francisco District Attorney. My wife and I got involved with Boudin’s campaign for District Attorney from the start, going to fundraisers and campaign events when campaigning and participating in town hall meetings like the Oct 10, 2021, information rally in Noe Valley Town Square.

Boudin was first and foremost a criminal justice reform advocate, pushing both decriminalization and decarceration. By 2020 decriminalization was a well-established principle in much of California with regard to drugs (marijuana legalization), sex (homosexuality, prostitution) and other non-violent “crimes.” He created a wrongful conviction unit, the Innocence Commission that freed Joaquin Ciria who had been imprisoned for decades. He stopped prosecuting children as adults. He pioneered diversion programs for nonviolent and misdemeanor crimes, mental health and drugs to reduce prison overpopulation. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic he reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 25% (and then 40%). Older inmates, those with medical conditions, inmates near the end of their sentences for misdemeanor crimes were prioritized for early release, home detention or probation. Boudin further reduced prison populations by promoting alternatives to incarceration like restorative justice or Veteran’s Justice Court. Central to both decriminalization and decarceration was his elimination of cash bail. Bail is a way to keep poor people in jail, whether or not they’re guilty of any crime.Had Boudin stopped with criminal justice reform he would have been called “soft on crime” but he might have survived in office. But Chesa then took on the real criminals in society. He launched the Economic Crimes Against Workers Unit which took on food delivery services like DoorDash, claiming the company illegally classified delivery workers as “independent contractors.” The classification denied workers proper wages and benefits and the right to unionize, and led to similar suits against gig companies like Uber and Lyft. He prevented his office from cooperating with ICE over raids and arrests against undocumented immigrants. Then he took on the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) over accountability issues.

With George Gascón and Diana Becton he approached the State Bar of California to unsuccessfully prohibit elected prosecutors from taking contributions from police unions. With Supervisor Shamann Walton he successfully prohibited hiring police with prior misconduct charges. He implemented several new policies. He required prosecutors to review all evidence before charging any cases involving allegations of resisting or obstructing cops or committing an assault on cops. Cases would then not be charged or prosecuted based on the sole evidence of officers with a history of misconduct (such as excessive force or discrimination) without prior approval of the DA. And victims of police violence would be able to file for medical compensation whether or not the cop was prosecuted for assault or use of excessive force despite loopholes and gaps in the state’s compensation laws. Boudin filed criminal cases against nine SFPD officers for misconduct while on duty, including Officer Terrance Stangel. This case was known as the “first-ever use-of-force case against an on-duty officer for excessive force.” The case was ultimately unsuccessful, with Boudin’s conservative DA successor Brooke Jenkins dismissing the rest.Chesa’s aborted term as San Francisco DA coincided not only with the Covid-19 pandemic but also with the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests, and the accompanying demands to “Defund the Police.” He faced intensifying backlash from the SFPD and SFPOA, tech industry leaders, Republicans and residents fearful of rising crime rates, becoming the target of relentless criticisms. Some criticisms involved how he handled particular criminal cases (the killings of Vicha Ratanapakdee and Deshaune Lumpkin, the assault on Rong Xin Liao). Other broader criticisms accused him of  mismanaging the office of District Attorney and releasing repeat offenders. The Alliance of Asian American Justice filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Boudin’s office for violating victim’s rights. No fan of criminal justice reform, Mayor London Breed was a waffling moderate Democrat turning conservative as she grew frustrated with the City’s homeless problems, unveiling her emergency declaration in the Tenderloin, her new tough-on-crime turn, and her support for recalling three SF Board of Education members. She and Boudin began taking swipes at each other by the end of 2021, with Breed criticizing “white San Francisco progressives” for not supporting her Tenderloin emergency declaration, and eventually supporting Boudin’s recall.

But Boudin was subject to a particularly brutal smear campaign by the SFPOA and SFPD that used on-duty police officers to falsely rig crime statistics, particularly claiming a rise in burglaries, car theft and murders during his tenure. The Atlantic reported a decline in rates of general violent crime, to include rapes and assaults, and the Intercept reported a decline in overall crime numbers. Samantha Michaels in Mother Jones wrote: “crime rates are not spiraling out of control, and there’s no evidence that Boudin or other DAs are responsible for the upticks that have occurred. In fact, academics who studied progressive prosecutors around the country found that their policies did not cause violence to rise.”Public opinion ultimately turned against Boudin and a recall campaign targeted him. The Safer SF Without Boudin pro-recall campaign was led by SF Democratic Party Central Committee chair moderate Mary Jung. It was financed by ultra-wealthy funders (tech industry investors Ron Conway, Garry Tan and David Sacks) and billionaire GOP mega-donor William Oberndorf. The recall “raised $7.2m and ran a campaign that blamed Boudin’s policies for the complex problems of crime, violence, homelessness, drug addiction and other challenges in the city” according to the The Guardian’s Sam Levin who wrote “[t]he recall message won out in a low-turnout election on Tuesday, with initial results showing 60% of voters supporting his removal, despite a lack of evidence that Boudin’s reforms were causing an uptick in crime rates.” (6-9-2022) Lindsay Grathwohl bragged on Facebook that she routinely attacked Boudin’s San Francisco counter-recall rallies with fellow fascist Amber Cummings without fear of being arrested by the SFPD. Meanwhile SFPOA president Tony Montoya issued statements mercilessly denouncing Boudin’s shortcomings, also on Facebook, eliciting comments from Catherine Hart that “[he] is the son of domestic terrorists, Read Lindsay Grathwohl’s father’s book…” before going on to claim that “George Soros is funding DA races all over the country.” As a footnote, Mission Local subsequently revealed that Brooke Jenkins illegally emailed sensitive documents to a colleague before leaving her position in Boudin’s DA office to join the recall campaign.“For now, at least, San Francisco can no longer be called a progressive city.” This according to the 3-6-2024 San Francisco Chronicle. “Not after voters approved ballot measures Tuesday to loosen restrictions on the police [Prop. E] and screen welfare recipients for drugs [Prop. F], while a measure to boost developers was leading and likely to pass.”  Both propositions were sponsored by moderate-Democrat-turned-conservative London Breed who has low approval ratings and is facing strong challengers to her reelection bid this November.

My wife and I raised money, attended rallies, wrote letters and made phone calls to stave off Boudin’s eventual defeat. We’re not happy that San Francisco has turned from a progressive/liberal Democratic city to a moderate/conservative one. We’re now backing Supervisor Aaron Peskin to challenge Breed’s disappointing incumbency as mayor, one of the only progressives left standing.

Proletarian: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2022

I sat at Nati’s Restaurant in Ocean Beach for a late brunch on a Sunday afternoon. It was 1986. I was on my third Negra Modelo when the waitress served up my heaping plate of Machaca con Huevos with dolloped sour cream, refried beans, Spanish rice, escabeche, pico de gallo, and a stack of corn tortillas. I had high tolerances in those days so I wasn’t even buzzed as I dripped Tapatío hot sauce on my aromatic food.

I had a few drinking routines when I was gainfully employed and living in San Diego. Weekdays after working as a typesetter I bought 16-oz cans of Schlitz malt liquor and drank in the privacy my Pacific Beach apartment. I occasionally went to shows on Friday and Saturday nights. Whether at bars like the Casbah or Spirit Club, or larger venues like the Pacific Palisades or Adams Avenue Theater, I drank my crap malt liquor before the show in my parked car. I didn’t want to be buying expensive, watered-down drinks at some punk dive bar. I’d do a little day drinking some Saturdays and Sundays starting at Nati’s before hitting the Pacific Shore Lounge, then the Beachcomber in Mission Beach and ending up at the West End or the Silver Fox in Pacific Beach at night. The idea was cheap drinks and happy hours, and if I got too wasted by the time I got round to Pacific Beach I could always park my car and walk home.

Hope is the mother of fools: “What’s Left?” August 2020

Train Tracks

Hope is the mother of fools.
—Polish proverb

Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.
—Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

The populist myth: “What’s Left?” February 2020 (MRR #441)

When the axe entered the forest, the trees said: “The handle is one of us.”

—Turkish proverb

I remember a brief carefree idyll when I was fourteen. I lived with my family in Ventura, California, went to Balboa Junior High, and had teenager jobs the occasional evening, weekend or summer. But I spent all my spare time at the beach swimming, surfing and skateboarding. When I enrolled in Buena High School the head gym teacher, Mason Parrish, put all the incoming sophomores through a battery of athletic tests to determine in which sports we might excel. Parrish coached the football team, and was in the process of building Buena’s swim and water polo teams to win multiple national awards, compete in the 1968-72 Olympic trials, and field numerous Junior Olympic Champions. I was a natural in the water, so Coach Parrish recruited me immediately for swimming and water polo.

Parrish was an old school, conservative high school gym coach who began and ended every game with a Christian prayer. He required loyalty from his athletes in school and expected us to practice routines, lift weights, and train regularly outside of class on our own time. All I wanted was to have fun, swim, and go to the beach. Parrish started me in a few swimming competitions and played me in a couple of water polo games. But when he realized I lacked the dedication and drive to give him the full commitment he demanded, he benched me for the duration of the semester. Parrish was openly disappointed, my gung-ho teammates disdained me, and I still had to show up for team practice and events. I was developing, maturing and acquiring new, formative interests in my adolescent life. But my love for swimming was irreparably damaged.

Being Middle Class: “What’s Left?” November 2007, MRR #294

I no longer have to work for a living, thanks to circumstances I won’t go into at the moment. I can do my own projects full time, and I can actually enjoy the rest of my life. I’ve got credit cards and investments. I own a car and a house. No doubt about it, I’ve become middle class.

In a way, I’ve loosely paralleled my parents’ journey up the social ladder. They started out as working class Polish immigrants from war-torn Europe in the mid-1950s. By the time I went off to UC Santa Cruz in 1972, they were solidly, comfortably middle class. I dropped out of graduate school in 1979 to join the wage-laboring proletariat. Now, I too am middle class, though my social status is far more precarious than was my parents’.

Take health care, for example. I exhausted my eighteen months of Federal COBRA Blue Shield health insurance from my last job a few weeks ago. I paid the full cost of the insurance, that is, what the company paid as well as what had previously been deducted from my paycheck, plus a COBRA administration fee. Now I’m on Cal-COBRA, the California-mandated equivalent, for the next year and a half. That’s costing me almost forty dollars a month more, for the same coverage. And, unless Ah-nold manages to push through his market-based knock-off of universal health care, I’ll use Federal HIPAA regulations to convert to a permanent health insurance policy, which promises to cost even more for less coverage.

Being middle class, I can afford to purchase supplemental health insurance to augment my HIPAA policy. That I’m now entirely dependent on legally protected health care and insurance portability has not escaped me, however. When COBRA screwed up a couple of months ago and reported that I wasn’t paid up, resulting in the temporary cancellation of my coverage, I completely freaked out. My anxiety went through the roof and I was in a panic until I straightened out the error. One of my middle class lifelines is my health care, and the incident demonstrated how shaky that was.

My parents made their climb up the economic ladder when folks had careers. People sought to work for a company for life. Unions had a measure of strength in those days, and one of their top demands was always job security. My dad worked most of his life for the government, a civil servant who went from loading dock foreman to managing the Pacific missile range. He retired early, and was guaranteed perks like access to high-level health care and a pension with built-in cost-of-living adjustments.

By the time I toppled out of the ivory tower’s rarified atmosphere, into the murk and mire of wage slavery, the idea of a career had become a joke. The deindustrialization of the United States was beginning in earnest, unions were crumbling, and corporate capitalism was demonstrating its lack of loyalty to the American working class in spades. Workers were reciprocating, and no one expected to work for the same company for life. I never worked at the same job for more than six or seven years. Many of the companies I worked for tried their damnedest not to provide benefits to their employees, one in particular going so far as to declare all its workers freelancers and independent contractors until busted by the government. My last job canned me, allowing me to take an early retirement as well, but leaving me with bare bones health care.

I realize that having shitty, expensive health insurance is better than having no health insurance at all. Forty seven million Americans-mostly working class and poor-are uninsured, so I hold onto my pitiful policy tooth and nail. Nor am I ashamed to say that if the Governator pushes through a better deal for me, I’d take it in a New York minute. My point is that, while being working class is still hell, becoming middle class is not the guarantee of security it once was.

My mom didn’t have to work. Now, it takes two people, sometimes working two or three jobs each, to maintain the middle class life my dad could afford on his salary alone. Not only has the range of health care and pension benefits become shabbier, it’s no longer a sure thing as health insurers regularly deny or cancel coverage, and corporate pension plans go belly-up one after another. Middle class saving has plummeted over the last forty years, and a good number of people in that middle class are also just one or two paychecks from the street. So, while it can be debated as to whether the American middle-class has shrunk demographically in the past few decades, there can be no doubt that, today, it takes a lot more time and effort to maintain a middle class existence that is far more economically precarious.

Now, for the sixty-four dollar question. Might there be a reason for this, other than the relentless avarice of corporations needing to maximize profits?

My parents were part of a post-World War II economic wave that saw the explosive growth of private-sector wealth, suburbs, the white middle class, and a consumer-oriented economy. In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a book, The Affluent Society, the title of which neatly summarized how America portrayed itself going into the ’60s. And affluence meant the ability to buy more and more commodities, with the growing leisure time to enjoy them. Both the threat demonstrated by union organizing and the socialist upsurge during the Great Depression, and the need during the Cold War to outperform the Soviet Union, helped to underpin an economic prosperity that, in turn, produced its own discontents.

This much-touted affluence did not include significant parts of the society-black people for instance-which helped precipitate a civil rights movement, race riots in America’s cities, the rise of a black middle class, black power, and revolutionary nationalism. The burgeoning affluent white middle class raised a generation with the comforts of abundance, only to see significant numbers of their children rebel, even reject their middle class status, by protesting the Vietnam war, immersing themselves in New Left politics, or dropping out to become hippies. By turning affluence into austerity and putting the screws to the middle class, it was hoped that a repeat of the social unrest of the 60s could be avoided.

There was an interesting notion circulating in those years that uprisings by the oppressed didn’t occur when social conditions were at their worst, but actually happened when there was the glimmer of improvement. The rising expectations and aspirations sparked by incremental progress was what prompted rebellion and revolution in the lower classes, not the total desperation of being up against the wall with nothing left to lose. Fostering a climate of increasing scarcity in which even the middle class finds it harder and harder just to tread water helps insure that America’s oppressed minorities don’t get any wrong ideas.

Those who participated in the various social movements of the 1960’s who neither flew off into the ether of Hindu/LSD mysticism nor sank into the quicksand of one or another kind of Leninism-that is, those who straddled the divide between the counterculture and the New Left-often came to similar conclusions about America’s affluent society. The more politically aware communalists, Diggers, Yippies, Provos, Motherfuckers, et al, realized that US society was so wealthy, so abundant in commodities and leisure time, that an entire alternative social order could maintain itself, even flourish, simply on what this society threw away. Some even fancied that their marginal cultural and political spaces would grow strong enough to entirely supplant the dominant society. The absurdity of this fantasy aside, any potential for creating an alternative social order by siphoning off or stealing a fraction of society’s prosperity was easily annulled by replacing abundance with scarcity. If the lower and middle classes spend all their waking hours just struggling to make ends meet, that possibility is effectively negated.

Not to be too heavy handed, but the history lesson here bears repeating.

America’s economic collapse in the Great Depression generated unprecedented labor organizing, the most radical elements of which had called for both revolution and socialism. The bourgeoisie responded to this threat with equal parts carrot, stick, and diversion. The diversion was entry into the second World War, which drafted American workers and shipped them overseas to fight and kill German and Japanese workers. The stick was a savage post-war anti-communism, under the catchall called McCarthyism, which domesticated the American working class and gelded its union movement. And the carrot was a post-war consumer economy and leisure society built on the myth that everyone was middle class. When the affluent society failed to lull significant segments of the population into soporific acceptance of the status quo, and instead produced the racial conflicts, political protests, and countercultural experimentation that we now call the ’60s, it was time for a further tweak. Austerity replaces affluence, the middle class is driven to the edge, and the ruling class once again turns their full attention to maximizing profits.

What may disturb some of you is that I seem to think that the capitalist ruling class-the bourgeoisie-is some kind of secret, totally evil, smoke-filled backroom cabal that is consciously conspiring to fuck over the rest of us. Nothing could be further from the truth. I really do loath conspiracy theories, of any sort. But I do assume that, nine times out of ten, people act out of their economic interests, and that different social classes in society have different economic interests. After that, systems theory and Marxist notions of “class consciousness” can adequately explain how the capitalist class asserts its interests, and control, over the working class.

A basic tenet of systems theory is that, an ecosystem for example, can be entirely self-organizing and self-regulating based solely on the autonomous, self-activity of its members. There is no “grand council” of the redwood forest for instance, yet the redwood forest functions just fine without one. There is overwhelming evidence that biological systems, and growing evidence that social systems, abide by this rule. All living systems, and in theory human social systems, thus have an innate capacity to self-organize and self-regulate. That this can apply to social classes within a larger society is not much of a stretch.

Follow up systems theory with Marx’s idea that one of the preconditions for a social class to gain power in society is for that class to become self-aware. In other words, class conscious. This requires that the class in question go beyond the unconscious self-activity, self-organization, and self-regulation common to all systems, towards the creation of organs and institutions of self-reflection. self-governance, and self-defense. In Marxist terms, the social class must move from being a “class in itself” to a “class for itself.” The bourgeoisie exemplifies just such a “class for itself” with its various business newspapers and journals, its numerous commercial and manufacturing associations, its vast private security and intelligence apparatus, and its well-oiled lobbying and influence machinery. Thanks to such class conscious activity and organization, they are in de facto control over government at all levels of society, affirming Marx’s definition of the state as “the executive committee of the ruling class.”

The capitalist ruling class, therefore, does not have to conspire to globalize the economy, or bust the unions, or undermine the middle class. It does so openly, discussing such matters candidly in the Wall Street Journal and then carrying them out through the marketplace and government policy. Obviously there is obfuscation, public relations, and influence buying. But out-and-out conspiracy? It’s hardly needed. Nor, I might add, is the bourgeoisie particularly evil. It is merely pursuing its class interests, with a vengeance.

Common wisdom used to be that the poor far outnumbered the rich, and that a strong, prosperous middle class was the best possible bulwark against the poor ultimately expropriating the rich. Supposedly, this was one of the lessons the bourgeoisie learned from the Great Depression. This astute observation no longer holds much influence these days as the middle class gets driven to the wall. Whether this means that poor and working people will rise up and “expropriate the expropriators” is, at this point, the subject of another column.