TIM MARSHALL is a university student in San Francisco and a member of the US socialist organisation Solidarity. In Sydney in July to attend the Resistance conference, he was interviewed for Green Left Weekly by REIHANA MOHIDEEN.
What is it like to live in the United States today?
It's a country full of contradictions. Increasingly the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's difficult because, as a socialist, you have to try to convince people that there is a way to change the balance of forces.
The ruling class has spread an individualistic ideology around all classes, that their success is their success and their failure is their failure. So you have a challenge to say: It's not your fault that General Motors has moved or closed your plant.
It's difficult for people who are facing those kinds of social realities, and you have to try to intervene in a rational way but also in a way that's as radical as the crisis itself.
There's a really high level of distrust and cynicism about the government, and yet that doesn't translate into a left-wing impulse or support for a third party. In fact, in the last elections there was electoral support of 17% for a right-wing third party candidate, Ross Perot.
The abandonment of inner city communities is one of the cutting edge questions. Inner city communities are increasingly left without resources to even provide the most basic services like sanitation and education. They are just abandoned by the bourgeois politicians, who orient their rhetoric and their policies towards better-off suburban and typically more conservative populations.
Which issues would you consider to be the most pressing?
There's really a challenge to preserve public education. People have become accustomed to a levelling out of class privileges, where people come together in public education facilities and gain an education through their own hard work and advance to college and to a better life. It is becoming harder for poorer people and minorities to gain access to that kind of education.
The health care crisis is so severe that even Clinton has to address it in some fashion. There's such a deep need and feeling of anger that there's no guaranteed access to health care. The left has formulated responses, and those are really key to challenging the logic of the market. Working class, even middle class, people increasingly have a hard time meeting payments for private insurance.
The way you can advance is through independent mobilisations like the one we have in California to put single payer health care to a referendum. Some trade unions and some left leadership of trade unions decided to try to win a real single payer health plan that would provide something similar to what you have: a Medicare card for all Californians subsidised by increased tax on individuals, a cigarette tax and a combining of all the other health care programs into a single fund.
There's a polarisation between people who have some kind of union or corporate-funded health plan and those who don't. People who don't are forced to seek care through emergency rooms of public hospitals, which are underfunded, overworked and increasingly being closed down because they're not profitable.
Many people have just what they call catastrophic insurance, which means that in case of a severe accident or debilitating illness you don't lose your home, if you have a home. Every time you go to a doctor and the charge is less than $1000 or $2000, you have to pay for it, and that's considered insurance. And those are people who are employed, and sometimes professional people, who just have that.
A lot of my friends who are employed rely on the free clinics and the public health system, and I myself do. I haven't been to see a doctor in 12 years. Increasingly young people just don't have access to health care.
What is education like?
The numbers they throw around in the courses that I take, studying to become a teacher, is something like one in five people coming out of the public education system are functionally illiterate.
Wherever people can afford to get out of the public school system, they increasingly do so. Chicago population figures are something like 40% white, 30% black, 30% Chicano. In the public school system it's about 90% black and Chicano. All the white people who can possibly get out of the public school system have gone into private schools, religious schools, any kind of alternative to get their kids a better education.
How violent is it in the public school system?
Gangs are still a small minority of youth inside inner city populations. However, they have a disproportionate amount of influence. They set the tone, and that makes the schools increasingly violent.
Gangs are human beings, and if you could provide jobs and educational alternatives in the inner city, you'd see a decline in their influence and a decline in their attractiveness to young people.
Life expectancy is declining, especially for minorities. You have poor people dying of cancer at higher rates than rich people so that really reflects in the poor communities.
Also environmental racism impacts there: people who live by the toxic waste dump, by the huge incinerator in an inner-city disadvantaged community, will be more susceptible to diseases. Asthma is one of the growing diseases in inner cities and industrial areas.
More young African-American men are in prison than are in college or secondary institutions. That gives you a sense of the government's priorities.
There's a social alienation and a kind of randomness to crime that there may not have been in more traditional communities 50 or 30 years ago. Crime rates have not gone up that significantly, but the public perception and fear and alienation have gone up appreciably.
And of course the underlying question is race?
Yes, racism is really on the rise, especially in a place like California, where there are organised campaigns to attack the most basic rights of immigrants. The card that is played by these political movements is that these are illegal immigrants, illegally tapping the resources of us Californians. But immigrants who work in California, illegal or legal, pay taxes, and so even on that level of analysis, they should have as much right to use those services as any other taxpayer.
When the right-wing people say taxpayer and citizen, they mean white citizen. A lot of it is really thinly veiled racism against the Latino population.
The standard of living for white working people has declined, so there's scapegoating of immigrants. The real backlash is against the rights and even just the wage levels of immigrants. The state wants them there because they keep the economy afloat, but they use the anti-immigrant backlash as a way of minimising their impact politically, prohibiting them from even organising.
What is the state of political democracy?
Democracy in the United States is contradictory. People believe in it, and that's something we can work with as leftists; we can try to reassert traditional revolutionary participatory democracy. However, most people are pretty cynical. Presidential elections have turnouts of less than 50% of registered voters, which is not even representative of all those potentially registerable.
So there's a high level of cynicism and deep distrust of the government, and a lot of it has right-wing implications. A lot of the right wing gets its energy from distrust of government. Even right wing people don't see the state as operating in their interests.
How is the left faring in this context?
It's been a key question how the left will relate to the Democratic Party since the 1930s. One tendency has been to relate to the Democratic Party by building a left wing in it. That still exists; it mobilised people to vote for Clinton as recently as the last election.
The Democratic Socialists of America — that has been their project for quite a while. They have a number of congressmen who affiliate with the Democratic Socialists of America and that would be their strategy, to get more Democratic Socialists of America elected on the Democratic ticket.
That strategy has become increasingly hard to mobilise around, especially young people, who may have had some illusions that Clinton would make things better and are now facing the fact that there are still no jobs. It wasn't just a crisis of Reaganism and Bushism but the crisis of capitalism. That's where we have to educate people and that's where there is an edge to youth politics.
Labour especially has been betrayed in its view: Clinton betrayed it on NAFTA, and so the Democratic Party alliances that labour has made are strained.
Labour still has nowhere to go, and the bureaucrats have no real interest in pushing outside the Democratic Party, but rank and file people in the unions and some mid-level bureaucrats have actually began to examine third party options. One key one is Labour Party Advocates.
There are a couple of other third party efforts, specifically the New Party and one called Campaign for a New Tomorrow led by former Rainbow Coalition organiser Ron Daniels, who worked with Jesse Jackson in the '80s and has now come to the realisation that that wasn't the place to work, inside the Democratic Party.
How has the Communist Party fared since it split?
They still produce their paper People's Weekly World, and they may have as many people as any other left group in the United States.
The DSA actually have more people but that is less of a party. The Communist Party has been reduced by age and reduced by the split. They still have some influence in Democratic Party politics in certain areas, and within certain unions they play a key role, but they're increasingly not a part of movements and new developments on the left, especially among students.
And what's happening with the Committees of Correspondence?
Committees of Correspondence still has a great deal of potential. It's people from the Communist Party who have broken with the political project of Stalinism. It's still to be seen what will develop out of them.
They have some positive developments in that they have oriented towards Labour Notes, which is a pool of opposition with a magazine that comes out in support of rank and file workers' struggles and reform caucuses within bureaucratised unions. Committees of Correspondence seems to be fully in support of that project.
What's happening to the Green Party?
The Greens have official ballot lines for all offices in the statewide elections in California. They had to gather 100,000 signatures. A lot of the left see that as a positive thing, as a way to progressively challenge the Democrats in electoral politics.
But since then, there's been a real decline. The Green Party has challenged on local levels but has never mounted a statewide campaign to challenge for governor in a serious way. They haven't raised their presence that high after what initially had been an exciting campaign based on the assumption that there finally was going to be a left alternative to the Democratic Party.
There's also in California a Peace and Freedom Party which has green concerns and is a left-wing alternative, but it's also very small. It may get 1% of the vote in the statewide elections, and the Greens in local races may get 5% or 6%, but none of those really raises left-wing alternative politics to a higher level.
How do you see Solidarity's role in terms of building an independent political alternative?
Solidarity is a regroupment project. It's not yet at the stage where it would call itself a party. Solidarity's project is rebuilding a left that can be viable in the movements, that can begin to challenge some of the assumptions of the free market and the cynicism of people living in the United States.
We have been key players in building Labour Party Advocates and also supporters of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow.
We have focused on building movements that can unite workers and people who depend on the state for services. In California we've helped to build something called People First Campaign, which challenges the priorities of the state's budget crisis. That's really where we're at, building those movements in a way that can begin to bring people from different sectors together, to fight together, rather than to fight for a piece of the pie at the expense of one of the other sectors.
There's been a long decline in the union movement in the States, but there are recent reports of a turnaround. How significant is it?
I think it's very significant. Rank and file members of bureaucratised unions have begun to assert their right to a democratic union structure, to a union that responds to their needs, rather than just making backroom deals with the Democratic Party politicians. Examples of this are Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the New Directions movement [in the United Auto Workers].
Another key element has been organising the unorganised, which is absolutely crucial. The best example of that is the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles, which did what was presumed to be nearly impossible: organise immigrant workers in service industries.
In Illinois, there's kind of a generalised level of fight back. The workers themselves have come out with a slogan that says Illinois is a war zone. Different sectors and different factories have begun to relate to each other and rebuild solidarity.
Especially interesting in immigrant communities in large cities is something called workers' centres. They have built these workers' centres for people from different unions and from non-unionised workplaces and have shared skills and information in a particular neighbourhood or community. That is really a novel approach and one that has not yet been very much supported by traditional unions. It's very important.