Has Jesse Sharkey’s Fringe Socialism Shaped CTU Political Spending and Chicago’s Politics?
Elements injected into citywide discourse strangely mirror the little-known group to which the labor heavyweight devoted years of his life.
Takeaways:
Microfilmed sources show that recent Chicago Teachers Union president Jesse Sharkey was deeply involved with a strange outlier socialist group that believed in armed revolution.
The fringe group’s thinking around law enforcement and race mirrors peculiarities of ongoing political priorities established under Sharkey and backed up by CTU political spending.
People with ties to the historic far left periodically percolate out into today’s mainstream– and that’s not just erstwhile Obama supporters Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn or revolutionary-raised, recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but also former International Socialist Organization (ISO) member and recent Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Jesse Sharkey.
Though rarely if ever mentioned in the Chicago press during his 2014-2022 tenure and omitted or downplayed in his own self-narrations, Sharkey’s ISO entanglements helpfully explain much of the union’s recent history and almost certainly its near-term future, as his preferred Caucus of Rank & File Educators (CORE) successors Stacy Davis Gates and Jackson Potter have now taken the helm and appear to be maintaining Sharkey’s distinctive ISO-like priorities and emphases.
And yet, a large part of Sharkey’s ISO activities from the early 1990s through his first years at CTU have remained buried in many years of undigitized microfilm, thus preventing a deeper understanding of how one man’s intense participation in an explicitly revolutionary group likely came to shape the strategies and culture of one of the nation’s most prominent unions.
Although relatively forgotten today thanks to its protracted mid- to late 2010s dissolution and the absorption of some of its remnants by the suddenly thriving upstart of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the ISO should not be confused with its younger and milder cousin that embraces elected officials from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Chicago City Council’s inaugural Democratic Socialist caucus.
Instead, as seen in the ISO’s Socialist Worker newspaper from the years of Sharkey’s growing involvement, the organization was more radical and regimented as well as often times stranger, even as it propounded some positions in continuity with mainstream political discourse.
Although many of the most prominent American radicals began to display openness to democratic change from the early 1990s onward, a perceived necessity of arms and even some scattered occasions of revolutionary violence were not uncommon characteristics of the far left of the mid-to-late 20th century, whether for the Black Panthers that marched in formation, the Weather Underground that built bombs, or the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst, crammed her into a closet, and transformed her into a beret-wearing bank robber named “Tania.”[i]
Here, the ISO patterned relatively similarly. Making their home in the variegated and shifting world of outsider subcultures that social scientists have theorized as the testing grounds for many different kinds of social change, extreme political groups can constitute a staggering array of overlapping currents as well as a thwarted tangle of fine distinctions and explosive touchstones whose importance to insiders is matched only by their opacity to those on the outside.
Thus, like other groups on that outer end of the political spectrum, the ISO internally most defined itself through a myriad of intellectual and geo-political positions. Specifically, as quasi-religious self-styled bearers of the “real” Marxist tradition, the ISO notably revered Trotsky, while viewing Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union as socialism-perverting “state capitalist regimes.”[ii]
And yet, in retrospect, perhaps the most striking fact is the ISO’s not infrequent verbal flirtation with the idea of necessary violence. Although apparently not committing any acts of armed violence nor making any explicit, immediate threats of the type that could be legally actionable, the group nevertheless raised the issue at least theoretically via means like the recurring lecture “Is Violence Necessary to Change Society?”[iii] Furthermore, the ISO platform’s baseline stances not only traditionally questioned the legitimacy of the “federal and state governments” and state-authorized users of force like the “army and police,” but also denied their essential compatibility with any form of worker control due to the fact that “[t]he present state apparatus… was developed to maintain the capitalist system [and] cannot be taken over and converted to serve workers.”[iv]
In line with this background position of the current U.S. social order’s illegitimacy, the ISO accordingly seems to have envisioned the ultimate overthrow of the government at some point down the line. For example, one article entitled “The limits of non-violence” flags civil disobedience as “fundamentally elitist and ineffective as an overall strategy to change society,” concluding in a fairly representative sentiment that “[a]ny struggle for major change – let alone revolutionary struggle – will necessarily involve a test of strength with the forces of the state” since “it is utopian to expect our rulers to concede anything without a fight.”[v]
Pointedly, however, even as other groups that advocated for revolution dwindled and collapsed across the decades after the country moved past the 70s zeitgeist, the ISO nevertheless marshaled on as an outlier and used its primary public-facing organ to make such statements all the way through and beyond the year 2000 and the dawn of the new millennium, even as dedicated long-term member and Socialist Worker contributor Jesse Sharkey began teaching in Chicago classrooms.
* * *
For parsing the recent history of CTU, however, this advocacy of armed violence is a striking but otherwise irrelevant part of larger ISO culture and its two much more directly germane major dynamics: certain overarching social change theories and strategies, and a heightened regimentation underlying it all.
First, although perhaps a bit overwhelming when first encountered, many details of ISO theory and practice map rather neatly onto CTU’s political turn as it emerged from the Karen Lewis era.
Within the confines of its thinking, the ISO apparently perceived itself as coalescing the earliest stages of a movement that would more fully manifest as a workers’ party, draw broad public support, and then ultimately challenge and replace the existing state as part of a necessarily multi-country global revolution. “To achieve socialism, the most militant workers must be organized into a revolutionary socialist party to provide political leadership and organization,” a 2000 platform intoned; “The activities of the ISO are directed at taking the initial steps to building such a party.”[vi] Accordingly, the ISO seemed to imagine a subsequent bi-pronged progression where “political organization [should] coordinate the power of workers” through “strikes and well-organized workers’ demonstrations,” while “[u]rban rebellions will play a part.”[vii] After that, the ISO foresaw an inevitable conflict between the capitalist forces that control the government and its armed wings like the military and the police, and an ISO-sparked bevy of “councils of workers’ delegates” and “a workers’ militia.”[viii] In the farthest future, this new ISO-led form of social organization would then draw on “the lessons of 1917” and replicate its insurrectionary success across countries in order to avoid a situation like how “the isolation of the Russian Revolution internationally eventually robbed workers of their victory.”[ix]
To dwell on several organizational specifics of the most immediate of these stages, though, the ISO importantly planned to create a revolutionary socialist party headed by militant workers and drawing on the efforts of marginalized urban communities.
In terms of the worker component of this movement, the ISO appeared to arrive at a strategy of developing rank-and-file-led unions and eventually a corresponding political party. Here, in a transmutation of common labor movement goals, the consistent strategy seemed to revolve around growing groups of rank-and-file workers independent of union bureaucracies and gestating them through consciousness-raising actions within labor and eventually other causes as practice runs for ordering society after ending existing forms of government. “Each of these struggles gives workers a further sense of their ability to run society for themselves,” the Socialist Worker observed in one such regular assertion.[x]
The political destination of this worker energy was more of a roving target, however. Despite scare quotes-deploying contempt for Bernie Sanders’s early 1980s electoral success – “[S]upport for Sanders cannot be equated with support for ‘socialism’ of whatever stripe,” the Socialist Worker said at the time – the ISO came to settle on a position equating all Democrats and Republicans from at least as early as Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign, eventually advancing efforts like the Green Party’s Ralph Nader as a means to “build a socialist alternative” since “Bore” and “Gush” “isn’t a choice.”[xi] Per the ISO’s plans, this new political party would then foment social change, avoiding historic pitfalls like how the Democratic Party absorbed and enervated worker radicalism during the age of FDR.[xii]
In terms of the broader public portion of this movement, one important component was drawing in related causes so as to form a common group of people devoted to overturning the system. “Revolutionary workers have to struggle alongside non-revolutionaries over immediate issues – from building the unions to fighting police brutality to defending gay rights,” the Socialist Worker stated at one point, since “[i]n this way, the revolutionary party grows in size and influence – slowly during ‘normal’ times, rapidly when economic crisis forces millions to draw radical conclusions.”[xiii]
Of these populations, perhaps most important were marginalized urban communities, who were viewed as a malleable potential constituency and occasionally contrasted to a self-focused, well-off black population like that seen behind Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s mayoral tenure.[xiv] For example, what’s popularly known as the LA Riots was categorized by the Socialist Worker “an [1]expression of deep-seated anger at the bottom of society” and “a glimpse of what masses of people can accomplish by their own action,” although ideally “[w]orkers and their organizations” need to help these underclasses identify “their real enemies” and “give a focus for spontaneous explosions of anger and bitterness when they break out.”[xv] In a revealing choice of vocabulary, these events were consistently renamed to justify and valorize them via labelling as “the Watts rebellion,” “the LA rebellion,” “the Attica uprising,” and the like, thus aligning them with labor actions like the 1909-1910 garment worker “uprising” that led to International Women’s Day.[xvi]
In an accordant strategy, the Socialist Worker maintained corresponding reportage and propaganda. It kept up a years-long stream of headlines and story blurbs like “Killer cop goes free in Detroit,” “Thugs in blue,” “LAPD: Racist thugs in blue,” “Police terror in New York City,” “NYC cops kill again,” “NYC’s killer cops strike again,” “New York cops go berserk,” “Murdered by the cops,” “Police in the U.S. today: OUT OF CONTROL,” “Don’t let the cops get away with murder!”, “Don’t let another cop get away with murder,” and “Stop the killer cops!”[xvii] Although many if not all of these incidents likely indexed to actual police brutality, it is nonetheless also undeniable that coverage deployed a consistent messaging strategy of movement recruitment through visceral blanket demonization of law enforcement. Multiple articles could appear in a single issue – for example, “New York cops on a rampage” surfaced alongside a San Francisco-related article “Murdered by the cops” – while multiple articles across multiple years also displayed the same or similar motivational title “Stop the killer cops!” or “Stop these killer cops!”[xviii] More tellingly, at least three times across a period of more than three years, the Socialist Worker actually re-used the same stock protest photo of people holding a protest banner “STOP THE RACIST KILLER COPS,” thus violating the basic operating assumption of world-to-page truthfulness in order to manipulate readers and push this pre-set message.[xix] For a contrasting positive path, the Socialist Worker juxtaposed the social spending dysfunction captured in Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex, albeit in cover blurbs like “Money for schools, not more prisons” and “Jobs not jails,” not to mention pointed questions like “Will more cops stop crime?” and assertions that increased policing will lead to “more harassment” and “even more violence.”[xx]
Against this admittedly lengthy background, a number of intertwined CTU developments become more intelligible.
Most obviously, ISO theory and practice helps explain CTU’s mid-2010s pivot towards funding the political party United Working Families (UWF), a major organizational development already somewhat in the public eye due to how both the press and union-internal factions like the Members First caucus are increasingly scrutinizing and questioning CTU spending. As analyzed in Micah Uetricht’s 2014 book Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity – a book that now reads very much like a pre-UWF time capsule – CTU leadership witnessed a shift in their social change thinking and began tentatively expanding outward from “bargaining for the common good” to electoral politics in 2013 and 2014.[xxi] After UWF was incorporated in August 2014 in what would turn out to be the last months of Karen Lewis’s CTU presidency, in late 2014 she was sidelined by the cancer that would eventually cause her death and so ISO devotee Jesse Sharkey thus became acting president. Afterwards, UWF formed its corresponding political action committee (PAC) in January 2015, and then enjoyed a nearly $50,000 founding donation from CTU’s own PAC.
Although quasi-linked organizations are a feature of labor life – the current Fight for $15 movement associated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is probably the foremost example – certain emphases of UWF and its evolution seem notable in light of Sharkey’s historic ISO commitments.
Notably, even beyond the early 2010s moment when many in labor were questioning the solidity of Democratic support, UWF is strongly associated with the ISO-shared devotion to forging a ‘third party’ – whether disavowing the two party system and declaring “our commitment to form a new political party” in its 2016 platform, or its slightly moderated openness to “candidates from the major parties and in third parties” in its current constitution.[xxii]
In terms of the militant workers that are supposed to theoretically nourish such a party according to ISO theory, it is suggestive that the existence of UWF overlapped with recent CTU leadership’s drive to push labor actions even in doubtful situations, like the January 2022 Covid precautions dispute that drew substantial pushback in the subsequent CTU leadership election. Presumably, CORE leadership ploughed on despite red flags because of the operative assumption that such an action would further help develop radical worker consciousness and ownership of power.
Perhaps even more resonant with the ISO’s strategies is the relationship of CORE and UWF to matters of race. Initially, issues of race were comparatively backgrounded in UWF priorities and optics, and its founding 2015 press junket even highlighted how its executive director was a German heritage woman from rural Wisconsin. As a stated priority, however, UWF has increasingly emphasized its support of “Black and brown candidates who come from the rank and file of our movements for racial, social, and economic justice” – a position that at its most anodyne could be a simple recognition of activist achievements and the importance of representation, but is also compatible with the ISO theory of bottom-up revolutionary development from within marginalized urban communities and through topical alliances. Strikingly, although minimal or absent from past City Council endorsees like Scott Waguespack and Sue Sadlowski Garza and fresh aldermanic faces like Matt Martin and Maria Hadden, inflammatory law enforcement rhetoric resembling that deployed by the ISO has also found a home with and around some recent UWF endorsees and hyped politicians like City Council members Jeanette Taylor, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, and Daniel La Spata, and the use of the word “cop” as a slur against “Cop Lightfoot” has even been pushed over UWF social media channels, in conjunction with CTU’s and UWF’s social media feeds disseminating “uprising” terminology. Of the many intersecting issues surfacing or that could surface in the highly polarized discussion of the police killing of thirteen year old Adam Toledo – issues that at times have included gangs and guns and even occasional mention of the Covid era-absence of schools as safe havens – the most characteristic rhetorical pattern from the CTU-UWF orbit has been the ISO’s traditional opposition of policing to public services, often with ISO-like inflammatory wording. For example, a recent UWF tweet used the hook of a budgetary item to deploy preset messaging and issue the demand “#StopShotSpotter and reinvest that money into the youth programs that Adam needed, not militarized police who get away with murder.” Furthermore, the relation of UWF aldermanic endorsees to the currently regnant socialist organization of the DSA seems telling; whereas someone like Carlos Ramirez-Rosa adopted socialism through teenage reading, someone like Jeanette Taylor appears to have grown into it haltingly via grassroots activism around educational disinvestment and then political alliances, in line with the generalized conversion biography envisioned by the ISO.
In favor of some form of ISO influence over CTU’s political spending via Jesse Sharkey, it should also be noted that these distinctive emphases on third party politics and race vis-à-vis policing are not explicitly mentioned within CORE’s purpose as expressed by its bylaws, despite the overwhelming presence of issues like democracy, social justice curricula, differential underfunding of public education, and anti-racism – a notable gap that raises the fundamental question of where these characteristics came from and how they came to be woven into the most prominent manifestation of CTU’s recent political turn. Here, too, it might also be noted that although there was an explosion of concern and thinking about nitty-gritty issues of policing in schools in between the 2012 and 2018 versions of The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve – the document that one CORE member has termed “our manifesto” – these matters of community well-being and justice are separable from and largely do appear separate from these larger political strategies that by all appearances seem to have roots in or received encouragement from Sharkey due to his personal formation in the ISO.[xxiii]
* * *
Second, beyond theory and practice, the ISO displayed a certain telling excess that is a subtle but defining characteristic creeping out from and increasingly normalized by CTU under CORE’s leadership.
To take a step back from all that thinking about society and its transformation, throughout all of ISO’S organizational culture there was what can be described as an extraordinary fire apparent in a heady mix of tight cadres, overriding single-mindedness, and black-and-white factional touchstones.
Many social movements can foster and even depend on immoderate devotion, and, as befits this self-described “core of revolutionaries committed to keeping alive the genuine socialist tradition while most of the left was in retreat,” the Socialist Worker not only catalogued injustices from boss fights to police killings across many years of articles and multi-city coordinated lectures, but also told hagiographies of the Russian Revolution where workers for a brief instant were able to consistently monitor and quickly recall any charged delegate who violated the popular will.[xxiv] Revealingly, the organization could even poke fun at this intensity, archly beginning one article about summer beach books with a checklist of swimsuit, sunscreen, and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.[xxv] Admittedly, some disagreement did in fact exist, but even in these small matters, a push towards the extreme was evident, like occurred with outflanking adversarial behavior extrapolating implications of other members’ thoughts and encouraging intellectual uniformity. For example, in a particularly lively 1997 debate about recognizing as a language what’s now termed African American Vernacular English, Sharkey’s fellow ISO member and eventual spouse Julie Fain sharply rejected the ideological implications of a previous article mentioning potential funding competition among Spanish, Mandarin, and Ebonics in Oakland schools. That position on Ebonics “is coming dangerously close to accepting the argument that the pie isn’t big enough,” she writes; instead, “we should argue… there’s plenty of money to go around.”[xxvi]
Accordingly, this intensity at times went a notch beyond what is typically found in other groups that also seek to improve society. Strangely, the publication offered reviews of high-profile pop culture developments, and, despite the many ways art is popularly judged – typically, beauty or pleasure – here the dominant criterion seemed to be ideological alignment, however inchoate. For example, Harry Potter is praised as an allegory of the proletariat where “an ordinary boy whose full potential – at first ruthlessly suppressed – bursts out in a struggle against domination and evil,” while Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide was recognized because “Kurt sang for millions who wanted to rebel.” Fain herself commends the film adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker due to its proper vilification of the U.S. healthcare system, under the joylessly didactic title “Why we hate insurance companies.”[xxvii] In their fervency, everything, including entertainment, collapsed into the cause.
In this regard, though a very small thing, the Socialist Worker’s treatment of Princess Diana is telling; shortly after her death, they ran an article entitled “Diana was not one of ‘us’” that not only disputed her moniker “people’s princess,” but also termed her “one of ‘them’” and called for the expropriation of the wealth of the British royal family.[xxviii] Interestingly, this particularly vehement hatred of Princess Diana appears to have become something of a mental crotchet of the group, surfacing almost two years after her death as a post-mortem potshot in a published letter condemning the then-new Star Wars stereotype of Jar Jar Binks; “Queen Amidala’s ever-changing wardrobe and decadent marble palace,” it states, “are reminiscent of the late Princess Diana’s lifestyle.”[xxix]
In light of this subcultural texture evident within the ISO, scattered occurrences at CTU and with UWF also become more intelligible. For example, uneasiness with the escalating authoritarian and somewhat arbitrary group norms that are technically separate from the formation of coalitions and timely achievement of political goals probably helps to explain the number of progressives frozen out by or dissatisfied with CORE: fired CTU field rep John Kugler, recently disappeared long-time CTU staffer Martin Ritter, the otherwise politically similar Respect-Educate-Advocate-Lead (REAL) caucus, and top Chicago progressives like Scott Waguespack, who had previously been endorsed by UWF but was noticeably absent in the 2019 cycle, even as he ultimately received CTU’s endorsement.
In a slightly more diffuse example, one might categorize here too the associated public disciplining of Alderman Andre Vasquez for his vote for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 budget and against the UWF party line. Just like the ISO had Russian Revolution hagiography praising short-order responsiveness to a popular assembly, so too has such a narrative template floated around the edges of the DSA and even become applied to CTU. For instance, in his Strike for America book, DSA member Uetricht retells how early in CORE’s history Karen Lewis faced revolt over and retracted her unwise endorsement of Illinois legislation undermining union power, thereby showing CORE’s fealty “to its left, bottom-up principles.”[xxx] From gerrymandering to policy particulars, the ability of representatives to insulate themselves from their constituents is undoubtedly a recurring topic in political life, as is the periodic granting or withholding of contributions by interest groups. Yet here, in line with the ISO ideal and in tandem with a political party formed roughly in accordance with ISO strategies, a hardliner cadre including those outside a representative’s district expected to exercise immediate control on developing political circumstances, even in a murky situation where progressives were split.
Lastly, one might also point to certain quirks in mentality and behavior apparent in the City Council members most at home with UWF and CTU’s current leadership. For example, DSA Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez can put on an apocalyptic tone sometimes found among scattered socialists, such as where she expresses a desire to “build a society worth living in” and thereby makes use of an extreme bifurcation to mournfully gesture towards the nature of life in a fallen world. During the most recent Democratic Party presidential nomination battle, DSA Alderman and outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter Carlos Ramirez-Rosa strongly endorsed the Tara Reade sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden and repeatedly stated on Twitter that “Joe Biden is a rapist,” including in the mentions of Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Milano. In each respect, though small, both politicians undertook behavior that reaps organization-internal rewards and social reinforcement, but stand in tension with advancement in influence and achieving social change; put quite simply, at times they have simply lost track of what they sound like to others, and have thereby rendered themselves exceedingly strange. Like people penning paint-by-number pop culture reviews and set off by Princess Diana, they have become steeped in and dulled to those outside their subcultural norms, norms grown increasingly regnant and promulgated under the auspices of UWF through recent Jesse Sharkey-guided CTU political spending.
* * *
Overall, in terms of influences on CTU, it is true that many of these aspects have not been limited to the ISO, and direct causality cannot be easily drawn among documentation gaps and subcultural cross-fertilization. Furthermore, many of Sharkey’s contributions are relatively innocuous, detailing the struggles of unionized workers at Rhode Island Hospital and then later at Chicago Public Schools.[xxxi]
And yet, neither should the depth of Sharkey’s involvement in and formation by the ISO be underestimated. When explicitly revolutionary groups were already past their heyday, Sharkey chose to join and maintain membership in such an outlier-turned-further-outlier. He also married and created a life together with fellow ISO member Julie Fain, and together they contributed a letter on standardized testing to the Socialist Worker as late as 2013, when Sharkey was already CTU Vice President under Karen Lewis.
Even more than that, Sharkey’s Socialist Worker contributions repeat many of the group’s core tenets. For example, for a 1995 item coincidentally published on January 6th , he co-conducted the worker interviews that hyped social unrest via one interviewee’s quote chosen for presentation in bolded type: “Someday soon, there might be a revolution of some kind – there might even be another civil war.”[xxxii] Sharkey himself almost certainly supported overturning the U.S. government and may have preached about it at least once since the Socialist Worker lists him by name as delivering the stock ISO lecture “Reform or Revolution”; although the lecture’s exact contents are not given there, the implications of its title could not be clearer, since the adjacent ISO platform specifies in bold “REVOLUTION NOT REFORM” over a section declaring Congress and the armed forces illegitimate and instead calling for the institution of workers’ councils and militias.[xxxiii]
Similarly, Sharkey committed to paper specific forms of the ISO’s overarching thought on workers and urban rebellions. In a book review of an account of a late 1980s factory strike, he endorsed the position that worker actions can lead to desirable transformations in consciousness by highlighting material about workers taking charge and getting lost in the cause.[xxxiv] In addition to writing on police brutality within the ISO’s ideological framework, he also penned a lengthy historical review that valorized “the bravery and unity of the 1,300 prisoners” behind what’s commonly known as the Attica prison riot, terming them an “uprising” in an article entitled “Rebellion at Attica” and mentioning their spontaneous formation into democratic forms with elected leadership.[xxxv]
Furthermore, even as Sharkey left CTU leadership, his legacy remains. One should imagine nothing so crass as a McCarthyite witch hunt-meriting “red scare”-type scenario, where the remnants of the ISO have invaded and internally subverted organizations from the DSA to various unions and political committees. Instead, better envisioned is a situation where one fervent man who happened into a position of sizeable influence then located ‘fellow travelers,’ quietly steered political spending into places that align with his half-stated thoughts and strategies, and helped jumpstart the UWF organization as an ongoing experiment that is now set off into the world and disproportionately shapes the politics of America’s third largest city.
In this ongoing situation, then, on the one hand there remain Sharkey’s fellow travelers who determine dollars’ direction and thus wield pointed political influence. Among them are Sharkey’s CORE acolytes and current CTU President Stacy Davis Gates and Vice President Jackson Potter, not to mention current UWF Executive Director Emma Tai, as UWF embarks on a fresh round of “social investment vs. police spending” for the 2023 municipal election cycle, having moved on to this narrative from the “social investment vs. tax increment financing” framing of cycles past. Although not often as mentioned, SEIU Healthcare (SEIU HC) has served as a strong but silent partner for UWF and its ways, particularly through current Executive Vice President Erica Bland-Durosinmi, who has even made at least one attempt in importing manipulative ISO-resonant tactics into her own union. For instance, in a move without seeming parallel in recent SEIU HC history, Bland-Durosinmi sent a strange March 2021 membership-internal email about two dueling courses of action for reforming police raids; notably, she claimed that “[w]e know it could happen to us” and “[i]t has happened to some of us already” and deployed starkly contrastive rhetoric highlighting the favored ordinance as the “only solution,” only for this lurid depiction of imminent member unsafety to disappear once that legislative push faltered.[xxxvi]
On the other hand there remain the participants and beneficiaries who are either cynical or unwitting. Although CTU has a laudably open and democratic union election structure, its primary UWF partner SEIU Healthcare has a mega-local pattern where advancement is more dependent on pleasing higher bureaucratic echelons; thus, it stands to reason that UWF funding and the ascendence of Bland-Duronsinmi and her protégée and current SEIU HC Political Director Candis Castillo has taken place through the negligence or more likely with the approval of current President Greg Kelley. Within the domain of supported politicians, although there are deeply involved representatives like attack dog Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, there also are less closely aligned progressives like City Council members Maria Hadden and Matt Martin and State Representative Theresa Mah. With the latter – as also with Governor J.B. Pritzker and Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, who have elevated and appeared alongside Bland-Durosinmi -- it must be wondered if they are truly aware that they lend their reputations and give gas to this open secret of a schismatic tendency and its medium-term potential to severely undermine the Democratic Party. The same goes for individual members of Chicago’s many recently seeded Independent Precinct Organizations that have proliferated and per common community organizing playbooks have provided backdrops to challenge and replace current representatives with those more amenable to UWF-determined policies and practices.
Overall, observations have floated around about the changing nature of CTU for a while now – for example, when the Chicago Tribune noted that its official social media account strangely hyped a quasi-official CTU delegation to Venezuela that performed apologetics for the Maduro regime, or when controversy arose around how CTU approvingly tweeted about protestors putting a guillotine outside then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s house (“We are completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed.”). Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been particularly astute; she has been terming CTU here and there as something increasingly like a “political party” and has even referred to their actions with the term “propaganda.” Indeed, her famous “You gotta be f*cking kidding me” reaction to DSA Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez’s strange meandering comments on black people effectively amounted to a visceral reaction to subcultural norms unexpectedly colliding with the mainstream, though Lightfoot later claimed she was reacting to something else. Yet, amidst all this noise and even amidst all of these memorable occurrences, missing has been a fuller picture of recent developments, including the growing and increasingly unavoidable UWF.
As strange as it may seem – and as hard as it may be to point out, given how much it resembles a Fox News fever dream – it seems indisputable that under the cover of progressives pushing Democrats, there has arisen a fringe socialism-shaped and union bureaucracy-backed experiment that dissembles and lurches and has the strong potential to linger on institutionally and even split the party, even as a key player like Jesse Sharkey has stepped back from active engagement.
We are living in strange times, and life is a very strange thing.
Author’s Note. During many years of political engagement, my paths have repeatedly crossed with a good deal of the people and organizations named here. For instance, my participation in higher education unionization drives alone saw me coming into contact with Micah Uetricht in his capacity as editor for an article of mine at Jacobin; Alderman Scott Waguespack through my testimony as a worker at a City Council hearing; Candis Castillo in her work as a late-stage drive staffer; and Jesse Sharkey when he spoke at a rally. In all cases, hunches and insights deriving from this deep knowledge have been developed through conversation and verified through extensive further research, the sources for which have been hyperlinked and footnoted. Since in the past inflammatory rhetoric around policing has allegedly been met with threats of violence, it must be stated unequivocally that any such threats are unacceptable and should be quickly investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
[i] Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, With a New Foreword by Alicia Garza, Cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 3-6, 294-296.
[ii] Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 122-124. For authenticity phraseology and religious overtones, note various ISO events related to “What is the Real Marxist Tradition?” (e.g. in the ad for the ISO’s “Socialist Summer School ’97,” Socialist Worker [SW], 23 May 1997, 9; and the “What’s On” event listing, SW, 8 October 1999, 12); as well as how the regular feature “What Do Socialists Say?” denies that Marxism is a religion, yet also declares Stalinism “a perversion of Marxism” and endorses an alternate “genuine Marxist tradition… which Socialist Worker stands in today” (John Molyneux, “Is Marxism nothing more than dogma?”, SW, 3 January 1997, 7). For the influence of Trotsky, see lectures such as “Who Was Trotsky?“, “Who Was Leon Trotsky and What Did He Stand For?”, “The Revolutionary Ideas of Leon Trotsky,” and “The Politics of Leon Trotsky” (“What’s On,” SW, 8 December 1995, 8; and 14 March 1997, 8); repeated mention of books on Trotsky that can be ordered from the same P.O. Box where ISO interest slips can be sent, including one volume touted as “Trotskyism [brought] up to date as a weapon for workers in struggle” and extending through a later post mortem tribute to those books’ author Tony Cliff and his contributions to “Trotskyists” and “the ideas of the genuine Marxist tradition” (“Season’s Readings from Bookmarks,” SW, 6 December 1996, 8; “From Bookmarks, Trotskyism after Trotsky,” SW, 13 August 1999, 8; and Lance Selfa, “Tony Cliff: 1917-2000, A giant whose shoulders we stand on,” SW, 28 April 2000, 10); and the incorporation of Trotsky’s perspective within political analysis of the Russian Revolution through the rise of Stalin (Harold Moss, “Why the Russian Revolution was lost,” SW, 24 October 1997, 6). For continuity across more than 12 years, compare the regularly-published stock platforms of “Where We Stand, SW, October 1988, 12 (“We don’t believe there are any socialist countries… The so-called ‘socialist’ countries are state capitalist, in which the state bureaucracy exploits the working class as the private employers do here”) and “Where We Stand,” SW, 7 July 2000, 12 (“China and Cuba, like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, have nothing to do with socialism. They are state capitalist regimes which oppress and exploit workers”).
[iii] For example, the Socialist Worker’s “What’s On” event listings for 24 November 1995, 8; 26 February 1999, 8; and 7 July 2000, 12.
[iv] “Where We Stand, SW, October 1988, 12. Note the roughly equivalent platform in “Where We Stand,” SW, 7 July 2000, 12: “The structures of the present government – the Congress, the army, the police and the judiciary – cannot be taken over and used by the working class. They grew up under capitalism and are designed to protect the ruling class against workers.”
[v] Lee Sustar, “The limits of non-violence,” SW, October 1988, 13. In this vein, other articles from across a span of years also sweepingly observe that “[r]evolution… is the necessary means by which human society moves forward” since “no ruling class ever exited the stage of history without fighting to maintain its own rule and privileges” (bolding in original; Paul D’Amato, “Does social change happen gradually?”, SW, 4 February 2000, 13); and that “[a] revolutionary socialist organization” is needed “because the ruling class is well-organized through its state and military [and] will use this force to put down even the smallest struggles for reform” (Ashley Smith, “Why you should join the socialists,” SW, April 1994, 9).
[vi] “Where We Stand,” SW, 7 July 2000, 12. Note the roughly equivalent platform in “Where We Stand, SW, October 1988, 12: “In order for workers to transform their struggles against capitalism into the fight for a new society, a revolutionary party rooted in the working class is necessary to provide political leadership and organization,” prior to an identical statement that “[t]he activities of the ISO are directed at taking the initial steps to build such a revolutionary party.”
[vii] “Why our rulers hate the ‘rabble,’” SW, 19 June 1998, 7 (bolding removed).
[viii] “Where We Stand,” SW, 7 July 2000, 12. Note the partially equivalent platform in “Where We Stand, SW, October 1988, 12, which highlights “mass democratic councils of workers’ delegates,” but omits the precise mechanism of violent resistance.
[ix] Paul D’Amato, “Lenin and the Russian Revolution,” SW, 13 October 2000, 10. Note similar statements across more than a decade in the recurring “Where We Stand” ISO platform summary: “A socialist revolution cannot survive in one country” (SW, October 1988, 12), which aligns with “[t]he experience of Russia demonstrates that a socialist revolution cannot survive in one country” (SW, 7 July 2000, 12).
[x] Excerpt from Alan Maass’s book Why You Should Be a Socialist in “How workers can change the world,” 17 March 2000, 8: “But the struggle to change this or that aspect of society raises deeper questions. People begin to see the links between the struggles they’re involved in and other issues – and the nature of the system itself. Each of these struggles gives workers a further sense of their ability to run society for themselves. The act of taking over political power is the final step of a revolution that has already been felt in every workplace, in every neighborhood and in every corner of society.” For a clear statement about the strategy of organizing within unions, see Bill Roberts, “One big union?”, SW, 18 August 1995, 7 (italics in original): “The push from below must be organized. Rank-and-file pressure without leadership can quickly dissipate. Socialists in the workplace aim to build rank-and-file organization that takes as its guide the 1915 declaration of the Clyde Shipyard Workers’ Committee in Scotland: ‘We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately if they misrepresent them.” See also assertions such as “[t]his is why struggle is so important. In the course of fighting back, workers gain confidence” (Lian Schmidt, “Are workers able to run society?”, SW, 3 July 1998, 7; bolding removed); “Activity is the most important single factor in changing consciousness. In changing the world, people change themselves” (Duncan Hallas, “How our rulers keep their grip,” 24 May 1996, 7); “The act of struggling radicalizes people – making them open to a deeper and broader understanding of society and how to change it” (Paul D’Amato, “Is socialism ‘alien’ to U.S. workers?”, SW, 31 March 2000, 13); and “victories give workers both the experience and confidence to fight for more in the future” (Alan Maass, “The power to beat the bosses,” SW, 15 September 2000, 9; italics removed).
[xi] “Falling for the illusion of ‘electoral success,’” SW, December 1986, 8. For attitudes towards Democrats during Presidential elections, see Lance Selfa, “Is the Democratic Party an alternative?”, SW, May 1988, 5; the lecture “Are the Democrats a Real Alternative?” in the events listing “What’s On,” SW, January 1992, 12; “This is no choice at all, Tweedlebob & Tweedlebill,” SW, 25 October 1996, 1; “Build a socialist alternative to… Four more years of Republican Lite,” SW, 8 November 1996, 1; and “Bore vs. Gush, This isn’t a choice!”, SW, 4 August 2000, 1. Note, however, a different position on Ralph Nader’s 1996 campaign in “Why Ralph Nader is no alternative,” SW, 25 October 1996, 6: “The sentiment for an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans is widespread. Unfortunately, Nader doesn’t provide one.”
[xii] “Why is there no labor party in the U.S.?”, SW, May 1990, 14.
[xiii] Lee Sustar, “Why we need a revolutionary party,” SW, 20 November 1998, 7. See also the Socialist Summer School 2000 ad “Fight for a Socialist Future!”, SW, 14 April 2000, 10: “THE FIGHT for a socialist future begins today – on workers’ picket lines, in the struggle against the death penalty and police brutality, in movements against war and oppression” (capitalizing in original).
[xiv] Alan Maass, “Harold Washington, The making and unmaking of a myth,” SW, January 1988, 5: “But to the extent that City Hall has been opened up, it is a tiny minority of Blacks – the Black middle class – who made up the growing number of Blacks in Chicago government. They pursued a political agenda all their own, one not at all related to needs of Black workers…Washington’s success in portraying this one-sided feast for middle-class Blacks as a victory for the people at once explains his lasting popularity and shows the absence of any political alternative in the Black community outside the leadership of the middle class” (italics in original). See also the similar class division vis-à-vis Clinton era Haiti issues in Lee Sustar, “Why Black leaders supported the U.S. occupation of Haiti,” SW, 4 November 1994, 7: “…a section of the U.S. Black middle class did a profitable business with the regime… Now Clinton, like other U.S. presidents before him, wants to use Black middle-class support to sugar-coat U.S. imperialism… It is only a matter of time before ordinary Blacks in Haiti and the U.S. again rebel against occupation” (bolding in original removed).
[xv] “Why our rulers hate the ‘rabble,’” SW, 19 June 1998, 7.
[xvi] Sharon Smith, “The Watts rebellion,” SW, August 1990, 13. Lee Sustar, “Rebellion in LA showed growing class division in the Black community,” SW, August 1993, 9; cover notice “Five years since the LA Rebellion,” SW, 9 May 1997, 1; and the lecture “The LA Rebellion: Five Years Later” in the “What’s On” events listing, SW, 25 April 1997, 8. Amy Muldoon and Rosie Campos, “We rebelled to be treated as humans,” SW, 8 October 1999, 13. Sharon Smith, “International Women’s Day,” SW, 27 February 1998, 13.
[xvii] Leighton Christiansen, “Killer cop goes free in Detroit,” SW, 5 June 1998, 12. Andy Thayer, “Thugs in blue,” SW, May 1994, 5. Elizabeth Schulte, “LAPD: Racist thugs in blue,” SW, 1 September 1995, 12. Joan Parkin and Kouross Esamaeli, “Police terror in New York City,” SW, 7 June 1996, 12. “NYC cops kill again, This violence must be stopped,” SW, 31 March 2000, 1. Cover notice “NYC’s killer cops strike again,” 17 March 2000, 1. Cover notice “New York cops go berserk,” SW, 31 March 1995, 16. Kim Rabuck and Phil Gasper, “Murdered by the cops,” SW, 23 June 1995, 12. Article spread by Anthony Arnove, “Police in the U.S. today: OUT OF CONTROL,” SW, 29 September 1995, 6-7. Kim Rabuck, “Don’t let the cops get away with murder!”, SW, 7 July 1995, 12. “Don’t let another cop get away with murder,” SW, 15 September 1995, 1. Coverage notice “Stop the killer cops!”, SW, 30 July 199[9] (mistakenly written 1998), 12.
[xviii] Sharon Smith, “New York cops on a rampage”; and Kim Rabuck and Phil Gasper, “Murdered by the cops,” SW, 23 June 1995, 12. See a similar array of articles about police in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, on SW, 15 September 1995, 2. Coverage notice “Stop the killer cops!”, SW, 30 July 199[9] (mistakenly written 1998), 12. “Stop these killer cops!”, SW, 26 February 1999, 1. Tristin Adie article spread “Stop these killer cops!”, SW, 12 March 1999, 6-7.
[xix] Compare the photo illustrations in Anthony Arnove’s “Police in the U.S. today: OUT OF CONTROL” article spread, SW, 29 September 1995, 6; Anthony Arnove’s “Will more cops stop crime?” article spread, SW, 15 March 1996, 6; and Tristin Adie’s “Stop these killer cops!” article spread, SW, 12 March 1999, 7. Despite different cropping, the underlying photo is identical, as can be seen in details such the folds in the banner, the positions of protestors and their feet, and even a tree trunk in the background.
[xx] Cover notice subsection for “Throwing a generation behind bars,” 12 May 2000, 1. “Jobs not jails,” SW, December 1993, 1. See also Eric Ruder, “Victims of a racist system,” SW, 18 August 2000, 8-9; “Victims of an unjust system” and the cover notice subsection “Politicians build more jails while our schools crumble,” SW, 26 March 1999, 1; and the opposition of “police violence” to “…n[o]t enough playgrounds for the kids” and “not enough food” in the interview conducted by Eric Ruder, “‘We should be judging the cops’,” SW, 18 August 2000, 7 (bolding removed from original). Anthony Arnove’s “Will more cops stop crime?” article spread, SW, 15 March 1996, 6-7. Interviews conducted by Kirstin Roberts and Bridget Broderick, “More cops will lead to more harassment,” SW, 2 December 1994, 2. “More cops means even more violence” cover notice subsection for “Jobs not jails,” SW, December 1993, 1.
[xxi] Micah Uetricht, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso: London and New York, 2014), 132-133.
[xxii] For example, see the trends detailed in Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, Jenny Brown, Jane Slaughter, and Samantha Winslow, How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers (Labor Notes: Detroit and Brooklyn, 2014), 189-211.
[xxiii] Jen Johnson, “Foreword, Chicago Teachers Show How It’s Done,” 3, in Bradbury et al., How to Jump-Start Your Union. The 2018 edition of The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve fronts mention of “racist police killings” to start off the document body (5), but no explicit discussion occurs in that section “Social Justice” (5-10) and the later “Non-School Issues Impacting Education” (23-26).
[xxiv] Alan Maass, “20 Years of Socialist Worker,” SW, 25 April 1997, 7. For a recurring hagiography of workers councils, see Harold Moss, “Democracy of the workers councils,” SW, 24 October 1997, 7; and Eric Ruder, “An alternative to their undemocratic system,” SW, 8 December 2000, 9.
[xxv] “Books to bring to the beach,” SW, 4 July 1997, 9.
[xxvi] Julie Fain, “Don’t take same side as racists,” letter to SW, 17 January 1997, 10.
[xxvii] Helen Scott, “What’s all the fuss about Harry Potter,” SW, 4 February 2000, 11. Kirstin Roberts and Sheila Bitts, “Kurt sang for millions who wanted to rebel,” SW, May 1994, 11. Julie Fain, “Why we hate insurance companies,” SW, 5 December 1997, 9. Note how Fain herself ends “What’s behind the rise in homelessness today?” (SW, 14 February 1997, 9) with the declaration that the reviewed book “is on the right side of the struggle against homelessness” (italics added). Elsewhere, she explicitly subordinates pleasure to cause but also seems to strain against the boundary of this constrained thinking when she terms the movie The Birdcage “a brilliant attack on right-wing bigots – and tremendously entertaining in its own right” (“A sharp and entertaining attack on anti-gay bigots,” SW, 29 March 1996, 9).
[xxviii] “Diana was not one of ‘us,’” SW, 12 September 1997, 3.
[xxix] Dennis Kosuth, “New Star Wars film filled with racist stereotypes” letter to SW, 18 June 1999, 4.
[xxx] Uetricht, Strike for America, 41-45 (quote on 45).
[xxxi] For example, Jesse Sharkey, “Rhode Island Hospital,” SW, 2 December 1994, 11; and Jesse Sharkey, “Chicago teachers,” SW, 26 February 1999, 10.
[xxxii] Dan Fratz and Jesse Sharkey-conducted workers interviews, “‘We’re making history now,’” SW, 6 January 1995, 11.
[xxxiii]“What’s On” event listing for “Providence, R.I.–North,” SW, 16 August 1996, 8, which advertises “Thursday, August 22: Jesse Sharkey on Reform or Revolution” in the text block to the immediate right of the ISO platform “Where We Stand” and its pronouncement “REVOLUTION NOT REFORM” (“Reforms within the capitalist system cannot put an end to oppression and exploitation. Capitalism must be overthrown. The structures of the present government – the Congress, the army, the police and the judiciary – cannot be taken over and used by the working class. They grew up under capitalism and are designed to protect the ruling class against workers… The working class needs an entirely different kind of state – a workers’ state based on councils of workers’ delegates and a workers’ militia”). Note also how that same event listing mentions a “Portland, Ore.” event entitled “Revolutionary Rehearsals: Poland 1980-81,” while the title of a lecture in Boston asks, “Can There Be a Revolution in the U.S.?” (bolding removed from original). The stock status of the “Reform or Revolution” lecture can be seen in its appearance over at least a 5-year period within the recurring “What’s On” event listing, frequently with a question mark at title end (e.g. 26 September 1997, 8; 27 March 1998, 8; 7 May 1999, 8; and 27 October 2000, 12).
[xxxiv] Jesse Sharkey, “Who betrayed the International Paper strikers?”, SW, 22 October 1999, 11. The summary sections from the book review highlight the formation of “an organizing center” and “[h]alf a dozen committees” where “[m]ost of the people who ran the committees had never done anything even remotely like it,” and then it introduces an italicized quotation from a worker who became involved and “got caught up in that sense of togetherness” and was made to “feel very important, a piece of the whole thing.”
[xxxv] Jesse Sharkey, “Guatemalan refugee beaten by two racists,” SW, 15 March 1996, 10; “Providence, R.I., police brutality,” SW, 22 November 1996, 10. Jesse Sharkey, “Rebellion at Attica,” SW, 13 September 1996, 6-7, which uses italicized type to highlight how “[w]ithin hours, prisoners elected leaders from each cell block, who began directing prisoners to ration food, safeguard the prisoners’ hostages, organize cleanup details and keep lookout” above a picture captioned “Elected leadership of the Attica prisoners in negotiations.”
[xxxvi] Email from SEIU HC Executive Vice President Erica N. Bland-Durosinmi to internal member communications list (15 March 2021).