Communism/Marxism/Maoism – Radio Free

China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation

Tricontinental Asia — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:00:54 +0000

In 1954, Mao Zedong said, ‘We cannot deny that we are still unable to produce motor cars. We are still very far away from being industrialised’.

Mao was speaking to an audience of Chinese industrialists and merchants at a time when the country was desperately poor, its resources stretched by decades of Japanese invasion, civil war with the nationalist Kuomintang, and ongoing US aggression in Korea, where China had intervened in support of the forces of national liberation.

Yan Jun (China), Work hard to complete the national plan – Build a great socialist motherland, 1954

Four years later, in 1958, the first Chinese passenger automobile, Dongfeng CA71, rolled off the assembly line of the aptly named state-owned enterprise First Automobile Works in Changchun – a product of China’s first five-year plan. Dongfeng means ‘east wind’ in Mandarin, and, for China, it was a source of national pride. After a century of humiliation, the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), were able to organise themselves to produce an automotive machine. Dongfeng CA71 was a milestone in the transition from semi-feudal and semi-colonial status to modernity.

Zhang Wenrui (China),The Dongfeng sedan car, 1959.

In 2024, First Automobile Works, now known as China FAW Group, sold 3.2 million vehicles – 819 thousand of which were self-owned brands. China is now widely considered to be a leader in the transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles – around two thirds of global sales of electric vehicles are in China. The rapid development of China’s automobile sector has been spectacular, but it is part of a much broader story of China’s modernisation set in motion since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

It is not immediately clear that there is such a thing as a Chinese model for economic development, let alone a ‘Beijing consensus’. Deng Xiaoping’s famous exhortation to ‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’ – said in the context of China’s reform and opening up process – leaves a great deal of ambiguity when trying to understand how China developed in the past decades. China itself is still engaged in deep debates to clarify its modernisation process. Chinese literary critic Li Tuo, in an essay titled ‘On the Experimental Nature of Socialism and the Complexity of China’s Reform and Opening Up’, which is published in latest issue of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng, argues that before President Xi Jinping’s heralding of a ‘new era’ during the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017, the flagship success stories of the reform and opening up period focused on the successes of private entrepreneurs rather than the ambitious state-led infrastructure projects which could not simply be explained by the profit motive. In 2020, during the 20th National Congress of the CPC, President Xi intervened to offer further clarity, emphasising that, ‘Chinese modernisation is socialist modernisation pursued under the leadership of the Communist Party of China’. This statement does not provide a theory of China’s development; however, it is a significant step in explaining the political foundation and original aspiration of the modernisation process.

China’s development and the threat it poses to the Global North’s monopoly on technology has given impetus to a growing academic literature on ‘industrial policy’, which attempts to empiricise China’s economic policies. This literature does not adequately engage with President Xi’s assertion that Chinese modernisation is socialist in orientation and led by a Communist Party – instead, it tries to isolate policy from politics.

Attempts at state-led industrialisation in the Global South are not new. In both Tsarist Russia and Qing dynasty China, there were attempts to initiate modernisation from the top down. Post-independence states such as India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ghana made valiant efforts to industrialise. But such projects yielded limited results as they were unable to confront the external challenge of imperialism, and the internal social structures that militated against the development of productive forces.

Xiao Zhenya (China), Take over the brush of polemics, struggle to the end, 1975.

First, the political elites in the state, who were closely tied to the old society, often failed to do away with the parasitic classes such as the landlord, merchant, and usurer. Second, and closely related to the preceding point, the political elites of these projects grew increasingly distant from the masses, leading to bureaucratisation of the state. Third, the embryonic industrial capitalists who grew in these projects quickly consolidated into rent-seeking interest groups satisfied with consolidating domestic market share rather than competing internationally through innovation. This in turn left them, and the nation, dependent on foreign technology.

Art created by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Meng Jie, a professor at the School of Marxism at Fudan University, Shanghai, has spent decades doing fieldwork on factory floors and local government offices to make sense of China’s economic system. One could say that he is trying to find a pattern to the stones that Deng Xiaoping said to feel for. His essay, ‘Industrial Policy with Chinese Characteristics: The Political Economy of China’s Intermediary Institutions’ (also in the latest issue of Wenhua Zongheng), co-written with Zhang Zibin, draws on both Marxist-Leninist theory and the literature on industrial policy to explain China’s development. The authors emphasise that ‘the CPC relied on the popular demand for independence to seize power, and that political independence was a pre-condition for establishing China’s industrial system’. They argue that it is this historical, social, and political context that helps ensure that, ‘whenever industrial development faces fundamental strategic choices, the CPC’s ideology will guide policies back toward independence’.

Li Hua (China), Roar!, 1938.

Indeed, confronted with US-led attempts to curb technological development, through the banning of Chinese telecommunications companies and the control of exports of, and investment in, semiconductors, China has responded by doubling down on efforts to build an independent industrial chain and develop ‘new quality productive forces’.

In 1933, as the CPC was embroiled in a bloody civil war with the Kuomintang, Chinese poet Lu Xun was invited to contribute to the magazine Modern Woman. He wrote an untitled poem which strongly criticised the nationalist’s repressive campaign against the Chinese people:

War and floods are nothing new in our land,
In the desolate village remains but a fisherman.
When he wakes up from his dream in the dead of night,
Where is the place to find him a decent living?

The post China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Tricontinental Asia.

To Each According to Their Need

Ted Glick — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 13:50:21 +0000

To whatever extent we reach our potential in this world, my grandmother would be furious if I didn’t say that it was due to a combination of our individual talents and the societal conditions – the real existing material conditions, as a good Marxist might say – that have shaped our lives. But while she would probably not admit it, the faith in her eyes – the challenge to imagine with others a better world and actively move with them towards it, to engage in collective struggle to achieve a more humanistic society – that faith will always remain with us.

— Dorothy Ray Healey remembrance, Jewish Women’s Archive

“Without vision, the people perish.” This famous quote from Proverbs 29:18 in the Old Testament is absolutely on target, based on my experiences over many years. A variation of this quote—if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there—underlines the danger of not having a vision. A road to nowhere is a dangerous road.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had a vision, summed up in the phrase, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Was this an original idea back then, 177 years ago? I don’t think so.

In his younger years Marx was connected to religion; he was baptized as a Lutheran at the age of six. He studied religion, ultimately leading him to develop his well-known critique of it as an “opiate of the people.”

The book of Acts is a religiously oriented history of the first years and decades of the Christian church after Jesus of Nazareth was killed. In chapters two and four, it is made clear that in these early days of the Christian religion, the concept of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” was a central vision.

Here’s how it is described in Acts 2: 44-45: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all as any had need.” And similarly in Acts 4: 32 and 34: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common… There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.”

I’m pretty sure that Dorothy Healey got this. She was the first socialist I ever heard quote Bible verses as she made her case from the podium speaking to hundreds of mostly young people at a national conference of the now-defunct New American Movement in 1974. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember thinking that I wished I could do that. Why did I feel that way?

One reason is that I had generally positive experiences growing up in the church my parents took me to every Sunday, as well as with others in my extended family, especially my grandparents, who were devout Christians. But it was also because, as I became a peace and justice and impeach Nixon activist in my late teens and early 20’s, and as I was exposed to individuals who looked to Marx and Engels and “scientific socialism” as their “bible,” it seemed to me that one thing both had in common was a vision for a very different kind of society than the one dominating much of the world.

And let’s be real: what both also have in common is the corruption of the original vision of their founders as they grew politically stronger and more institutionalized. That is a reality that can never be forgotten, something those of us today need to study and learn from going forward.

Healey tried to put the two positive visions together. She believed in Christian/Marxist unity. She may or may not have been an atheist, I don’t know, but her life was grounded in the best of both those worlds.

All of us have a responsibility to “imagine with others a better world and actively move with them towards it, to engage in collective struggle to achieve a more humanistic society” with the long term goal, one many of us will not see, of human societies where the abilities of all are used to meet the economic, social and cultural needs of all. We must hold fast to this vision whatever the odds against us right now.

The post To Each According to Their Need first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

From Capitalist Control to Working-Class Power

Andrew Lehrer — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:50:49 +0000

Introduction

With growing disillusionment in capitalist “democracy,” more and more people are looking towards alternatives to provide the answers they need. As Marxists, our role is to guide others out of the darkness of liberalism and toward the liberating path of Socialism. With that in mind, one of the first steps is to clear up the confusion, which mainly stems from propaganda and anti-communist movements, about a concept at the very core of our ideology: the dictatorship of the proletariat. I aim to be brief, clear, and accessible to all readers as I do my best to make understood the meaning of dictatorship and how it is not about oppression, but liberation of all people currently being oppressed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the more controversial topics within Socialist and Communist politics. The word ‘dictatorship’ strikes fear in the hearts of many, and can stoke the flame of a million skeptics with a single blow. Discussions of the dictatorship of the proletariat tend to fixate on the word ‘dictatorship’ while ignoring the class content—’of the proletariat.’ This superficial reaction, shaped by decades of propaganda, demands correction.

Marx, from the very first mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, repeatedly clarified what exactly this meant, repeatedly fought against opportunism (that is to say so-called representatives of the working-class collaborating with the very forces that dominate us)–a term he knew would invite distortion. Yet, the opportunist still persists. Our struggle continues to fight against this, to guide people onto the path of proletarian dictatorship, to clear up all confusion and purposeful slandering of the truly freeing vision behind the term. In order to fight against those who weaponize this idea, one must first understand its conception, i.e., the material and historical womb from which it was born.

The Origins of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

…the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

— Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, 1850, Marxists.org

Louis Auguste Blanqui, from whom Blanquism derives, was a revolutionary that was imprisoned for over thirty years. His ideology was heavily focused on the revolution itself, and not so much as to what society would look like after the revolution. Blanquists believe that a very small group should lead the revolution and establish a temporary dictatorship in order to redistribute wealth in a just manner. This marks a clear break from the class-conscious foundation of Marxist ideology, which sees revolution not as the task of a small elite, but of the organized working-class.

The first mention of proletarian dictatorship by Marx traces all the way back to 1850, to the early stages of his and Engels’ work. From its earliest days, Marxism has emphasized the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. The quote above from Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, is the earliest mention by Marx of proletarian dictatorship, and what is even more outstanding than its age in relation to Marxism is how fleshed out this necessary idea already is: “…the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally…”, from the first mention of it, Marx makes it very clear that proletarian dictatorship is necessary in abolishing all class distinctions and antagonisms entirely from society, i.e., in realizing Communism.

There is no revolution without a revolutionary change in who controls the state. From the minority using state apparatuses to oppress the majority to the majority building new state machinery as the mechanism for suppressing counter-revolutionism. This, in essence, is the dictatorship of the proletariat — power wielded by the hand of the majority for the first time in all the history of class society.

Proletarian vs Bourgeois Dictatorship

In order to inspire a change in society toward proletarian dictatorship we must first educate the masses, help them see that we already live under a dictatorship, dominated by the very rich who hold immense political power, on top of their inhumane amounts of wealth, and have control over every aspect of political, social, and economic life. Democracy is not a form of governance, but a measure of what class of people benefit from the government in charge. The control over the majority by a tiny minority is the essence of capitalism, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, or, if you like, liberal democracy, the form of control and oppression that we’ve lived under and been subjected to for far too long.

The first step is to clearly expose the countless injustices perpetuated daily by the bourgeois dictatorship—those who claim to represent you and me while serving their own class interests. Let no travesty wither away in silence, let no misstep go unchecked, let no politicians consider themselves invincible. We must take on the role of the microscope in examining the current government and that of the megaphone in relaying their constant mistakes and wrongdoings to the people.

A workers’ government is one in which no official, no parliamentarian, no representative, officer, leader, etc. makes more than the average worker’s wage. The natural remuneration weeds out those who seek those positions for their wealth, privilege, influence, etc. This government brings to the forefront leaders who are dedicated in their service to the people with whom they share a class background, who know the struggles of the people and are better fit to deal with them than any politician born in the bourgeois cradle. This is the manifestation of proletarian dictatorship, which very clearly shows the striking differences between it and the dictatorship of the bourgeois class.

What we need is a government that is created by the working-class, for the working-class, and constituted of those who belong to the working-class. This government has the interests of the majority rather than current governments that exist to serve corporations and a handful of billionaires. A government made up of the people it governs is true representation.

A government of and for the people, that is proletarian dictatorship; a government not of the people, but for profiting off the suffering of the people, that is bourgeois dictatorship, that is capitalist government, that is your government, and that is my government.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not about oppression, but liberation—the transfer of power from the few to the many, the unlocking of the chains that hold us down. It is a necessary phase in building a world free of class domination.

The post From Capitalist Control to Working-Class Power first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Andrew Lehrer.

Does China have an Internationalist Foreign Policy?

Greg Godels — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 15:10:05 +0000

A number of observant commentators have raised questions about Peoples’ China’s Belt and Road Initiative and more broadly, the foreign policy of the PRC.

Reliable left observers like Ann Garrison, writing in Black Agenda Report, have voiced concerns about Chinese investments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, based on Siddharth Kara’s book, Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara contends that Chinese are engaged in a brutal competition to acquire a raw material essential to battery manufacturing, participating in the highly exploitative practice of artisanal cobalt mining.

More recently, Razan Shawamreh has challenged the PRC’s economic engagement with Israel. Writing in Middle East Eye. Shawamreh cites three different Chinese state-owned companies heavily invested in Israeli firms servicing or operating in illegal settlements — ChemChina, Bright Foods, Fosum Group — that own or have a majority stake in an Israeli corporation. She charges Peoples’ China of hypocritically publicly denouncing Israeli policies while quietly aiding the cause of Israeli settlers.

On May 22, Kim Petersen posted a thoughtful, well reasoned piece on Dissident Voice, entitled “Palestine and the Conscience of China.” Petersen persuasively lauds the many achievements of Peoples’ China. It is easy to forget the century of humiliation that this once proud, advanced society suffered at the hands of European imperialism. After 12 years of fighting Japanese invaders and enduring a bloody civil war costing tens of millions of casualties, China’s advance since — under the leadership of the Communist Party of China — has been truly remarkable.

As Peoples’ China celebrates meeting its goal of becoming a “moderately prosperous” society, it is important to see how far it has come from 1949. When Western apologists for the market economy brag of the aggregate economic gains that global markets have brought to the developing world, they are largely talking about China (and, more recently, Vietnam and India).

By any measure of citizen satisfaction with their government by international surveys, the PRC consistently ranks at or near the top.

At the same time, Petersen raises questions about the seeming inconsistency of the Chinese government’s vocal criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and Peoples’ China’s continuing economic engagement with Israel. The PRC accounts for over 20% of Israeli imports.

Petersen quotes Professor T.P. Wilkinson: “Non-interference is China’s top principle — business comes first. If there is any morality it only applies in China.” And it is precisely China’s moral conscience that Petersen finds wanting.

Nick Corbishley, writing on June 6 in Naked Capitalism adds:

However, not everyone is trying — or even pretending — to distance themselves from Tel Aviv right now. The People’s Republic of China, for example, is actually seeking to strengthen its ties with Israel.

After initially siding with Palestine (and Hamas) following October 7, Beijing is now looking to rebuild ties with Israel. Just four days ago, as Israel’s Defence Forces were unleashing coordinated attacks on aid depots, China’s ambassador to Israel Xiao Junzheng discussed “deepening China-Israel economic and trade cooperation” with Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Nir Barkat.

Still others ask why Peoples’ China, a self-described socialist country, has failed to replace the Soviet Union in guaranteeing the economic vitality of tiny socialist Cuba– a country starved by a US blockade and harsh sanctions upon anyone defying that blockade. It is difficult to reconcile the PRC’s modest economic aid to Cuba with China’s $19 billion dollars of annual exports to proscribed Israel.

China’s Foreign Policy in Retrospect

China’s foreign policy is a direct reflection of the political line of the Communist Party of China, a line changing often in the Party’s history. At the 10th National Congress (August, 1973) — the last before Mao’s death — Zhou Enlai delivered the main report. He affirmed that:

In the last fifty years our Party has gone through ten major struggles between the two lines… In the future, even after classes have disappeared… there will still be two-line struggles between the advanced and the backward and between the correct and the erroneous… there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the danger of capitalist restoration… The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), p. 16 [my emphasis]

Zhou explains that the opposition in the last two Congresses — led by Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao — advocated that the main contradiction facing the party was “not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but that ‘between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces of society’”. In short, the two lines continually challenging the Party, as explained at the tenth congress, were that of the “productionists” — those giving priority to the development of the productive forces — and that of the class warriors — those giving priority to political struggle.

The CPC’s failure to simultaneously advance the productive forces and, at the same time, carry out a consistent, comprehensive class line accounts for its often inconsistent foreign policy.

Since the “opening” — the Deng reforms, beginning in 1978 — the productionist line has held sway in the Communist Party of China.

From the time of the rebuilding of the Party based on the rural peasantry after the destruction of its urban working-class base in 1927, Mao had sided with the class warriors.

Even in the era of the united front against Japanese aggression, Mao wrote in On New Democracy (1940) of the necessity of a cultural revolution, a focus on political and cultural struggle over other forms:

A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic revolution and is in their service. In China there is a united front in the cultural as in the political revolution… and the cultural campaign resulted in the outbreak of the December 8th Movement of the revolutionary youth in 1935. And the common result of both was the awakening of the people of the whole country… The most amazing thing of all was that the Kuomintang’s cultural “encirclement and suppression” campaign failed completely in the Kuomintang areas as well, although the Communist Party was in an utterly defenceless position in all the cultural and educational institutions there. Why did this happen? Does it not give food for prolonged and deep thought? It was in the very midst of such campaigns of “encirclement and suppression” that Lu Hsun, who believed in communism, became the giant of China’s cultural revolution… New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics… [my emphasis]

The centrality of cultural revolution likely comes from the class base shaping the trajectory of Chinese Communism. Because the Kuomintang wiped out the CPC’s urban working-class centers in 1927, the Party became based in the rural peasantry, as Mao freely concedes in On New Democracy:

This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution…. Essentially, mass culture means raising the cultural level of the peasants… And essentially it is the peasants who provide everything that sustains the resistance to Japan and keeps us going. By “essentially” we mean basically, not ignoring the other sections of the people, as Stalin himself has explained. As every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China’s population are peasants. So the peasant problem becomes the basic problem of the Chinese revolution and the strength of the peasants is the main strength of the Chinese revolution. In the Chinese population the workers rank second to the peasants in number…

On New Democracy suggests that Mao places primacy of place in the struggle for the support of the peasantry, a struggle that is cultural in form and national in scope. While Mao locates the Party’s battles within the world revolutionary process, he doesn’t see it as an immediate fight for socialism, but apart from it, for China’s national liberation:

This is a time … when the proletariat of the capitalist countries is preparing to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and when the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and other sections of the petty bourgeoisie in China have become a mighty independent political force under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Situated as we are in this day and age, should we not make the appraisal that the Chinese revolution has taken on still greater world significance? I think we should. The Chinese revolution has become a very important part of the world revolution… [my emphasis]

The separation between the proletariat’s role in the capitalist countries and the Party’s “independent” role in shaping a multi-class force could not be clearer.

Absent from the 1940 statement of Mao’s vision is any endorsement of the Communist International’s broad principles of solidarity. Instead, the Party operated under the Three Principles of the People, the CPC’s revision of Sun-Yat Sen’s original Three Principles. On New Democracy defines them as:

Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the peasants and workers. Without each and every one of these Three Great Policies, the Three People’s Principles become either false or incomplete in the new period…

Thus, “alliance with Russia” (USSR) became central to China’s foreign policy and expanded to alliance with other socialist countries. After liberation in 1949, the PRC practiced that line by aiding the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, especially in repelling the US and its allies as they invaded DPRK territory. The PRC military fought in the DPRK until the armistice of 1953. Over 183,000 Chinese died resisting the invasion of the North.

The CPC established ties with various liberation movements after the Korean War, with Peoples’ China offering military aid and training to many movements in Asia and Africa. At the same time, the PRC adopted Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to lead foreign relations: respect for territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and cooperation for common benefit, and peaceful coexistence.

The Five Principles were strikingly similar to the natural-law doctrines adopted by the early mercantilist theorists of bourgeois international relations; they constituted an even less robust version of the eight points of the 1941 Atlantic Charter crafted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Nonetheless, they were enshrined in the constitution of Peoples’ China:

China pursues an independent foreign policy, observes the five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence, keeps to a path of peaceful development, follows a mutually beneficial strategy of opening up, works to develop diplomatic relations and economic and cultural exchanges with other countries, and promotes the building of a human community with a shared future. [my emphasis]

By the end of the 1950s, The CPC had rejected the first of the “three great policies”: the “alliance with Russia”. The PRC had embarked on a period of bitter conflict with the USSR, culminating with a split in the unity of the World Communist Movement. It is source of great irony that many of the charges the CPC made against the Soviets in the Mao era were and are features of China today that have drawn the same charges from some on the left: The Chinese attacked the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with the US, taunting the US as a paper tiger; they accused the Soviets of being “social-imperialist” intent on global hegemony; they claimed a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; they accused the Soviet Party of revising Marxism-Leninism. All charges that resonate for some in current policies of Peoples’ China.

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC support for the US proxies in the former Portuguese African colonies. For over a decade, the PRC sided with South Africa, Israel, the US, and bogus liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, delivering weapons, training, and material support to surrogates fighting the internationally recognized freedom fighters. It was left for thousands of Cuban internationalists to give their lives to finally close the door on this ugly chapter and open the door to the fall of Apartheid.

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC 1979 invasion of Vietnam, ostensibly in response to Democratic Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge — an intervention, if principally motivated, that cannot be squared with the PRC’s vocal denunciation of the Warsaw alliance’s engagement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It is difficult to reconcile the twists and turns of Peoples’ China’s foreign policies with its once radical denouncement of Soviet foreign policy as “social-imperialist.” The late, estimable Al Szymanski– a scrupulous researcher– met those charges in great detail (“Soviet Socialism and Proletarian Internationalism” in The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social-Imperialist?, 1983), showing that Soviet “export of capital” outside of the socialist community was minimal, largely limited to establishing enterprises that expedited trade. Soviet assistance was limited almost entirely to countries outside of or escaping the tyranny of global markets. Soviet trade was minimal — Szymanski argued that it was the world’s most self-sufficient system (no doubt often through forced isolation). Its importing of raw material was minimal: “In short the Soviet economy, unlike those of all Western imperialist countries… has no… need to subordinate less developed countries to obtain raw materials.”

Also, the Soviet Union frequently paid higher prices for imported goods than market prices. Citing Asha Datar, “[O]f the 12 leading export commodities studied…, six were consistently purchased by the USSR at higher than their world prices, three usually purchased at prices higher than those paid by the capitalist countries, and two purchased on a year to year basis sometimes above and sometimes below the world market price.”

Suffice it to say, the Soviet Union substantially subsidized trade with fraternal countries, especially within the socialist community (CMEA), Cuba receiving especially generous terms of exchange.

It would be interesting to compare the PRC’s current foreign policy with the internationalist standards set by the former Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Peoples’ China — since the victory of the productionist line under Deng’s leadership — has largely been a force for stability in international relations. Over the last thirty or so years, the PRC has sought to maintain a peaceful stage for its trade-based economic expansion while the US and its capitalist allies have engaged in one bloody, imperialist adventure after another. Entry into the global market and acceptance into its market-based institutions has been well served by its Five Principles foreign policy.

But it has been naive to expect capitalist great powers to respect the high-minded, Enlightenment values of the Five Principles and simply stand by while the PRC rises to challenge their dominance of the world economy. Since Engels’ early writings, Marxists have understood that competition is the motor of the commodity-based economy. And since Lenin, Marxists have understood that competition between monopoly capitals and their hosts have spawned aggression and war.

It is equally naive — or disingenuous — to equate the Five Principles with the proletarian internationalism, class solidarity that has been embraced by the international Communist movement throughout the twentieth century. From Comintern activity, to the internationalist sacrifices made for democratic Spain, to the generous support for liberation movements, and the aid to the people of Vietnam, militant, principled internationalism differs fundamentally from the neutrality embodied in the Five Principles. The Five Principles serve a world with no injustice, a world without class struggle, a world without aggression and war.

Indeed, the solidarity advocated in the PRC constitution — “China consistently opposes imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism, works to strengthen its solidarity with the people of all other countries, supports oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies, and strives to safeguard world peace and promote the cause of human progress” — is inconsistent with the neutrality and non-intervention of the Five Principles, in any realistic sense.

Where neutrality may have borne few negative consequences during the PRC’s isolation from global markets, China’s profound economic relations with virtually every country in the twenty-first century, do have consequences, consequences of enormous moral impact.

Like other countries that engage economically or refrain from engaging economically (sanctions, tariffs, boycotts, blockades, etc.), the PRC must be judged by that engagement.

With the daily slaughter of Gazan civilians, the brutal actions of Israel cannot be separated from its trading partners: China, the US, Germany, Italy, Turkiye, Russia, France, South Korea, India, and Spain, in descending order of dollar volume of exports to Israel.

And now with the brazen, unprovoked Israeli attack on its putative “friend” Iran, the neutrality of the Five Principles is even less defensible. The “win-win” strategy of many CPC leaders and their allies is a utopian dream that social justice cannot afford.

The post Does China have an Internationalist Foreign Policy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Building Bridges between Vygotsky and Marx

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 30 May 2025 15:00:41 +0000

From Promiscuity to Polyamory

In the early 1970s I joined a community organization called Radical Psychiatry in Berkeley, California. The purpose of the group was to help people in the community who were suffering with moderate to severe mental problems so they did not have to go to a traditional psychiatrist or use drugs. As I recall, these community meetings were once or twice a week for a couple of hours for each meeting. The staff was organized as a collective and this collective had its own weekly meetings to discuss how the public meetings were going. Pretty much all the members of the collective were committed to socialism.

However, an added dimension to the collective was the members’ commitment to “polyamory”. This meant any romantic relationships that were formed had to be open. Both men and women could have more than one sexual relationship at a time while attempting to maintain a loving relationship with each partner. As socialists, we wanted to “smash monogamy” as a form of bourgeois property relations. I first attended the Radical Psychiatry meetings as a member of the community and came, in part to work on my own problems but also because I found what they were doing interesting. Since there was no formal training necessary to be a member of a collective, any member of the community could be asked to join the collective, after the collective had deliberated about it. After a couple of months of attending 10-15 community meetings, I was asked to join. I was flattered and also hot to trot with some of the women in the collective so I easily accepted.

Later on in this article I will tell you how the use of the word “polyamory” instead of “promiscuous” was used to define what we were doing and helped me to participate in the collective’s sexual relations in a more meaningful way. The change in the word meaning to promote both individual and group development will also be a key to understanding how Vygotsky attempted to create parallels between his own psychological theory and Marx’s theory of political economy. I will analyze this story further on in this piece once the tracks of Vygotsky’s theory are laid down.

Orientation
Goodbye to cutting and pasting
When the Russian Marxian, Lev Vygotsky first started out in psychology, he said he didn’t want to contribute to the field by cutting and pasting quotes from the theories of his Marxian masters. He wanted to use Marx’s method to write his own version of Capital for psychology. My article is an attempt report how his efforts turned out. To do this I will rely on three books. Vygotsky and Marx edited by Carl Ratner and Daniele Nunes-Henrique Silva; An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity by Andy Blunden and Vygotsky’s own Thought and Language. Following the lead of these authors, I claim that there is a parallel between Marx’s attempt to understand capitalism through the “cell” of the commodity and Vygotsky’s attempt to understand psychology through the cell of new word meanings.

I What is Marxist psychology?
Capitalist categories
How would we know a real Marxian psychology when we saw it? For one thing, it would include the major categories in Marx’s work and draw out their psychological implications for individual and social psychology. Marx’s categories for capitalism include at least the following:

impact of crises of capitalism
impact of finance capital
alienation
reification
the class structure and relations
private property
wage labor
impact of commodity production
Llfe under socialism

Psychological categories

The categories above would be applied to the typical topics within psychology:

Darwinian evolutionary psychology
how the brain works
personality theory
development throughout the life span
sensation and perception
emotions
thinking processes
states of consciousness
what motivates people
how people learn
how people remember
social psychology
cross-cultural psychology
psychopathology
therapy

Let us take an example of a controversy within psychology: how does the brain function? Carl Ratner points out the issue is whether the brain is localized in prefigured brain centers (modules) with unique neurophysiological properties or whether the cortex is a general flexible unspecified processing apparatus on which psychological function can be processed from any location. General information processing of psychological features are cultural in nature, origin, formation and function. Evidence is on the side of general processing which would be consistent with Marxism.

How Does the Brain Function?

Localized brain center with unique neurophysiological processes	What does the brain do?	Cortex is generalized unspecified processed apparatus
Biological	Theoretical orientation	Sociocultural

What is Cooperative learning?
Vygotsky argued that the leading edge of learning did not happen inside people’s heads. It begins in the social relationship between people in cooperative learning. The sites can be at work, at play or in school The cooperative activity must be meaningful, recursive, with a specified goal and a division of labor. Vygotsky called this first stage the zone of proximal development. In the second stage the cooperative learning becomes internalized and available for the individual to act on independently in terms of specific projects and goals. Ratner writes that the intellectual process of internalization enables the logical operations of reasoning to operate like analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization and abstraction. The third stage learning is when the individual applies it again to the social world but on a more global scale than they did in stage one. This includes more extended relations across space and time as well as to think more complexly. This will be illustrated in the example below. I call these stages “local interpersonal”, “internalization” and global interpersonal.

An example of the three stages of cooperative learning
Here is an example. A father, Antonio, teaches his son Jules how to bag cookies. In the beginning the father takes the hardest part of the baking process like breaking and mixing the eggs whereas his son might get out all the ingredients and pour milk into a measuring cup. Gradually over the next two or three weeks the father will cede the more difficult parts to his son. This beginning process is called the zone of proximal development. Now let’s say Antonio plays a learning trick on his son. He tells Jules he has to run to the store to get some food for dinner. He tells his son to proceed and they will finish when he gets back. But Antonio stays out longer in the hopes his son will finish the job. It turns out that Jules does finish. Since his son has gone through the whole process of baking the cookie himself, he has now internalized the skill of baking cookies. He can make cookies by himself if he wants to.

Now Antonio tells Jules that the neighborhood he lives on is having a garage sale in a couple of weeks. He wants his son to make cookies for the sale. Baking cookies for a garage sale involves social skills on a higher order than just baking cookies for his domestic household. Now he has to:

calculate how large a volume of cookies needs to be made
bake many more cookies
bake a larger variety of cookies
develop the rhetorical skills necessary to convince garage sale browsers to buy the cookies

Later on in this article I will show how Jules’ learning meaning of the new words “neighborhood” “probability” and “perspective” assisted him in completing Vygotsky’s third stage of learning.

The legacy of Soviet psychology
Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev developed what they called “socio-historical psychology” for many years in what was then the Soviet Union. Their work has been passed on to the next generation which included Ilyenkov, Mikhailov, Lektorsky, Galperin and Davydov. Socio-historical psychology is the most developed expression of Communist psychology in the world. For political reasons coming from both inside and outside the Soviet Union, Western radicals did not build on this tradition. Instead, they tried to build a Marxian psychology from scratch. But as Ratner tells us it is impossible to engage with Marxist psychology while disregarding this 65-year-old social-historical tradition.

Beyond eclecticism
The Frankfurt School, other so-called Western Marxists and radical feminists saw fit to initiate building a Marxist psychology from scratch either because of ignorance of Vygotsky and his comrades or because they considered that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Marxist. Instead, they eclectically cobbled together a hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, radical gender theory, constructionism and postmodernism and then added selectively from the young Marx without understanding the limits of their eclecticism.

Eclecticism juxtaposes various approaches together including multiple contradictory principles or assumptions. Eclectics attempt to combine the parts of two or more systems that are heterogeneous and diverse. As a Vygotsky follower, Carl Ratner says, the tail of one system is placed against the head of another and the space between them is filled with the trunk of a third. Eclecticism papers over antagonistic elements, as it throws together different systems.

Eclecticists violate a principle of science which is logical coherence and the law of parsimony. The logic of sciences holds that a wide variety of empirical and theoretical issues should be commonly explained by a few core, self-consistent principles. Instead of eclectically combining incompatible systems together we must first tease out the essential incompatibility of systems such as Freudianism, constructivism and radical gender theory with each other first before comparing them to Marxism. Also, Vygotsky’s non-Marxist followers have been eclectic in using Vygotsky’s concepts. These eclectics have ignored, denied and distorted the Marxist system of Vygotsky’s concepts. See my article Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology Part II

II Marx’s Method For Analyzing Capitalism

Philosophy of internal relations
Marx had a special way of understanding socio-history that he learned from Hegel which Bertell Ollman described as the “philosophy of internal relations”. According to Ollman, the philosophy of external relations (in his The Dance of the Dialectic) reality is conceived of as being essentially static and change is only attended to when things bump into each other or into us with sufficient force to have an impact. What externalists take to be things, are from the internalist viewpoint, processes and relations. For externalists, while the whole may be comprised of parts, it is nothing more than the sum of their parts. Internalist contend that:

reality is change and stasis is derivative (processes rather than things)
not only are the wholes more than the sum of their parts
whole is found in the parts

Marx’s internalist orientation allowed him to uncover the details of the multiple internal relations between capital, labor, value, credit, interest, rent, money and wages as part of a web of dialectical relations.

Marx’s methodology
According to Ollman, Marx’s methodology encompasses six components

a commitment to a materialist ontology
an epistemology comprised of several subcomponents
- perception (sensory output, mental and emotional activity)

- abstraction

- conceptualization of what is abstracted into new or redefined concepts (surplus value, labor power, commodity, credit)

- an orientation that socio-historical context must be part of all explanations

the laws of dialectics operating in capitalist society via the concepts uncovered as a result of abstraction and analyzed through the study of history both backwards and forwards

the intellectual reconstruction of what is uncovered through inquiry, where the results of the analysis are unified for the understanding of the researcher in notebooks (as found in Marx’s Grundrisse)

the exposition of the results of the analysis for others to comprehend ( in Marx’s Capital)

praxis, which unites theory to political practice, which feed backs to a political theory for understanding reality more deeply

When Marx turns to psychology, his starting point for understanding consciousness is the world itself. Humans engage this reality through human species activity, labor and verbal language which is socially created. Consciousness is a product of social labor on one hand and verbal language on the other. Consciousness can exist before and without labor and verbal language.

Marx’s use of the germ cell
Ratner informs us It wasn’t until microscopes became powerful enough to reveal the microstructure of organisms that Schleiden and Schwann were able to formulate a cell theory of biology in 1839. According to Andy Blunden, Goethe sought to utilize this idea in his study of botany. He insisted on proceeding from the whole (the cell) to the parts. Just as every part is connected to a whole, the whole is in every part of the cell. As Goethe proposed, the foundation for the understanding of a complex whole such as an organism is the discovery of its’ cell form. Furthermore, this whole is a concrete unity. Principals are not something behind appearances but are contained within appearances. This is different from an abstract unity built from a common ancestor, built into a general category. For Hegel the earthly figure of Napoleon was a concrete unity of the spirit of history. For Marx the concrete unity of the commodity is the cell of capitalism

Commodities for Marx is the cell of a capitalist society
Marx searches for the cell of capitalist society when he writes Capital. He found it in the production of commodities. These commodities produce a conflict between use value and exchange value. He then unfolds from an analysis of these contradictions within this single cell the entire process of capitalist society from its private property to its evolution, from industrial to finance capital, its concentration of capital to its globalization process to its terminal crisis.

III Vygotsky’s Method
Vygotsky wants to write his own Capital
Vygotsky thought it was fundamental to submit the founding categories of traditional psychology to the same methodological processes Marx used in the study of the category of political economy. Regarding this movement in relation to psychology, Vygotsky says he wants to write its own Capital. What does this mean? For Vygotsky psychology must aim to study the complex unit of a cell, like Marx. We must not begin by searching for the most fundamental atomic building blocks like sensations, perceptions, impressions like the empiricists do. Vygotsky called these “elements”. Instead, he wanted to find the cell for psychology.

So what is the cell for a Vygotskyan psychology that is equivalent to the relationship between commodity capitalism in economics? There are three levels down we have to go to discover that:

in the most macro psychology we have verbal language
at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
a microcosm in new word meaning

Dualism between mechanists and holists
Before Vygotsky, there had been a split in psychology between physiologists who approached the field as if psychology were a branch of the natural sciences and those who saw psychology as a branch of the human sciences having little to do with the body. In the 2oth century this split in psychology was demonstrated between behaviorists who denied the existence of consciousness and saw psychology in terms only of reflexes and conditioned responses. On the other hand, empirical psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt studied the mind by means of introspection. There were other holists like the Gestaltists who studied perceptual wholes with no roots in evolutionary biology. But the physiologists, behaviorists, the introspectionists and Gestaltists all had one thing in common. They accepted the separation between the subjective and the objective worlds. Vygotsky argued that the subject matter of psychology should be consciousness (or the mind). But the link between the human subject and social object in consciousness was through human practical activity theory in laboring.

Consciousness, tools, and signs
According to Vygotsky, reality cannot be grasped by human consciousness passively. It is by using the socio-cultural tools and signs given to us by previous generations in history that problems are solved. It is through solving these problems in collaboration with others that people become self-reflectively conscious. The root meaning of consciousness is, after all, “together knowledge”. To master and capture reality requires a system of mental processes which grow when humans are engaged in work. It is human work which acts as a mediator between human beings and nature. However, in order to work we have to talk each other. One of the great benefits of verbal language is that we can talk about the past and future. So in work we can pool our experience that we learned in our past practice and we can debate the future about how, what and where we work next. The most essential function of language is to enable us to work together. Charles Sanders Pierce further classified signs according to how they are connected to their object by index, icon or symbol.

Speaking and thinking
Vygotsky pointed out that speech develops in two directions:

in its communication use
in its self-reflective function

Vygotsky claimed that if he could understand the relation between thinking and speaking he could create a paradigm for all domains of psychology. He writes that thought and speech had different roots. There is pre-intellectual speech (babbling) and pre-verbal thought (utterances). Only with the mastery of verbal language does speech become cultural and thought become verbal. The mastering of verbal language creates an active dialectic between what you have to say and what you think.

An Example of the dialectic between thinking and speaking

When I was first teaching an Introduction to Psychology class I tried to think logically about how to present the order of the topics to my students. First, I think about the history of the field, then the difference in theoretical schools of psychology and lastly about research methods (how we know what we know). However, I learned that when I teach the subject (the speaking part) I would lose about one-third of the class if I taught the subjects in this order. I have to speak in teaching rhetorically. I start with what people I know students are spontaneously interested in. First, psychopathology, then personality theory. “Why are people crazy, especially my cousin Phyllis?” For personality theory, “how can I understand my fights with my boyfriend? We seem to have different personalities.” Only later on when people have their curiosity satisfied they might become interested in the history of the field, the theoretical schools and even research methods. As a result of teaching, I reorganized how I thought about teaching.

Word meaning as the unity between speech and thinking
In 1934 Vygotsky came to the conclusion that the central cultural artifact through which people appropriated the culture of the community was not just through tools, as Marx emphasized, but through the verbal language that was mastered. From him spoken word and its meaning was the cell of a unity of speech and thinking. However, we cannot talk about the meaning of the word taken separately. Word meaning is linked up to a sign system that involves the whole of verbal language.

Where is the word meaning? For Voloshinov, a Marxian philosopher of language, meaning does not reside in word, nor the psyche of the speaker nor in the psyche of the listener. Meaning occurs as the result of interaction between speaker and listener as they cooperate in working and planning. But this word meaning is relative not only in working, but cooperative learning at school and in playing. Below is a summary.

An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The cookie sale
Let’s return to our example of a father teaching his son how to bake cookies. In Vygotsky’s third stage of social learning we said that the dad needed to teach his son to think on a larger scale in order to prepare for the cookie sale during the block garage sale. Up to now, the son, Jules, only learned to bake cookies for his domestic household. In order to prepare for the cookie sale in the neighborhood the boy has to learn what a neighborhood means. Neighborhood is not an easy word to define. When the boy asks, the father may tell him the name of the neighborhood or he might show him a map of the major cross-streets of the neighborhood. Jules also has to consider that many more people may come by his cookie stand who he has not dealt with before. How many? “Well”, Antonio says “it depends on many things – weather conditions, like if it’s cold or warm, how well the garage sale is advertised and the quality of the stuff offered at the sale. The best we can do is think in terms of probability.” Since Jules is too young to understand the practical application of probability, Antonio will have to do the figuring.

The third issue involved Jules’ capacity to take perspective into account. Jules may have to learn what perspective means. He has to move beyond his egocentric preferences for his favorite cookies. Then Antonio may ask Jules how many other kinds of cookies there are besides the chocolate ones he likes that exist. Antonio encourages his son to make 4 other kinds of cookies besides chocolate. Jules will learn that even though he does not like those cookies, making cookies he doesn’t like will make him some money. He learns “perspective”. So “neighborhood”, “probability’ and “perspective” are new word meanings that are critical to expanding his cooperative learning skills.

An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The term rhetoric in teaching my classes
As I said earlier In my learning process as a teacher, I learned over the years what students liked and didn’t like in terms of subject matter through trial and error and I made my chronological adjustments accordingly. Little did I know that the secrets of how to persuade students to learn was a part of a much larger field that was 2000 years old. If someone would have told me there was a field called rhetoric, I would have shrugged my shoulders. The word meant nothing to me. In fact all my associations with rhetoric were negative. Rhetoric was:

form without content
bombast of a demagogue
talk without action

But when I discovered the field of rhetoric through teaching a critical thinking class I discovered the deeper meaning of rhetoric. This new word, rhetoric, made me consciously apply principles that I was only groping for before. This one word was a key to understanding 2000 years of theorists from the Sophists to Aristotle, to Quintilian, Cicero, Sheridan, Campbell, Whately, Perelman, Toulmin, Burke, and Walton. This one word, rhetoric, when deeply understood opened up a new meaning for me as a teacher and improved my work. Keep in mind my learning of this new word was not just to satisfy a curiosity of mine. It not only deepened my thought process, but I discussed it in my critical thinking classes. I also used it in the practical critical activity of teaching in all my classes.

An example of a revolutionary change in word meaning:
The term “polyamorous” in radical psychiatry
When I first heard the world polyamorous discussed in Radical Psychiatry, I really didn’t understand it. I thought their rules about being non-monogamous as a kind of “socialist promiscuity” might be justified through anthropology by some Marxists. But as I got involved with a couple of women at the same time, I came up against both the facts of how liberating it was to satisfy lusts and how difficult it was to overcome jealousy. What the community was doing was the first stage of Vygotsky’s cooperative learning. The whole concept of Radical Psychiatry was in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. We were all struggling and some of us were doing better than others.

Our collective meetings also became therapy sessions for some members needing to process sexual engagement with unresolved conflicts while others offered support. It was a very deep experience to attempt to love someone even though I knew they were also dating someone else. I loved those women in a way that I loved no other woman I have dated with a monogamous agreement. However, the relationships were very unstable and it took a lot of emotional work and processing to keep them afloat. Nevertheless, the meaning of the new word polyamory used in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development took me and many others to new dialectical heights for however a short time it lasted.

I stuck with polyamory for about three months. I stopped because the time it was taking to process feelings of jealously became more work that I wanted to do. I didn’t drop out of the collective, but I stopped trying to have sexual relationships with the women in the collective. What I have since come to see is that sexual jealousy has deep roots in evolutionary psychology and those predispositions are not going away any time soon. What we were doing in Radical Psychiatry was a great experiment, but in order to overcome evolutionary psychology would take at least a generation of socialist support at regional or even national levels. It can’t easily be done successfully on a local level in a few months or even years. A new generation must be taught polyamory early in life in order for it to gain a foothold.

The relationship between Vygotsky’s three stages of learning and new word meanings
Earlier I said that there are three phases of cooperative learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. How do new word meanings fit within each of the stages as given in my three examples? In the example of the learning situation of cooking-making between Antonio or Jules, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal. That is because Antonio understood all the new word meanings of neighborhood, probability and perspective. The new word meaning was internalized by Jules through the process of making cookies at a larger scale for the garage sale. We don’t know how well he mastered the higher level social situation because I never addressed the results of the cookie sale.

In the case of my teaching, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal stage because I was just learning how to teach and unconsciously figuring it out by trial and error. However, as part of preparing for a course in critical thinking I internalized a new word “rhetoric” and its history. I didn’t really have a global interpersonal stage with the term rhetoric because I just applied what I had learned to deepen how I taught my existing classes. An example of global interpersonal would have been to have used my knowledge of rhetoric to give lectures at the Seattle Atheist church which I have done recently.

Lastly, in the case of Radical Psychiatry the new word meaning, polyamory, was present in the local interpersonal stage of learning because the entire community was attempting to develop new sexual relationships. The whole community was in the first stage of the zone of proximal development. As for internalization it was not realistic to expect anyone to have internalized the word polyamory so that they could practice it gracefully. There were too many Darwinian sexual selection habits to overcome. The same is true for moving polyamorous practices to larger scale communities. It will be the task of socialist societies in the 21st and 22nd centuries to address whether this is a visionary way to conduct socialist romances.

Conclusion
I began my article by discussing what a Marxist psychology looks like. First, I named the typical categories Marx used in his criticisms of capitalism and then I identified various subheadings of the field of psychology. I applied Vygotsky’s theory to areas of learning, social psychology, and sexuality. Specifically, my examples included cooperative learning in cookie-making, the use of rhetoric in teaching and my attempts to engage in polyamory as a member of a community of Radical Psychiatry in the early 1970s.

A big part of my article centers on the comparisons and parallels between Marx and Vygotsky’s methodology. An important key in investigating Marx’s method is to avoid eclecticism. Marxist psychology began in the Soviet Union with Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev and any attempt to improve it by the Western psychology must start with them, and not throw together an eclectic hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, the radical gender theory, constructionism or postmodernism. The second methodological starting point for Marx was to analyze capitalism by using a “cell” concept, which for Marx was the commodity. Vygotsky followed Marx, but wanted to find the “cell” for psychology which was rooted in:

macro psychology in verbal language
at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
a microcosm in word meaning

For Vygotsky:

the word-meaning is a unit of analysis for the relation of thinking and intelligent speech
thinking and speech together with work, play and school is the microcosm of consciousness

Lastly, I built a bridge between how these new word meanings interacted with Vygotsky’s three stages of learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. I applied how word meanings played out in my examples of cookie-making, teaching techniques and building a polyamorous community in Radical Psychiatry.

What’s missing within Russian Marxist psychology?
In his great book, Problems in the Development of Mind Vygotsky’s comrade Leontiev gave a wonderful example of how a Marxist theory of the mind’s relationship to reality would work in a hunting and gathering society. However, none of the Russian theorists painted a full-fledged picture of how Marxian psychology would apply to all psychological topics listed at the beginning of my article. Secondly, the theory did not contrast how it would work generally with individuals living in a capitalist society and generally how it would work on people living in a socialist society. In the case of the latter it is understandable given the political tensions existing in Russia with Stalin wanting to control the field of psychology. Can you imagine the reception of the state if any of these psychologists tried to make a dialectical critique of the Soviet Union as a socialist society? Lastly, socio-historical psychology must integrate its findings with evolutionary psychology. Socialists can no longer run screaming away from evolutionary psychology by claiming it is biological reductionism in order to continue to be scientifically relevant.

The post Building Bridges between Vygotsky and Marx first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

A Sketch of the Origins of Jiang Jieshi’s Relationship with the United States

Joseph Essertier — Thu, 29 May 2025 14:49:39 +0000

A public opinion poll in 2023 found that 64% of likely United States voters thought that our government should officially recognize the Island of Taiwan as an independent nation, while a poll this year found that 82% of them believe that Taiwan “is” independent. A few months ago the U.S. State Department removed a line from their website stating that the US does not support Taiwan independence, triggering a rebuke from Beijing that this “sends a seriously erroneous message to the separatist forces” in Taiwan. Consistent with such views among U.S. citizens and State Department officials, the number of U.S. military personnel on Taiwan has increased recently. It was previously known that the number stationed there was 41; now, according to the testimony of retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery on 15 May, there are approximately 500.

U.S. experts speak of war with China. The U.S. and China are apparently preparing for it (Peter Apps, “US Prepares for Long War with China that Might Hit Its Bases, Homeland,” Reuters, 19 May 2025). And according to opinion polls, a large percentage of Americans, if not the majority, do support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan. Thus it is important in 2025 to understand Taiwan’s special status and U.S.-China relations.

The civil war between the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued intermittently from 1927 until 1949, when the Communists won control over mainland China. The war resulted in the premature deaths of millions of people, with a large portion of those non-combatants. In 1949 the head of the Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek (1887-1975), known today as “Jiang Jieshi” by most mainland Chinese speakers, retreated to the Island of Taiwan with the remnants of his forces and “established a relatively benign dictatorship” there, executing one thousand farmers, workers, intellectuals, students, labor union activists, and apolitical civilians during the White Terror in the 1950s. (Po Chien CHEN and Yi-hung LIU, “A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II [1945-1950],” Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, eds., Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, Verso, 2022). The martial law that Jiang Jieshi imposed in 1949 lasted for nearly four decades, until 1987.

Under his reign there were two Taiwan Strait crises in which a hot war between the Guomindang and the CCP almost broke out. The most dangerous, in terms of the prospects for decent human survival, was probably the second crisis, in 1958. It almost resulted in a nuclear war, according to the late Daniel Ellsberg. At a point in time when U.S.-backed Jiang Jieshi aspired to take back all of China, the U.S. had a secret plan to “hit every city in the Soviet Union and every city in China.” The U.S. military was prepared to annihilate 600 million people, a “hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg explained. Today the Island of Taiwan may or may not be the “most dangerous place on Earth,” as the Economist called it (Justin Metz, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” The Economist, 1 May 2021), but given the constant tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) during the last three quarters of a century, the fact that the U.S. and the PRC are both nuclear powers, the fact that U.S. intelligence leaders have recently called the CCP the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security, and the fact that the Trump administration is riddled with China hawks underscores how important it is, for our species as a whole, and especially for people in East Asia, that sincere agents of peace understand Taiwan.

Over the course of nearly half a century, Jiang Jieshi and his party received constant diplomatic support, weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. Our government has recently even “quietly unfrozen about $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan.” With all this U.S. “support” for, or U.S. domination of, Taiwan, what does the word “sovereignty” mean in Taiwan’s case? And what does it mean for an island of 23 million people to prepare to fight with the PRC, with its population of 1.4 billion? How can Lai Ching-te say that they must prepare for war?

To understand the fight between the Republic of China and the PRC, and the intervening/interfering role of the U.S., one must have a basic understanding of the nature of this fight. A little study of the historical context in which Jiang Jieshi first seized power a century ago might help. This month marks 100 years since the start of the May Thirtieth Movement, when Chinese workers stood up against the imperialism of the West and Japan, while at the same time taking on the greedy business class and the power-hungry warlords of China.

Chinese Workers Struggle for Dignity in 1925

Back in 1925, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East,” and like Paris, it was a place where the rich could have fun as they liked and the poor had to suffer as they must. The workers of Shanghai suffered the injustices of colonialism and racism. Rich Europeans and Japanese colonizer-parasites had carved up the city and set up their own “International Settlement,” that they, rather than the Chinese, governed. This Settlement allowed them to live among and exploit the local laborers even as they disrespected them with the pejorative “coolies.” Some Japanese said they were “worthless” and called them “foreign slaves” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, Duke UP, 2002, page 163).

Shanghai had been a frequent site of labor “unrest” for some time. It was not a coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been founded there in 1921. Early in 1925 a Japanese company that owned a cotton mill had rejected an agreement made by the striking workers and a mediation board. The conflict reached a head on the 15th of May that year when the managers of the mill locked out the workers and stopped paying their wages. (Apo Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton Strike,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour). In this conflict, Japanese supervisors physically beat several workers and one foreman shot and killed a 20-year-old worker, a Communist, by the name of Gu Zhenghong.

This was not the first time that foreign bosses had murdered Chinese workers, but it was said that “Japanese capitalists treat Chinese laborers like cattle and horses” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 164). Many people, not only workers and students but also Chinese business persons, were fed up that year, in 1925. On the 30th of May nearly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Shanghai to the International Settlement where the British, French, Japanese, and other privileged foreigners lived. It was guarded by foreign soldiers and police. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). The British chief of police gave orders to fire on the protesting workers and students, and thirteen people were killed, shot at “point-blank range” (Working Class History, PM Press, 2020, page 111-12). Dozens were injured. This triggered what is known today as the May Thirtieth Movement. Through the cooperation of workers, students, and many Chinese businesses, a general strike was organized in Shanghai. There were at least 135 solidarity strikes in other regions. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

By one estimate, there were already 84,000 unionized workers in Shanghai at this time and many unions had contributed to building worker solidarity (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 154). Up until the May Thirtieth Incident, the Shanghai Federation of Syndicates (SFS) had been a leading labor organization, if not the leading organization in Shanghai. It had been established in 1924, mainly by right-wing members, but also by many anarchists, such as Shen Zhongjiu (1887–1968), the editor of the anarchist journal Free Man (Ziyou ren) and later the chief editor of Revolution (Geming). Anarchism was the “central radical stream” in China after the First World War. And there had been a “long-standing indigenous libertarian tradition” in China (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, PM Press, 2010, page 519).

Many SFS labor activists distrusted the Communist Party because they felt that CCP intellectuals tried to speak for the workers. The SFS had a “vaguely anarchist orientation,” but did not espouse federalism. (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 155-59). Chinese anarchists in general, regardless whether they were members of SFS, had vocally opposed the CCP’s statist goals and promotion of “proletarian dictatorship” and “iron discipline.” But the fledgling CCP was on the ball. They “instantly launched a campaign calling for solidarity with the textile workers, a boycott of Japanese products, and a public funeral” for Gu Zhenghong (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

In the city of Guangzhou, already an industrial center near Hong Kong then, anarchists had established at least 40 unions by 1921, and had been collaborating since 1924 with the Guomindang labor leaders in the syndicalist movement. The Guomindang was founded in 1924 by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) in Guangzhou, and many anarchists and communists had collaborated with them for years. In May 1925 the “Second National Labour Conference” was held in Guangzhou. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was established, representing 166 trade unions and 540,000 members. It was a national umbrella organization that functioned as a platform to coordinate different forces among workers, including non-party actors. After the Shanghai Massacre, the ACFTU called for a demonstration on 2 June and a solidarity strike. In the wake of the Massacre, many more workers joined unions (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

Union leaders organized a strike in Guangzhou and in nearby Hong Kong. This strike began on 19 June. Soon, 250,000 workers hand had joined and many students in Hong Kong were also mobilized. In fact, half the labor force of Hong Kong was on strike, paralyzing the city. By the 21st of June, there was a full embargo against the foreign powers, and on the 23rd of June, a public procession in solidarity with the May Thirtieth Movement. The joint foreign security force with police from multiple countries opened fire on students and killed fifty-two people.

1925 was the beginning of a period of very active worker resistance, that is sometimes called the “Revolution of 1925-1927.” It was a time of many large uprisings, often or usually very violent, and a time of dedicated labor organizing. Through this revolution, Chinese workers regained some dignity, but true liberation was put on the back burner. According to the historian Gotelind Müller, “the CCP worked on Comintern instructions in a united front with the Guomindang, an authoritarian party populist in rhetoric but tied in practice to defending the interests of China’s business groups and rural elites. The terms of the alliance required the CCP’s subordination to the Nationalist [i.e., Guomindang] leaders and the submersion of its membership.” She explains that, just as with anarchists elsewhere, “Chinese anarchists were at first sympathetic to the Bolsheviks but by the mid-1920s they saw the regime in Moscow as oppressive.”

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong knew that something was happening, and he became very interested in this movement in the summer of 1925 (Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World, Duke UP, 2010, page 29). In addition to labor unions in the city, peasant unions were also forming, appearing in Hunan and surrounding provinces. Mao saw revolutionary potential among them, even more than among workers in the cities. This put him in opposition to the orthodox Marxist approach.

A Year of Strikes: 1926

There were even more strikes in 1926 than in 1925, and some of the rulers of China resorted to violence to keep them down. “During 1926 in Shanghai there were, according to one official survey, 169 strikes affecting 165 factories and companies and involving 202,297 workers.” Half of them were “wholly or partially successful.” (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938). In May 1926 the Third Labor Congress was held in Guangzhou, with the participation of 699 labor organizations, who claimed to represent 1.24 million workers.

And it was at this point, when things were going so well for the workers, that Jiang Jieshi started abandoning them and dismissed his Soviet advisors (Dennis Showalter, “Bring in the Germans,” The Quarterly Journal of Military History 28:1, page 60). It was the Soviets who had urged the Communists of China to work with the Guomindang.

On 18 March, there was a massacre of anti-imperialist protesters in front of Beiyang Government headquarters. The Beiyang Government was run by warlords like Duan Qirui (1865-1936), who was tight with Japan. They were the main government of China between 1912 and 1928, and were based in Beijing.

Among those injured during the 18 March massacre was the leader Li Dazhao (1889-1927), who had co-founded the CCP with Chen Duxiu (1879-1942). Chen Duxiu had also founded the progressive journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in 1916, advocating human rights, democracy, science, and even Esperanto. Influenced by the October Revolution, it was openly promoting communism in 1920.

The great writer Lu Xun, who is often credited with modernizing Chinese literature, wrote about the March 1926 massacre in some detail in “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen.” Lu Xun wrote, “On March 18 in the fifteenth year of the Republic of China, Duan Qirui’s government ordered guards with guns and bayonets to surround and slaughter the unarmed protesters in front of the gates of the State Council, the hundreds of young men and women whose intent was to lend their support in China’s diplomatic dealings with foreign powers. An order was even issued, slandering them as ‘mobsters’!” (Lu Xun, “In Memory of Liu Hezhen,” Jottings Under Lamplight, Harvard UP, 2017, page 72).

Meanwhile in June, Jiang Jieshi was put in charge of the Northern Expedition aimed at removing the warlords from power and unifying the country.

Jiang Jieshi’s 1927 Slaughters

In 1927 rich men slaughtered workers like never before. Early on, the CCP suspected that something was up. On 26 January an internal Party memo read, “The most important problem which requires our urgent consideration at the moment is the alliance of foreign imperialism and the [Guomindang] right wing with the so-called moderate elements of the [Guomindang], resulting in internal and external opposition to Soviet Russia, communism, and the labor and peasant movements” (Michael D. Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, UCLA dissertation, 1996, page 121). The Communists knew that the Guomindang was allied with the “Powers,” i.e., the empires of the West and Japan. Yet they still encouraged workers to trust the Guomindang.

Around this time in early 1927, a powerful Communist-led union called the Shanghai General Labour Union (GLU) launched two insurrections. Their first insurrection was a general strike from the 19th to the 22nd of February, and their second was a strike supported by an armed militia from the 21st to 22nd of March. The strike in February “shut post offices, all cotton mills, and most essential services” (S.A. Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, and Working Class History 41). This contributed greatly to the popularity of both the Guomindang and the CCP in Shanghai.

For their second insurrection in March, the GLU’s plan was “to take control of the city first and then welcome” Jiang Jieshi. But the British, the Americans, and the Japanese in Shanghai already knew the script. Written in 1938, Harold Isaacs’ historical account got to the heart of the matter:

The prevailing attitude among them during those early weeks of 1927 seemed to be to hear and protect the evils they had rather than fly to others they knew not of. For to your foreign business man, banker, soldier, consul, and missionary, this incomprehensible unrest, these endless slings and arrows for which they were the quivering targets, seemed the blows of a universally outrageous fortune. They could not make out who were the hares and who the hounds. So they barricaded their settlements behind gates and barbed wire. From overseas came regiment after regiment and whole fleets to protect them against all contingencies. Only the keenest among them understood from the beginning that their bread was buttered on the same side as that of the Shanghai bankers and oriented themselves accordingly. They knew Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] as a politically-minded militarist who wore a coat of many colours. If the Shanghai bankers were ready to back him, they knew they could follow suit. Only the workers of Shanghai stood between them and the consummation of the deal. Chiang’s coming would remove this obstacle. Thus by February when Chiang’s troops advanced into Chekiang, the situation was vastly clarified for all concerned except the workers and the Communist leaders for whom Chiang still remained the hero-general of the revolution. (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938).

But as evidenced by the quote from the CCP internal Party memo, the Communist leaders, too, knew what was happening, that Jiang Jieshi was not on their side.

“On 21 March between 600,000 and 800,000 workers struck in demand for an end to militarist rule of the city. Among the workers who played key roles were the printers, postal workers, and mechanics. Several thousand radicals also formed an armed militia that occupied key sections of the city” (St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide: Major Events in Labor History and Their Impact).

On the same day that these Communist supporters of Jiang Jieshi launched their violent take-over of Shanghai, Guomindang troops took control of the City of Nanjing, attacked foreigners and looted foreign property there, “including the American, British, and Japanese consulates.” (Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, page 111). Foreigners were frightened by these attacks and they blamed it on communists, not on Jiang Jieshi. “Actually, however, the nationalists [i.e., Guomindang] were the perpetrators of this series of attacks on foreign civilians. Some foreign officials, such as the Japanese Consul General, thus advised [Jiang Jieshi] to crack down on the radical elements in the city” (St. James Encyclopedia…). This is remembered as the “Nanking Incident of 1927.”

On 22 March, the stage was set for the great betrayal and a years-long bloodbath. On that day, a subordinate of Jiang Jieshi, called off the strike in Shanghai and ordered the suppression of the labor unions and other radical groups (Wilson 110). With thousands of soldiers in toe and at his command, Jiang Jieshi himself arrived on 26 March and began meeting with members of the local Guomindang, the Shanghai business community, and the gangsters. He was promised financial support “if he broke from the communists and pledged to ‘regulate’ the relationship between labor and capital” (St. James Encyclopedia…).

April 1927: Let the Reign of Terror Begin

Jiang Jieshi agreed with these parasitic foreigners that the changes being proposed by the workers and the Communists were too radical. “It should have come as no surprise to anyone that [Jiang Jieshi] decided to move against the radicals, as he had already done so in several other cities in late March” (St. James Encyclopedia…), but many Chinese workers as well as French, German, and Russian communists continued to believe in him.

After the Guomindang’s attack on Westerners and Japanese in Nanjing (i.e., the Nanking Incident of March 1927), Jiang Jieshi started to seek support from Japan and the U.S. rather than the USSR and the CCP (Wilson 33, 72, 134).

Jiang Jieshi viewed the success of the peasants and the workers as a threat to his party’s political, military, and social control, and this is one reason why he initiated the April 12th Shanghai Massacre, in which the Guomindang slaughtered communists in Shanghai and other places. According to Vincent Kolo, the “capitalist class and rural landowners whose sons were well represented in the officer corps of the [Guomindang] armies grew fearful of the increasingly radical demands of the working class (for shorter work hours and against the terror regime in many factories) and the peasantry (for land reform and against the crushing taxes of the landlord class)” (Kolo, “90 Years since Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai Massacre,” Chinaworker.info).

On 5 April Jiang Jieshi “instituted martial law and ordered the disarming of all bearers of arms not properly registered with the Nationalist Army” (Wilson 123). On the 11th, Wang Shouhua [the President of the GLU] was thrown in a sack and “buried alive” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). By the morning of the 12th, the worker militias “had been crushed,” according to historian S.A. Smith. That day, Jiang Jieshi hired hundreds of armed gangsters to massacre labor leaders and communists (Wilson, page 124).

Even so, the tenacious workers, led mainly by the GLU, called a general strike for the 13th of April. “240,000 workers walked out” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). Machine gunners opened fire on their parade. “Attackers” engaged in “stabbing, shooting, and clubbing the panic-stricken crowd.” One hundred were killed. But even on the 14th, the majority of striking workers did not give up.

By the 15th, the GLU estimated that three hundred trade union activists had been killed. It is estimated that by the end of the year, two thousand “Communists and worker militants” had lost their lives. The Guomindang killed “thousands of worker activists” in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). “Over the following twelve months, more than three hundred thousand people would be killed in the Guomindang’s anti-communist purges” (Working Class History 80-81).

The police of “Qingbang and Hongbang brutally executed the captured communist and union members by slaughtering them and putting them in the crater of a locomotive.” (“4.12 Shanghai Coup,” Namuwiki, 15 April 2025). Communists refer to the following years of Guomindang massacres as the “White Terror.” By one estimate, this White Terror resulted in the deaths of one million people (Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World 33). Enabled by the governments of the U.S. and other countries, Jiang Jieshi began in 1947 another White Terror on the Island of Taiwan. It did not end until 1987.

This is the way that Jiang Jieshi thanked the peasant and worker revolutionaries who had propelled his party to power. His rewards for this great achievement of “unifying” the nation included generous financial support from the business class of Shanghai (David Lowe, “Generalissimo,” The Weekly Standard 9:27:22, page 43), lots of help of various kinds from the Powers of the West and Japan, and recognition from the Empires that he was the legitimate ruler of China.

With his solid track record of bullying into submission Chinese workers, the U.S. showered Jiang Jieshi with treasure for decades, until his death in 1975. The U.S. was the first foreign country to step forward and grant recognition to his new regime (in 1928), and soon the U.S. would begin supporting him financially and militarily, too, even when informed U.S. observers, such as John King Fairbank (1907-91) labeled his Party as “proto-fascist.” For Fairbank, the Guomindang were a “small political group holding tenaciously to power…with hopes of using industrialization as a tool of perpetuating their power and with ideas which are socially conservative and backward-looking” (Wilson 2).

Yokomitsu Riichi, the Japanese ultra-rightist author who wrote the novel Shanghai (1931), presented in that story a surprisingly similar picture of the political and economic situation of China, a country where parasites of the West, Japan, and even China committed state violence against them and stole the fruits of their labor. For example:

He [Sanki] fell silent. He had detected the strength of will of the authorities who had hired Chinese to kill Chinese.

[Fang Qiu-lan, a woman to whom Sanki is attracted and a Communist who organizes workers in Japanese textile factories:] “That’s right. The craftiness of the British authorities isn’t new. The history of the modern Orient is so filled with the crimes of that country that if you tried to add them up, you’d be paralyzed. Starving millions of Indians, disabling Chinese with the opium trade. These were Britain’s economic policies. It’s the same as using Persia, India, Afghanistan, and Malaysia to poison China. Now we Chinese must resist completely.” (Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi, Dennis Washburn, trans., Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001, page 153).

Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in “defense equipment and services, with a number of large sales during recent U.S. administrations.” Is this how we deliver “power to the people” and peace in East Asia? Were we promoting industrial democracy by increasing the wealth and power of Jiang Jieshi even after he committed massacres of Chinese workers with impunity? Don’t the people of Taiwan, the vast majority of whom are Han Chinese, deserve credit for sprouting democracy even under the sun-starved, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Jiang Jieshi? Where in the U.S. is there any recognition of the crimes that the U.S. committed against the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups of Taiwan and the rest of China? How solid is the foundation on which the current President Lai Ching-te stands, the man who called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” in 2017? When we spend 250 million U.S. dollars on an upgrade on our “informal,” 10-acre embassy in Taiwan, is that an example of how we adhere to our One China policy? Even merely with the foregoing brief exploration of the history of the obvious class struggle in China a century ago, and quick examples of U.S. support for Jiang Jieshi’s attacks on the working class of China, one can see that U.S. dollars were spent on death, destruction, and tyranny rather than on democracy and peace.

The post A Sketch of the Origins of Jiang Jieshi’s Relationship with the United States first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

Obscene Wealth

Greg Godels — Sat, 24 May 2025 15:00:59 +0000

Gabriel Zucman is a French-born economist who teaches at California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. Zucman’s academic specialization is in wealth inequality, using tax data to track the stratification in wealth in the US and the rest of the world. A student of famed inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, he is an important figure in the World Inequality Database.

His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message.

Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.

Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US– nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.

Other conclusions drawn from the WSJ article:

● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.

● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.

● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.

● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).

● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).

● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.

● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1% account for 21.3% of the total wealth in the British Isles, 27.2% in France, and 27.6% in Germany (2023).

● The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.

● The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.

● CONSEQUENTLY, THE OTHER HALF OF US HOUSEHOLDS (~ 66 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS, ~166 MILLION CITIZENS) SHARED ONLY 3% OF ALL THE WEALTH ACCUMULATED IN THE US.

These data underscore the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.

What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?

First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality.

Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.

Wealth on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income.

Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.

While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.

Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.

For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3% of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes.

Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1% in order to dominate political power.

Cold War intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy– the rights to participate in electoral politics– enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining.

Further, the next 40% of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30% of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.

The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality– a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.

The fact that the top 10% of US households have a grip on 67% of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.”

Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1%” — so popular with slippery politicians or internet naïfs — actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data.

Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”

As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly:

The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalization of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, i.e., the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labor power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, “establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.” The Transition to Socialism, lecture, 1971

Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality.

While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed.

With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households and an estimated 89% of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10%, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10% of wealthy households.

It should be just as clear that the bottom 50%– with 3% of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property– survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living.

Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today– 177 years later– remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital– whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises– concentrates wealth at the top.

Between the bottom 50% and the top 10% of households is a contested field of largely income earners– workers– as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbor the illusion that their class status will improve.

Some have been characterized as “aristocrats of labor” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterized– to follow Marx– as “petty-bourgeois”: small, insignificant capitalists.

From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst S. N. Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.

If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers– the working class– who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

The post Obscene Wealth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Beyond Socialist Purity

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 10 May 2025 15:20:20 +0000

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant. As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
economic as well as political;
must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

They are anti-imperialist.
They are anti-war.
They are anti-finance capital.
They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
the famines in Russia;
the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

What is the role of the state?
What is the role of a socialist party?
What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing. On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

The post Beyond Socialist Purity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours

Greg Godels — Sat, 03 May 2025 15:05:17 +0000

It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, “Gramsci and Political Theory,” before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).

Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work.

The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure.

It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.

With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker — in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917 — is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”.

By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.

Would Hobsbawm — if he were alive today — be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist”?

The WSJ reports:

Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:

Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.

Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection.

The right sees politics as a contest — even a war — over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor.

Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.

Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure — what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” — is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.

When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement.

Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.

Quite obvious, the populist-right has — crudely appropriating Gramsci — launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.

Lessons for the Left

As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation.

Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” — not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing.

As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.

In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist-influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.

Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.

As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”

Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life — they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci — with no vital connection to working-class life.

Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class.

John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.

It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.

Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:

[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)

Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.

In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.

Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.

Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution– met with great expectations by the socialist left– appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “…we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.

Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.

One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”

Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

Michael K. Smith — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:31:01 +0000

After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.

Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, band of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh’s imminent victory.

At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.

Saigon was no more.

To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people, he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.

The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished are punished anew.

After two decades of Western terror, retributive deaths were near zero. The much-predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese.

This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those whom Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures.

The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.

As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless:

“There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth . . . A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel.”

Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for “success.” This position, reiterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.

U.S. hands off other countries.

To the Times‘ editors, these words were incomprehensible.

U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that “We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in,” perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the “loss” of Vietnam on the “impatience” of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. “You can’t fight a war on television,” he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would “be well advised to silence future critics by executive order.”

With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. “The lessons of the past,” he implausibly advised, “have already been learned . . . and we should have our focus on the future.”

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

What’s Next?

Greg Godels — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:59:51 +0000

There is a growing sense among many that we may be on the verge of a new world order or — to be more accurate — at the end of an old one. Opinion polls show very low confidence in the familiar institutions of governance and high uncertainty about the economy. Voters are rejecting traditional centrists parties, with new alternative parties and movements growing in popularity. There is little or no popular consensus on the path forward and an abiding sense that matters are, in general, going badly.

The global economy is variously afflicted with inflation, stagnation, or both, and growing insecurity. Political leaders are rigidly defending the old consensus or unsuccessfully advancing “new” wrinkles on the old that go nowhere. Inequality of wealth, income, power, and outcomes grow dramatically.

Few are satisfied that we can continue in the old way, but even fewer know of a way forward.

So, it should come with little surprise that intellectuals have taken on the daunting task of describing where we are and where we might be going.

Within the broad left, two characterizations of the current “international order” have been popularized: a policy, “neoliberalism” and a process, “globalization.” Much nonsense has been written and spoken about both. As the terms grew in popularity and usage, their meaning became fuzzier and fuzzier.

There have been useful accounts of neoliberalism that place it both in an historical context and within the evolution of modern capitalism (see my discussion of Gary Gerstle’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order). Gerstle, notably, gives a credible account of neoliberalism’s origins in the late 1970s and strong reasons for its fragility today.

Similarly, Branko Milanović has offered a credible account of globalization in an article that I recently reviewed. However, he dates it from 1989, when, in fact, the expansion of trade has been consistent from the establishment of the post-war global trade architecture, with qualitative leaps coming from the 1978 “opening” to China, the 1991 demise of the European socialist states, and again with China’s entry into the WTO, but followed more recently by globalization’s wane after the Great Recession of 2007-09.

It is important not to confuse the two: neoliberalism is a political initiative that gained traction from the failings of New Deal Keynesian policy and became policy with the establishment of centrist consensus and its subscription by mainstream political parties, spreading throughout the world as dogma; globalization is an expansive process accelerated with new technologies and the migration of capital to new and expanded labor markets. While they overlap in many ways, they are different phenomena.

An even more recent participant in this discussion is Perry Anderson, writing in the London Review of Books. Contra Gerstle, Anderson sees a still-resilient neoliberalism locked in a political struggle with populism — “The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.”

Within the various fora of left-wing intellectuals, Anderson is a well-known, important, but controversial figure. His writing, his editorship of New Left Review, and his hand in Verso books placed him in the center of UK left intellectual life — independent of Communist and socialist parties — in a role similar to that played by Monthly Review in the US. Wherever Marxism rose in fashion in student and professorial circles, Anderson’s influence could be found.

The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Western Marxism, in 2017 (2024 in English) placed Perry Anderson at the center of Losurdo’s critique of Euro-American trends, a critique generating much attention with the anti-imperialist left. There was certainly some merit to Losurdo’s charge that some of the “Marxism” exercised in Europe and the US was stained by Eurocentrism. Certainly, Losurdo was on to something.

Anderson’s leftism was decidedly hostile to, real-existing-socialism — both East and West — and the various Communist Parties. He opted, instead, for some pure vision of socialism, a version that Marx would have scoffed at as utopian. Moreover, Anderson encouraged a left scholasticism that took young activists further and further from changing the world and more and more toward an academic career.

But the failings of the Western left lie less in any “geographical” disposition, but more centrally in the virus of anti-Communism and the disillusionment after the demise of the USSR. Gary Gerstle — no friend of Communism — captures it:

The collapse of communism… shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.

Ironically, Anderson concedes as much:

[Behind] neoliberalism’s apparent immunity to disgrace– lay the disappearance of any significant political movement calling robustly either for the abolition or the radical transformation of capitalism. By the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone.

But notice the difference. Gerstle — the liberal — identifies the socialist left as in retreat from socialism, with not a little suggestion that the “redefinition” was based on opportunism. There really was an alternative, despite what elites wanted us to believe.

Anderson — the Western Marxist intellectual — describes the retreat in the passive voice, as though there was no agency in the retreat, merely a “disappearance.” Who or what caused the “disappearance”? Who or what swept socialism clear from the stage? Did it fall from the sky?

There are no regrets of the setbacks to the socialist world. There is no remorse over the sponsorship of student rebellion over worker actions. There is no reflection on the dalliance with the renegades, malcontents, and dreamers on the margins of the left.

Anderson writes of “the widely differing set of revolts… united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s.” “What they oppose,” he asserts “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it, neoliberalism.” And what was the role of New Left Review in taking socialism off the table?

Like so much of the academic left, Anderson and his colleagues were fully compliant with the post-war Western intellectual catechism: ABC – “Anything But Communism.”

Not surprisingly, Anderson sees a bleak future: either a continuing neoliberal nightmare or an ineffective populism, possibly offering worse outcomes.

In the last few weeks, the discussion of the next international order further develops with an intervention by Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, an establishment figure who has taken the rare enlightened position on Ukraine and Palestine. In Giving Birth to the New International Order, Sachs argues that:

The multipolar world will be born when the geopolitical weight of Asia, Africa, and Latin America matches their rising economic weight. This needed shift in geopolitics has been delayed as the US and Europe cling to outdated prerogatives built into international institutions and to their outdated mindsets.

Sachs endorses a view widespread on the Left, a utopian view that a diverse and multi-interested group of states organized around diverse and often contradictory grievances against the reigning US-centered international order — the BRICS alliance — can produce “a new multilateral order that can keep the peace and the path to sustainable development.”

Almost instantly, Sachs article was met with a critical response from Dr. Asoka Bandarage, who challenges the BRICS commitment to social justice for the smaller, weaker, less powerful nations:

Unfortunately, BRICS appears to be replicating the same patterns of domination and subordination in its relations with smaller nations that characterize traditional imperial powers. Whether the world is unipolar or multipolar, the continuation of a dominant global economic and financial system based on competitive technological and capitalist growth and environmental, social and cultural destruction will fundamentally not change the world and the disastrous trajectory we are on.

Through her intimate knowledge of Indian-Sri Lankan relations, Bandarage shows how decidedly unequal power relations function even with the BRICS founders, questioning: “…would this truly represent a move towards a ‘New International Order,’ or would it simply be a mutation of the existing paradigm of domination and subordination and geopolitical weight being equated with economic weight, i.e., ‘might is right’?”

A welcome voice joins the conversation with the April 16 issue of the Morning Star. Andrew Murray — Marxist trade union and anti-war leader — affirms that “[t]his is a moment of transition, so we should hold firmly in our heads that the destination is not foreordained.”

Indeed.

Murray, like the others, sees neoliberalism as the current order: “a prolonged assault on working-class institutions, on the social wage and on the sovereignty of the countries of the global South, with the state receding from some of the obligations it had assumed after 1945 — the maintenance of full employment for example.”

Unlike the others, he sees 2008 as the apogee of neoliberalism’s ascendance:

Neoliberalism met its own Waterloo in the crash of 2008. The stagnation in living standards since has been paralleled by an intellectual stagnation of the ruling classes, unable to easily preserve the old systemic assumptions yet equally incapable of transitioning to new ones.

Murray reminds us that the previous transitions always included the socialist options, noting a fascinating quote from former French socialist president François Mitterrand — frustrated by difficulties around the Programme commun of the Communists and Socialists — reportedly saying “in economics there are two solutions– either you are a Leninist or you won’t change anything.”

Until Murray’s contribution, no one even hints at a Leninist solution.

The leading oppositional candidate for a “solution” today is right populism. And we must take note of Murray’s warning: “Previous transitions have been accompanied by war, or at least violent social convulsions.”

If elites continue to cling to neoliberal dogma, “that hands the initiative to the Trumps, Le Pens and Weidels who embrace a lot of Hayek and a little of Hitler, a rhetorical dash of Roosevelt and nothing of Lenin,” concludes Murray.

Conclusion

The growing sense that neoliberalism is a spent force, both popularly and in practice, leads to the question: “What comes next?”

Ruling circles offer only two choices:

Clinging to a nearly 50-year consensus of deregulation, privatization, public/private partnership (socialism for the capitalists), dismantling of social safety nets, austerity, growing inequality, and money-democracy.
A right-populism that postures as anti-establishment, but maintains existing unequal relations of power and wealth, employs bully-democracy, while dismantling the institutions and organizations of their opposition, and scattering their forces.

Neither choice challenges the socio-economic system that spawned both options: capitalism. Neither option serves the interest of the people.

The liberal Gerstle, the social democrat Milanović, the academic Marxist Anderson, and the multipolarista Sachs offer us a return to a disastrous neoliberalism or blind faith and hope in a yet-to-be-discovered solution.

Only Murray offers an approach with historical antecedents and the prospect of a sharp break with capitalist malignancy.

We must remember that those who have been swayed toward right-wing populism were despairing for better alternatives. Blaming their votes when they are offered no real choice is arrogant foolishness. Better we find a real alternative.

Without another alternative emerging, the neo-nationalism of right populism — expressed today as tariffs, sanctions, barriers (protectionism) — will inevitably lead to war.

The only answer to an obscenely inhuman capitalism hell bent on a catastrophic path is the “Lenin” answer: socialism.

The post What’s Next? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Globalization, its Demise, and its Consequences

Greg Godels — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:44:18 +0000

There is very, very much to like about the recent (3-24-2025) article in Jacobin by Branko Milanović entitled “What Comes After Globalization?”

First, Milanović explores historical comparisons between the late-nineteenth-century expansion of global markets and trade (what he calls Globalization I and dates from 1870 to 1914) and the globalization of our time (what he calls Globalization II and dates from 1989 to 2020). The search for and exposure of historical patterns are the first steps in scientific inquiry, what Marxists mean by historical materialist analysis.

Unfortunately, many writers — including on the left — take the more recent participation of new and newly engaged producers and global traders, a revolution in logistics, the success of free-trade politics, and the subsequent explosion of international exchange as signaling the arrival of a new, unique capitalist era, even a new stage in its evolution.

Recognizing a growing share of trade in global output, but burdened with a limited historical horizon (the end of the Second World War), left theorists drew unwarranted, speculative conclusions about a new stage of capitalism featuring a decline in the power of the nation state, the irreversible domination of “transnational capital,” and even the coming of a borderless “empire” contested by an amorphous “multitude.”

Countering these views, writers like Linda Weiss (The Myth of the Powerless State, 1998) and Charles Emmerson (1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War, 2013) bring some sobriety to the question and remind us that we have seen the explosive growth of world trade before, generated by many of the same or similar historic forces. Weiss tells us that “the ratios of export trade to GDP were consistently higher in 1913 than they were in 1973.” Noting the same historical facts, Emmerson wryly concludes “Plus ça change”.

Milanović’s recognition of this parallel between two historic moments gives his analysis a gravitas missing from many leftists, many self-styled Marxist interpretations of the globalization phenomenon.

Secondly, Milanović — an acknowledged expert in comparative economic inequality — makes an important observation regarding the asymmetry between Globalization I and II. While they are alike in many ways, they differ in one important, significant way: while Globalization I benefited the Great Powers at the expense of the colonial world, the workers in the former colonies were actually benefited by Globalization II. In Milanović’s words:

Replacing domestic labor with cheap foreign labor made the owners of capital and the entrepreneurs of the Global North much richer. It also made it possible for the workers of the Global South to get higher-paying jobs and escape chronic underemployment… It is therefore not a surprise that the Global North became deindustrialized, not solely as the result of automation and the increasing importance in services in national output overall, but also due to the fact that lots of industrial activity went to places where it could be done more cheaply. It’s no wonder that East Asia became the new workshop of the world.

While he misleadingly uses the expression “coalition of interests,” Milanović elaborates:

This particular coalition of interests was overlooked in the original thinking regarding globalization. In fact, it was believed that globalization would be bad for the large laboring masses of the Global South — that they would be exploited even more than before. Many people perhaps made this mistake based on the developments of Globalization I, which indeed led to the deindustrialization of India and the impoverishment of the populations of China and Africa. During this era, China was all but ruled by foreign merchants, and in Africa farmers lost control over land — toiled in common since time immemorial. Landlessness made them even poorer. So the first globalization indeed had a very negative effect on most of the Global South. But that was not the case in Globalization II, when wages and employment for large parts of the Global South improved.

Milanović makes an important point, though it risks exaggeration by his insistence that because Globalization II brought a higher GDP per worker, the workers are better off and exploited less.

They may well be better off in many ways, but they are likely exploited more.

Because he forgoes a rigorous class analysis, he assumes that gain in GDP per worker goes automatically to the worker. Most of it surely does not; if it did, capital would not have shifted to the Global South. Instead, most of the GDP per capita goes to the capitalist — foreign or domestic. Capital would not migrate to the former colonies if it garnered a lower rate of exploitation.

But engagement with manufacturing in Globalization II, rather than resource extraction or handicraft, certainly provides workers in the former colonies with greater employment, better wages, and more opportunity to parlay their labor power into a more advantageous position — a fact that nearly all development theorists from right to left should concede.

Structural changes in capitalism — the rapid mobility and ease of mobility of capital, the opening of new lower wage markets, a revolution in the means and costs of transportation — have shifted manufacturing and its potential benefits for workers from its location in richer countries to a new location in poorer countries, creating a new leveling between workers in the North and South.

Denying or neglecting this reality has led many leftists — like John Bellamy Foster — to support the “labor aristocracy” thesis as a reason to ignore or demean the potentially militant role of workers in the advanced capitalist countries. As one of the strongest voices in support of the revolutionary potential of the colonial workers and peasants, Lenin was scathingly critical of elements of the working class who were indirectly privileged by the wealth accumulated from the exploitation of the colonies. Those “labor aristocrats” constituted an ideological damper on the class politics of Lenin’s time (and even today), but by no means gave a reason to deny the class’s revolutionary potential. Certainly, the ruling classes of the Great Powers employed that relative privilege and many other ploys to further exploit their domestic workers to the fullest extent and discourage their rebellion.

Bellamy and others want to deny the revolutionary potential of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries in order to support the proposition that the principal contradiction today is between the US, Europe, and Japan and the countries of the Global South. Bellamy endorses the Monthly Review position taken as far back as the early 1960s: “Some Marxist theorists in the West took the position, most clearly enunciated by Sweezy, that revolution, and with it, the revolutionary proletariat and the proper focus of Marxist theory, had shifted to the third world or the Global South.”

While frustration with the lack of working-class militancy (worldwide) is understandable and widespread, it does not change the dynamics of revolutionary change — the decisive role of workers in replacing the existing socio-economic system. Nor does it dismiss the obligation to stand with the workers, the peasants, the unemployed, and the déclassé wherever they may be — within either the Great Powers or the former colonies.

Just as revolutionary-pessimism fostered the romance of third-world revolution among Western left-wing intellectuals in the 1960s, today it is the foundation for another romantic notion — multipolarity as the rebellion of the Global South. Like its Cold War version, it sees a contradiction between former colonies and the Great Powers of our time as superseding the contradiction between powerful monopoly corporations and the people.

Of course, richer capitalist states and their ruling classes do all they can to protect or expand any advantages they may enjoy over other states — rich or poor — including economic advantages. But for the workers of rich or poor states, the decisive question is not a question of sovereignty, not a question of defending their national bourgeoisie, or their elites, but of ending exploitation, of combatting capital.

The outcome of the global competition between Asian or South American countries and their richer Western counterparts over market share or the division of surplus value has no necessary connection with the well-being of workers in the sweatshops of the various rivals. This is a fact that many Western academics seem to miss.

Thirdly, Milanović clearly sees the demise of Globalization II — the globalization of our time:

The international wave of globalization that began over thirty years ago is at its close. Recent years have seen increased tariffs from the United States and the European Union; the creation of trade blocs; strong limits on the transfer of technology to China, Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” countries; the use of economic coercion, including import bans and financial sanctions; severe restrictions on immigration; and, finally, industrial policies with the implied subsidization of domestic producers.

Again, he is right, though he fails to acknowledge the economic logic behind the origins of Globalization II, the conditions leading to its demise, and the forces shaping the post-globalization era. For Milanović, globalization’s end comes from policy decisions — not policy decisions forced on political actors — but simply policy preferences: “Trump fits that mold almost perfectly. He loves mercantilism and sees foreign economic policy as a tool to extract all kinds of concessions…” Thus, Trump’s disposition “explains” the new economic regimen; we need to look no deeper.

But Trump did not end globalization. The 2007-2009 economic crisis did.

Globalization was propelled by neoliberal restructuring combined with the flood of cheap labor entering the global market from the “opening” of the People’s Republic of China and the collapse of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Cheaper labor power means higher profits, everything else being the same.

With the subsequent orgy of overaccumulation and capital running wildly looking for even the most outlandish investment opportunities, it was almost inevitable that the economy would crash and burn from unfettered speculation.

And when it did in 2007-2009, it took trade growth with it and marked “paid” on globalization.

As I wrote in 2008:

As with the Great Depression, the economic crisis strikes different economies in different ways. Despite efforts to integrate the world economies, the international division of labor and the differing levels of development foreclose a unified solution to economic distress. The weak efforts at joint action, the conferences, the summits, etc. cannot succeed simply because every nation has different interests and problems, a condition that will only become more acute as the crisis mounts…

“Centrifugal forces” generated by self-preservation were operant, pulling apart existing alliances, blocs, joint institutions, and common solutions. Trade agreements, international organizations, regulatory systems, and trust greased the wheels of global trade; distrust, competition, and a determination to push economic problems on others threw sand on those wheels.

Anticipating the period after the demise of globalization, I wrote in April of 2009:

To simplify greatly, a healthy, expanding capitalist order tends to promote intervals of global cooperation enforced by a hegemonic power and trade expansion, while a wounded, shrinking capitalist order tends towards autarky and economic nationalism. The Great Depression was a clear example of heightened nationalism and economic self-absorption.

The aftermath of the 2007-2009 Great Recession was one such example of “a wounded, shrinking capitalist order.” And predictably, autarky and economic nationalism followed.

The tendency was exacerbated by the European debt crisis that drove a wedge between the European Union’s wealthier North and the poorer South. Similarly, Brexit was an example of the tendency to go it alone, substituting competition for cooperation. Ruling classes replaced “win-win” with zero-sum thinking.

The pace and intensity of international trade has never recovered.

While Milanović does not attend to it, this cycle of capitalist expansion, economic crisis, followed by economic nationalism (and often, war) recurs periodically.

In the late-nineteenth century, the global economy saw a vast restructuring of capitalism, with new technologies and rising productivity (and concomitant rises in rates of exploitation).The era also saw what economists cite as “a world-wide price and economic recession” from 1873 to 1879 (the Long Depression). In its wake, protectionism and trade wars broke out as everyone tried to dispose of their cheaper goods in other countries, only to be met with tariff barriers.

The imperialist “scramble for Africa” — so powerfully described by John Hobson and V. I. Lenin — raised the intensity of international competition and rivalry, while generating the foundation for economic growth and global trade with newly acquired colonies. This is the period that Milanović characterizes as Globalization I. A further aspect and stimulus of the rebirth of growth and trade was the massive armament programs mounted by the Great Powers. The unprecedented armament race — the “Dreadnought race” — served as an engine of growth, while exponentially increasing the danger of war (from 1880 to 1914 armament spending in Germany increased six-fold, in Russia three-fold, in Britain three-fold, in France double, source: The Bloody Trail of Imperialism, Eddie Glackin, 2015).

One could argue, similarly, that the 1930s were a period of depression and economic nationalism, following a broad, exuberant economic expansion. And as with the pre-World War I Globalization I, the contradictions were resolved with World War.

Is War our Destiny after the Demise of Globalization II?

Certainly, the historical parallels cited above suggest that wars often follow pronounced economic disruptions and the consequent rise of economic nationalism, though we must remember that events do not follow a mechanical pattern.

Yet if history is a great teacher, it certainly looks like the mounting contradictions of today’s capitalism point to intensifying rivalry and conflict. A March 24 Wall Street Journal headline screams: Trade War Explodes Across World at a Pace Not Seen in Decades!

The article notes that the infamous Smoot-Hawley (tariff) Act of 1930– a response to the Great Depression– was only rescinded after the war.

It also notes — correctly — that tariffs are not simply a Trump initiative. As of March 1, the Group of 20 have imposed 4500 import restrictions — up 75% since 2016 and increased 10-fold since 2008.

The World Trade Organization, responsible for organizing Globalization II has failed its calling. As the WSJ reports:

In February, South Korea and Vietnam imposed stiff new penalties on imports of Chinese steel following complaints from local producers about a surge of cut-price competition. Similarly, Mexico has begun an antidumping probe into Chinese chemicals and plastic sheets, while Indonesia is readying new duties on nylon used in packaging imported from China and other countries.

Even sanctions-hit Russia is seeking to stem an influx of Chinese cars, despite warm relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Russia in recent weeks increased a tax on disposing of imported vehicles, effectively jacking up their cost. More than half of newly sold vehicles in Russia are Chinese-made, compared with less than 10% before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

As tensions mount on the trade front, rearmament and political tensions are growing. War talk mounts and the means of destruction become more effective and greater in number. The US alone accounts for 43% of military exports worldwide, up from 35% in 2020. France is now the number two arms exporter, surpassing Russia. And, in over a decade, NATO has more than doubled the value of weapons imported.

European defense spending is expanding at rates unseen since the Cold War, in some cases since World War II. According to the BBC, “On 4 March European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced plans for an €800bn defence fund called The ReArm Europe Fund.” Germany has eliminated all restraints on military spending in its budget. Likewise, the UK plans to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP in the next two years, while Denmark is aiming for 3% of GDP in the same period (growth rates consistent with those of the Great Powers before World War I, except for Germany).

Dangerously, centrist politicians in the EU are beginning to see rising military spending as a boost to a stuttering economy. As military Keynesianism takes hold, the possibility of global war increases, especially in light of the shifting alliances in the proxy war in Ukraine.

Even more ominously, Europe’s two nuclear powers — France and the UK — are seriously discussing the development of a European nuclear force independent of the US-controlled NATO nuclear capability.

At the same time, the incoming chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced readiness to supply more NATO powers with a nuclear capacity.

As war cries intensify, the EU Commission has issued a guidance that EU citizens should maintain 72 hours of emergency supplies to meet looming war dangers.

Of course, the continually escalating wave of tariffs, sanctions, and hostile words directed at The People’s Republic of China by the US and its allies threatens to break into open conflict and wider war, a war for which the PRC is quite understandably actively preparing.

As with previous World Wars, it is not so much — at this moment — who is right or wrong, but when the momentum toward war will become irreversible. Another imperialist war — for, in essence, that is what it would be — will be an unimaginable disaster. No issue is more vital to our survival than stopping this momentum toward global war.

The post Globalization, its Demise, and its Consequences first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:45:03 +0000

Orientation
This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual is configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why two dimensional beings on Flatland fail to understand the Spaceland dimension of some of its creatures. I’ve included a link to a video of the story. This will conclude Part I.

In Part II we will discover that even when liberals find out about the Russian activity theory led by Lev Vygotsky, they interpret him in a bourgeois fashion. By this I mean they focus on educational reform and play, rather than work, while ignoring social class, exploitation, alienations as well as what an anti-capitalist individual might look like. To explore both parts of this article will referring to a great book by Carl Ratner: Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. In my opinion more than any other individual in the United States Carl has remained the most uncompromising in presenting the communist psychology of Vygotsky to the Yankee public.

Hard Facts About Political Economy in Mordor
The US has the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world – 23% and climbing. We have the second highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries. Mordor has the highest incarceration rate in the world (spending is three times the amount that is spent on education). We are something like 125th in the world of 200 countries in literacy. American Association for the Advancement of Science discovered that one third of American’s population believes that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. In absolute numbers we easily have the highest obesity rate in the world. We have a political party, a party that imagines itself as liberal, complicit in the production of genocide in Palestine while propping up dictators the world over. The highest paid individual in John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008 was Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist. Her salary was higher than McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. The so-called program “War on drugs” program does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US. The 400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million.

Sixteen years after the near collapse of the global financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to re-regulate financial institutions. The financiers and politicians who created the financial implosion of the early 21^st century have foisted greater harm on the US than all the country’s enemies. Why aren’t these problems fixed? We have no mass political party that might address these problems in a systematic way. We have political debates that are sponsored by a private organization, Commission on Presidential Debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate unless the two major parties agree.

In a Degenerating Society the Need for Propaganda is Essential
The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

The ruling class does not invent its ideology by itself. The upper middle class perpetuates the ideology not only in economics, but in philosophical, artistic and scientific fields. Presidents of community colleges work for capitalists to dampen the expectations for working class students. Their commission institutes are specifically charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing capitalist practices such as the RAND Foundation. Also on the ground floor is the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. All three hire intellectuals to do their bidding by giving talks and writing papers and books. These institutions play hard ball. For example, the RAND corporation installed its academic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in powerful university administrative positions. Thomas Schilling was one of the key figures in established rational choice theory, probably the most direct enemy of communist psychology.

Propaganda supporting individualism such as social contract theory has kept social scientists from solving complex social problems by refusing to understand these problems as structural and due to capitalism. Instead, the psyches of individuals are blamed. It enlists a massive social apparatus to block the truth and reality of exploitation as the real source of most psychological problems today.

Being mystified by this propaganda does not mean people are blind to every aspect of society. It only means they do not fundamentally understand how their society works. They are ignorant of the following deep issues of how power is distributed: the infrastructural relationships between the Deep State and particular political regimes; how capitalism operates and why it gets into crises roughly every seven years. The Mordor public, whether liberal or conservative, may know about lobbying, corruption, lying and cheating. They may be aware of inequality, poverty and discrimination. However, propaganda keeps them from not understanding the basis of these, or how these problems are interrelated and macro cultural in both form and content. Propagandists do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to its will as Stephen Lukes points out in his third dimension of power. Furthermore, these propagandists can commit evil and be agents of oppression without themselves being perverted, sadistic or psychotic.

Consumer Psychology
Ratner writes that consumer spending accounts for 70% of Mordor’s GDP. For capitalists, it is vitally important for the population to not only consume a great deal but to do so quickly. He writes that for capitalists, the natural cycles of growth of animals are too slow for the profit motive so cows are fed hormones to speed up that growth. Fish are also farmed in conditions that speed their growth. The same is true for people. Capitalists do not want people to eat according to when they are hungry. This takes hours to peak. Instead, the act of eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun because no other consumer activity can be performed as continuously as eating. We cannot wear new shoes all the time, but one can eat food every hour when watching TV, going to the movies or attending ball games because they require the rapid turnover to generate profit. It includes getting to work faster, working faster and spending money faster when these same workers consume.

Wholesome food takes a long time to digest, and afterword the person is sated and has no desire for more. Added to the headaches of capitalists, some wholesome food can be cheap to buy and generates low profit. On the other hand, junk food is digested quickly and its fat, sugar and salt provide instant gratification without real satiation while stimulating new cravings. Ratner refers to Jules Henry’s book Culture Against Man who uses the adjective “pecuniary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with commodified. Furthermore, enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. For many consumers the process of shopping becomes more enjoyable than using the product. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. We can go window shopping and browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. Obsessive shopping can become a pathology. One researcher, H. Dittmar found that compulsive shoppers have a larger discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self than others.

Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture, in popular music, in entertainment with car crashes, special technical effects and plenty of sexual suggestion. There is minimal, trivial content with little character development or substantive plot. Sensationalism offers no continuity between people and product. Throw-away products are deliberately designed for the short term and wear out quickly. They are unrepairable and replaced by new purchases. Capitalist intervention into the emotional life of the consumer with advertising campaigns is fueled by mass market psychologists. Capitalists can’t admit what they are doing to anyone else, let alone to themselves so they invent a theory that is the opposite of what they are doing.

A rational choice theory of economics ignores the emotional and sexual appeal of the advertising industry that posits the consumer as having a natural rationality where you know what you need, you gather information and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing. Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology because it construes society as an outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It is the mother of contemporary individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro-cultural psychology

Why Can’t We See Through The Hard Facts of Political Economy, Propaganda and Consumer Psychology?
In order to penetrate below the surface of capitalist society and analyze what is going on, we need a communist psychology which requires more than a liberal or conservative understanding of what is what is happening in the political economy. Understanding communist psychology requires:

understanding infrastructural and structural dynamics of capitalism that are invisible to the naked eye;
understanding that these factors may contradict common sense. Because reality is complex and expanding we cannot experience its totality through sense impressions. We must use sense impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality on which science is based;
understanding society as a kind of verb in motion, not a noun, an unchanging thing.

Carl Ratner gives three examples from the sciences which show that they have to move beyond their senses and beyond common sense in order to make new discoveries.

Astronomy is concerned with the immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on earth and bring it into being. Just as the characteristics of earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, other planets, distant galaxies and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelligible without first understanding macro-cultural factors.

Secondly, Darwin could have never discovered how species evolved from changing environmental circumstances if all he had to go on was the plant and animal life in Britain in the 19th century. He had to travel half-way around the world to discover fossils of plant and animal life thousands of years old. He needed the geological work of Lyell in order to familiarize himself with ages much larger than human history to begin to understand the gradualness of bio-evolutionary change. He had to refuse the easy and infantile explanations of theologians who could not imagine that matter was self-organizing and not a passive lump molded by the will of God.

Lastly, in the atomic structure of steel beams:

Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constituents which areinvisible to the naked eye, are difficult to accept from the perspective of common sense. Looking at a steel beam it seems inconceivable that it is composed of atomic particles which are in motion…. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic science in revealing constituents that are invisible to the naked eye, …macro cultural psychology changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory changes our way of understanding steel beams.

Macro cultural psychology is also like unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave. Everyday life in capitalist society with its villains and heroes in the movies, sports, music and politics are like the shadows cast by the sun’s light on the back of the cave. When we get involved in the puppet show of the shadows on the wall we ignore the capitalist sun that is responsible for the whole show. People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions and thoughts based on the shadows on the wall in the hopes of achieving satisfaction. However, behind these subjective experiences lies a macro cultural, political economic logic of the sun that structurally patterns them unconsciously in particular ways to remain focused on the puppet show rather than the light behind them.

From Flatland to Spaceland
Another way to capture the difference between liberal psychology and communist psychology is to imagine that each inhabits different dimensions of reality. In his mathematical science fiction book Flatland Edwin Abbot tells a story of life in the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The people on Flatland take their world as self-evident. The higher functioning ones get around quite well just as working or middle-class people get along in capitalist society. What they don’t understand is that there is a third dimension of height. By accident, one of the Flatland inhabitants is visited by someone from the third dimension which is called Spaceland. The third dimensional being can get along in the two-dimensional world, just as communists can get along in a capitalist world but their full life is more complex, living in the third dimension.

When the three dimensional being tells the Flatlander (a square) about the existence of Spaceland, the Flatlander is cynical. Finally the Spacelander challenges the square to ride with him into the dimension of height. The Flatlander is both frightened and delighted to find the real existence of Spaceland. In our time, the Flatlander being drawn into Spaceland would be like a Flatlander living through a socialist revolution. The square returns to Flatland to proselytize about the existence of Spaceland but he finds their resistance to the existence of Spaceland remains entrenched. Below is the link to a 30-minute video about the story.

What is Macro Cultural Psychology?
From the political to the economic to the psychological
Infrastructural macro cultural psychology posits that psychology is rooted in political and economic institutions that are neglected by neoliberal psychology. They include the state, the army, the stock market, the Catholic Church, corporate farms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industries, capitalist media and their impact on psychology. From this flow capitalist relations like commodification, alienation, surplus value, consumerism, class structure and possessive individualism. Lastly, these influence the familiar psychological expression such as emotion, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality and the senses. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if they are to function effectively. Whenever people express themselves psychologically, they mostly express and promulgate macro cultural factors embodied within it. Vygotsky writes that mental structures are inseparable from a social structure and that there is a social structure designed just for psychology.

Invisible levels in deep time beyond the senses
For macro cultural psychology nature is both outside and inside us. Culture mediates both outside and inside. Macro culture mediates our external interactions with nature (earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air, water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (our hormones, sense organs, motor organs, and cortical processes). This structure is invisible, yet implicit and outlasts the lives of the individuals who shape it. Macro culture imposes constraints as more than a mere sum of individual acts as claimed in liberal micro psychology.

Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions by themselves. One cannot see or hear the full dynamics of the stock market or a transportation system over time and around the world. Culture and communication are the most immediate bases for mental and psychological life. Without the symbolic duplication of objects over deep social space and time there would be little freedom to imagine variations in our choices. The freedom to imagine new things is a cultural product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, macro culture provides the mechanism for making anything in culture psychologically possible. In Ratner’s conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities:

its own distinct quality (family as a distinct institution);
the qualities that are imparted from structural forces such as the state, laws, educational practices;
the political economy – the stability of the stock market, as work opportunities and the cost of goods and services.

All layers of macro culture are not equal. The economics of manufacturing are more influential in society than painting or sculpture. For example, automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of workers. In its success or failure, it affects the steel, oil and transportation industries.

Beyond mind-body problems
Ratner argues that the so-called the mind-body problem of how the physical body-brain produces mental life is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness. It is culture that produces the mind, not brain circuitry. If nature is world one and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three. Culture does not influence some primordial consciousness and then adds certain extrinsic elements to it. Rather, culture forms consciousness. A major difference between human and animal cognition it’s that animals perceive relations of observable features of immediately present entities (first order relations). With the exception of chimps dolphins, ravens and crows, for humans, the socio-cultural world mediates their relations. For the rest of the animal kingdom, present sensuous relations are all there is.

Interpersonal micro relations vs interpenetrating macro relations
Neoliberal micro psychology finds it roots in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It assumes that individual relations with society are associative, contractual and voluntary. Furthermore, society is confined to sensual relations between people in Everyday life. Macro cultural psychology is grounded in the interpenetrating, interdependent relations of Hegel and Marx. It assumes individual relations with society are organic, necessary and involuntary. Society includes not just personal relations in everyday life, but structures and networks beyond sensuous interpersonal relations that impact an individual whether we like it or not.

For neoliberal capitalist psychology, psychological functions evolve on the individual level in order to realize individual agency or expression. For neoliberal psychology agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture – as expressing the individual resisting culture or recasting culture in more fulfilling personal terms. But this championing of individual agency breaks down. A good example of why this doesn’t make sense is early advertising campaigns to get women to smoke. Women’s “agency” did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. It was the macro culture of advertising agencies that began and sustained the process. Micro cultural society ignores macro cultural socialization such as various types of propaganda which are necessary to spread common cultural psychological signification throughout the population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization.

Overcoming Conventional Methodology
From idealism and mechanism to political practice
It is important not to restrict macro cultural psychology to conventional methodology. We should not conceptualize macro principles to terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations. But how are the objective and the subjective integrated? Because in liberal micro psychology the objective and the subjective are kept separate, their studies always are either overstressing the objective, resulting in mechanism or reification, such as behaviorism. The other possibility is they overstate the subjective which results in idealism, like humanistic psychology. In macro cultural psychology, the ultimate integration of the objective and the subjective is collective political practice of a party, union, or social movement in which individuals engage in attempting to change the world. This practice enriches and changes the objective world while transforming subjective experience. This collective political practice avoids the twin dangers of mechanism and idealism, reification and subjectivism.

Individualism in liberal micro psychology research methods
Individualism in research methods are designed to validate subjects by:

allowing them to speak freely;
accepting their point of view uncritically;
renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity;
ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity.

A central political issue in capitalist society as in all class societies is exploitation. Micro liberal psychology avoids the reality of exploitation marginalizing by:

reducing it to personal meanings;
interpersonal negotiations;
discourse symbols;
fragmenting it into variables.

Macro Cultural Psychology Qualitative Research

A phenomenon’s function is revealed when it answer at least these four questions:

why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary for that particular constellation of elements;
what role the element plays in the capitalist or socialist system;
what it reciprocally contributes to the system;
why the system needs it.

Ratner identifies primary questions for research which include:

How can it conceptualize these elements as parts of a system?
Which system are they part of?
What are the other elements of this system?
How do they depend upon and support one another?
What features do each element acquire through its role in the system?
How are the elemental features distinctive to or particular to this system?
How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles

in this system or if they were transposed to a different system?

What kinds of methods must be used to elicit answers to these questions?
What kinds of probing questions must we ask to extract these answers?

Please see Table 1 at the end of Part I for a summary of the differences between micro and macro cultural psychology.

Let us close out Part I of this article with a discussion of the emotions.

Macro Origin of Emotions
The starting point of human emotions is not internal private experiences based the individual’s private history. These emotions are already always housed in macro cultural emotions. Ratner names love of country, anger at capitalists or racial minorities, hatred of socialism, national shame, dejection about political trends, fear of economic depressions, fierce loyalty to professional baseball, football, basketball or hockey teams or devotion to certain kinds of music or dance. Anger that culminates in violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of a working-class person who fought in wars has PTSD and is homeless. Other working-class people are competing for jobs and whose union is not treating them well. Others face low wages and lack of medical benefits. These macro cultural emotional states are environmental, not outside private emotions. The macro-cultural environment is already inside of psychological private states.

Personal and interpersonal behaviors do not exist on their own. What appears to be individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper macro culture of emotions as a window into it. The same is true of memory. Personal memories are embedded in collective memories that involve systematically remembering favorable aspects of political life while forgetting other events as a result of political propaganda. These unify people whether they are based on reality or illusions. Whether individuals are conscious or not of having been internalized, these collective memories are the soil for private in which memories to grow or die.

It used to be thought in the 50s and 60s that advertising propaganda influenced people in a very heavy-handed way, implying the public was passive (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders). Then it was found by Michael Schudson in his book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion that people were less snowed by advertisers than researchers thought. What I want to bring to your attention is the way advertisers directly impact the public emotions by fragmenting emotional experience during a television program.

Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional scene. This emotional fragmentation is built into the formatting of television scenes. One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. It does not permit long, continuous development and resolution of our emotions (168-169)

Ratner says this emotional format is recapitulated by people in their personal relationships. Individuals get used to experiencing fragmented emotions because cell phones, text messages, Twitter and Instagram break up a full emotional expression. Ratner says that individuals get so used to this that grow uncomfortable with extended continuous emotional responses.

Coming Attractions
“But” you might say, “I’ve heard of this Vygotsky you speak of. He worked in the field of cooperative learning and developed something called the zone of proximal development. So Vygotsky’s communist ideas are here in the United States.” The problem is this assumes that the communist ideas of a theorist can be directly translated into a capitalist society with no distortion, exaggeration or even censorship. In part two of this article, I will show 11 differences in how Vygotsky is interpreted by those whom Ratner calls “neoliberal” Vygotskyan psychologists.

Differences Between Micro and Macro Cultural Psychology

Macro Cultural Psychology	Category of Comparison	Micro Cultural Psychology
Socialist	Political, economic orientation	Liberal
Organic, interdependent and necessary	What are social relations?	Associative and independent Social contract theory, voluntary
No – they are the result of historical processes which outlive the individual	Are social relations visible?	Yes. Sensual and interactive rise and fall within local culture
Massive, political, social institutions such as transnational corporations, and psychology have those characteristics	What is culture?	Primarily interpersonal, face-to-face interactions, then psychology would have those characteristics, not the characteristics of the political economy.
The state, stock market, mass media, the military	Ultimate subject matter	Parent-child relations, teacher child relations,
Surplus value, exploitation, alienation, social class, reification, ideology	Presence of capitalist phenomena	These are rarely mentioned
Culture creates individuals	Relationship between culture and individuals	Individuals exist first, then create culture
No problem Culture creates the mind, brain-circuitry does not	Mind-body problem	Mind-body problem of how the physical body/brain produces mental life
Psychological relations are indirect, mediate social relations to stimulus Personal comes later	Are psychological relations immediate and natural or not	Psychological relations are direct, immediate, natural and personal responses to stimulates
Macro-cultural socialization; political, economic, religious propaganda Macro psychology is an emergent extrinsic, exogram that transcends idiosyncratic individuals	How common cultural socialization is spread	Interpersonal socialization is too fragmented and idiosyncratic to achieve this massive common socialization. Slippage form the first dyad to the last—as studies of rumor indicate
Politics integrates the objective and subjective	How objective and subjective are integrated	No political integration Danger of mechanism or idealism
Imagining new things are the result of cultural processes	Where imagination begins	In the psyche of individuals
Qualitative questions are complete, deep connected over time and space that go beyond present fragmented behavioral observations	Methodology	Conventional, quantitative Simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations
Attempts to explain the variation	What cultural psychology attempts to do	Describe psychological variations in different cultures
Explains their synthesis of culture and psychology though a parsimonious set of unobservable but real constructs	How to explain diverse phenomenon	Explain culture and psychology as separate and distinct
Dialectical model of interdependence with each element impacting the others and permeating everything. It explains the organic relation between culture and psychology.	Causation	Atomistic model of causation independent variable causing dependent variables Each element is separate and qualitatively independent. They come together only momentarily
Realism Postulating unobservable cells, atoms, germs, gravity and genes before the microscope could detect them is more objective than sensory observation and has more explanatory and predictive power than empirical facts	Philosophy of science	Positivism What is immediately observable, measurable and testable. Sensory observation Empirical facts

The post Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Organized US Labor’s Anticommunism

Roger Keeran — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:17:42 +0000

On December 2, 2024, MLToday posted Ruth Needleman’s review of Jeff Schuhrke’s outstanding book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (London: Verso). Without taking anything away from either the reviewer or the author, I would like to make a few supplementary points.

Needleman credits Schuhrke with providing “a clearly written, comprehensive and meticulously documented account of the AFL-CIO’s decades of subversive actions aimed at dividing, replacing or just destroying labor federations and movements throughout the world.” In the name of fighting communism, this campaign began before the Cold War, peaked during the Cold War and continues after the Cold War under the auspices of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. By undermining militant trade unionism and pro-labor political leaders in Europe and the Third World, the AFL-CIO not only palpably worsened the wages and conditions of workers abroad but also injured American workers by diverting resources that could have been used for domestic organizing to the pursuit of the government’s foreign policy objectives and by making these countries more attractive for American capital investment encouraged the deindustrialization that began in earnest in the 1980s.

All that Needleman says is true, but it leaves out part of the story, namely why did labor play this role?

One could come away from Needleman’s review as well as many other accounts by thinking that labor’s anti-communism just represented a kneejerk response to the Cold War or a kind of psychological disturbance, a form of paranoia. Of course, labor’s anticommunism did reflect the times and had an exaggerated and irrational aspect. Schuhrke, however, explains that labor’s anti-communism was rooted in the dominant ideology of the labor movement that emerged under AFL leader Samuel Gompers in the 1890s. This was the ideology of class collaboration. This ideology posited that labor would benefit by cooperating with employers to increase production, productivity and profits and by eschewing strikes and other conflicts and by avoiding political involvement with any radical movements or parties. This ideology reflected the interests of what Karl Marx called the “labor aristocracy,” the most well-placed members of the labor movement.

The ideology of class collaboration did not reign uncontested. Throughout the history of American labor, another ideology opposed it, namely the ideology of class struggle. His ideology reflected an analysis by Karl Marx and others that under capitalism the interests of workers and capitalists were inherently and inevitably in conflict. Demands for better wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions inevitably conflicted with the capitalists’ desire for greater profits. In this situation, workers could advance only by using strikes, slowdowns, and other means of force to wring concessions from the capitalists. Early in his career as leader of the Cigarmakers, Samuel Gompers read Marx and more or less agreed with his analysis and its implications for trade unions. At a time when the Knights of Labor, the largest labor organization of its time, welcomed workers and nonworkers and relied on education and cooperatives to improve the workers’ lot rather than strikes, Gompers argued that workers needed an organization exclusively of workers, and one that defended the workers’ right to strike. By the end of the 19th century, as President of the AFL, Gompers changed beliefs and came to embody the ideology of class collaboration, and while not opposing strikes in principle, opposed them in practice.

In opposition to Gompers, the ideology of class struggle gained adherents. Before World War I the ideology of class struggle was embraced by the William Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Industrial Workers of the World, the Syndicalist League of North America, and leftwing Socialists like Eugene V. Debs. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the class struggle ideology found expression in William Z. Foster and the Communist Party and the Communist-initiated Trade Union Education League, and later the Trade Union Unity League. From the mid-1930s to the end of the 1940s, militant class struggle ideas served as the ideology of the Communists and other militants who organized the industrial unions of the CIO. After the expulsion of the so-called Communist-led unions by the CIO in 1949, the ideology of class conflict was largely confined to those unions that had been expelled and to pockets of Communists and leftists in other unions. George Meany and the leaders of the AFL-CIO trumpeted the dominant ideology of class collaboration.

Leading capitalists and politicians, at least among those not openly hostile to unions, supported the ideology of class collaboration. Promoting this ideology was the raison d’etre of the National Civic Federation, an organization of capitalists and union leaders formed in 1900, whose first president was the capitalist Republican Mark Hanna and whose vice-president was Samuel Gompers, president of AFL. Thus, the ideology of class collaboration represented the ideology of the capitalists within the labor movement. This ideology did not result in any meaningful gains for workers or labor. From 1900 until 1935, most workers labored under subsistence wages, long hours, unhealthy conditions, and less than 10 percent of the workers (mainly skilled workers, and miners and garment workers) belonged to a union.

This situation did not change until the mid-1930s when Communists, Socialists and other militants with a class struggle orientation succeeded in organizing the workers in such mass production industries auto, rubber, steel and electrical, waged successful strikes, won union recognition and collective bargaining agreements, and became the leaders of these unions.

The scandalous foreign policy that mainstream labor pursued and that Schuhrke describes cannot be understood apart from the equally scandalous behavior that most labor leaders followed at home. Needleman does not fully appreciate this connection. This is reflected by her neglect of Schuhrke’s discussion of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).

At the end of World War II, unions in the Allied countries formed the WFTU. This move was spearheaded by the Soviet trade unions and the CIO. Following meetings of representatives of the Soviet trade unions and the CIO, the CIO issued a document calling for cooperation of all the trade unions in the allied countries and the promotion of peace, justice and prosperity for all workers. In a preface, Phil Murray, President of the CIO, wrote, “I consider this document of first-rate importance, not only for American labor but for all who are interested in knowing the truth about the Soviet trade union movement and promoting friendship and understanding between the peoples of our two countries.”¹

As constituted in October 1945 and headquartered in Paris, the WFTU represented unions in 56 countries, representing 67,000,000 workers. The largest organizations were those of the USSR, Great Britain, the USA (CIO), Italy, France, and Latin America. The preamble of its constitution stated that its purposes, among others, were to organize and unite trade unions in the whole world, to assist workers in less developed countries in forming unions, to fight against fascism, to combat war and the causes of war, to support the economic, social and democratic rights of workers, as well as the worker security and full employment, the progressive improvement of wages, hours and working conditions, and social security for workers and their families.² Underpinning the WFTU was a shared ideology of militant, class- struggle unionism.

Schuhrke points out that the WFTU and its affiliated unions became the major target of the AFL’s disruptive anticommunist campaign. In 1945, the AFL established a Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) which would serve in Schuhrke’s words as “its primary weapon for waging the Cold War.” Initially, free trade unions referred to unions purportedly not dominated by a Communist state, but “by 1945 the term was being used by the AFL as a synonym for anticommunist unionism. In other words, even if a union were autonomous and democratic, the AFL would still consider it illegitimate and ‘unfree’ if it happened to be led or influenced by communists.” This included, for example, the French CGT (General Confederation of Labor), the largest labor federation in France, two thirds of whose affiliates were led by Communists. After 1949, when the CIO’s expelled its leftwing unions and acquiesced in the Taft-Hartley Act’s requirement that all union officers sign non-Communist affidavits, the CIO leaders adopted the AFL’s “free trade unionism” position and rejected the WFTU. This meant not only the rejection of unions in Communist countries and unions anywhere led by Communists but also a rejection of the kind of class struggle unionism that these unions represented, that is to say a unionism rooted in the Marxist idea that the essential interests of labor and capital were in conflict, and that furthering the interests of labor required international cooperation and economic and political struggle on behalf of their interests and against the employers.

Support for “free trade unionism” meant that American labor leaders would become adjuncts of American foreign policy. It also meant adherence to a class collaboration ideology at home. It meant that AFL leaders like George Meany and the UAW (United Automobile Workers) leader Walter Reuther (head of the CIO after 1952) opposed the kind of progressive, class struggle oriented unionism that the WFTU and the CIO had hitherto stood for and adopted a unionism that prioritized class collaboration, the idea that the interests of workers was best served by cooperating with the employer and the foreign policy operations of the government. After World War II, Walter Reuther, who continues to enjoy an undeserved reputation as a progressive labor leader, actually spearheaded the class collaboration ideology. Schuhrke said, “Instead of a constant struggle for control of the workplace through strikes, slowdowns, and similar militant tactics, Reuther held that unionized workers would gain far more by behaving themselves on the shop floor and boosting production in exchange for getting to partner with government and industry in economic planning.”

Did the class collaboration bring workers and unions the benefits Reuther promised? It opened a spigot of government money to fund labor’s overseas operations, and gained leaders like Reuther a measure of respectability, but in the main, it produced the exact opposite of what was promised. Labor organizing diminished. The CIO abandoned Operation Dixie, its stillborn campaign to organize the South, which remained ever since a bastion of the open shop and right-to-work laws. After expelling eleven leftwing unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) in 1949, the CIO devoted resources to raiding the members of the expelled unions instead of organizing the unorganized. The Communist and other militant organizers of the CIO’s heyday were shunted aside. Reuther and his followers weakened the steward system, abandoned the right to strike between contracts, extended the length of collective bargaining agreements (often to five years), introduced the idea that wage increases should be linked to productivity gains, initiated labor-management administered benefit programs, and downplayed civil rights, and made labor a junior partner of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the percentage of organized workers peaked in the mid-1950s at about 33 percent and declined thereafter. Today less than 10 percent of workers belong to unions. Moreover, in Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions, Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin show, unions led by non-Communists, acted less militantly, gained worse contracts, and behaved less democratically than unions led by or influenced by Communists.

Moreover, by undermining militant trade unions abroad and cooperating with rightwing dictators who suppressed unions, the AFL-CIO contributed to the low wage environment in Latin America and Asia that produced the offshoring and deindustrialization that has plagued the American working class since the late 1970s.

In the end, Schuhrke’s treatment of labor’s global anticommunist crusade provides a more trenchant and far-reaching critique of mainstream labor leadership than even such a discerning reviewer as Needleman recognizes.

Schuhrke’s book provokes a question that goes beyond his focus on labor’s foreign policy. After the expulsion of the leftwing CIO unions in 1949, what happened to the militant, class struggle ideology? The radical tradition remained alive in what remained of the left-wing CIO as UE, FE and the Westcoast Longshoremen. Schuhrke shows that an echo of this ideology manifested itself in dissent from the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy. In the 1960s and 1970s, opposition to the War in Vietnam developed in some sections of the labor movement, and in the 1980s a segment of labor supported the movement for democracy and human rights in El Salvador and the movement against South African apartheid.

Still, the real “untold story” was the persistence of labor activists who, even through the dark days of the Cold War and McCarthyism, upheld a militant class struggle ideology. These were mainly Communists and those who had been or remained close to them. Schuhrke does not mention them. Indeed, he does not mention any Communist role after 1947. Of course, the ranks and influence of those who upheld the ideas of militant class struggle were greatly reduced by the persecution and ostracism of those times. One has only to look at the fate of UAW Local 248 at Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee and its leader Harold Christoffel to appreciate the sledgehammer that fell on such militant unionists. (See Stephen Meyer, Stalin Over Wisconsin.) Nevertheless, these ideas had a voice in such leaders as Mo Foner and Leon Davis of District 1199 of Hospital Workers, and David Livingston and Cleveland Robinson of District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers (RWDSU). It also had a voice in UAW Local 600 at Ford, which with some 60,000 members in the 1950s was the largest local union in the world and which practiced what historians Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin (see above) called a “homegrown American workers’ version of “‘Communist ideology.’” It also continued in the ideas and practices of the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) at International Harvester. (See Toni Gilpin, The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor and Class War in the American Heartland.)

The main proponent of militant trade unionism and class struggle ideas after 1950 was the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations. Until 1960, William Z. Foster kept promoting class struggle unionism in his writings, and the Party kept his books, including American Trade Unionism and Pages from a Worker’s Life, in print. George Morris, labor editor of the Daily Worker, wrote a regular column on labor and several books including in 1967 one of the first accounts of American labor’s betrayals abroad, CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy. Moreover, the International Publishers issued Philip Foner’s multi-volume The History of the Labor Movement in the United States, which recounted the contest between class collaboration and class conflict in the history of American labor. In 1971, Foner published American Labor and the Indo-China War: The Growth of Union Opposition. This book and Morris’s show that labor’s anticommunist crusade abroad was not completely, as Schurhrke would have it, an “untold story.” Plus, the Party-affiliated Labor Research Association produced a yearly fact book of working class conditions and labor struggles. Throughout the Cold War, the WFTU maintained an American presence through its representatives, Ernest DeMaio, Fred Gaboury and Frank Goldsmith, who promoted militant unionism and international solidarity. These figures remain heroes of an untold story.

In his recent book, The Truth About the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike in Canada, Tony Leah submits that the revival of American and Canadian labor will depend on absorbing an important lesson of that struggle, namely the need to transform unions into “organizations that are based on the interests of their members as part of the working class — on class struggle not class collaboration.” This transformation will involve learning the history that Schuhrke tells as well as the history he does not tell, namely the history of those who against all odds kept the ideas of Marxist class struggle alive to pass on to a new generation of activists.

First published at Marxism-Leninism Today.

Endnotes:

The post Organized US Labor’s Anticommunism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 George Morris, The CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 53.

2 William Z. Foster, Outline History of the World Trade Union Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1956), 404-407.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger Keeran.

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:55:52 +0000

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

savagery (hunter-gatherers);
barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
the globalization myth; and
the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction.

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast. He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920); Clashing Tides of Color (1935). In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

The post The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:55:52 +0000

Orientation

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

savagery (hunter-gatherers);
barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
the globalization myth; and
the theoretical great traditions myth.

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the topics.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

The post The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Presidential Marxism: AKD and the Sri Lankan Elections

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:28:16 +0000

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes. The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri Lankan independence in 1948.

AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons. He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real estate and aristocratic privilege. The fall of the Rajapaksa family, propelled by mass protests against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s misrule in 2022, showed that the public had, at least for the time, tired of that tradition.

Not only is the new president outside the traditional orbit of rule and favour; he heads a political grouping known as the National People’s Power (NPP), a colourfully motley combination of trade unions, civil society members, women’s groups and students. But the throbbing core of the group is the Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP), which boasts a mere three members in the 225-member parliament.

The resume of the JVP is colourfully cluttered and, in keeping with Sri Lankan political history, spattered with its fair share of blood. It was founded in 1965 in the mould of a Marxist-Leninist party and led by Rohana Wijeweera. It mounted, without success, two insurrections – in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989. On both occasions, thousands died in the violence that followed, including Wijeweera and many party leaders, adding to the enormous toll that would follow in the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

It is also worth noting that the seduction of Marxism, just to add a level of complexity to matters, was not confined to the JVP. The Tamil resistance had itself found it appealing. A assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency from March 1986 offers the casual remark that “all major insurgent organizations claim allegiance to Marxism” with the qualification that “most active groups are motivated principally by ethnic rivalry with the majority Sinhalese.” None had a clear political program “other than gaining Columbo’s recognition for a traditional homeland and a Tamil right to self-determination.”

By the time Dissanayake was cutting his teeth in local politics, the JVP was another beast, having been reconstituted by Somawansa Amarasinghe as an organisation keen to move into the arena of ballots rather than the field of armed struggle. Dissanayake is very much a product of that change. “We need to establish a new clean political culture … We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”

In a statement, Dissanayake was a picture of modest, if necessary, acknowledgment. He praised the collective effort behind his victory, one being a consequence of the multitude. “This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you. Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful. This victory belongs to all of us.”

The unavoidable issue of racial fractiousness in the country is also mentioned. “The unity of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans is the bedrock of this new beginning.” How the new administration navigates such traditionally poisoned waters will be a matter of interest and challenge, not least given the Sinhala nationalist rhetoric embraced by the JVP, notably towards the Tamil Tigers.

Pundits are also wondering where the new leader might position himself on foreign relations. There is the matter of India’s unavoidably dominant role, a point that riles Dassanayake. His preference, and a point he has repeatedly made, is self-sufficiency and economic sovereignty. But India has a market worth US$6.7 billion whereas China, a more favoured country by the new president, comes in at US$2 billion.

On economics, a traditional, if modest program of nationalisation is being put forth by the JVP within the NPP, notably on such areas as utilities. A wealth redistribution policy is on the table, including progressive, efficient taxation while a production model to encourage self-sufficiency, notably on important food products, is envisaged. Greater spending is proposed in education and health care.

The issue of dealing with international lenders is particularly pressing, notably in dealing with the International Monetary Fund, which approved a US$2.9 billion bailout to the previous government on extracting the standard promises of austerity. “We expect to discuss debt restructuring with the relevant parties and complete the process quickly and obtain the funds,” promises Dissanayake. That said, the governor of the Central Bank and the secretary to the ministry of finance, both important figures in implementing the austerity measures, have remained.

In coming to power, AKD has eschewed demagogic self-confidence. “I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen. There are things I know and don’t know. My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.” In the febrile atmosphere that is Sri Lankan politics, that admission is a humble, if realistic one.

The post Presidential Marxism: AKD and the Sri Lankan Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Venezuela: Where Next?

Greg Godels — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:03:40 +0000

We must speak the truth: therein lies our strength, and the masses, the people, the multitude will decide in actual practice, after the struggle, whether we have strength.

— VI Lenin, 1905

Hugo Chavez will live on as one of the most outstanding foes of US imperialism in our time. His defiance of successive US governments was truly remarkable. Situated in the US backyard, Venezuela — under Chavez’s leadership — brought joy and admiration to millions throughout the world and inspired others in Central and South America to mount their own response to US domination. Faced with foreign intervention, coup attempts, and a vicious domestic opposition, Chavismo will be honored for rebelling against US arrogance and aggression long after his death.

However, Chavismo was not socialism, nor did it construct a path to socialism. Chavez brought a Christian love and respect to the poor and disadvantaged and offered a dash of utopian “socialism” gleaned from Western leftist “advisors.” The movement was multiclass, with the working class playing no special role. The transformation of the state into a peoples’ democracy was never projected. In short, a radical transformation was not and is not secured against the maneuvers of the domestic bourgeoisie and foreign intervention.

Consequently, Venezuela’s path is very susceptible to detours, reversals, and backsliding, especially in the face of potent domestic reaction and foreign intervention. History has shown that mobilization and empowering of the working class is the most important barrier that a government can erect against the machinations of hostile class forces. The ready cooperation of the parties of the most militant workers– the Communists– is essential to this effort.

Yet, the Maduro government not only rejected the collaboration of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), but effectively banned the PCV and obstructed its electoral participation. This unprincipled attack on the PCV is well documented; no one among the international solidarity community has disputed its veracity.

Yet those who know of the complicity of the Venezuelan Supreme Court in enforcing the ban choose to ignore the Court’s failure. They choose to look away from the denial of any hint of due process or transparency in the Court’s slavish toadying to the Maduro government.

It speaks poorly of a left that indignantly rallies against comparable politically tainted decisions of the highest courts in their own lands.

The recent Venezuelan election is the object of intense contention. Ultimately, the Venezuelan people will resolve the question of its legitimacy, as they, and they alone, must do.

Does it help Venezuelans find the truth for some to pretend that the most recent electoral process measured up to the past practices applauded by a number of recognized international observers? One prominent left commentator appealed to the Venezuelan Constitution to sheepishly note that the Constitution did not mandate that the electoral council respect those past practices — hardly, a ringing defense of the results that he, and many others, stoutly maintain.

Of course, it is scandalous that the Maduro government marked “Paid” on the election results through the same compromised Supreme Court that attempted to arbitrarily shape the outcome beforehand by denying ballot status to some parties, including to the Communist Party.

To be sure, the Venezuelan people will overcome this blemish on the legacy of Hugo Chavez and return to a political process that will welcome the most ardent champions of working people, the Communists.

The post Venezuela: Where Next? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The Collective Creativity of Workers

Bruce Lerro — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 06:03:06 +0000

Orientation

One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most powerful forms of creativity are collective, not individual. One problem is that with the evolution of society into social classes the collective creativity of workers and peasants is buried in their alienated social-historical unconscious. Making this collective creativity conscious is inseparable from making a social revolution.

I proceed first by discussing individual creativity. I begin by describing the ways in which the artist is different from other workers. Then I connect this to the values and limitations of the romanticization of art. Then I discuss what an artistic person is like. In the second part of my article I discuss the field of history. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.

There is the long shadow of alienation of collective creativity in caste and class societies. But then I show how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary times when workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils.

The Artist as a Visionary

The life of an artist provokes many, if not most, people. Whether dismissed as a good-for-nothing slacker, a vehicle through which the Muses may speak or just an eccentric personality, an artist in the 21st century West is not boring. One reason is that artistic activity flies in the face of that old sop, “you can’t mix business with pleasure”. In its highest moments, considered as a process (rather than a product), artistic activity approaches a synthesis of work and play as well as work and pleasure.

For most of my twenties I worked in various blue-collar jobs, unloading and loading trucks and driving a forklift in a warehouse. Wage-labor, especially the unskilled kind, is so mechanical and deadening it became associated with suffering. It was something I hated to do, a drudge to be gotten over with, a scourge to be wistfully contrasted to “the good life”. After years of this kind of work, it is difficult not to generalize from this particular job to work in general. Among workers not only is work avoided like the plague, as Marx says, but activity itself can come under suspicion. By activity I mean purposeful, non-frivolous deeds which require concentration and the exertion of will. When activity is done under alienated conditions, it is experienced as a dissipation. Rather than experiencing the outpouring of energy as producing more energy, the expenditure of energy is felt to be a loss.

One the other hand, if the hatred of work because synonymous with activity, then the good-life appears to be consuming sprees of mass media, sporting events and concerts, sensual, sexual pleasure, substance abuse and rest. In the United States, even active play like table games, video games, dancing or travel far from home competes with TV, or internet surfing. Rather than an interlude, a moment of respite and fertilization for the more gratifying work to come, leisure becomes an end-in-itself. Bourgeois utopias are written about a time when leisure will be all there is.

However, we all need a rest from rest. Justifiably, there is a sense of uneasiness when idleness is posed as a way of life, and the discomfort is not limited to puritanical preachers. Many of us can sense this House of Death, jingling with the trappings of divine honors, as Nietzsche said, when we refuse to retire from jobs, even miserable ones, because we “wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.” I wonder how many people unconsciously kill themselves before or soon after retirement, when we start to get a full dose of “leisure for leisure’s sake”. Contrary to superficial notions of pleasure, rest can be disturbing just as activity can be alienating.

The road in between the cycle of hard, mechanical work and passive consumption lies the road of the artist. And she is not alone. Skilled workers, middle class professionals such as teachers, along with upper-middle class professionals such as doctors and architects, know better and use what is called “best practices”. For these folks share with the artist a certain joy in the activity of working. Clearly there is a joy in making objects, pictures, music, in dancing and acting for anyone who does it as leisure. But engaging these activities as a way of life creates a sensitivity that escapes others. It is not just the end result that sets the artist afire, in either joy or exasperation. It is the process of production over and over again which invites a sensitivity that we know as the creative process. If, as Nietzsche says, maternity is the love of what is growing within one, then the artist knows well the joys of expectant motherhood. Once impregnated with an idea, she gleefully muses on how it will come to be: who is the audience; what is the theme; which materials will I use; what technical obstacles will challenge me?

The careful ascertainment of how we shall do so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – this sense of authority is for the master builder, the treasure of treasures – renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret of life (Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin, p. 150).

In this self-contained magical workshop, in this valley of fertility, the artist pushes and pulls, she hems and haws, and when the oils dry, when the clay is fired, when the curtain falls a baby begins to make its way through the world.

Every artist is at heart a magician. Just as the shaman ventures into the forest or the desert on his vision-quest, so the artist heads for her secluded place of work, fitfully muttering “good riddance” to daily distractions. Alone at last, she surrounds herself with her talismans – a hat with a feather, a ring of beads. Like the Greek chorus, they whisper to her of previous glorious ventures, revelation. “Yes” they tell me, “this time you too can make magic on paper”.

Magical considerations of timing motivate the artist’s habits. Just as a magician studies the stars and arranges her correspondences, so too the artist becomes attuned to when and how she does her best work. What are the optimum conditions? What stage of the creative process is most appropriate based on her mood that day? What non-artistic activities are most likely to stimulate further creativity? The artist becomes sensitive to knowing when persistence pays off and when it doesn’t. In short, the artistic creative process is a secularization of a magical ritual:

In the minor occurrences of everyday life which passed unnoticed…the person disposed towards the creative life repeatedly finds clues, fragile portents which he seizes as the basis of some future identity at odds with the social pressures prevailing about. He lives like Schubert’s wanderer, in search of the land which speaks his language. (Dialectical Economics, L. Marcus, p. 100)

Artists can be understood as the link between the old world and the one which may be born:

How can an individual within capitalist society base his identity on a non-capitalist set of identity and world-outlook? In the study of creative personalities. (Dialectical Economics, p. 98)

Limitations of Romantic Theories of Art

The following bullets below are the beliefs and assumptions of Romantic theories of art. Let us take them one by one. The first two beliefs can be taken together. Like other animals, the human species has to adapt to its environment. Creativity is rooted in the capacity to solve problems that its environment presents. Since all human beings problem-solve, all human beings have some degree of creativity. The Romantic artist not only fails to see the creativity necessary for people to live in everyday life, he also images that the very involvement in the arts bestows upon him the mantle of creativity. By merely crossing the sacred portals of the arts each novice becomes initiated into the mysteries of creativity. It’s as if artists could never be accused of being mechanical or uncreative just because they are artists. But on the contrary, there can be instances of everyday problem solving that involve more creativity than an artistic product.

We can also combine tenets three and four. Romantic artists have a distrust of groups. Rooted in the individualist reaction to the mindless repetition of factory work of the industrial revolution, romantic artists think of groups only as a force for conformity or obedience to the authorities. The Romantic takes the alienation between the individual and society as given. He ignores the fact that extraordinary social circumstances, such as natural disasters and revolutions, can bring out the most of an individual’s creativity.

When the Romantic artist discounts planning and structure, he accepts that creativity is fundamentally unreasonable or irrational activity. On one side are the emotions, intuition and spontaneity and antithetical to that are reason, organization and constraints. It is hard to imagine how a Romantic artist who made their living from art could hold these beliefs. To sell a work to the public requires rationality, organization and deadlines. Only individuals who are supported by others or dabble in the arts as a form of therapy can imagine art as antithetical to organization, planning and setting priorities.

What is the place of shock in the arts? Surely one of the callings of the artist is to move a society beyond the comfortable, the taken-for-granted and the obvious. In the early part of the 20th century, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists did this as a reaction to the Renaissance and Baroque conventions. Before a society is crumbling this is a very important calling. However, once social cracks appear and spread, too much shock from the arts is counter-revolutionary. The Romantic artist imagines that shocking people might propel masses of people into social action. This may be true. But too much shock can result in anesthetizing, not moving people. Past a certain point artists should be creating constructive visions of the future not tripping over themselves about how to outrage a public already frightened by social conditions.

The values and beliefs of Romantic theories of art include:

All creativity is artistic. All other activities are less creative.
There are creative individuals and then there are the rest of us.

Maximum creativity is achieved in isolation (groups hold creativity back).

Creative activity has nothing to do with everyday life. It is an escape from that life.

Creativity and planning are mutually exclusive.

(Disciplined, intellectual and structured activity holds creativity back)

What is creative is what is shocking and incomprehensible

What is creative is what makes us feel better. Art as therapy (Feedback from an audience matters little to the creative process).

What is creative is what appears to be absolutely new.

Art expresses more creativity than craft. Art is non-utilitarian (the more people use the art, the more debased it becomes). Art is about ornaments and decorations.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Objective judgments about what is creative are impossible. Judgment of creativity is purely subjective.

Art is secular and has little to do with sacred beliefs, mythology or rituals.

Art is all about the process and the product doesn’t matter.

Being an artist means you are eccentric, an outcast, unrealistic and a dreamer.

Art is the opposite of necessity. It is subjective and voluntary.

Art is fictional. It is an escape from reality.

Romantic artists turn art into therapy. However, while there are certainly therapeutic elements to the arts, the purpose of art is to move the public from more than it is to massage and prop up the emotional states of the artist. Romantics fancy themselves as undiscovered geniuses who are too sensitive to subject themselves to the barbaric tastes of the public. But without criticism from the world the artist loses a vital feedback loop that helps him to stay in touch with the socio-historic reality.

Is there anything that comes into the world that is absolutely new? Romantic artists imagine creativity in the Christian sense of God making the world out of nothing. In reality, the most creative work is always built upon the work of others in society, in the cross-currents between societies as well as the influence of those who have went before. There is no such thing as a genius creating something out of nothing.

Crafts are about making things for everyday use such as baskets, hats, pots, and beads. Crafts are embedded in everyday life and can be used by others in the spirit of carrying on a tradition of their kin and the ancestors. The separation of art from crafts in the modern period came about as part of the class divisions within society. Artists were hired by the Church to support its spiritual ideology and among the upper classes to immortalize themselves. During the Romantic period, artists began to rebel against these influences and began to make statements about societies that were somewhat independent of the upper classes. Unlike craft, art in this sense was more abstract, self-reflective, intended for fewer people and involved innovation as part of an ideology of change. To say that art is more creative than craft says that creativity has less to do with everyday life, large groups of people and that which has continuity across time and space. It is a hard case to make. At its worst, the Romantic artist can be accused of being elitist.

The notion that art is merely a matter of subjective taste is a relatively recent phenomenon. Western art became increasingly psychological in the 20th century and with that, the inner experience of the artist became a subject of consideration. This change in part was a reaction to the objective standards of the academic painting. Cross-cultural research on aesthetics together with evolutionary psychology has shown, however, that there is a set of objective standards that all cultures point to when making aesthetic judgments about beauty. Among them include bodies of water, places to hide, and available food.

The Romantic movement was not opposed to spirituality, but to organized religion. While many Romantics wanted to bring back myths and rituals, still for many of the Romantics spirituality was an individual experience so that art in the eyes of Romantics is separated from collective myths, rituals and religious practices. This stance ignores the fact that for most of human history, art was in the service of preparation and delivery of magical rituals and the making of costumes for acting out mythological stories.

While Romantic artists rightfully drew attention to and reflects on the creative process rather than just the product, there is a point at which process becomes everything and the product becomes incidental. Again, artists who make their living as artists must pay attention to the product and reactions of the public in order to continue to paint. It is only those who are supported by others or using art for therapeutic purposes who can afford to ignore the product.

“I will live on the fringes of society rather than compromise my art”. This image of an artist as being an outcast, an eccentric, unrealistic or a dreamer has not been typical of how artists have been seen throughout history. More times than not the artist was producing objects that supported the existing order. Many artists who lived during the Renaissance were well-off, conventional, realistic and by most standards, creative. Suffering based on feeling misunderstood is atypical in the history of art.

What does it mean to say that art is the opposite of necessity? By necessity I mean that there is some external crisis or constraint that the artist must respond to. In other words, making art is not a voluntary experience. This is offensive to the Romantic because art is imagined to be coming from within, a free choice uninhibited by external circumstances. But why can’t art begin in reaction to something that must be done for social or historical reasons? Art, like problem solving, is often most creative when forced by circumstances out of their control. Conversely, without the force of external events artist can fall asleep, falling back on the usual subject matter, materials and treatment or means of creativity. They can become obsessed by personal problems and lose their perspective.

Lastly, the belief that art is fictional is based on the assumption that reality is unchangeable, and the best you can do is escape it into an imaginary world or a future world. On the contrary, revolutionary art can change social and historical reality by being used in the service of a social movement.

The Artist’s Life as a Work of Art

Though Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were both significant artists in the traditional sense, each understood that artistic products and artistic processes are just moments of living life. How creative is the artist beyond the activity of making art? Certainly, it is possible to be creative as an artist and uncreative in how life is lived. Both Stein and Miller understood that creativity should be extended beyond art. The artistic products and processes are like streams, which, if followed long enough, can converge into the river of how an individual lives their lives. Stein points out the shortsightedness of exclusively identifying creativity with being an artist:

They become writers. They cease to be creative men and they find that they are novelists, or critics or poets or biographers. When a man says “I am a novelist” he is simply a literary shoemaker (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, p. 162) – a very important thing – and I know because I have seen it kill so many writers – is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing…When one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form, but the fact that you are the form that is important (Ghiselin, p. 167). ‘This book will make literary history’ and I told him, ‘it will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you can go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making, until you become part of it yourself’.

Henry Miller continues the same line of argument:

I don’t consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life… I become more and more indifferent to my fate as a writer and more and more certain of my destiny as a man…My life itself becomes a work of art…Now I can easily not write as write, there is no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. (Ghiselin, 178-180)

These are modern artists aware of their own psychology. However, there were artists before them like Leonardo or Goethe who clearly as artists, lived extraordinary lives and their lives were works of art.

Coming Attractions: Conscious and Unconscious Creativity in History

Up to now I have argued that a) Romantic notions of art keep the artist imprisoned in their subjective life and alienated from society and history; b) the vocation of an artist can still be understood as a link between the old world and the world being born; c) even the artist’s life at its best has its limits. An individual’s entire life can be understood as a giant canvas which may include art, but is more than art. Are there more inclusive levels in which creativity can be expressed than an individual’s life? In Part II I discuss the history of human societies as going through three phases:

The conscious creativity of people in egalitarian hunting and gathering and simple horticultural societies;
the unconscious, alienated collective creativity of caste and class societies beginning with Bronze Age states and ending with capitalist societies;
the return of conscious creativity in capitalist society which can be seen in natural disasters, social movements and revolutionary situations which are expressed in workers’ councils.

• First published in https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org

The post The Collective Creativity of Workers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Fascism: What’s in a Word?

Greg Godels — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 21:08:29 +0000

The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist.

Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.

Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….

Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval– a kind of expletive.

A problem arises when the claimant– the person using the word– has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world.

The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.

In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.

Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.

Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.

On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.

Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism– one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.

As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism.

Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” — a form of illiberal liberalism– that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.

In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is eminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article “This Isn’t Fascism,” posted on Consortium News, that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”

Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.

But more consequentially, the charge of fascism — invoked irresponsibly — has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party — bereft of an appealing program — charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.

Again, invoking Lawrence:

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history — dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.

Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.

Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!

The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people– reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues.

Lawrence makes a similar point:

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly… I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?

Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.

Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).

Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains:

Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).

Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.

Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:

Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).

Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.

These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.

Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately.

There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right — the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc. — do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.

For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability.

Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.

In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe.

We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people.

The post Fascism: What’s in a Word? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

East or West? West is Best

Eric Walberg — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:16:55 +0000

Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, free education, economic equality. His paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted, as reviewed by Peter Boghossian, is self parody. Kisin is also a stand-up comic, a would-be enfant terrible, so he’s comfortable with over-the-top. We learn from the book blurb that ‘he experienced both untold wealth and grinding poverty.’ Not.

There are two more slots for Konstantin. Jewish. Probably 1/4. His grandfather was a gynaecologist who in 1980 protested openly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, promptly became a nonperson, and his family blacklisted. The fall from Soviet grace was hard (sorry, no ‘grinding poverty’) and grandpa emigrated to Britain.

The real story on grandpa is most likely the following. His Jewish great-grandpa was falsely arrested in the 1920s. However, as an engineer, he was still of use to the new socialism, so he lived out his 10 years in the Gulag with three more years added for the hell of it and exile in Siberia till Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin and sent everyone home. He had been a devoted communist at the start and seems to have left his prison years behind, welcomed back into the socialist fold, allowing his son (Konstantin’s father) to become the celebrated doctor with fancy car and prestige apartment. Thank you, Nikita.

The family quickly became part of the nomenklatura and things looked rosy until 1980. Clearly, the gynaecologist had become a dissident, foolishly poking his finger at the bear at a very delicate time. Being a dissident Jew in 1980 in Russia, with Israel and world Jewry hysterically shouting down naive Soviet calls for peace and socialism, demanding the mass emigration of half the Soviet elite NOW, was not a happy vocation. Unless you planned to leave. Again the story is muddled, but Konstantin’s story is that his parents decided he should join grandfather in England and go to a private school. Many Russians gave up hope in the 1990s and looked to the West for a good future. So at 11, he was put on a plane unaccompanied, and began his long march to fame and fortune at the heart of Russia’s traditional enemy.

His other moniker is dissident. While Konstantin never suffered directly in Moscow and became a devoted anglophile, he seems to have inherited the smart-ass, rabblerouser Jewish gene, and he prides himself in his tussles with political correctness [critical race theory (CRT)], occasionally being banned and censored, which of course only adds to his cachet, provides grist for his podcast and more ‘untold wealth’.

That is how I stumbled upon Kisin. What a puzzle: Jewish Russian emigre, smart, young, anglophile … but ‘alt-right’, as he gleefully admits he’s been called? ‘All very, very Soviet.’ Disser of CRT, trans, lgbtqaetc. And bestselling author at 40. I wanted to piece together this puzzle.

An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West starts with an earnest quote from Solzhenitsyn about the decline of the spiritual life leading to social collapse: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand. Hmm. Kisin as a footnote to Solzhenitsyn’s Jeremiad about the decline of both the Soviet Union and the West, but no. Kisin was referring only to the Soviet Union, still hoping the West will recover its soul. It is more interesting as a picture of the confused attempt to justify abandoning his homeland and embrace its enemy. You feel sorry for him at the end, with no sense of where he belongs.

He starts with the anecdote about opening Tamerlane’s tomb on June 21, 1941, inscribed Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I. Tamerlane was given a proper Muslim burial on December 20, 1942, in time for the Battle of Stalingrad, ensuring the defeat of Hitler, so that had a happy ending. He sees CRT as the equivalent of Tamerlane. ‘Today, the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance once again. The tomb of discord and division has been forced open by a small group of ideological zealots. Retreat is no longer an option.’

True, the world around us is indeed changing at unprecedented speed. People are indeed afraid to express their viewers, men and women are opponents, mention of race separates us. He’s right about CRT, but wrong about just about everything else.

Trust me: West is best

His first two chapter are great but for the wrong reasons. The social legacy of the Soviet Union which morphs into black Americans’ ‘the talk’, advice to children about how to act if they’re stopped by police. He had the same lecture as a child in the Soviet Union (SU), except he was instructed ‘how to keep our private conversations secret from the State.’ Cool. The US is becoming like the SU. He trots out Pavlik Morozov (a Stalin-era story of a boy betraying his ‘wrecker’ father), comparing him to Bernie Sanders (?) as a ‘useful idiot’. ‘They are generally the sort of college-educated westerner who embraces this bankrupt ideology [communism] without having any understanding of its real-world implications.’

He then boldly admits that there was optimal income distribution in the Soviet Union (the elite earned 4x what workers earned) vs the 1000+x difference in the West). This was in fact the secret as to why the SU survived so long (and the reason it is mourned by the vast majority of Russians today). Free health, university education (students actually paid a stipend to study!), no racism, no ‘white privilege’, women’s rights, abortion, child care … Things he is disappointed not to see in the West, which he can’t understand. But there’s a catch in all this. Equality, but where everyone is poor, i.e., the Soviet solution to inequality is to cut off people’s legs, though he doesn’t specify that it’s the rich people’s legs that are cut off, so to speak.

Okay, the SU never managed to ‘catch up’ to the West in money income, consumerism, but that’s not the point. At the Muslim Association of Canada 2024 conference ‘Seizing the moment’, Hussein Elkazzaz addressed this false comparison of the West with the Islamic world, which is really just the other ‘other’ for us in the West, like communism.

It assumes you are western, interested only in money and things, so if, say, Egypt is poor, then it is bad, a failure. But, Elkazzaz asks, can you worship freely? Observer the holy days in a vibrant spiritual community? Bring your children up in a safe environment, without the Hollywood-driven culture undermining morality? Some Muslim Canadians go back when they start a family, as that is what’s really important to them, not money and fancier things.

For communism too, money and commodities were not considered as important as good education, health, holidays, camps for children, culture that was moral. Muslims, more than communists, are caught between the two worlds, spiritual growth or economic growth. And they are never really compatible. The SU was operating under the handicap of state-legislated atheism, officially replacing religion with communist ideology, a bad fit as it turned out, as ideological as capitalist America or Muslim Egypt but without the latter’s spirituality.

A study of East Germany and Bulgaria revealed that women had twice as many orgasms in the socialist bloc than in the West. The men were better husbands, the women weren’t stressed by money worries, everyone was equally ‘poor’. Which is nonsense as people didn’t starve. They lived comfortably. The Soviet Union was widely respected in the global south. That’s why I liked communism. It was people-oriented, a friend of the postcolonial world, not $-oriented (to a fault). I liked that workers were honored vs our capitalists feted and treated like kings.

Re universal health care, Kisin is blissfully unaware, by his own admission, as to why Trump, ‘even the almighty Clintons and Barack Obama, couldn’t figure that one out.’ Really? How about capitalism? But no, Kisin loves capitalism. And let’s not forget sunny Cuba and its woes. Sanctions and subversion for 60+ years. The SU endured the same treatment from 1917 till it finally collapsed 74 years later, bringing down most of the socialist world with all its many advantages.

As for freedom, again Kisin admits his parents, and anyone else who cared, had lively debates at home. Everyone was literate and all the pre-Soviet-era classics of world literature and science were available to all. Yes, you had to watch your tongue in public. The SU was never really at peace with a hostile West, so it was naturally paranoid. If you paid any attention to world affairs, that would have been abundantly clear. Nice Cuba also has to restrain its frustrated population to preserve socialism.

Socialism is not easy to build and is easily destroyed, as the whirlwind collapse of the SU showed. And what comes after it is the nasty what-came-before, only worse, as vengeance must be enacted. So empty shelves are a drag, but as long as no one suffers malnutrition, there is definitely a good case to keep socialism alive in the face of unremitting hostility.

Magical sky men

Kisin identifies the underlying problem being the Russian revolution itself, inspired by ideology rejecting real world capitalism. ‘Instead of wasting time trying to create a perfection, which can’t be achieved, the best we can do is deal with reality as we find it.’ Presumably that goes for all revolutions. Kisin excepts the American revolution and its ideology of liberalism, free speech and consumerism.

Kisin compares the modern West to the cargo cults that sprung up among the Melanesian islanders during and after WWII. The trinkets, guns, SPAM were all magical things these nice sky men brought. The Melanesians are skilled carvers so they fashioned mock guns and headphones of wood and sat in makeshift control towers, even flapping their arms on pretend runways. Lesson? ‘We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They have stood the test of time.’ Oh, really?

His analogy with Melanesians is flawed. They saw the sky men as gods with nice miraculous things, and they wanted the things. They didn’t care about western ideology, which indeed is flimsy and is collapsing before our eyes, much like the Soviet ideology of ‘real existing socialism’ collapsed before his eyes. And the magical things we get from Chinese sky men are ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, leaving us high and dry, much like the Melanesians.

As he described the Melanesians, I was thinking ‘what an apt analogy for the mindless consumerism of the late Soviet period, when anything western, from bubble gum to sleek cars, was worshipped and coveted as if it could magically make Soviets feel happy.

Kisin and his fellow Russians view westerners as naive and ‘drunk on decadence, so accustomed to liberty and prosperity that they take it for granted and appear to be throwing it away, completely unaware of its inherent value and fragility.’ They are replacing it with postmodern ideologies culminating in transgenderism, and the cancelling/ destruction of western culture as racist etc.

Kisin is a mirror image to Dmitry Orlov, a hard-nosed Russian American whose Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2011) compare the collapse-preparedness of the US and the SU, arguing that the SU was a mild collapse compared to what’s in store for a totally unprepared, over-the-top arrogant US. Like Orlov, Kisin sees the weakness underlying western society, but can’t see the bankruptcy of both the ideology and reality of the West. His hopes for a miraculous renewal of western society are doomed, much like Gorbachev’s hopes of renewing ‘real existing socialism’ with hasty market reforms, still trapped in the materialist ideology.

I can sympathize with Kisin’s naivete, as I became a communist and lived in hope of a Soviet renewal, reaffirming the ideology of universal brotherhood, real equality, state-funded health and education. It turned out that that ideology-reality was doomed too. Too far apart there. They are equally far apart in the West now too. How about a reality check? Prosperity? Safety? Life expectancy? Stability? Freedoms? Peace? No comment.

Apologist Kisin and Polyanna Pinker

Kisin is an acolyte of Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) seriously claims the world has never been in such a wonderful state, prosperous, blessed with ‘knowledge, mobilized to improve human welfare’.¹

Kisin is a hard-nosed Russian Brit, with no use for ‘pathological altruism’ or any of the ‘wacky, postmodernist, semi-Soviet viruses’. He chastises the West for too much freedom, e.g., Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson, ‘as if their success was their undoing.’ Well, yes, they did have too much material success. Soviet artists lived the high life but a very modest one. I don’t know of any tragedies of the scale of Michael Jackson there.

When capitalism takes control of culture, it encourages the image of freedom, while poisoning the actual lives being lived. We need constraints, especially artists, something to fight against in the interests of Truth. If there is no truth, only ‘drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll’, of course, overnight success becomes the road to infamy, culture degenerates. Kisin sneers at lefty ‘massive wasters snorting failed theories and downing shots of communism, or occasionally injecting socialism straight into our veins, even though we know it’s bad for us.’ That’s just the price of ‘freedom’.

Poe, Freud and Visigoths

Edgar Allan Poe explains in The imp of the perverse (1845) that knowing something is bad for us is the one unconquerable force that compels us to do it. Freud took this to Einstein when he asked Freud if we could avoid war and conflict. Freud replied that we have a tendency to self-sabotage, Thanatos. People are their own worst enemies and strive to bring themselves and the world to ruin, ‘to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter.’ We distract ourselves from stress, guilt, fear of death with reckless behavior, leading ourselves and the world to destruction.

Kisin can’t explain this (like his incomprehension of the lack of universal health care in the US) except as ‘too much freedom’. That’s no explanation, though again, he is right that we are gaslit into thinking that it’s western culture that’s to blame and that the way forward is backwards, to cancel culture, to yet another revolution. To start again, this time basing our (magical) thinking on race, making sure that there’s a balance of colors everywhere, that this balance, like Lenin’s communism, will somehow bring peace and prosperity. He likens the new ideology to a bacterial infection, which targeted and killed Christianity, the English language and capitalism.

Nonsense! Christianity was in steep decline by the mid-19th century, capitalism is alive and well. Kisin is right about how language is being held hostage (be careful what you say doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), but it’s not just woke culture that’s responsible. It’s technology, pushing us to write like AI. You are now a ‘client’ at the public library rather than a patron.

But a good chunk of cancel culture is well-founded. There’s no getting around it: West was in fact built on slavery, racism, militarism and genocide. Kisin has no time for that. But he has no idea how to stop cancel culture and renew the social fabric. Many argue that ‘a good war’ is the solution’ though he demurs. He wants ‘liberals to have a little bit of grit in their oyster.’

Kisin is caught in his ‘love letter to the West’ by the contradictions of capitalism, where freedom means more sexual violence, and social malaise is solved by war, which conveniently increases profit and leads to greater ‘prosperity’. He bemoans the ‘new tsars’ who want to flatten everything and start again, much like what happened in the Soviet Union and which led to woeful results. He compares the West to the Roman empire brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in the 5th century, quoting Carinal Robert Sarah: Europe has lost the sense of its origins. And, like a tree without roots, it will die. ‘Ancient Greece and Rome were the most advanced civilizations of their day. Technologically, culturally, philosophcally, scientifically and politically. Right up until the moment they collapsed.’ Hello Dmitry Orlov!

From Marx to Islam?

This is what was missing in Marx’s critique of capitalism – the psychological side of any attempt to make socialism work. Contrary to Kisin (and Thatcher), socialism is the only way out of our physical destruction of the world at this point, so we better get on board fast. This (huge) hole in Marx’s social theory was seized upon by CRT, a pseudo-Marxism which views everything via race.

No! Kisin reacts viscerally to CRT, but his hatred of all things Soviet prevents him from appreciating that precious part of Soviet reality: an end to racism, and to make sure, you tax the rich and keep income distribution within bounds. Racism is, in the last analysis, economic. Kisin talks about ‘learning from mistakes’ but has no interest in a fair assessment of Soviet experience as important for us precisely now.

We have to build on what worked in the SU and what didn’t, including psychology as a vital part of any answer. He stands by ‘the marriage of free-market capitalism and western liberal democracy, despite the ‘fact’ that they are both at the center of the problem. He knows that income inequality means a bad society, that ‘people’s subjective experience of life is that they are losing,’ that taxing the rich is the unpalatable answer, i.e., socialism. ‘That the ugliness of socialism is only matched by the grotesqueness of capitalism’s excesses,’ but rather than promoting a political backbone to tax the rich, he lamely concludes that ‘society is usually fucked.’

Kisin considers us ‘by far and away the luckiest people in history.’ He even claims capitalism creates peace (‘The UK is currently a nation at peace.’), meaning Friedman’s Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. So why are Macdonalds trashed and forced to shut down across the Middle East, as IDF soldiers are fed free Big Macs in pursuit of … by far and away not ‘peace’?

Kisin’s family’s ‘dissident Jew’ status was unpleasant, but understandable. Those that wanted to managed to leave, happy and healthy. The SU was not ‘a complete fucking nightmare’ as Kisin claims. It did not ‘collapse under the weight of its own flaws’ so much as it was subverted to death, done in by paranoia and consumerism. And the post-Soviet ethnic strife was not a return to primordial animal instincts so much as the lifting of a firm social norm of equality, replaced by greed, which loves dissent and strife, the better to chain the masses to a soulless consumerism.

Read some Marx, Kostya! Have another look at your Soviet-Russian homeland which tirelessly fought for peace from 1917 and was met by war, invasion and subterfuge right up until 2024 and for many more horrible, blood-drenched years, until ‘the collective West’ is defeated. Who incited and why the current war in Ukraine? Whose missiles are raining down on Russian Crimea, Belgorod, the Kremlin?

Or better yet, have a look at Islam, which meets your socially conservative goals, but unlike capitalism and like socialism, is not so much concerned with flooding the world with consumer junk, but creating a society where your heath and education are free, where social harmony is maintained by redistributing income, where peace is not just hoped for as a by-product of greed, but is the priority of all people, of society, the ummah. Where we have the best conditions to praise God for the bounties we have been blessed with, where we are encouraged to do this with humility. But then there is not a trace of humility in Kisin’s worship of capitalism and ‘his’ talents (as if he produced them), and his new-found exciting consumerist paradise. Our enfant terrible is really just a terrible infant.

ENDNOTE

The post East or West? West is Best first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a ‘pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.’

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

How Africa’s National Liberation Struggles Brought Democracy to Europe

Vijay Prashad — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:41:54 +0000

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), A Poesia Está Na Rua I [Poetry Is out on the Street I], 1974.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities.

Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom, which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship responded, ‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant communist’.

John Green (England), Peasants in Beja Demanding Agrarian Reform, 1974.

It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass workers’ strike in Marinha Grande.

Around this time, the dictator Caetano read Portugal and the Future, written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’.

What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers (who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which – despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented).

Mário Macilau (Mozambique), Bending Reality: Untitled (2), from The Profit Corner series, 2016.

On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA approved its programme Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation, drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution erupted in April, Antunes explained, ‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come.

In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up guns.

Nefwani Junior (Angola), É Urgente (Voltar) [It’s Urgent (to Return)], 2021.

Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called ‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against Portuguese colonialism:

It was then that in eyes on fire
now with blood, now with life, now with death,
we buried our dead victoriously
and on the graves recognised
the reason for these men’s sacrifice
for love,
and for harmony,
and for our freedom
even while facing death, through the force of time
in blood-stained waters
even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory

Within us
the green land of São Tomé
will also be the island of love.

That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers against guns.

Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola (April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa.

Bertina Lopes (Mozambique), Omenagem a Amílcar Cabral [Tribute to Amílcar Cabral], 1973.

Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this September and who did more than many to build the African formations against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said, is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our complex cultural formations.

Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to his speeches, a luta continua. The struggle continues.

The post How Africa’s National Liberation Struggles Brought Democracy to Europe first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Palestinians Will Remain on Palestinian Land

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:11:08 +0000

Nabil Anani (Palestine), In Pursuit of Utopia #1, 2020.

On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked about ‘Gaza’s waterfront property’, which, he said, could be ‘very valuable’. ‘If I was Israel’, he continued, ‘I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and finishing the job would be the right move’.

Kushner’s choice of the Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is interesting. Al-Naqab, located in what is now southern Israel, has long been a place of tension and conflict. In September 2011, the Israeli government passed the Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, also known as the Prawer-Begin Plan, which called for the eviction of 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their thirty-five ‘unrecognised’ villages. Kushner is now advising Israel to illegally shift even more Palestinians to al-Naqab, many of whom were originally pushed to Gaza from cities in parts of Palestine that are now within Israel. As Kushner might know, both a population transfer to al-Naqab and the seizure of Gaza are illegal according to Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Abed Abdi (Palestine), Massacre in Lydda, 1980.

The displacement that faced Palestinian Bedouins in 2011 and that faces Palestinians in Gaza today is reflective of the plight that has been inflicted upon Palestinians since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Every year since 1976, Palestinians around the world have commemorated Land Day on 30 March, marking the killing of six Palestinians during a mass action to fight an attempt by the Israeli state to eliminate Palestinians from the Galilee region and carry out Yihud Ha-Galil (the Judaisation of the Galilee). The Israeli regime has tried to annex all of the Galilee and al-Naqab since 1948 but faced fierce resistance from Palestinians, including Palestinian Bedouins. Israel’s violence has failed to intimidate and cleanse the region for the establishment of Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema) from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has not been able to attain its aims. It cannot eliminate either the Palestinians or the Bedouin. Its dream of a pure Zionist state is futile.

Samah Shihadi (Palestine), Mansaf, 2018.

On 9 December 1975, the Palestinian population of Nazareth elected Tawfiq Zayyad of the Communist Party (Rakah) with 67% of the vote. Zayyad (1929–1994), a well-regarded poet, was known as ‘The Trustworthy One’ (Abu el-Amin) for his ceaseless role in forging a united front amongst Galilee Palestinians against the Israeli policy of forced evictions. For these activities, Zayyad was arrested on numerous occasions, but he never wavered. Zayyad joined the Communist Party in 1948, became the head of the Arab Workers’ Trade Union Congress of Nazareth in 1952, led the party in his hometown of Nazareth, won a seat in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in 1973, and then became the mayor of his city in 1976 as the candidate for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. His victory, which surprised the Israeli establishment, was hailed by the Palestinians of Galilee, who had been fighting against the attempts to steal their land and homes since 1948.

In 1975, the Israeli authorities announced that they would expropriate 20,000 dunums (18 million square metres) of Arab land, mostly in central Galilee or ‘Area 9’, which meant the extinction of the villages of Arraba, Deir Hanna, and Sakhnin. These were not new plans. Beginning in 1956, Israel created cities to displace Arab villages around Nazareth such as al-Bi’neh, Deir al-Asad, and Nahef: first, it created Natzeret Illit (known as Nof Hagalil since 2019), and then, in 1964, it created Karmiel.

When I visited Nazareth in 2014, I was taken for a walk around the city’s perimeter to experience how the new Jewish-only settlements were designed to throttle the old Palestinian city. Haneen Zoabi, then a member of the Palestinian party Knesset for Balad, told me about how Nazareth, where she was born, has, like the West Bank, been gradually squeezed by illegal settlements, the apartheid wall, checkpoints, and regular attacks by the Israeli military.

Fatma Shanan (Palestine), Two Girls Holding a Carpet, 2015.

Before the general strike could get going on 30 March 1976, the Israeli regime sent in a full contingent of armed military and police to ruthlessly beat unarmed Palestinians, injuring hundreds and killing six. Tawfiq Zayyad, who led the strike, wrote that it was ‘a turning point in the struggle’, since it ‘caused an earthquake that shook the state from end to end’. The Israeli regime planned to ‘teach the Arabs a lesson’, Zayyad wrote, but that ‘caused a reaction far greater in its effect than the strike itself. This was demonstrated at the funerals of the martyrs who fell in the strike, which were attended by tens of thousands of people’. That day became Land Day, which is now part of the calendar of the struggle for Palestinian national self-determination.

The Israeli regime was undeterred by public outcry. On 7 September 1976, the Hebrew newspaper al-Hamishmar published a memorandum written by Yisrael Koenig, who had administered the North District, including Nazareth. Koenig’s thoroughly racist memorandum called for Palestinian land to be annexed on behalf of fifty-eight new Jewish settlements and for Palestinians to be made to work through the day so that they would have no time to think. Israel’s prime minister at that time, Yitzhak Rabin, did not repudiate the memorandum, which also detailed plans for the Judaisation of the Galilee. The plans never ceased.

In 2005, the Israeli government decided that the deputy prime minister would administer the Galilee and al-Naqab. Shimon Peres, who held that post, said then that ‘[t]he development of the Naqab and the Galilee is the most important Zionist project of the coming years’. The government set aside $450 million to transform these two regions into Jewish majority areas and expel Palestinians, including the Palestinian Bedouin, from them. That remains the plan.

Fatima Abu Roomi (Palestine), Two Donkeys, 2023.

Jared Kushner’s statements are easy to dismiss as a fantasy since they contain a measure of ridiculousness. However, to do so would be misguided: Kushner was the architect of Trump’s Abraham Accords, which led to the normalisation of Israeli relations with Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. He also has a close relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who used to stay in Kushner’s childhood bedroom in Livingston, New Jersey).

Al-Naqab is a hot desert, a place that remains sparsely populated even after the expulsion of many of the Palestinian Bedouin. But Gaza has possibilities as a seaside resort and as a base for Israel’s exploitation of natural gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. This accounts for the sustained attention it has received within the Zionist agenda, represented in Kushner’s blunt statement. But, if history is any judge, it is unlikely that the Palestinians will move from Gaza to al-Naqab or even the Sinai desert. They will fight. They will remain.

Tawfiq Zayyad in Jaffa in 1974, photographer unknown (courtesy of The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive).

In September 1965, after he returned to Palestine from Moscow, Tawfiq Zayyad wrote the poem ‘Here We Will Remain’. It was published the next year in Haifa by al-Ittihad Press alongside his classic ‘I Shake Your Hand’, which was put to music by the Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam and memorised by Palestinian children across the world (‘my hand was bleeding, and yet I did not give up’). The events of 1976 strengthened Zayyad’s popularity in Nazareth, where he remained the mayor till his death in 1994. Tragically, he was killed in a car crash as he returned from the West Bank, where he had gone to welcome Yasser Arafat to Palestine after the Oslo Accords. Thinking of Land Day, and thinking of Gaza, here is Comrade Zayyad’s ‘Here We Will Remain’:

In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
We shall remain,
Like a wall upon your chest,
And in your throat
Like a shard of glass,
A cactus thorn,
And in your eyes
A sandstorm.

We shall remain,
A wall upon your chest,
Clean dishes in your restaurants,
Serve drinks in your bars,
Sweep the floors of your kitchens
To snatch a bite for our children
From your blue fangs.

Here we shall remain,
Sing our songs.
Take to the angry streets,
Fill prisons with dignity.

In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
We shall remain,
Guard the shade of the fig
And olive trees,
Ferment rebellion in our children
As yeast in the dough.

The post Palestinians Will Remain on Palestinian Land first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 7)

B.J. Sabri — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 19:29:23 +0000

Previously, Part 6, I stated that weakening, cancelling Russia’s presence in the world, planning to partition it, or even destroying it has been a fixed U.S. objective. I also stated that U.S. anti-Russian hostility predates the events in Ukraine by decades. For that purpose, I gave two examples out of four. The following are the other two.

Example 3: Under the headline: Revelations from the Russian Archives, The Library of Congress outlines U.S. stance toward Russia in clear terms. I’m citing here two consecutive paragraphs.

Paragraph A: “The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet leaders for taking Russia out of World War I and was opposed to a state ideologically based on communism … The totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin’s regime presented an insurmountable obstacle to friendly relations with the West. Although World War II brought the two countries into alliance, based on the common aim of defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union’s aggressive, antidemocratic policy toward Eastern Europe had created tensions even before the war ended.”

Comment: If one wants to analyze U.S. motives for persistent enmity toward Russia without recourse to tiring research, paragraph “A”could provide invaluable insight.

The phrase “Taking Russia out of WWI …” This is true. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, took Russia out of that war because he did not want Russians to die for internecine capitalistic wars and colonialistic rivalry. He stressed his views in Imperialism, The highest Stage of Capitalism published during the war.

Further, Russia’s withdrawal from that war was a sovereign decision—considering its colonialist motives, and coupled with the discovery of the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France to divide among them the Arab land in Western Asia. Was that withdrawal the true cause for the U.S. hostility toward Russia as stated? No. Most likely, U.S. resentment of Russia was due to the missed hope that a protracted war with Germany and the Ottoman Empire may lead to the collapse of Russia and the newly established Communist system.

The phrase, “Totalitarian Nature of Joseph Stalin’s Regime, etc.”: The writers of the “revelations” appear to be claiming that aside from opposing Communism, the U.S. also opposed Stalin’s “totalitarianism”. The argument is: preposterous, irrelevant, justificatory, and insidious.

It is preposterous because, ideally, no nation is entitled to preach, demand, or impose any form of government on other nations. For example, in the British settlers’ experience in what is now the United States, Britain had to bow to the will of George Washington and his lieutenants to form a republic thus detaching the aspired-for state from the British monarchy. During those times, did Spain, for example, intervene to abort the new republic because had reservations about it? Equally, then and now, the United States has no right to tell Russians how to choose their political system. Invariably, political systems are determined by historical circumstances and national events pertinent to each nation—except when imperialist forces impose them as it happened in Iraq consequent to the U.S.-British invasion.
It is irrelevant because the nature of Stalin’s government was in relation to his application of the Marxian theory of socialism through the “dictatorship of the proletariat” paradigm—not in relation to how the United States thinks of Marxism and Russia. Regardless of how one thinks of this paradigm, the fact is, this is how the forces of history work—by waves, currents, tumults, and uprisings; by philosophical, social, and political theories; and by dynamic social changes in all forms including revolutions.
It is justificatory: the United States was not opposing Russia under the premise that Communism posed a mortal danger to the U.S. capitalistic system. (If the foundations of capitalism are that strong, why the fear for their failure?) From the start, that opposition had a factual origin. With a huge landmass, diverse but cooperative nationalities, and bountiful natural resources, the Soviet model of equality among the constituent socialist states posed potential challenge to the U.S. imperialist model of domination.

Further, the U.S. never proved that the USSR of Stalin was a threat to the United States. It is a well-known fact that prior to WWII, Stalin’s focus was set on one exclusive target: Socialism in one country—the Soviet Union. He knew that the West would not sit idle while seeing a socialist experiment (the collective ownership of means of production) unfolding. Knowing the perils of possible wars because of it, Stalin had no interest in expanding his socialist model beyond Russia. He even ferociously fought Leon Trotsky who was advocating Permanent Revolutions across the world.

It is insidious because it wants to spread the notion that the United States is the sole authority in charge of how the world must function.

To close, Stalin neither urged the United States to convert to Communism nor proposed military action to force it upon any other country. However, with WWII knocking on all doors, and seeing the U.S.’s continuing hostility (the U.S. recognized the USSR in 1933—16 years after the Communist revolution) the formation of the Socialist bloc at the end of war can be seen as response to defend the USSR from Western adventurism and declared intent to attack it—Churchill’s was an example.

In all cases, being a major world power does not qualify the United States to impose on Russia any form of government or to fight Communism just because (a) it is antithetical to Capitalism and its notions of private property, and (b) it did not fit its world agenda. (Note: discussing the speculative concept of totalitarianism (coined by the anti-Communist and anti-Russian Hanna Arendt) goes beyond the scope of this work.)

Of special interest: why did the United States feel compelled to oppose totalitarianism but not Europe’s dehumanizing colonialism? As for its own colonialism and imperialism, the United States purposely does not see itself in that way.

Another argument: U.S. unipolarity in world relations, as well as its oversized pressure on all nations resisting subjugation is a form of totalitarianism—the same concept they purport to oppose. Without a doubt, the accusation of totalitarianism (selectively applied to others) is a ruse to justify adversarial political decisions versus the accused.

The phrase, “The Soviet Union’s Aggressive, Antidemocratic Policy”: I discussed the notion of “democracy” as defined by the United States in the upcoming parts. As for the claim of “Soviet aggressive policy”, this is worn projection psychology. Even if the Soviet Union was aggressive, its aggressiveness pales by comparison with that of the Union States. For one, the Soviet Union did not exterminate the population of its republics. But the United States nearly exterminated all Original Peoples to make space for European settlers.

To close, accusing others of aggressions and aggressive behavior while dismissing own aggression and aggressive behavior is a tactic that the United States has been practicing since foundation. It does not matter whether people point to that fact or not. What matters for U.S. ruling circles is the continuation of the practice as a tradition, and as a means for public relations.

Paragraph B: “Beginning in the early 1970s, the Soviet regime proclaimed a policy of détente and sought increased economic cooperation and disarmament negotiations with the West. However, the Soviet stance on human rights and its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 created new tensions between the two countries. These tensions continued to exist until the dramatic democratic changes of 1989–91 led to the collapse during this past year of the Communist system and opened the way for an unprecedented new friendship between the United States and Russia, as well as the other new nations of the former Soviet Union.”

Comment

The United States, the primary violator of human rights around the world, is not qualified to speak of human rights—it is like a criminal and a thief who insists to give solemn sermons against crime and theft. Besides, the proverbial crocodile tears shed on the question of human rights as violated by Russia could never cover up U.S. criminal conduct around the world—the ongoing U.S.-Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is a case in point.
Claiming that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created “new tensions between the two countries” is so preposterous that one cannot help but recalling U.S. voluminous history of invasions and interventions. Playing the virtuous preacher has been constantly a game that the U.S. could never master because of its venality and the ease with which it can be seen. The following limited references can corroborate my charge: (1) A Chronology of U.S. Military Interventions From Vietnam To the Balkans; (2) Foreign interventions by the United States; (3) S. Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991, and 469 since 1798.
Legions of American politicians, ideologues, think tanks, writers, media owners, and smattering opinion makers have joined in the relentless campaign to vilify and oppose Russia. When the USSR was alive and kicking, the pretext was Communism. When Russia became capitalist, the pretext was authoritarianism. This strongly suggests that America’s former anti-Communist policy was no more than a ploy to (a) weaken and destabilize Russia, and (b) establish the United States as an arbiter of its fate.

Example 4: is there an origin to U.S. hostile attitudes toward Russia in post -WII environment? Yes. It is called McCarthyism. McCarthyism, in its vast anti-communist ideological and psychotic contexts, has been invariably understood by U.S. imperialists and public alike as being anti-Russian—is the matrix to U.S. official enmity toward Russia.

Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against intellectuals, artists, writers, actors, and politicians is known. His role in creating stable anti-Russian hysteria and policies could never be overlooked for two reasons. First, from his time through present, his anti-Communist campaign (anti-Russian by association) and the ideology behind it kept reincarnating in different ways through countless personalities. Second, he left deep marks on U.S. political attitudes in the context of international and Russian relations. (Writing for Middle Tennessee State University under the headline: “The First Amendment Encyclopedia: McCarthyism,” Marc G. Pufong gives an incisive review of Joseph McCarthy and his American world)

Before everything, McCarthy, as a politician, is a product of U.S. ideologized imperialism. Meaning, whatever that system represents in terms of political cultural, party line, government policy, and worldview are necessarily imbued in him. Proving this, the Senate website published an article on McCarthy dated June 9, 1954. The opening paragraph is quite telling. It states,

“Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism.” [Italics added].

The meaning is self-evident: the system has already created an atmosphere of “of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism”. All what McCarthy had to do was to dip into that anxiety and amplify what the system wanted him to do. In essence, he played according to preset rules including the anti-Russian rule. As such, he was (a) the leading promotor for building the future American hostility toward Russia, and (b) the ideological progenitor to countless clones who followed his example without mentioning his ideological influence.

The point: high profiles anti-Russian figures—without McCarthy’s theatrics and hearings—across U.S. political spectrum, followed the basic ideological stance of McCarthy vs. Russia. Examples: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Jackson, Barry Goldwater, Paul Nitze, Alfonse D’Amato, Ronald Reagan, Harold Brown, Madelaine Albright, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Nikki Haley, Victoria Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan and Robert’s brother Frederick, Antony Blinken, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and countless others.

Discussion: I maintain that U.S. foreign policy conduct vis-à-vis Russia never recovered from Kennanism and McCarthyism. Both currents had origins in and found inspirations in Woodrow Wilson’s stance on Russia after the October Revolution and his intervention on the side of forces fighting Communism. Proving this are the multiple ideologies copied from Wilson—Nixon-ism is the highest example. With his many hyper-imperialist books, Nixon, the mass destroyer of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos set the tones on how to hate Russia while appearing “normal”, “cool”, and “knowledgeable”.

In the end, American anti-Russian currents inserted themselves deep inside the American political culture, pop culture, policymaking, and legislation. The anti-Russia plan moved along two axes. The first owes its existence to the original thinking patterns of empire. That is, the United States would do anything to assert itself as a world power that accepts no challenges. The second is McCarthyism, Kennanism, and all their derivations. By dint of this configuration, all traits, principles, and paradigms of acute ideological determinism related to Russia embedded in those currents have become the distinguishing marks and modus operandi of the United States.

From February 2022 (the day in which Russia intervened in Ukraine) forward, McCarthyism and Kennanism (with the added benefits of Nulandism, Bidensim, Blinkenism, Schumerism, and Grahamism) came out of their momentary hibernation after Gorbachev and associates dismantled the Soviet Union. The nouveau McCarthysts and Kennanists intimidate that if you do not side with the U.S. against Russia, then you are siding with Russia— and that would make of you a Putin-loving anti-American. Lindsay Graham has recently applied his brand of McCarthyism to his own party. Zero Hedge reports that Graham suggests. “If Conservatives Want Border Security They Will Have To Support Funding For Ukraine”. This reminds us of fascist Israel: either you support the Zionist settler state in killing the Palestinians and annex their lands, or you are “anti-semitic”.

To close, turning Russia into an enemy because of its intervention in Ukraine was never spontaneous or empathic. In his article, “McCarthyism Re‐Emerging Stronger than Ever in Ukraine Policy Debates,” Ted Galen Carpenter, a former senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute (no lover of Russia), summarized the revival of McCarthyism as a political discourse vis-à-vis Russia as follows:

“A troubling pattern has developed over the decades in which foreign policy hawks smear their opponents and thereby seek to foreclose discussion of questionable U.S. policy initiatives…. Zealous anti‐Russia voices are actually demanding that anyone opposing their views be silenced, and even criminally prosecuted.

In reviewing the history, aims, and details of U.S. foreign policy since WWI, it would not take long to conclude that self-serving rationalizations are effectively driving its world policy aiming at subduing or vanquishing any country out of U.S. control. Now that Russia has been re-baptized as America’s perennial enemy, how did all this start? A quick glance at the origin and successive stages of the United States can tell many things about current U.S. global posture and operational mentality. Early signs marking the U.S. forming character includes:

George Washington’s vision to expand the boundaries of his 13 colonies,
Slave owner Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the doctrine of discovery,
The near extermination of the Original Peoples, black and native slavery, violent colonialist expansions,
Manifest Destiny,
Monroe Doctrine,
Andrew Jackson wars against the Original Peoples and his Indian Removal Act (compare with the fascist Israeli plan to remove the Palestinians from Gaza).
James Polk’s doctrine,
Wars with Mexico and Spain,
McKinley’s annexation of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico,
William Walker’s push into Nicaragua and becoming its president,
Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Island,
S. control of the Panama Canal Zone, and
Supremacism as a tool of domestic and foreign policies,

With each stage of the U.S. development as a state, the quest for an expanded empire and world domination has developed its self-perpetuating mechanisms. Meaning, whoever aspires to become a member of U.S. ruling establishment, must adopt them and defend their objectives. For instance, one cannot run for an elective office on any platform that is antagonistic to the doctrines of the dominant politico-ideological structures of the American state.

In defense of this assertion, consider the following question. Do you know of any candidate who ran and won on a platform calling for (a) ending U.S. military interventions, (b) ending U.S. control of the United Nations, and (c) ridding the United States from the policies and ideologies that underpin its world policy—specifically imperialism and Zionism?

For the record, in the immensely grim, Zionist-controlled American political landscape, courageous and principled politicians showed their moral sinews, stood against the imperialist system, and even sought to bring it to justice. I’m referring to former Representative and presidential candidate Denis Kucinich. Kucinich tried and failed to impeach George W. Bush for his crimes in Iraq (House Resolution: 258). Sixteen years later, could any Congress member today dare to challenge the Biden regime’s actions in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen?

Thoroughout this article, I repeatedly used the term “doctrine”. Do doctrines have any relevance in the building of ideological attitudes, foreign policy culture, and political decision-making? How doctrines work in relation to the U.S. posture in Ukraine?

Read Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The post Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 7) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.J. Sabri.

The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 16:59:27 +0000

8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has there always been any such day at all. The idea emerged from the Socialist International (also known as the Second International), where Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party and others fought from 1889 to hold a day to celebrate working women’s lives and struggles. Zetkin, alongside Alexandra Kollontai of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, sustained a struggle with their comrades to recognise the role of working women and the role of domestic labour in the creation of social wealth. In a context in which women across the North Atlantic states did not have the right to vote, these women intervened in a debate that was taking place among delegates of the Socialist International over whether men and women workers must be united under the banner of socialism to fight against their shared experience of exploitation or whether women should stay home.

In 1908, the women’s section of the Socialist Party of America held a mass rally in Chicago on 3 May to celebrate Woman’s Day. The following year, on 28 February 1909, this expanded to National Woman’s Day, held across the US. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, a resolution was finally passed for all sections of the Socialist International to organise Women’s Day celebrations that would take place the following year. Socialist women organised public events in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland on 19 March 1911 to commemorate the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany. In 1912, Europeans celebrated Women’s Day on 12 May, and in 1913, Russian women marked the date on 8 March. In 1917, women workers in Russia organised a mass strike and demonstrations for ‘bread and peace’ on 8 March, which sparked the wider struggles that led to the Russian Revolution. At the Communist Women’s Second International Conference in 1921, 8 March was officially chosen as the date for annual celebrations of International Working Women’s Day. That is how the date became a fixture on the international calendar of struggles.

In 1945, communist women from around the world formed the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a body that was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day. In 1972, Freda Brown from Australia’s WIDF section and the Communist Party of Australia wrote to the United Nations (UN) to propose that it hold an International Women’s Year and that it advance the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Pushed by WIDF, Helvi Sipilä, a Finnish diplomat and the first woman to hold the position of UN assistant secretary-general (at a time when 97% of senior positions were held by men) seconded the proposal for the International Women’s Year, which was accepted in 1972 and held in 1975. In 1977, the United Nations passed a resolution to hold a Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, which is now known as International Women’s Day and held on 8 March.

Each March, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research honours this tradition by publishing a text that highlights an important woman in our struggle, such as Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005) of India, Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004) of Ecuador, and Josie Mpama (1903–1979) of South Africa. This year, we celebrate International Women’s Day (though perhaps International Working Women’s Month would be better) with the publication of dossier no. 74, Interrupted Emancipation: Women and Work in East Germany, produced in collaboration with the Zetkin Forum for Social Research and International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR). We have published two previous studies with IFDDR, one on the economic history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the other on healthcare in the DDR. The Zetkin Forum is our partner on the European continent, named after both Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), whose work contributed to the creation of International Working Women’s Day, and her son Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965), a surgeon who helped build the new healthcare system in the Soviet Union, fought as part of the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and became a leading physician in the DDR.

Interrupted Emancipation traces the struggles of socialist women in East Germany in various women’s platforms and within the state structures themselves. These women – such as Katharina ‘Käthe’ Kern, Hilde Benjamin, Lykke Aresin, Helga E. Hörz, Grete Groh-Kummerlöw, and Herta Kuhrig – fought to build an egalitarian legal order, develop socialist policies for childcare and eldercare, and bring women into leadership positions in both economic and political institutions. These programmes were not designed merely to improve the welfare and wellbeing of women, but also to transform social life, social hierarchies, and social consciousness. As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.

Women entered the workforce in large numbers, fought for better family planning (including abortions), and demanded the dignity that they deserved. Interrupted Emancipations teaches us how so much was achieved in such a short time (a mere forty years). Leaders like Helga Hörz argued for women’s entry into the workforce not merely to enhance their incomes, but to ensure the possibility of women’s participation in public life. However, changes did not take place at the speed required. In December 1961, the politburo of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’. To transform this reality, women set up committees in workplaces as well as housewives’ brigades to build mass struggles that fought to win society over to women’s emancipation.

The destruction of the DDR in the 1990s and its incorporation into West Germany led to the erosion of the gains socialist women had made. Today, in Germany, these socialist policies no longer remain, nor do mass struggles retain the level of vitality that they achieved in the four decades of the DDR. That is why the dossier is called Interrupted Emancipation, perhaps a reflection of the authors’ hope and conviction that this dynamic can be brought back to life.

Gisela Steineckert was one of the women who benefitted from the transformations that took place in the DDR, where she became a celebrated writer and worked to develop the cultural sector. In her poem ‘In the Evening’, she asks, is the struggle worth it? Without much pause, she answers: ‘the heart of the dreamer is always overly full’. The necessity of a better world is a sufficient answer.

In the evening, our dreams rest their heads against the moon,
asking with a deep sigh if the struggle is even worth it.
Everyone knows someone who suffers, suffers more than anyone should.
Oh, and the heart of the dreamer is always overly full.

In the evening the mockers come, a smile on their lips.
Belittle our every asset, turn pounds into chips.
They like to come at us with their lines, no one’s spared it.
Oh, and they advise us: Nothing was worth it.

In the evening, the sceptics come with creased faces,
leaf through old letters, don’t trust our words.
They stay away from it all, age ahead of their time.
Oh, and their pain and suffering are sublime.

In the evening, the fighters take off their boots,
eat dinner with relish, hammer three nails into the roof.
They want to contend with half a book, fall asleep at the end of a line,
amid captured weapons, next to red wine.

The post The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Unbecoming American: At Election Time

T.P. Wilkinson — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:23:58 +0000

2024 is a year full of elections. For what they are worth they also present a display of the wealth and poverty of language with which active and passive electorates are confined, at least to the extent there is any serious effort to relate the utterances incidental to the process with the lived reality such elections ostensibly reflect. As I have argued elsewhere and repeatedly the limits to rationality in social management have long ago been breached. Although the meaning of political language is no more immanent than any other language, elections may be understood as an exercise in at least temporary stabilization of the response to the terms and concepts used and abused in all the colour bands of the spectrum of organized interest representation.

In the course of little more than a century the attempts to aggregate popular demands within the channels of conflict resolution have led to the abolition of class-oriented and programmatic political parties. The last of these survived in the colonial/ neo-colonial environments of Central and South America until they were defeated in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite the preservation of conventional labels inherited from the French Revolution, the range of political ideologies available has been reduced to the West’s universal values of neo-liberalism. Liberalism and conservatism also mutated into forms that would be barely recognizable to those whose tracts laid the theoretical basis for these positions. This did not happen overnight. Nor was it a natural phenomenon. Counter-insurgency complemented by the infiltration and manipulation of the standard bearers of nationalism and socialism in Latin America ultimately subdued those few attempts to restore class and programmatic politics after 1945.

Of course there was also violent counter-insurgency waged (e.g., Gladio) by the covert operators of the State (and its owners) in the US and throughout the territories where Anglo-American power was projected, mainly through NATO and in the western peninsula of Eurasia also through its civil department the European Economic Community or European Union. By the time the official socialist states associated with the Soviet Union were defeated and transformed into Western vassals, the leadership—such as it was—of ostensibly left-leaning political organizations had been decapitated and or replaced by academically credentialed professionals indebted to corporate funding. Before the European Management Forum/ World Economic Forum initiated its cadre program, numerous transatlantic entities such as the German Marshall Fund, Fulbright and Rhodes Scholarships and other lesser-known programs recruited and indoctrinated the predecessors to today’s “global leaders”. Funds channelled through parastatal agencies, NGOs and corporate tax dodges promoted generations of scholars, journalists, teachers and bureaucrats enabling them to march through the institutions with competitive advantage over those with sincere political convictions.

Anyone paying attention to this process could see that parallel to this transfer of “leadership” academic literature and the publications of the so-called quality press were reshaping the language of post-war mass movements, turning activism into grant-funded research. Beneath the banner of postmodernism in the Anglo-American dominated humanities and social sciences the principles of empirical Marxist analysis were subsumed by a theological form of scholarship even more dogmatic than the much-maligned work of the state institutes for Marxism-Leninism in the so-called Soviet bloc. While the latter were explicitly responsible for regulating the application of core Marxist texts to state ideology, the sacerdotal caste of the postmodernist cult preached the dissolution of explicit state action in social management. Nationalism, racial equality, feminism and socialism itself were relegated to the dustbin of archaic ideologies for social formations that had been dissolved or rendered obsolete by the alleged maturity of identity-based humanism. Possessive individualism, both metaphoric and literal, emerged as the driving force behind the sublimation of citizenship and the exaltation of consumerism as its apogee. Social movements arising from resistance to centuries of Western domination were redefined as mere aggregates of individual ambitions that the new freedom would inevitably manifest. Hence fundamental changes in productive relations and the distribution of political power over whole classes of people were abandoned in favour of enhanced personal opportunities to participate in the pillage by the prevailing system of embedded power. The appointment of a single member of a previously oppressed or subordinated class was interpreted as a sign that the class was no longer the target of the domination against which it had arose in resistance. Class ceased to exist as a meaningful category of human interest. A myriad of excuses were provided to show that there was neither a society nor a power structure in control of it.

In the 1980s the academy-based political cadre, supported by covertly funded career tracks began redesigning all of the systemic criticism that had characterized liberation struggles in anticipation of the radically individualized mass media that would soon dominate the political and economic space contested by all those who, perhaps naively, expected that the United Nations Charter would guarantee their liberation and an end to “non-self-governing territories”. Then just as industrialization provided the means by which chattel slavery could be abandoned, the onset of digitalization began to render organized industrial workforces redundant, depriving them of their practical tools of asserting control over the means of production and the media for social organization necessary to convert that into social power. By the time formal decolonization had increased the membership in the United Nations from 51 in 1951 to 194 in 2024, the capacity of nation-states to develop and protect their citizens had been thoroughly undermined by the absolute corporate control over the intergovernmental body and its agencies. Instead of local industrialization and internal development augmented by fair trade, the blue flag with its wreath encircled polar projection of Earth not only represented the corporate ideal of its founders. It became the banner of a global public-private partnership for the monopoly in the traffic of labour, money, information and with blue helmets armed force.

This was enhanced by the redesign of human development. Instead of the liberation of peoples from centuries of exploitation, the vast majority of the world’s population became de-territorialized. Social development was translated into a mere aggregate of individual enrichment or impoverishment, subject to a global “free” market governed by corporate management on behalf of finance capital. Moreover this postmodern political economy was subjected to the neo-Malthusian strategy of competitive advantage by which nations were converted into warehouses for latent resources to be traded or bunkered according to the exigencies of discounted cash flows. The humanist democratic governance principles imperfectly asserted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and expanded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were abandoned. Instead they were proclaimed as absorbed in the corporate governance doctrines formalized and propagated by the Anglo-American capitalist theocracy, housed in the leading Business faculties at mainly American universities and non-governmental organizations. It is perhaps no accident that the technology for surrogate childbirth—once highly controversial—was perfected at the same time as NGOs through “civil society” usurped citizenship for whole classes of disenfranchised persons.

As I have argued elsewhere, the political economy of surplus allocation associated with classical economics, e.g. Adam Smith, was transformed into the neo-classical analysis of scarcity at the same time that chattel slavery was abolished in the 1880s. Postmodernism expanded this doctrine to denounce human social development at the end of the Second World War. Instead the value of human society and collective development was reclassified in the global accounting regulations as a threat to an abstract planetary welfare. That planetary welfare, currently promoted in various forms such as Climate Change dogma or DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) doctrine, is merely a euphemism for the ascendency of finance capital and its neo-feudal oligarchy. Applied to the human race, natural reproduction and economic activity in lived human communities are unacceptable costs, which the management of the global private-public partnership must reduce if the rate of profit and the magnification of centralized power are to be sustained. In cost accounting terms, every human being, excepting the caste of oligarchs and their retainers, is a unit cost that had to be eliminated if the capitalist enterprise is to remain sustainable.

The human development indices cease to reflect increases in the level of nutrition, education, healthy live births and sufficient living conditions in the places real human beings actually inhabit. The preservation of wildlife, whether plant or animal, is only important for sustaining the class of those who claim to own everything. The intergovernmental regime, discretely appropriated and managed by international corporations through their postmodern cadre, measure human development by success in reducing the number of exhaling lungs and depriving those still allowed to breath of the energy resources required to feed, clothe, house and otherwise carry on meaningful lives.

Not satisfied with crushing national independence and development efforts worldwide, local autonomy is to be subverted by means of a pseudo-healthcare regime that grants carte blanche to pharmaments manufacturers and other branches of the armed forces to incarcerate indefinitely or even to poison the population wherever cyclical mayhem and destruction leaves survivors.

In order to preserve the veneer of coherence with the ideals espoused in the UN Charter, the social structures of historical communities are aggressively deprived of their material base. Here “civil society” performs a chimeric function facilitating the current manifestation of global parasitism. Just like the keyboard attached to a computer imitates the function of the manual typewriter, the hyper-individualism embedded in the NGO surrogate pronounces social values of the obsolete modernist humanism while driving computational processes created and controlled by the software and ultimately the hardware of the new feudal estate.

Within this constellation the terms “left”, “right” and “centre” have retained nothing of their original associations. They are entirely inadequate to describe the positions, program, loyalties, or motives of the bureaucratic-sacerdotal class still recruited to perform electoral charades. While those who still go to the polls may try to discern what words are really meant in the storm of gestures and synthetic sound bites, they can be sure that the solution to the riddle their vote has offered is wrong. They may see the hand waving or grimace as an allusion to a tradition they value. They may interpret the high-minded slogan escaping through the lips of some young LSE graduate or a legacy party functionary as a sign that their interest in a decent life and future are supported. They may paint one clown with a red nose and the other with a blue, green or brown one. Yet by the end of the performance, the clowns will remain and they, the audience, will be swept away like so many empty popcorn bags or cold drink cups on the ground. It is a truism that whenever there is some accident or mishap in the midst of a circus performance—they send in the clowns. Unfortunately on the eve of great destruction there are no laughing matters.

The post Unbecoming American: At Election Time first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Peoples’ China: What Lies Ahead?

Greg Godels — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:00:19 +0000

Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people — across the entire political spectrum — developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on every word uttered by The Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, and stood by every release explaining Chinese events in the People’s Daily, Red Flag and Peking Review. A few Communist Parties and many middle-class intellectuals embraced the Cultural Revolution as a rite of purification. Yet for most, as with Palme Dutt, the paramount question remained: Where is the PRC going?

Today, forty-five years later, the question remains open.

I wrote the above thirteen years ago. I contend that the question remains open today. Much has changed, however. In 2011, China-bashing was widespread especially where jobs had disappeared in manufacturing, but largely tempered by a Western business sector anxious to exploit low wages and the Chinese domestic market.

But almost simultaneously with the 2011 posting, the Obama administration made official its “pivot to Asia,” directed explicitly at Peoples’ China. As the Brookings Institute ‘diplomatically’ put it, “Washington is still very much focused on sustaining a constructive U.S.-China relationship, but it has now brought disparate elements together in a strategically integrated fashion that explicitly affirms and promises to sustain American leadership throughout Asia for the foreseeable future.” More explicitly, they intend “to establish a strong and credible American presence across Asia to both encourage constructive Chinese behavior and to provide confidence to other countries in the region that they need not yield to potential Chinese regional hegemony.”

To be sure, the officially declared Obama administration hostility to the PRC was neither a reaction to job loss nor to deindustrialization. The Administration showed no interest in recreating lost jobs or restoring the industrial cities in the Midwest. The real purpose is revealed in the simple phrase “Chinese regional hegemony.” Clearly, by 2011, ruling circles in the US had decided that the PRC was more than an economic cherry ready to be plucked. Instead, it had developed into an economic powerhouse, a true, even the true, competitor in global markets; indeed, it had become a robust threat to U.S. hegemony.

With the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the anti-PRC campaign continued, though conducted in an accelerated, cruder fashion, employing sanctions, threats, ultimatums, and even legal chicanery (the detention of one of Huawei’s executives, the daughter of the company’s founder).

The subsequent Biden administration pursued the same approach, adding another level of belligerence by stirring conflict in the South China Sea and reigniting the Taiwan issue. To anyone paying attention, successive administrations were intensifying aggression against the PRC, a process fueled by the eagerly compliant mainstream media.

It has become commonplace on the left to explain the growing hostility to the PRC by the U.S. and its NATO satellites as the instigation of a new Cold War, a revival of the anti-Communist crusades strengthening after World War II. In the past, I have suggested as much. But that would be grossly misleading.

The original Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and socialism. Whether Western critics will concede that the Soviet alternative was really socialism is irrelevant. It was a sharp and near-total alternative, and the West fought it as such. The Soviet Union did not organize its production to participate in global markets, it did not compete for global markets, nor did it threaten the profitability of capitalist enterprises through global competition. In short, the Soviet Union offered a potent option to Western capitalism, but not the threat of a rival for markets or profits. Moreover, Soviet foreign policy both condemned capitalism and explicitly sought to win other countries to socialist construction.

The same cannot be said for the Western antagonism to the PRC. The West courted Peoples’ China assiduously from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution through the entire Deng era. Western powers saw the PRC as either an ally against the Soviet Union, a source of cheap labor, an investment windfall, or a virgin market. But with China’s success in weathering the capitalist crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. and its allies began to look at the PRC as a dangerous rival within the global system of capitalism. Chinese technologies more than rivaled the West’s; its share of global trade had grown dramatically; and its accumulation of capital and its export of capital were alarming to Western powers bent on pressing their own export of capital.

In contrast to the actual Cold War, even the most ardent defender of the “Chinese road to socialism” cannot today cite many instances of PRC foreign policy strongly advocating, assisting, or even vigorously defending the fight for socialism anywhere outside of China. Indeed, the basic tenet of PRC policy — the noninterference in the affairs of others, regardless of their ideologies or policies — has more in common with Adam Smith than Vladimir Lenin.

What the Soviet Union took as its internationalist mission — support for those fighting capitalism — is not to be found in the CPC’s foreign policy. Nothing demonstrates the differences more than the Soviet’s past solidarity and aid toward Cuba’s socialist construction and the contrasting PRC’s commercial and cultural relations and meager aid.

Accordingly, the PRC’s commercial relations with less developed countries can raise substantial issues. Recently, Ann Garrison, a highly respected solidarity activist, often focusing on imperialism in Africa, wrote a provocative article for Black Agenda Report. In her review of Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives — an account of corporate mining and labor exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo– Garrison makes the following commentary guaranteed to raise the ire of devotees of the “Chinese road to socialism”:

[The author of Cobalt Red] explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Huge Chinese corporations so dominate Congolese cobalt mining, processing and battery manufacture that one has to ask why a communist government, however capitalist in fact, doesn’t at least somehow require more responsible sourcing of minerals processed and then advanced along the supply chain within its borders. I hope that Kara’s book has or will be translated into Chinese. (my emphasis)

Predictably, rejoinders came fast and furious. In both an interview and response posted on Black Agenda Report, Garrison’s critics struggled to explain why PRC-based corporations were not contributing to the impoverishment and exploitation of Congolese workers. They cited Chinese investments in infrastructure and in modernization; they noted huge increases in productivity wrought by Chinese technology; they reminded Garrison of the corruption of the DRC government and local capitalists, and even blamed capitalism itself. How, one critic asked, could the PRC be singled out, when other (admittedly capitalist) countries were doing it as well?

Yet none even made a feeble attempt to explain how the extraction of one of the most sought-after minerals in modern industry could leave the people of the mineral-rich DRC with one of — if not the lowest — median incomes in the entire world. This striking fact points to the enormous rate of exploitation engaged in cobalt, copper, and other resource extraction in this poverty-stricken African country (for a Marxist angle on this question, see Charles Andrews’s article, cited by Garrison, but seemingly misunderstood by her).

In their zeal to defend the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative, these same defenders of the penetration of Chinese capital in poor countries often cite the frequent Chinese concept of “win-win” — the idea that Chinese capital brings with it victory for both the capital supplier and those ‘benefitted’ by the capital. Theorists of the non-class “win-win” concept are never clear exactly who the beneficiaries are — other capitalists, corrupt government officials, or the working class. Nevertheless, within the intensely competitive global capitalist system, this “win-win” is not sustainable and is contrary to both experience and the laws of capitalist development. Theoretically, it owes more to the thinking of David Ricardo than Karl Marx.

The PRC’s vexing relationship to capitalism has produced contradictions at home as well as globally. The ongoing collapse of the largely private construction/real-estate industry is one very large example. Once a major factor in PRC growth, overproduction of housing is now a substantial drag on economic advance. Monthly sales of new homes by private developers peaked late in 2020 at over 1.5 trillion yuan and fell to a little more than .25 trillion yuan at the beginning of 2024.

With the private real estate sector on the verge of bankruptcy and a huge number of residential properties unsold or unfinished, the PRC leadership is caught in a twenty-first-century version of the infamous scissors crisis that brought the Soviet NEP — the experiment with capitalist development of the productive forces — to a halt. If the government allows the private developers to fail, it will have harsh repercussions throughout the private sector, with banks, and foreign investors. If the government bails out the developers, it will remove the market consequences of capitalist excess and put the burden of sustaining capitalist failure on the backs of the Chinese people.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the government, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is considering placing “the state back in charge of the property market, part of a push to rein in the private sector.” The WSJ editors construe this as reviving “Socialist Ideas” — a welcome thought, if true.

The article claims that in CCP General Secretary Xi’s view, “too much credit moved into property speculation, adding risks to the financial system, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and diverting resources from what Xi considers to be the ‘real economy’ — sectors such as manufacturing and high-end technology.…”

Putting aside the question of how the private real estate sector was allowed to create an enormous bubble of unfinished and unsold homes, the move to return responsibility for housing to the public sector should be welcome, restoring price stability and planning, and eliminating speculation, overproduction, and economic disparities.

Unfortunately, there will be uncertain consequences and difficulties for banks, investors, and real estate buyers who purchased under the private regimen.

It is worth noting that no Western capitalist country or Japan has or would address a real estate bubble by absorbing real estate into the public sector.

Under Xi’s leadership, the direction of the PRC’s ‘reforms’ may have shifted somewhat away from an infatuation with markets, private ownership, and foreign capital. The former “enrich yourselves” tolerance for wealth accumulation has been tempered by conscious efforts at raising the living standards of the poorest. Xi has made a priority of “targeted poverty alleviation,” with impressive success.

Western intellectuals harshly criticize the PRC’s ‘democracy’ because it rejects the multi-party, periodic election model long-favored in the West. These same intellectuals fetishize a form of democracy, regardless of whether that particular form earns the trust of those supposedly represented. The mere fact that a procedure purports to deliver democratic or representative results does not guarantee that it actually makes good on its promise.

If China-critics were truly concerned with democratic or popular outcomes, they would turn to measures or surveys of public confidence, satisfaction, or trust in government to judge the respective systems. On this count, the PRC is always found at or near the top in public trust (for example, hereand here). Moreover, Chinese society shows high interpersonal or social trust, another measure of success in producing popular social cohesion by a government.

It’s telling that with the Western obsession with democracy, there is little interest in holding bourgeois democracy up to any relevant measure of its trust or popularity. When it is done, the U.S. fares very poorly, with a six-decade decline in public trust, according to Pew. As recently as February 28, the most recent Pew poll shows that even people who do respect “representative democracy” are critical of how it’s working. Their answer to their skepticism may be found “if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office”, say respondents. Those elites who so glibly talk of “our democracy,” in contrast to those including the CCP that they call “authoritarians,” might pause to listen to the people of their own country.

The PRC has shocked Western critics with the breakneck pace of its adoption of non-emission energy production. In 2020, the Chinese anticipated generating 1200 gigawatts of solar and wind power by 2030. That goal and more will likely be reached by the end of 2024. Overall, the PRC expects to account for more new clean-energy capacity this year than the average growth in electricity demand over the last decade and a half. This means, of course, that emissions have likely peaked and will be receding in the years ahead– an achievement well ahead of Western estimates and Western achievements, and a victory for the global environmental movement.

At the same time, the PRC’s successful competition in the solar-panel market makes it the target of global competitors, a brutal struggle that undermines the espoused “win-win” approach. Despite the benign tone of “win-win,” market competition is not bound by polite resignation, but aggression, conflict, and, as Lenin affirmed, ultimately war. That is the inescapable logic of capitalism. PRC engagement with the market cannot negate it.

Western leftists too often simplify the ‘Chinese Question’ by making it a parlor game revolving around whether China is or is not a socialist country, an error confusing a settled, accomplished state of affairs with a contested process.

As long as capitalism exists and holds seats of political power, the process of building socialism remains unstable and unfinished.

The 1936 Soviet constitution declared in Article One that the USSR was “a socialist state of workers and peasants,” a status that was under great duress over the subsequent following decades. The 1977 constitution stated even more boldly that the USSR was “a socialist state of the whole people…,” a state without classes and, by implication, class struggle. A decade and a half later, there was no USSR. Building socialism is a fragile process and one prone to reversals and defeats.

Thus, we should follow Palme Dutt’s sage advice and observe developments in the PRC with vigilance and a critical eye. If building socialism is a dynamic process, we should attend to its direction, rather than pronouncing its summary success or failure. The PRC is a complex creation with a complex — often contradictory — relationship with other countries as well as the socialist project. The cause of socialism is ill served by either ignoring or exaggerating both missteps and victories in the PRC’s revolutionary path.

The post Peoples’ China: What Lies Ahead? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times

Vijay Prashad — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 19:06:43 +0000

A Red Books Day event at the May Day Bookstore in Delhi (India), 2024.

It is nearly impossible to think of joy while Israel continues its genocidal violence against Palestinians and while the terrible war escalates in the eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced in Gaza and near Goma (DRC). In both these places, the immediate demand must be to end the violence, but rising alongside it is the need to end the root of this violence (such as ending the occupation of Palestine). When there are conflicts of this kind, we get trapped in the present, unable to think about the future. Increasingly, the deterioration of everyday life, with famine stalking large parts of the planet, has made it impossible to dream of another world. The demands from Gaza, Goma, and tens of thousands of places across the word are the same: one less bomb, one more piece of bread.

Even in the bleakest times, however, humans seek joy and promise, looking for a horizon that is not merely framed by the immediate indignities of life. Nearly a decade ago, I spent an afternoon at the Jalazone camp, north of Ramallah (Palestine), where I attended a session at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school. Outside the UNRWA school, in the West Bank, the quotidian tension of the occupation was sharpened by a series of killings of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

In an art class at the UNRWA school, I watched young Palestinian children draw a story depicting a recent dream they had. The teacher allowed me to walk around the classroom and interact with the children. Many of them drew what children often draw: a house, the sun, a river beside the house, children playing on a swing or a slide. There were no signs of apartheid walls, no checkpoints, and no Israeli soldiers. Instead, there was merely the simplicity that they wanted to experience. This is how they portrayed happiness.

A Red Books Day event at The People’s Forum in New York City (United States), 2024.

Now, when I ask my friends in Gaza about their children, they say that the sound of the war, the dust of the bombed landscape, and the fear of death envelops them. Saleem, in Rafah, says that his two young daughters often sit on the floor of their uncle’s apartment, drawing on any scrap of paper they can find. ‘Next year’, he says, ‘we will do Red Books Day in Gaza City, inshallah’. ‘What book will you read’? I ask him. ‘For you’, he said, ‘we would read Darwish, the great Palestinian poet’. And then, he recites these lines, from the poem ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’:

What are you writing in this war, Poet?
I’m writing my silence.
Do you mean that now the guns should speak?
Yes. Their sound is louder than my voice.
What are you doing then?
I’m calling for steadfastness.
And will you win the war?
No. The important thing is to hold on. Holding on is a victory in itself.
And what after that?
A new age will start.
And will you go back to writing poetry?
When the guns quiet down a little. When I explode my silence, which is full of these voices. When I find the appropriate language.

Israeli jets had begun to bomb the edges of Rafah, and yet Saleem took time to talk about Red Books Day. For him, as for his children, the present is not sufficient. They want to imagine what lies beyond the horizon, what lies beyond the unfolding genocide.

A Red Books Day event at the Simón Bolívar Institute in Caracas (Venezuela), 2024.

This year, from Indonesia to Chile, a million and a half people participated in Red Books Day, which is becoming a fixture on the calendar of the international left. In 2019, the Indian Society of Left Publishers began to look into holding a celebration on 21 February, the publication date of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. This book, one of the most widely read in the world, has inspired billions of people over the past century and a half to build a process of socialism that will transcend the stalled problems created by capitalism (such as hunger, illiteracy, poverty, genocide, and war). The book continues to inspire millions in our time, its words more relevant than ever to solving the struggles of the present.

Since this date is also shared by International Mother Languages Day, the idea was for writers, publishers, bookshops, and readers to go into public places and read the manifesto in their own languages. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, 30,000 people from Venezuela to South Korea participated in the first Red Books Day in 2020, with its epicentre in India. Soon, it became clear that the point was not to read the manifesto alone, but any ‘red book’ on that day. Engaging more deeply with left ideals, many decided to hold festivals of different sizes to rescue collective life and promote the cultures of the left.

Chemm Parvathy dances to ‘The Internationale’ in Thiruvananthapuram (India) in preparation for Red Books Day.

This year, the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP) initiated Red Books Day festivities in early February with the release of a powerful dance video by the young artist and communist cadre Chemm Parvathy. She performed to the French version of ‘The Internationale’, dancing through the markets and workshops of the workers of Thiruvananthapuram. The song culminated with Parvathy at the beach, holding a communist flag as the red sun sunk into the horizon behind her. The video went viral and set the tone for Red Books Day. This year’s events were accompanied by a series of original commemorative posters designed by artists from around the world to encourage more and more people to organise readings and performances in their regions.

It was clear that the scope of events held in 2024 would eclipse our previous attempts given the width and depth of participation. Public events were organised by socialist forces in Indonesia and East Timor while the Havana Book Fair in Cuba set aside 21 February for a special day of events. Readings of red books were held by the Socialist Movement of Ghana and the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST), as well as by Red Ant in Australia and the Workers’ Party in Bangladesh. Communists in small villages in Nepal convened meetings in the high mountains to discuss the importance of study and struggle. In New York City, The People’s Forum held a celebration on the life and writings of the communist Claudia Jones, while in Chile speeches of Salvador Allende were read at La Cafebrería and in South Africa a discussion was held at The Commune about how the imperialist powers use the concept of human rights. The Communist Party of Ireland organised readings and a workshop in the cultural centre Aonach Mhacha, and the UK Young Communist League and a group from the Students’ Federation of India organised a film screening of The Young Karl Marx at the University of Southampton.

A Red Books Day event organised by the Socialist Movement in Accra (Ghana), 2024.

Red Books Day is now rooted in the cultural landscape of India’s left. This year, Red Books Day also became a forum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In Kerala, half a million people met to read and discuss EMS Namboodiripad’s Leninism and the Approach to the Indian Revolution in 40,000 places. The largest of these events was in Thiruvananthapuram, where Communist Party of India-Marxist, or CPI(M), Kerala State Secretary MV Govindan inaugurated the festival. The Purogamana Kala Sahithya Sangham (PuKaSa or the Progressive Arts and Literary Organisation) held seminars across Kerala on the contemporary relevance of the manifesto, and VKS Singers Group of the Pukasa Nattika Mekhala committee prepared a music video on The Communist Manifesto. In Karnataka, CPI(M) Politburo member MA Baby delivered a lecture on ‘Lenin and Culture’ while in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, workers, peasants, and youth discussed Lenin’s life and writings (including through a webinar organised by Mana Manchi Pustakam).

In Maharashtra, a webinar was held on Godavari Parulekar’s Jevha Manus Jaga Hoto (‘The Awakening of a Man’). In many parts of India, such as Assam, the Students Federation of India organised readings of The Communist Manifesto. In both West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, people read the Bangla and Tamil editions of The Political Marx, written by Aijaz Ahmad and me. In the same state, G. Ramakrishnan of the CPI(M) inaugurated a reading session in central Chennai, and crowds read and discussed the short booklet Lenin: The Polestar of Revolution.

Students at Hyderabad Central University and The English and Foreign Languages University ran with the idea of turning the day into a broader cultural spectacle and organised a poster exhibition and a book festival. At New Delhi’s May Day Bookstore, there were songs and dances as well as a street play by Jana Natya Manch, readings of the manifesto in various Indian languages, and a poetry recital in solidarity with Palestine.

A Red Books Day event organised by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brasília (Brazil), 2024.

Building toward Red Books Day 2025, the IULP will release a poster on their social media channels every month that will culminate in a Red Books Day calendar at the end of the year. The idea is that Red Books Day will not only be about the day alone but will also be defined by activities through the year that build toward the main events on 21 February.

Red Books Day is part of the broad cultural struggle to defend the right to write, publish, and read red books and to fight against obscurantist ideas that stand in for reason these days (such as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that ancient India excelled in plastic surgery because the Hindu Lord Shiva, who replaced the head of his son Ganesh with an elephant’s head, as we wrote in our latest dossier). Though Red Books Day is anchored by the IULP, which includes over forty publishers from around the world, it is not solely organised by the union. The general hope is that this day will go beyond the IULP and become a key part of the calendar of the left. It was remarkable to see Red Books Day spread beyond our left networks. This is precisely the objective of Red Books Day: for it to become an integral part of public culture and to struggle to establish rational and socialist ideas as the foundational ideas of society. By the end of the decade, we estimate that over ten million people will participate in Red Books Day. Next year, in Gaza.

The post There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Is There a Future for the Left?

Greg Godels — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:41:02 +0000

…the Left narrative, no matter how accurate and intellectually powerful it may be, cannot expect to catch the imagination of the citizenry without including a vision for a real alternative future. Moreover, working-class institutions need to be reinstituted for the enhancement of class consciousness and authentic socialist parties need to be rediscovered for the Left narrative to become politically effective. Social movements are important, but their actions rarely have lasting effects. Only political parties can succeed in forging the Left narrative into the policy agenda and turn it into a programmatic plan for social change. Understandably enough, this is quite a tall order, but the Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes. But it needs the necessary political agencies and cultural instruments to do so. It cannot accomplish it on intellectual grounds alone, especially with the politics of identity acting as a spearhead for social transformation… The Communist Manifesto would have remained just a mere political document if it wasn’t for the existence of radical political parties across the globe to embrace it as their guide and vision for the emancipation of the working class from the yoke of capital.

— CJ Polychroniou, “The Left has a Great Story to Share About Alternatives to Capitalism–But Sucks at Telling It,” Common Dreams

Shorn of the academic jargon, Polychroniou’s conclusion to his Common Dreams article gets a lot right about the failings of the US and European left and the road back to relevance.

It is true that today the left’s unstated action model is a plethora of focused, but single-issue social movements. However, that model has enjoyed, at best, limited success in the US since single-issue activism won big gains in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the movements effectively complemented a bloody defeat of US Cold War aggression and the other completed the formal constitutional promise of full-citizenship rights for Blacks, women, and other minorities.

But substantial, larger, associated issues remain unresolved. US imperialism continues unabated with ever-more casualties and injustices; the inequalities suffered by oppressed groups remain intact, with a token stratum of those groups allowed through the door of privilege, even to elite status, but with most lagging far behind.

Social movements have focused on specific policies (NAFTA, tax structure, minimum wage, healthcare, immigration reform), emerging trends (globalization, “neoliberalism”), gross inequality (Occupy), changes in governance (Arab spring, police reform), environmental degradation (fracking), or US foreign intervention among many other identifiable wrongs, all of which burn brightly in the beginning, then unfortunately just as quickly fade, as protest confronts the glacial, fractured electoral system.

It is also true that most of the left operates and acts without any overarching program of reform or revolution. The majority of US leftists, for example, enthusiastically, reluctantly, or by default rely upon the Democratic Party and electoral politics to drive broad, systemic change. They may hope that their issues will be embraced by the party’s policy makers, they may struggle with the party’s entrenched leaders for a suitable program, or they may simply defer to the Democrats out of desperation. DSA, a self-described ‘democratic’ socialist party, is very far from cutting the umbilical cord with the Democrats. While the Green Party expends impressive effort to achieve ballot status, it brings a hodge-podge of candidates to the ballot, seldom aligned with any kind of common program or larger goal. And the small Marxist parties have failed to impact the labor movement or pressure reform movements from the left, as last did the US Communist Party of Gus Hall’s era when anti-Communist repression was far more intense than today and the word “socialism” was then a term of abuse.

But it is not just a program that is missing, but a vision as well.

‘Anti-capitalism’ is not a vision, but a defiance; it expresses hostility and resistance, but not rejection. It gives us no alternative to capitalism. Most of the US left counts itself as anti-capitalist, but one can only guess at what that might mean.

Some are more specific: they are anti-neoliberal capitalism, anti-disaster capitalism, anti-racial capitalism, or perhaps anti-monopoly capitalism. But, by implication, are they for some other kind of capitalism? Do they pine for the era before neoliberalism? Do they imagine capitalism without racism? Do they wish to turn the clock back to the stage before monopoly capitalism? An imagined time when capitalism did not spawn disasters?

These are not political visions, they’re mere fantasies!

The dominant alternative vision to capitalism until the collapse of real-existing-socialism in the late-twentieth century was Marxist socialism. From the rise of mass socialist parties in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the vision sketched by Marx and his followers dominated the hopes of ‘anti-capitalist’ working people. Whatever else the early Marxist militants meant by socialism, they agreed that socialism should end the exploitation of workers by capitalists; they envisioned ending capitalism once and for all and not merely managing it or buffering its worse aspects.

With the birth of real-existing-socialism, creating, shaping, and developing the vision proved to be a lengthy, often messy process, as though serious onlookers would expect it to be otherwise. Previously rare or unheard-of levels of economic, cultural, and human growth were achieved. Enormous sacrifices were made. And internal and external enemies were met.

Some leaders rose to meet challenges, some failed to do so. Mistakes were plentiful, as were acts of unparalleled heroism. The costs of change and of development were enormous, which any thoughtful observer would concede in a life-and-death struggle against capitalism. Ultimately, those living in the lands where socialism was won, no matter how briefly or for how long, must weigh the sacrifices against the gains made, and discount the judgment of smug, privileged foreign critics.

Ironically, Polychroniou, who correctly steers the left away from aimlessly drifting in the political maelstrom of left-wing faddism and unmoored posturing, paints a picture of real-existing-socialism so without merit or achievement as to turn anyone away from the socialist alternative.

Polychroniou, like his sometime collaborator, Noam Chomsky, often shows an impressive critical eye toward the failings of the capitalist system and of imperialism, but follows unfailingly the conventional, stereotypic Cold War demonization of real-existing-socialism; he cannot even credit twentieth-century socialism with being ‘real,’ calling it “actually-existing-socialism.” Like Chomsky, Polychroniou mistrusts the mainstream media at every turn, recognizing its obedience to the ruling class, but accepts everything it sells about the ruling class’s arch-enemy: the real-existing-socialism of the last century.

As a result, Polychroniou’s often perceptive comments are diminished, lost before disdain for a project that he believes has proven, in reality, to be an unmitigated disaster. According to Polychroniou, “actually existing socialism” was “undemocratic,” undermining its “social, cultural, and economic achievements…” “Workers had no say in economic decisions… [T]he rulers possessed no wealth and had no private property of their own but made all of the decisions for the rest of society. The USSR was at best a ‘deformed workers’ state’.” [my emphasis]

Polychroniou sees this ‘deformation’ as a huge impediment to the achievement of socialism. Consequently, he is surprised that its disappearance did not bring on a flowering– a revival– of interest and commitment to socialism. “Instead of feeling liberated by the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ the western Left felt a loss of identity and entered a long period of intellectual confusion and political paralysis.” In other words, the Western Left suffered malaise, lost its bearings, and floundered at a time when Polychroniou thought his “real” socialism was within reach.

Surely this bizarre psychologistic explanation of the failure of a Left unburdened by the legacy of Communism is as unsatisfying as Polychroniou’s comic strip characterization of over 70 years of real-existing-socialism. As he concedes, the so-called Western Left found its opportunity to fulfill its promise of a different alternative. But the promise collapsed before it got started, degenerating into scholastic quarrels over truth, identity, and forms of governance.

Still Polychroniou recognizes the urgent need for a Left political party — a class-based organization of those committed to a common road to social change– to serve as the vehicle for a program and a vision. In his words, “[The] Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes.” In his judgment, systemic change must be realized through the political party. However, he surely knows that the idea that radical political ideas can be realized through centrist parties has long been discredited, though far too many radical organizers continue to pursue that dead end in the US and Europe.

It must be acknowledged that the popular idea that a Left political party can be constituted by addition, simply bringing all the various social movements together, is equally flawed, relying on the magical thinking that ideological proximity or contiguity is the same thing as the organic unity necessary for party-building.

Similarly, the seductive idea that a political party can be constructed around the mere fact that it is new and different from the failed, bankrupt center-left parties of Europe and the US has been proven wrong by the corruption or decline of Europe’s new wave. From the German Greens to Spain’s Podemos, Italy’s Five Star, or Greece’s SYRIZA, the promise of a shiny new toy filling the political vacuum left by a dying center-left is decidedly broken.

Without a distinctive vision, without a concrete program, with only a pledge for more “democracy,” all of the new wave disappointed its idealistic followers, leaving many disgusted and disenchanted with political action.

To his credit Polychroniou is critical of this trend. In a September, 2023 article “Endgame for Syriza, The Unbearable Lightness of the Greek Left” in Common Dreams, he chronicles the rise and fall of Greece’s SYRIZA party, a new-wave, self-styled radical party that actually grasped the brass ring of political power in 2015, but soon capitulated to capital without a fight. Since SYRIZA’s fall from its former heights, Polychroniou ponders its future.

“The answer to that mystery,” he says, “was revealed during the leadership election that was held just this past Sunday [September 24, 2023] when party members elected a gay, liberal, former Goldman Sachs trader, shipping investor, and political neophyte Stefanos Kasselakis to head the once radical left-wing Syriza party.” The once “radical” SYRIZA has devolved into a nondescript liberal party of the center/center right (as has the German Greens).

But he concludes his insightful essay on SYRIZA’s rapid decline with this bizarre note: “Under Kasselakis, Syriza will cease having affinity to leftist politics in any form or shape, which means that Greece will now be left with a Leninist-Stalinist Communist Party as the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class.” [my emphasis]

Is the idea of the KKE — the Greek Marxist-Leninist party “fighting for the interest of the working class” which he dismissively refers — so distasteful to Polychroniou as to rule it out-of-hand? Would Greek working people be better off if the KKE were not fighting for their interests? Is the fourth largest political party in Greece declared “untouchable” by Polychroniou? Is he apologizing because Greece actually has a committed fighter for the interests of its working class?

Polychroniou’s dismissal comes with no logic and no evidence. It is simply the deeply entrenched, unexamined anti-Communism that he shares with so many middle-strata, academic and intellectual leftists of his and past generations. Despite KKE’s long history of contesting capitalism and imperialism, its unwavering, heroic resistance to fascism, and its persistent promotion of a Greek society free of exploitation, Polychroniou and others of his ilk can find no circumstances in which they could even conditionally support “the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class” in Greece.

Surely, this is the epitome of blind, foolish, and counterproductive anti-Communism.

It is ironic that the KKE pointed out– long before 2015 and Polychroniou– that SYRIZA would not and could not answer the challenges facing Greece in the throes of crisis. At the time, intellectuals like Polychroniou, dismissed KKE’s assessment and charged it with sectarianism for refusing to join in coalition with the now admittedly discredited SYRIZA.

*****

It is, however, a good thing that Polychroniou and others are reexamining the tactics and strategies of the European and US Left in the twenty-first century. It is difficult to reconcile the occurrence of economic catastrophes unseen since the Great Depression, numerous tragic and bloody wars of aggression and domination, and social and political crises with the lack of significant social change or revolution over the last quarter-century. The title of Vincent Bevins’s recent book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, captures the dilemma well. Arguably more people have been motivated to protest existing conditions than ever before, but no revolutionary change has ensued. Why?

The question, or one very much like it, is taken up by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello in their recent book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession. Both books are the subject of a critical review in the 8 February 2024 issue of The London Review of Books (James Butler, “A Circular Motion”).

Certainly, the failure of the Left and the current numerous fractures on the Left deserve serious retrospection and assessment. The way forward could well come from such study. But it will falter if poisoned from the onset with mindless anti-Communism. It will be prone to the same limiting calls to individualism, to identity, and the vacuous, vague, but always heralded cry for more “democracy.” A challenge to capitalism will require more than virtue-signaling.

Surely, the lessons of a century of social upheaval, confrontation, and revolution animated by working-class organizations cannot be cavalierly dismissed. The role of Communists and Communist Parties was decisive in colossal social change in the twentieth century. Might they be decisive again?

The post Is There a Future for the Left? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The World of Yesterday

T.P. Wilkinson — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 21:05:28 +0000

Ninety years ago (1934), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig began writing the book published posthumously in 1942 as Die Welt von Gestern. In 1932, Joseph Roth published Radetzkymarsch. Both authors died in exile essentially by what in German is so prosaically called “Freitod” or suicide. Their principal subject was the end of Austria-Hungary. However for both men these were stories of the end of the world as they knew it.

Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars the multi-ethnic empire of the Habsburg double monarchy had become a silent financial dependency of the British Empire, alternatively a continental resource for British industry and a brake on Prussian and French expansion. Vienna‘s urbane society was a fusion of Francophilia and Anglophilia with sophisticated music and literature accompanied by conservative political culture. Sigmund Freud, whose work was ultimately distorted beyond recognition by his daughter Anna and nephew Edward Bernays, had devoted his study to explaining the peculiar combination of Enlightenment and repression the legacy of which would be world war and neo-liberalism (Austrian economics).

Unlike Britain, whose insular pirate culture had seized the Habsburg‘s sun, the world from which Zweig and Roth had been thrusted, the abyss into which they fell, had been genuinely cosmopolitan, if highly contradictory. On one hand there was the harsh order by which seven or more language communities were held together- by Germanic administration and Magyar military prowess. On the other there was the blend of cultures that nourished arts and intellect.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary left a vacuum in Europe. That collapse is treated in the school history books as the product of an unfortunate military alliance with the ascendant German Empire. Supposedly forced into war by Germanic militarism, the roots of the Great War can be found in the covert diplomacy of the British Empire. Britain had been secretly supporting every conceivable separatist movement that could fuel the centripetal dissolution of the central European state. This culminated in the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.

It is no accident that the true dissolution of civilization- such as it is- in the European peninsula of Eurasia should properly be dated with the Anglo-American (aka NATO) destruction of Yugoslavia. The European Union (successor to the Anglo-American prototype Western European Union- WEU) has been falsely marketed as the model of a new Europe. In fact it was created to prevent the emergence of a post-war Europe beyond the control of the Anglo-American Empire.

The defeat of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the subsequent dissolution of that great multi-ethnic polity was complemented by the destruction of Yugoslavia based on the same principles by which Britain had ruled India and ts cousins had ruled the western hemisphere. Thus a pattern which ought to be recognized today was cut for preaching independence in order to weaken the capacity of cultures and peoples to retain their autonomy.

That autonomy protected by conservative traditions is the greatest obstacle to the cancerous growth of finance capitalism- a euphemism for state-sponsored piracy. Heralded as a new order of peace, the proliferation of economically neutered polities, led by what today would be called identity fetishists, guaranteed the expansion of financial debtor states no longer able to pursue rational trade or industrial policy. When the financial and monetary engineers let loose their wrecking balls in 1929, they also used the ruins of continental Europe to excite antagonisms at every turn. Those whose hands were on the levers of finance were far from the wreckage they caused. Local attempts to restore sanity to the post-war world were sabotaged by every means available in London or New York.

Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “all that is solid melts into air”. Of course he was predicting the cannibalism of the bourgeoisie while expressing optimism that it could be overcome. The world of yesterday should not be idealized. However Marx and his socialist and communist contemporaries were humanists. For them humanism was based on the principle that value comes from labor- even if it is stolen.

The world of yesterday was filled with people. It was decorated by artisans. Musicians animated daily life. Literature was not just intellectual property to be hoarded. Machines were made by people to increase the quality and distribution of useful goods for human needs. The aim was not to eliminate work but to preserve the value of those who performed it.

The destruction of that world was not replaced by peaceful work for the good of real human beings. It has been replaced by the peace of the grave. The largest industries extant today are devoted to using ever fewer humans to annihilate those that remain. The blasphemy of artificial intelligence is propagated to further that annihilation by denaturing the human heart-mind and reducing life to computation.

While the neutered offspring of the survivors contemplate their atomic identities all the attributes of historical personality and daily life are erased so that those few allowed to breathe (but not exhale) can masturbate to death. Freedom is reduced to the freedom from anything not produced through binary notation. The masturbating class rages against biological difference into obsessively binary cellphones.

Anyone anywhere who insists on a life like those of their grandparents or ancestors is targeted with calumny and outright violence. Digital fanatics scream pledges against the “binary” with slogans of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) oblivious to the emptiness they signify. Russophobia is more than an attack on the Slavs, although it is that too. It is a pattern for absorbing the nihilism that is the true technological product of the 20th century. Lacking even the will to know- let alone understand- the history of the world of yesterday, they have already become lab-made growths from the petri dishes due to replace the wombs from which humans throughout history have emerged to work, play and contribute to their communities. They willingly watched their grandparents executed in hospitals converted to death chambers. They renounce the age of procreation in favor of celibate and even sodomistic fornication.

Should it be any wonder then that their ideal has become a world without gardens and forests, without pastures and grazing, without communities with traditions, where there is no labor, no value, but only the realm of the dead?

Without the world of yesterday, there can be no world of tomorrow.

The post The World of Yesterday first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Out on a Limb with Dialectical Materialism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 16:00:03 +0000

Orientation

Who cares about philosophy?

When most people hear about philosophy, they think it is:

Hopelessly abstract
The opposite of concreate reality
The opposite of application
For talking heads who are otherwise inept and clumsy – the wallflowers at a party
It has no impact on daily life unless we consciously apply it
It is a philosophical study about lives of old great men, either talking heads or idle dreamers

As we proceed, I hope you will feel differently about philosophy. In my experience, philosophy is one of the most practical subjects to study there is. Why? Because the simplest practical act contains within it assumptions about the nature of reality. Furthermore, a person does not have to have a conscious interest in philosophy in order for that to be operating in their life. Either we choose our philosophy consciously, or it chooses us. If we do not choose it consciously, including the way in which we make meaning, our actions will be out of our control.

I think of philosophy as the skeleton of our thinking process, our infrastructure. If a person has worked out a rough sense of where they stand on the basic philosophical questions, then over time that stance will sink into the plumbing of how they think about any everyday problem. It will seem less and less abstract and closer to everyday life. In other words, the person will see how the choices made in everyday life relate to the abstract philosophical issues. In addition, the individual’s thinking process will be interconnected and more consistent across a wider and wider range of situations. As it stands now most people’s thinking processes are a confused hodge-podge of contradictory platitudes, unexamined assumptions which are often centered around religious belief. But you may say, how do philosophical assumptions get inside the heads of people who have no interest in it?

Every culture must have answers to the fundamental questions regarding the relationship of the group to the larger reality. Part of what makes human life tolerable is the meaning we give to these questions. Now the answers to these big questions have been answered throughout history in various ways. Further, new philosophical questions come into being at different points in history, depending on the general problems a society faces. So I don’t think that philosophical questions are eternal and unanswerable. Over time we develop answers to some questions which are good enough to generate a set of problems for scientists to solve. Cultures that do not develop science answer these questions through mythical stories. Philosophy is not invented voluntarily by smart people.Every individual living in an industrial capitalist society today has at least partly internalized the philosophical thinking and assumptions of Plato and Aristotle because both Protestant and Catholic theorists have drawn from them. Of course, it is possible to challenge their ontology and epistemology but it takes substantial effort.

My claim

My purpose in this article is to argue that dialectical materialism (which I will refer to as DM) is too narrow in the way it understands the history of philosophy. Typically, it divides the schools into idealist or materialist. Through the work of Stephen Pepper and Andrew Reck I will suggest that the history of philosophy can be better grouped into five schools. These schools will do better justice to the variety of what philosophical ontology has to offer.

Ontological Questions

Ontology deals with the fundamental nature of reality. So let’s look at what these philosophical questions are which every philosophical school must deal with:

What are we? Are we biological, social or spiritual beings?
Where do we come from? the earth or the heavens?
Where are we going? Is there an afterlife or do we die in our graves?
How is the universe organized? What proportion is designed, improvised, determined or chaotic?
What is the relationship between mind and matter? Which is primary and which is derived?
Is the universe good, evil or neither?
What is the relationship between permanence and change? Which is primary and which is secondary?
What is the relationship between determinism and free will? To what extent can our actions be controlled?
What is the nature of time? Is it coexistence with space and matter or does it emerge separately?
What is the shape of time? Is it cyclical, linear or a spiral?
What is the nature of space? Is space an empty container for matter? Is it separate from matter? Or is space a qualitative location for magical correspondences such as the zodiac of astrology?

Epistemological Questions

Epistemology answers the question of how we know things. Epistemological questions include the following:

How trustworthy or untrustworthy are our senses in how we know things? Are they direct reflections of the material world (naïve realism)?
Are the senses partly accurate and must be refined by reason?
How trustworthy or untrustworthy is reason in telling us about what is true?
How trustworthy is mathematics (rationality) in describing to us what is true?
How trustworthy are our emotions in guiding our understanding of the world?
Is there such a psychological process such as intuition and if there is how is it different from the senses, reason, rationality, and emotions?
How trustworthy is a revelation (claims to knowledge that are claimed to come from other worlds)?

Our major focus will be on the ontological schools with some reference to epistemology.

Axiology

The field has to do with the nature of values. These values include morals, ethics and beauty. I will not be addressing this topic in this article.

How Many Philosophical Schools are There?

Since I am a Marxist and I studied how Marxists made sense of philosophy, I was taught to divide all philosophical schools into either idealist or materialist. Over the years I have come to see that this grouping was too stark and narrow. Thanks to the work of Stephen Pepper in his book World Hypothesis his division made more sense to me. He divided philosophical schools into:

Organicism
Contextualism
Formism
Mechanism

I also found the work of Andrew Reck very helpful. In his book Speculative Philosophy he grouped philosophical schools into:

Idealism
Materialism
Realism
Process philosophy

Roughly speaking materialism and mechanism have considerable overlap. The same is true between process philosophy and contextualism. There is more moderate overlap between idealism and organicism but there is more difference than in our first two pair. Realism stands roughly midway between materialism and idealism in Reck’s system. Lastly, formism overlaps with realism.

In the following section I will describe the assumptions of each school. I will also compare the schools to each other. For example, I show that mechanism and organicism will have different answers when applied to how each understands the relationship between individual and society. I will also name the philosophers who go with each school. The assumptions for each school will answer most of the ontological questions at the beginning of this article.

Lastly, all philosophical tendencies don’t fit neatly into the schools listed. Schools of thinking such as rationalism, empiricism and skepticism, pragmaticism, or positivism are mixtures of two or three different schools. Rather than add these and raise further complications, for purposes of learning I wanted not to be overly simplistic (materialism vs idealism) or overly complicated. I suspect there will be some inconsistencies in parts. My intention is to give you a rough and ready map so that you can categorize individual philosophers you might be aware of into their proper categories. Once you become aware of the typical responses of some of these great thinkers you will be in a better position to make up your own mind and group the philosophers into schools rather than treat each as individuals.

Mechanical or Atomistic View

Fundamental assumptions

Entities of things exist prior to their relationships (objects are mutable and self-contained atoms).
Relations only externally or secondarily define an entity.
Differences are prior to commonalities.
Boundaries are prior to connections (freedom is the right to be separate).
Reductionism is a complex system that can be completely accounted for by analyzing their simple parts. Qualitative relations can be completely understood by quantification.
There is no design in nature, neither divine or human (all change is due to either rigid determinism or chance or both.
There is no self-reflection within entities (as opposed to an internally generated feedback system).
Change is secondary and is not constitutional or necessary. Change is an anomaly or a temporarily disturbance on a more basic state of permanence.
Linear or cyclic causality. Initial conditions determine the outcome. The past determines the future. This is as opposed to being pulled in the direction of a future goal as in divine or human teleology.
Change eventually leads to a state of equilibrium or homogeneity. This is opposed to change leading to disequilibrium, accumulation, irreversibility and crisis. From this more complex heterogeneous systems may emerge.

Two forms of Mechanism; discrete and Consolidation

In his book World Hypothesis, Stephen Pepper further divides Mechanism into two parts:

Discrete
Consolidated

Discrete mechanism is ruled by chance.

Things are real only if they have a time and place (as opposed to what is real being hidden or sometime in the future) and grounded on primary qualities such as size, shape, motion, solidity, mass (weight) and number. Secondary qualities such as color, texture, smell and sound are not counted
Most of the structured features of nature are externally related. These include space from time; every atom from every other atom; every natural law from every other natural law; primary from secondary qualities; names of things from their objects (nominalism).
Fields of location are primary
Whatever can be located is real.
Only particularities exist.
Atoms are indestructible and eternal.
Time is an infinite one-dimensional manifestation of externally related locations.

In the history of philosophy examples of discrete mechanism are Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius from the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Gassendi, Galileo, Hobbes and Descartes are representatives from early modern Europe.

Consolidated mechanism is ruled by determinism

The entire world is internally determined, and machine-like. The structure of space and time is completely determined. Historical examples in the history of Western philosophy include Spinoza, Laplace, De La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvetius all from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries.

Each form of mechanism is called a “mechanical materialism” by Marxian dialectical materialists.

Examples of mechanism at work in understanding the relationship between society and the individual

This contrast will be between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism. Mechanical materialism is the philosophical position of capitalists.

Individuals are more than or equal to the sum of social relations.

This is in contrast to the Marxian dialectical materialism which says society is more than the sum of individuals.

Individuals or families can exist independently of society as in functional or dysfunctional families or healthy or sick individuals.

Dialectical materialists would say that whatever problems there are within the family or individuals they are ultimately grounded in larger social institutions.

Home is the haven from a heartless society.

Dialectical materialism says that, like Martha and the Vandellas, there is nowhere to run. The only haven is building a heartfelt society.

The individual’s relation to society is voluntary, accidental and contractual, as in Rousseau’s social contract theory.

For dialectical materialists, individuals’ relation to society, is constitutional, necessary and organic.

Society exists as a neutral field in which individuals compete to satisfy needs and pursue happiness.

The opposite of this for dialectical materialists is society as a womb which gives birth to individuals through cooperative relations. Competitive relations internal to society are a product of the last 400 years (Macpherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism).

Social change only partly impacts individual change.

Dialectical materialists say that social change will dramatically change an individual like whether or not they want this.

Freedom consists of minimizing external social constraints and maximizing the pursuit of private dreams. Flying “free as a bird”.

What is the opposite of this? It is discovering freedom by acting first within social constraints and then acting on those constraints and expanding them. As Robert Frost said, freedom is moving easily within your harness.

Human beings cannot shape history since history is the result of only determinism or chance. Only extraordinary individuals can shape history.

For dialectical materialists human beings can shape history, not just extraordinary individuals. However the shaping is mostly unintended and behind our backs. It is possible to design history in the future.

Organic World View

In DM view, the organic view is connected with idealism. For us, most of the organic view of the world is the opposite of mechanism.

Fundamental assumptions of organicism

Relations within a larger whole define entities.

Objects will change as the whole changes:

Relations within a larger whole internally define what is an object.
Commonalities within a larger whole are more important than differences.
Differences have to do with differences in the entity’s functional role within the whole of which it is a part.
Connections within a whole are more important than boundaries.

All boundaries are relative and permeable.

Anti-reductionism – complex systems cannot be completely understood in terms of their parts; qualitative relations cannot be completely understood through quantification.
There is design in nature. There is a hierarchy of wholes with the supreme spirit at the top.
Entities grow in self-reflection. They develop self-regulating feedback systems.
Change of an entity is inevitable and moving towards the self-development of the whole universe
Reciprocal causality. All entities reciprocally affect each other so that what was once a cause is now an effect. It is the future telos or striving that is the final cause.
Change inevitably leads to increased differentiation or heterogeneity, increasing expansion and integration with other entities.

Organic worldviews on truth, conflict and evil

Truth lies in development.

Unlike the mechanist, truth is not to be found in local space and present time.

It is found in ever-widening connections between entities which will occur in some future time.

Appearances are secondary. What counts is an ever-unfolding unity. This unity is in the process of becoming which is deeper than appearances and is largely hidden.
The importance of stages. The present state of entities is only a moment of their true identity, which unfolds over time.
Conflict is secondary. They are understood as either inconsequential or illusions.
Evil is a product of social or psychological problems. It not ontologically real.

Examples in the history of western philosophy include Schelling, Hegel, Green, Bradley, Bosanquet and Royce.

Contextualism

Contextualism shares with mechanism a materialist outlook, but it is not the reductionist mechanical materialism. In many ways contextualism is the opposite of organicism and it has most in common with process philosophy which I will cover shortly.

Fundamental assumptions of contextualism

Entities have no essence independent of the situation or context in which they are embedded.

These contexts are not necessarily wholes or systems (in contrast to the organicist view).

The uniqueness of each context is more valuable to understand than the commonalities between situations
Anti-reductionism. Elementary analysis can be distortive of the richness of the context
There will always be elements in the universe which are recalcitrant and will resist organization and integration (unlike the organicist).
Anti-foundationalist. There is no top or bottom in the universe. The search for either an ultimate material building block (mechanism) or a supreme force at the top (organicism) is fruitless.
Change is primary and structure is secondary. However, change is not preprogramed in a particular direction as it is in organicism.
Novel events are constantly coming into being that are unpredictable relative to previous structures.
Improvisation in nature produces more complex levels but these levels are not designed.
Time is part of the creative process in nature

Time is much more than a tracker of events. Time is part of the events themselves and changes them.

Reciprocal causality. All contexts reciprocally determine others, but as material, formal or efficient causes. Unlike organicism there are no final causes.
Truth is present in every local context or situation.

This is opposed to the need to derive natural laws from sensuous events (mechanism).

Neither is truth an end point in development as in organicism.

Truth lies in its ultimate utility, as successful functioning. Truth is, as William James says, in its consequences, in what works.

Most of the contextualism school comes out of the Yankeedom pragmatists, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce.

Realism/Formism

This is the trickiest category of all the schools of philosophy. First, because it is easy to confuse with Organism or Idealism. Secondly, because there is an ontological realism which I will discuss also and an epistemological realism.

Ontological realism

There is an objective world of universals like Platonic forms, typologies, archetypes and templates which exist transcendentally to either the material world or the human mind that seeks to grasp them. Universals can be love, beauty, or truth.

This issue emerged in medieval times over the question of the relationship between the universal and particular things. There were three possible positions:

Nominalism – only particular things are real. Universals such as fathers or mothers are not as real as sensually detected objects.
Conceptualism – universals exist, but only as conceptions in the human mind.

Their being is in human mentality. In the natural world there are only individual things.

Realism – universals have existence beyond particular things or mental constructions of those things. Universals are beyond matter and human minds. They are archetypes or like Plato’s forms.

The main problem of universals is how to connect the particular to the general. Another problem is the relationship between external objects in nature and mental objects. This included the relationship between sense data, perception, representation and ideas. Another problem is the relationship between the mind and the body; that is between mental states and physiological processes.

In the history of philosophy in the ancient world, Plato and St. Augustine are good examples. In the medieval world, Duns Scotus defends realism against nominalism.

Closer to the present, Charles Sanders Peirce was a realist.

Fundamentalist formism or realism assumptions

What is the relationship between things and form? Form or types exist prior to things.
What is the relationship between commonalities and differences? Commonalities matter more.
What is the connection between change and structure? Structure matters more. Change comes out of structure. Change is a sign of imperfection?
What matters is what is eternal. Time is atemporal (unlike Organicists).
There is design in nature, but it happens once. This is unlike the Organicists for which design is an ongoing process in nature.
There are levels in reality, but the levels are there from the beginning. They don’t unfold (Organicist) or emerge (process philosophy).
Ordering of the levels: descend from the top, down.
What is the place of self-reflection? Self-reflection is there from the beginning. It is not an unfolding or an emergence.
Type of causality – final causes, due to purpose at the beginning.
What is the relationship between appearance and reality? Appearance as surfaces which create illusions (Plato). Reality is invisible, prior to and behind appearances.
How do we make sense of conflicts? Conflicts are not part of nature as they are with the Contextualists. They are to be explained away as due to ignorance or wrong information. The ultimate reality has no conflicts.
Epistemological foundations are grounded in externalities, eternal forms (Plato) or Aristotle’s unmoved mover.
What is the realist theory of truth? Truth is externally found in mathematical equations, geometry, maps, diagrams and formulas. This is opposite to the contextual theory of truth. The latter is operational and is manifested in successful functioning or in concrete consequences.

Epistemological realism

This is directed mostly at Organicists either objective idealists like Hegel or various subjective idealists like Kant or Fichte. Epistemological realism says there is an independent objective world independent from the mind that knows it. When cognition relates knowing minds to objects known or knowable, these objects will always have independence of any mind, human or divine.

Epistemological realism comes close to materialism or mechanism because it implies:

The independence of biophysical nature.
The mind does not exist as a substance but rather as a function of the physical organism.

The philosophers who were tenacious examples of epistemological realism were all in the 20^th century and included GE Moore; RB Perry, A. Lovejoy; Santayana and Strong.

Process Philosophy

Evolution

In science, the seventeenth century had been the century of physics and astronomy. In the eighteenth century thanks to Lyell, there was the discovery through geology of deep time. With the invention of the microscope, we learned about minuscule organisms. When Darwin began his studies when on the voyage of the Beagle we learned of the vast variety of organisms. But of course, Darwin went much further, first in his discovery of adaptation and sexual selection. Then in 1871 with his book The Descent of Man, the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature was posed without the need for a “Grand Creator” who divinely intervened.

Creativity in time

In the history of philosophy neither mechanical materialists, nor organicists or realists took time seriously. Along with space, it was a container for natural or social events. Marx and Engels were among the first to suggest that human history was a process of class struggle, rather that the frozen events like congresses or wars. Pragmatists in the late 19^th century like Charles Sanders Peirce and Chauncey Wright sought to think not just about quantitative change within organic nature but qualitative change that occurred in large scale relationships between matter (the inorganic), life (the organic) and the human mind. Peirce writes that evolution displays three types:

Tychism – evolution of change
Anancasm – mechanical necessity
Agapism – evolution of creative love

It was Henri Bergson who emphasized that “creative evolution” was a never ending process and that static events were temporary thick moments of an effervescence movement the flowed between matter, life and mind.

Immanent vs emergent evolution

In the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, organicists had their answer. The lower levels of nature were immanent in the higher levels. What happened at the lower levels unfolded from higher forms. Higher forms descended into the lower and brought them up. In the 20^th century Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo in India continued this tradition.

By what if Bergson was right about creativity of time? Does that mean that instead of evolution being immanent, evolution was emergent? What if the levels of nature emerged from lower levels and there was real novelty in nature? This was the road taken by George Lewes in the mid-19^th century and followed up on by British philosopher comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan and by the American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars and to a lesser extent by John Dewey. In the field of social psychology George Herbert Mead showed how society was the next emergent property beyond life and matter.

Process theology

Many see the grandest synthesis of process philosophy in the work of Alfred North Whitehead in his great book Process and Reality. Whitehead did not want to abandon process philosophy to materialists and insisted that God can be seen as a process rather than as a being. Charles Hartshorne learned from Whitehead and added some twists of his own. David Ray Griffin worked to sharpen the work of Hartshorne. Process theologists wanted to unify nature through a kind of panpsychism, without any supernaturalism.

Fundamental assumptions and endeavors of process philosophy

Despite the differences between theological and secular process philosophy we can still identify many principles that unite them:

Movement and change is the primary reality. It is ongoing independently of human intentions. Structure or form is a derivative of change and not primary as it is with the mechanists.
It strives to articulate the conditions in which change takes place.

To what extent is it the result of necessity, chance or design?

It strives to develop a typology of change distinguishing qualitative from quantitative change and distinguishing transitions from crisis.
It strives to understand the shape of change whether that change is cyclic, linear, non-linear or a spiral.

Are changes oscillations of a primary statis state? Are changes irreversible or reversible?

To what extent does change accumulate and have consequences?

Process philosophy strives to understand the relationship to time, the past, present and future.

It strives to understand the levels of change. Process philosophers involve themselves in understanding the relationship between matter, life, mind and society.
It strives to understand the value of change.

Is change inherently good, progressive and negentropic? Or is change degenerative, and entropic? Is change necessary?

With which other school of philosophy does process philosophy have most in common?

Process philosophy shares most in common with contextualism.

There are no essences independent of contexts and situations
Anti-reductionism – there are levels of complexity in nature.
There are recalcitrant elements in nature which resist organization.
Anti-foundationalism – change is infinite in space and time.

There is no bottom or top where change ceases.

Emergence of novel events are constantly happening in the universe.
Nature is self-regulating through improvisation. Nature creates and recreates herself.
Time and timing is a constitutional element in this improvisation.

What Can Dialectical Materialism Learn from Mechanism, Organicism, Formism, Contextualism and Process Philosophy?

Mechanism

In trying to integrate DM to the five schools, it’s best to start with mechanism because mechanism starts from the material world, nature. It dismisses any spiritual essences or interventions. At the same time, DM departs from mechanism because mechanism is reductionist. In contrast, DM shares with contextualists and process philosophy a sense of emergent levels in nature. Furthermore, mechanism lacks a sense of self-reflectiveness that characterizes organicism and contextualism. DM shares with mechanism the conviction that what drives natural evolution is necessity and chance. What mechanism misses is that at the level of humanity there is design in nature in that human social plans that can change nature. Lastly mechanism’s sense of matter is that it is dead and externally driven. In DM, as for La Mettrie, matter is dynamic and self-organizing.

Organicism

DM is directly opposed to organicism in its point of departure. Organicism starts with a spiritual whole whether the whole is of Schelling or Hegel. DM begins with matter in motion. It agrees with organicism that there are levels in nature, but it sees these levels as emergent processes, driven from the bottom to the top. Organicism understands levels in nature as unfolding and moving from top to bottom and back to the top. DM agrees with organicism that self-reflection and internality are an important part of nature. Yet, organicists assume self-reflection is built into the cosmos as a whole, right from the beginning. For DM self-reflection is an emergent process which occurs with the rise of social complexity. Self-reflection is not there at the beginning. DM agrees with organicism that internal relations precede things. However, internal relations only apply at certain levels of complexity. Primitive matter does not have internal relations. It is driven by external relations such as natural selection and chance variations. We agree with organicist Hegel that conflict is the mother of all change. However, Hegel’s conflict is too neat and pretty and lacks the “out of control” dimension when conflict is generated outside the system.

Formism/Realism

DM has the least in common with formism for many reasons. We don’t think much of Plato who is probably the most well-known Formist. Like organicists, Formists start with a spiritual essence (Plato’s eternal forms) but unlike organicists Formism lacks a developmental direction that organicists share with DM. Also, unlike organicists time is unimportant to Formists, while it is essential to emergent nature for DM. Formists are opposite to DM in that conflict and change are indicators that something is wrong. In DM both conflict and change are more important that stability or types. We agree with Formists that appearances should not be taken as given. For us, the senses can be deceptive and should not be taken for granted. However for Formists, appearances never tell the truth because they depart from eternal forms. For us, sometimes the senses, corrected by reason are trustworthy. We agree with Formists that structures are important, but for us structures are not transcendental, eternal forms. They are a necessary part of nature but they change, disintegrate and reform.

Contextualism

DM has a great deal in common with contextualism. We appreciate their perspective on situational change, conflicts as foundational in nature and emergence as a property of levels in nature. We applaud its insistence that appearances matter but they often understate the important of structures underneath appearances. DMs are less militant that there are no foundations in nature. Though foundations today keep changing (the nature of subatomic particles) that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Our main problem with contextualism is that it comes out of a liberal understanding of society. The pragmatists – whether James, Dewey and to a lesser extent Peirce and Mead – see the individual as the basic unit. This applies to its theory of truth – practice and consequences. For DM truth for humans is practice, but social practice. Individual practice is not the test of truth for science. Individuals are far too untrustworthy to measure the truth of something. It is the social practice of science which is a much more reliable test.

Process philosophy

Process philosophy can be broken down into types:

The naturalistic process philosophy of Heraclitus, Lloyd Morgan and Roy Wood Sellars.
The process theology of Samuel Alexander, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, Hartshorne and David Ray Griffin

DM has little in common with Chardin’s God or Whitehead’s eternal objects. We would take issue with Hartshorne or David Ray Griffin’s argument that the internality of nature goes very far back. Rather, psyche is emergent in complex human life. However, some of the concepts of Samuel Alexander can be worked into a dialectical framework. For example, Alexander’s slogan “deity is an effort not an accomplishment” is a powerful statement about what matters most is movement rather than things. Alexander’s God is the material world in its totality. This makes Alexander a pantheist god. Furthermore, Chardin’s concept of a noosphere surrounding the earth speaks to the globalization of society and a planetary communist society in the future. I still find Chardin’s description of the growth of the noosphere as breathtaking now as it was to me 50 years ago.

Process philosophy has levels in nature, usually matter, life and mind. DM claims that levels of nature are matter, life (biology) and society, not mind.

Mind is the emergent result of societies that grow to become complex. In addition, process philosophy has no primary place of conflict in its philosophy. Unlike Hegel and Marx, in which conflict is the driver of evolution, for process philosophy if conflict exists at all in nature it is not given a primary place. As Marxists evil for us has no ontological status. Rather it is a derivative of social life under class conditions. For theological process philosophy, evil has an ontological place though their evil has nothing to do with any fundamentalist devil. DM stress the importance of time, not just in philosophy, but in social life such as the preconditions for capitalism and socialism. Both dialectical materialism and process philosophy see nature as self-regularity and immanent.

What’s wrong with dialectical materialism

DM has two forms of idealism – the objective idealism of Plato, Schelling and Hegel and the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. However, it makes no distinction between Formists like Plato and Organicists like Hegel and Schelling. Secondly, while the distinction between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism is good, the difference between discrete and mechanical materialism is not clear enough. Marx’s dissertation of a comparative study between Democritus and Epicurus should have been followed up on. It is my hope that Marxists open up their framework of philosophy to include six types rather than two or three.

Please see the table on our website for a summary of the six schools at the end of the article.

Six Schools of Philosophy (Pepper and Reck)

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Paradise: A Dystopian Anti-Capitalist Gem

Carlos L. Garrido — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 20:02:25 +0000

The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade.

The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you read that correctly, the life of the working poor (especially the large migrant populations – a phenomenon, as Immanuel Ness shows, integral to modern imperialism) is literally sold to the rich. Max is one of these salesmen. He is exceptional at his job, which is introduced to us as he tries to convince an 18-year-old migrant kid that he should sell him 15 years of his life for 700 thousand bucks. His family has been living in dire poverty since they arrived in the country, so this loss of life is presented as a gain. Now, Max tells them they will have enough money to live better in the years to come. Following this scene, Max is awarded employee of the month (Aeonian of the Year), showing us how capable he is at sucking the life of the poor to keep the rich alive. This award celebrates the 276 years he was able to collect.[1]

Aeon (the company’s name) comes from the Greek ὁ αἰών, which originally meant a lifespan of 100 years. With time, it came to be understood also as vital force (a sort of Élan vital a la Bergson), life, or being. This is, after all, what the company is taking from the working poor to give to the elite. As Max’s working class father-in-law notes, the rich are living longer as the poor (who are unable to pay for the service even with a lifetime of saving) die younger. Because of the enormity of the company, they have their own private militia (which they will use towards the end of the film) and a tremendous power over the state’s judicature. Everything they are doing is perfectly legal, as the father-in-law tells Max. (Interestingly, socialist China is the leading international force behind the attempt to ban these life-year transfers.)

The company pitches the selling of life as an opportunity, as a ‘winning of the lottery’. Their advertisement is filled with phrases like ‘choose your dreams,’ ‘when you give time, life recompenses you,’ ‘your time, your opportunity, your choice.’ The company’s president, Sophie, tells us of how great it would have been if some of the great poets, composers, scientists, etc. could have lived decades longer. Now with Aeon’s services they can!

How can we not think here of Stephan Jay Gould’s famous quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In the Paradise universe, how many geniuses are never able to actualize their potential because of the material conditions of their existence? How many of these, perhaps wealthier in their potential to serve humanity than the wealthy scientists and artists, are forced to give their life years to the rich to get by?

This dystopic society terrifies us because we know that if our society ever achieved such technological development, it would be used and legitimized in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t take much imagination for us to see the homologies already present, even though we lack the technology the movie is centered around.

It is already scientifically established that the wealthier live longer than the poor. Studies which have followed the lives of twins have shown how the richer sibling consistently lives significantly longer. The rich have the capacity to access healthier foods, better medical services, and to free themselves from the life-sucking stresses and traumas of not knowing how one will pay the bills at the end of the month (for the latter point, see the work of Gabriel and Daniel Mate in The Myth of Normal). An MIT study showed that “in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.” These statistics are only intensified when we take into account the inequalities of life expectancies between the rich of imperialist countries and the poor of imperialized countries.

The wealth that the capitalist vampires suck from the working poor is life itself. “Capital is dead labour,” as Marx tells us, “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Capitalist exploitation is already, like life-year selling in Aeon, the sucking of the Aeon (vital force) of the working class to accumulate capital for the elite. The inequality of life expectancy is merely a reflection of the relations of production and the exploitation at the root of capital accumulation. Each pole is dialectically interconnected; the rich get richer and live longer because the poor are poor and live less, destroying their bodies to accumulate capital for the wealthy.

Research has shown that we have developed the productive forces to the point of only needing to work around 3 hours a day (15 hours a week). The 3-hour workday prediction of John Meynard Keynes, only an aspirational ideal decades earlier for Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, has today become materially possible. The impediment to its realization is rooted in social, not material incapacity. It is the capitalist mode of social life, with profit as its sole goal and purpose, which prevents this freeing up of humanity’s time and potential. Its relations of production are a fetter on human life and culture, not just on the forces of production. Under a different mode of life, with a modus operandi for society other than capital accumulation, we could radically reduce the socially necessary labor time and increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time. As I’ve argued before, the absence of its actualization is “not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.” But until then (that is, until socialism can freely develop without pressures from the global imperialist system), we will continue to slavishly give more than a decade worth of work hours (90000 on average) working in alienating jobs that make our bosses richer while we stay poor and triply exploited. Is this not, like in Paradise, the giving up of decades of our life to making the rich not only richer, but capable of living significantly longer than us?

The way Aeon defends its practices are also reminiscent of apologists for wage slavery. It is, after all, presented as a ‘choice,’ something we ‘consent’ to. But as with wage slavery, what is the alternative? Can I expect anything other than death if, born into a working family, I decide not to commit my life to being exploited through wage slavery? How would I obtain the necessaries of life if I object to spending labor power in enriching someone else? Under capitalism this is impossible. The choice is between a slavish life of being exploited and death. As socialist thinkers (utopian and Marxists) have criticized from the start, this is really no choice at all. Perhaps there is a slight bit of choice in deciding who exploits us (for instance, Walmart or Amazon), but what does this amount to other than the capacity to pick our slave masters? Is this really what we want to herald as pillars of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’? Likewise, for those who sell their life-years to Aeon, the ‘choice’ is one between unlivable poverty and a fractioned lifespan with a better living standard. This is hardly a ‘choice’ at all.

Aeon also describes selling your life-years as akin to winning the lottery. Is this not, like we see today, a linguistic whitewashing which puts a pretty terminological veil upon a horrific practice? For instance, how we call civilian deaths ‘collateral damage,’ or US state department propped up terrorists ‘moderate rebels’. In relation to work, a similar romanticizing language is operative. Today the growing precarity of a gigifying workforce is pitched as ‘flexibility’. As I have argued before:

The last four decades of neoliberal capitalism has been a continuous disempowerment of workers through the cutting of benefits, stagnating of wages, and repression of unionization efforts. The gig economy takes this even further, through an employer’s complete removal of responsibility for workers. By categorizing workers as ‘independent contractors’, the ‘flexibility’ they continuously speak of is one that is only for them. Flexibility for the capitalist entails the removal of responsibilities for his workers, and subsequently, increasing profits for him. But for the worker – regardless of how much the capitalist’s propaganda says they are now ‘flexible’ and ‘free’ – flexibility means insecurity, less pay, and less benefits. Like in sex, flexibility for the worker here only means he can get screwed more efficiently.

Aeon’s immense resources also allow it to advance its practices, regardless of how unethical they might be, into the sphere of legality. Everything it is doing is perfectly legal. It is accepted under bourgeois ‘justice’, where justice is indistinguishable from the interests of the economically dominant class. Today readily available cancer drugs like Imbruvica are priced at 16 thousand dollars a month, something only the ultra-rich can afford. In the US, 45,000 people die a year because they do not have insurance. Any sane society (as opposed to a deeply irrational one centered on upholding the interests of capital accumulation) would consider the activities of the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex criminal. However, because the American state is the state of their class (i.e., the big monopoly capitalists), their profit-rooted class interests are consistently upheld to the detriment of the majority of Americans.

Aeon’s capture over their society’s judicature is simply a particular form of how the state and its institutions have always functioned. The state in general doesn’t exist. What exists is particular types of states, corresponding to various modes of life holding one or another class in an economically dominant position – a dominance the state is tasked with reproducing. “The modern state,” as Marx and Engels write in 1848, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When profitable technology like Aeon’s develops, the state’s judicature adapts it to the existing framework of bourgeois legality. As Marx and Engels write in 1846,

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property.

Paradise, all in all, puts a mirror up to our capitalist societies. It shows us, through the medium of a new technological development, the barbarity of the logic operative in our mode of life. A barbarity, of course, which is historical, not eternal. It is something we can overcome when the class struggles for the conquest of political power by working people succeed.

First published in the Midwestern Marx Institute.

Note

[1] This review will focus on the more general social critiques operative in the movie. There are no ‘spoilers’ here, so feel free to read even if you intend to watch the movie afterwards.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology

Carlos L. Garrido — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 18:49:08 +0000

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Claus is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:

Santa: I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.

Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.

Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?

Santa: I’ve already told you…

(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho… That was naughty.

Soviet Police: We found a list of names.

Santa: Ah my list.

Soviet Police: These are American spies?

Santa: No, no…

Soviet Police: There was also a second list.

Santa: Oh you don’t want to be on that list.

Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.

Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing…

Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.

“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”

Soviet Police: This is clearly code.

Santa: No it’s not code.

Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?

Santa: That’s me.

Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.

Santa: Yes, I’m known by very many names.

Soviet Police: So you are spy?… How do you know my children’s names?… What are you doing in Russia?

Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.

Soviet Police: Presents? For who?

Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.

Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?

Santa: Well, nothing.

Soviet Police: Nothing? So…You are communist?

Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?

Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa.

The post Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

Carlos L. Garrido — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 22:07:38 +0000

This article is a transcript of a presentation for a panel on the subject, hosted by the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop, and the Midwestern Marx Institute, with other presentations from Gabriel Rockhill, Radhika Desai, Glenn Diesen, and Noah Khrachvik.

The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind.

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power.

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated?

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us.

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down.

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?”

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors.

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism.

Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against.

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much.

I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people.

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US?

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained.

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction.

They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.”

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.”

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today.

First published at Midwestern Marx.

The post Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

Carlos L. Garrido — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 22:07:38 +0000

First published at Midwestern Marx.

The post Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Liberalism and Its Discontents

Greg Godels — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 19:04:12 +0000

These are difficult, perilous, and frustrating times. Many cherished beliefs are coming unraveled. Many once-shared values are no longer shared. And distrust of unshakeable institutions is widespread.

Yet it was only a little more than three decades ago that North America and European intellectuals joined in acknowledging the triumph of the Western world’s “gift” to all: political and economic liberalism. For nearly half a century, Western liberalism had waged a “cold” war against the most serious challenge to its dominance. Apart from the fascist counter-revolution of the 1930s against political liberalism, no movement shook the Western liberal establishment and its self-confidence as did revolutionary socialism. Seemingly, that threat ended in 1991.

In that crowning moment, many saw the values of the European enlightenment as proven to be universal and timeless. It was Francis Fukuyama who boldly stated the unstated in 1992: history had found its dialectical resolution with the victory of capitalism and its political institutions.

If it was a victory in the minds of many, it was a victory in two respects: it proved that there were states — nested in two continents, Europe and North America — that won because they adhered to and promoted the victorious values and also that those values were, in fact, the most advanced, most righteous values of all time.

Europe’s sordid twentieth-century history of imperialism, war, and inhumanity make for a poor example of sustaining enlightenment thought, of meeting standards of equality, democracy, and social justice.

The US, on the other hand, embracing its isolation from European misanthropy, celebrating its youth, vigor, and revolutionary tradition, and whitewashing its own destruction of indigenous peoples, posed as the paragon of political and economic liberalism. Fixated on continental expansion (displacing native peoples), the US came late to the global imperialist scramble, relying more on economic coercion than military might in international affairs.

With some merit, the US points to its progress: its endurance through a great civil war to cast off the bonds of chattel slavery, its past openness to immigration, its uninterrupted history of electoral practice and enduring social and political stability. Of course, on closer inspection, none of these glories bear the weight that they carry within the national mythology.

Nonetheless, for better or worse, they have stood as the best example of the West living up to standards set by the revolutionary transition from feudal despotism, from economic backwardness, and from religious oppression. The US Declaration of Independence remains one of the most advanced ideological reflections of those moments.

Ironically, soon after the dissolution of the USSR — the ending of a great struggle for the allegiance of billions of people — that US liberal image was quickly and greatly tarnished beyond repair. With the need to show an enlightened face to the world apparently gone, the mask came off, revealing a country ruled by an intolerant, privileged, and rapacious ruling class with little regard for the long-professed values of classical liberalism.

A refreshed militarism constructed around a ludicrous war on “terrorism” shaped a destructive, bullying foreign policy. The blowback jihadist attack upon US civilians in 2001 served as the excuse for a government war on citizens’ privacy and civil liberties that was unprecedented in its sweep and its technological sophistication. Little attempt, beyond a feeble, transparent weapons-of-mass-destruction lie, was made to clothe the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. After only a few years of the twenty-first century, an Orwellian curtain had dropped on US public and private life. The myth that the US was never an aggressor was in tatters.

Both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib destroyed another myth, the deception that the liberal icon would never torture its prisoners. Philosophical musings about the efficacy of torture were no longer hypothetical.

US pundits freely embraced imperialism, speaking openly of the Old World and ancient empires as precedents for US intervention globally and for the US role as global arbiter and enforcer. The US refused to accept international courts’ findings or democratically determined United Nations resolutions as binding. The negative findings of human rights organizations — willing, useful tools in the Cold War — were shrugged off when they were even modestly critical of US practices.

Liberalism’s promise of universality and equality before the law was shattered by an explosion of racially skewed, draconian incarcerations in the 1990s, filling the US prison system beyond capacity and making a mockery of judicial process and fairness.

The vast inequalities of wealth and income in the US — rising geometrically over the last fifty years — are like sand in the gears of the heralded liberal political mechanism: frequent, informed, and trusted elections. As more than half of the jaded citizens do not bother to register or vote, as election to most significant offices requires a campaign investment well beyond the means of most citizens, as most candidates have sold their souls to wealthy funders, as the media sensationalizes and trivializes issues, the value of “democratic” procedures diminishes sharply.

The sharpest edge of these economic inequalities strikes those minority populations historically denied full participation in civic life — the center-piece of liberalism. Racism, anti-immigrant nationalism, and intolerance rage through the former liberal bastions of Europe and North America.

The failings of economic liberalism have only added to the stresses on political liberalism. Global capitalism has endured several severe shocks since the dawn of the twenty-first century: financial crises, debt crises, and now inflation.

Contrary to Francis Fukuyama and other smug celebrants of Communism’s “demise,” the wheels began to rapidly fall off of the liberal train. By 2023, confidence in the destiny of liberalism had collapsed.

Voters have little recourse but to stay the course or to turn to a new populism with one foot in the past (“Make America Great Again!”) and one foot in the promise of a vague, shapeless future without the corruption and hypocrisy of the mainstream parties.

To be sure, hip, youth-driven new movements arose to meet the collapse of mainstream consensus, promising new, fresh wine in shiny new bottles. Movements like OCCUPY and formations like SYRIZA, PODEMOS, and FIVE STAR dazzled many with their ultra-liberal, ultra-tolerant agenda, aimed at an educated middle and upper-middle strata economically relatively secure, but pushing past older lifestyle and cultural frontiers. When these movements matured, often into politically influential parties confronting the old guard, they proved to be the same old wine, leaving their supporters with an ugly taste.

Today’s politics are at a miserable impasse, with much noise and fractiousness, but, nonetheless, still contained in the narrow vessel of classical liberalism in one flavor or another. Remarkably, the unease among the intellectual strata and the anger of the citizenry has stoked a kind of tribalism. Academics and pundits write and speak of saving “our democracy” as though anyone believes that we can have democracy when candidates, votes, and the news are bought and sold. Their right-wing-oriented counterparts celebrate the sanctity and virtues of the US Constitution, as though it were from God rather than enlightenment reason.

But left and right, in the confines of mainstream politics, are now ready to cast away the tolerance and civility of liberalism to thwart — even proscribe — their political opponents. Freedom of expression, of speech, of association, of advocacy carry little value in today’s sordid world with liberalism’s most self-righteous advocates violating liberalism’s most sacred values and supporting censorship and cancellation.

The once hallowed doctrine of rights has been stretched so far beyond human rights as to be trivial and meaningless, by including corporations, all organic creatures, and even inanimate objects. All now widely accepted to be rights-bearers.

Liberty– the cornerstone of liberal constitutions — is today divorced from its roots in liberation and reduced to personalized and individualized self-indulgence, the decadent product of corporate consumerism.

The few remaining true-believing liberals — people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi — are roasted by all sides for their defense of free speech for everyone and “neutral” journalism. In an age of gross hypocrisy, they are true naïfs.

If Karl Marx were alive, he would not be surprised by this turn. He associated classical liberalism’s emergence with the origin and maturation of capitalism. The rise of the bourgeoisie as a class spawned its own ideology, an ideology that broke the chains of hereditary noble privilege and religious obscurantism, and spread hope for the masses consigned to an unchanging future of peasant labor and grinding poverty. That hope for working people — based on the potential of natural, universal human rights, fraternity, and universal suffrage — served to cement the alliance of the bourgeoisie with working people against the nobility and its supporters.

Bourgeois ideology, classical liberalism, challenged the foundations of Medieval privilege based on Divine Right and on fixed stations in life. In place of the old thinking, enlightenment thinkers proposed natural rights– the social counterparts to the natural laws of the emerging sciences. Like the laws of nature, social laws were to be grounded in reason and not God or birthright.

For Western societies, the new ideology was a welcome gift, broadening political participation, enhancing social mobility, freeing economic and scientific development, and creating more democratic political institutions. Accompanying these advances came a conceit that the ascendant classes had revealed universal truths, that the new economic, social, and political orders were the best that could be devised.

Bourgeois academics have been obsessed with providing a rational foundation for this conceit for centuries, but without success.

The young Karl Marx would have none of it; writing dismissively of the bourgeois fetish for natural rights in Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage, he said: “None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man… that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accord with his private caprice…”

He recognized that the bourgeois social apparatus — classical liberalism — “fit” and served, in its time, the emancipation, the liberation of the bourgeois class and to a limited degree the working class. But he also recognized that it was limited by its class perspective. With property and the sanctity of private ownership at the center of classical liberalism, the emancipation of humanity could not be completed.

In the revolutions of 1848 that rocked Europe, all three classes — the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat — participated and forged temporary, unstable alliances to secure their diverse goals, a time beautifully captured by Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. But the differences between the ascending bourgeois order and a future proletarian order were tersely conveyed by the popular slogan: “Not freedom to read, but freedom to feed!”

Today, capitalism is moribund. Its decline was in plain sight in the last decades of the twentieth century, only to be lifted by its expansion in People’s China and the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, capitalism’s ability to deliver an adequate standard of living, safety, and security grows weaker with every economic crisis and war. It should come as no surprise that its political and social superstructure, inclusive of the ideologies of economic and political liberalism, would also be in crisis, showing similar signs of decline and dysfunction.

Just as political liberalism rose with the ascent of capitalism, it is falling with capitalism’s decline. The cancer of corruption and greed, the rot of political practice, and the decadence of culture and social media ensure the further demise of the institutions of classical liberalism.

What will replace them?

It is a good time to recall and consider Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

The post Liberalism and Its Discontents first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The Ugly Face of Anti-Communism

Greg Godels — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 18:34:05 +0000

Since the Russian revolution, the founding of the Communist International, and the organization of a revolutionary party “of a new type” in nearly every country, Communist and Workers Parties have been in the sights of every country’s bourgeoisie. In nearly all countries, the bourgeoisie, its political parties, its media, and its other henchmen have sought to thwart, even destroy the revolutionary vanguard of the workers. Thus, the existence of maneuvers or actions to suppress or repress Communist Parties comes as no surprise.

Throughout the last one hundred six years, a Communist Party’s size or influence has been reflected in the force or violence to which they are met. That, too, comes as no surprise.

Of course Communists resist the repression that inevitably ensues from capitalism’s defenders. In some cases and on some rare occasions, a deeply embedded sense of fair play or principled belief in liberal values among the masses ensures that Communists enjoy a modicum of permitted activity in spite of the ruling bourgeoisie’s wishes.

So it should come as no surprise that the bourgeoisie in Venezuela would like to bury the Communist Party, consigning it to the political margins or worse. Over the course of the Venezuelan Communist Party’s long and determined history of the defense of Venezuela’s workers, it has been attacked, repressed, and banned by bourgeois politicians or the military. In fact, since its birth in 1931 until 1969, the Party has known little more than five years of legality.

It should come as no surprise, either, when a popular movement wins electoral victories against the established bourgeois parties, promising to defend Venezuela’s independence and to implement a people’s program, that Venezuela’s Communist Party would enthusiastically offer conditional support. With its own program based on revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, the vigorous support the Communists offered to the government of Hugo Chavez was necessarily conditional, though supportive.

The Chavez program was vaguely socialist– drawing on Christian ethics, utopian socialism, and a motley assembly of enthusiastic volunteer academic advisors from around the world. Nonetheless, it drew the enmity of US imperialism and its allies for its foreign policy and resource independence. While it defied the influence of the domestic bourgeoisie, the Chavez government did not establish workers’ power or eliminate the bourgeoisie’s economic base.

Despite these weaknesses, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) continued to defend the government and support it against US intervention and counter-revolutionary intrigue. The PCV continued its conditional support in the post-Chavez era– with Maduro’s election– but with emerging differences over domestic policy, especially with regards to the working class and corruption.

Over the last decade, the differences grew sharper. In the eyes of the PCV and in its own words: “It is on the reality of total rupture with the Unitary Framework Agreement [an agreement proposed before the 2018 election] and with the programmatic bases of the Bolivarian process initiated by Hugo Chavez that the PCV distanced itself from the Maduro government.”

Of course the distancing does not mean abandoning joint patriotic resistance to US and other foreign intervention.

In the wake of these political differences– a common enough feature of center-left and left electoral formations– the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice imposed a new leadership on the PCV on August 11, a wildly arbitrary and unjust move with no possible motivation other than to weaken and disable the PCV. Venezuela’s highest court summarily ruled that a new leadership– composed of renegades, dissidents, and non-members– should constitute a new leading body, negating the democratically elected leadership of the PCV from its last Congress in November of last year.

Venezuelan Communists were denied serious participation, due process, and the right to appeal this attempt to disable a historical instrument of the Venezuelan working class.

Some might dismiss this as a rogue court attacking the PCV, but the fact that the Venezuelan government had sought to deny electoral participation by the PCV earlier and that a prominent leader of the leading political party had mounted a campaign against the PCV, demonstrate that Maduro’s party was complicit in the court’s maneuvers.

Certainly the government, Maduro, and Maduro’s party have had every opportunity to denounce or resist the blatant attempt to disarm the working class’s most dedicated advocates, the Venezuelan Communists. They have not.

Clearly, this is an instance of raw anti-Communism, updated to the twenty-first century. Others can probe the reasons that Maduro and his party have succumbed to anti-Communism, but succumb they have. If they believe that creating a bogus Communist Party will deflect criticism or improve their electoral opportunities, it will not be the first time that fear of Communism leads to the suppression of political choices and dishonors the perpetrators.

But the PCV will endure. Its cadre will find their way through this thicket of distraction and continue to fight for working people.

Many Communist and Workers’ Parties have rallied– along with many other honest people– in defense of the PCV and the cause of Venezuelan workers. They understand the cost of anti-Communism on the fate of working people.

But many on the left have failed this moment. Their reasons constitute a basket of opportunism. They stare at their shoe tops, equivocate, plead ignorance, or soil the banner of solidarity. History will judge.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Korea: Colonized, Plundered, Divided, Devastated by War, under Ongoing Threat of War

Charles Pierce — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:28:11 +0000

The War on Korea (1950-53) was suspended with an armistice agreement. A hostile truce has persisted ever since. With respect to that ongoing confrontation, what Americans get from their government and their news mass media abounds with crucial omissions and misleading distortions resulting in a false portrayal of the geopolitical realities. Relevant history and essential facts.

The Fight for National Independence

Korea was unified as a nation by the 10th century. During the last half of the 19th century, multiple invasions by foreign powers (US, France, Britain, and Japan) forced the country to allow foreign capital to enter and operate in Korea. ^[1]

In 1905, imperial Japan subjugated Korea as its Protectorate. In 1910, Japan proceeded to annex Korea, which it then ruled until 1945. While Japanese capital exploited the labor and natural resources of the country, the Japanese state banned use of the Korean language and customs in an attempt at forced assimilation. ^[1]

In 1919, the Korean independence movement organized mass rallies involving some 2 million protestors demanding independence from Japan. Japanese police and military forces crushed these protests with repressive violence causing some 7,000 fatalities. Independence leaders in exile then established the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea [PGRK] which then obtained some limited international recognition and served until 1945 as an advocacy center for the independence movement. ^[1,2]

Between 1935 and 1940, the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army [NAJUA], led by the Communist Party of China [CPC], conducted guerrilla operations against Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea. Kim Il Sung, then a member of the CPC, obtained some distinction as an effective and popular division commander in the NAJUA. Japanese countermeasures forced Kim’s division, by the end of 1940, to escape into Soviet territory where they were retrained by the Soviet army. Kim then became an officer in the Soviet Red Army and was serving therein when the USSR joined the War against Japan (1945 August). During the interim, he was not present in Korea or China. Kim returned to Korea with Soviet forces in 1945 August. ^[3]

Forced Prostitution

During the Asia-Pacific War (1941-45), Japan forced up to 200,000 Korean women (along with many more from other occupied countries) into sexual slavery to serve Japanese soldiers. During the Korean War (1950-53), the South Korean government re-established this system of forced sexual prostitution to serve South Korean and allied soldiers, the victims being conscripted almost exclusively from the ranks of the disempowered (worker and poor peasant) classes. This system persisted into the 21st century as a for-profit industry with sexual prostitution in “camp towns” (organized and regulated by the US and South Korean military authorities) around military bases. ^[4]

How Korea Came to be Divided

As the Soviet Army was about to liberate Korea from 40 years of oppressive Japanese colonial rule, the US, wanting to prevent that country from falling under predominant Soviet influence, asked (1945 August 10) that Soviet forces stop at the 38th parallel so that the US would be able to occupy the southern half of the country. Hoping for a good postwar relationship, the USSR promptly agreed, with the expectation that this would be a temporary arrangement until the removal of Japanese forces and the establishment of an independent government for the whole country. Actual liberation began on August 14 with Soviet Red Army amphibious landings in the northeast of the country. US forces did not enter southern Korea until September 08, by which time Soviet forces would otherwise likely have occupied the entire country and disarmed all occupying Japanese forces. ^[5]

In August, popular People’s Committees affiliated with the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence [CPKI] arose throughout Korea. This organization was led by activists in country including: Lyuh Woon-hyung, and veteran Christian nationalist Cho Man-sik. On September 12, activists from the People’s Committees, meeting in Seoul (in US occupation zone), established the People’s Republic of Korea [PRK] to govern the country. The PRK program included:

confiscation of lands held by Japanese and their Korean collaborators;
distribution of that land to peasants;
rent limits on all leased land;
nationalization of major industries;
guarantees for basic human rights and freedoms (speech, press, assembly, faith);
universal adult suffrage;
equality for women;
labor law reforms (eight-hour day, minimum wage, prohibition of child labor, et cetera);
good relations with US, USSR, China, and Britain; and
opposition to foreign interference in affairs of state. ^[6]

Soviet authorities recognized the People’s Committees and PRK which then instituted progressive social reforms in the North ^[7]. Meanwhile, the US Army Military Government [USAMGIK] in the South: regarded said PRK and People’s Committees as unacceptably leftist, and suppressed them by military decree and armed force. USAMGIK also: put rightwing former Japanese collaborators in key power positions ^[6], and persisted in repressing reform advocates ^{[7, 8]}. Popular protests and localized rebellions followed ^[9]. By 1948 state repression in the South under USAMGIK had subjected dissidents to arbitrary detention, torture, and murder with thousands of victims ^{[7, 9]}. The US also chose rightwing anti-Communist, Syngman Rhee, as their man to govern the country ^{[7, 10]}.

With the US and USSR deadlocked in disagreement over the content of a government for a united Korea, the US orchestrated the establishment (1948 August 15) of the Republic of Korea [ROK] with Syngman Rhee as President. Authorities in the North responded by establishing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK] on September 09 with Kim Il-sung as Premier. ^{[5, 11, 12]}

What Happened to Democracy?

In the South, Rhee’s autocratic regime brutally persecuted Communists and other dissidents with detention, torture, assassination, and mass murder. Victims numbered in the tens of thousands. Repressive autocratic rule persisted in the South (with one brief reprieve) until 1987 when replaced by a liberal “democratic” regime with some semblance of civil liberties. However, government under this regime remains dominated by political parties which represent factions of a ruling capitalist class. Consequently, its “democracy” is illusory. ^{[13, 14]}

In the North, the People’s Committees constituted popular democratic institutions, which were already active when Soviet forces arrived. With Soviet backing, said Committees, with widespread popular support, constituted the governing authority. By 1946, the Soviet-backed (Communist) Workers’ Party had begun to dominate the Committees and the governing administration. Following the Korean War, Workers’ Party leader Kim Il Sung: purged other leading Communists (1952-62), replaced proletarian internationalism with Korean nationalism in Party doctrine, promoted a personality cult around himself, and created a hereditary dynastic autocracy, practices incompatible with Marxism and socialist participatory democracy. Thusly, the DPRK devolved into a dynastic bureaucratic welfare state, not capitalist, but also not actually socialist. ^{[5, 11, 15]}

The War on Korea

Both Korean governments claimed the right to govern the entire country and had made preparations to enforce said claim thru military force. From 1949, there were border skirmishes, nearly all which began as incursions and/or artillery bombardments from the South into the North. In 1950 June, following a 2-day ROK cross-border bombardment and seizure of northern territory (including the city of Haeju) in the Ongjin area, the DPRK responded with a full-scale invasion of the South. The unpopular ROK regime collapsed, and DPRK forces quickly gained control of most of the South. ^{[16, 10]}

During its brief control in the South, the DPRK instituted progressive reforms (nationalization of industry, land reform, and restoration of the People’s Committees). According to US General William F Dean, “the civilian attitude seemed to vary between enthusiasm and passive acceptance”. ^[17]

The US, its allies, and their major news media, falsely characterized: the event as an unprovoked Communist aggression, the repressive ROK as a popular democracy, and the conflict as an international crisis (belying its reality as a civil war). The US, taking advantage of USSR boycott of United Nations [UN] meetings, induced said UN to authorize a US-led military intervention to save the ROK. Thusly, the US transformed the hitherto relatively-bloodless Korean civil conflict into the horrendous Korean War. Moreover, the US, by threatening to invade China and by bombing China’s territory and threatening hydropower stations serving its proximate industries, provoked China to enter the conflict on the side of the DPRK. ^[10]

Toll. The War took the lives of an estimated 3 million people, including some 1.6 million civilians, many of them as a consequence of indiscriminate US aerial bombing and war crimes perpetrated by US and allied forces. Said crimes included:

massive US use of chemical weapons (especially napalm) in violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention;
massive US use of bombing attacks upon civilian targets (cities and villages);
deliberate destruction of crops and of food production infrastructure;
massacres of many thousands of unarmed civilians by US armed forces under orders from high-ranking commanders at No Gun Ri and at many other locations (where US Army soldiers gunned down large crowds of civilians, or US airpower strafed and/or bombed them); and
massacres of at least 100,000 Koreans by ROK police and army (as at Sancheong and Hamyang where ROK forces slaughtered 705 mostly women and children), at Koch’ang (where 719 persons of both sexes and all ages were mowed down by machine gun), and thru mass executions of rounded-up prisoners on mere suspicion that they might be unsympathetic to the repressive ROK regime.

Nearly all of the North and much of the South were reduced to rubble. ^{[18, 10, 19]}

Armistice signed in 1953 July left a hostile and uneasy truce with little net change in the control of territory, but no peace agreement. This condition persists to the present time. Moreover, foreign troops have not been stationed in the North since 1958, but US armed forces (in the tens of thousands) have never yet left the South. ^[20]

Who First Introduced Nuclear Weapons?

The US deployed nuclear weapons in south Korea (in violation of the Armistice Agreement) from 1958 until 1991 (when it apparently decided that its interests would be better served with a prohibition of nuclear weapons in Korea). Moreover, US warships carrying nuclear weapons operate routinely in waters around Korea. ^[21]

With the (1991) collapse of its protective USSR ally and with continued hostility from the US and ROK, the DPRK (in 1993) announced its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and stepped up its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability as a deterrent. The DPRK suspended that withdrawal under the 1994 Agreed Framework whereby it agreed to remain in the NPT and to be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] in return for:

light water nuclear power reactors to replace existing graphite nuclear power reactors (which were capable of easily producing weapons-grade plutonium),
fuel oil deliveries to replace the power from shut down of the graphite reactors (until the light water reactors came on line),
relief from sanctions,
an end to threatening US-ROK military exercises, and
movement toward normal diplomatic and economic relations.

It is now widely suspected that the US embraced the Agreed Framework on the assumption that the DPRK regime was on the verge of collapse which would mean no need for the US to fulfill its commitments. ^{[22, 23]}

The US did default on the agreement thru long delays in construction of the light water reactors which was years behind the targeted 2003 completion date. Then in 2002 the US further defaulted by ending delivery of promised fuel oil shipments. Further, the US falsely accused the DPRK of having confessed violation of the Agreed Framework by misinterpreting the DPRK’s assertion of having an inherent right to possess nuclear weapons as an admission of actual possession of such weapons. Finally, US President Bush: branded North Korea together with Iran and Iraq as an “axis of evil”; and then invaded Iraq where the US imposed regime change (followed by show trials and executions of deposed Iraqi leaders). The DPRK responded (in 2003) to the US default and intensified hostility by reactivating its nuclear reactors and by quitting the NPT. However, it offered to end its nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees, but the US was unwilling to provide. ^{[22, 23]}

Repeated talks (2003-07) between the two sides failed to produce any lasting agreement. The Obama administration ratcheted up the threatening military exercises and ignored DPRK calls for talks to make peace. The DPRK has made six nuclear bomb tests (in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 January, 2016 September, 2017); and it has also developed an intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] capability. ^{[20, 24]}

The US, in 2017, deployed its THAAD anti-missile system in south Korea thereby further destabilizing the confrontation and also provoking alarm in China ^[25].

The Current Danger

In 2011, the US and its allies used military force to oust the Gaddafi regime in Libya (after having used military force to effect regime change in Iraq in 2003). Both Iraq and Libya had given up their nuclear-weapons and other WMD programs. The DPRK drew the inevitable conclusion that it needed a nuclear weapons deterrent to protect itself against a similar event.

The US (with its imperial interventionist bi-partisan foreign policy consensus, arrogating to the US the “right” to use subversion, economic siege, military force, and any other available instrument in order to enforce its dictates against any country which insists upon following an insubordinate course) continues its hostility toward the DPRK. Under Biden, it persists in its aggressions against said DPRK: vilification, economic siege, annually conducting threatening US-ROK joint military exercises in the South (to which the DPRK responds by test-firing its missiles). The US refuses to discuss making a peace treaty or normalization of relations; it persists in its unwavering goal of regime change. In fact, the US has used its economic power to intensify international sanctions (economic siege) against the DPRK. Meanwhile, the obsequious (and/or negligently ignorant) mainstream news media misleads the public as to the realities of the confrontation; while the liberal left, if it responds at all, ignores US provocations and, tacitly or explicitly, accepts the mischaracterization of the DPRK as an aggressive “rogue” state.

Astute experts, including former US President Carter, have recognized that the current US policy, of attempting to coerce the DPRK to give up its nuclear deterrent while refusing to provide security guarantees, cannot succeed ^[4]. As long as the threat remains, the DPRK, regardless of who leads its government, will certainly not agree to give up the nuclear weapons deterrent which is its best insurance against military attack by an imperial US superpower bent upon regime-change. The way to ensure peace in the Korean peninsula is to remove the sanctions and other hostile measures against the DPRK including the provocative joint military exercises with the ROK.

The DPRK does not want war. It wants a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War. Its officials have asserted that it also wants Korea reunified under a federal system wherein the central government’s functions would be limited to national defense and foreign relations. Finally, the DPRK wants normal relations with the US and its neighbors; and, with that, it would, as it has repeatedly asserted, envision and welcome an end to hostile actions on both sides. ^{[20, 22]}

US government policy has never prioritized the welfare of the Korean people, North or South. Imperial hostility and pressure for regime change from outside forces, namely the US and its allies, has driven the DPRK regime to react with intensified repression of dissent. That then has operated to reinforce the bureaucratic rule and dynastic autocracy, which (along with economic siege and need to heavily invest limited resources in military deterrent) are contrary to the best interests of the people of the DPRK. Moreover, this US policy seriously threatens a catastrophic war which would devastate Korea and cause massive loss of life, South as well as North. The principal beneficiaries of this policy are: the munitions vendors; their supportive imperial-minded US politicians of both major parties (whose election campaigns are significantly funded by said munitions vendors); government officials (who will subsequently become corporate executives or lobbyists for the merchants of death) ^[26]; and the “experts” in policy institutes and academia (who make their careers as apologists for Western imperialism).

ENDNOTES

[1] Wikipedia: History of Korea (2023 Oct 17) ~ §§ Later Three Kingdoms, Foreign relationships, Korean Empire (1898-1910), Japanese rule (1910-1945).

[2] Wikipedia: Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea (2023 Oct 26) ~ §§ introduction, Foreign relations.

[3] Wikipedia: Kim Il Sung (2023 Nov 02) ~ §§ Communist and guerrilla activities, Return to Korea.

[4] Hynesᵒ H Patricia: The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished (Truthout, 2013 Jul 12) @ https://truthout.org/articles/the-korean-war-forgotten-unknown-and-unfinished/ .

[5] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Division of Korea (1945—1950).

[6] Wikipedia: People’s Republic of Korea (2023 Oct 30).

[8] Wikipedia: United States Army Military Government in Korea (2023 Oct 20).

[9] Wikipedia: Autumn Uprising of 1946 (2023 Oct 18).

[10] Blum⸰ William: Killing Hope – U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (© 2004, Common Courage Press) ~ chapter 5 ISBN 1-56751-252-6. Note: 1st half, thru chapter 34, of 2003 edition is online @ http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/livres8/BLUMkillinghope.pdf .

[11] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

[12] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 209—17.

[13] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 217—24.

[14] Wikipedia: History of South Korea (2023 Nov 02) ~ §§ First Republic (1948—1960) thru Fifth Republic (1979—1987).

[15] Wikipedia: Workers’ Party of Korea (2023 Oct 27) ~ § History.

[16] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 247—264.

[17] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Korean War (1950—1953).

[18] Wikipedia: Korean War (2023 Nov 09) ~ § Casualties.

[19] Wikipedia: Geochang massacre (2023 Sep 07); Sancheong-Hamyang massacre (2023 Jun 04); No Gun Ri massacre (2023 Sep 22).

[20] Wikipedia: Korean Armistice Agreement (2023 Jul 27).

[21] Wikipedia: South Korea and weapons of mass destruction (2023 Oct 25) ~ § American nuclear weapons in South Korea.

[22] Sigalᵒ Leon V: Bad History (38North, 2017 Aug 22) @ http://www.38north.org/2017/08/lsigal082217/ .

[23] Wikipedia: “Agreed Framework,” 21 May 2023.

[24] BBC: North Korea: What missiles does it have? (2023 Sep 03) @ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41174689 .

[25] Borowiecᵒ Steven: THAAD missile system agitates South Korea-China ties (Nikkei Asia, 2023 Jun 22) @ https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/THAAD-missile-system-agitates-South-Korea-China-ties .

[26] Kuzmarov, Jeremy, “Senate Report: Nearly 700 Former High-Ranking Pentagon and Other Government Officials Now Work at the Top 20 Defense Contractors,” Covert Action Magazine, 2023 May 12 .

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

An Overdue Look at the Environmental Crisis

Greg Godels — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:15:25 +0000

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Our global environmental crisis is widely understood to be reaching a crucial moment; the danger signals are flashing almost daily. Yet a certain complacency follows the many catastrophic climate events attributable to a critically injured environment. People talk easily of a climate Armageddon, while maintaining business as usual.

Is this fatalism? Are there onerous sacrifices necessary to save the planet? Are there insurmountable obstacles to finding solutions? Are we beyond the point-of-no-return?

These questions need urgent answers.

The truth is that some leftists have been addressing these problems and ringing the alarm for decades. But some of us, though recognizing the crisis, have paid only lip-service to its solutions, neglecting to apply the unique perspective that Marxism could bring. Looking at the crisis through the lens of class and exploitation surely offers a deeper understanding than the sensationalism and superficiality of the capitalist media and their punditry.

Mea culpa

Hopefully, my own absolution began with acquiring a copy of Monthly Review’s July-August issue devoted to perspectives on the environmental crisis from a left, Marxist-friendly perspective. Entitled Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development (volume 75, number 3), the volume offers eleven contributions, with an important, essential, introductory essay by John Bellamy Foster. Foster has labored productively in the vineyards of ecosocialism for some time. The journal number comes highly recommended.

Much of the popular response to the unfolding environmental disaster is reducible to cultural environmentalism. Advocates call for a change in consumption patterns– switching from products whose production, reproduction, or disposal is most harmful to our land, water, or air. Some cultural environmentalists demand a radical overall cut in consumption, insist on the elimination of conspicuous consumption, or even pose a philosophical challenge to the very concept of consumerism so prevalent in capitalist societies.

But cultural environmentalism alone does not thoroughly address the institutions that encourage or incur needless carbon emissions, senseless waste, and the depletion of precious resources– institutions like the military, the security, judicial, and penal system, the sales and marketing effort, mass entertainment, etc. Nor does it challenge capitalism itself.

On a global level, conserving only the twentieth-century resources allocated for war making, the social wealth lost to the destruction of past wars and necessitated by the remedial costs of death and suffering would put us uncountable years behind our current rendezvous with disaster. Even eliminating today’s bloated military budgets and stopping the current wars would lessen the immediate crisis dramatically.

Most of the mainstream liberal and social democratic cultural environmentalists ignore these institutions that are deeply embedded in the capitalist infrastructure, instead opting for campaigns to eliminate or recycle the most energy-soaked articles of convenience– cans, bottles, plastic bags, etc. or forcing the issue into the thick, impenetrable muck of bourgeois politics, legislative decision-making, and state regulation.

The Green New Deal, the consensus approach of the techno-environmentalists, promises to restructure capitalism by rewarding positive changes in energy generation and use, while sanctioning corporate foot dragging and avoidance. Implementation rests with the commitment of political puppets of corporate power– the political strata. Again, there is no substantial challenge to capitalism and its institutions with techno-environmentalism.

The contributors to the Monthly Review anthology more or less understand the shortcomings of the liberal/social democratic approach. They grasp that capitalism — with its insatiable thirst for accumulation — cannot meet the challenge of environmental catastrophe. That reality animates all of the selections in “Planned Degrowth.” Yet, among the writers, there is little agreement on how to move beyond capitalism (of all the contributors, Ying Chen makes the strongest case for a robust, planned socialist economy genuinely independent of the capitalist mode of production).

Resolving those differences is made all the more difficult by the ambiguities and confusions accompanying the central concepts of planning and degrowth

It is commendable that nearly all of the participants understand that market forces alone are inadequate to extract humanity from the catastrophe awaiting us. Moreover, the alternative to markets necessarily is some form of economic planning — some form of conscious human-based decision making. This alone is a departure from the left’s post-Soviet love-fest with market mechanisms and market socialism — indeed, a welcome departure opening the way to a more robust socialism. But what form should the planning take? Who should make the plan?

Foster wisely sees the cause of environmental disaster in the capitalist’s insatiable need to “accumulate! accumulate!” — borrowing Marx’s succinct summation. Accordingly, the challenge is to organize the economy around social usefulness, and not profit — “focusing on use value rather than exchange value,” to employ Foster’s words.

Certainly, contrasting use value against exchange value, advantaging the former, requires some exiting from the market mechanism and a turn toward a different mechanism for the allocation of resources: conscious human decision-making, i.e. planning.

This makes a neat, compelling argument for some form of planning.

Unfortunately, most of the contributors have little regard for the rich twentieth-century experience in planning afforded by the now-defunct European socialist community. It is fashionable, among Western academic Marxists (or Marxians, as they sometimes like to be called), to heap scorn on the Soviet central planning mechanism in its different iterations despite its relative successes even without the benefit of today’s astounding computational powers. Apart from Paul Cockshott and some of his colleagues, there is little interest in exploring how a similar planning mechanism could be optimized using available technologies.

Foster, to his credit, offers a very modest defense of Soviet planning, especially regarding its impact on the environment. But others acknowledge the need for planning without providing even a sketch of how that would be done.

Instead, several writers revisit the old New Left fetish of participatory democracy, as though the more fingers in the planning pie, the better, regardless of the results. This reaches the limits of absurdity with the Venezuelan rural commune proposed as the model for a planning mechanism to rescue the world economy from the throes of environmental crisis, a utopian fantasy.

The other Western Marxist obsession is decentralization. Apparently, the political model beloved by the North American-European left is the Swiss canton, the landsgemeinde, combining the smallest possible political units with the most direct democracy. How such decentralized planning could successfully redirect a modern juggernaut economy to escape the tyranny of markets requires a giant leap of faith (As Nicolas Graham understates, “… it is quite difficult to imagine effective planning… without some coordinating authority and external arbiter.”)

Planned Degrowth’s other key idea, degrowth, is also underdeveloped. Informing this concept is the looming disaster cited by Foster and implicit with all of the authors:

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5-degree Centigrade increase over pre-industrial levels this century– or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2-degree Centigrade increase– if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe… All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Understandably, faced with these limits, most of us recognize that, in some sense or another, we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. That is, growing carbon emissions, growing consumption patterns, more broadly– growing GDP as support for growing consumption or growing population, and any and all other forms of growth that potentially increase carbon emissions cannot be simultaneously sustained without an existential threat to life on the planet.

But is it misleading, simplistic, and maybe even harmful to popularize degrowth in general as the solution to the life-or-death challenge of carbon-emission limits? Are there different kinds of “growth” — minimal emissions, emissions-neutral, or even emissions-free– that sidestep the rendezvous with climate disaster? Would not market-free, planned economic growth, itself, forestall that rendezvous? Can we not envision a growing, planned socialist economy that stems or reverses increases in emissions?

In the historically nuanced Marxist perspective, growth of the productive forces of society need not be coupled with an anarchical, unfettered, profit-driven economy, nor has it always been so associated. On the other hand, the preferred capitalist measuring stick of growth– gross domestic product– reflects that association: in the capitalist industrial era, growth (GDP), national wealth, the unregulated exploitation of carbon-based energy, and the exploitation of labor are inextricably bound.

For Marxists, there is no such necessary link. Free of the wasteful uses of social wealth for class aggrandizement, class suppression, and endless accumulation, growth can be redefined as the unbounded improvement in both the quality and prospects of all human life. For example, the development of vaccines for Covid or future attacks of new viruses requires the further development of productive forces and constitutes a growth in social wealth, but with far less impact on the environment when undertaken outside the framework of the profit-driven capitalist system.

Marx and Engels gave us a different perspective on growth in The German Ideology, linking the development of forces of production directly to the improvement of humanity’s survivability and flourishing, while faced with ever-arising challenges from nature and other humans. They remind us that the mode of production is not only what people produce but how they produce. That ever-present, evolving challenge may, in some sense, at some time, require “growth,” but growth away from carbon emissions, waste, excess, inefficiency, and greed. Thus, we would define a new, humane concept of growth and production.

Foster comes close to recognizing this possibility by distinguishing “a quantitative as well a qualitative sense” of productive forces. But he seems to overlook that the qualitative expansion of productive forces might well be qualitative production, production independent of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and environmental degradation– production of new ideas, new living arrangements, new divisions of labor, etc. This would be a more refined notion of growth, far more useful than the BEA or OECD definition of gross domestic product that degrowth addresses.

Two contributors, Isikara and Narin, are dismissive of the explanatory power of the second law of thermodynamics in the social world. Yet it does capture the fundamental struggle that only humans wage with ultimately limited, but astonishing success against a system’s tendency toward disorder. The development of productive forces was– qualitatively or quantitatively– the primary effective human response to this law: the law of entropy. The idea of degrowth, so superficially compelling in its simplicity, fails to account for this universal struggle. The environmental crisis is only the latest chapter in the perpetual struggle against species extinction. Like previous struggles, it will take development (and in the broadest sense, growth) of the productive forces to win, even if only temporarily from the inevitable disorder of closed systems.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a just, viable solution to the environmental crisis is the gross inequalities found in the capitalist countries and found between the advanced capitalist countries and those less advanced. The weakness of the degrowth mantra aside, any immediate solution to the crisis will require limits to carbon emissions, limits that will fall unfairly upon the disadvantaged unless some compensatory distribution– national and global affirmative action– is established. In other words, should sacrifices be necessary, they must be fairly imposed. No poor country or poor population should be required or even asked to make commensurate sacrifices with wealthy countries or wealthy elites. More importantly, their development– their ‘catching up’– should not be delayed as long as they lag behind their wealthier counterparts. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan make a powerful historico-empirical argument that capitalism can never meet this demand in their contribution.

The only large-scale affirmative action program ever effectively actuated was the post-World War II collaboration of the socialist countries, coordinated by the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, known in the West as Comecon). The CMEA based itself on the Leninist doctrine and the history of intensive investment of Soviet resources in the former Russian empire’s disadvantaged oppressed nations. Cognizant of the uneven development produced and reproduced by class society, the Soviet Union proportionately devoted far more resources to the “backward” constituent republics than to the more advanced Russian Republic.

The CMEA sought to continue this policy with the post-war socialist community. For example, the Soviet Union would offer an extended contract for oil to Cuba at the lowest market price of a previous period, while agreeing to purchase a fixed amount of sugar at the highest market price of that period. In addition, the Soviet Union would grant the poorer member state favorable, extended payment terms. It should be noted that the Soviet beet crop was more than adequate to supply Soviet sugar needs at a lower cost. At the same time, the Soviet Union would provide grants and low-interest, long-term loans for Cuban infrastructure and industrial development.

This, and most internal CMEA agreements, typified affirmative action on a massive scale to correct uneven development.

Given that capitalism has never known or even devised such a leveling, developmentally egalitarian approach in international affairs nor that any country today practices it (apart from socialist Cuba, generously, but with limited resources), the necessity for global affirmative action on the environment would seem to be a powerful argument for socialism among leftist activists.

True to the history of Western Marxism, European-North American socialists find little worthwhile in the history of the Soviet Union, so the argument seldom sees the light of day.

That is not to say that the contributors to Degrowth Planning are unaware of the inequalities standing in the way of any fair and equitable answer to the environmental crisis. Foster is explicit: “At the same time, the poorer countries with low ecological footprints have to be allowed to develop in a general process that includes contraction in throughput of energy and materials in the rich countries and the convergence of per capita consumption in physical terms in the world as a whole.”

But what is lacking with all the participants’ accounts is agency. Who will tackle these challenges? Who will adopt a program that incorporates these considerations? Who will build a movement to move a program forward?

It would be unfair to fault the twelve academics contributing to this issue for having no ready answer to these questions. Nonetheless, if theory is to matter, we must have practical answers (Isikara and Narin almost broach this issue, but deliver it in unnecessarily opaque academic language) and avoid utopia-spinning. Too often intellectuals deliver theory in the passive voice: “What is objectively necessary at this point in human history is therefore a revolutionary transformation… governing production, consumption, and distribution… a shift away from the system of monopoly capital, exploitation, expropriation, waste, and the endless drive to accumulation.”

Yes, but who is to accomplish this and how are they to do it?

It is far easier to say who will not do it! But surely it can be conceded that we need a class-based revolutionary party committed to a robust socialism that will wrest political and economic power from the capitalist class. Should we not be vigorously working toward that end if we want to avoid our date with doom?

Despite my reservations, I strongly recommend the special Monthly Review issue “Planned Degrowth: ecosocialism and sustainable human development.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Postliberalism: A Dangerous “New” Conservatism

Chris Wright — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 16:30:13 +0000

In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the most thoughtful expressions of classical liberalism, these passages appear:

The true end of Man… is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes… Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies but merely with mechanical exactness…

[T]he principle of the true art of social intercourse consists in a ceaseless endeavor to grasp the innermost individuality of another, to avail oneself of it, and, with the deepest respect for it as the individuality of another, to act upon it… The very variety arising from the union of numbers of individuals is the highest good which social life can confer, and this variety is undoubtedly lost in proportion to the degree of State interference. Under such a system, we have not so much the individual members of a nation living united in the bonds of a civil compact, but isolated subjects living in relation to the State…

The entire book is an elaboration of these ideas. In them, we do not see a vulgar individualism, a reduction of humans to mere nodes in the cash-nexus who buy and sell to one another and need protection from each other, the kind of anti-humanism for which traditionalists and Marxists have criticized classical liberalism. We see, instead, an appreciation of the richness of every individuality; an emphasis on the human need for community, respect, friendship, and love; an anarchist critique of coercive institutions, in particular the state; a proto-Marxist theory of the alienation of labor; socialistic intimations that people have the right to control their own labor; in short, a liberal humanism of the sort that leftists of various persuasions would embellish in the following two centuries.

If one were to believe the “postliberals” who have burst onto the ideological scene in recent years, liberalism doesn’t have the moral or intellectual resources for such a mature humanism. It seems they haven’t read Humboldt.

Postliberalism has emerged in the UK and U.S. during the last ten years as a reaction against the manifest failures of what its thinkers call liberalism. The economic, social, political, and environmental crises that afflict the world they attribute to a systemic lack of regard for the “common good,” which, in turn, they attribute to a liberalism that has been horribly successful in its reduction of humans to atoms—“increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” So writes Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. Other vocal postliberals include Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Pabst, Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and some other writers associated with such magazines as American Affairs, UnHerd, and Compact. For all their differences, these writers share a rejection of any one-sided fixation on liberty, whether it be that of right-wing libertarianism—the “free market” doctrine to which the Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed—or left-wing social liberalism, the liberalism of identity politics. They seek to resuscitate ideas of social obligation, duty, community, and tradition, for example in the forms of family, church, and nation. The modern understanding of liberty is unhealthily and immorally licentious; better is the ancient and Christian conception that true freedom consists in self-control, self-discipline (under the constraints of tradition and religion), rather than slavish submission to base and hedonistic appetites.

Postliberals, therefore, criticize the modern gospel of “progress” and its ideological cognates, alleged solvents of social bonds, such as “Enlightenment rationalism,” or the application of critical reason to all forms of order and authority for the sake of dismantling whatever isn’t emancipatory, liberal, or conducive to economic growth. Their perspective is reminiscent of that of the social theorist and historian Christopher Lasch, whose 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics was an extended critique of the ideology of progress and a history of its dissenters in the United States. Preferring an honest recognition of ineluctable limits—not least ecological limits—over modern liberalism’s faith in endless economic growth, endless moral progress, and liberation from the benighted parochialism of the past, Lasch turned to the culture of the lower middle class as a more human and realistic alternative. Without denying the historical vices of this culture (“envy, resentment, and servility”), he was nevertheless impressed by “the moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty,” in general its rootedness, so different from the deracinated future-fixation—detachment from the past—of contemporary liberal elites. Postliberals share these concerns and values.

What postliberalism amounts to, then, is a rejection of dominant tendencies of modernity. Some writers are more willing than others to acknowledge the positive achievements of liberalism—for instance, in The Politics of Virtue (2016), John Milbank and Adrian Pabst grant that liberalism “has afforded some protection against the worst transgressions upon the liberty of some by the liberty of others”—but, on the whole, postliberals are attracted to a kind of Burkean conservatism. “Right-wing on culture, left-wing on the economy” is how they are usually characterized. Through this formula, they think, it may be possible to bring back social cohesion, “the wisdom of tradition,” and respect for “the common good.”

Two books published this year by leading lights of postliberalism, Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari, provide an opportunity to critically evaluate this “new” school of thought (perhaps not so new). On the one hand, Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future illustrates the weaknesses of the ideology; on the other hand, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It illustrates its potential strengths. Ultimately, however, despite its mutability, postliberalism is misguided and dangerous in its idealism, its theoretical confusions, its political naïveté, and many of its political commitments. It too easily slides into proto-fascism. What is valid in it can be and has been expressed more sophisticatedly by the Marxist left.

Since it has the ear of some right-wing populists, such as J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, and it seems to be growing in influence, this ideology should be taken seriously. Leftists may be able to find common ground with its advocates on certain issues, but in general, they should strongly resist this latest brand of conservatism.

The Idealism of Postliberalism

One of the major analytical flaws of postliberalism is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of all conservatism: its anti-Marxian idealism. In all his romantic talk of reverence for ancestral traditions, Edmund Burke abstracted from the actual daily functioning of these traditions, from their foundations in appalling violence, in constant violations of the dignity and freedom of the lower classes, in the irrationality of a nation’s being subject to the will of some arbitrary monarch who happened to be born to a previous monarch. A very different conservative, Milton Friedman, similarly abstracted from the daily realities of capitalism—the indignities of working for a boss, the suppression of the right to unionize, the violence in which the rule of capital is grounded—in his simplistic paeans to “freedom.” (His famous book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) consists of abstract idealizations like this one, chosen at random: “The kind of economic organization that promotes economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.” As if, in the real world, economic power doesn’t tend to confer political power!) Fascism was even worse: it idealized will, nation, race, the state, the Leader, and war, abstracting from the grubby realities of all these things.

Being a type of conservatism, postliberalism does the same. Its very name is idealistic and simplistic. “Liberalism” can’t be the fundamental problem we face today for the simple reason that there isn’t only one liberalism, there are many. Among the classical liberals, there were British, French, American, and German figures, as diverse as John Locke, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kant, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville. There were socialists, anarchists, and capitalists. There were deists, Protestants, Catholics, and atheists. There were democrats, republicans, and monarchists. And in the twentieth century, liberalism evolved in even more complex ways, towards social democracy and its protection not only of “negative liberty” but also “positive liberty,” as in the freedom of people to have a living wage, a home, an education, and affordable healthcare. Even the anarchist communism of Peter Kropotkin can be said, in some respects, to belong to the liberal tradition. In short, the core intuition of liberalism—“a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life,” as Lionel Trilling described it—can be fleshed out institutionally in innumerable ways, including in socialism, i.e., people’s democratic control of their work. (In fact, one can argue that Marxism is but a continuation and conceptual deepening of the best traditions of liberalism.)

Patrick Deneen’s two recent books—Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change—exemplify the idealism of conservatism. Again and again, imposing a false unity on the liberal tradition, he blames liberalism for things that are more realistically attributed to capitalism. When he refers to “[recent] decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” what he means is capitalist dismantling. Liberalism is but an ideological attitude, a constellation of philosophies; capitalism—how people work, how they acquire property, how they exchange goods, how class relations are structured, how culture is produced and politics is organized—is the real basis for a way of life.

When Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed, writes that “[liberalism] has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities,” one recalls the words of an infinitely more profound thinker:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

No mere ideological “tendency” (to quote Trilling again) could achieve all this. It is the class structures of capitalism that have remade the world.

Regime Change is shot through with idealism. The basic structure of the book is reasonable enough: in the first two chapters, Deneen diagnoses the faults of liberalism, including not only its ostensible ripping apart and atomizing of the social fabric but also its elevation of hypocritical liberal elites (“the managerial class,” the real power elite) who don’t care about “the people” but use identity politics to pretend they do, shredding the last vestiges of traditional norms in the process. In the next three chapters, he presents the postliberal vision. He calls this “common-good conservatism,” associating it with Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and G. K. Chesterton, but more generally with “the classical and Christian tradition of the West—a common-good political order that seeks to harmonize the various contentious elements of any human society.” This conservatism aligns itself with the “common sense” of ordinary people, who “seek stability, predictability, and order within the context of a system that is broadly fair.” The solution to contemporary social ills is to implement the political philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a “mixed constitution” (democratic and aristocratic) in which an elite much more noble than that of today will “work to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people,” as the people, in turn, demand excellence from the elite and themselves are influenced by the virtues of the new aristocracy.

In the final two chapters, Deneen fills out his Aristotelian vision, which he calls “aristopopulism,” while also gesturing towards an answer as to how this glorious new society will be realized. His answer isn’t particularly satisfying: “an ennobling of our elite” will come about “through the force of a threat from the popolo [people],” that is, “through the efforts of an energized, forceful, and demanding populace.” This is pretty much all he says on the matter. Likewise, his sketches of the better world to come consist of empty bromides and exhortations. Rather than meritocracy, we need a society that integrates the “working-class ethos of social solidarity, family, community, church, and nation” with the “virtues of those blessed by privilege.” To combat racism, we shouldn’t embrace affirmative action or other divisive approaches but should resurrect Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “deeper ‘integration.’” Tepidly criticizing the ardent nationalism of people like Yoram Hazony (author of The Virtue of Nationalism), National Review editor Rich Lowry, and other “national conservatives,” Deneen proposes instead “a new form of integration of local, national, and international” (italics in the original). What that concretely means he leaves unsaid. His practical program for reinfusing religion into social life is similarly perfunctory, containing little more than such vague entreaties as “a simple first step would be to publicly promote and protect a life of prayer.” Politics should be “a place for prayer, since politics is how we together seek to realize the good that is common.”

One of the greatest swindles of postliberalism is its nostalgia for an idealized past. According to Deneen, the Enlightenment project of individual liberation required the overthrow of “older social forms that had taught and reinforced the cultivation of virtue.” Traditional institutions “protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people,” and in fact are deeply democratic “because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears” and “largely develop from the ‘bottom up.’” As it happens, feudalism wasn’t a particularly democratic institution that cultivated virtue. Nor was absolute monarchy. Nor was the Catholic Church, which, until the spirit of liberalism finally began to permeate it, was a rapacious tyranny that burned heretics, policed thought, crusaded against the advance of knowledge, and made common cause with autocrats everywhere. (Also, of course, it now has the distinction of systemically aiding and abetting child abuse.) However inspiring the figure and philosophy of Jesus may be, history has shown that religious institutions, like all administrative hierarchies, are prone to abusing their power unless suffused with the liberal spirit of respect for individual rights.

This worship of religion is a classic instance of mistaken idealism. Postliberals are enamored of Christianity, attributing much of what is good in our civilization to its religious inheritance and much of what is bad to its abandonment of religion. Most of the time, they ignore questions about whether, after all, it is true that something called “God” exists or that Jesus is His son and was resurrected after dying for our sins, or any of the other dogmas of Christianity (or Judaism)—and rightly so, for in order to evaluate the plausibility of any proposition, it’s necessary to use the Enlightenment’s “rationalistic” method they dislike. With regard to socially relevant questions, they appear to have a pragmatist conception of truth: if a belief is useful, we might as well believe it. But is religion in fact useful? Its violent, tortured, bigoted history suggests otherwise. Nor is it at all clear that humans need religion in order to enjoy a healthy communal and family life or to heed the moral duties that bind us all together.

Often, religion has functioned to undermine the well-being of communities and families. It isn’t a secret that conservative politicians use appeals to religion to convince people to vote against their economic interests. An infamous example is that of Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, a religiose Christian who passed radical tax cuts in 2012 that, as the Brookings Institution summarizes, “led to sluggish growth, lower-than-expected revenues, and brutal cuts to government programs” like schools, housing, infrastructure, and police and fire protection. Similarly, for over a hundred years, businesses in the American South have used conservative Christianity to ward off the threat of unionism, helping to keep the region in a state of relative poverty. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South (2015), historians Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf describe how corporate executives in the postwar era relocated their factories to this region, where “chambers of commerce advertised the benefits [of] locating in a ‘distinctly religious city’ where the ‘labor is of native Anglo-Saxon stock—loyal and efficient.’” The CIO’s Operation Dixie was unable to overcome the resistance that evangelical Protestantism (among other forces) put up to unions.

On the whole, then, postliberals have a rather uncritical attitude towards tradition and religion, as conservatives usually do. They’re nostalgic for a lost social cohesion, the lost unity of “Western culture.” As Adrian Pabst writes in Liberal World Order and Its Critics (2019), identity politics (combined with “corporate crony capitalism”) is “changing the fundamental character of Western civilisation from being a cultural community bound together by common values that define shared interests to a ‘business community’ based on sectional interests that promote divisive values.” But when, exactly, was “Western civilization” such a unitary entity? The history of Europe is the history of constant clashes, constant wars, constant struggles between different value systems and interests and cultures, long centuries of violence and bloody suppression of innumerable popular uprisings. Divisiveness is history. And idealism is false history.

Buried under all the confusions and shallowness of postliberalism, however, there is a truth: throughout its five-hundred-year history, riven by war, privatization and the destruction of the commons, mass immiseration, and the crushing of democracy, capitalism has profoundly disrupted communities and uprooted identities. This is precisely why, or one reason why, leftists and “the people” have fought against it. Genuine leftists are well aware of the human need for roots, for order and stability and community. The great anarchist mystic Simone Weil even wrote a book entitled The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul… Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive.” There is no reason such a recognition should be incompatible with the best traditions of liberalism, for instance Humboldtian liberalism. That is, there is no reason a philosophy of individual rights and individual dignity should preclude a recognition of mutual obligations and the essentially social nature of humanity, including even a valorization of honorable traditions and shared norms that constrain unfettered liberty. This isn’t the place to delve into the philosophies of communism, socialism, and anarchism—the writings of Kropotkin, William Morris, Anton Pannekoek, Rudolf Rocker, Murray Bookchin, etc.—but the societies they envision are hardly licentious or degenerate or atomized. (Or remotely similar to the Soviet Union’s state capitalism, with which socialism and communism are absurdly associated.) They are eminently ordered, communal, and democratic, because they are grounded in a liberal humanist sensibility.

Indeed, one might even say that the real reason the world is in such an awful state is the opposite of that given by postliberals: there is too little freedom, not too much. There is too much authoritarianism, not enough liberalism or democracy. In particular, the authoritarian structures known as corporations have overwhelming power—including over governments—which they certainly do not use in the interests of humanity, community, or social harmony. Noam Chomsky is surely right that classical liberalism, or libertarianism, in its profoundest forms is not only not fulfilled in capitalism but is actually incompatible with it, inasmuch as capitalism tends to violate both the negative and positive liberties (“freedom from” and “freedom to”) of ordinary people. A vast literature of the left, of journalism, and of historical scholarship exposes the tyrannical nature of capitalist institutions; for example, in 2017, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson published a well-received book called Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). (A corporation is “a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they must obey… [T]here is no rule of law… Superiors are unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors,” etc.) The most recent addition to this literature may be a surprise, though: Ahmari’s new book.

Tyranny, Inc. could not be more different from Regime Change. It appears, in fact, that Ahmari is undergoing a semi-conversion to the left, or to aspects of the left. It is striking, after all, that a postliberal should have written a book the very subtitle and substance of which valorizes “American liberty.” Whereas Deneen wallows in a lazy idealism that traffics in windy abstractions like virtue, excellence, and tradition, Ahmari investigates the material conditions workers have faced under the neoliberal onslaught, together with the corrupt political economy that has brought about these abysmal conditions. Where Deneen believes that an enlightened Aristotelian aristocracy will magically come into being and work to uplift the people, Ahmari comprehends the essential fact of class struggle and advocates the resurrection of strong unions and social democracy. He even uses Marxist language: “cultural norms, practices, and beliefs…rest on a material substrate that includes law, politics, and economics.” In short, while Deneen and his co-thinkers blame a unitary ideology of their imagination called liberalism, Ahmari, at least in this book, blames capitalism.

One can’t help wondering if the postliberal gang is a little unhappy with Ahmari’s semi-apostasy. Consider his criticisms of conservatives in his concluding chapter:

[C]onservative defenders of the [social] system are often the first to lament its cultural ramifications: …a decline in civic and religious engagement, particularly among the poor and working classes; low rates of marriage and family formation; and so on.

…[What results] is a downright ludicrous politics centered on preaching timeless virtues while denying what political theory going back to the Greeks has taught, and what every good parent or teacher knows: that cultivating virtue requires tangible, structural supports. A child will struggle to master honesty if his parents routinely model dishonesty; a body politic will likewise spurn the virtues if subjected to merciless economic exploitation.

It’s true that more populist conservatives these days are prepared to defend right-wing cultural values against ‘woke capital.’ But few if any dare question the coercive power of capital itself. Dig into the policy platforms of tub-thumping GOP populists, and you will likely find effusions of unreserved praise for capitalism.

Here, he is coming close to the realization that right-wing populism is completely phony, that it has always functioned to distract from the class conflicts that are fundamentally responsible for popular suffering, so that a large portion of the public instead rages against LGBTQ people, liberals, Muslims, immigrants, Jews, Communists, China, and anyone else not big business. To be sure, postliberals don’t effusively praise capitalism, as other populist conservatives do. But if they really valued “the common good” about which they prattle, they would, like leftists and the new-and-improved Ahmari, direct their ire at the chief agents of the collapse of community, family, morality, and the natural environment, namely the capitalist class. Otherwise they’re in danger of being useful idiots for this class that is interested only in further shredding the social compact.

Tyranny, Inc. is dense with journalistic investigations of a litany of types of “coercion” corporations inflict today on employees and the public, informed by a competent telling of the history behind it all (relying on scholars like Karl Polanyi, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Harvey). Among other topics, Ahmari illuminates the many ways in which the sacred doctrine of “liberty of contract” between employer and employee conceals chasmic disparities in power that can ruin people’s lives. He illustrates the capture of the judiciary by the corporate sector. He exposes the predations of private equity, including its use of private emergency services (firefighting firms, ambulance companies) to fleece unsuspecting innocents of tens of thousands of dollars. He discusses the ongoing evisceration by Big Tech and Big Finance of the U.S.’s newspaper industry, which has seen almost a third of its newspapers shutter since 2005 (while many of the remainder are gutted by their new Wall Street owners). And so on. The most viable solution to all these tragedies, he argues, is to revive Galbraithian countervailing power. “Once more, it’s up to the American worker to drag our politicians and corporate leaders into a new consensus.”

Insofar as Ahmari remains a postliberal, his book shows the mutability of this ideology. Its proponents can choose any particular agenda to devote their energies to, whether reconstituting unions and social democracy, advocating a Catholic theocracy (like Adrian Vermeule), fighting against the rights of non-heteronormative people, seeking a much more restrictive immigration regime, denouncing so-called “liberal” interventionist foreign policy, or prohibiting the teaching of the history of racism in the U.S.’s public schools. Rhetorically at least, all of this can be defended in terms of shoring up the disintegrating social order and protecting “communal solidarity.” In a sense, this mutability can be considered a strength, for it allows postliberalism to appeal to people of very different values and interests. But it is the strength of fascism, an ideology that likewise prided itself on being postliberal. Fascism was no less resourceful in appealing to different groups of people, including peasants, landowners, industrialists, the petty bourgeois, racists, traditionalists, even a small minority of workers, who were told their interests would be represented in the great community of the nation bound together by common traditions. In practice, of course, fascism, as a species of conservatism, ended up representing above all the interests of the ruling class, while crushing unions and working-class political parties.

The Proto-Fascism of Postliberalism

Tyranny, Inc. shows that leftists can find common cause with postliberals on some issues. To the extent that someone of the right really does care about the common good, or rather the good of the vast majority (to which the good of the ruling class tends to be inimical, since its power rests on the exploitation of others), a socialist might well be willing to work together with him. Such an alliance, necessarily limited and conditional, is often ridiculed as “red-brownism” by leftists, but it does happen in politics that people of different ideologies cooperate on a political campaign or policy that will conduce to the greater good. A politics that rests on maintaining one’s purity is unlikely to get very far.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that postliberalism is very dangerous, potentially fascist. Insofar as it is anti-liberal—which left-leaning postliberals, such as Adrian Pabst, are not—this isn’t a difficult case to make. “Within the West, Hungary has set the standard for a reasonable approach,” Gladden Pappin believes. Vermeule deplores the expansiveness of liberal rights: “Yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest, or who knows what.” In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony argues that “cultivation of the national religion is an indispensable purpose of government.” He goes so far as to affirm, quoting Irving Kristol, that “there is no inherent right to self-government if it means that such government is vicious, mean, squalid, and debased.” But who is to make such a judgment? Why is your definition of what is right and good necessarily better than someone else’s? Are you infallible? What gives a reactionary religious nationalist like Hazony the right to impose his vision of the good life on an entire society?

Apart from the noxious political commitments of most postliberals, there is an even deeper problem: in conditions in the United States today, to ground one’s politics in attacking liberalism is to undermine postliberals’ own professed values of “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant” (to quote Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics). This is because the chief beneficiaries are the forces most aggressively sabotaging these values, the Republican Party and reactionaries in the business community.

To put it bluntly, postliberals’ embrace of politicians like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, even (in some cases) Donald Trump, and their hope for an authentically populist, working-class Republican Party, is incredibly naïve. Nor is it new. At least since (in fact, before) Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Republican politicians have been clothing themselves in populist garb, stoking culture wars and denouncing liberal elites in order to cleave the “working-class” vote from Democrats. As Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew traveled the country attacking “permissivists,” “elitists,” “radical liberals,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts.” Reagan liked to invoke the “postliberal” themes of family and community: “When they [Democrats] talk about family, they mean Big Brother in Washington. When we talk about family, we mean ‘honor thy father and mother.’” These themes, of course, have been a mainstay of Republican rhetoric for generations. “I am here to say to America,” Bob Dole pontificated, “do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history. Do not topple the pillars of those beliefs—God, family, honor, duty, country—that have brought us through time and time again.” George W. Bush preached the virtues of compassionate conservatism, which proved to be just as oxymoronic as common-good conservatism will doubtless be. Today, the enemies du jour are critical race theory, transgenderism, and wokeness, but the underlying strategy is always the same.

And what does that strategy eventuate in? Tax cuts for the rich, gutting of regulations to protect the environment, and a war on workers and the poor. Trump’s NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. His administration weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. The great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spout racist “great replacement” nonsense and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. Meanwhile, the Republican Party remains rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. If this sabotage of life itself is what the postliberal common good looks like, one might even prefer the classical fascists.

Analytically, a key error that helps make possible postliberal political naïveté (assuming the likes of Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony are acting in good faith) is to associate together, in one overarching nefarious tradition, classical liberals, modern economic conservatives, New Deal liberals, contemporary centrist liberals, woke identitarians, and “liberal” imperialists from Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In a sense, even Marxism is included in this tradition, inasmuch as it shares the orientation towards progress of all these groups, their detachment from and denial of the virtues of tradition. (As if the left doesn’t want to preserve healthy traditions and abandon unhealthy ones.) This is a hopelessly confused classification, wholly superficial because of its idealistic focus on the supposed shared commitment to vague concepts of progress and freedom. In order to understand political history, you have to consider the material interests that these different groups and ideologies serve.

For example, economic conservatives like Milton Friedman or Paul Ryan are liberal or libertarian in name only. Their talk of free markets is a fig leaf for outright authoritarianism in the form of slavish support for corporate tyrannies (as Ahmari describes), which would have horrified classical liberals like Adam Smith. Most conservatives don’t care about a mythical free market anyway, as shown by their enthusiasm for exorbitant government spending on the defense industry and for munificent tax breaks and subsidies for corporations. Capitalism could not survive without these sorts of government interventions, nor can markets operate without some firms soon exerting “illiberal” market power; so it is idle for postliberals to talk about a nonexistent economic liberalism.

New Deal liberals were and are totally different from self-styled economic liberals, serving a popular constituency—so it’s odd that Deneen attacks them, too. After all, they often acted—as progressives still act—in approximately the same way as his ideal aristocracy would, “work[ing] to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people.” If one cares about the common good, why denounce social democracy, which more than any other capitalist formation protected families and communities? But because the progressive state was irreligious, non-traditional, and supposedly inspired by elite fear and loathing of the people (?), it was and is bad. (Deneen also opines that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order,” citing no evidence.) His preferred reforms include increasing the size of the House of Representatives to 6,000 members; requiring that every American serve one year in the military; “substantially reducing” university education and investing in more vocational education; breaking up monopolistic companies; investing more public funds in infrastructure and manufacturing; penalizing companies that employ undocumented immigrants; banning pornography and passing laws that promote “public morality”; and enacting policies that reward marriage and family formation, such as Hungary has instituted under Orbán. Predictably, he says nothing about labor unions, except, as a parenthesis, that strengthening them is “a worthy undertaking.”

Leftists would be more sympathetic to postliberals’ contempt for the conventional centrist liberalism of the Democratic Party today, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. Indeed, many are similarly disdainful of the performative, business-friendly identity politics that has become a dominant ethos in the “professional-managerial class” that postliberals despise. But to call this “class” the real power elite, the real oppressors—as Deneen and others do—is both laughable and proto-fascist. This thesis is a core premise of right-wing postliberalism, for, if you can find a villain that isn’t the capitalist class, you don’t have to locate yourself uncomfortably close to the left. The PMC will do the job nicely, since it’s a diffuse category of people, many of whom have an elite status, that pervades and partially runs society’s hegemonic institutions. Its members tend to be culturally different from the masses of Americans without a college degree, so it’s easy to stir up resentment against them, which can be used to elect reactionaries who will do the bidding of the real ruling class (while blaming woke liberal professionals for the suffering that results).

Deneen’s treatment of the “managerial elite” is influenced by a favorite text of postliberals, Michael Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020), which itself is influenced by James Burnham’s famous book The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham posited that ownership and control were separated in modern corporations, and that, as a result, a new managerial class was replacing capitalists as the ruling class. This was a flawed analysis: for one thing, despite the transformations of the economy that had indeed occurred in preceding decades, corporations were still subject to the logic of capital, which required that they squeeze profits out of the exploited labor of workers. Capitalism was not ending. But whatever plausibility the thesis may have once had was long gone by the time of the 1980s’ shareholder revolution, which Deneen and Lind seem not to have heard of. The stubborn fact is that some people still make their money from ownership and investments, while others make money by selling their labor-power. These two groups tend to have antagonistic interests, an antagonism rooted not in the vague cultural differences between the “meritocracy” and “the people” that Deneen describes—such as (he says) the former’s mobility, its “disconnection from a shared cultural inheritance,” and its identity politics—but rather in objective structures of how money is made and how power is distributed in the workplace and the economy.

It is true that most professionals occupy an ambiguous place between capitalists and the larger working class. Barbara and John Ehrenreich theorized this ambiguity in their landmark 1977 essay “The Professional-Managerial Class,” and Marxists since then have devoted a great deal of effort to making sense of this huge group of people, some of whom have more interests in common with the traditional working class and others with corporate executives and owners. Since its emergence in the early twentieth century to help manage “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations,” the PMC has, most of the time, not shown much solidarity with the blue-collar working class. In fact, in their 2013 essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream,” the Ehrenreichs argue it “has played a major role in the oppression and disempowerment of the old working class.” Professionals (usually more or less politically centrist, or “liberal” in today’s parlance) are easy to dislike, since they often exhibit the vices of high-status groups everywhere: they’re prone to being smug, elitist, hypocritical, conformist despite their pretensions to independent thought, complicit in the neoliberal evisceration of society, etc. Leftists are, perhaps, almost as fond of ridiculing them as conservatives; see Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (2021) and Amber A’Lee Frost’s “The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class” for examples.

Nevertheless, if you want a more communal, just, and sustainable social order, you have to think about strategy. No class exemplifies virtue. The question is whether your agenda will be to dismantle corporate power, the real engine behind the atomization that postliberals decry, or to attack the relative peons of the PMC, who (as the Ehrenreichs note) are beginning to succumb to the disintegrating economic and political forces that have decimated the old working class. The second path is the road of fascism, the search for a scapegoat that only ends up empowering the most vicious elements of the ruling class. The first path, according to which professionals in precarious economic circumstances ought to be appealed to instead of vilified, is the road to genuine social change.

In other words, postliberals have to make a decision: do they want to concentrate on combating social liberalism—banning pornography, criminalizing gender-affirming health care for those who suffer from dysphoria, erecting draconian barriers to immigration, banning “liberal” books and school curricula that address America’s real history—thereby empowering faux-populist Republicans who will cut social programs, attack unions, increase military spending, accelerate environmental destruction, give corporations and the wealthy even more power than they have, and devastate families and communities? Or do they want to concentrate on tackling the latter crises and forego a war on social liberalism? They can’t have it both ways, because only the left will ever honestly confront the material catastrophes that are savaging working-class communities. The left itself would do well to start prioritizing class solidarity rather than only identity politics (as some leftists have argued), but at least it is trying to do far more for the working class than the right is (since the right, after all, exists to serve business). Even Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have enormously benefited working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection.

Thus, because of its alleged interest in the public good but its conservative (Republican) orientation, postliberalism is ultimately incoherent. It is not a new ideology, being in many ways a return of paleoconservatism, of the anti-modernism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan, even of the—admittedly more extreme—alt-right of several years ago, which shared a lot of the reactionary cultural grievances of postliberals. Deneen & Company try to make their ideas more respectable by invoking Aristotle, Aquinas, Tocqueville, Pope Leo XIII, and other exalted names, but this is a transparent exercise in idealistic mystification. The proto-fascism is right below the surface.

There is a particle of hope, however. If more postliberals choose the left-wing path of Tyranny, Inc. than the far-right path of Regime Change, they might manage to make a positive contribution to American politics. But this will require shedding their illusions about the likes of J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, and instead following the example of, say, Bernie Sanders. That’s where a humane, working-class politics is to be found.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

A Reading List for the Delhi Police from Tricontinental Research Services

Vijay Prashad — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 16:36:41 +0000

On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?

At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.

During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:

1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.

2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.

3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.

4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.

5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).

6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.

7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.

8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.

9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.

10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.

11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.

12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.

The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.

Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Policing and Policy

T.P. Wilkinson — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:23:24 +0000

To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as literature there are still remarkable insights to be gleaned, even if the excessive attacks on the Soviet Union should be taken cum grano sale. The first point was formal— the use of footnotes in a literary text to comment on what had been written in the main narrative. The second observation, anticipating Foucault et al., was the function of ordinary criminals in a population of political prisoners.

Footnotes can have the formal function of lending an otherwise weak or absent authority to a text full of unsubstantiated or anecdotal assertions. They can also permit the shift of reader attention from a story to the underlying or derivative aspects of that story. They can also instigate a dialogue with the text by showing the reader how to expose the covert reading of the shadow text.

The role of ordinary crime in disciplining political prisoners was described in some detail in the hundreds of pages Solzhenitsyn devoted to his topic, what he called the archipelago of incarceration throughout the Soviet Union to which political prisoners under Soviet Union law could be sent. The form he chose was the literary version of the “docudrama“. Meanwhile less partisan authors and scholars have disputed the number of prisons and the actual number of prisoners suggested or claimed in Solzhenitsyn’s book. However, this does not invalidate one of his central observations, namely, the function of organized crime in the operation of an oppressive regime. To be clear about this, no matter what system creates and maintains prisons, prisons are instruments of oppression. Any discussion about theories of penitentiary organisation, correctional practice, punishment cannot erase this fundamental fact. Moreover any society that lacks oppressive/ repressive capacity cannot maintain stable commerce and social interaction. Therefore the question is not whether a society has oppressive or repressive instruments but what does any given society value and therefore support or repress in order to maintain such values?

No later than what I have claimed in an earlier essay is the shift from surplus appropriation to scarcity management in economic theory, modern political economy has been taught through mass education as a new religion— a secular form of the grace and sin regime established by the Latin and Reformed clerical elite in the reorganisation of sparsely settled sedentary populations in the Western peninsula of Eurasia into fodder for nomadic barbarians who would extend their empire over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Until the political-economic apologists were faced with the abolition of slavery and the ascendency of an industrial proletariat, theory focused on how to allocate stolen wealth among the elite estates. With the abolition of slavery (around 1886), the principal occupation of political-economists and the school known now as Social Darwinism was to explain how to prevent the newly freed and the proletariat from claiming their share of the wealth their labour had generated over half a millennia. The explanation they developed was the theory of marginal utility and the redirection of economic management to administering newly discovered “scarcity.”

Introduction of scarcity as the underlying condition of political economy — perversely at times when capitalist crises of overproduction were recurrent — was a sleight of hand. Fast forward to the end of the War against the Soviet Union and Communism: in the US a Canadian Stanford (amazingly) economist named Lorie Tarshis published a textbook, The Elements of Economics (1947) An Introduction to the Theory of Price and Employment, that was recognized as the first textbook in the US based on the theories of Maynard Keynes. This book was quickly banned after a vicious letter-writing campaign led in part by archconservative and reputed CIA asset, William F. Buckley. When I say “banned”, I mean banned. In more than twenty years it has been impossible for me to find even second-hand editions of this book. It is available only in a very difficult to use e-book version in Internet Archive. That is the condition more than fifty years after it was first published. In its place was the Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) by Paul Samuelson. It is to the best of my knowledge the only introductory economics textbook in use in the English-speaking world.

Why is that important? What has that to do with Solzhenitsyn and organized crime in prisons, one might ask? Tarshis was far from being a communist as was insinuated at the time. Maynard Keynes was a liberal eugenics adherent and no friend of the working class or poor. However, Tarshis following Keynes included a very important chapter: on administered pricing and monopoly/ oligopoly. Samuelson’s contract as theoretical “hit man” was to expunge this critical element of political economy from the study and teaching of economics. He was also— thanks to the enormous academic-criminal enterprise of which many in his family have been a part, e.g. Lawrence Summers— able to reap accolades long before that ostensible bête noir of liberals, Milton Friedman, earned his fame as economic terrorist (especially as leading theorist of Chile’s economic destruction after 1973).

What is administered pricing? According to the fairy tale still propagated by the Samuelson catechism, all prices are derived from scarcity equations settled in the market by a tendency of supply and demand to reach equilibrium. The deceit— not unlike that propagated by climate hysteriacs- is that there is such a thing as “equilibrium,” never mind economic equilibrium. Tarshis distinguished quite clearly between real economies of scarcity or surplus and oligarchic/ monopolistic economies. For Samuelson et al. oligarchy and monopoly are merely “imperfect competition”. This is akin to calling something ugly, less beautiful.

According to the so-called “neo-classical synthesis”, only the horrible socialists try to set prices and make economic decisions according to plans. In the “free market” these decisions are the result of mathematical divination derived from the laws of economic nature. However, administered pricing, like administered energy policy, constitutes planning by invisible, publicly unaccountable actors in the private sector using such key performance indicators as return on investment (ROI) or simply how much profit can be obtained at any given price. Since vertically integrated cartels can manipulate input/ factor prices, also with the help of rigged taxation and accounting rules, the question is not at what price will a certain demand level be satisfied but at what price a certain rate of profit can be obtained. This is why such strategies as cross-subsidization or transfer pricing mechanisms can be used to obtain profits despite obvious price inflexibility at the end of the chain— the consumer. To the extent that this is discussed at all in Samuelson and his derivatives it is a pure aberration or distortion. Political power exercised to benefit these actors is concealed by the euphemism “externalities.”

How can a sane person say “distortion” when describing the impact of beneficial ownership of a media market where only five enterprises dominate the industry worldwide? When five oligarchical entities operate under such a regime that were there real, enforceable anti-trust law would be forbidden. Only ignorance or mendacity can call it an exception. It must be treated as the rule. That is point. Assuming that every single graduate that has passed through the Samuelson indoctrination continues either in academic or commercial economics, then we are talking about millions of people whose fundamental education ignores a central fact and operating principle of economics since the beginning of the 20th century. The anecdotal evidence of global ignorance/ mendacity ought to be sufficient to convince any sober thinking person that what we are told about the economy and the society it constitutes is at least twenty per cent nonsense. (I am being generous here.) The damage is actually much worse since the discipline is thus so detached from reality and bound by pseudo-scientific mathematical models that we cannot even begin to imagine another way of organizing resources. (Economist Michael Hudson has worked very hard to do this by returning to the original critical forms of political economic theory: Professor Hudson, who learned economics working in Business and not the Academy, also makes very clear that all modern economies are “planned,” Gosplan was responsible for the Soviet economy, while Wall Street—a closely held private financial cartel—plans the Western economy. See among others Hudson’s Superimperialism)

What does all this have to do with policing?

Since the declaration of the COVID-19 war in 2020 numerous business districts throughout the United States and other Western metropolises have experienced bizarre mass attacks mainly on the retail sector. These attacks often followed or were contemporaneous with mass demonstrations apparently organized and/ or supported by offshore NGOs like Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Action or groups demonstrably trained by the successor to OTPOR. The attacks included looting, vandalism, arson, and assault and battery. Millions of US dollars in property damage were recorded. Many businesses closed their doors or were forced to create expensive security barriers to customers. During this period policing was conspicuous by its absence.

Before continuing the term “offshore” should be explained. The construction of astro-turf organizations requires funding. Organizations are needed to obtain and pay for facilities used whenever masses of people are brought together for any purpose. A daylong event of any sort, especially in countries like the US with a low density of public conveniences, needs provision for basic things like toilets and drinking water. These are key logistical elements of any sustained mass activity and they cost money. A friend of mine from Leipzig who grew up there during the GDR era remarked often about the Monday demonstrations there: who paid for all the toilet facilities during those demonstrations? There was a US TV sitcom, All in the Family (a variant of the 1965-75 British satire Till Death Us Do Part) that was initially quite scandalous not only because of fluid bigoted language but also because the protagonist explicitly talked about and went to the toilet in prime time television. Perhaps American culture is so sanitized that no one can even imagine the necessity of a toilet in public life. Offshore NGOs are these conduits for cash and organizational resources whose actual beneficial owners are screened from public view. The National Endowment for Democracy directs funds for such entities beyond US borders. Other government agencies facilitate these cash and resource flows in the West.

Nevertheless it did not take long to find that massive amounts of money were funnelled to bank accounts of these AstroTurf agents, announced for use as bail bond, etc. At the same time banks on both sides of the great northern border were seizing donations for Canadian truckers protesting government policies. The spokespersons for these demonstrations claimed that they were being held to protest against police brutality and racism, ostensibly in official conduct and economic behaviour. These demonstrations received vast mass media and social media coverage. They were praised by public authorities at state and federal level and in rare instances also by local government officials. During these summers of discontent, much of the population was subject to house arrest; curfews and public assembly restrictions ordered in violation of all principles of due process under US law. In fact, demonstrations attempted to protest the violations of constitutional rights to free speech, due process and freedom of assembly were strictly suppressed by police at all levels while these peculiar demonstrations against police brutality and racism were unobstructed. It became clear that many demonstrators at these events had been bussed in from other locations around the country. Hence local residents were an insignificant part of the action.

As argued in an earlier article, there is an ideology and a strategy at work here. The religious component is a missionary strategy based on and organized through a “purity” cult. However, the social transformation or re-engineering which is the long-term plan has a serious economic component, too. That economic component is rooted in the theories of eugenics and marginal utility or marginalism. Both of these theories arise with a fundamental ideological change that matured in the Manhattan Project.

Prior to 1942, the prevailing – by that I mean also in popular culture—model of humans and nature was mechanical. Nature was a machine and humans, including their cerebral –corporeal interfaces, were mechanical. The culmination of this human model can be found in Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, explained in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911). There was a critique of this model among the Romantics but this minority was itself marginalized in favour of the apparently modern “systems” theories. Romantic criticism of the emerging industrial society was complex and contradictory since, unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism was not a concept of social coherence but an attempt to deal with the inherent incoherence of society and human personality. In any event by 1942, the Romantic approaches to humanism were thoroughly marginalized (to use this metaphor again) in favour of systems theory together with an analogue and then digital-calculation model human nature. When the first artificial intelligence (AI) claims were being asserted at US research universities, one of the leading developers of the underlying programming, Joseph Weizenbaum, denounced the cause in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). In a talk he gave in the late-1990s in his native Germany, he reiterated that the so-called Information Society was fraudulent. Compulsive computation, as he called it, not only erroneously equated data with information. It also substituted calculation for judgment.

Thus it also followed that the mathematical, compulsive model of the world prevented the judgment that would have condemned the Manhattan Project as the quest for the world’s most nihilistic weapons. Today the computer model of man, the “hackable animal”, whose every act is described and defined on the basis of mathematical modelling, includes the negation of judgment (and of values). Instead this mathematical model of man, merely an aerobic program medium with disposable parts, forms the basis for re-engineering of a society that will be “sustainable and robust”. However, there is a grand deception in this language developed through the appropriation of opposition language in the 1970s and its propagation as reconstituted liberation product—political-economic Velveeta. If the economy is driven by calculation of utility and economic man is governed by this rule, then he—yes, he—must by nature be a calculator and governed by the “laws” of mathematics. From this follows the anti-humanism of Norbert Weiner (Cybernetics, 1948) and Yuval Noah Harari. It is crucial to recall that atomic weaponry and genetic engineering were developed contemporaneously and have continued parallel to this day as elements of a unified weapons suite.

The so-called UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ought to be judged first of all by their source. The source of all international policy from the United Nations and its agencies was and remains the executive suite of the world’s largest multinational corporations and the governments they own. The flowery language aside—and one must see it for what it is, marketing (propaganda)—this is the agenda of institutions that have all been sworn to the worldview for which the Manhattan Project stands—atomic domination or annihilation of humanity. From this standpoint the human computer and the digital economy are a continuous fabric with the ARPA Net, now called the Internet, which was designed as sustainable communications in the wake of the two atomic strikes the then US Strategic Air Command had planned to destroy the USSR. That is the immoral foundation of this still proprietary technology that billions have been persuaded is the public sphere and governed by liberal freedoms like speech and assembly.

While there have been legal and commercial challenges to create some kind of public sphere out of this technological space—something akin to squatting and the doctrine of adverse possession—we have seen that the real owners of the Internet regularly assert their ownership, either through state agencies or corporate entities. We have yet to establish a doctrine that the electrical and communications grids upon which the theory of Internet liberty is premised can actually be articulated, let alone aggressively defended. Instead we are debating as to why private owners and their state agents do not respect archaic and naïve ideas about human liberty. Is this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?

There is no enforceable legal regime because there is also no comprehensive economic regime that includes the human as someone more than a computer or machine with legs. There is no biological or moral regime because the argument has been accepted that humans are not animals like the rest of life on the planet and hence no more enemies of Nature than rabbits, fish, birds or fruit trees. Instead the psychopaths of compulsive calculation swoop around the planet to gather, catalogue, patent, digitalize and synthesize everything that could enable their sustainability. Those who fanatically argue for population reduction never appear on the assisted-suicide rosters. Could it be that they don’t mean a reduction of all the population?

Seemingly parallel—but actually at deniable arm’s length—the CIA sponsored World Economic Forum has not only taken the mantle sewn with SDGs, it has also turned them into the loincloth for the not yet unsustainable to wear called “Diversity – Inclusion – Equity”—DIE, for short. (Their marketing departments certainly advised a different order of wording to avoid the obvious connotation.) The principal sponsors of this exclusive club and cutout for the “sustainable class” coincides with those whose wealth derives from the exact opposite of those terms, if one understands them naively. In fact, the WEF and the wholly owned United Nations apparatus are all beneficiaries of the atomic extortion system created by the Manhattan Project. What D-I-E means is literally what Stanley Kubrick so effectively depicted in Doctor Strangelove. It is the world depicted in Soylent Green. It includes the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Outbreak. This Hollywood propaganda product has been called “predictive”. It is part of creating the psychological conditions for re-engineering.

So amid the Woke Crusade, the legally protected vandalism of vast majorities by “pure” fanatics, two phenomena have emerged to coincide with the worldwide counter-insurgency by force of arms (aka the War on Terror and now the war against Russia). These have been a) mass migration from the countries that the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals have been plundering and pillaging since 1975 almost without meaningful opposition at home or abroad and b) abject failure of even the most rudimentary public safety and policing mechanisms to function.

The rampages since 2020 mainly in the US and the mass illegal migration, in the US and EU but also in countries unfortunate enough to border the imperial plunder and pillage operations everywhere except perhaps Russia and China, are destroying the economic order in which the vast majority of people live their lives. Officially this disruption is a struggle for social justice. However, justice is not a natural condition but one created within definable social contexts. Precisely these contexts, until now, defined by nation-state legal and moral regimes, are under universal attack. The assailants are not secret. The attack on definable social contexts in which local communities can establish and maintain social justice is being organized and conducted at the strategic level by those who own the United Nations and compose the World Economic Forum. The sustainable development goals they pursue are those which clearly permit them to sustain their position and power amidst the destruction of every other social structure that could in any way deviate from the digital-computational vision of life (let us not call it humanity) they have been raised to promote and impose.

It is clear testimony to the effectiveness of the psychological weapons used that while so much has been scrubbed from the Internet (or blocked by available search engines), one can still find a notorious 60-Minutes interview in which George Schwartz (Soros) unabashedly admits that since the age of 14 (!) he has unrepentantly participated in the deportation of people (also to slavery or death) in order to profit from confiscation of their goods and property. This man has been able to promote himself as a philanthropist while enriching himself for some 79 years by the same methods. His Open Society foundations, in addition to acting as conduits for other government agencies, have served as cadre schools and organizational support to thousands whose business model is the destruction of the citizen framework that has historically guaranteed social justice or any kind of organized cultural and economic life—for power and profit. He is demonstrably one of the major funders of the AstroTurf NGOs that wage the war for “purity” (DIE) throughout the world. Mr Soros is just the most prominent and unabashed of the atomic war elite. The dissolution of the legal and social context for communities, historical nations or states, is being pursued to create a world of statelessness in which no institutions are available to protect human beings, especially from those who are like Soros.

The removal of policing, whether of borders or city streets, is elemental to this policy. The destruction of the SME sector, one of the COVID-19 objectives, was accelerated by the armed propaganda tactics of the offshore AstroTurf NGOs. There is a complex of weaponry deployed and the US itself has finally become the target of the strategy its owners have pursued for decades in every corner of the empire. Mass migration will flood the labour market in a country already deindustrialised. It will replace furloughed and mRNA poisoned workers and their families with raw muscle from abroad. At the same time the US will be subjected to unique tactics.

While the EU comprises populations long accustomed to national registration, social management and lack of lethal force among the citizens, the US is a society with a notoriously well-armed population. Moreover its most traditional elements include police, fire brigades, and military veterans indoctrinated with even more patriotism than the average person outside the US can imagine. This poses a threat—mirrored in the regime’s fanatical attempts to prevent Donald Trump from standing in the next POTUS election. The ruling oligarchy has surely been asking itself, especially after growing barracks unrest following the forced mRNA injections, whether its uniformed security forces are sufficiently loyal. Therefore it is very likely that among these “military-aged” illegal immigrant males there are cohorts of trained paramilitary infiltrated into the country, like in Libya or Syria. All this can lead to a major reorganization of the economy based on new forms of forced labour and political repression. Without the SME sector the US population becomes even more dependent upon the oligarchs that own corporations like Amazon. At the same time the barriers between licit and illicit economy are being dissolved/ demolished. When ordinary business has to pay protection only armies will be able to do business.

The digital war, launched against humans and nature in 1945 with the obliteration of two Japanese cities, opened a new era, the era of global nihilism whose lingua franca is mathematics and whose form of reality is the mathematical model in which humans are mere computational factors. There are cultures on this planet still that resist this compulsive computation and its practice of natural and human degradation. They cannot be reduced to digits or some factor or marginal utility. They are not enemies of Nature but integral elements of Nature. It is necessary to remember that. Those who bombard us with lies about sustainability are only the descendants of the Strangeloves, the Tellers, von Neumanns, Oppenheimers and the psychopathic misanthropes who paid them for creating the means by which they may sustain themselves (they believe) at the expense of annihilating the rest of us. The Sustainable Development Goals and DIE are the immoral basis by which sustainable atomic, biological and chemical war can be waged against Nature and its human members.

Read related articles: “Missionary Strategy for Social Engineering” and “Poverty and Grace.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Policing and Policy

T.P. Wilkinson — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:23:24 +0000

What does all this have to do with policing?

Read related articles: “Missionary Strategy for Social Engineering” and “Poverty and Grace.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Greater of Two Evils

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 03:46:54 +0000

I’m reposting this article about the Democratic Party five years after it was published because after re-reading it, I wouldn’t change a thing. In addition, the Democratic Party has become even more right-wing since it gained power in 2020. At the end of the article I will name the many ways it has gotten still worse.

How to Conceive of the Two-party System

Lesser of two evils

Among liberals and all the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most, if not all, problems while the Democratic Party is presented as shortsighted, weak and/or incompetent bumblers. Among some of the more compromising members of the Green Party, the lesser of two evils manifests itself when it implores its voters to “vote in safe states”

There are a number of reasons why I will claim that the Democratic Party is not the lesser of two evils. But for now, I want to point out that the lesser of two evils has at its foundation a political spectrum which is organized linearly with conservatives and fascists on the right. Along the left there are liberals, followed by social democrats, state socialists, and anarchists on the extreme left. All the forces moving from liberals leftward are broadly categorized as “progressive.” What this implies is that there are only quantitative differences between being a liberal and being any kind of socialist. In this scenario, being a liberal is somehow closer to being a socialist than being a liberal is to a being a conservative. However, there is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is capitalism.

What unites all socialists – social democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, council communists and anarchists – is opposition to capitalism? What divides us from liberals, whether they are inside or outside the Democratic Party, is that liberals are for capitalism. In relation to the economic system, liberals are closer to conservatives than they are to socialists of any kind. So, the “lesser of two evils “argument is based on the expectation that socialists will ignore the capitalist economic system and make believe that capitalism is somehow progressive. It might have been possible to argue this case 60 years ago, but today capitalism makes its profits on war, slave prison labor and fictitious capital. Characterizing this as “progress” is ludicrous.

The parties are interchangeable

Most anarchists and various varieties of Leninists claim there is no difference between the parties. They say that capitalists control both parties and it is fruitless to make any distinctions. I agree they are both capitalist parties, but what most socialists fail to do is point out that, in addition to protecting the interests of capitalists as Republicans do, the Democratic Party: a) presents itself as representing the middle and lower classes; and (b) stands in the way of the formation of a real opposition to the elites.

The second reason I disagree with the idea that the two parties are simply interchangeable is that it fails to make a distinction between the interests of the ruling and upper classes (Republicans) on the one hand, and the upper middle class (mostly Democrats) on the other. There are real class differences between elites that should not be dissolved.

The Democrats are the greater of two evils

The argument I will make in this article is that the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for about 85% of the population. I make this argument as a Council Communist, and my argument in no way implies voting for Republicans, Greens or even voting at all. Before giving you my reasons for why the Democratic Party is worse for most people I want to give you a sense of how I came up with the figure of 85% .

Old money vs new money and the class composition in the United States

Sociologists have some disagreements over how many classes there are in the United States and what occupations cover what social classes. While some might have a bone to pick about my percentages, I am confident that I am at least in the ballpark. The ruling class constitutes the 1% (or less) of the population and the upper class another 5%. What these classes have in common is that they all live off finance capital and do not have to work. This is what has been called “old money”. This old money had its investments in extractive industries like oil, mining and the war industry. This is the stronghold of the Republican Party.

The upper middle classes consist of doctors, lawyers, architects, and senior managers who make a lot of money, but have to work long hours. It also includes scientists, engineers as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities Yet there are tensions between the elites and the upper middle class. The upper middle class represents “new money” and makes their profits from scientific innovation, the electronics industry, including computers and the Internet, among other avenues. This class constitutes roughly 10% of the population. The upper middle class is the stronghold of the Democratic Party.

A number of economists from Thomas Piketty to Richard Wolff have argued that for these social classes there has been an “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008. For all other classes there has been decline. The role of the Democratic Party is

To represent the actual interests of the upper middle class
To make believe it is a spokesperson for the other 85%

Far be it for me to say that the Republicans and Democrats represent the same thing. There is real class struggle between the interests of the ruling class and the upper class on the one hand and the upper middle class on the other. My point is that for 85% of the population these differences between elites are irrelevant. What the top three classes have in common is a life and death commitment to capitalism – and this commitment is vastly more important than where the sources of their profits come from.

Who are these remaining 85%? Poor people, whether they are employed or not, constitute about 20% of the population. When they are working this includes unskilled work which simply means no previous training is required. Working class people – blue and white collar – represent about 40% of the population. This includes carpenters, welders, electricians, technical workers, secretaries, computer programmers, and X-ray technicians. Middle class people – high school, grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle management, and small mom-and-pop storeowners – are about 25% of the population. Most poor people don’t vote and in a way, they are smart because they understand that the Democratic Party can do nothing for them. While many working-class people don’t vote, highly skilled working class people do vote, and many will vote Democrat. Middle classes are also more likely to vote Democrat with the exception of small business owners. In fact, research by labor theorist Kim Moody into the voting patterns of the last election showed that a high percentage of this petty bourgeois voted for Trump.

The Democratic Party has nothing to offer the middle class

When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my father worked as a free-lance commercial artist about 40 hours per week. My mother stayed home and raised my sister and I. One income could cover all of us. My parents sent me to Catholic grammar schools and high schools, which were not very expensive, but they had to save their money to do it. They helped pay for part of my college education after I dropped out and then came back. They helped my partner and I with a down payment on a house in Oakland, CA. Today both parents in a middle-class family need to work and the work-week for middle class workers is at least 10 hours longer. As for savings, if a middle-class family buys a home, it is much more difficult to save for their children’s education.

In 1970 I was living in Denver, Colorado and had my own studio apartment for $70/month. I worked 20 hours a week at the library as a page and could afford to go to community college part-time. Twenty years later I tried to communicate this to my stepdaughter who was 20 years old and then compared it to her experience. She was working full-time as a waitress, had to live with two other people and could only afford to take a couple of classes without going into debt. Reluctantly and seemingly defeated she had to return home to live if she were to ever graduate from a community college. The Democrats did nothing to stem the tide of the decline of the middle class. Working class and middle class people may continue to vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t mean Democrats are delivering the goods. It just means these classes don’t want to face that:

a) They have no representation;
b) There is no alternative party and they do not live in a democracy.

Now on to why I believe the Democratic Party is worse that the Republican party for this 85% of the population.

The Democratic Party has nothing to do with being liberal

Most people who support the Democratic Party don’t really consider the party as it actually is, but how they imagine it should be according either to political science classes they’ve picked up in high school or college or from what they have picked up unconsciously through conversations. They have also gotten this from Democratic Party members themselves who talk about liberal values while in practice acting like conservatives. These voters think the Democratic Party is liberal. What do I mean by liberal? The term liberal has a long political history which I have traced elsewhere (Counterpunch, Left Liberals Have No Party) but let’s limit the term to what I call “New Deal Liberals”.

These New Deal liberals think that the state should provide essential services like pensions, food stamps, natural disaster relief as well as road and bridge construction. They also think the state should intervene to minimize some of the worst aspects of capitalism such as child wage work or sex slavery. These liberals think that Democrats should support the development of unions to protect the working class. This class deserves an adequate wage and decent working conditions. They also think – as it is in the American dream – that in order to justify their existence, capitalists should make profit from the production of real goods and services. These liberals think that the Democratic Party should support the development of science and research to create an easier life so that the standard of living for the American population should go up from generation to generation. These are the values of New Deal liberals. If the Democratic Party acted as if it supported these things, I could understand why liberals would say voting for the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. The problem is that these New Deal liberals are trapped in a 50-year time warp when the last real liberal Democratic president was Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic Party hasn’t been liberal in 50 years. This is one reason why the program of New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders had been so popular.

It does not take a Marxist to argue that the United States has been in economic decline since the mid 1970’s. It won’t do to blame the Republicans alone for this 50-year degeneration. The Democratic Party has had presidents between 1976 and 1980, in addition to eight years of Clinton, as well as eight years of Obama. They have had twenty years’ worth of chances to put into practice liberal values and they have failed miserably. Under the Democratic Party:

The standard of living is considerably below the standard of living 50 years ago.
The minimum wage bought more in 1967 than it does today.
The standard of living for all racial minorities has declined since the 1970’s.
Unions, which protected the working class, have dwindled to barely 10%.
With the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich, no Democrat is prepared to commit to building infrastructure as a foundation for a modern civilization.
The proportion of wealth claimed by finance capital has dwarfed investment in industrial capital compared to fifty years ago.
The Democrats have signed off on all imperialist wars for the last 50 years.
Science has lost respectably in the United States as it fights a battle against fundamentalism. Do Democrats come out unapologetically for science and challenge the fundamentalists and the New Agers? There are more people in the US who believe in astrology than they did in the Middle Ages. Does the Democratic Party, in the name of its claimed roots in the Enlightenment, rescue the public from these follies? Hardly.

Please tell me in what sense is this party liberal?

The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party: the Republicans play hardball; the Democrats play badminton

It is right about this time that a liberal defending the Democratic Party would chime in and say something about the Supreme Court. The line is “If we don’t get so and so elected, then the evil right-wing judge will get appointed and Roe vs Wade will be threatened.” This line has been trotted out for the last 45 years. What it conveniently ignores is that the Democratic Party has been in power for at least 40% of the time, whether in the executive or any other branch. It has had forty years to load the Supreme Court with rabid liberals so as to bury the right-to-lifers when they had the chance. An oppositional party would have done this. The Democratic Party has not.

Trump has been on a tear destroying what was left of US international diplomatic relations put into place by Kissinger and Brzezinski. His “policies” are consistently right wing “interventions”, whether they succeed or not. At the same time, domestically Trump has been consistently right wing on every issue from public schools, to immigrants to social programs. What he has done has destabilized international and domestic relations. Conservatives have been doing this kind of thing for 50 years, but with more diplomacy. If the Democratic Party were really an oppositional party, I would expect to find liberal interventions that are roughly the reverse of what Trump and the conservatives have done. There have been no such interventions.

Examples of what an oppositional party would look like

Under an oppositional Democratic regime we would have found a normalization of trade relations with Cuba. There would be scientists and engineers sent to Haiti to build and repair roads and bridges destroyed by natural disasters. There would be normalization of relations with Venezuela and bonds built with the social democratic parties of the Latin American left. Domestically the minimum wage would be restored to at least the standard of 50 years ago. After all, statistics show “productivity” has gone up in the late 50 years. Why wouldn’t the standard of living improve? Social Security and pensions would be regularly upgraded to keep up with the cost of inflation. Bridge and road repair would have been undertaken and low-cost housing would be built. A real liberal president might be so bold as to deploy US soldiers to build them since most of them would no longer be employed overseas. They might also have put forward bills implementing a mass transit system, one that is as good as those of Europe or Japan. Has the Democratic Party done any of these things?

This is “opposition”?

Internationally the Democratic Party’s policies have been indistinguishable from the Republicans. Obama did try to normalize relations with Cuba but that was in the service of the potential for foreign investment, not out of any respect for the social project of building the socialism Cuba was engaged in. The US Democratic regimes have done nothing for Haiti. Its attitude towards the Latin American “pink tide” has been hostile while supporting neoliberal restoration whenever and wherever possible.

Domestic Democratic regimes have done nothing to stem the tide of longer work hours and marginalization of workers as well as the temporary and part-time nature of work. Social Security and pensions have not kept up with the cost of inflation. The Democratic Party has had 20 years to repair the bridges, the roads and the sewer systems and what has it done? The Democrats had 20 years to build low-cost housing and get most, if not all, the homeless off the streets. What have Democrats done? Like the Republicans, the Democrats have professed to have no money for infrastructure, low cost housing or improving mass transit. Like the Republicans they have gone along in blocking Universal Health Care that virtually every other industrialized country possesses. But just like the Republicans they suddenly have plenty of money when it comes to funding seven wars and building the prison industrial complex. Time and again Democratic politicians have ratified increasing the military budget despite the fact that it has no state enemies like the Soviet Union.

In 2008 capitalism had another one of its crisis moments. Marxists and non-Marxist economists agree that the banks were the problem. The Democrats, with that classy “first African American president” did not implement a single Keynesian intervention to reign in the banks. No banker has even gone to jail. What a real Democratic opposition would have done is to tell the banks something like, “look, the public has bailed you out this time, but in return for this collective generosity, we require that you make your profits from undertaking all the infrastructural work that needs to be done, like building a 21st century mass transit system and investing some of your profits in low cost housing.” This is what an oppositional party would do. Notice none of this has anything to do with socialism. It’s straight New Deal liberalism.

In sum, the last 45 years have you ever seen a consistent left liberal intervention by Democrats that would be the equivalent of what Trump is doing now or any conservative regime has done in the last 50 years in any of these areas? Has Carter, Clinton I or Obama done anything equivalent in their 20 years of formal power that Republicans have done in their 30 years? No, because if they ever dreamed of doing such a thing the Republicans would have them driven from office as communists. When was the last time a Democratic candidate drove a Republican from office by calling them a fascist? The truth of the matter is that the Republicans play hardball while the Democrats play badminton.

The second reason the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party is because “opposition” is a relative term. The lesser of two evils scenario works with the assumption that parties are partisan: all Republicans vote in block and all Democrats vote in block. This, however, is more the exception than the rule. Most times some Republicans support Democratic policies and most times some Democrats support Republican measures. Many Republican policies would not have been passed had the Democrats really been an oppositional party. In 2004, when Ralph Nader ran for president, he was raked over the coals for “spoiling” the elections. Yet as later research proves, more people who were registered Democrat voted for Republicans than the total number of people who voted for the Green Party.

The Democratic Party is a party of the elites

Those politicians and media critics who inhabit the nether worlds between left liberal and social democracy such as Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Cornell West are tenacious in their search for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. They insist on dividing Democrats into conservative and liberals. The latest version is to call right-wing Democrats “corporate” Democrats as compared to some other kind of Democrat labelled “progressive”. The implication is that it is possible not to be bought hook line and sinker by corporations if you are in the Democratic Party. I am skeptical that any person can run as a Democrat candidate win an election and not make some compromises with corporations even at a local level, I am cynical this can be done at a state or national level. Corporations are ruling class organizations and they own both parties. There is a reason why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X never joined the Democratic Party.

If the last Democratic primaries in which Clinton II was handed the nomination over Bernie Sanders was not enough to make you leave the party, the World Socialist Website published two major articles on how the CIA is running its own candidates as Democrats this year. When a world terrorist organization runs candidates under a liberal banner, isn’t that enough to convince you that the Democratic Party is a party of the elites?

Earlier I stated that the upper middle class represents the Democratic Party and the upper class and the ruling class represent the Republican Party. While each may have interclass differences it is essential for all three social classes that their struggle be seen by the 85% as something this 85% has a stake in. It is important for the ruling class and the upper class that there is a party that appears to represent the unwashed masses (the Democrats). The ruling class and the upper class need the Democratic Party even if they have differences with the upper middle class, whom the Democrats represent. They need the Democratic Party to help create the illusion that voting is an expression of democracy. But the Democratic Party has as much to do with democracy as the Republican Party has to do with republicanism.

The Democratic Party’s presence is an obstacle to building a real opposition to elites

By far the greatest reason the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party is the way in which the presence of the Democratic Party drains energy from developing a real opposition to the elites and the upper middle class.

The Democratic Party attacks the Green Party far more than it attacks Republicans

While the Democratic Party plays badminton with Republicans, it plays hardball with third parties, specifically the Green Party. It does everything it can to keep the Greens off the stage during the debates and makes things difficult when the Greens try to get on the ballot. After the last election, Jill Stein was accused of conspiring with the Russians to undermine the Democrats.

If the Democratic Party was a real liberal party, if it was a real opposition party, if it was a party of the “working people” rather than the elites, it would welcome the Green Party into the debates. With magnanimously liberal self-confidence it would say “the more the merrier. May all parties of the left debate.” It would welcome the Greens or any other left party to register in all 50 states and simply prove its program superior.

The wasted time, energy and loss of collective creativity of non-elites

About 10% of the 40% of working class people are in unions. Think of how much in the way of union dues, energy and time was lost over the last 50 years trying to elect Democratic candidates who did little or nothing for those same unions. All that money, energy and time could have been spent in either deepening the militancy of existing unions or organizing the other 30% of workers into unions.

Think of all untapped creative political activity of working class people who are not in unions that was wasted in being enthusiastic and fanatical about sports teams because they see no hope or interest in being part of a political community. Instead of being on talk show discussion groups on Monday morning talking about what the Broncos should have done or could have done on Sunday, think of the power they could have if instead they spent their time strategizing about how to coordinate their strike efforts.

Think of all the immigrants and refugees in this country working at skilled and semi-skilled jobs that have wasted what little time they had standing in line trying to get Democratic Party politicians elected. That time could have been spent on more “May Days Without An Immigrant” as happened thirteen years ago

Think of all the middle class African Americans whose standards of living has declined over the last 45 years who wasted their vote on Democrats and put their faith in the Black Caucus. Think of the wasted time, effort and energy of all middle class people who often actively campaign and contribute money to the Democratic Party that could have been spent on either building a real liberal party or better yet, a mass socialist party.

For many years, the false promise that the Democratic Party just might be a party of the working people has stood in the way of the largest socialist organization in the United States from building a mass working class party. Social Democrats in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who should have known better continue to blur the line between a real socialist like Eugene Debs and left liberals like Bernie Sanders. With 33,000 members there are still factions of DSA that will not break with the Democrats.

Are there real differences between the neoliberal Democrats and the neoconservative Republicans? Are there differences between Soros and the Koch brothers? Yes, but these differences are not, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire have said, “a dimes worth of difference”, especially compared to what the presence of the Democratic party has done for 50 years to 85% of the population. Their fake opposition has stood in the way of building a mass left political party.

The Democratic Party is a parasite on social movements

Can you remember a time when the Democratic Party had an innovative program of their own that was clearly separate from the Republicans yet distinct from any left wing social movements?

I can’t. What I have seen is a Democratic party that does nothing but sniff out the flesh and blood of social movements and vampirize them. I have no use for identity politics, but I can remember a time when the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with it. Now it runs candidates based on identity politics. Black Lives Matter is now part of the Ford Foundation, a Democratic Party think tank. The Occupy Movement term “occupy” was taken as a name for a Facebook page sympathetic to the Democrats, Occupy Democrats, as if the Democratic Party could be occupied. The Democratic Party, which did nothing for feminism while it was attacked and marginalized by the right wing since the 1980’s, has suddenly “discovered” feminism in the Pink Pussy cats. This is an upper middle class party that sings “We Shall Overcome” fifty years too late.

What should be done?

Rather than focusing on the evil Republican Party, which makes the Democrats seem merely wishy- washy or inept, the policies of the Democratic Party should be attacked relentlessly while paying little attention to Republicans. In the election years, the Green Party should abandon its strategy of soliciting votes in “safe states”. Instead, the Greens should challenge those who claim to be “left-wing” Democrats to get out of the party as a condition for being voted for. In my opinion, there needs to be an all-out war on the Democratic Party as a necessary step to building a mass party. The goal of such a party should not be to win elections, but to use public opportunities as a platform for deepening, spreading and coordinating the commonalities of the interests of the poor, working class and middle class people.

How the Democratic Party Has Gotten Worse in the Last Five Years

It has surrendered its foreign policy maneuvers to neocons Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan.
It has aided, trained and supplied military supplies of fascist forces in Ukraine
It has blown billions of dollars on the war in Ukraine (I thought the Republicans were the “War party”).
It cannot compete with China or Russia in building infrastructure, providing raw material and goods so its solution is to make war on them.
It failed to replace a head of state who is incompetent, incoherent and is incapable of any rhetorical debate while lacking in any power and backbone.
Its profits are made on either destroying the productive forces (wars) or the creation of fictitious capital.
It has exerted no control over the financial, insurance or real-estate sector while the manufacturing sector of the economy declines (this is Build Back Better?).
The Fed solution to debt is to print more money not backed by gold.
The Democrats have done nothing to stabilize the manic-depressive stock market.
It has failed miserably to reform its domestic terrorist organizations, euphemistically referred to as “police departments”, where killing civilians has become normalized.
It has failed miserably to attack the NRA and intervene effectively in regular mass shootings all over the country.
It has done nothing to raise the minimum wage. People can work-full time and be homeless because their rent is higher than their income.
It is does nothing to end the slave labor in prisons or reduce the numbers of people in prison.
It has done nothing about the housing crisis where the number of vacant houses in this country are five times that of the homeless population.
High school and grammar school education is in shambles. Yankee students cannot compete internationally.
Primary and secondary educators are leaving the field. The Yankee state is hiring teachers at that level with no teaching experience or formal training.
After all its promises it has failed to do anything to relieve student debt.
It has failed to protect the Roe vs Wade decision making abortions legal.
The party has a paranoid, conspiratorial explanations for its failures, beginning with the loss of Clinton to Trump in 2016. It used to be the Democratic Party made fun of conspiratorial people like Alex Jones. Today its conspiracies are its stock and trade explanation for its failure.

On the other hand the Democratic Party has embraced New Deal liberalism in the following ways….ummm…it’s okay, I’ll wait.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Conservatives and Communists of the World, Unite!

Eric Walberg — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 04:00:06 +0000

Cosmopolitan — ‘world politics’, ‘world citizen’ — people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don’t cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That’s what democracy and freedom are all about, right?

But is the apparent real?

Statistics suggest there’s much more to all this. Income distribution has never been more skewed, clearly the result of four decades of neoliberalism. We’ve never been closer to world war (except in 1914 and 1939). Weren’t countries merrily trading in ‘free markets’ supposed to be peaceful? Reason and logic fail us.

Peter Myers’ Cosmopolis is a collection of essays, available free at his website, which can be read independently, packed with quotes, reflecting on past conspiracies, critiquing the neoliberal plot for world hegemony today, its origins and its relation to Jewish, Freemason, Nazi, Bolshevik, capitalist ones. The main actors — Trotsky vs Stalin, HG Wells and Orwell, the pandemic, and the return of fascism/ Nazism as the conspirators push for their TINA moment in the Great Reset, culminating in the war in Ukraine.

The star is HG Wells, who proposed a World State which he also called ‘Cosmopolis’. His ‘Open Conspiracy’, the world movement for the supercession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic, and social institutions … a movement aiming at the establishment of a world directorate” (Wells, Open Conspiracy, 1933, p. 32-3.)

There are two main themes. The first centres around the role of Jews in the Russian revolution, how Stalin ‘stole’ ‘their’ evolution (Myers calls it ‘one of the great Denials of our time’¹), and how that resulted in Israel and feminism-gay liberation as the new, post-Marx ‘revolution’. He shows that the new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian Russia and Confucian China, both a hybrid socialist-capitalist authoritarian on the other.

Myers’ other main theme is linking all suspicious recent events — assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, 9/11 + the anthrax letters, MH370, the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset — to deep state elite plans. The WEF ‘penetrates the cabinets’, ‘but for an unelected body to do so is undemocratic and subversive. It implies Oligarchic rule—for the greater good, of course, because most people are Deplorables. The Globalists are attempting to implement the World State advocated by HG Wells.’

Myers draws from dozens of sources, many of which he unearthed himself and with the help of his strategically located readers, from the New York Public Library to the grave site of Stalin’s mother in Georgia. Part of the fun in reading this very readable work is following his sleuthing.

His appendices including the smoking gun revelations of Morrow and Hunt on JFK are welcome reminders of how truly bizarre US politics is. They make the case of assassination as the CIA modus operandi for JFK, MLK, and RFK. Truman’s 1963 Oped to the New York Times calling for the CIA to be brought under control disappeared the moment it appeared. (Eisenhower made sure his message got out and stayed out by springing it on a nationally broadcast farewell speech in 1960.) RFK was killed for calling for an independent investigation of his brother’s death. Which brings us to the ultimate cloak and dagger, the blowing up of North stream. The CIA is alive and well and still out of control.

Promised lands

Myers, like Solzhenitsyn, is not afraid to analyze the role of Russian Jews in the Russian revolution from start to finish, with a short bumpy patch under Stalin. The details are fascinating. It’s finally time to access Soviet history through different lenses, and Myers is a good source for this. One tidbit: ‘Both Trotsky (Kronstadt, collectivization) and Stalin (gulags) lived by the sword and died by the sword.’ i.e. they were both assassinated.²

It struck me that Israel is actually a slicker version of the Russian revolution from Lenin to Putin: a cosmopolitan ideological state, originally socialistic but quickly devolved into authoritarian capitalism, governed by a European elite as a police state oppressing non-Jews. BUT with a ‘heppi end’ for the Jews both in Russia and Israel. All but one of the Russian oligarchs are Jewish.

Just stating this truth is heresy. The centrality of the Jewish tribe must be rigorously denied, a feat which we watch as laws are pushed even in the United Nations (and unwritten laws for media stamped in journalists’ minds), asserting that any criticism of the Jewish state is racism, despite clear practice that shows Israel is the font of racism. Orwell’s 1984 doublethink and newsspeak have a new playing field, where INGSOC (Orwell’s Britain) has devolved into the most loyal supporter of the new Oceania (US), and no one notices that the Grand Inquisitor is a Goldstein.

In the days of the British empire, before the state of Israel, it was easier for the goy empire of the day (Britain) to manoeuvre, as the elite Jews at the centre of that conspiracy had to behave. The Shaftsbury/ MacKinder idea of a Jewish colony in the Middle East was there by the mid-19th century, but when it materialized in 1948, it had a new mother country and quickly started to play its own political games. Jews are nobody’s puppets. So the US-Israel empire is unwieldy and is wearing thin as Israel celebrates 75 years, its diamond jubilee. And moves to unite Sunni and Shia in a newly invigorated united front against Israel, with the US out of the picture, suggest that all the plandemics and wars might not be enough to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Illuminati/ Freemason

Myers deals with the origins of today’s conspiracy, giving a central role to the Illuminati and Freemasons. I’m not convinced that there is more than an just an element of nostalgia in those who identify with these secretive groups. The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale are based on Masonic legends. Mozart’s Magic Flute has clear Illuminist influence. Goethe was a member of the Illuminati. Myers traces Freemason imagery, poses and beliefs as continuous through the post-enlightenment period. The hand-hiding pose traces back to classical times – Aeschines, founder of a rhetoric school, suggested that speaking with an arm outside one’s chiton was bad manners. The pose was used in 18th-century British portraiture as a sign that the sitter was from the upper class.

But there are definitely two versions of today’s conspiracy. Myers sees the Illuminati as more globalist (rule by the United Nations, UN Committees and International courts) as opposed to a more hegemonic nationalist rule by the UK/US/Israel. Jews, the most internationalist/cosmopolitan and yet ‘the most nationalist (chauvinist, self-absorbed) of peoples, are riven by the oscillation between Akhenaten’s Universal God and Jehovah the Tribal God.’

Elite Jews are behind the conspiracies today, though a small minority of ‘good’ Jews reject this secular Judaism-Zionism and work with non-Jews to unite as opponents to this corporate globalization, either nice Wellsian or chauvinist. Such as Jeffrey Sachs, who condemns US imperial policy today, having participated in the post-collapse Russian reforms which almost cemented post-Soviet Russia into the US-led conspiracy. Sachs and Putin ended up on much the same page three decades later, both essentially fighting the post-pandemic push by the globalists.

Marx was not a Freemason nor were Lenin, Trotsky, etc. Stalin, Hitler, Franco banned it as do all dictators. The most authoritative text, Manly Hall, Lost Keys of Freemasonry, 1923, is anodyne, admirable, no hint of anything nefarious, just another ‘path to enlightenment’. Freemasony operate(d) as a secret society but never very secret (unless outlawed) as it became fashionable in the 18th century. It was openly behind both the American and French revolutions (though not the Russian). Now it is more or less completely open. It has evolved over time as capitalism developed and made use of the Freemasons as a governing force of educated bourgeois.

Freemasonry serves imperialism though it is either unaware of this or accepts imperialism as the way to a universal society, the ancient dream, the Tower of Babel in reverse, as sincere striving rather than hubris. Hall’s thought stops with bourgeois society, though he explains the pomp of mystic self-striving which ‘true’ Masons pursue as part of their 33-level initiation.

Myers chides RFK Jr for not pointing to Masonic handshakes by Fauci and others, but are they just colourful flourishes, hiding the real deep state? Most Masons are just nice science-oriented, educated middle class men and women. Though Freemasonry might have sparked the French revolution, it didn’t come to power as a disciplined elite, and it was not a factor in the conspiratorial organization that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Freemasonry did not re-emerge in the former Soviet Union until after the breakup of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

Vladimir Antyufeyev, deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed the ongoing conflict on US and European Masons. If in fact all European leaders are Freemasons and the US has Freemasonry built into its revolution, then Antyufeyev is right. Putin also attacked ‘Masonic’ competitors (at 15 minute spot) and warned that Russia has always ‘caught up with them in strategic weapons’.

An appeal online by Andrey Bogdanov, Great Master Of The Grand Lodge Of Russia, addressing the war in Ukraine, suggests the role of Freemasonry is not a serious lethal conspiracy: ‘For a real Freemason, no matter how complex the outside world is, a sense of inner harmony, fraternal communication and continuity of the chain of communication of Masonic knowledge are the prevailing aspects of its existence. Everything passes and only brotherhood seems eternal to us.’

New morality: anything goes

It is interesting that both ‘Marx and Engels saw the bourgeois family as a farce, oppressing women and predicted communal child-rearing but traditional forms of living, as did HG Wells. ‘ Yet all had traditional families. Rousseau, author of Emile, on free child-rearing, place all five of his children in an orphanage at birth.’ My takeaway: Intellectuals make poor rulers, always theorizing, conflicting and/or totalitarian.

Myers shows how important the Stalin-Trotsky war-within-the-revolution is to understanding our current cultural wars. ‘Trotskyists did not learn from the Soviet Union’s experience, because they deemed Stalinism a ‘betrayal’ of True Communism. Instead, they are bringing the Culture War — begun by Old Bolshevism — to the West; but, as David Horowitz noted, in the West it is called ‘Feminism’ rather than ‘Marxism’. … Whereas Hitler’s supporters are in jail for Holocaust Denial, and most of Stalin’s supporters in the West disappeared after 1991, Trotsky’s heirs and supporters are entrenched in Academia, university campuses, Foundations, the Media, the Public Service, and the Judiciary. They have dominated university campuses for decades. They regularly march in city centres—marches organised by Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, or other Trotskyist sects. Green Left Weekly is a mainly Trotskyist newspaper.’

You must read the details yourself. The ‘revolution’ snuck in the back door.

And now we arrive at the Globalists, the ‘collective West’ elites, the new Oceania, having rewritten 20th c history as a benevolent empire that crushed fascism and communism (i.e., Stalinism), with no mention of the role of Judaism, though it was behind both, as Svengali for the Nazis and as shapers of communism in the latter.

‘The anti-Stalin ‘Trotskyoid’ Left, which Stalin defeated in Russia, has consolidated in the West and largely overthrown the Christian order via the so-called Culture War,’ which is already creating a centre of opposition that brings left and right together. ‘Putin, meanwhile, has re-established Christianity in Russia. The new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian-socialist Russia and Confucian-Stalinist China on the other.’ Which is now attracting the evangelical right in the US, creating fissures in any conspiratorial attempt at a ‘Great Reset’.

Where is the East in all this? Myers points out that ‘Knowledge and ideas spread both ways across the Silk Road, from around 2000BC. Heraclitus’ philosophy is similar to Taoism, and he too took to the hills.’ Eastern thinking culminated in Plato. Marx dismissed ‘oriental despotism’ but Schopenhauer built his philosophy around Buddhism and despised socialist notions of elevating the working class as a historical actor. He quips in The World as Will and Representation that he would prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of his fellow rats. So were the nonentities that followed Stalin rats? They certainly weren’t lions. And the workers’ state collapsed in an awful hurry, with rats fleeing the sinking ship in droves when the hatch opened.

As for totalitarianism, Plato was the first to promote it, though he insisted his republic would only work for a community of 5,000. We shouldn’t blame Plato. ‘When Russian emigrants went to Palestine and established the state of Israel there, they brought with them both socialism (the kibbutzes being a benign kind) and the totalitarianism disclosed by Israel Shahak.³ Their treatment of the Palestinians and of their neighbours bears comparison with Soviet precedents. As for the ‘Open Society’, could there be anything more ‘Closed’ than the Jewish Bible’s mindset in its depiction of Goyim/the Nations?’

It is important to have reliable sources when dealing with Jewish issues. This work by Myers and his online library are essential tools to recognize the Jewish origins of today’s world.

Prescriptions

‘There IS a need for Environmental Limits, but the One Worlders are using this as an excuse to push World Government. The Trotskyist/HG Wells version of Communism is alive and well. ‘Open-border immigration, casual relationships treated as equivalent to marriage, We did not recognise it as Communist simply because we identified Stalin’s modifications as Communism. The Marxist Cultural Revolution, begun in the West in the late 1960s, has taken the West down the path pioneered by the early USSR. … To treat “relationships” as the equivalent of marriage is, in effect, to abolish marriage.’

‘As social breakdown proceeds, desperation will force us back to the essentials of life. We’ll be looking for ways to re-establish family ties, and the bonds between men and women.’ Myers takes many blinkers off leftists’ eyes (including mine). Even John Lennon’s Imagine: ‘no borders and no religion too.’ Many of us were smitten by the promise of 1917, which somehow morphed into a backdoor revolution of sex and drugs.

Myers has his finger in the dyke to stem the flood of book burning and newspeak today: History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. … A great deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed. (1984 p. 250) As Myers points out it is the Trotskyoids of today that are the Thought Police for this brainwashing.

Is there any hope for ‘a less-severe Managerial State one day, not burdened by this Jewish bitterness or, equally, by a ‘white separatist’ prejudice’? China’s long tradition of state bureaucracy without full-blown slavery suggests itself as a tradition worth building on today, though contemporary China’s 996 policy⁴, and the plight of Tibetans, Uighurs and no doubt others, suggest capitalism erases even the most honoured traditions. Egypt and Babylon were successful state bureaucratic formations which were admired by Herodotus. It’s only biblical lore that paints a (self-serving) narrative dissing those civilizations.

Myers’ chapter on the covid plandemic documents how the Trotskyists in Australia sided with the conspiracy, denouncing anti-vaxxers as fascists. He could add the remnant of the communist parties too, which have all gone down the trans/gay road and meekly promoted the pro-vax plan. Even Cuba. The future opposition to the Wellsian world government is taking shape now, centred on Russia and China and their growing trade bloc with the third world (85% of the world population).

Wells is still the inspiration behind the one-worlders today, complete with his recommendation of an end to war and instead to deindustrialize in the interests of preserving the planet. ‘Wells presents a strong case for World Government, and it is a matter we should be discussing openly and (I believe) agonizing over, because we are in a Catch-22 situation. The threats are real, but the outcome could be Tyranny and the End of Civilization.’

‘Was George Orwell wrong when he depicted the coming tyranny as a Left-wing one?’ Left and right have lost their meaning. Genuine conservatives and genuine Marxist socialists have much common ground in opposing the liberal, now neoliberal Great Reset behind the plandemic and the cementing of a Wellsian globalism but under US-Israel.

*****

Afterthought:

The world had its moment of a global civilization. It started in 1917 and embraced the world by 1945 but collapsed when the US launched the Cold War. It was a proto-socialism, which the ‘collective West’ tolerated long enough to let the Communists beat Hitler. In the 1930s, it was implanted in the minds of anyone who took the time to consider it. Even the western media seemed to be on board as the fascist rivals prepared to destroy (the idea of) Communism.

Communism was the 19th century answer to industrial society, but Stalin made it a nonstarter for the ‘collective West’. Reading all this and the complicity of western media in giving Stalin’s regime lots of slack during the 1930s (Ukraine famine, mass arrests, slave labour), I’m reminded of my own ‘sov-symp’ Soviet sympathies, even today, with all the filth and horror exposed. It was never just a ‘managerial’ bureaucratic society. It was and will remain a stirring symbol of defiance of capitalism, banker-capitalist control, war as a plaything for weapons producers and cynical imperialist governments.

And it is Stalinism that retains the stamp of authenticity. The 1920s NEP mixed market was only a way station, and Khrushchev’s Thaw was really just living off the fruits of Stalinism; but without the ideological backbone, it slowly, then quickly collapsed. That spark/ flame in history is now the stuff of legend, still inspiring Africa and Asia for help in liberating themselves in the 1960s. When Russia needed them, they held out their hands.

Yes, Cuba and a few others survive, fiercely attacked by imperialism, but none of them would have existed without the Soviet Union, and none have found a magic key to leave its legacy – good and bad — behind. It still looms as the conscience of the world cosmopolis. It included villains but many more heroes and many happy, if exasperated campers. And inspired the best music of the century (Shostakovich, Prokofiev), the best athletes (hockey, figure skating legends). They proved socialism could work, even under excruciating conditions. Russians are right to mourn its demise. I will die a sovsymp.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

The Cycles and Spirals of Capitalism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 21:15:29 +0000

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic, spiral-like or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century. Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

raw materials (land)
means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
commodities (finished products and services)
money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

a tendency towards a concentration of capital
a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories. Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone. I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^thcentury the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core. In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States. By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
Dutch war-making was superior
the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^thcentury the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
the chance to colonize space
an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^thcentury among workers and peasants
the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Mired in Opportunism

Greg Godels — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 15:15:55 +0000

It should be obvious to everyone that the US left is in difficult straits. It is not even remotely clear who or what counts as left in this country.

To most — encouraged by the capitalist media — the left is the Democratic Party. But that must undoubtedly be mistaken. To be left, one surely has to be outside of the centers of power, looking in; and that certainly is not true of the Democrats and their leaders. Since the beginning of the modern two-party system, the Democrats have been the Pepsi to the Republican Coke, taking its turn in ruling. There may be an estranged left wing of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party itself is not a left organization. Only deranged columnists for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal could believe that fantasy.

Aside from dismissing the Democratic Party as an example of the left, it remains difficult to capture what is left in today’s political life. Historically, the thread that united the “left” politics of the last millennium was its rejection of existing political and/or socio-economic formations. Looking back or forward from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, opposition to the existing order generally defined the left, whether that opposition was broadly democratic, liberal democratic, anarchist, or socialist.

Today, that is no longer true in the US.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, self-proclaimed US leftists had lowered their designs from advocacy of a new order to a defense of the more “progressive” old order: The New Deal, the Great Society, and a human rights-based foreign policy.

James Carter’s presidential administration was perhaps the high point of and the point of departure from expanding the social democratic vision of a better world. Carter’s electoral platform captured the highest aspirations of the non-revolutionary left to date, with job guarantees, national healthcare, and reduced militarism. Within two years of his presidency, Carter had jettisoned his platform and Ted Kennedy picked up the tattered banner.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the broad left has been in retreat, engaged in a defensive posture, lowering its expectations with every electoral cycle.

Marginalized by the Red Scare, ostracization, official repression, and petty-bourgeois self-indulgence, the radical, revolutionary left clung at the margins of political life, advocating a new world against the cynicism and despair fostered by the rout of the “progressive” hordes.

Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union only added to the difficulties of the radical left with the flight of careerists, opportunists, and fair-weather friends from the Marxist-Leninist left.

“Lesser-of-two-evils-ism” became the guiding light of most of the left from the Reagan era onward. With an emboldened, more radical Right emerging, this posture had some merit. The idea of thwarting the rightward march above all other considerations appealed to many. But far too many equated a new Republican-initiated aggression against the gains of working people with Mussolini’s march on Rome.

But nearly half a century later, it has only hardened into a policy of settling for any concession– no matter how small or of little consequence– that the ruling elites will grant. “Lesser-of-two-evils” has inexorably moved the US left to begging for a place within the respectable tent, into a role as the loyal opposition. Too much of our left substituted “please” for “we demand.”

We see this in recent lows in left journalism and commentary. The website Portside — a creation of 1991 dissidents from the Communist Party USA, recovering members of the New Communist Movement, and assorted other activists — illustrates this decline. Portside proves the futility of combining loyal opposition to the Democratic Party mainstream with nostalgia for the New Deal and the Great Society.

While the war in Ukraine has exacerbated and exposed the weaknesses of the US left, there has been slow, but encouraging move toward opposition to the war and the demand to negotiate an end (nearly the entire organized US left picked a side early on and hesitated in calling for the war’s end, with the notable exception of Code Pink).

So it was disappointing, but not surprising to see that Portside recently reposted a provocative article, “The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance,” from Foreign Policy in Focus. Author John Feffer attacks those within the generic left who dare to challenge the rigid narrative on the Ukraine war established by the US State Department and slavishly followed by the mainstream media.

Feffer finds arrogance because the US left — undoubtedly justified in believing that the US manufactures consensus — does not embrace the views of the Ukrainian “left” (part of an equally manufactured consensus). Feffer suggests that first hand, authentic opinions of those who are living in Ukraine trumps the opinion of outsiders, while concealing the well-known fact that the Ukrainian government suppresses those who oppose the war. With eleven parties banned in Ukraine, it is surely likely that public opinion in Ukraine is stifled by this reality. It would be equally silly to value the opinion of the Russian left on the war over what we can independently establish, given similar official pressure.

Feffer’s argument is pure sophistry — a variation on the fallacious argument from authority (ad Verecundiam) as taught in beginning logic textbooks.

Further, Feffer denies that there is a place for US pressure in ending the war. He mocks those who may well exaggerate the possibility of a quick, decisive end to the war, but asks us to believe that it could continue indefinitely without US material aid and encouragement. To promote this view, Feffer pictures the US as a mere ineffective leaf blowing in the global political winds — a vulgar reversal of the real US situation. He conveniently forgets the consequential effects of the international anti-war movement in the 1960s.

If Feffer mounts the best case for Portside’s siding with the US State Department, the editors have no case at all.

But a week later, Portside stoops even lower.

Reposting an incendiary article worthy of Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, or Red Channels, the editors returned to the era of guilt by association and Moscow Gold. “People’s Media” Network, but Pro-Russia and Pro-China — taken from The Daily Beast, the self-described “high-end tabloid” — purports to connect a media outlet and a number of left groups and personalities to a wealthy funding source, Neville “Roy” Singham.

Author William Bredderman desperately wants to foster the impression that these entities take the positions that they take because they are directly or indirectly on the payroll of the Russian Federation and/or the People’s Republic of China, that they are Putin’s or Xi’s puppets. His sole evidence is a two-year old raid and accompanying allegations by the Indian authorities that Singham served as a conduit for foreign money to an Indian opposition media outlet. Even the two-year-old Times of India article cited by Bredderman puts the “link” between Singham and the PRC in quotation marks.

But of course, a link between foreign monies and the Indian medium, NewsClick — should it be established with Singham as an intermediary — would have little evidentiary bearing, other than innuendo, upon the relationship between US leftists and the RF or the PRC. No further evidence is introduced.

Bredderman goes to great lengths to show that the organizations and individuals cited all oppose US foreign policy toward the RF and the PRC. He wants the reader to conclude that this opposition is due to influence, rather than principle, despite the well-established fact that these groups and individuals have long been consistently critical of US foreign policy!

The experts that Bredderman surfaces are all deeply hostile to the left, including the discredited Alexander Reid Ross, the popularizer of the laughably imaginary Red/Brown alliance — a particularly nasty notion that served to divide the left since the 1930s.

Many of us have seen this before: the charge that the civil rights movement was directed and funded by Communists, that the anti-war movement was guided by Moscow, that opposition to US foreign and domestic practices must have insidious origins kept from the general public.

The temptation to point to the source of support is especially tempting when power and wealth bear such overwhelming influence through think tanks, institutes, foundations, grants, non-profits, and a host of other ruling-class fronts posing as “independent” voices. Exposing their hypocrisy is a useful service to those who naïvely take their products at face value.

However, “Gotcha” journalism can be an impediment to critical thinking, a diversion from the substance of unconventional views. Since we cannot know if donors support the left because they agree with them, because they insist on compliance for their donations, or if they are solicited by those they fund, we cannot judge the effect upon the recipient’s independence, nor should we be obsessed with it. To be sure, the money won’t come from the US ruling class to seriously subvert itself!

And that should have crossed the minds of the editors of Portside who posted this scabrous assault on the left. And it should be understood as an attack on the left, since it serves no purpose beyond casting a shadow on a section of the left and raising distracting questions about the rest of the left.

Are the editors still mired in the nonsense of RussiaGate? Do they still see foreigners under our political bed?*

History will decide many of our differences, without help from ruling-class apologists and hucksters.

* While this was being written, Portside reposted an hysterical, crude revival of the RussiaGate nonsense and related conspiratorial gibberish by radio host and spiritualist, Thom Hartmann. By revisiting every discredited, distorted, and misleading claim, Portside demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to get a Democrat elected President in sixteen months.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Promethean City Builders vs Finance Capital Malthusians

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 02:03:19 +0000

Orientation

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article, I contrasted the differences between rising Multipolarism with a declining Anglo-American empire. Taking the side of the multipolarists of the East, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone who bridged the gap between East and West.

His concept of “The American system” defends the Enlightenment as the movement to look to if the west is going to join the multipolar world. I also presented Matthew Ehret’s book The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I The Unfinished Sympathy as a concrete example of the battle between the British System and American system in the 18th and 19thcenturies. At the end of Part I, I raise questions as to where to place these advocates of the American system on the political spectrum and ask who its enemies are.

Are there times when centrism is unrealistic, ungrounded, and against common sense?

Unlike the left-wing and right-wing of the political spectrum, centrism is presented as a golden mean against the extremes. It embodied common sense, as opposed to fanaticism, pragmatism in contrast, unrealistic idealism and non-violence against violence. Yet there are times when centrism doesn’t work; occasions when centrism is not common sense, circumstances when centrism is not pragmatic, when compromise between extremes comes up empty. Not only is centrism unrealistic but the entire linear political spectrum founded at the end of the 18th century is bankrupt.

Strange bedfellows? Finance capitalists and the New Left

By the end of World War II, the financial capitalists had two enemies – the liberalism of FDR and the world communist movement. Most of us know the historical differences between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left represented the world communist movement as well as the forces of the Enlightenment. Is it possible that the emergence of the New Left with very different values driven by Romanticism was shaped by the anti-communist finance capitalists?

My claims in Part II

1)The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalists empire is centrism and it must be opposed.

2) The forces of Promethean City builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.

3) For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left, to oppose the development of a communist movement.

The first image at the top of this article includes arch anti-communists Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The second image is the founder of Democratic Socialist of America, Michael Harrington, also an anti-communist.

Poverty of Centrism

As I wrote in my article: Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description.

Today the fact that liberal and conservative parties are the same is far more significant than their differences. They have at least agreed on:

Support of finance and military capitalism as an economic system domestically
Never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way Marxists would
Suppressing third-party access into political debates.
Supporting imperialism around the world
Supporting the instillation of right-wing dictators
Supporting Israel elites despite 75 years of Zionist fundamentalism and their oppression of Palestinians
Opposition to state-centered socialism around the world

What this means is that:

There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism

The linear political spectrum is too simple for today’s complex politics

Examples include:

China forming alliances with non-socialist countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia
Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists (Germany, Norway, Sweden). This goes way back to Social Democrats voting for war in 1914
Right-wing governments like Modi’s of India supporting a socialist country (China)
The Recent elections in France in which Le Pen (supposed fascist) has social programs to the left of Macron (a neoliberal)
A neoliberal Democratic Party supporting fascist Ukrainian forces

Centrism is bankrupt in extreme capitalist crises

The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is compromising, pragmatic, down-to-earth and can never be unrealistic. Supposedly, centrists are moderate and not hysterical like the fascists or communists. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions the center doesn’t hold. It caves in. In certain periods of history being moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is so overpowering that it would overwhelm its centrist structures. Under the conditions of our time extremes are the only answer because of capitalism’s failure to address its contradictions. It has brought us to the point where neither liberal nor conservative solutions can nor will work. A new model of the political spectrum must be:

More inclusive of many more political ideologies
Economic as well as political
Able to account for qualitative leaps such as revolutions
Able to decenter the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable
Make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum, not just among those next to each other

How the left and some conservatives might work together is because both are industrializers whose goal is to expand the productive forces. They may fight about how the wealth gets distributed but they agree that real wealth should be produced. By contrast, neo-liberals, fascists, Greens, Social Democrats, and anarchists are de-industrializers who abhor the introduction of new wealth-creation, especially nuclear technologies and city building. They are Malthusians.

We are now at the point where I can reintroduce the distinctions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Part I. I want to show how the Anglo-American empire, finance capitalists and the CIA shaped the New Left into embracing Romanticism.

Below is a table I developed from my book Forging Promethean Psychology which compares what the Enlightenment stands for as opposed to Romanticism.

Table A Enlightenment vs Romanticism Compared

Enlightenment (1715-1815)	Category of Comparison	Romanticism (1750 – 1850)
Political – rights of man	Primary Identity	Cultural artistic identity
Against monarchist, aristocratic and religious authorities. Respectful of scientific authority	Attitude Towards Authority	Critical of all authorities
Civilization brings out the best in humanity	Relationship Between Civilization and Nature	Rebellion against civilization Wants to “get back to nature”
Value what is modern and adult	Origins and development of culture and individuals	Value what is primitive in cultures; the innocence of childhood
Primitive superstitious stories before humans had science Myths were also seen as lies told by priests	What is Myth?	Mythic stories hold the key to what is most important to being human Grimm’s fairy tales
Trade was an improvement compared to control of land by kings, aristocrats and the Church	Attitudes Towards Capitalism	Against crass utilitarian commercialism of capitalism
Its predictability and lending itself to measurement	What is Valuable in Nature?	The wild, exotic and untamable
Deist – God is an engineer or watchmaker	Characteristics of Spiritual Presences	Pantheist – god is everywhere in nature. Birth of Neopaganism
Beauty – in symmetry with proportion No unusual or accidental elements in art	Art Appreciation	Sublime – value what is unique, striking, or new; the unusual or accidental features in art.
In the eye of the spectator	What is the Arena for Judging Art?	In the creative process of the artist
Progress Quantitative gradual change	How does Change Occur?	Revolutions Qualitative change through crisis
Deliberation	Planning vs Spontaneity	Spontaneity
Reason should guide emotions	Place of Emotion and Reason	Emotions are valuable in and of themselves and should guide reason
Happiness, serenity, contentment	Types of Emotional States	Storm and stress Mania and depression as signs of real living Altered states, revelry
Confessing inner depths is bad taste	Self-revelations	Confessing inner depths is a virtue Sincerity
Republican reformist	Politics	Revolutionary, apolitical Conservative
Cosmopolitan Exotic people became a laboratory for expanding theory of universal humanity	Cross-cultural Expansion	Parochial Exaggeration of the differences between cultures
Holbach, La Mettrie Diderot, Voltaire	Typical Theorists	Rousseau. Vico, Herder, Burke

The Politics of the Anglo-American Empire, The British System, Romanticism and the New left

The Old Left

As many of you know, soon after World War II capitalists in Mordor set out to destroy the Socialist and Communist parties. But the CIA also wanted to create a relatively harmless alternative to Communism by recruiting leftists who were critical of the Communist Party but did it in the name of socialist democracy. As many of you know, this began with the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Along the way, it helped to craft an ideology of the New Left that would render it harmless against capitalism while at the same time keep the Communist movement from growing back.

The heart of the Old Left was the defense of countries that were at least part way towards socialism – Russia, China and Cuba. Its economic focus was on the inherent contradictions of capitalism whether it be the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, underconsumption or the profit squeeze. Very importantly, communists were committed to the belief that Communism had to be based on abundance, which meant “developing the productive forces”. If a communist society’s economy stagnated that would introduce the temptation to steal. By producing more than enough stealing would not be an issue. As different as anarchists are from Marxists, even anarchists before the 1960s understood that abundance was the foundation for socialism.

The major social category for political organization was socio-economic class. It was only the working class that had the power to overthrow capitalism. Also, the only real democracy was economic democracy in which workers control what is produced, how much is produced and how it is distributed through centralized planning and workers’ control. In terms of political parties the Old Left advocated a Leninist vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries.

While claiming that the workers were internationalists, in practice the Old Left political organization operated at the nation-state level. Whatever tiny ecology or changes in the climate movement existed it was not on the radar of communists. For communists’ growth of the human population was taken as given since by the second half of the 19th century and into the 1950s it seemed human productivity could easily accommodate a rising population.

When it came to the arts and psychology, the Old Left was fairly conservative. In the arts, socialist realist mural painting was predominant. In painting and music, the focus on working class life was its subject matter. In personal life, Communists usually did not drink and their appearance emulated working class clothes. Their personal life was relatively unimportant and their marriages were traditional. They were generally hostile to psychology, saw it as a bourgeois distraction from their main purpose was to work for the revolution. While most Communists were atheists, they understand that most workers were not, and they had to make relative peace with this “superstition” in order to organize workers. The CIA, and the Rockefellers set out to destroy the values of the Old left and replace with a very different orientation to the world. Table B displays the values of the New Left, and what is equally important, how these values support and are beneficial to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers, and the CIA.

Table B How the Values of the New Left Benefit the Anglo-American

Empire, Finance Capital the Rockefellers and the CIA

New Left (beginning in Early 1950s)	Category of Comparison	Benefit to Anglo-American Empire, Finance capital and the Rockefellers
Social Democrats, Anarchists Complaints against excessive State control Lack of worker participation	Point on Political Spectrum	All anti-communism for different reasons Against all communist countries, planned economy
Rejection of Soviet Union, China, Cuba In favor of Sweden, Norway, Denmark	Socialist Countries to Emulate	Loss of international identity with large socialist countries Even socialist countries need capitalism
No – capitalism can go on forever	Does Capitalism have Inherent Limits?	Throws push of politics onto voluntarism Demoralizing people by imagining capitalism is much more flexible than it is and capitalists are more competent than they are
No – we already have too much Socialism is based on morals or sustainability: Malthusianism	Does Socialism have to be Based on Abundance?	Teaching socialists to learn to do with less Socialism based on “degrowth”
Race and sexuality: identity politics Workers have proven to be too interested in material things to be revolutionary	Social Category for Socialist organizing	Race and sexuality don’t have the work location to organize Diffusion of focus
Small is beautiful Anarchist decentralization or planetary society Rejection of nation-state	Political Scale	Rejection of the nation states which is the only political unit that can resist global capitalism
Makes an issue of lack of political party choices under socialism Minimizes democratic gains under socialism in literacy, education and job security and health care	Place of Political Democracy	Diverts focus of socialists into focus on tiny political parties that are never strong enough to take power
Pay attention to Mother Earth Go back to nature	Attitude to Ecology	The issue distracts from socialist organizing to overthrow capitalism Imagining ecological problems might be solved under capitalism
Earth has limited carrying capacity Earth is overpopulated	Growth in Population	Rockefeller-inspired Club of Rome report Blaming the global south for having too many children
Anti-science	Attitude Towards Science	Anti-science dampens down the possibility that alternative energy sources to oil will be found
Solar and wind power Against nuclear power	Natural Resources	Big oil (also little oil) does not have to compete with nuclear power
Reject working class culture for Beat poets, happenings, youth culture (white left)	The Arts	Modern art is anti-working class Drives the working-class away from art museums for inspiration
Personal is political (radical feminism)	Relationship Between the Political and the Personal	Activists become bogged down in attempting to change romance, open marriages and can focus less on political activity
Pot, LSD, peyote	Alcohol – Drugs	CIA flooded communities with LSD for distraction
Expressive hippie clothing (white left)	Clothing	At the beginning this created divisions between middle class and working class: organizational turn-off
Sympathetic to Freudian left – Fromm, Horney, Reich (White left)	Attitude Towards Psychology	Potential socialist organizers become psychotherapists
Alienated from traditional Christianity Interest in Eastern mysticism, native religion	Spirituality	Threatens working class with religions they don’t understand – might consider it Satanic
Romanticism	Intellectual Movements	Championing primitive and childlike to keep people hostile to science and technology
Idealism Cultural, psychological: Frankfurt School Linguistic: postmodernism	Epistemology	Red herring – draws people away from economics and building a socialist party
Global warming	Climate	Supports de-indoctrination
New Left (began in the Early 50’s)	Category of Comparison	Benefit to Anglo-American empire, finance capital, Rockefellers and CIA

Techniques Used by the Powers that be to Undermine Communism

If you examine all twenty categories, the purpose of the CIA and the Rockefellers was to divide and conquer:
Existing state socialism from the New Left
Class on the one hand, race and gender on the other
Personal life and political life
Clothing, physical appearance middle class hippies and the working class
Non-Christian religions and Christianity
Ecology movement and the working class

Distracting people:

With sex and drugs and nihilistic or hedonistic rock music
With psychological preoccupations as at Esalen (The Human Potential Movement, social psychology of groups and therapy) rather than economics
With cultural or linguistic issues (Frankfurt School, postmodernism)
With romantic exoticism, primitivism, individualism

Fragmentation by:

Decentralizing politics from the nation-state to local configurations
Championing infinite diversity to weaken commonality and unity of organization
Treating ecology as separate from a Socialist program
Making art psychological instead socially inspiring

Demoralization

That capitalism had no inherent limits
Undermine belief in progress and that people should expect an abundant life
Pessimistic anti-science
There is no alternative to the Democratic Party

Demonization:

Of nuclear energy
Of all state socialist societies
Any international leader who wants to set their own economic foreign policy

Qualifications

I am not suggesting that the New Left was simply a creature of the CIA and the Rockefellers. The New Left was a movement that came out of the middle class which was anti-war, anti-racist, mostly anti-capitalist and a rebellion against a conservative culture. Surely the “powers that be” did not encourage this. What I am saying is that the CIA and the Rockefellers either intervened directly as in the existence of COINTELPRO or threw money at New Left projects that suited their needs.

Conclusion

In Part II I argued that the political philosophy of the Anglo-American empire is centrism. I argued that political centrists are losing elections all over the world because centrism cannot speak to the extreme crisis that finance capital has created. Also, the linear political spectrum that houses centrism no longer works in depicting political change. I identify five characteristics a new political spectrum would need in order to be workable.

Then I contrasted the multipolar values in the East and the Enlightenment in the West to the Romantic values in depth. The reason for this comparison that Romanticism is the foundation of the Anglo-American empire’s attempt to control the potential forces of Communism in the West by shaping a New Left.

I close my article with a contrast between the Old and the New left. The Old Left of the Communist Party was a great threat to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers and the CIA. All these powers attempted to support the shaping of an anti-communist New Left. I begin with the values of the Old left. Then I identified 20 characteristics of the New Left and how each served directly or indirectly to support the powers that be against the rise of Communism. All twenty characteristics used a combination of five techniques: divide-and-conquer; distraction, fragmentation, demoralization and demonization.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Fuel Shortages in Cuba are Worse Than You Think

Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 23:02:18 +0000

One hundred and fifty young people from the United States and Canada arrived in Cuba in late April 2023, just days before International Workers Day. As members of CODEPINK’s youth cohort, our goal was to understand the Cuban political system, the US blockade and its impacts on everyday life. We sat in a room upon our arrival, listening to our trip hosts explain the issue of fuel shortages on the island. Before they were done talking, the microphones went silent. The power had gone out. The rest of the presentation sounded like faint whispers to the delegates sitting in the back of the room. We tried our best to hear, trying to silence all the background noise to no avail. Thinking of it now, there was no better way to understand how dire the situation was than to see it for ourselves.

In 1960, following the Cuban Revolution that propelled Fidel Castro to power, a memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs was written and later declassified. It stated that a majority of Cubans supported Fidel, and if the US wanted to counter the rise of communism in its backyard, it would have to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and an overthrow of the government.”

The US imposed a blockade which still restricts necessary items from entering Cuba and prevents other countries from selling them to the island. On top of the embargo, the Biden Administration keeps Cuba on a state-sponsor of terrorism list, further restricting economic development. The goal of these policies are explicit in the 1960 memorandum: the US is trying to starve socialism out of Cuba. The purpose of the US policy towards Cuba is to create misery, and it’s proudly displayed on the State Department website.

And we certainly saw misery with our own eyes. Usually for May Day, millions of Cubans rally in Havana, celebrating socialism and workers. May Day was scaled down this year due to fuel shortages – Cuba has to conserve the fuel it has for farming and other necessities. US media certainly reported on it, but without any mention that it was the US government that was causing shortages of all kinds in Cuba.

Leading up to May Day, a massive storm swept through the island, causing emergencies that the Cuban government couldn’t effectively deal with because of the lack of fuel. We sat through multiple power outages, even in a hotel that had decent fuel access. We toured neighborhoods in transformation, learning how Cubans were developing their own communities to have better access to medical care, food and other life affirming services. Even those tours, full of hope and self determination, were plagued by outages. Tourism is a huge industry that helps sustain the Cuban economy, so tourists like us are usually shielded from occurrences like this. We had no way of truly grasping the day to day effects that these power shortages were having on Cubans outside of Havana.

Even though the people we met in Cuba had a thorough understanding of what our country was doing to theirs, they welcomed us with open arms. Not only were they kind to us, they were also hopeful for the kind of future we would build together – one where our two countries can base foreign policy on the person-to-person relationships we build rather than deferring to the dinosaurs in Washington who value the victory of their ideologies over millions of Cuban lives.

Our cohort visited the Blas Roca Contingent where we were warmly welcomed with fresh coconuts, t-shirts, and hats. We joined delegations from all over the world: Switzerland, Australia, Uruguay, Panama, just to name a few. It was amazing to see union leaders and organizers from all over the world come to Cuba to show support for the Cuban project. It was also transformative to see how well Cuban workers are taken care of. The entire facility we were in was a place for the workers and their entire families to come for food, community, and fun. The union even obtained 3 farms in the area in order to grow food for the workers and their families.

Later, a smaller group of us took a tour with a worker at the facility. He told us how his father had grown up very poor before the revolution and how much his family’s life changed for the better after the revolution. He spoke of the hardships of the blockade, especially not

having access to fertilizers for farming which could easily double their yields. He also mentioned how he has had family emigrate to the USA and while he doesn’t fault them for leaving, he himself could never leave the Cuban revolutionary project behind. He is a revolutionary through and through. His story is the kind that the policy makers in the US choose to ignore. Cubans on the island are charting their own course outside US hegemony and it is clear that the US’s policy is to try and deny them that right.

All of us, like the delegations that have gone before us and the countless ones who will go after, returned to the US with a deeply held commitment to end our country’s blockade on the Cuban people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard.

The Fuel Shortages in Cuba are Worse Than You Think

Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 23:02:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard.

The Fuel Shortages in Cuba are Worse Than You Think

Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 23:02:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eli Smith and Kaitlin Blanchard.

Western Marxism: The Unwholesome Temptation

Greg Godels — Mon, 22 May 2023 14:35:37 +0000

Image credit: Left Voice.

The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism.

Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism.

As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. Liberalism — the dominant ideology of the capitalist class — served workers and peasants in their fight against absolutist tyranny.

With capitalism and liberal institutions firmly established, anarchism — the ideology of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois — rivalled Marxism for the leadership of the workers’ movement. Contradictorily, embracing extreme individualism and Utopian democracy distilled from capitalism, yet voicing a bitter hatred of capitalist institutions and economic arrangements, the anarchists failed to offer a viable escape from the crushing weight of capitalism.

Once Bolshevism seized power in 1917, the workers’ movement found an example of real-existing-socialism led by real-avowed-Marxists, a powerful beacon for the way forward in the struggle against capitalism. The victory of the Russian Revolution established Marxism as the most promising road for an exploited majority, with Leninism the only successful ideology for revolutionary change and socialism. To this day, Leninism has remained the only proven guide to socialism.

Immediately after the revolution, rival “Marxisms” sprang up.

The failure of subsequent European revolutions outside of Russia, especially Germany, sheared away numerous intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and György Lukács,who imagined a different, supposedly better, path to proletarian revolution. Buoyed by material support from benefactors, university appointments, and the many eager sponsors of class betrayal, critics and detractors of Leninism abounded.

Especially in the West — North America and Europe– where the working class was significant and growing dramatically, dissidence, class betrayal, and opportunism proved disruptive forces in the world Communist movement, forces that capitalist rulers were eager to support. Young people, inexperienced workers, aspiring intellectuals, and the déclassé, were especially vulnerable to the appeal of independence, purity, idealism, and liberal values. Money, career opportunities, and celebrity were readily available to those who were willing to sell these ideas.

Indeed, not every critic of Marxism-Leninism — revolutionary Communism — was or is insincere or without merit, but honesty demands recognition that no real advocate for overthrowing capitalism could achieve prominence, celebrity, or a mainstream soap box in the capitalist West. He or she could be a curiosity or a token for the sake of appearances — a stooge.

Conversely, any intellectual or political figure who does achieve wide-spread prominence or influence cannot represent a serious, existential challenge to capitalism when the road to prominence and influence is patrolled by the guardians of capitalism.

Nonetheless, the workers’ movement has been plagued by divisive ideological trends or fads spawned by independent voices who, wittingly or not, are exploited by and render service to the capitalist class.

In the West, it is almost impossible to be a young radical and not be tempted by a veritable ideological marketplace of putative anti-capitalist or socialist theories, vying with one another for allegiance. Since the demise of unvarnished, real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union and the disorientation of many Communist and Workers’ parties, the competition of ideas has created even more confusion.

Clearly, the working-class movement, the revolutionary socialist movement, needs guidance to avoid distractions, bogus theories, and corrupted ideas. The march of political neophytes through the arcade of specious, fantastic ideas is a great tragedy, especially regarding those ideas posing as Marxist.

*****

Happily, a new generation of Marxist thinkers are challenging the allure of Marxist pretenders, more specifically, those associated with what has come to be called “Western Marxism.” A sympathetic Wikipedia article offers about as accurate a definition of the words as one might want: “The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.” It couldn’t be made clearer: Western Marxism is anything but the Marxism-Leninism that has buttressed worker-engaged revolutionary parties since the time of the Bolshevik revolution!

Marxist historian and journalist, Vijay Prashad, gave a seminar at the Marx Memorial Library on November 21, 2022, in which he excoriated the Western Marxism of the 1980s:

There was a sustained attack on Marxism in this period, led by New Left Books, now Verso Books, in London, which published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in 1985. The book mischievously utilised the work of Antonio Gramsci to make an attack at Marxism, to in fact champion something they called “post-Marxism.” Post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism: this became the flavour of academic literature coming out of Western countries from the 1980s… Particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a great weakness in our ability to fight back against this denigration of Marxism in the name of post-Marxism… When they [Laclau and Mouffe] talk about “agency” and “the subject” and so on, they have basically walked away from the structuring impact of political economy and returned to a pre-Marxist time; they have in fact not gone beyond Marxism but back to a time before Marxism. (“Viewing Decolonization through a Marxist Lens,” published in Communist Review, Winter 2022/2023)

Prashad places the influential works of Hardt and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari in the same post-Marxist mix.

He regrets the multiculturalism turn because it ”basically took the guts out of the anticolonial, anti-racist critique, at the global level you had the arrival of ‘postcolonial’ thought, and also ‘decoloniality’ — in other words, let’s look at power, let’s look at culture, but let’s not look at the political economy that structures everyday life and behavior and reproduces the colonial mentality; that has to be off the table… So, we entered into a kind of academic morass, where Marxism was not, in a sense, permitted to enter.”

Prashad might well have added the intrusion of rational-choice theory into Marxism in the 1980s, an uninvited analysis of Marxist theory through the lens of methodological individualism and liberal egalitarianism. One leading exponent of what came to be called “analytical Marxism” eviscerated the robust Marxist concept of exploitation by proving that if we have inequality as an initial condition, we will quite logically reproduce inequality– a trivial derivation with little relevance to understanding the historically evolved concept of labor exploitation..

Prashad might have noted the continuing influence of postmodern relativism upon Marxist theory in the 1980s and beyond, a denigration of any claim that Marxism is the science of society. For the postmodernist, Marxism can only be, at best, one of several competing interpretations of society, coherent within Marxist circles, but forbidden from making any greater claim for universality. Moreover, the postmodernist denies that there can ever be any valid overarching theory of capitalism, any “metanarrative” that plots a socio-economic system’s trajectory. While its flaws can not be addressed here, the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood exposed the academic trend with great clarity.

Another excellent, contemporary critique of Western Marxism can be found in the writings of Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill. Rockhill skillfully and thoroughly discredits the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism, especially its most celebrated thinkers, Hockheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse, exposing their fealty to various sponsors. Those who paid the bills enjoyed sympathetic ideas, an outcome often found with the practitioners of Western Marxism.

Rockhill also does a scathing exposé of today’s most prominent Marxist poseur, Slavoj Žižek. I was happy to heap praise on Rockhill’s deflation of Žižek’s unmatched ego in an earlier post. Both Rockhill’s unmasking of the Frankfurt School and his destruction of the Žižek cult are essential reading in contesting Western Marxism.

Most recently, philosopher Carlos L. Garrido ambitiously tackles Western Marxism in his book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023). Central to Garrido’s argument is the notion of a “purity fetish” that is at the core of the Western Marxists’ attack on Marxism-Leninism. This insightful and original thesis indeed captures a feature common to the leading lights of left-wing Western anti-Communism; from Frederich Ebert to Slavoj Žižek, “Marxists” have hypocritically insisted that revolutionaries be held to a higher standard of democratic governance, judicial perfection, non-violence, and policy perfection beyond anything experienced in bourgeois society or to be reasonably expected of a revolutionary society outside of sheer fantasy.

Western Marxists can conveniently overlook capitalism’s history of genocidal, undemocratic, and exploitative sins while excoriating the Fidelistas for settling accounts with a few hundred Batista torturers. They deplore the sweeping changes that Soviet and Chinese Communists implemented in agriculture to overcome the frequent famines that devastated their countries when the changes unfortunately coincided with severe famines, as though great change for the better could evade natural events and tragedy anywhere but in their imagination.

They turn a blind eye to the human costs imposed on humanity by ruling elites’ resistance to great change, while denouncing revolutionaries for seeking that change and risking a better future. Western Marxism diminishes the great accomplishments of real existing socialism, while relentlessly denouncing the errors incurred in socialist construction. Garrido effectively underscores the necessary pains and errors in realizing a new world, in escaping the clutches of ruthless capitalism.

As Garrido notes:

This is the sort of ‘Marxism’ that imperialism appreciates, the type which CIA agent Thomas Braden called “the compatible left.” This is the ‘Marxism’ which functions as the vanguard of controlled counter-hegemony.

He eloquently summarizes:

Socialism for the Western Marxists is, in the words of Marx, a purely scholastic question. They are not interested in real struggle, in changing the world, but in continuously purifying an idea, one that is debated amongst other ivory-tower Marxists and which is used to measure against the real world. The label of ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’ is sustained merely as a counter-cultural and edgy identity which exists in the fringes of quotidian society. That is what Marxism is reduced to in the West — a personal identity.

I might add that it is also a commonplace for Western Marxists to invest heavily in other-people’s-socialism. Rather than engaging their own working classes, Western Marxists fight surrogate struggles for socialism through the solidarity movement, picking and choosing the “purest” struggles and debating the merits of various socialisms vicariously.

Garrido elaborates on socialism-as-an-investment-in-identity:

In the context of the hyper-individualist West’s treatment of socialism as a personal identity, the worst thing that may happen for these ‘socialists’ is for socialism to be achieved. That would mean the total destruction of their counter-cultural fringe identity. Their utter estrangement from the working masses of the country may in part be read as an attempt to make socialist ideas fringe enough to never convince working people, and hence, never conquer political power.

The success of socialism would entail a loss of selfhood, a destruction of the socialist-within-capitalism identity. The socialism of the West is grounded on an identity which hates the existing order but hates even more the loss of identity which transcending it would entail.

Garrido’s objectives are not completed with his masterful dissection of Western Marxism. In addition, he devotes great attention to Western Marxism’s critique of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) in a section entitled China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism. Of course, he is correct to deplore Western Marxism’s unprincipled collaboration with bourgeois ideologues in attacking every policy or act of Peoples’ China since its revolution in 1949. As with the USSR, any honest, deeply considered estimation of the trajectory of the PRC must — warts and all — see it as a positive in humanity’s necessary transcendence of capitalism.

As anti-imperialists, we must defend the PRC’s right (and other countries’ rights) to choose its own course.

As Marxists, we must defend the Chinese Communist Party’s right to find its own road to socialism.

But Garrido goes further, by mounting an impassioned, but one-sided defense of Chinese socialism. As a militant advocate of the dialectical method, this is an odd departure. As esteemed Marxist R. Palme Dutt argued in the 1960s, the pregnant question for a dialectical materialist is Whither China? not: Does the PRC measure up to some pure Platonic form of socialism?

A more balanced view of the PRC road would reference the significance of the Communist Party’s overwhelmingly peasant class base in its foundation, its engagement with Chinese nationalism, and the strong voluntarist tendency in Mao Zedong Thought. It would consider the 1960s’ break with the World Communist movement and the rapprochement with the most reactionary elements in US ruling circles in the 1970s, capped by the shameful material support for US and South African surrogates in the liberation wars of Southern Africa. PRC was funding Jonas Savimbi and UNITA while Cuban internationalists were dying fighting them and their apartheid allies. Which suggests the question: Could Peoples’ China do more to help Cuba overcome the US blockade, as did the Soviet Union?

A fair account would address the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Peoples’ China’s unwavering defense of the Khmer Rouge. Surely, all these factors play a role in assessing the PRC’s road to socialism.

These uncomfortable facts make it hard to agree with Garrido that the PRC has been “a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

Of course, today is another matter. My own view is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is “riding the tiger” of a substantial capitalist sector, to use imagery reminiscent of high Maoism. How well they are riding it is in question, but they are indeed riding it. There are many promising developments, but also some that are worrisome.

In any case, the comrades who are critical or skeptical of the Chinese road should not be summarily swept into the dustbin with Western Marxism.

Garrido brings his purity fetish home when he discusses US socialist organizing. He casts a critical eye on the class character of most of the US left, rooting it in the petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. He locates the conveyor for these ideas in academia, the media, and NGOs. Additional material support for petty-bourgeois ideology comes from non-profit corporations and, of course, the Democratic Party.

The petty-bourgeois bias of the US left reinforces its hyper-critical attitude toward movements attempting to actually secure a socialist future. Wherever socialists or socialist-oriented militants tackle the enormous obstacles before them, many on the left will insist that they adhere to courteous liberal standards, an unrealistic demand guaranteeing failure. Garrido mocks the insistence on revolutionary purity: “…the problem is that those things in the real world called socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in a pure form in my head….”

The purity fetish of the middle strata extends to radicals who scorn workers as “backward” or “deplorable.” Garrido counters this purity obsession with a wonderful quote from Lenin: one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material especially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”

Regarding the Trump vote and the working class, Garrido scolds the US left:

…they don’t see that what is implicit in that vote is a desire for something new, something which only the socialist movement, not Trump or any bourgeois party, could provide. Instead, they see in this chunk of the working class a bunch of racists bringing forth a ‘fascist’ threat which can only be defeated by giving up on the class struggle and tailing the Democrats. Silly as it may sound, this policy dominates the contemporary communist movement in the U.S.

While not all of the left is guilty of this failure, the charge is not far off the mark.

Finally, Garrido faults much of the US left for its blanket dismissal of progressive trends and achievements in US history. Many leftists debase heroic struggles in US history by painting a portrait of a relentless trajectory of reaction, racism, and imperialism. Garrido correctly sees this as an instantiation of a negative purity fetish– denouncing every page of US history as fatally wanting and inauthentic: “…purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept.”

While this is true, it must be remembered that there is always the danger that US history would be celebrated so vigorously that the country’s legacy of cruelty and bloody massacre might be muted by patriotic zeal. During the Popular Front era, for example, Communist leader Earl Browder’s slogan that “Communism is twentieth century Americanism” invested too much social justice in Americanism and too little in Communism.

US history and tradition is contradictory and Marxists should always expose that contradiction– a legacy of both great, historic social change and ugly inhumanity. The country’s origin shares a tragic settler-colonial past with countries like Australia and South Africa in its genocidal treatment of indigenous people. Those same settlers established or tolerated the brutal exploitation of Africans forced into chattel slavery. While we could lay the blame at the doorstep of the US ruling class, it is US history as well.

At the same time, the US revolution was the most radical for its time and every generation produced a consequential movement to correct the failings of the legacy or advance the horizon of social progress. An emancipating civil war, the expansion of suffrage, workers’ gains against corporations, social welfare and insurance, and a host of other milestones mark the peoples’ history.

While writing and reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution (Echoes of the Marsellaise), Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t help but be struck by the lesser global influence of the earlier US revolution upon nineteenth-century social change. He thought that reformers and revolutionaries of the time could recognize their point of departure “more readily in the Ancien Régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America.” Undoubtedly, the stain of the genocide of indigenous peoples and brutal slavery influenced that disposition.

Indeed, Hobsbawn’s observation underscores the contradictory character of the US past. It is not a “purity fetish” that explains this judgment, but the cold, harsh facts of US history.

Nonetheless, it is appropriate for Garrido to remind us of the many revolutionaries — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, William Z Foster, Herbert Aptheker, Fidel, and more — who have both drawn inspiration and offered inspiration from the victories of the people as well as the fierce resistance to ruling-class oppression contained in US history. He effectively cites Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who rejects the practice of national nihilism — the denigration of all expressions of national pride and accomplishment. Within every national identity is an identity to be celebrated in its resistance to oppression and its dedication to a better way of life. Workers must draw national humility from the failures of the past, while drawing national pride from the victories over injustice. A left that attends to only one and not both will fail the working class.

*****

Western Marxism — Marxist scholasticism, disconnected from revolutionary practice — distracts far-too-many well-meaning, hungry-for-change potential allies on the arduous road to socialism. It is heartening to find voices rising to challenge the sterile, obscurantism of this distraction, while defending and promoting the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and Communism. We should encourage and support Marxists like Prashad, Rockhill, and Garrido in conducting this struggle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:00:40 +0000

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people…”

“Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” — Karl Marx

Cynical Attacks by Marxists About Neopaganism

“Neopagan Marxists? What are you talking about? We Marxists are atheist materialists. We don’t believe in any gods. Do you remember what Marx said about religion? It is the opium of the people. Why are you bringing superstition back in? Neopaganism is just more decadent 1970s hippie romanticism calling for the return to a preindustrial age. All this Goddess crap is just the lunatic fringe of the women’s movement trying to bring religion back in. Real socialist feminists are atheists. If anything, Christianity was a moral advance over the barbaric paganism of the Bronze and Iron Ages.” Serious charges indeed to be answered throughout this article.

Demanding Workers be Atheists Alienates Marxists from their Base

One of many problems for Marxists in the West is that most people in the working class believe in God, whether they are Protestants, Catholics, Jews or Muslims. Furthermore, whether Marxists like it or not, most people around the world find religious rituals enjoyable, comforting and meaningful. If people treat rituals in a mindless, reified way, that does not mean rituals can be dismissed. In addition, rituals have power not just in religion, but in nationalism and sports which have drawn from religion. Typically, Marxists dismiss religion, nationalism and sports as deriving from false consciousness, simplistic reasoning of the workers or evil machinations of priests or rulers. But this has not stopped working-class people from continuing to be faithful to their religion, country and sports teams. Do you Marxists really want to continue to throw stones at the buildings of churches, stadiums or the bronze cast statues of famous nationalistic generals?

The Structure and Superstructure of Societies

Using a Marxist delineation of social structures, both capitalist and socialist societies have an infrastructure and superstructure. The infrastructure includes the economy technology, methods of harnessing energy and work patterns. The superstructure of society includes the knowledge systems including politics, law, philosophy, art, religion and recreational patterns. Broadly speaking, superstructural institutions supportthe existing order for better or worse. More specifically, under capitalism these include religious monotheism, nationalism and professional sports.

The Superstructural Mainstream Institutions of Religion, Nationalism and Sports and their Commonalities

Religious monotheism, with all its material configurations (churches, altars, pews) is comprised of social-psychological techniques (sin, confession, guilt) and paraphernalia (rosary beads, crosses on necks) was also used by nationalists to get people to bind themselves to the state politically. Sports helped to organize people’s loyalty in their leisure time to a sports team. Religion, nationalism and sports all have many commonalties:

A mythology of origins and destiny
A founder
A set of rites the community engages in
Special holy days and holidays throughout the year
A place to go for pilgrimages
A set of buildings – temple, stadium to enact these rituals
A set of holy objects
A cultivated songbook of inspiring music
Very specific set of rules to follow
A holy book
A definite attitude to other groups
Emotional expectations
Heretics
Scapegoats
Specialized language
Sacred arts
Methods of altering states of consciousness
Attitudes towards the senses
Collective memories – what you remember; what you forget

Monotheism, nationalism and sports are mainstream superstructural institutions of capitalism that are directed mostly atthe working-class. These institutions both alienate them from their social needs while providing them with inspiration, comfort, solace and hope. At the same time, there are superstructural capitalist movements which offer hope not only to working class people but to middle class and upper middle class people.

The Social and Psychological Aims of Capitalism vs the Hopes and Desires of the People

In order to derive maximal profit, the capitalist structure must pulverize social life so that every social and psychological need and desire is for sale. It must also create a consumer individuality so that the person is preoccupied with building and sustaining their individuality through consuming capitalist products. Naturally enough, many people who live in a capitalist society want to get away from this. Some of them flee into the capitalist superstructural institutions such as monotheism, nationalism or sports as a way to:

Creating an ideal community
Experience altered state of consciousness
Develop an individuality that is larger, wider and deeper than what consumer individuality has to offer

Superstructural Movements: Human Potential, New Age and Neopaganism

But the working class is not the only class which seeks another way of life from what capitalism has to offer. The Human Potential movement in the 1970s was an attempt by mostly middle-class people to create alternative communities, to experience altered states of consciousness and cultivate a new individualist identity. So too, in the late 1970s the New Age movement wished to the same thing for the upper middle classes. These included spiritual, political and psychological cults, the paranormal movement (interest in ESP, telepathy, extraterrestrial civilizations) and Eastern mysticism (mediation, yoga) Lastly, also in the late 1970s Neopaganism exploded in both the United States and England.

Unlike monotheism, nationalism, sports and interest in cults, the New Age and Neopaganism are attempts to break awayfrom what seems to be to be the collapse of western religious institutions. What these movements promise the individual is to be swept away from everyday life to an alternative community, radically altered states and an individuality which is not submissive to a god, state or sports team but something higher, deeper and richer. To summarize, there are two components in the capitalist superstructure:

Mainstream institutions: religion, nationalism and sports – which support capitalism
Movements: the Human Potential Movement, the New Age movement and Neopaganism which seek to break away from capitalism or at least its corporate version

What both superstructural institutions and movements all seek to create is:

An ideal community
Experiencing altered state of consciousness
Developing an individuality that is larger, far more so than what consumer individuality has to offer

Socialist Infrastructure and Socialist Superstructure

At its best, the socialist infrastructure has an economy that is communist, with workers’ councils deciding what and how much to produce at the local level, federated at the regional level and centralized at the state level. There is advanced technology. The socialist superstructure consists of a materialist philosophy, is pro-science and pro-technology and practices political direct democracy. There is also socialist art and there is atheism.

Socialist Rejection of Capitalist Superstructure

Good reasons for rejection

There are the atheists, socialists, communists and anarchists who think that religion, nationalism and sports are intentional distractions concocted by the ruling class to keep the working class from collectively changing life on earth. Further, the search for paranormal or mystical experience will be understood by Marxists as an attempted withdrawal from capitalist institutions in a fruitless search of meaningful experience. Socialists argue that paranormal experience has never been proven by scientists to be repeatable experimentally, while mystical experience is private escape and rarely produces revolutionaries. “Who needs spiritual a superstructure?” Marxists may say. “We see what happens when superstructural institutions are introduced into the capitalist superstructure by way of monotheism, nationalism, sports. People reify their gods, national heroes and sports figures. They engage them superstitiously and religious participants, citizens or sports fans behave submissively or mindlessly and use these institutions as escapes.

Furthermore, the impact of superstructural movements can also be engaged superstitiously and its leaders reified. The eruption of cults, psychic research and meditation centers produces its share of gurus, groupies and escapism. “Who needs that?” say the Marxists. The problem is that these capitalist superstructural institutions and movements contain 80% of the population (40% working class, 30% middle class and 10% upper middle class).

Bad reasons for rejecting

However, atheistic socialists and communists do not understand that what people who engage in institutions, movements and personal quests also want is not just about what they believe, but what they experience in a ritual-altered state. Arguing with people that science shows the earth is actually a lot older than the bible says is not going to change any fundamentalist’s minds and the evangelical atheists are foolish to try. Attempting to convince nationalists that their country’s crimes are greater than their heroic deeds is like spitting in the wind. Making an effort to convince sports fans that they shouldn’t root for their home team because neither the players nor the owners are loyal to their city will never work. The great weakness of all atheist socialists is that what people believe and the vehicles they use to support their beliefs can’t be argued with because these things all give comfort, hope and community. Communists throw rocks at the churches and stadiums but they are really afraid to go in. What socialists need to do is:

Understand what people believe and how the rituals work that supports beliefs
Recreate our own version of the 19 elements I earlier named that religion, nationalism and sports all share

Marxists do not have to Reinvent the Wheel:

The Neopagan Movement can Provide Marxists with a Missing Sacred Superstructure

Enter Neopaganism. At its very best, Neopaganism provides a far more convincing story about the cosmic evolution. It also offers a way to live in a world of conflict without losing heart or enthusiasm. Neopaganism also uses some of the same methodologies as monotheism, nationalism and sports to create altered states of consciousness. It does so relatively successfully and it does not require dogma to do it.

The Neopagan movement can bring life of the sacred into the socialist superstructure in ways that, at their best, are not superstitious, not reified, anti-hierarchical and not escapist. Joining with Neopagans will enable socialist to recruit the population currently embedded in the capitalist superstructure and lure them into a neopagan superstructure that will be in the service of socialism in our fight against capitalism.

Marx’s Criticism of Religion was too Sweeping

Marx rightfully criticized the Catholic and Protestant monotheism as it was practiced by the ruling classes of Europe, but his criticism of monotheism does not cover the polytheism or animism of pagans. In the case of the animism of hunter-gatherers who occupied most of human history, there are a lot of problems with characterizing animism the way Marxism criticized religion in my opening quote. The first animists were politically egalitarian, economically practiced what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called “generalized reciprocity” and they had no private property. There were no gods and goddesses, just earth spirits, totems and sometimes ancestor spirits. There were no spiritual hierarchies. These earth spirits were treated as humanity’s brothers and sisters. There was no adoration, worship, begging and pleading or faith necessary. The sacred life of hunter-gatherers was no vale of tears, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless word. The type of magick they practiced was hardly the opium of the people. I am not suggesting socialists return to hunting and gathering times and practice animism. However, the animistic beliefs and practices can be used as a sacred model on which to build a communist future.

Neopagans are Hardly Washed-up Left-over Hippies

According to Margot Alder, in her book Drawing Down the Moon, Neopagans as a group are intelligent, interested in science, creative, imaginative and growing in both the United States and England. They have made inroads into mainstream religious conferences and they have yearly conferences of their own as well as regional celebrations throughout the United States. In fact, in the United States, Neopaganism is the fastest growing “religion”. We Marxists would be very lucky to have them join our ranks.

There is no Contradiction Between Dialectical Materialism and Most Neopagans

Ontologically, I identify as a Neopagan, but this in no way requires me to challenge a materialistic framework. Though some pagans are god and goddess theists, there is a vital community of Atheopagans who are materialists and believe in no gods. While I have a couple of disagreements with Mark Green (author of Atheopaganism: an Earth-honoring path rooted in science), we have enough in common to say that Atheopaganism will answer in a scientific way most, if not all the reservations of Marxists. There are other Neopagans whose goddesses and gods are admitted as psychologicalprojections and have no real independence. This is no threat to dialectical materialism. My criticism of Marxism is an immanentcriticism. It’s that materialism needs to incorporate collective and individual imagination without becoming a vitalist or a pantheist.

Characteristics of Neopaganism

There are at least fourteen characteristics of Neopaganism which have literary roots going back to mid 19^thcentury Europe. These characteristics would work very well with Marxism.

Perception of divinity as immanent (as opposed to transcendent)
A multiplicity of deities (polytheism) while for a few there is one deity, a single goddess (this is opposed to patriarchal monotheism)
The deities are female as well as male
A commitment to ecological responsibility as the most practical way to engage nature
Appreciation of science, science fiction and technology (as opposed to superstition and luddism
Creative approach to ritual with singing, dancing, music, drawing, and mask-making
Emphasis on imagination in guided visualization as essential in creating altered states of consciousness
Orientated to the tides of nature and circle of the seasons and the four directions
Devotion to hedonism or the sanctification of pleasure
A focus on the local places (as opposed to large spaces or beyond space)
No concept of sin or salvation
No need of proselytizing
Sacralization of psychology through Jungian psychology or the sacred psychology of Jean Houston
Living in the here and now, not seeking escape in heaven or nirvana

The Neopagan movement in Yankeedom largely came out of the feminist sacred movement, which was also political. Some Neopagans are liberal, but many are radicals. Generally, thanks to Starhawk and Z Budapest, many witches integrate their magickal rituals with political activity. As for Marxism, there might be a smattering of Marxists who were pagans. But for the most part, they were isolated and didn’t constitute any identifiable subgroup within Neopaganism. Then, at the turn of the century, feminist Silvia Federici wrote Caliban and the Witch that brought a feminist understanding to the witch hunts. More recently, about seven years ago, a practicing Marxist Neopagan named Rhyd Wildermuth began a small publishing house called Gods and Radicals. One of his books was All That is Sacred is Profane: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. In this work, Wildermuth tried to make a Marxian understanding of capitalism understandable to pagans. However, he did not try to make Neopaganism attractive to Marxists. That’s what my book is about – From Earthspirits to Sky Gods the primitive magic-mythology in tribal societies will be very different from the secondary magic of agricultural states. The difference between the high magic of Renaissance Italy is very different from the low magic of witchcraft, as you will see in Chapter 21 of my book.

Neopagan Marxists work with other pagans’ gods and goddesses psychologically and sociologically, even though for us, these gods and goddesses are not ontologically real. Ghosts, ancestor spirits, and earth spirits can be claimed by Atheopagans and Jungians to be psychological projections. For us they are also sociological and historical projections of human social life and the differences between classes. The characteristics of gods and goddesses – that they all have strengths and weaknesses – are projections that are worth working with but with the understanding that there is a danger of reification. Humanity can have gods, but the gods cannot have us. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses, their identification as departments of life, should be worked in as part of our socialist plans. For example, rituals to the god Hermes could accompany socialist transportation meeting plans. Rituals to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, accompany the meetings of socialist farmers.

We agree with hardline Marxists that consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain, but we disagree with some other pagans that consciousness is rooted in nature or in a spiritual world. After the existence of the brain and a central nervous system, consciousness arises (as in bonobos and chimps) as the result of toolmaking, social life, and culture that is the inheritance of social animals. However, self-reflective consciousness is the result of the development of a sociohistorical envelope wrapped around the Earth over the biosphere, which Vernadsky and Chardin called the noosphere. Self-reflective consciousness is rooted in sociohistorical activity in creating and sustaining the noosphere.

Lastly, historical sacred oppression is very important to us. Like Neopagan feminist witches, we don’t forget nor forgive what Christianity did during the witch hunts. Neither do we forget nor forgive what the Christians did to the Alexandrian library and how the Church terrorized the likes of Bruno, Galileo and Spinoza. We reject any reconciliation with Protestants, Catholics, Jews and the whole patriarchal 5000-year albatross. Neither are we seduced by Eastern mysticism, whether it be Hindu or Buddhist, cousins of the Western patriarchal family. As a feminist titled one of her plays many years ago, Your 5000 Years Are Up. As sociohistorical Neopagans, we neither forgive nor forget. We will treat the rulers of patriarchy with the same sacred hatred that we treat the capitalists in the secular world. Far from being an advance in sacred life, as many traditional Marxists think, Christianity is a slave religion, a degeneration of a once vital pagan love of life.

What is Magick and What’s With the “k”?

The word “magic” means many things to many people. The technical breakdown of the word is to shape or make vigorous. In this book magic is not a) a secular art of creating perceptual illusions as in stage magic. Neither is it a literal individual and group technique that can directly impact physical reality. What I am calling magickal is a socio-psychological technique for altering individual and group consciousness through ritual by saturating the senses through the arts of singing, dancing, and the use of guided visualization. At its best there is nothing superstitious, reified or escapist in this. As I describe in my book, The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism it can be a guide towards group and individual evolution.

Genesis of this Book

This book really snuck up on me. Over the last five years I have been writing articles for our website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. In some of these articles I pointed out how religion, nationalism and sports were very big for working class people, but that Marxists had failed miserably to understand what the appeal was, let alone what socialists could do about it. In later articles, I identified rituals, the non-superstitious use of symbols and making of talismans as tools for creating, socialist altered states of consciousness. It wasn’t until the past 15 months that I realized I had written enough articles that I could turn them into a book. Furthermore, I realized that I could add four chapters about magick from my previous books. One chapter is on the place and misplace of goddesses in the Stone and Metal ages. Another chapter is on the differences between primitive magic, secondary magic and religion that was also part of my book Power in Eden. Finally, I included a discussion of high magic in early modern Europe. One chapter was on Renaissance magick as seen through the eyes of Jungian James Hillman. The other chapter was how the Protestant religion, mechanistic science and commercial capitalism teamed up against the high magick of Paracelsus, Bruno, John Dee and the low magick of witchcraft. Both these chapters came out of my book Forging Promethean Psychology.

My Literary Sources

In this section I only want to draw from the books that have most influenced my thinking about this subject. The first is Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance which I read in the early 1980s. Next was Margot Adler’s great book Drawing Down the Moon which gave me a historical window into the enchanting world of Neopaganism. Throughout the 1980s I read books by Israel Regardie which were excellent in combining magickal work on the Tree of Life with psychology. He saw magick as applied psychology with nothing supernatural about it. Around 1990 I met Madonna Sophia Compton and read her book Archetypes on the Tree of Life. She taught me how to apply the Tree of Life to actual daily practice to the work on psychological problems. I had my own solitary practice for some time. Since the middle of the 1990s, until about two years ago I turned to other projects. But in 2020, my partner Barbara and I joined the Seattle Atheist Church. One of the board members really wanted to get more ritual into our group. We wound collaborating on a Fall ritual by changing the liturgy and making it more magickal. For me this meant introducing Neopaganism into the Church. This led me to start an Atheopagan book club in which we read Atheopaganism by Mark Green; Godless Paganism, edited by John Halstead and Wakeful World by Emma Restall Orr.

Why I Wrote this Book

The purpose of this book is not to convince Neopagans that Marxism is a worthy enterprise. Neither is it to convince Marxists to become Neopagans and leave Marxism behind. Rather it is to convince Marxists that Neopagan practice might breathe charm, heart, play and inspiration into the political practice of Marxism, by bringing in ritual and the arts.

Usually, Marxists naively lump animism and polytheism with Marx’s criticism of religion. The purpose of this book has been to show why this is a mistake. In my three chapters on socialism and my chapter on The Power of Magic I show how Neopagan rituals can be worked into a Marxist political practice. These changes in ritual are far more likely to bring back working-class people to socialism who have stayed away up until now because Marxism in the United States has no heart or soul.

So long as Marxists dismiss religion, nationalism and sports as merely false consciousness, simplistic reasoning or blind superstition we are left out in the cold. Dismissal has not worked before and it will not work now or in the future. Marxists will continue to be alienated from working class people who are religious and at least somewhat patriotic and enthusiastic about professional sports. Neither will the middle and upper middle class explorers of cults, parapsychology or New Age mysticism be drawn to Marxism.

Red Emma was Right: If I can’t Dance, I don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution

Marxists need to sing, spiral-dance and celebrate socialism on a weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly basis. On a regular, weekly basis we could have a “socialist mass” that must answer the same big questions religion asks and answers:

What are we?
Where have we been?
Where are we going?

During these large-scale and small-scale events, we must play and sing to socialist songs from around the world, not just IWW songs. Just as religion has its patron saints, nationalism has its revolutionary heroes and sports has its Hall of Fame. So socialists could regularly commemorate the lives of great socialist leaders, great socialist strikes and revolutionary takeovers of states. Just as religion has its temples, sports has its stadiums and nationalism has its presidential memorials, so Marxists need their own buildings to commemorate, mourn and celebrate the past and anticipate future days of triumph.

The socialist movement is not a night in which all cows are black. Socialism consists of individuals of different classes who have unique lives. Some are red diaper babies and some are new to the movement. In true socialist form, we celebrate the commonalities that all socialists go through from birthdays, coming of age ceremonies to marriages and funerals. During a portion of most socialist rituals, we should acknowledge rites of passage and support people in the milestones of their lives.

To those Marxists who remain cynical I want to remind them that the labor organization of the Knights of Labor in the 19^th century had many rituals celebrating the events of the individual life cycle. My article The Mythology, Ritual and Art of Romantic Socialism discusses all this. The image at the heading of this article comes from the social graphic artist Walter Crane who did much work for the Knights of Labor. In addition, the Communist Party in the United States had many cultural institutions such as book clubs, dances and plays that speak to the ritual-like needs of human beings. We have a great deal we could learn from them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Rescue Collective Life by Reading a Red Book

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:10:29 +0000

Kael Abello (Venezuela), 1848, 2023.

In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told the Cuban youth, and this globalisation was ‘an unsustainable and intolerable world economic order’ founded on the cannibalisation of nature and the brutalisation of social life. Capitalist ideologues championed greed as foundational for society, but this, Castro cautioned, was merely an ideological claim rather than a statement drawn from reality. Similar ideological claims – such as those about the rational operation of markets – encouraged Castro to insist on the urgent need to wage a ‘battle of ideas’ to make the case for the richness of the human experience against the reductions of market fundamentalism.

‘Not weapons, but ideas will decide this universal battle’, Castro said, ‘and not because of some intrinsic value, but because of how closely they relate to the objective reality of today’s world. These ideas stem from the conviction that, mathematically speaking, the world has no other way out, that imperialism is unsustainable, that the system that has been imposed on the world leads to disaster, to an insurmountable crisis’.

That was in 1998. Since then, matters have become even more grave. In late January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists brought the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, ‘the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been’. The self-described managers of the ‘world order’ (the G7 countries) who are responsible for this journey to annihilation continue to dominate the Battle of Ideas. This must no longer be permitted.

Shehi Shafi (Young Socialist Artists/India), Read Marx, 2023.

I am typing these words in Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, which is the home of arts and culture not only for Cuba but all Latin America. Founded in 1959 by Haydée Santamaría (1923–1980), one of the pioneers of the Cuban Revolution, Casa became a reference for the necessity to advance class struggle on the cultural front. For Fidel, institutions such as Casa, with whom we collaborated for our dossier Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, are integral to this battle of ideas, to this confrontation with a vision of reality that is inimical to human progress. ‘Ideas are not simply an instrument to build consciousness and lead people to fight’, Fidel told the youth in 1998. In fact, ideas ‘have become the main weapon in the struggle, not a source of inspiration, not a guide, not a directive, but the main weapon of the struggle’. He quoted José Martí, the great Cuban patriot, as he often did: ‘Trenches made of ideas are stronger than those made of stones’.

In our dossier, thesis eight focused on the erosion of the collective life. As we wrote then:

Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:

by weakening the trade union movement and the social possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.

The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.

Red Books Day, one gesture to rescue collective life, emerged from the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), a network of over forty publishing houses. On 21 February 1848, 175 years ago, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. The IULP picked that day, 21 February, to encourage people from around the world to go into public places, from the street to cafés and union halls, and read their favourite red books (including the manifesto) in their own languages.

Paolo C. Ratti (Italy), Lapidary Free, 2023.

In 2020, the first Red Books Day, more than 30,000 people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the manifesto in their own languages. The epicentre of Red Books Day was in the four Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, where the bulk of public readings took place. Peasant organisations affiliated with the Communist Party of Nepal held readings in rural areas, while the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil held readings in occupied settlements. In Havana, study circles met to read the manifesto, while in South Africa the Sesotho translation was launched and read for the first time. Left publishing houses from Expressão Popular in Brazil to Batalla de Ideas in Argentina and Inkani Books in South Africa also joined the effort. Many participants reported that this was the first time that they had opened a book by Marx and that the captivating prose has drawn them to start study circles of Marxist literature.

Due to the pandemic, Red Books Day 2021 was held largely online, but enthusiasm remained high nonetheless. The publishing house Založba (Slovenia) released a released a short film entitled Dan rdečih knjig (‘Red Books Day’), in which Založba’s writers read from the manifesto. Meanwhile, the publishing house Yordam Kitap in Turkey asked its authors to read from the manifesto in Turkish and organised a talk with Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Small, appropriately distanced gatherings took place in Kerala, where the manifesto was read in Malayalam and English, as well as in Brazil, where militants of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) organised readings of the manifesto in Portuguese in their encampments. Not one corner of India was without Red Books Day events, as readings took place from Assam to Karnataka to Tamil Nadu.

Yoni Lingga (Indonesia), I Read Banned Books, 2023.

The highlight of Red Books Day 2022 was that half a million people in Kerala (India) read the books of EMS Namboodiripad in 35,000 meetings across the state. Various colleges in Perinthalmanna (Malappuram) held a three-day-long book festival, The Battle of Literature in the Era of the Ban, while the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (Association of Progressive Art and Literature) held programmes across Kerala. At the Vijayawada Book Festival in Andhra Pradesh, Prajasakti Bookhouse erected a popular Communist Manifesto book stall, while in villages in Maharashtra, night classes were held that reminded participants of the early days of the peasant movement.

Readings were held in Indonesia and Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela. Films were screened and music was sung while social media buzzed with the hashtags of Red Books Day in multiple languages. The South African shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo held a talent show on Red Books Day at the eKhenana occupation site. ‘The price for land and autonomy is always paid in blood. But struggle is not only shared suffering. It is also shared joy’, the organisation declared.

Zach Hussein (Palestine/United States), We Have a World to Win, 2022.

At dawn on Red Books Day in 2022, members of the neo-fascist RSS organisation entered the Thalassery (Kerala) home of Punnol Haridas, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). They hacked Haridas, a fisherman, to death. ‘I was supposed to write on my favourite red book today’, wrote V. Sivadasan, a member of parliament and CPI(M) leader, ‘but I ended up writing about my comrade who was hacked to death by RSS terrorists’.

In 2023, the fourth Red Books Day promises to build on previous years, fighting to rescue our collective life from the atomisation of precarious living.

Last week, a severe earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, taking the lives of more than 30,000 people so far, displacing millions in the region and plunging them into precarity. In Syria, US-led sanctions have delayed the delivery of critical international aid. Many also see the high death toll as a result of the Turkish state’s neglect. Following the devastation of the 1999 Gölcük-Marmara earthquake, an ‘earthquake tax’ was levied on the public, raising nearly $4 billion between July 1999 and July 2022. Yet, no clear evidence exists regarding how those funds have been spent and if they have gone towards emergency services and safety measures. In an attempt to rescue collective life in this terrifying moment, Ertuğrul Kürkçü of the HDP calls to ‘transform earthquake solidarity into a social movement’ against the prevailing neoliberal system. If you would like to donate to the relief efforts, you can do so here.

On one side of our world today are red books and the urge to expand the boundaries of humanity and left culture; on the other side are violence and bloodshed, the ghastly side of barbarism. Red Books Day affirms the culture of the future, the culture of humans. It is a crucial front in the Battle of Ideas.

The post Rescue Collective Life by Reading a Red Book first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!

Paul Haeder — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 15:20:56 +0000

Yah, I am training to be a school bus driver. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, and that’s First Student, a foreign outfit in 49 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and it’s an equity firm out of Belgium. Bidding on school district transportation contracts far and wide, and alas, this Belgium company is getting paid by guess who?

USA and Canadian taxpayers footing the bill and reaping the poor services. This is what they call the public-private arrangement, again, what is a low level form of socialized payola for private companies while the taxpayer is screwed. As if the public and our governments and our states and our national funding can’t take care of OUR own children’s food, education, and transportation needs: we have to go to a private equity fund to handle schools shuttling. How long will I last is a crap shoot, since this is it for Lincoln County — no luck getting past interviews for county, city and state jobs as a case manager or services coordinator, even though there is that great 10 million shortfall of men dropping out of the workforce.

Oh, shit, I’m almost 66, with too many college degrees and a resume way too long to get very far.

Ahh, I’m also a social worker, educator, writer, journalist and even someone in urban and regional planning, but I can’t get past the interview stage. Missing men, well, there are many reasons for this new phenomenon. In the uncritical thinking USA, we will not get much deep analyses, though, just plain black and white rationales.

*****

The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond: a loss of enrollment revenue, less viewpoint diversity on campus, and fewer men in jobs that require some college education. Some academics want to make clear that just because women outnumber men in college it doesn’t mean that gender-equity issues no longer remain.

This collection of Chronicle articles features news stories, analysis, advice, and opinion essays, including several articles that sounded a warning years ago. It also looks at how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there.

Section 1: Why Don’t Men Go to College?

Section 2: How Can Colleges Draw More Men?

Section 3: Deconstructing the Gender Gap

Don’t get me started on the nanny state, the reverse sexism, the anti-feminism bullshit female empowerment. Don’t get me started on the battle of the sexes, and don’t get me started on the sheeple aspect of education, social work, and nonprofit work. Don’t get me started, man.

I can go down a thousand rabbit holes or warrens, but the thing is I come back out, revitalized, smarter, and, sure more pissed off. This is the state of the world, under capitalism. A Belgium company in the USA and Canada is monopolizing on school transportation. No union shop, $19 an hour here in Lincoln county where home prices and gasoline and food are outrageous and where other districts might pay more per hour.

Again, it’s a bunch of older folk, mostly women, driving buses at age 67, 71, 78. What the hell is that about?

I have also been a substitute teacher in this district, and I’ve written about that too: “Take Down this Blog, or Else! No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans.” Of course, I was and still am mad as hell at my banishment teaching, and can’t accept it, or take it. Even writing this will get me scrutinized by those overlords of the HR subhuman species who spend countless millions of dollars a year on software applications that do snazzy background checks, credit checks, employment checks, reference checks, drug checks, and of course, in my case, Google Scans/Checks, looking for any anti-this or anti-that diatribes or even plain old inverted triangle journalism.

Let’s scoot over to the issue of the failing male, the males in the womb, those just out of the womb, and then the developing baby, child, kid, teen and we end up with 355 million Americanos and a shit load of chronic illnesses for EVERYONE, including the poor child, babes in the woods. The top ten:

What are the 7 main types of learning disabilities? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that developmental disabilities occur among all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Children from ages 3 through 17 frequently have one or more developmental disabilities, such as:

ADHD
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Cerebral Palsy
Hearing Loss
Intellectual Disability
Learning Disability
Vision Impairment
Developmental Delays

In particular, psychology professionals should study these seven learning disabilities:

Auditory processing disorder. …
Language processing disorder. …
Nonverbal learning disabilities. …
Visual perceptual/visual motor deficit.
Types of Learning Disabilities

Dyscalculia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and learn math facts.

Dysgraphia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s handwriting ability and fine motor skills.

Dyslexia A specific learning disability that affects reading and related language-based processing skills.

Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities Has trouble interpreting nonverbal cues like facial expressions or body language and may have poor coordination.

Oral / Written Language Disorder and Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit Learning disabilities that affect an individual’s understanding of what they read or of spoken language. The ability to express one’s self with oral language may also be impacted.

Related Disorders

ADHD A disorder that includes difficulty staying focused and paying attention, controlling behavior and hyperactivity.

Dyspraxia A disorder which causes problems with movement and coordination, language and speech.

So here we are at, now, in a society with so many epigentic, developmental, gestational, chromosomal and neuro disabilities. So many youth are faced with a lifetime of struggle, even before crawling, and then in pre-K and then K12, and then as adults. If this were a socially just society, there would be trillions spent on finding out the causes and effects and then the effects as new causes for new effects on the individual gestating, and what it is that makes this such a prevalent issue in our Western Society. Schools are warehouses, for sure, and the school to prison pipeline is not some goof-ball concept. We’d be looking hard at the chemicals, the stressors, the mother and father and their own stressors. All the toxins in air, water, food, drugs, including EMFs, and just the lack of nutrition, the fatty liver disease in 1/3 of folk, and the failing sperm counts in men since 1950, and, well, the discussion of who is that village that takes to raise a child.

Everything in capitalism is ANTI-health, ANTI-human, ANTI-Learning, ANTI-community engagement. More and more children, and yes, mostly boys, are monitored in the classroom, those prisons, and the effect or affect is that there is little significant learning and developing going on inside the school and their brains. They are a nerved up/out or nervous wreck, and they are watched and graded and sent home with behavior reports.

Now is the time to pity the child. Our children, and of course, all those children hit with the wagers of war, the wagers of sanctions, the wagers of economic and health and food sanctions. Depleted uranium or lead in the pipes. All of those realities also tie into the flagging mental health, the growing pressures put upon mother, father, child, grandparents, the lot of them in education, et al.

This is the sickness of America:

In solidarity with Cuba, leaders and activists of all Left and democratic parties of India welcomed Aleida Guevara in Surjeet Bhavan.

To a packed hall, Aleida said that it is one thing to talk about an economic blockade and quite another to live under that blockade.

She narrated how no country was ready to even give easily available medicine for a five-year-old child only because of the fear of America. In spite of not being a milk producing country, Cuba supplies one litre milk daily for all children and the aged, by importing it from New Zealand which is expensive because of the high transportation costs.

They were forced to buy milk from far away New Zealand, as their northern neighbour, US is not ready to trade with Cuba. The sixty years of illegal and inhumane US blockade has taught Cuba to spread humanism through sending doctors to wherever they were in need. Cuba is just 90 kilometres away from the mighty imperialist super power US. Even then it can’t be defeated since it believes in the scientific principle of people’s unity and those who are united can never be defeated. “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (The people united, shall always be victorious). She said Cuba took arms for peace and defending their motherland. She asserted that Cuba believes in standing up for equality against any kind of barbarism in the world. Thanking the people of India for always standing with Cuba, she said that the people of Cuba will always treasure this solidarity and value it immensely. (source)

Milk, man, and the United Snakes of America is so so powerful, going after children far and wide. You know, Cuba never attacked the USA, never went to war, and alas, this is the power of the dirty capitalists, war mongers and some sick psychopaths. Medicines, medical equipment, air conditioners, food, and energy. This is the way of the rat, the USA RATON.

The entire psychiatry and psychology and sociology of oppression is what runs modern Western society. There are no right ways now to raise children, to support families, and to build community. It’s all about the private sector sucking up as much as the public sector can regurgitate to this thieves. While the children suffer, and while the entire shooting match is toast as we in a culture of pollution and gestational crimes and constant bombardment of children with poisons — from those in the plastics, chicken nuggets, lawn sprays, all the off gassing, all those artificial flavors — find it harder and harder to survive all the death traps that we know this society is unleashing at an earlier and earlier age.

We are in an age of behavior adjustment, brainwashing, mind control, sinister Stockholm Syndrome, general anxiety disorders created by social media and generalized hatefulness from the legislators and two-bit politicians. Checked out or challenged just looking at a book, we are in the new normal of trillion$ for the pigs of war, for SWAT teams, for the opposition to beat us down, to implode the family, to eradicate the human and humane family. These kiddos come onto the bus with behavior plans, with their little classroom check slips for the parents to mull over at home.

Oh, what is enlightenment? “Behavior charts and similar public shaming methods don’t teach self-regulation. They mainly harm vulnerable learners.” The following is pretty light weight compared to the scenes I have been enmeshed in as a substitute teacher in special education and blended classrooms. Believe me.

Mr. Hill stops reading aloud to his 4th grade students and turns to Anisa. “Anisa, you’re off task. Change your clip. I asked you once and you are still digging in your desk. Walk over and change it now.”

Anisa stands and walks across the classroom. Several of her peers make condescending comments under their breath. Anisa moves her clip from green to yellow and returns to her desk and puts her head down. Her nonverbal behaviors indicate that she’s angry, hurt, and frustrated.

A few minutes later, Josh raises his hand. Mr. Hill calls on him and Josh responds, “Anisa is off task again.”

Mr. Hill looks at Anisa and says, “Again? Please change your clip to red. One more problem and it will be another call home. You have to learn to pay attention.” (Source: Tear Down Your Behavior Chart! Lee Ann Jung Dominique Smith)

Read the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freire gives the term “freedom” a specific meaning: it is the freedom to critically question and change the world. In other words, a person is free when they are able to understand and change their own conditions.

For Freire, education and oppression are connected, since education can be used either as a tool for oppression or as a method of liberation from oppression. Freire distinguishes between a pedagogy (a way of practicing education) that serves oppressors, and one that helps oppressed people understand and change their society. According to Freire, “freedom” (the freedom to critically question and change the world) requires people to gain a new understanding of how reality works. Changing the dominant understanding of history is a key part of this process. Freire sees education as useful not just for individual growth, but also for achieving social change. To expand on this point, he discusses social change as a necessary tool to achieve freedom and overthrow oppression. Within Freire’s framework, systems of oppression try to prevent radical social change so that they do not lose power. Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics. A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. (some clipped notes)

*****

Feeling the burn yet, the absolute oppression instilled in the greatest country and system the world has ever seen?

Get a little primer on exactly what capitalism and inflation and the systems of Milton Friedman are all about here:

Hudson: Since the Democrats took power in the 1990s under Clinton, they’ve stopped the anti-monopoly regulation. They’ve stopped the antitrust laws from being enforced, and you have a great concentration of monopolies, and they can raise prices for whatever they want, as much as they want. For agricultural goods, the distributors have simply raised the prices without paying the farmers and the dairy farmers any more.

So when you say that inflation is only a monetary phenomenon, what Milton Friedman is saying is, “Don’t look at the power structure. Don’t look at how markets are structured. Don’t look at monopolies. Don’t look at how the wealthy corporations are inflating [prices]. Look at something that we can blame on labor.”

The inflation that Milton Friedman talks about — and you just mentioned my old boss’s boss Paul Volcker — is wages. So when the Federal Reserve talks about inflation, they say, “It’s really wages rising.” Well, we know that wages have not risen anywhere near as fast as the cost of living, so that can’t be the reason — that wages are rising.

But if you can claim that inflation is only caused by labor making too much money and hurting other workers as consumers, then you have the Federal Reserve able to come in and say, “We’ve got to have a depression. We’ve got to have unemployment. We’re going to raise interest rates because we want more unemployment to increase the reserve army of the unemployed so that wage earners will be so desperate for a job that they’ll work for less. And if only they worked for less, then prices will come down, if somehow the companies are going to lower their prices because they can pay their labor less.”

The pretense is that it’s all labor’s fault.

We are all on this behavior and consequence chart. We, that is, the 80 Percenters who have 8 percent of wealth in the USA, compared to the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the One Percent and 19 Percent holding 92 percent of the money-power-possession chart. We mustn’t act up, mustn’t question the boss, mustn’t wonder why the oppressors are our neighbors, the ones our taxpaying work funds, or why so many Americanos believe this is it for Nirvana — the USA, greatest invention in human kind since the wheel.

Oh, those progressives are capitalists to their bones:

Liz Warren shifted from supporting Medicare for All to advocating a two-phased approach intended to build support for a single-payer model (in which the federal government would provide health insurance for every person in the U.S.), by first creating a federally based plan to compete with private insurers and expanding access to Medicare. Elizabeth Warren Says She’s ‘a Capitalist To My Bones’ And Positions Herself as FDR’s Heir

And that is THAT capitalism —

“Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Rupa Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Raj Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.” (“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness)

Imagine that, all those children, and I am not talking about those with allergies, with multiple chronic illnesses, including diabetes and asthma, caught in this vice which is CAPITALISM.

Daily, we are oppressed, and as the digital oppressors get more powerful, everything about us will be transhumanist, and we will be abiding by retinal scans, saliva analyses, galvanic skin response tests, and then the body will be the internet of physiology, the absolute bot world of nano things controlling the entire human experience, and that’s not just heart rate and BP, but thoughts.

Below, I find these on the bus floors much of the time. The children leave them in their desks at school. They are on the playgrounds with orange peels wrapped inside. Oh, the behaviorists. The mind benders. The psyops, the dead-end Americans, paying for the tools of Nazi War, and now, how many teachers are talking about the Doomsday Clock to their high schoolers, just to broach the issue?

Hell, people do not talk about Ukraine and the pimping of weapons of child-killing in public or at the workplace. These bosses, like the Belgium First Student honchos, send memos out on what can and cannot be said during election A or election B at the workplace.

And we wonder why so many neuro-normal (sic) people are checked out. Trauma: The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank, baby, trauma!

This is Startup to Storefront, and on today’s episode, we are unpacking the science of how to get unstuck. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the title of the book written by our guest today: author, psychotherapist, and trauma specialist, Britt Frank. Britt knows a thing or two about getting unstuck, as she has battled everything from meth addiction to sexual abuse. She emerged from that trauma with a new outlook on life, a Master of Social Work degree, and a desire to help others overcome their own hurdles. These hurdles vary from individual to individual, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s not uncommon for someone to put up a mental blockade that prevents them from moving forward. Getting over this mental blockade that inhibits you from progressing forward is what we are dissecting today.

In today’s episode we discuss:

– Why you don’t need every friend to be a best friend

– How Covid didn’t create a mental health crisis, it just exposed the one we already had

– The power behind changing your why’s to whats. So roll up your sleeves and let’s start the process of getting unstuck.

The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank,

The post More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Thoughts of an Ageing Communist

Declan McKenna — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:46:02 +0000

I was struck by an article in Counterpunch late last year: Scott Tucker wrote a piece centred around war and peace and to further enlighten his readers he provided links to two other articles: “I am including links to two articles readers may find useful. The first article was just published at World Socialist Website (WSWS). They are Trotskyists and I am not, but in this case I pretty much agree with their views.”

Oh dear! A man failing to dismiss a political group on the basis of their description or political leaning! Where will it all end?

I am a communist in the traditional sense that I aligned myself to the Communist Party of Ireland for many, many years only to discover that either most of them – or me – are not the type of ‘communists’ that should keep each other company. Eventually, I was expelled for – to keep a long story very short – disobedience!

Now, how many of you readers are still with me? How many of you have now instantly made one decision or another based on what you have read so far or are you prepared to read on?

First, I will contend that in the ‘west’, liberals, progressives, left, socialists, communists, etc are so far away from achieving any political power that many of the differences between them, the historical animosities, the petty squabbles, the inflated egos, the personal disputes, are completely and utterly ridiculous. And, that many people see us that way and is why so many people will not touch us.

By all means indulge ourselves in establishing or maintaining historical or current differences. But, as is frequently the case, our fractious nonsense is only a thin veil that covers our organisational and political failures within our ever-decreasing circle. It does nothing to create any possibility for progress whatsoever. Mostly, it provides a cheap, ignorant platform to help us escape having to answer so many awkward or pertinent questions. And it certainly contributes nothing to resolving deeper fundamental issues that will inevitably arise at a later level of organisational development.

Frankly, an objective look at many organisations, including communist parties, must conclude we that have long since descended into pathetic cultish outfits. There are plenty of individuals and organisations in most ‘western’ countries that could form the basis of a united Left challenge to the prevailing and very successful ruling bodies. Many, especially in the Americas, have been successful or have made considerable progress despite overwhelming odds.

Now, look at the comfortable ‘western’ record. Take Europe. There is barely a handful of relatively successful organisations and even fewer successful communist parties. The left, the progressive forces have been chewed up and spat out for the most part, though many ‘survive’ in insular and constant states of delusion.

Discussion of revolution and communism in the English-speaking world is just fantasy role playing unless it begins and ends with the cold hard reality that the left has been completely neutralized and marginalized here and the numbers are nowhere close to what they need to be. Moving revolutionary leftism out of the farthest margins and closer to the mainstream should be your first and foremost objective before you talk about anything else, because otherwise you’re just LARPing. You’re arguing about a political movement that has no actual movement.

You can do this by outreach and activism. You can also do this by finding ways to make socialism and communism look so fucking cool that people start knocking each other over to be a part of it. Finding clever ways to make it shiny and attractive in a very indoctrinated society.
— Caitlin Johnstone, Australian journalist

Where to start? At least, acknowledge that the capitalistic and imperialistic forces, organisations and political parties have excelled themselves compared to the Left despite their differences. Acknowledge that they have utilised every means available to them — especially the media — in spectacular fashion particularly in relation to their struggle with the Left. The enormous imbalance in our access to the broad media does not absolve us of the requirement to at least try to counter or circumvent that imbalance.

Nothing does more to fracture the Left than the Left itself. The establishment, along with the media (and frequently with the media and their armies) plant the seeds of division and the Left grows those seeds to maturity with unrelenting eagerness and astonishing success.

I am sorry that this little peep into the Left is largely concentrated on Europe. Despite decades of engagement in solidarity with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela (chiefly), my practical political experience is in Europe.

I have watched (and marched with) people being led to the top of the hill so many times in my lifetime on so many issues only to find that everyone had to find their own way home with nothing more than either the satisfaction that they had done ‘something’ about something or the feeling that they had been led astray – completely astray by leaders who had no sense of direction.

For now, in the ‘west’, we have lost the battle with the capitalists and our prospects of changing that trajectory are slim. However, to improve those odds, to prepare for the coming confrontations we have to be better organised than in the past. That is self-evident:

Stop living in the past

Stop accepting mediocre leadership

Stop listening to ‘leaders’ whose only response to any issue is to ‘organise’ a picket or a march

Stop relying on so-called liberals whose only purpose in life is to let you down when you need them the most

Stop believing that governments who do not respond to any democratic demands will be intimidated into accepting the demands of some pathetic picket outside (always outside) some government department or other

Stop everything and reassess and learn from our past failures

Stop responding to each and every provocation thrown at us by our governments, or blocs or employers – they are laughing out loud at us. It is so hilarious for them that they feed us on a constant drip diet of provocation and watch as hundreds of separate organisations respond in hundreds of separate ways – none of which threatens them in the slightest

Stop and try to work out how and why we have lost the argument when our message could be and should be so attractive – how can this be?

Stop believing that when a government retreats on some particular issue that that has been a victory for the opposition. At best, it may be a tactical retreat. If only the Left would engage in a tactical retreat from failed tactics, we might make some progress on some front

Stop accepting any financing from your government or local authority to ‘assist’ in running some social organisation or other, some quasi-educational project, some ‘human-rights’ outfit, there are literally hundreds of examples. The state funding organisations that often engage in campaigns against the government! Do you think that the governments are stupid?

Stop accepting leadership from rogues and charlatans – if you take the time to look, they will expose themselves, and usually the only cover they have is a compliant membership

Stop evading our responsibility for ensuring the effectiveness of our organisation

Stop embracing all sorts of side-issues – race, religion, gender, etc and stick to the only thing that can resolve these issues – class unity and class victory

Stop strangling discussion: at the same time stop analysing issues to death at the expense of any form of organised response

Stop showing how small we are, how little support we have. The governments, the capitalists and unfortunately the people already know this, mostly because in case they missed it, we insist on reminding them at every opportunity!

Stop thinking that every defeat is somehow a victory – skip the self-delusion and start to learn the real difference between the two concepts

Stop and accept that especially in the English-speaking world and in Europe generally we lost and are continuing to lose more every day and try to figure out why that is the case and try to figure out what to do about it

Stop and consider why there are so many separate groups with separate approaches on issues that most other organisations would hold some degree of sympathy with. There is no question that many of the leaders of these, let’s call them specialised or sectional groups, have been driven out of other groups or had failed to make any progress or even see any prospect for progress on some issue within some larger group. There is a lot of talent out there, a great number of people with specialist knowledge yet all, including the larger groups, are running round like headless chickens and failing to recognise the basic principle that unity, or even co-operation, is strength

Stop and consider the issue of unity being strength (for the most part): If unity is strength, then disunity is weakness. Weakness inevitably leads to failure. Who is responsible for the disunity of forces on the Left?

Stop and consider how we are rated, not necessarily in terms of success or failure, as these concepts are subject to wild variations according to our environment, but in terms of how we are perceived: how does our government rate us in terms of being a threat, how do other organisations rate us (for all manner of reasons), how do the people we appeal to rate us?

“Street activism reinforces the negative public perception”

“Street activism is more about cops, “symbolic” arrests, and social media”

“Street activism gives us the illusion of being a threat”
— Mickey Z

Stop behaving as if we just represent ourselves. By our own declarations we take on to represent the working class. Yet, carrying that responsibility we expose ourselves variously as disorganised, violent (sometimes), incompetent, tiny, fractious, vulgar, arrogant or cult-like outfits presenting ourselves as glorious defeated heroes and/or marked with an obvious outcast mentality. If you don’t recognise yourself then ask anyone in the street and they will set you straight. Even if you are not one of the above, even if you are one of the few stalwarts, you will be lumped in with the above either because people are not able to distinguish one from the other, or you will be deliberately so labelled by the media, etc

Stop and look to see if there is one thing we do well: any one thing that we do well that makes us indispensable in the wider or narrower scheme of the political reality you inhabit

Just Stop. Consider for one moment what would be the consequence if your particular organisation ceased to exist. Would such a disappearance even be noted within the great scheme of things? Be honest with ourselves. The fact is that most left political organisations would not be missed. That does not mean that they should go away. Indeed, they are needed more than ever. However, it does mean that most of them do have to completely reassess their situation. Instead of wasting time doing the same futile things time after time, take a look at ourselves and develop some self-respect for our image.

Considering that the capitalists have outgunned the Left — in every sense of the word — how can it be possible that we continue to use every method that we know does not work. What is the matter with us?

The Left has no credibility, for the most part and in most instances. It is not only the governments and the capitalists that ignore us but also the very people we try to appeal to. They deserted us in droves and continue to do so.

“But that’s the magic of ‘activism,’ isn’t it? We rebels loyally follow the time-worn script and then pat ourselves on the back for being so badass that the ‘pigs’ have no choice but to come after us.”

“Imagine if those who are passionate about living in a more sane, equitable, and compassionate society, took steps that actually contributed to that noble goal.”

“It’s never too late to try something new…”

— Mickey Z

What is to be done? There is no alternative to good organisation — it is the key to everything. Solid political and organisational structures will transform any group no matter what it is. Rejecting all the previous methods that did not work — and will not work — is the first step to being forced to consider alternative approaches. That can only happen when the organisation itself is nourished with clear plans and strategies. When we skip that step, we are doomed and so is anything we touch. Building the organisation and promoting policies are distinct activities which, although related, require separate attentions and expertise.

Look at the real world, the world of capitalist successes and outright victories in pursuing and achieving their goals for themselves. Capitalism itself is a disaster but the people who oversee that disaster are first-class organisers and strategists. They have not secured and cemented their grip on most of the world on a wing and a prayer.

We cannot lead others until you know where we are going ourselves. We have to recognise that too many people have been led up blind alleys and are no longer willing to be fooled again. We have to take responsibility for having been the cause of that disastrous outcome and take steps to make sure there is no continuation or re-occurrence of that disaster. Think quality, not quantity. Just like the 1% does. Think organisation. Just like the 1% does. Think strategy. Just like the 1% does. Or, do we consider ourselves (from a broad organisation and strategic perspective) to be better at the job than they are?

“Using no way as way. Having no limitation as your only limitation.”
— Bruce Lee

Leaving the futility behind will be no loss but seriously reassessing our internal situation just might sow a seed of our choice that we could learn to nourish and develop. Is that proposition so hard to understand? After we have achieved some organisational and leadership capacities, we might just be able to look at the next step: how to cooperate with others and then achieve unity. We have nothing to lose but our own self-imposed chains!

It is likely that I may be wrong on some of the points I have raised. It is just as likely that I have missed many other important points. In any event, can you correct me or enlighten me without attacking me? At least, try.

The post Thoughts of an Ageing Communist first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Declan McKenna.

The Slavophile Russian Cosmists

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 16:04:25 +0000

This beautiful Earth is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born and the sea of stars which we must now. venture forth

— Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future

Orientation

In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither.

Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia

For political and economic reasons, I disagree with Nicholas Berdyaev’s characterization of the Russian “soul” as conflicted spiritually between Dionysian paganism and ascetism or politically between anarchism and despotism. However what Berdyaev is right about is that Russians are not bourgeois. For Russian thinkers, individual freedom often seems more like willful license than genuine freedom. In addition, there are two other Western tendencies which have never taken hold in Russia. One is a disembodied transcendental spirituality. Those “cosmists” (to be defined shortly) like Nikolai Fedorov insisted his spirituality include a technological dimension such as the colonization of the planets. At the same time, epistemologically neither philosophical schools such as dry-as-dust rationalism nor bean-counting empiricism ever seriously took hold in Russian philosophy as they did in the West.

Culturally there was the battle between the Slavophiles who emphasized what Russia could teach the West about say, the communal life of peasants. Then there were the Enlighted liberals like Belinsky and Herzen-who tried to show what Russia could learn from the West. The Slavophiles essentially won. This can be seen in the minority status of liberalism throughout Russia’s 19th century, the early 20th century, throughout the Soviet period and even after.

For example Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov (1912-1992) argued that Russia’s future as an international power lay not in emulating the Western European and Atlantic powers, but in gathering and uniting the “passionarity” of the steppe peoples in the East.

Young in his book The Russian Cosmists tells us Gumilyov’s views have been a major influence on the neo-Eurasian cultural and political movement prominent since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. He is a source for Russian neo-nationalist thought. Capitalism never got a foothold in Russia except when Russia was invaded by Mordor’s free market fundamentalists after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

What is Russian cosmism?

According to Berdyaev, Russians are preoccupied with eschatology – the kingdom at the end of history. Cosmists were not convinced that we were fixed in present evolutionary time. We can slide backwards in evolution at the change of the moon or setting of the sun. According to Young, tales of vampires and werewolves have haunted Slavic lands at least since the time of Herodotus.

According to George M. Young, Russian cosmism is a blend of political activist speculation, futuristic religious science and utopian outer space colonization. It includes the following assumptions and motives:

Active evolution: the present humanity is not the end point;
The exploration of the cosmos;
A belief in the existence of astral forces;
Inclusion of premodern bodies of knowledge like astrology, alchemy and the kabbalah as valuable sources of knowledge;
A belief that leading scientists should be involved in the human future
Belief in unlimited extension of human physical longevity;
Humanity bears the responsibility for our future development on this planet;
The existence of a planetary envelope, the noosphere on top of Vernadsky’s biosphere and lithosphere.

Let’s take the example of Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) who developed his own version of spiritual Darwinism. He argued there were three stages in the development of humanity:

Telluric earthbound man who is confined to this planet. He is a captive of gravity and the senses. Sukhovo-Ko claims the practice of “unkinship” is the present state of the world. As fallen humanity we are now natures slaves.
Our common task is to become nature’s master. When we do, we become Solar man, inhabiting or solar system.
Sidereal man – inhabiting all worlds in the universe.

He thought that the further we evolve, the smaller our bodies should become.

Individual commonalities among the cosmists

The cosmists were interdisciplinary, self-educated and they spoke many languages. They were optimistic when compared to the gloom-and-doom that has enveloped the West throughout the 20th century. They included mystic Nikolai Fedorov, who had explored the territory between science and magic; the mystical poet Vladimir Solovyov; rocket scientist pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and geochemist VD Vernadsky. One man, Florensky, was called the Russian Leonardo. He was a groundbreaking mathematician, inventor, aestheticist, an electric engineer and social worker. He wrote a visionary book called The Pillar and the Ground of Truth.

Cosmists’ stormy Relationship with the Soviet Union

Cosmists were very aware of the Russianness of their ideas and activities. They sensed that their best work would not and could not have been done elsewhere. During the Soviet period the religious cosmists worked in exile like Berdyaev and Bulgakov. Others sharing unorthodox political and economic views were restricted, suppressed and eventually liquidated including Florensky, Bogdanov, Gorky, Setnitsky and Muravyov. The scientific cosmists like Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky Chizhevsky and Kuprevich were honored in their fields, provided their work did not contradict dialectical materialism. It wasn’t until the 1980s that hidden works from previous periods came out.

A Sampling of Science Fiction Writers, Mystics and Philosophers

Name

Accomplishments

Karazin (1773-1842)

The first to call for the human management of nature, including the use of balloons explosive projectiles and maximum control over all meteorologic phenomena

Lomonosov

Made accurate, original scientific observations about the northern lights and firestorms and the sun

Odoevsky (1803-1869)

Wrote a futuristic fantasy The Year 4338

Vladimir Solovyov 1853- 1900

Political thinker, mystic, poet, literary critic

He was immersed in Qabalah and the Divine Sophia

He thought the transformation of sexual love onto a higher plane would require the transformation of the entire external environment (in other words, eroticization of matter)

Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903)

Fedorov wanted to regulating nature and resurrect dead ancestors. He complained that all the time that now goes into attracting a mate and bringing life into the world could be used to restoring life to those who gave it to us.

He wanted to erect great cones on the earth’s surface so that people might be able to control the earth’s electromagnetic field in such a way as to turn the whole planet into a spaceship under human control. We would no longer slavishly have to orbit our sun but could freely steer our planet.

Russian artists who worked on Fedorovian and cosmic themes included the artist Kandinsky, the composer, Scriabin and the poet, Andrei Bely.

Scientific immortalism

The search for technological, physical, material solutions to the problem of death. Everything in their view, even thoughts of love, memories of childhood, can ultimately be understood as matter and energy, chemical and electronic impulses and exchanges. Mind is nothing but operations of the brain. Some immortalists are in the business of freezing brains and even entire heads of people who wish to become immortal when adequate technology becomes available.

Sergei Bulgakov (1871- 1944)

He believed the entire world-historical process proceeds from the contradictions between mechanism or thingness (based on necessity), and from nature to the principle of cosmic freedom (the world soul)

The cosmos as it exists is not yet an organism, but human labor can, but not necessarily will, make it so. Through labor humanity introduces a new cosmogonic world creating force equivalent to natural force.

Bulgakov’s man is not a creator, but recreator. This is akin to Spinoza’s “Natura Naturans”. He used images of Sophia as the world soul.

The Place of Theosophy and mediumship

Young tells us that even the early Soviet prominent officials, self-proclaimed atheists and materialists showed great interest in studies associated with the occult. For example, Gorky was interested in thought transference and the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Rosicrucian initiate. For Scriabin and Kandinsky, occult philosophy was a lifetime pursuit that impinged on all aspects of their personal, spiritual and creative lives.

Many of you who have heard of Theosophy may dismiss it as the wild ravings of Madam Blavatsky about cycles of previous races and lost civilizations. In the Anglo-American world of transcendental spiritualism, Theosophy might seem to be the opposite of radical political activity. But in the Russian Silver Age, Mary Carlson says most educated readers had some acquaintance with spiritualism and Theosophy. Theosophy also claimed that present humanity is not the most advanced in history and vanished races of humanity, Atlantean and Lemurian were physically, mentally and spiritually superior to us.

Theosophists were not insensitive to human suffering. Theosophists were active in mending the clothing of soldiers during World War I and Annie Besant was a socialist. Some of the principles of theosophy could be interpreted socialistically. Here are four of its characteristics:

Spirituality could be divided into exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric religion is religions for the masses based on superstition and controlled by religious elites. Esoteric religion is the core teaching of all the world religions which are only known to a few wise people who have no control over the masses.
It is universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caster or color.
It is the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science.
To investigate the unexplained laws of nature along with the power latent in humanity to tap into the paranormal.

When Marx talked about religion as the opiate of the people, it is directly connected to exoteric religion. Esoteric spirituality’s criticism of priests would have warmed Marx’s heart. The second principle of universal brotherhood was a challenge to racial, religious and sexual hierarchies. Marxists would support that. Thirdly, the fact that the comparative study of religion and philosophy included science would have made room for skepticism about religion that Marxists would favor.

Russian Scientists

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

Young called Tsiolkovsky an unpretentious self-made genius. According to Young, he arrived in Moscow from a provincial village in 1873 with no money or friends, minimum education and was nearly deaf from childhood after a bout of scarlet fever. He visited the library where Fedorov worked every day and joined a group of followers. Fedorov was his ideal teacher spending hours with him discussing his own studies. Fedorov directed his studies towards math, physics and chemistry. Tsiolkovsky was very interested in space travel after studying Jules Verne. He dreamed of an eternal striving outward of humanity to the sun which would allow humanity to be released from the chains of gravity. He began to make rocket boats, rocket wagons and rocket powered spaceships. He wrote narratives about traveling beyond earth by rocket ship and developed mathematical formulas that would make some of his fantasies possible.

Tsiolkovsky wrote papers that would eventually lay the foundation for the 1957 launching of Sputnik. We are informed by Young that his work contained the embryo of nearly all the scientific-technological attainments of the Soviet Union in the exploration of space. He was able to determine most of the things necessary to make, launch and sustain life inside rockets as we now know them. He also calculated the amount of fuel needed to overcome the earths gravitational pull. Finally, he popularized space exploration with a number of long and short science fiction articles that drew Russian scientists into the field of colonizing the cosmos. Today The Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics sponsors conferences containing 12 sections with people from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas attending.

Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945)

Vernadsky was well-read in the literature of the world’s religions and in Eastern and Western philosophy. He felt closest to the ancient Greek hylozoic pantheism which finds life in all matter. He read Darwin in English when he was seventeen and mastered fifteen languages. He also read widely in history and world literature.

His main breakthrough was to demonstrate the role of living matter – humans, animals and plants – in the transfer of solar energy into mineral matter. He claimed that life not only evolves from hard mineral matter but in the process of disintegrating over eons contributes to the creation of new matter. With the emergence of the noosphere in human societies in the 19th and 20th centuries, mankind becomes a geological force. It was as part of the noosphere that would guide humanity in a gradual but inevitable evolution. He says that two billion years ago plants containing calcium emerged from the world of minerals. Five hundred thousand years ago, animals with calcium skeletons began to emerge. This development of calcium within living matter was one of the major stages in the geological history of the biosphere. Young says that though Vernadsky is relatively unknown around the world today, in time he will be considered the equal of Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937): the Russian Leonardo

Florensky was called the Russian Leonardo and made major contributions to mathematics, physics, electrodynamics, folklore, philology, marine botany, art history and theory, earth science, and philosophy. He was also a master theorist of avantgarde art contributing to the mathematical, philosophical and theological revolution that was taking place in all the arts from realist to symbolist literature.

In Pillar and the Ground of Truth Florensky explores concepts and images of Sophia the way we experience her as a hint of the heavenly city to be built – the world soul come to earth. He proved to be of major assistance to Lenin in his efforts to electrify Russia. He wrote to Vernadsky in 1929 concerning the biosphere becoming a noosphere or planet of thought. He suggests that interpenetrating the biosphere is what he would all the “pneumatosphere” a sphere of spirit and culture intimately related to, affecting and being affected by the rest of the biosphere. The nephew of Solovyov once remarked that Florensky looks as if he had already lived a thousand years.

Alexander Chizhevsky (1897- 1964)

Like most cosmists he was interdisciplinary, acquiring great skill in music, poetry and painting. He produced hundreds of accomplished impressionist oil paintings, and water colors. Later with friends he went on archeological expeditions in Greece and Egypt.

He had increased humanities’ ability to anticipate changes in the weather. While Tsiolkovsky wanted to know how we can affect the cosmos, Chizhevsky wanted to know how the cosmos affects us and how we are subjected to the laws of nature. His life work would be the study of solar and cosmic influences on human behavior. He was called) Leonardo of the 20^thcentury with discoveries in aeroionization – air purifiers; heliobiology – the effects of solar pulsation on human life and hemodynamics which sheds new light in the circulating of blood through living bodies.

He writes as an uncompromising determinist. Everything of culture and the psyche consists of physiochemical and neurological interactions. Our blood flows with the veins of the cosmos and our heart beats with the pulse of the cosmos. Tsiolkovsky became his mentor and supporter of his publications.

The power of electricity in history

Chizhevsky argued that it is the principle of electricity that affects both culture and history. The power of electrons is to combine, attract and find larger units of matter and energy. Gravity magnetism, spacetime and matter-energy are all electronic. For Chizhevsky, the sun’s influence on the biosphere, including human behavior, is a matter of the transfer of electrons. The discovery that patterns of solar activity – sun storms, and sun stops – coincide with patterns of mass human behavior such as wars, revolutions and epidemics. He calls this new science historiometry.

Reds on Earth: From the Biosphere to the Noosphere

Animal species activity

Like all other animals, we humans have to earn a living in the environment in order to meet our needs. Each species has a specific activity, a “species activity” unique to itself by which adaptation is accomplished (for example, building dams is the species activity of beavers). All animals work – i.e., they expend energy in a focused way over time in order to survive and reproduce. But the overwhelming majority of animals do not deliberately cooperate with other members of their own species, except in the case of mammals in caring for their young. They complete all processes of work essentially alone. The simple biological strategy of most other animals is to graze, forage, or chase down prey in solitude. Humans, considered in isolation, without society or culture, and relying only on physical prowess, are mediocre competitors to other large-bodied mammals. Other animals can run faster, jump higher, and have greater sensory acuity.

Human species activity is cooperative

It is our social strategies that have made us the dominant large-bodied species on this planet, and these social strategies entail cooperation. It is our ability to cooperate with other human beings that gives us the edge over the rest of the animal kingdom. We cooperate by (a) pooling our resources, (b) creating a division of labor, and (c) working to a common end. Cooperation creates a social whole which is more than the sum of any individual. Human societies emerged as an adaptive strategy of homo sapiens to compensate for our physiological mediocrity. But society does far more than help us to survive and reproduce. Society is responsible for completing our humanization and expanding it over the course of history.

Cooperation changes human species-activity from work to labor. In laboring, we accept roles in a division of labor. Members of a hunting band agree beforehand that some will join together to frighten the game, while others will wait in ambush. Later, if they have been successful, they will share the kill with other members of the band who have stayed behind at the campsite. After all is done and they have finished consuming the edible parts of their prey, those members who did not participate in the hunt are expected to engage in other roles, such as sewing the carcass and tanning the leather of the animal.

The planetary noosphere is historical

For most of human history there was no noosphere. But in the last two centuries, our species has built a network of social institutions that reflect on each other (what Chardin called centrapedalization) around the Earth that changes, and is changed by, our biophysical environment. Society becomes akin to what Teilhard de Chardin termed a “noosphere”—a “super-organic” planetary feedback system, a “socio-sphere” nested within the biosphere. A look from outer space would show the noosphere concentrated in cities. Chardin poetically compared the system of cities of communication with electric power links and tied the circulation and electric power lines with the circulation of the nervous system.

It is within this socio-sphere (noosphere) that history takes shape. The dynamics taking place among other animals within the biosphere over time could be called “evolution.” “History” is a unique kind of irreversible and accumulating evolutionary activity that goes with the building of the noosphere. Without a noosphere there would be no history. With the few exceptions of those other animals that have some socio-culture, the human species is the only species on earth that produces history. History consists of socio-cultural systems changing over time.

Summing up:

Non-human animals Human beings

work labor

little or no cooperation cooperation: social roles

biological evolution socio-cultural evolution

evolution without history evolution with history

Human practice is the accumulating irreversible, recurring and conflicted process by which collective humanity intervenes in the biosphere, noosphere and history for the purposes of satisfying needs and wants. It is conflicted because it is both intentional and unintentional and because there are class struggles over the form and content of the intervention.

Mystics and mechanical materialists

There are at least three ways of understanding the relationship between the biosphere, the mind, the noosphere and the spiritual world. Mystics say that biosphere, mind and noosphere are all creatures of a spiritual world. The epistemological framework for mystics is with the relationship between a spiritual world and an individual. At the other extreme for mechanical materialists, the relationship is between the biosphere and the biological individual. They ignore the mind and the noosphere. Where mystics and mechanical materialists differ is in the ultimate nature of objective reality. For mystics the ultimate reality is the spiritual world. For mechanical materialists it is biophysical nature. But they agree that subjectivity begins with the individual.

The place and misplace of mind in socio-historical psychology

For Vygotsky and the sociohistorical school, in between the biophysical world and the individual mind is a sociohistorical noosphere layer of reality. It is sociohistorical objectivity of human practice which engages in an expanding feedback loop with the biosphere. Individual subjectivity emerges from and interacts with the historical-social layer of reality. The individual mind does not engage the biosphere directly, only indirectly. The individual mind does not even become a human mind until it is socialized and historicized. For dialectical materialists like Vygotsky, the human mind is created out of a socio-historical network of institutions from birth to death. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria claimed that psychological skills first originate through structural, meaningful, cooperative, and recurring forms of labor.

The main function of the mind is externally, not internally, driven. Primarily, the human mind is concerned with the collective engagement of transforming external objects through the laboring process in order to satisfy basic needs. Introspection or self-reflection is the second stage of this process, but it is not the main focus as it is with idealist mysticism. For dialectical materialists the human mind is a function, not a substance (as it is for mystics) of highly organized material bodies – human beings. To say that the human mind is inseparable from society and history is not to say that other animals do not have minds. What it does mean is that without intense social life and verbal language, animal minds are mostly imprisoned in the present. It is the socialization and historization of Homo sapiens that is responsible for making the mind a human mind.

From brains to minds

Before the emergence of the human mind, internality had an origin in matter, specifically the brain. The brain is an adaptive responsive to a rapidly changing biosphere where instinct was a less and less reliable resource. There are non-social creatures without brains that have no mind. With the emergence of a central nervous systems, animals developed brains. But is only when animals have a social life and brains, that pre-human minds appear. To be sure, nature was physical, chemical and biological before the brain or the mind appeared. So, the mind is first a product of material nature (the brain) and later through the social and historical practice of human beings, the mind emerges. Then the mind becomes a coproducer through society and history with nature. For materialists, there is no mind beyond nature, society or history. A dialectical materialist, unlike a mechanical materialist does not reduce the mind to the brain. While the brain is a necessary condition for the mind, once the mind emerges through its building of a socio-historic layer of nature, mind becomes more than the brain. With this foundation in place let us return to the cosmists.

God builders and biocosmists

Marxist intellectuals and future Soviet officials including Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky wanted to redirect the religious character and spiritual energy to the Russian revolution. Gorky says that mysticism and science are not incompatible. They wanted to create a new Adam for a new Eden. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the character Bazarov contended that nature was not a temple but a laboratory. These “God Builders” wanted to combine non-Euclidean math, subatomic particles and depth psychology. In the arts they wanted to follow Wagner to unite all the arts into a single great pageant. Alexander Bogdanov was a physician, an experimental scientist and a science fiction writer who wrote Red Star which was published in 1908. His major philosophical work was Tektology— which he called the science of organization. It anticipated the work in Western Europe on general systems theory and cybernetics.

Valerian Muraviev (1885-1932) was as much an alchemist as a Marxist. He hoped for a total alchemical transformation of the individual and the cosmos. He wrote a book called Control Over Time to parallel the discoveries of Einstein. Muraviev wanted to investigate time, not in a lab but in history and society based on the Russian experience of the revolution and the total reorganization of society. He said it is the collective, not the isolated individual that is the shaper and director of humanity.

Valerian said there are two kinds of time:

Inner time – the realm of freedom—under the control of the individual
External time – the realm of necessity

The goal of the collective is to expand their control over the whole universe along with death. Soviet scientists and scholars are to be the guiding force for the common task in science. Valerian said we must create a population of supermen who overcome time. By contrast, bourgeois society focuses on individual creativity which is the representative of a world-view of commercial interests. This creative industry presently creates objects, not for overcoming time but for passing time.

For the biocosmists the time had come to inhabit outer space and to bring life to all the inhabitants. They viewed the struggle against death as a logical continuation of the revolution’s struggle against bourgeois culture. They agreed with Fedorov that death was not inevitable.

How Reds Would Explore the Cosmos: The Cosmic Extension of the Noosphere

Beyond technological determinism and humanism

The noosphere could become not merely the realm of interaction between society and the biosphere but rather the interaction between all cosmic civilizations and the rest of the universe. In their book The Universe and Civilization, Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko lay out what a communist practice would be like in space exploration. When it comes to the exploration of outer space there is a Flatland duality to overcome between the technicist conception which regards the astronautical as a panacea for all the difficulties and hardships of social development. The opposite is romantic humanist whose supporters reject the needs for the development of an astronautic society and insist the focus to be only with man’s earthly problems.

For communists the exploration of outer space is not a stage in the natural evolution of living matter on earth. Rather It is a new stage in social history. The space age is an explosion-like extension into infinity of man’s sphere of practical-critical activity on earth. To one degree or another, the cosmos has influenced and continues to influence the development of mankind and the outer terrestrial environment. But now that applied astronautics has emerged, society is beginning to affect the nature of the cosmos.

Realms of space exploration

The authors say space exploration is now going on in the following fields:

Immediate vicinity of near space – the higher layers of the earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere, the radiation belts and of outer space. This is accomplished though the help of astronomic instruments placed above the atmosphere (extra-atmospheric astronomy).
Processes are being studied that are artificially created in outer space by the human species. These include technological devices in flight like growing crystals in weightlessness. Others include medical and biological research done directly in flight or on objects placed in spacecraft.
Explorations of Earth from outer space such as meteorological observations and the study of natural resources and aquatic regions.

Should we try to faithfully reproduce terrestrial conditions in space? “No!” say Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko. The essence of creative humanity consists precisely of the ability of humans to change both of our external and internal nature in any direction we choose. They say:

the construction of cities, excavation of natural deposits, and utilization of underground space for communication may well be characterized as redistribution of the planets’ mass transfer of matter into surrounding space, creation of a porous planet. (97)

This tendency is what Buckminster Fuller called euhemerization – doing more with less.

Cosmicization of human practical critical activity

As human practice extends beyond the terrestrial realm there are new processes to consider. Now the conditions and objects of activity may be both terrestrial and cosmic. The range begins at one extreme with terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions. At the other are extreme cosmic objects under cosmic conditions. Here are the steps in between.

Earth	Moving to Outer Space
Terrestrial subjects (human culture)	Cosmic culture
Terrestrial objects (prehuman, extra human nature)	Cosmic objects
Terrestrial conditions	Cosmic conditions
Terrestrial instruments tools	Cosmic instruments

Here are the full fifteen steps:

The terrestrial subject studies terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions using terrestrial instruments
Terrestrial subject studies the effect of cosmic conditions on terrestrial objects with the aid of terrestrial instruments. How solar processes affect physical, chemical and biological objects on the Earth (the sun, conscious utilization of cosmic conditions in terrestrial production)
Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth in a natural way (meteorites and cosmic radiations)
Terrestrial subjects studying terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions with the help of space instruments (rocket technology and automatic stations for exploring the earth)
Terrestrial subject studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions using terrestrial technical instruments of cognition (astronomy)
Although the core of practice is humanity’s affect on objects of cognition and results in changes in these objects, nothing of the kind takes place in the case of astronomic observation. The object of cognition astronomy here affects the subject.
Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth with the aid of spacecraft
The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments for observing terrestrial objects and conditions (permanent orbital stations)
Unmanned recent devices transport cosmic and raw materials and instruments of labor to earth
Automatic cosmic implements are used to process cosmic objects under cosmic conditions for production on celestial bodies and in satellites orbiting earth
The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments of cognition for observing terrestrial objects and conditions
The subject undergoing cosmicization studies the behavior of terrestrial objects under space conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments
The space environment and the conditions of space flight have specific features – weightlessness, vacuum, radiation. There is a need to study living beings under these conditions.
13) The subject undergoing cosmicization uses cosmic instrument on cosmic objects in his study of the possibility of creating terrestrial conditions (conditions similar to terrestrial ones are created for astronaut on spaceships) This task also arises in the construction of inhabit bases on the Moon and the planets
The highest achievement in science is that the subject who undergoes cosmicization studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments.

Conclusion

This article begins by arguing Russia is different from the West philosophically in its rejection of both empiricism and rationalism. In addition, economically it has consistently rejected capitalism even when not in its Soviet phase. Politically it has said no to liberalism, and lastly Russians have turned their backs on Western transcendental religions. Next, I have defined Russian cosmism as having eight characteristics. I close the last part of the first section by naming the personal traits these cosmologists have in common, including their multilingual, self-educated, interdisciplinary and optimistic approach. They included mystics, poets, rocket scientists, geochemists, mathematicians, inventors and engineers.

In the second half of the article, I gave a sample of specific cosmists who were science fiction writers, mystics and philosophers including the interest of some in Theosophy.

Next I turned to the cosmitism of four scientists: Tsiolkovsky; Vernadsky; Florensky, Chizhevsky and their various fields of study.

In the last third of the article, I turned to a communist theory of how the earth is becoming a new layer of evolution called the “noosphere”. I closed the article with a visionary description of how communist theory of the noosphere on earth can be extended into the spreading of noospheres to other planets.

The post The Slavophile Russian Cosmists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor

Eric Zuesse — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:34:30 +0000

Two examples — Korea and Indonesia — will be documented here in order to display that America’s Cold War against communism was/is a cover-story, or deceptive cloak, for a war actually against the poor (and the political Left) in all nations: in other words, a fascist war, meaning that America’s Government became fascist-imperialist as soon as World War II ended, despite FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt — America’s President throughout WW II) having been passionately anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. All of this will be explained here, and documented in the article’s links. First, however, will be explained the underlying economic mechanism employed by means of this war that’s actually against the poor, not ONLY against communists. This modern version of fascist-imperialism relies more on deception — on sophisticated propaganda — than Hitler’s did, because Hitler never pretended to advocate for democracy, whereas America does. So, here it is:

In third-world countries, where labor is non-unionized and cheap, an international corporation can supply the latest industrial machinery, to be worked by the fewest dirt-wage workers in order to undercut the prices of any merely intranational (or ‘local’) corporation while still making intranational (within-nation) profits that are vastly higher than any merely local corporations (which are competing against the multinational ones) in any country can and do; and this is the secret of billionaires (who control international corporations) by which they consequently generate vastly higher rates of return on investment than any merely local entrepreneurs possibly can. Offshoring production thus greatly increases return-on-investment for the billionaires while it drives wages down for the workers in the industrialized countries. On a global scale, it’s a war by the super-rich against the poor. In both respects (by lowering wages in industrialized countries and prohibiting labor unions in the banana republics), the result is to cause an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s wealth to become concentrated amongst the billionaires — the people who control international corporations. From the standpoint of billionaires, it’s the system that surpasses any other. From the standpoint of the world’s poor, however, it is the worst system imaginable, because it funnels wealth from the masses to the super-rich; it impoverishes billions while pouring a bigger and bigger share of the world’s wealth into the control of the world’s mere 3,000-or-so billionaires. That’s the way the world works and ever-increasingly has worked ever since 1945.

Here’s how it happened:

Korea

“The secret genocide in South Korea you’ve probably never heard of”

(The sources in the article, by Écspielle Kay, excerpted here are mainly hidden behind paywalls because the U.S. Government has always suppressed what this article is reporting. But I have accessed every source here, and find the article to be fully honest and accurately documented. I have removed the photos but retain their descriptions.)

… What had really happened in Daejeon in the summer of 1950 … was later termed the Bodo League massacre.

The centre of Daejeon, South Korea, appearing as an ordinary industrial city. Also the site of one of history’s largest massacres.

Song Joon-ae immediately told the manager of the site. The manager of the site called the Daejeon division of the construction contractor company. It continued upwards until the discovery was brought to the attention to South Korean authorities. The construction site became an excavation site, and the bones which Soon Joon-ae found were not the last to be unearthed.

Government officials at the various sites around Daejeon found hundreds of sites with hundreds of bodies, some children, some infants, some civilians, some wearing peasant clothing, others wearing military uniform. Park Rae-mun, an archaeologist who appeared at the site estimated that 1.2 million people were massacred at the various sites around Daejeon. Kim Dong-Choon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South Korean governmental body, conservatively estimates that approximately 100,000 were executed by the South Korean military on October 1950, while many point to 400,000 as a likely figure. Both executioners and escapees came forward, and a picture gradually built up that these people were massacred on the suspicion of being leftists. …

The story of South Korea’s past starts with a provisional government often forgotten about in history textbooks. The People’s Republic of Korea lasted only from 1945 to 1946, and its capital was in Seoul. Through people’s committees all over the Korean peninsula, a twenty-seven-point programme was formed through democratic participation in government, a relatively novel experience for Korean people at the time.

“the confiscation without compensation of lands held by the Japanese and collaborators; free distribution of that land to the peasants; rent limits on the non-redistributed land; nationalization of such major industries as mining, transportation, banking, and communication; state supervision of small and mid-sized companies; …guaranteed basic human rights and freedoms, including those of speech, press, assembly, and faith; universal suffrage to adults over the age of eighteen; equality for women; labor law reforms including an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and prohibition of child labor; and “establishment of close relations with the United States, USSR, England (ed. should be the United Kingdom), and China, and positive opposition to any foreign influences interfering with the domestic affairs of the state.”…

As soon as American troops landed in September of 1945, something seemed off about the People’s Republic of Korea. Nationalisation of major industries? Free distribution of land to peasants? People’s committees? Strong labour-unions and an eight-hour work day? To the United States, this experiment in a united Korean peninsula under democratic rule whiffed of communism.

What immediately occurred afterwards was the abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree. Officials serving under the government were shot, buildings were bombed, and supposedly “communist-sympathetic” Korean troops stationed in the country were summarily executed in a bloodbath lasting for several months. The United States Army Military Government was established, causing the eruption of mass public outrage at military personnel from the former Japanese Empire serving in office in South Korea.

To even further outrage, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the 24 Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army, assessing the situation badly, announced that the Japanese colonial government in Incheon would be kept, and, surprised at the poor reaction from Korean citizens his decision had elicited, tried to placate them by creating the Korean Advisory Council to represent the voice of ordinary Koreans. Unsurprisingly, his council was composed of landowners, wealthy businessmen, and officials from the Japanese colonial government.

Still not taking the hint, the military government continued to rule over months of civil unrest and outbursts of violence after outlawing the people’s committees and the PRK government. On September 23, 1946, 8,000 railway workers in Busan lead a strike, quickly spreading to hundreds of other towns and cities. A police station in Yeongcheon went under siege as a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands converged all at once, killing 40 policemen. More rebellions killed more than 20 Japanese officials and landlords. The situation escalated, and the American military declared martial law, tens of thousands being killed as military troops fired into mass crowds of demonstrators.

With haste, the First Republic of Korea, what we now know as South Korea, was declared in 1948. Syngman Rhee was flown abroad a US military aircraft to Tokyo, travelling to Seoul, and was installed as [president of the First Republic of Korea]. Rhee immediately arrested the remaining left-wing opponents in the political arena, setting his sights on Kim Koo, a former independence activist, an increasingly popular statesman, and advocate of unification. Syngman Rhee, as a fierce anti-communist and nationalist who would later be forced into exile by his own citizens, had him killed on 26 June 1949. …

*****

“South Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 1 March 2010

MS [Mark Selden]: How have the media covered the work of the Commission?

KDC [Kim Dong-chun, retired Standing Commissioner of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission]: We have had to contend with the fact that the biggest Korean newspapers have ignored or suppressed our important findings and resolutions. The conservative press fails to recognize the relationship between past wrongs and present injustices facing many Korean citizens and those of other countries.

*****

“The Road to the Truth: Lessons from South Korea’s Truth Commissions” (2021)

1 The Final Report of the Jeju Commission confirmed systemic massacres, indiscriminate arrests, torture, and summary executions by the Rhee government during the U.S. military occupation of Korea. 72 The release of the Final Report in 2003 resulted in a public apology from then President Roh Moo-hyun, the inclusion of the Final Report in Korea’s educational curriculum, and the creation of memorials for the deceased.73 Unlike the Anti-Nation Commission, the Jeju Commission had a clear mandate that authorized the Jeju Commission to freely conduct investigations into the Jeju Uprising.74 The extensive involvement of the Office of the Prime Minister also showed how proper governmental support helped the Jeju Commission succeed.75 The apology from President Roh was particularly significant because it marked the first apology by a head of state for human rights abuses in Korea.76 Furthermore, the allowance of the Final Report in high school classrooms allowed for a more neutral understanding of what really happened in the period leading up to the Korean War.77 C. South Korean Truth Commissions and the Korean War The Korean War claimed the lives of over 1,000,000 civilians, which made it the deadliest civilian event in Korean history.78 During the Korean war, atrocities were committed by the South Korean government against its own citizens. 79 For example, the 1949 Bodo League massacres that occurred during the Rhee presidency claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 South Koreans for allegedly being North Korean spies or communist sympathizers. 80 …

Although the TRCK made efforts to locate remains from mass graves related to the Bodo League Massacres and the Geochang massacres, the TRCK’s efforts were cut short due to an abrupt change in leadership in 2008, when President Lee Myung-bak came to power.89 When established in 2005, the TRCK had the full support of then President Roh Moo-hyun who was committed to using truth commissions as a vehicle for uncovering the violent truths of Korea’s past.90 In contrast, President Lee saw truth commissions as an obstacle to his goal of bolstering Korea’s economy.91 The TRCK’s resources and mandate became even more vulnerable when Lee appointed “new leaders” to the TRCK commission to better serve his policy agendas.92

*****

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War”

1 March 2010, by Kim Dong-choon

The Other War: Korean War Massacres

More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953).

*****

“Truman put Nukes in Guam and Gave the Order to Nuke North Korea”

(Based upon key details that slipped through in the academic book by Bruce Cumings; (2011) The Korean War, Robert Barsocchini documents that President Truman had an order drawn up to nuke North Korea but, for some unclear reason, “the order [to nuke North Korea] was never sent.” This was already after Truman had –)

managed to kill millions of Koreans, many, if not most, with “oceans” of napalm produced largely by the Dow Chemical Company, which the US air-force “loved”, referring to it as the “wonder weapon” for its ability to wipe out whole cities of people.

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.” Reporters saw case after case of civilians drenched in napalm — the whole body “covered with a hard, black crust sprinkled with yellow pus.”

US “intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”.

Cities were destroyed, civilians burned to death and blown to bits with zero “tactical or strategic value”. Killing was an “end in itself”.

“[T]he United States Air Force was inflicting genocide”, Cumings notes, “on the citizens of North Korea.”

*****

“The Case Against North Korea”

(I had posted this on 23 September 2019, to place into historical perspective the U.S. regime’s war against North Korea:)

So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China”? It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the U.S. regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the U.S. regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the U.S. regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the U.S. propaganda-media to allow the publics in the U.S. and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the U.S. is the world’s champion of).

This massive historical document opens:

On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S.A. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.

At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.

Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to U.S.-and-allied publics:

Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.

Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]

The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the U.S. flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.” Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.” In other words: the U.S. regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under U.S. President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II. Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.

(The Netflix series from South Korea, The Glory, is fictional but its portrayal of current South Korean culture is relevant here because it portrays South Korea as having a rigid and brutal caste-system that honors the rich and damns the poor, and thus it exemplifies in today’s generation of South Koreans the values-system that the U.S. regime has inculcated into their culture. This is an extreme version of neoliberalism-libertarianism, a zero-sum-game view of life in which individuals are evaluated mainly if not entirely by how wealthy or poor they are: rights come ONLY from wealth, and the poor are worth nothing and deserve to be trashed.)

*****

Indonesia

The October 1965 through March 1966 Indonesian government extermination of anywhere from 500,000 to two million Indonesian supporters of communism and of any other left-wing (or pro-poor) political party — including supporters of Indonesia’s leader, General Sukarno, who had some leftist supporters, including some that were communists — was probably masterminded, ordered, by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, on behalf of the owners of the mega-corporations who were backing the Democratic Party. Certainly, LBJ was behind this ‘ethnic cleansing’, even well before it began. As early as March 1965, Johnson’s people were privately vitriolic against Sukarno, who was making noises about land-reform and possibly nationalizing natural resources. For example, on 18 March 1965, “118. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Ball) to President Johnson” opened:

Our relations with Indonesia are on the verge of falling apart. Sukarno is turning more and more toward the Communist PKI. The Army, which has been the traditional countervailing force, has its own problems of internal cohesion. Within the past few days the situation has grown increasingly more ominous. Not only has the management of the American rubber plants been taken over, but there are dangers of an imminent seizure of the American oil companies.

The coup started on 1 October 1965; General Suharto was installed to replace Sukarno, and promptly began the extermination-campaign. But he didn’t know whom to slaughter; so, as one excellent review of Vincent Bevins’s excellent book about the slaughters, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, succinctly put the matter, “The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of ‘troublesome’ employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.” Other fine reviews of this book are here and here. However, like the other books that have been published about that extermination-campaign, Bevins’s focus isn’t on the masterminds who planned and bribed to get it done (its beneficiaries), but instead on the physical perpetrators and their victims. The coup-and-extermination’s ultimate beneficiaries aren’t named, nor identified.

The U.S. did that extermination in conjunction with other members of the American gang, mainly in Europe. The Judge in the International People’s Tribunal stated that “the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia were all complicit to differing degrees in the commission of these crimes against humanity.” It was a Rhodesist operation, done for the U.S.-and-allied (especially Netherlands) aristocracies.

As I have documented elsewhere, FDR was intensely opposed to all imperialisms, but on 25 July 1945, Truman made the decision to reverse FDR’s foreign policies and aim for the U.S. itself to take control over the entire world.

(The 1982 Peter Weir movie, The Year of Living Dangerously, dramatically represents, from the standpoints of diplomats who were serving in Indonesia at the time leading up to and during the extermination-campaign, the chaotic conditions in Indonesia during that period, but sheds little light upon the reasons, methods, perpetrators, and beneficiaries, behind the massacres.)

The post America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Let Bygones be Bygones: Fresh Analysis Instead of Nostalgia

T.P. Wilkinson — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 16:05:08 +0000

In another 50 years China will be stronger, and by that time the Chinese Communist Party will be a hundred years old. The United States will surely be envious and ill-intentioned, but it doesn’t dare attack China, not even with a single bullet. It will research germ contamination. That is immoral. After it finishes with this unconscionable deed, imperialism will self-destruct.

— Mao Zedong, 毛主席50年前的预言 (Chairman Mao’s 50 Years Ago Prophecy), 1 July 1971, p 520

In Britain, 26 December is Boxing Day. However far more importantly it is the birthday of Mao Zedong, who would have been 129 years old. Mao was a brilliant leader, a poet, a military talent (although trained as a teacher not a soldier), and a keen observer and analyst of world affairs although he practically never left China. Comrade Mao’s selected works comprise a mere five volumes (much of his writing was lost during more than thirty years of war in China. However, there is much to amaze when one considers the almost universal defamation to which he has been subjected in the West. Reading Mao’s writing is particularly instructive because this work is also an astute lesson in how to read politics. That is a skill rarely exhibited in the Anglo-American Empire. Regardless of rank or station ignorance, mendacity and insincerity prevail on the plantation.

On one hand the field still seems at the mercy of those “house negroes” described in part 3. On the other the city never sleeps. New disappointments and embarrassments (putting it mildly) are reported by the hour (or however often the news cycle repeats these days).

So are we surprised that the P*OTUS (there are other words besides president that come to mind) declines to declassify records pertaining to the murder of John F Kennedy? What basis was there for great expectations to the contrary? At some point, maybe not in my lifetime, expectations might be replaced by unconditional demands.

As I suggested in numerous articles previously, any progress in the effort to obtain something like full disclosure would require adoption of a critical patriotism that recognises the nearly three centuries of bad faith that have driven the American Empire and takes responsibility for ending it. Until today only foreigners have spent their lives for America. Hardly any Americans have. Is that cynicism, ignorance or cowardice? The civil rights movement was only possible because the regime could not fight independence movements abroad without the complacency at home.

Now when the US is potentially at its most vulnerable — when pushing back against the oligarchy might actually achieve something the 4th Great Awakening (aka Wokism) has the nominally educated attacking the last scraps of liberty that made the US more than just another rich white man’s country. Ignorantly and cynically they claim to oppose white supremacy (or global warming) while defending the most stridently racist politicians and oligarchs the US has ever spawned.

I had to read the Scarlet Letter in school. Our teachers had no clue how to read (and today they still don’t). However Hawthorne captured the essence of American political culture, infused with the religious fanaticism that fueled the Thirty Years War. Pupils are taught to admire Mark Twain but not to read him, let alone understand what he wrote.

Mr Biden, a DuPont lackey and petty gangster, obviously did not decide anything with what little is left between his ears. (Give me Nixon any day!) Agnew had to quit for what amounted to parking tickets in comparison. It is frankly disgusting that anyone should even admit having actually cast a vote for this pedophile. He cannot even claim he is just a priest.

The Kennedy file (what there is of it) will only be declassified when the regime that controls those archives is no more.

Another burner which is still being used to torch the traces of pluralism still floating where the wreckage of ancient immigrant optimism sank in 1947 is the blow torch of parochialism that passes for political philosophy.

While it is attractive to draw on the literature analysing the NS-era. It is rare that someone in the English-speaking world is sufficiently versed in history or political-economy to adequately place the NS regime (a militarised form of Fabianism) in the proper historical context not merely in the terms of poorly understood Marxism.

I say that because the chimeric Left — the pwogs young and old — perpetuate this practice often with copious citations from real and unreal Marxists. This is possible because unlike Europe before 1947, the US neutralised all its popular Marxist intellectuals and popular organisations where ordinary people actually learned to read Marx and others.

The easiest place to begin is with the absurd discussions about Antifa. One author recently called this US gang a military response to fascism..

If the writers in the Alt-Media were better informed they would know the roots of Antifa. This armed propaganda element is modelled on a group formed in Germany during the 80s, most likely with the same funding as that provided to the so-called Neo-Nazis they pretended to fight. The German neo-Nazi groups were found to be composed almost entirely of off-duty political police whose job it was to agitate with the unwitting help of mainly unemployed youth and workers. Like various Gladio actions these Neo-Nazi/ Antifa shows served to promote de-politicisation and to bait both nationalists opposed to US occupation and leftists opposed to the real Nazis that the US installed and maintained behind Konrad Adenauer’s reactionary screen (and whose progeny form the cadre of the Green, SPD and CDU parties today).

In other words “antifa” is not nor was it ever “antifascist”, despite its name. Just as so many American “Maoists” and “Trots” were never even communists but pseudo-sectarians whose activities were coordinated by intellectual gangsters like Irving Kristol. These pseudo-extremists divided the Left and discredited serious political activity. This was one of the main criticisms raised by Malcolm as well as the BPP — this style of extremist infiltration by academically trained intelligence (red squad) assets.

The current Antifa (they did not even bother to change the German brand name) is an armed propaganda element based on the counter-terror program in the CIA’s Phoenix system. It is an asset of the fascist intelligence organisation that constitutes the core of the US executive branch (executive in the literal sense).

So many writers suffer from a failure to appreciate the differences while grasping too readily at apparent similarities. These comparisons with the NS era are not unwarranted but they only make sense when one places the NSDAP in the context of British and American anti-communism, British antagonism toward Russia (and Germany) in any form, and the determination of the Allies to use the Anti-Comintern Pact to crush nationalism and socialism in Russia and China, as they had in Spain.

They are misguided or insincere. If they were sincere they might recognise that by attacking the patriotic working class- many of whom are veterans- they are pulling the only teeth the American people have with which to bite their exploiters.

One can only conclude that they want to attack the American working class using paramilitary propaganda like Antifa (really Klan style) and psychological warfare to “wham” the very people whose contradictory patriotism and piety is probably the last bastion of the good that Jefferson intended when he wrote the 1776 declaration.

Read Part 1, 2, and 3.

The post Let Bygones be Bygones: Fresh Analysis Instead of Nostalgia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Pyotr Kropotkin, 180 Years Later

Sam Ben-Meir — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:22:40 +0000

Anarchism is an aspect of socialism (among many others) that those of us wishing socialism, or some comparable form of resistance, to survive will have to think about again, this time without a prearranged sneer.

— T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea

This December 9 marked 180 years since the birth of Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), the great Russian anarchist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, economist, and philosopher. Now, of all times, we should be remembering, revitalizing, and creatively reconstructing his legacy.

One might assume that a 19th century Russian anarchist would have nothing to say that could possibly have real bearing on the world today, that his political philosophy, whatever relevance it might have once held, had been long surpassed. I would dare to venture another point of view: not only are we unable to justify confining Kropotkin to the history (or worse, the dustbin) of ideas – rather, this is a thinker that remains still ahead of us, a thinker whose vision has yet to be truly realized. We have not yet caught up with Kropotkin, but there are indications that conditions more favorable to receiving his thought are on the horizon, and that perhaps there is a day approaching when we may even begin to see his ideas implemented on a scale that could radically transform our communities and, most especially, our workplaces.

Kropotkin’s importance for us has only grown because the material conditions, the post-scarcity, the technological advances, have made it possible, no doubt for the first time in history, to truly realize his vision of unfettered human creativity. There is one chapter in The Conquest of Bread (1892) that I want to focus on because it may surprise those who are new to anarcho-communist political philosophy. The chapter is entitled ‘The Need for Luxury,’ and his thesis is quite a simple one: “After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.” The anarchist commune — or what is sometimes referred to today as “luxury communism” — recognizes “that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind.”

We can agree with Aaron Bastani, who argues in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2020) that, “There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” Bastani is talking about using the levels of post-scarcity and automation that we’ve attained to finally usher in a society free of drudgery, toil, and where the full range of tastes can be satisfied.

Given the multiple crises we are facing, the general name for which is global capitalism, how should we answer the question famously posed by Lenin, “What is to be done?” There are at least three basic principles which can be derived from the work of Kropotkin, and that can and should strategically guide us as we move forward. The first is ending the tyranny of private property which has produced greater economic inequality today than we have ever seen in the history of the world. The concentration of capital has produced a condition in which a handful of individuals possess wealth exceeding that of the combined wealth of the billions of people who share this planet. So, as the great French philosopher Alain Badiou has also reiterated, our first principle must be that of collectivism in opposition to the dictatorship of capital: “It is not a necessity for social organization to reside in private property and monstrous inequalities.”

The second principle involve democratizing our workplaces, through worker self-management, or more precisely through what the economist Richard Wolff calls ‘worker self-directed enterprises – in a word, economic democracy. Experiments with non-traditional, non-hierarchical firms, have largely met with success. Perhaps the greatest example is Spain’s Mondrian Corporation, but there are many others. So that we are well past the stage of asking ourselves whether such non-capitalist forms of organization can succeed and be competitive. It has been amply proven that they indeed can.

The non-capitalist reorganization of our workplaces would undoubtedly improve the condition of workers, which is under assault around the world. In countries around the world, union leaders are routinely threatened with violence or murdered. Indeed, the International Trade Union Confederation reports that 2019 saw “the use of extreme violence against the defenders of workplace rights, large-scale arrests and detentions.” The number of countries which do not allow workers to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. In 2018, 53 trade union members were murdered — and in 52 counties workers were subjected to physical violence. In 72 percent of countries, workers have only restricted access to justice or none at all. As Noam Chomsky observed, “Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers’ rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous.”

And third, it is time we recognize, as Badiou put it two weeks after the election of Trump, “that there is no necessity for a state in the form of a separated and armed power.” The principle of free association as opposed to the state is one that anarchism has long advocated. But we need to be clear here: anarchism is usually taken to mean, if anything, opposition to all government or to government as such. In fact, this is a mistakenly one-sided view of anarchism, and it certainly does not represent a nuanced understanding of Kropotkin, who made a clear and sharp distinction between government and the state.

Anarcho-communism is opposed to the state inasmuch as it represents centralized power in the hands of a few, hierarchical relationships and class domination. But Kropotkin was not necessarily opposed to a condition of society in which certain elements of decentralized community government remain. Martin Buber underscored this point: Kropotkin’s “‘anarchy’ like Proudhon’s, is in reality ‘anocracy’; not absence of government, but absence of domination.” The distinctive feature of anarchist programs is not that governments are excluded from the process and without any meaningful contribution to make. The essential characteristics are voluntarism, anti-authoritarianism, the decentralization of political authority, worker self-management (economic democracy), and in general a tendency to address social problems from the bottom up, rather than by imposing solutions from the top down.

Kropotkin was one of Russia’s finest minds, and one that was among the most dedicated to the ideals of which we are in danger of completely losing sight. There is no better time than now to salvage the very best of Russian thought, to reaffirm its universality, its inherently critical posture towards authoritarianism, and the self-destructive pursuit of power through violence.

The post Pyotr Kropotkin, 180 Years Later first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sam Ben-Meir.

Multiple Economic Fractures in Mordor

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 04:20:24 +0000

Orientation

The golden age of left-wing economists

In part because the 1960s was still a period of capitalist abundance, there were few socialists in Yankeedom who pointed to the economic contradictions of capitalism as a motivator for the coming revolution. “Western Marxists” ignored the economy, imagining capitalism could go on forever. As first anarcho-communist and then as Situationists, the group I was in never talked about any economic laws that would drive the economy into a crisis. But a couple of my comrades, one from France, had been closely studying a book by Lyn Marcus (later his public name became Lyndon LaRouche) called Dialectical Economics. Here was a wake-up call for all of us to get back to economics, especially since by the late 1970s the days of economic abundance were over.

Throughout the next thirty years, good economic Marxists like Richard Wolff, David Harvey, Robert Brenner and John Bellamy Foster have carried the torch for political economy. However, it was not until The Great Recession of 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011-2012 really brought economic crisis into the foreground of life in Mordor. Since then, more Marxist economists have emerged such as Michael Perelman, Michael Roberts, and Anwar Shaikh. They have all added depth and scope. Non-Marxist economics such as Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and Jack Rasmus have made acidic analyses of finance capital. The great value in all these economists is that they speak in natural language, not mathematical language. This makes it easier for the Yankee population to understand them.

Varieties of capitalist crises theory and their rivals

In his book The Long Depression Michael Roberts asks four key questions from which he derives eight possible answers about the nature of economic turmoil or even whether there is a crisis at all.

Is capitalism subject to economic crisis?

Within the camp which says no, a second question is answered.

1b) Do periodic fluctuations need fixing?

If the answer is “yes” you are a Keynesian like Paul Krugman. If the answer is “no” you are a libertarian like Milton Friedman. For the libertarians capitalism only goes through “business cycles”.

Within the camp that says “yes”, that capitalism is subject to crisis, a second question is asked:

Is the kernel of the crisis found in production?

If the answer is “no” you are an underconsumptionist like Marxists David Harvey or Rosa Luxemburg.

If the answer is “yes” about the kernel of the crisis found in production, there is another question:

2b) Are crises more than struggle over wages and profit shares?

If no, you are a profit-squeeze supporter. Economics associated with this are Baron and Sweezy and Richard Wolff.

If the answer to the kernel of the crisis is found in production is “yes”, a further question should be:

3a) Are crises integral to the accumulation crisis?

If the answer is “yes” you follow Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is advocated by Michael Roberts, Anwar Shaikh and Robert Brenner.

If the answer to the question is crisis integral to the accumulation process is “no” then a further question is asked.

4a) Does extra-consumption come from outside the system?

If the answer is “yes” you are a follower of Rosa Luxemburg or David Harvey and claim that capitalism has limited resources and needs imperialism to survive.

If the answer is “no” to the question then there is second question.

4b) Does extra consumption come from state intervention?

If the answer is “yes” you are a post Keynesian such as Steve Keen.

If the answer is “no” you are a Malthusian.

In this article I will be drawing from David Harvey’s book The Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. I picked this book, not because I agree with Harvey’s theory of crisis, but because he lays out the contradictions so exhaustively. I am not a political economist by training but I have studied hard to understand him. What is most important for my readers to understand is that there are a great number of reasons that capitalism is in very, very, very serious trouble.

What is a contradiction?

Harvey says a contradiction is when two seemingly opposing forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event. A contradiction can be produced either by innovations, disasters or slow decline.

Contradiction 1 Exchange-value is More Important than Use Value Though Use-Value Matters More in Real Life

The use value of a house is contained in the cost of its production. This includes all the materials that went into building the house as well as the cost of labor to complete the house. The use value of the house is its protection from bad weather conditions, prowlers, a place of comfort, privacy and social reproduction, including sex and taking care of children. The use value of a commodity is relatively stable.

But the exchange value of housing is not fixed. It is interdependent on surrounding houses. Property values can go down on my house if my neighbors’ houses are not kept up, even if my house has been kept up. On the other hand, a house that is not kept up can sell for a high price if it is located in a gentrifying neighborhood. Harvey points out that there have been property market crashes in 1928, 1973, 1987 and 2008. The contradiction is that use-values are captive to exchange values and this constantly destabilizes the economy. Harvey says exchange value is always in the driver’s seat.

Contradiction 2 Money is Valued Above the Social Value of Labor

Harvey identifies four constructive functions that money provides:

It is the means or medium of circulation. Before money, with barter exchange was dependent on both parties having goods the other wanted. Money overcomes the incongruity in immediacy of goods and services that limits direct barter.
It provides a single measuring rod for economic values of all commodities.
It provides a way to store value.
It delays the need to buy a commodity immediately.

But there is a gap between money and the labor that ultimately produces it. Money hides the social labor that went into its material form. The problem is that money, which is supposed to be used to measure value, itself become a kind of commodity— that is money capital. Its use value is that it can be used to produce more value profit or surplus value. Its exchange value is, for example, an interest payment.

Commodity money such as gold and silver are rooted in tangible commodities with definite physical qualities like:

It is relatively scarce.
The supply is relatively inelastic so they maintain their relative value against all other commodities over time.
These metals do not oxidant and deteriorate.
The physical properties are known and their qualities can be assayed accurately so their measure can easily be figured out.

The problem is these commodity moneys are awkward to use on a daily basis of coin tokens. Bits of paper and then electronic moneys became much more practical in the exchange of goods. They are good at storing value but not so good in circulating commodities.

The problem is also the desire for finance capital as a means of social power becomes an end in itself. This distorts the concrete relation of the money that would be required simply to facilitate exchange. It also throws a monkey wrench into the supposed rationality of capitalist markets. Harvey writes that one of the most dangerous contradictions of capital is that of compounding growth so that with the abandonment of the metallic base, money could be printed infinitely by whoever was authorized to do so. This is exactly what is happening now with the Fed freely printing money without any foundation in gold or any real social wealth. Money out-of-control from material products is what leads to financial depression.

Contradiction 3 Private Property and the State Often have Conflicting Interests

Keeping refugees and immigrants out vs the need for cheap labor

The kind of rationality the state typically imposes is illustrated by its urban and regional planning practices.The job of the nation-state is to protect their borders from unwanted refugees or immigrants. On the other hand, capitalists need migrants to work under-the-table for dirt cheap wages. Capitalists indirectly fight with the state over the status of migrant workers.

Capitalists vs the matriarchal state

Secondly, the state can be divided into its matriarchal and patriarchal functions. Matriarchal functions include unemployment insurance, pensions, welfare, road construction and repair. The patriarchal state functions include the military, the police and prisons. Capitalists are against the matriarchal functions of the state because they cut into profits. However, capitalists are more than willing to invest in the police to protect them, prisons to house the unemployed or the military to take the natural resources of other countries.

Patriotism vs global trade

Even within the patriarchal state there are contradictions. On one hand the military is very patriotic and expect that people will buy Yankee cars. Harvey says the state is interested in the accumulation of wealth and power on a territorial basis. On the other hand, capitalists will seek to make a profit anywhere in the world and will import foreign cars and many other goods. As many of you know, capitalist oil businesses were making profits from Germany during the Nazi era and the Yankee state had to force them to leave.

Neocon war of all against all vs liberal laissez-faire trade policies

Lastly, the patriarchal state often opposes capitalists in its international ambitions. For example, neocon foreign policy war mongers like Victoria Nuland wants war with Russia and China. Liberal capitalists on the other hand, want to trade with China. Capital is not the only agent involved in the pursuit of technological advantages in civil society. The state apparatus looks for superior weaponry, surveillance and other methods for policing the population.

Contradiction 4 Capitalists Acting in Their Own Short-term Self-interest Undermine the Conditions of Their Own Reproduction

If the use value of a product and the price of the commodity were the same, there would be no room for capitalist profit. One the one hand, the common wealth created by social labor comes in a great variety of use values from the most basic knives and forks, to the food we eat, to the cars we drive. to the houses we live in and the clothes we wear. The capitalist private appropriation of common wealth along with the expropriation of social labor is legally sanction under normal conditions of trade. But there is a dark unseen and illegal side of the market which Harvey includes such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence which goes unaccounted for. In addition, there is market cornering, price fixing and Ponzi schemes. All these activities weaken the socio-production process. Harvey writes:

It is stupid to seek to understand the world of capital without engaging with the drug cartels, traffickers in arms and the various mafias and other criminal forms of organization that play such a significant role in world trade. (53)

All this swindling and double-dealing is labor expended in counter-production which weakens the amount of energy left for production. This production includes the amount of wages paid and products consumed by workers to get to the next day.

Contradiction 5 The Class Struggle Over the Proportion of Wages given to Workers as Part of the Working Day

Harvey states that one of the most outstanding aspects of the capitalist system is that it does not appear to rely on cheating. For Marxists, labor has two aspects. On one hand, labor as human species is activity which distinguishes us from the rest of the animals and produces all real social wealth. One the other hand, there is labor power which is a commodity the capitalist rents for roughly half the working day. This “fairness” of the wage rests on the assumption that laborers have an individualized private property right over the labor they are capable of furnishing. But in reality, workers have a social property right over their labor because the cooperative social labor of all the workers in factories and offices produces all the wealth.

The commodification of labor power is the only way to solve a seemingly intractable contradiction within the circulation of capital. This contradiction is that in a fully functioning capitalist system, where coercion, cheating and robbery are supposedly ruled out, the exchanges should be based on the principle of equality – we exchange use values of products with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. For all capitalists to realize a positive profit requires the existence of more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning means an expansion of total output of social labor. Without that expansion there can be no capital. Zero growth defines a condition of crisis for capital. Here there is no room for profit. So where does the profit come from? As Harvey says, there must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it has itself. That commodity is labor power. And this is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction. It’s the exploitation of the extra five or six hours of the workers’ pay that is pocketed by capitalists. In reaction to workers joining in unions for higher wages and better working conditions capitalists will:

lock workers out or close the businesses completely:
refuse to invest or reinvest in workers or infrastructure;
deliberately create unemployment and create an industrial reserve army; and
move jobs to peripheral world countries for their cheap land or labor.

So there is a long-term, relentless struggle between capitalists and labor over the proportion of wages given to workers on a given day.

Capitalist contradictions about education

Another part of this conflict is over education. On one hand, capitalists want to keep workers as uneducated as possible so that they find out as little of the workings of capitalism as possible. But on the other hand, capitalists must make workers more creative in order to fix problems on the job. The problem for capitalists is they can’t control how the workers may use their creativity on the job to undermine capitalism one way or another.

Contradiction 6 The Contradiction Between Fixed and Circulating Capital

Capital investment takes three forms: as an investment in fixed capital – machinery, plants, land and investment and an investment in variable capital which is labor power. Labor power is remunerated afterproduction has occurred, whereas the means of production are usually paid for prior to production (fixed capital). But capital also invents the circulation of commodities. When the commodity is sold, then capital becomes liquid again. In the circulation of commodities, the speed of its circulation is also important. If one capitalist can circulate their commodities faster than another they have a certain competitive advantage. So they attempt to accelerate the turnover time of capital.

Limitations of making a profit on fixed capital

However, there are limits to the speed of circulation. To paraphrase Harvey, if I want to make steel, the iron ore and coal are still buried in the ground and it takes a lot of time to dig them out. There are not enough workers close by who are willing to sell their labor power. I need to build a blast furnace and that takes time. There are physical barriers to reducing this turn-around time to zero. Workers, furthermore, are not automatons. They may lay down their tools or slow down their labor process. (73-74)

Once the steel is finished it has to be sold. The commodity can sit on the market for some time before the buyer shows up. The capitalist has a vested interest in securing and accelerating the turnover time of consumption. One of the ways is to produce steel that rusts so fast it needs rapid replacement: planned obsolescence (73-74)

These problems center on the category of long-term investments in fixed capital.

In order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space – anchored on the land in the form of roads, railways, communication towers and fiber-optics plants, airports and harbors, factory buildings offices, houses, schools, hospitals. More mobile forms of fixed capital are ships, trucks, planes and railway engines. (75)

Capital in danger of social sclerosis

The part which is moveable capital cannot be replaced during the item’s lifetime without loss of value. As time goes by the sheer mass of this long-lived and often physically immobile capital for both production and consumption increaserelative to capital that is continuously flowing. Whole sites are abandoned and wasted as in the rust belts of Mordor. On one hand, in order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space. Yet capital has to periodically break out of the constraints imposed by the world it has constructed. As Harvey says, it is always in mortal danger of becoming sclerotic. Why?

Capital is forever in danger of becoming more sclerotic over time because of the increasing amount of fixed capital required. Fixed and circulating capital are in contradiction with each other but neither can exist without the other. The flow of that part of capital that facilitates circulation has to be slowed down. But the value of immobile fixed capital (like the container port terminal) can be realized only through its use. It is generally much slower.

From physical goods to spectacles

One solution for capitalists is to sell events rather than physical commodities. Harvey says there is a huge difference between, for example, the live transmission of a World Cup football match and lugging around bottled water, steel girders, furniture or perishable items like soft fruit, hot pork pies, milk and bread. Commodities are variably mobile depending upon their qualities and transportability. Production, with some exceptions, like transportation itself is the least mobile form of capital. It is usually locked down in place for a time. In shipbuilding it is considerable.

Contradiction 7 The Contradictory Nature of Low Wages vs Capitalist Realization

The goal of capitalism is to sell as many products as it can at the cheapest possible price. But in the process of making a profit the capitalist must:

exploit labor power (surplus value) so it can raise the price of a commodity;
realize the sale of the product in the market – which is far from easy

The problem for capitalists is that if wages are kept low the aggregate demand of laborers won’t be enough to buy the products off the shelf. So if the cost of social reproducing of the laborers is being forced back into the household, then those laborers will be less likely to buy goods and services off the market. Lack of aggregate effective demand creates a serious barrier to the continuity of capital accumulation. Working class consumer power is a significant component of that effective demand. Yet if the capitalist insists on paying minimum wage how can the workers buy the products?

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the problem for capitalist was in the production of enough surplus valuebecause of unions were strong and wages high. When unions became weaker, wages dropped beginning in the 1970s. Then the problem for capitalists was was not in the achievement of extracting surplus value but in cultivating conditions for its realization since workers had less money to buy commodities. This is why in the early 1970s capitalists began issuing credit cards to workers in order for capitalist profits to be realized.

Contradiction 8 Contradiction and Alienation of Labor

Harvey says there is an important distinction between the technical and social division of labor. By technical he means a separate task within a complex series of operations, that anyone can do. By social he means the specialized task that only a person with adequate training or social standing can do, like a doctor, or an architect. In the technological division labor, the unity of mental and manual aspects of laboring was broken.

The meaning of the term “alienation” has psychological and sociological components. As a passive psychological term, it means to become isolated from connection to others whether at work or in leisure. As an active psychological state, it means being angry and hostile or feeling oppressed, deprived or disposed of. The person acts out that anger, lashing out without any clear definition. Teenage rebellion movies of years ago, The Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause, are examples.

As beautifully laid out by Bertell Ollman, sociologically alienation means the worker is estranged from his or her product of labor as well as the process of work. He/she is also alienated from other workers, from nature and from their own creativity. As Marx said it is only outside of work that the worker has the possibility to achieve any personal fulfillment. Uneven geographical development in the divisions of labor and the parallel increase in social inequality in life choices, are exacerbating that sense of alienation. This creates a danger for capitalists in the form of labor unions, strikes, labor parties and agitation for socialism. On one hand, the accumulation of capital requires squeezing the life out of the worker. On the other hand, this repression creates militancy on the part of workers.

Contradiction 9 Automation Might Shrink the Ratio of Necessity and Freedom vs Automation as the Driver od Unemployment

One of the mythological stories told by capitalists is that technological innovation would lead to more leisure time for workers. Well, since about 1970 in Yankeedom, we have seen an increase in the amount of full-time work from 40 hours to at least 50 hours per week. This is because capitalist motivation is not to create more leisure for workers, but to replace workers, especially militant workers, with machines.

On the other hand, automation and artificial intelligence now provide us with abundant means to achieve the Marxian dream of freedom beyond the realm of necessity. In other words, the population could have more leisure time to use their creativity for new inventions, new arts and new sciences. Full advantage could be taken of automation and artificial intelligence. But for the capitalists the more time that has been released from production, the more imperative it has become (for the capitalist) for the workers to absorb their leisure time in consumption. It has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth.

Contradiction 10 Technological Innovation vs Monopoly Capitalism

From competition to monopoly

According to Harvey, the development of technology first became a focus for capitalists in the second half of the 19^thcentury with the rise of the machine tool industry. Harnessing energy like the steam engine was applied to multiple industries. The classic Marxist argument is that through capitalist competition, the productive forces (technology) increase and outdistance the capitalist capacity to use this productive power. This overabundance of products creates the conditions for socialism. But what Marx didn’t anticipate is that capital demonstrates a trend towards monopoly rather than competition. This is a less favorable environment for innovation.

Wealth of Nations is the founding myth of liberal economic theory. Capital is imagined as constructed by a plethora of molecular and competitive collisions of individual capitalists moving freely and searching for profitable opportunities within a chaotic sea of economic activity. But in fact by the end of the 19^th century, corporations has overwhelmed Adam Smith’s competitive invisible hand. All this is news to market fundamentalist economists. Right-wing market libertarians present monopolies as an exception to the rule, rather than the predominant way of life under capitalism. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart and Apple are all examples of oligarchies tending towards monopolies. The tendencies in many sectors of the economy – pharmaceuticals, oil, airlines, agribusiness, banking software, media and social media – suggest strong tendencies towards oligopoly, if not monopoly. In fact, says Harvey, most capitalists, if given the choice prefer to be monopolists rather than competitors

Lenin saw capital moving into a new phase of monopoly power associated with imperialism at the turn of the 20^th century when the big industrial cartels combined with finance capital to dominate the leading national economies. This view re-emerged in the 1960’s with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s – stagflation and inflation – was widely interpreted by Marxists as a typical crisis of monopoly capital.

Why monopolies put the brakes on innovation

Capitalism today limits the rate of technological innovation because:

The organization of cooperation and divisions of labor must be made in ways to maximize efficiency, profitability and accumulation. This means that innovations that will not be very profitable, such as long-lasting technologies, will be repressed.
The capitalist needs to facilitate the acceleration of capital circulation in all its phases, along with the need to annihilate space through time. What I mean is increasing speed of transport and communication reduces the friction and barrier of geographical distance. This requires minimizing capitalist occupation of space.
Capitalist must shorten the turnover time by shortening the lifetime of consumer products (planned obsolesce).
Capitalist can shorten the lifetime of products’ shift from the production of things that last to the production of spectacles which are ephemeral and contain faster turn-around time.
Capitalists technologies of knowledge are used to identify consumer preferences.
The speeding up and turnover time by the use of the technologies of finance. Beginning with invention checks and credit cards, the goal is faster turn-around time. The rise of cyber moneys, like bitcoin, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos.
Capitalists must not only speed up the realization and consumption process, but they must develop technologies that speed up the workers. This includes time motion studies, the Hawthorn experiments, and surveillance. This attempted control encompasses not only physical efficiency but also the rise of robotization. As Harvey writes, robots do not complain, answer back, sue, get sick, go slow, lose concentration, go on strike, demand more wages, want tea breaks or refuse to show up.

All this means is that that the because the capitalist must speed up the production and consumption process, it is far from the ideal conditions of innovation. Scientific innovators are in no hurry and want their products to last. The contradiction is that capitalists want scientific innovation to create ever new processes and products. Yet in their efforts to shorten the turnover time of products, they undermine the innovative processes themselves. They will not be able to innovate at the pace that would develop the productive forces and would stagnate and shrink the rate of profit.

Contradiction 11 Globalization of Capital: Promises and Perils

The division of labor within capitalism is now taking place at a world-wide scale. Harvey writes that what is now in place is radically different from anything that existed prior to 1850.

There are three sectional classifications of the division of labor between:

primary – agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining;
secondary – industry and manufacturing; and
tertiary – services, finance, insurance and real estate sectors.

On one hand a world market in grains can forestall a local crop failure. At its best all capitalist countries have the technology to support each other during famines, extreme weather, floods, earthquakes and droughts. The fact that capitalist countries limit these interventions to countries that are their allies does not limit their potential to serve the whole world.

One the other hand, as Harvey points out today the clothing factories in Bangladesh, the electronics factories of southern China, the maquiladora factories strung along the Mexican border or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are all interdependent. Small disruptions in a supply chain can have very large consequences. A strike in a key car parts factory in one region of the world can bring the whole production system to a halt everywhere. Supply chain blockages thanks to Covid result in delays in both the process of production and the delays on the product.

Contradiction 12 Uneven Geographical Developments: Super-Concentrations of Production and Wastelands

The capitalist division of labor has reached a world scale and this results in uneven pockets of production with high concentration of work in some areas and wastelands in other areas. Time is money for capitalism. Traversing space takes both time and money. As much as possible the near elimination of transport costs and times is a factor in location decision making. This permits capitalists to explore different profit opportunities in widely disparate places.

Harvey writes that what arises is “agglomeration” economies where many different capitals cluster together. For example, car parts and tire industries locate close to car plants. Different firms and industries can share facilities and access labor skills, information and infrastructures. However other regions may become wastelands increasingly bereft of activities. They get caught in a downward spiral of depression and decay. The result is uneven regional concentrations of wealth, power and influence. Affections and loyalties to particular places and cultural forms are destroyed and treated as anachronisms. Large blotches of the world become wastelands where nothing is grown and people can no longer live.

Capital never has to address its systemic failings because it moves them around geographically. Since myopic capitalists treat these wastelands as “externalities” the problem grows worse. The heads of nation-states are enslaved to capitalists and are in no position to address the geographical mess capitalists have created. There are, however, limits to continuous centralization through agglomeration. It results in overcrowding and rising pollution. In addition, labor may become better organized in its struggles against exploitation because of its regional concentration.

Contradiction 13 Finance Capital vs the Physical Economy

There are two ways in which capitalist crises might be produced:

1) chronic inequalities produce imbalances between production and realization; and

2) financialization of profit means capitalists will not invest in their own infrastructure.

In the case of financialization, what makes the current phase special is the phenomenal acceleration in the speed of circulation of finance capital and the reduction in financial transaction costs. If all capitalists seek to live off finance, insurance and real estate interests and are just speculating in asset value or living off capital gains the gap between finance capital and the real physical economy grows.

The problem of compound interest

Harvey points out that – Michael Hudson in the Bubble and Beyond is one of the only political economists who takes the issue of compound growth seriously. He says that most people do not understand very well the mathematics of compound interest.

Nor do they understand the phenomenon of compounding growth and the potential dangers it can pose. Harvey writes that compound interest curve rises very slowly for quite a while and then starts to accelerate and by the end the curve becomes a singularity as it sails off into infinity. Harvey goes into much more detail on pages 223-228 of his book.

There is one form that capital takes which permits accumulation without limit and that is the financial form. Today finance capital is now unchained from any physical limitations. In Mordor today the Fed issues fiat moneys that can be created without limit. Adding a few zeros to the quantity of money in the circulation is no problem for them. The danger is that the result will be a crisis of inflation. The contradiction is in disparities between accumulation process that is necessarily exponential and the conditions that might limit the capacity of exponential growth. These conditions are the requirements to invest in the physical aspects of the economy such as buildings, harnessing of energy and infrastructure.

Fictious capital instruments

Besides the printing of fiat money another financial instrument in the purchase of assets includes debt claims. Harvey writes an asset is simply a capitalized property title. This was paralleled by the creation of wholly new assets markets within the financial system itself such as currency futures, credit default swaps, and CDOs.

This was fictitious capital feeding off and generating even more fictitious capital.

Harvey writes there is a labyrinth of countervailing claims that were almost impossible to value except by way of some mix of future expectation, beliefs and outright crazy short-term betting in unregulated markets with no prospect of any long-term payoff.

Contradiction 14 Capital’s Relation to Nature

Liberal environmental politics has preferred to ignore entirely the fact that it is capitalism that produced the current ecological crisis. Harvey writes that they nibble away at issues on the periphery of the capitalist system while they never reach the core of the system that is producing the problem. “Deep ecologists” wrongly call Marxism “Promethean” which has a disregard for nature and claims that only human history matters. But John Bellamy Foster has dedicated the better part of his life arguing for the belief that Marx was ecologically sensitive and had a concept of capitalism as creating a “metabolic” rift with nature.

In addition, by training David Harvey is a geographer and has written books on a Marxist criticism of what capitalism has done to the natural world. The change in climate and the frequency of severe weather events is increasing. Catastrophic local events can be readily accommodated by capital since a predatory disaster capitalism is ready to go. But pollution problems do not get solved, only moved around in uneven benefits and losses. The capitalist system is not prepared for the slow, cancerous degradations. Harvey says that whereas the problems of in past were typically localized, they have now become more regionalized such as acid deposition, low level of ozone concentration, stratospheric ozone holes, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

Conclusion

Harvey points out that this one-at-a-time presentation of capitalist contradictions does not address that all these contradictions are feeding into each other forming an organic whole. Do capitalists understand these contradictions? For the most part, no. Most are enthralled with market fundamentalist theories. A minority have read Marx. But even so, their short-term material interests as capitalists blocks them from understanding the full ramifications of their system. So capitalists as a class do not understand their system. They blithely roll along accumulating finance capital and pay no attention to the fourteen fractures I’ve identified. What problems occur are dismissed as “business cycles”. As the fractures deepen we can count on capitalists to ramp up their ideology and distract us with more extreme forms entertainment, including football games, escapist movies and increasing violence in movies coupled with special effects.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

What is China’s Political System?

Dongsheng News — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 17:23:49 +0000

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China is currently taking place and Dongsheng will be publishing a series of videos in order to better understand this political event. China is at the center of the world’s economy and geopolitics, however little is known about its internal politics.

So, what is China’s political system? Is it really a dictatorship like the Western media claims?

The post What is China’s Political System? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

20th CPC National Congress Report

Dongsheng News — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 12:35:01 +0000

This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

• 20th CPC National Congress report
• China’s EV battery supplies to the US
• Rice growing in salty, alkaline soil
• Physical growth of rural children in a decade

The post 20th CPC National Congress Report first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

China is Not Capitalist and it is Not Yet Communist

Kim Petersen — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 22:52:02 +0000

There are many western commentators who, apparently in profound dismay that a country which holds up the banner of socialism could be so economically successful, tiresomely deny that China practises socialism and insist that it is instead capitalist.

Author Jeff Brown wrote that China is “history’s most successful socialist and communist country.”

This conflation of communism and socialism is common but inaccurate. It fudges that, according to Marxist thought, socialism is an earlier stage in the process of reaching the end goal of communism.

That writer Ron Leighton asserts in his piece that “China is Capitalist” is rather simplistic. Laissez faire capitalism, neoliberalism, and exploitation of other nations are antithetical to Chinese political-economic practice.

Dictionary Definitions

Socialism: “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole, usually through a centralized government.”

Communism: “a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.”

Capitalism: “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.”

Is there an extant purely capitalist society? What do hospitals, schools, the fire department, the police, military, etc represent? The fact is that capitalism, because of its proclivity to concentrate wealth in a few hands, could not survive in a society without wealth redistribution.

The Communist Party of China prioritized pulling all its citizens out of absolute poverty and achieved this in late 2021. What “capitalist” country has achieved this? The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — despite a scorched earth bombardment by the US, climatological disasters suffered, and continuous sanctions against it — has achieved tuition-free education for all, kindergarten through university; free preschool; universal healthcare; full employment; and universal housing. What capitalist countries have achieved this? In fact, my North Korean guide proudly opined that the DPRK was more socialist than China.

China now strives toward becoming a xiaokang society, a moderately prosperous society — basically a society where almost everyone has attained a middle class level. This is hardly what one would expect to be prioritized under capitalism’s law of the jungle.

Unhindered, a system of socialism should function without need for capitalism.

Nonetheless, arguing about whether China is communist or capitalist is futile. China is neither.

If one wants to know what political-economic system China adheres to then check in with China’s chairman Xi Jinping. He states clearly in his book On the Governance of China that China follows and applies Marxist-Leninism to the Chinese context and that China is currently in the early stage of socialism, what Chinese call Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. The “Communist” in the Communist Party of China indicates the end goal, as Xi also makes clear in his book.

China emphasizes peace, the freedom for each nation to choose a system which best suits it, win-win commerce, and an improved life for people of all nations. It does not seek to impose a political-economic system on others, and it does not emphasize profit over people.

Sounds quite distant from capitalism.

The post China is Not Capitalist and it is Not Yet Communist first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Towards a Communist Theory of the Emotions

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 23:11:09 +0000

Orientation

History of the emotions

“Emotions” are one of those words that everyone thinks they understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:

Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that emotions were thought about as physiological
Emotions had no separate categorization of its own. It was rolled up into temperament and passions.

Plato was as distrustful of emotions as he was of pleasure. Emotions were part of appetite and a lower form of humanity. Rationality and mathematics were believed to be true. Aristotle, as he often did, struck a balance and said that reason and emotion went together. The Stoics, including Seneca, understood the passions to be dangerous and the cause of imbalances. Reason should put passions in their place. St. Augustine distinguished emotions of human frailty from emotions of God. Reason was separated from emotions since emotions could not be trusted. For Hobbes, the passions are bodily sensations and are the primary sources of action, which prompt both war and peace. Passions could go in two directions. One way was towards an object which was appetite and the other was away from object, which was aversion. Respite from passions make rational decisions possible and the basis for a social contract. Descartes, as most of us know, separated the mind from the body and believed emotion had no place in the mind, which was rational and mathematical.

The status of the emotions began to improve with Spinoza who wrote that both the mind and the emotions were part of nature. Locke added that emotions could be positive as well as negative and added the empathy people have with each other. Hume warned against the rising tide of passion, saying that passions controlled reason. Hume did not think that reason drove emotions. Rather, reason was just a calculator for a way out of predicaments that the passions had created. Rousseau championed natural feelings as more reliable than reason and despised “factious or sham feelings produced by civilization”.

How well do you know what emotions are?

To demonstrate how people’s understanding of emotions can be more confusing than you might suspect, try responding to the following statements below. Except for the eighth bullet, try to decide if each statement is mostly true, conflicted or mostly false. Don’t take more than a minute to answer each one, as my point for this article is to examine your spontaneous answers to these statements. After you’ve marked the bullets true or false, give a reason or two which justify each answer. Then answer bullet eight with a paragraph. The first part of this article is designed to address your answers before discussing other topics. Here are the statements:

Feelings and emotions are the same thing.
Emotions are irrational and are the opposite of thoughts.
Emotions are biological and out of our conscious control.
Emotions happen first and thoughts follow in order to explain them.
Negative emotions such as hostility and venting (screaming and throwing things) get those emotions out of your system so they don’t build up.
Changing your interpretations of thoughts about events that happen to you can change your emotions.
A two-year old cannot feel angry.
What kind of conditions might exist in which you wouldn’t know how you feel?
In general, women are more emotional than men.
Emotional ranges are universal regardless of one’s social class.
Non-verbal body language, like gestures and postures, are truer expressions of emotions than what people tell you about their emotions.
Regardless of the type of society, if a heterosexual woman finds her husband in bed with another women it is natural to feel jealous.

A Cognitive Theory of the Emotions

Are feelings and emotions the same thing?

Usually people use the terms “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably. I think this is a loss of a great opportunity to differentiate physiological states of arousal (feelings) from cognitive interpretation of events (emotions). While most feelings are biological and out of our control, (fight-flight, pleasure-pain; frustration-contentment), our emotions are under our control. But what do I say, as a counselor, when a member of my Men Overcoming Violence support group says to me “but my anger is out of my control. What do you mean I have control of them?”. Feelings like dry mouth, sweaty palms, headache simply start the process. Which emotion results from these bodily conditions depends on how the physiological state is interpreted. One interpretation is a panic attack. Another is anxiety while still another is anticipating the happy unknown of a wedding ceremony.

Emotional reactions from thick to thin

In order to have interpretations, the person has to give meaning, and in order to do that the person has to think. “Wait a minute” the participant in Men Overcoming Violence, says “when I get angry it happens very fast, I don’t think about which emotion to have, I just have them. How do you explain that?” The problem is many of us think of thinking as thick – weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of pants or trying to understand what is causing a leak in the pipe. We have less practice imagining thinking that is thin and happening quickly. How do we account for differences in the speed in which we think?

A child is not given a universal set of emotions which, like buttons, the child pushes on and off. She has physiological states of arousal and the child is slowly taught how to translate that state of arousal into emotions like hurt, confusion, or sadness. The time it takes to have an emotion is mediated by the set of interpretations the parent socializes in the child. As the child reacts to situations, the situations become more familiar, so both the thinking process and the emotional go faster. Soon the emotion is unconscious and automatic. It becomes so habitual that it seems “natural”, that is, biological. No emotion is biological. Feelings are biological, emotions are ontogenetic (part of individual development), social, cultural and historical, as we shall see.

Emotional reactions from thin to thick

In the last section I said there that as people are presented with situations that are familiar and predictable their emotional reaction speeds up and eventually becomes unconscious. But what are the conditions under which your emotional reactions will slow down? This can happen when a person is put in an increasingly unusual situation. For example, suppose I broke up with someone I loved after five years. We had differences over wanting children, where we wanted to live and how much money we expected each other to make. So we break up. It is a relatively small town and we are at the point that the last thing either of us wants to do is run into each other. But errands are errands, so I head for downtown. In the distance about three blocks away I think I see her. I duck inside a storefront and watch as the figure moves towards me. How do I feel? Sad, disappointed, angry but relieved. I am frozen in place. Then I see another figure is joining her and they hold hands. Now I am filled with new emotions. Outrage, as I decide not enough time has passed by to justify this. Was she seeing this guy while we were still together? What the fuck?? It gets worse. About a block away I see her partner is a woman. Now all the gaskets are blown. Fortunately, the store front was a clothing store that I can enter to possibly avoid running into them. Fortunately for me she and her girlfriend don’t come in. I flee the scene for home. Do I know how I feel? There is only so much complexity that can be integrated. A friend calls later in the afternoon to see how I am doing. He asks, “how are you feeling?” My true answer is that I don’t know how I feel. It will probably take me a few days to answer a question like this coherently.

Are emotions irrational and the opposite of thoughts?

Emotions are not irrational and the opposites of thoughts. There are rational and irrational thoughts, not rational or irrational emotions. Irrational thoughts are things like, “my boyfriend is cheating on me because he is talking to a female neighbor for 30 minutes. I am jealous”. The thought is irrational because the woman is jumping to specific conclusions without much evidence. Being jealous is only irrational because the thought is irrational. If the same woman claims that her husband is flirting with the neighbor and might be sleeping with her because she has many experiences of her husband having had casual sex is rational. Here, in this situation, the emotion of jealousy is rational. All emotions follow thought. Emotions are rational or irrational just as thoughts are. Feelings are biological and prerational but only emotions can be irrational or rational

Are emotions biological and out of our control?

Emotions are neither biological nor out of our control. Emotions are ontogenetic, social cultural and historical. Having a particular emotional reaction may be hard to change but that does not mean they are out of our control. As an Italian American man, I am socialized to express anger rather than hurt, sadness or confusion first. Can that be changed? Yes, but it requires a great deal of psychological work. Many men in the Men Overcoming Violence program learned how to do that, but it took them 40 weeks of meeting once a week for two hours. On the wall we had a large list of emotions on a 5×10 foot piece of butcher paper. At the top were seven kinds of emotion. But underneath each emotion there were seven other emotions going from strongest to weakest intensity. Every time a man in the program said he was angry, we would insist that he include at least 2-3 other emotions so he could become aware of the emotional variety of his emotional states that he was unaware of up to that point.

Thoughts precede and create emotions

As is probably obvious by now emotions don’t come first and thoughts follow. First comes interpretation of what events mean and then the emotion follows. The order is:

Interpretation of what the situation means – dangerous/safe; structured/loose;
Feelings – sweaty palms, dry-mouth, heart racing;
Emotion – fear, anger, disappointment.

Does the hydraulic theory of emotions work?

Allowing yourself to vent—yell, scream and throw things does not make you have less emotion. What it does is help you form a habit of escalating to the point where it gets easier and easier. “Getting it of your system” is part of an old way of looking at emotions called the “cathartic theory of the emotions” that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It has been called the “hydraulic” theory because it pictures emotions as rising up like water in a bathtub which will overflow if it is not drained. Freud had this theory and so did humanistic psychologists like Fritz Perls during the early 1970s. Reichian therapists would give people tennis rackets and have them flail the couch of the therapist, hoping to get their anger out of their system. It was not until the 1980s when cognitive psychologists argued that emotions don’t work that way (see Carole Tavris, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion).

Emotions emerge over the course of ontogenesis moving from simple to complex

Is anger present from birth or is it the product of a developmental process that only arises at a certain age level? Some theorists of emotion claim that there are universal emotions such as surprise, disgust, love, hurt, sadness. My point here isn’t to claim what the right batch is. Rather it is to say whatever the right batch is, it takes time for them to emerge. So to the question can a two-year old express anger, my answer is no. Let me give an example. If you are watching a two year old child play with a toy and you get up and put a barrier in front of the toy and you watch the child try to figure out how to get around the barrier to the toy the child may be frustrated, but they are not angry at you. In order to be angry the child has to perceive that there are certain social roles and rules that are normal. Anger comes over the violation of these rules. If the child was six years old and you again placed a barrier between them and their toy, chances are good they would be spending more time challenging why you put the barrier up than they would trying to overcome the barrier. Why? Because as the child’s parent, it is highly unusual for you to behave in such a sadistic way. There are complex emotions like jealousy, envy and revenge which require the mastery of rules and roles before they make sense.

How Emotions are Socialized

Are women more emotional than men?

At least in Yankeedom, it is common to say that women are more emotional than men. This is really not the case at all. Socially, women and men are given a range of emotions that are safe to express and another set that are more or less forbidden.

If we start out with straight women and straight men we can say, women are taught to express a wider set of emotions such as sadness, hurt, fear, confusion, humiliation and love. Men are socialized to be angry, brave and courageous. What is interesting is that if a woman crosses the line and expresses forbidden emotions, she is threatened by being called gay or a lesbian. We all know that when a woman is assertive at work she is called a bitch. On the other hand, can you imagine how a male attendant at a gas station would feel if after finally agreeing with his wife that they were lost came into the store and said:” I feel embarrassed, humiliated and confused because I can’t figure out how to get to such-and-such a place”? The guy might not give him the correct directions right away. He may first say “Get hold of yourself, man”.

There are at least two ways to think about having an emotion. The first is emotional impression and the second is emotional expression. An emotional impression is when an emotion is registered internally. An emotional expression is whether you decide to express the emotion to someone else. Often, women may express emotions more. But that does not mean women are more emotional than men.

Expression of emotions and social class

It is not true that all classes in capitalist societies have the same range of expression of emotions. In the first place, it matters what kind of religion the social class is committed to. If we consider the differences between men and women and we examine Catholic working-class women and men we will find they will express a greater range of emotions than the Protestants will. The protestant working class (at least the white working class) tend to be shut down emotionally. Working-class men and women generally have a hard life and it makes sense they will have thicker skins.

Middle class men and women have better jobs which requires less armoring. They will be more open emotionally than the working class. This is amplified by how committed middle class people are to therapy. Out-to-lunch, class-oblivious, humanistic psychology proclaims that the more open the person, the healthier they are. They fail to understand that if you live in rough neighborhoods, attend rough schools and take orders from a boss all day long, it pays to have a thick skin.

Upper-middle class men generally are the happiest in their work. Woman in upper middle-class positions at work have to be more careful, since they are in danger of being called a bitch for asserting their authority. They also have to be careful about being labelled as too emotional at the slightest turn.

The upper classes are generally old money conservatives. Both men and women tend to repress emotions and they generally feel that the very expression of emotion is bad taste. They carry on an aristocratic tradition which prides itself in never breaking down, whether in love or war.

Happiness and social class

Socialists would be very happy with the results of research about which social classes are happy and which aren’t and why. It seems intuitive to say that the upper classes are happier than the working class because they have an easier life. But research shows that this isn’t quite the case. What we know for sure is that money does bring happiness when money delivers the working class into a middle-class position. However, there is no necessary correlation that money buys happiness as one moves from middle class to upper class. It is not predictable that upper class people will claim to be happier than those who are middle class. All this means is that when money provides the foundation for a good life, people respond well. But beyond middle class there is no correlation between money and happiness. To say money can’t buy happiness is not true. Happiness can increase as we ascend from poor to middle class. A formula for a good economic social policy is that if you want happier people, try to make all workers middle class.

Differences between classes in becoming civilized and becoming disciplined

As we will see shortly when we discuss the history of emotions, the process of becoming civilized brought with it a whole different range of social and psychological emotions. But for now we want to ask, does the process of becoming civilized apply to all social classes from the 17th through the 19th centuries? In my book Forging Promethean Psychology I argue that the working class and the poor in absolutist states or nation-states never became civilized, but they did become disciplined.

How was becoming disciplined different from becoming civilized? The first difference had to do with the population in question. Becoming civilized was the psychogenetic socialization process of the middle and upper classes. Being disciplined mostly applied to the working class and the poor. The second difference was in the types of influences used. The process of becoming civilized involved softer influences such as rhetoric, charisma, symbolic power, and legitimacy. Discipline, at least initially, involved hard influences such as physical force, the threat of force (coercion), economic deprivation, politics, and later, legitimation.

The third difference was the direction of the class forces operating. Becoming civilized, as Norbert Elias writes, was a competitive process for status among classes who were roughly equal – aristocrats, merchants, and intellectuals. Becoming disciplined initially involved top-down orders. Poor or working class people had to obey the authorities or face consequences. Discipline came from the top: Calvinist and Lutheran theologians to their parishioners; from military authorities to their soldiers; and from the state to its subjects.

Following Elias, becoming civilized in the courts of Europe involved a new set of emotions for aristocrats such as shame, embarrassment, superiority and envy. For the working class under disciple, they had another set of emotions: fear, suspicion, paranoia and guilt. It is easy to think classes in other societies had the same set of emotions, but this is not true. Elias says that the situation in 16th and 17th century Europe was unique.

Cross-Cultural Emotions: How They vary from society to society

Collectivism vs Individualism

In his book Cultural Psychology, Steven J. Heine reports that broadly speaking individualists of industrial capitalist societies are more likely to express emotions than collectivists and they are certainly more likely to express negative emotions. This is not hard to understand. People in collectivist societies are interdependent upon each other and consider most as extended kin at work and in their villages. They cannot afford blow-ups. On the other hand, because the relationships between individuals in industrial capitalist societies are short-term and appear voluntary (following social-contract theory), they are more likely to tolerate a falling out.

Another common distinction is between cultures of honor (herding societies) and cultures that are not (farming societies). As has been pointed out in the book Cultures of Honor herders are far more susceptible to insult because: a) their wealth is mobile rather than stable; b) their population is sparse; and c) they have no protection from the state in terms of land disputes. Farmers are more likely to tolerate insult because their wealth in land is stable, they can count on the state for intervention and the land is densely populated. They are less likely to settle disputes with duels or shoot-outs. The differences between southerners and northerners in the United States follows.

Finally, Ruth Benedict characterized the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Shame is embarrassment at letting the group down. Guilt has little to do with groups. Guilt is remorse over a volition of a law, or a holy book. Puritans show a great deal of guilt. She also made a distinction between Dionysian cultures which are expressive and Apollonian cultures which were more reserved.

Analogical messages: gestures, postures

Most people well understand that it is necessary to do emotional work on the job and at home. Emotional work means a) showing emotions you do not have and; b) hiding the emotion you do have. This is especially true in customer-service work. However, people also imagine that their analogical communication (gestures, postures) is somehow less deceptive and imagine they are a more reliable gage than verbal expression of emotions. But cross-cultural research shows this is not the case. For example, Yankees may think that the A-Okay sign is universally recognized when among Southern Europeans, it is a crude gesture. In our Men Overcoming Violence group, a Yankee man innocently propped up his feet on a stool in front of an Iraqi man sitting across the way. He soon found out the showing the sole of one’s foot to someone from Iraq is the greatest insult. If there are gestures and postures that are universal, they are few and far between. They may be harder to hide than the verbal expressions but their origins lie deep in the local context of the culture which vary from region to region.

Cross-cultural nature of jealousy

The following is paraphrased from the textbook Invitation to Psychology by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris. A young wife leaves her house one morning to draw water from the local well, as her husband watches from the porch. On her way back from the well, a male stranger stops her and asks for some water. She gives him a cupful and then invites him home for dinner. He accepts. The husband, wife and guest have a pleasant meal together. In a gesture of hospitality, the husband invites the guest to spend the night with his wife. The guest accepts. In the morning the husband leaves early to bring home breakfast. When he returns, be finds his wife again in bed with the visitor. At what point in this story will the husband feel angry? The answer depends on the culture.

A North American husband would feel very angry at a wife who had an extramarital affair.
A North American wife would feel very angry at being offered to a guest as if she were a lamb chop.
But a Pawnee husband of the 19th century would be enraged by any man who dared to ask his wife for water.
An Ammassalik Inuit husband finds it perfectly honorable to offer his wife to a stranger, but only once. He would be angry to find his wife and guest having a second encounter.
A century ago, a Toda husband in India would not feel angry at all because Todas allow both husband and wife to take lovers. However, both spouses would feel angry if one of them had a sneaky affair, without announcing it publicly.

In most cultures people feel angry in response to insult and the violation of social rules. But they often disagree about what an insult is or what the correct rule should be. Here we have four different cultures lined up on the political spectrum in their attitudes towards hospitality and sexuality.

The most extreme right wing is the Pawnee Indian who draws the line at talk at the well. In the center right is a Yankee husband who is outraged at his wife having a martial affair. But on the liberal side of the spectrum we have the Inuit who draws the line not at having an affair, but at having sex twice. The Toda, the most radical has no problem with extramarital sex. The problem is if it is done in an underhanded manner.

History of the Emotions

Broadly speaking, it used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods. It was only at the beginning of the 18th century that emotions were thought of as originating from some part of the mind or the body. After 1860 emotions were seen as cultural, universal, inclusive of all species, biological, physiological and hard-wired.

What does it mean that emotions have a history? Does it mean that new emotions emerge in different historical periods? To say this is to challenge universalis ideas of emotions being static or possibly circulating in different historical periods. In my book Lucifer’s Labyrinth I follow Elias’ description of how differences from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe produced new sets of emotional reactions.

Emotions in the Middle Ages

As Elias says, people in the Middle Ages lived a life that was intense, brutal and short. They lived life to the fullest with the time they had. Their psychological life alternated between sensory saturation and religious mortification about what they had done. Middle Age people were more violent and could tolerate more pain. As Elias said, they live their life between the super-ego and the id. The ego was less developed.

The warrior class in the Middle Ages could be characterized as courageous, impetuous, wild, cruel and living in the present. But when these warriors were forced into the courts by the king and the merchants, they had to adapt themselves to court life. Above all, they needed to control themselves. Now their characteristics included being prudent, restrained, self-contained, timely, refined, more humane and more gossipy. Their every mood required foresight for the future, hindsight into the past (people they may have offended) and insight and self-reflection to make sure their behavior was not offensive. So within a century, the emotional life of one class significantly changed.

Emotional life in the Baroque and the 18th century

There are also major differences in the emotions between the Baroque 17^th century aristocrats and the 18th century merchants during the Enlightenment. The aristocrats of the 17th century had superiority complexes, were preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones” and cultivated a cool nonchalant attitude. On the other hand, some 18th century merchants strove openly to be happy, and were motivated by their quest for serenity. Their emotions were controlled by reason, not so much by what was expected of them. The emotional life between the aristocrats and merchants differed in many other areas such as attitude toward the senses; attitude towards pain; attitude towards animals; bodily conduct; sleeping patterns and attitude towards dying.

From honor and glory to avarice and ambition: warriors vs merchants

As we’ve said, the values of aristocrats in Europe were honor and glory. But for the merchants in the 18th century these values would not do. As Albert Hirschman traces a movement from glory and honor to “interests” in his book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray tells the story of how these values were undermined by two new values: avarice and ambition. Both these motivations were despised by all classes in the Middle Ages. But with the rise of merchants there was a slow process by which avarice and ambition were changed from vices to virtues, which supported merchant capitalism

Emotional life of Romantics: late 18th to mid 19th century

Lastly, in the 18th century with the rise of romanticism, early romantics had a new attitude toward the emotions which differed drastically from the Enlighteners. Lionel Trigger, in his book Sincerity, points out that with romanticism came new emotions: the importance of being sincere and the importance of being authentic. Being sincere was the exact opposite to the aristocratic of haughtiness and masquerading. It meant saying what you meant and meaning what you said. Being authentic came out of the romantic notion that everyone had a true self as opposed to the roles both aristocrats and merchants had to play. Being authentic meant showing people your true self. Sincerity and authenticity were hugely important to humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Summing Up: Evolution to an Emotion

We are now finally in a position to describe the evolution to an emotion. The first step, or point zero, is an external event that triggers the emotion. Let’s say you work as a cook in a restaurant and your ex shows up for dinner with her new boyfriend.

Physiological state of arousal:
- Physiological – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth
- Feelings – confusion, frustration, pain, discomfort
Internalized socio-cultural, class and historical forces
- Type of society – industrial capitalist
- Social class – all working class
- Cross-cultural – Mexican American; Italian
- Gender – heterosexual – man – woman
- Point in history – 21st century crumbling Yankee empire
Cognitive appraisal
- Automatic thoughts; cognitive interpretations; explanatory styles
- Assumptions – all this from the cognitive psychology of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
Analogical messages
- Gestures, posture, clothing
Situational constraints
- You are working and you can’t leave
Display rules and emotional work
- What feelings do you have to show that you don’t have?
- What feelings do you have that you can’t show?
Emotional impression
- Hurt, anger, fear, jealousy, disappointment, relief
Emotional expression
- Optional
- Act like you don’t care

Under normal circumstances which are routine, all eight of these steps could be processed in less than ten seconds because of years of practice. But because of the unusualness of this particular circumstance, our poor cook may take days to process what the situation means and what array of emotions he has.

As we have seen, the cognitive theory of the emotions has revolutionized the theory of emotions by arguing that emotions come from thoughts. But cognitive psychology implies that the individual makes up their own mind about which emotions they have. In the evolution to an emotion steps, the second step is entirely missing. A communist theory of the emotions would have social, cultural, class and historical mediators in place.

The hardest step for people in capitalist society to understand about this evolution is the second step. How could internalized socio-cultural, historical and class forces be inside of people rather than outside? Wouldn’t these forces come later, at the end?

The inclusion of step two attacks the idea that emotions are private, inside people and under their control. A communist theory of the emotions says that emotions are not private. They are products of a particular type of society, a particular social class, a particular kind of culture existing in a certain point in history. All these forces exist prior to the time you were born and they are socialized into you by your caretakers mostly unconsciously, especially in the first five years. The initial internalized socio-cultural, class and historical conditions are inside you whether you like it or not. That is our fate.

Later, as we mature, we become more active in dialectically reciprocating with these forces so that our class status might change. We might go to live in a different country (culture) or go to live in a socialist society. We might work as economic advisors to contribute to the world historical economy shifting Eastward in the 21st century. Whereas fate are the conditions that we are given when we are born, destiny is what we make of those conditions. However, even if you are active on all these fronts, step two is the infrastructural plumbing of all emotions and it creates and sustains all the steps that follow. The content of the infrastructural plumbing may change, but the presence of a plumbing infrastructure will not.

What Capitalism Can Do to Our Emotions

Capitalist psychology splits the individual from his social, cultural, historical and class identity. Then it takes the stripped-down, isolated, alienated individual as human nature as its point of departure. Most every psychological problem is rooted in the chaotic and contradictory interactions of the four systems as they interact.

Alienation Under Capitalism

Alienation is the inversion of subject and object, creation and creator. It is a reversal of ends and means so that the means acquire a life if their own.

Members of capitalist society are alienated in:

the products of their labor;
the process of producing the products;
the other people they are producing with;
the power settings in which the product is distributed;
the biophysical environment; and,
their self-identity

The products of their labor: commodity fetishism: hoarding, manic consumption

Marx talked about how under capitalism commodities acquire a life of their own, and become disengaged from the situation which produced them. Commodities, rather than becoming a means to an end for living, become an end in itself. Erich Fromm defined a particular kind of pathology which he called the hoarding mentality and the marketing pathology in which people are obsessed with the accumulation of commodities. The emotional life of a consumer is anxious and destabilized because their identity is centered around the acquisition of new commodities, whether they need them or not. Most capitalist psychologists treat accumulation of commodities and capitalist mania for accumulation as not worth identifying as a pathology as it’s not even in the diagnostic manual.

The process of producing the products: insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion

Under capitalism, the workday has lengthened from 40 to at least 50 hours of work in the last 50 years. There is less security about having a job and the average worker is more likely to have two jobs with no benefits. For workers a job is just something to put up with. Life begins when an individual has leisure time. Work under capitalism still possesses a religious root as a way to repent from original sin. This adds extra distress for workers during a recession or a depression when workers cannot find a job but blame themselves for not having a good “work ethic.”

Other people they are producing with: competitive anxiety anti-group mentality

Almost a hundred years ago neo-Freudian Karen Horney claimed that it was competition between workers and between workers and other social classes that produced anxiety. As I mentioned in my article What is Social Psychology Part II, that groups under capitalism are treated as:

no more than the sum of individuals;
less than the sum of individuals;
an entity that has a super-personally separate life from individuals.

To give you an example of the third framework, when people join a group at work, they often dissolve into it. They reify the group. They make the group a thing, above and beyond anything they can control. When an individual withdraws from the group, the group is renounced as a resource, as the individual believes their problems are so precious that no one could possibly understand them.

When the individual tolerates the members of a group, the individual renounces the capacity of the member being tolerated to change. The tolerating member does not consider that other members might be restless also, and they are not alone in putting up with members who are hard to manage. When individuals rebel against the group, they assume that other group members are conservative, never change or are stuck in their ways. If the individual tries to dominate the group, the dominating individual renounces their ability to get what they want through the collective creativity of the group. What withdrawing, toleration, rebelling or dominating have in common is that they are zero-sum game, with winners and losers. The best example of a group that is treated as less than the sum of individuals, is in the Lord of the Flies novel. A group being less than the sum of individuals exists in the hyper-conservative imagination of Gustave Le Bon in his books about crowds, or in mass media’s depiction of mass behavior during natural disasters where crowds develop a hive mentality.

The power-setting in which the product is distributed: apathy, myopia

Unions in the United States gave up a long time ago providing a vision for workers in terms of having a say in the decision making on the job. This leads to apathy. In addition, the specialization of labor discourages understanding what is going on in the entire production process. People do their job over and over and know nor care what is going on in other parts of the production process. “That’s none of my business”.

Alienation from nature: physical deterioration shortening life-span

This form of alienation under capitalism has reached a currant volatile form in the areas of pollution, extreme weather. John Bellamy Foster has called this a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. Air pollution worsened breathing for people with lung problems and added new physical problems. Extreme weather has made both winter and summer conditions hazardous almost everywhere in Yankeedom. The lack of state planning over Covid has either killed millions of people or given them Long-Covid. The United States life span has declined 2.7 years since Covid began. The US is the worst at managing Covid, having the highest number of infections and deaths. Environmental psychologists have long known that getting out into nature reduces stress and has long-term benefits. But thanks to capitalism, communing with a nature which is unpolluted is getting harder and harder to find.

Alienation from self: the illusion of free will under capitalism – depression

Capitalist psychology assumes people are fundamentally selfish, as if we individuals are like Hobbes’ atoms, greedy, insensitive, grasping and mindlessly crashing into each other. Whether it is Freud’s ego or the behavioral motivation of pain or pleasure, individuals’ primary motivation is self-interest.

Under capitalism individuals have supposed “free will”, meaning they may more or less freely choose their situations. Religious institutions, educational expectations, economic and political propaganda, legitimation techniques, mystification and collusion in the end have no bearing on what happens. In spite of everything, free will wins over the type of society we are raised in, our social class, our culture or the historical period in which we live. With these unrealistic expectations about freedom, the individual is likely to internalize the real-life constraints and blame themselves for their less than idyllic life.

For a communist psychology, all these forms of socio-political control affect free will. While none of these processes by themselves or even all together determine a person’s free will, the options people choose to exercise are significantly constrained.

Capitalists eternalize capitalist relations

Capitalists eternalize alien relations under capitalism and treat them as if they were always there. They project how people learn, think, emote and remember under capitalism into other historical periods. For example, they present narcissism, attention-deficit disorders or manic-depression as present in tribal or state civilizations just as much as they are under capitalism.

Emotions under Communism

Everything that follows is based on the real experience of workers in worker cooperatives, behavior in natural disasters and workers’ experiences in revolutionary situations. These emotional states represent communists at their very best rather than all the time. Under communism people are seen as primarily collectively creative. This is demonstrated in practice when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers’ councils in revolutionary situations or even how they behave during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Consuming commodities are a means to an end. There is no hoarding or manic consumption in communism since the primary identity of a worker is fulfilled on the job because they love their work.

Workers are not anxious or insecure about work because there is more than enough work for everyone. The number of hours of work per day will shrink because technology, no longer controlled by capitalist, is available to do mechanized part of the work, leaving people more time for the creative parts of the job.

Social unconscious: recalling the great moments in revolutionary situations

For a communist psychology, what is unconscious, at least for the working class, is a “social” unconscious. It is the repressed memory of the human past, dead labor, that causes this individual to have “social amnesia” and not care about their own history. However, when the collective-creative memory is revived, out pours the wisdom that has accumulated from revolutionary situations: the heroic stance of the Paris Commune; the heroism of Russian factory councils and the workers’ self-management experiments in Spain from 1936-1939. To make this social unconscious conscious is to make the working class shapers of history rather than just being a product of it.

Pro-group basis of communist psychology

In all these examples the group attitude under capitalism is a whole never more than the sum of its parts. The goal of communist psychology is to cultivate a “social” individual who gradually comes to see the activity of building and sustaining groups as the key to emotional health. Even though in socialist psychology, the group as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, the group is still the creation of concrete individuals. The group has no mystical identity floating above individuals. While there is no group without individuals, through the collective creativity of members,the group acquires a synergy whose products are more than what any individual can do by themselves. A communist psychology creates these win-win situations through cooperation.

A socialist psychological group challenges people who withdraw or dissolve into the group by asking what the group can do to give them what they want. The group confronts those who tolerate others by asking them why they are putting up with other members – what would need to happen for things to be different. To those who rebel the group asks “what are you rebelling against and how could we change things to make the group more attractive to you?”. To those who try to dominate the group, socialist group therapy does not moralize against dominators. We simply say that you are losing out on the collective creativity of others by trying to subjugate them.

Our job involves exposing the unconscious commonalities between people that lie beneath our individual differences. It means making a long-term commitment based on the belief that the commonalities between most working-class and middle-class people far outweigh our differences.

The idea is that if you learn to build the collective power of a one group, you can then go out into the world and change it by your newfound capacity to change groups wherever we go, now and into the future. Learning how to change groups through the collective creative capacity of the group moves us from being products of history to being co-producers of it. A rich, co-creative group life is the key to emotional well-being under communism.

Conclusion

Under capitalism we have an emotional life with elements that include hoarding, manic consumption, narcissism, short-attention span, insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, apathy, myopia, unnecessary physical deterioration, a shortened lifespan and depression. Under communism people are relaxed, serene, enthusiastic, creative, and happy and that goes with the research on happiness described earlier in this article.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Towards a Communist Theory of the Emotions first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Need for Alienation

William Manson — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:15:30 +0000

Cloudless contentment is not open to man, and if he trades his freedom or integrity for it, the time will come when he feels cheated.

— Walter Kaufmann¹

In his early Paris manuscripts (1844), the young Karl Marx defined “alienation” as an estrangement from the product of one’s labor. The modern factory, with its specialized division-of-labor (which even Adam Smith deplored as necessary but dehumanizing), exponentially increased productive output–but at the price of deskilling and condemning the worker to a single, repetitive task. (The psychological damage imposed on such workers was satirically dramatized in Chaplin’s unforgettable movie Modern Times, above.). In The German Ideology (1846), the young Marx and Engels idealized a communitarian, pre-industrial way of life in which one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner–without ever becoming any one of these.”

But in a broader sense–and in this article I am heavily indebted to the existentialist-humanist philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980),¹ alienation refers to the independent, rational thinker’s questioning of the prevailing norms and practices of his community or nation. For the vast majority, who crave a regressive “belonging to the community” and “feeling at home,” the non-conformist free-thinker and critical rationalist are unwelcome. But such alienation, Kaufmann demurs, is not the enemy of self-realization but its positive prerequisite:

It is those who are easily satisfied that we should worry about, and it is grounds for melancholy that most people cease so soon to find the world strange and questionable…. [A]s perception increases, any sensitive person will feel a deep sense of estrangement. Seeing how society is riddled with dishonesty, stupidity, and brutality, he will feel estranged from society, and seeing how most of one’s fellow men are not deeply troubled by all this, he will feel estranged from them. (p. 146-147).

Kaufmann highlights Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who, morbidly sensitive to the endemic hypocrisy and deceit all around him, is profoundly alienated and filled with a loathing for the social world he inhabits. The critical rationalist and free-thinker, skeptical of a corrupt status quo (“business as usual”), invokes his autonomous right to independent judgment — based on evaluation of the respective evidence and objective substantiation involved. He optimally values his autonomy, which he equates with intellectual integrity. Moreover, he is skeptical of the communitarian dream of total group-identification and reciprocal caring. He thus revises Jesus’ famous saying to: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.”

In the present-day, one thinks with admiration of courageous “whistleblowers” (usually women), who, alienated from the corrupt “corporate cultures” they inhabit, confront the power of those organizations–exercising their integrity and autonomous judgment. Their truth-revealing information, quite beneficial to a propagandized citizenry, is often only ambivalently received–by a public who may “prefer not to know.” I’m reminded of Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, tragic hero of The Enemy of the People. Although he originated and executed the plan for a health spa to bolster the economy of his beloved hometown, when he finds that the waters are in actuality contaminated and unhealthy from tannery wastes upstream, the townsfolk violently turn against him, repress his findings, and virtually drive him and his family out of town.

Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy. Peter Wyden, Inc., 1973.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

A Marxist Concept of Politics

Yanis Iqbal — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 13:20:57 +0000

Under capitalism, political violence is not constantly required for the extraction of surplus-value and the maintenance of capitalist social relations. The separation of direct producers from the means of production in capitalist social formations means that surplus-value can be appropriated by economic mechanisms without the repeated deployment or threat of deployment of politico-military force in the battle between classes. In Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau writes: “The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organization of social reproduction on the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its reproduction all by itself, as it were.” Capitalism constructs a new social relationship between the employer and the employed, one that allows the former to gain full control over the immediate environment of the latter. It needs workers to be “free” in a double sense: “free” to sell their own labor-power (not legally tied to a landlord or master) and “free” of any possession of the means of production, so that their material survival is dependent on becoming a wage-laborer. It is important to note here that the “freedom” to sell labor-power is rooted in “the mystified/mystifying moment of the wage contract and the freedom-of-contract rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberal individualism.” Such a notion of “freedom” refers not to the ¬ actual independence of workers but to the ideological concealment of the coerciveness of the wage contract through a discourse of legal voluntarism. It denotes the process whereby proletarianized masses – separated from the means of production – are given the legal ability to enter the abstract sphere of bourgeois-juridical formalism and participate in the capitalist labor market. Thus, the economic power of capitalism exists as a form of exploitation that appears as the agential and self-driven decision of the individualized worker. This appearance is supported not only by the ideology of liberal contractualism but by the operational modality of economic power, which involves the application of indirect, structural pressures upon the material environment of subaltern classes. As Mau comments: “Whereas violence and ideology directly address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the subject.”

Insofar that the economic power of capital renders superfluous the need for political coercion in the labor process, there emerges a separation of the economic from the political. This concept of separation, while analytically true, applies to the individual labor process of capitalists, not to the social totality of the capitalist social formation. At the level of the individual capitalist, the need to simply survive, to avoid starvation, surely impels subalterns to join the rank of the proletariat. However, when we look at this issue from the collective standpoint of the capitalist totality, the process that institutes wage slavery as the only economic way of ensuring subsistence is brought about by a political closure of alternative employment options. This situation differs significantly from the one that prevails in pre-capitalist societies. In these societies, direct producers are not yet deprived of the means of production. Given this fact, the surplus labor of the exploited classes has to be appropriated in a form other than the economic coercion of the market found under capitalism. This form is provided by the political power and naked violence of pre-modern ideologies, which use religious prejudices and primitive attitudes to ensure subservience to the exploiters. What is evident here is the fact that in pre-capitalist societies, individual owners of property have to continually use political violence to maintain control over property, a situation that is different from capitalism, where individual capitalists as capitalist property-owners do not have to use extra-economic force for the reproduction of their class status. But the capitalist class as a whole – in the form of the capitalist state – does utilize political and ideological violence to perpetuate the monopolization of the means of subsistence of the masses and the forcible destruction of non-capitalist livelihoods that may weaken the economic power of capital. Hence, both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations are dependent upon political violence for their social reproduction. What differentiates the one from the other is the fact that capitalists, unlike pre-capitalist exploiters, don’t have to use violence at the individual level to ensure their dominance since that role is served by the economic compulsion of the market. However, the absence of violence at the individual level is propped up by the presence of violence at the collective level, embodied in the capitalist state. The systematic construction of public apparatuses that can perform repressive tasks for the bourgeoisie ensures that the working class has no choice not to work for a wage, being unable to choose between capitalist and non-capitalist employers. This state of structural oppression – brought about through the political subjugation of non-capitalist subsistence options – demonstrates that in capitalism, what emerges is not so much the separation of the economic and the political but their functional division wherein individual capitalists possess economic power and the capitalist state possesses political power. Raju J Das writes:

the capitalist state and the capitalist class…are two arms of the social relationship called capitalist class relation. One arm signifies the exploitation of the majority and its (near) separation from property, and wealth-accumulation in the hands of the capitalists. Another arm signifies the political oppression/subjugation of the majority by the state. In other words, one arm signifies the capitalist class as a whole, and another arm signifies the state which is, above all, the coercive instrument to reproduce the capitalist class relations.

The capitalist relationship of dialectical mediation between the economic power of capital and the political power of the bourgeois state – distinguished from the sole presence of political power in pre-capitalist social formations – means that the immediate capitalist labor process appears to be free from violence and coercion. This appearance has a material basis in social reality because it reflects how the economic power of capital is structurally imbricated with the political power of the state. When acting as exploited workers in the capitalist civil society, it is only natural for proletarian human beings to perceive their engagement with the labor process as an economic one, as one that allows them to receive wages and satisfy monetary requirements. Viewed from the perspective of the human imagination, which concerns itself with the affective workings of the senses, the capitalist civil society is a representation of the act of economic exchange and nothing more. The interconnection of this economic sphere with the coercive logic of the state is ignored because the ideas of the proletariat are interwoven with the material practice of wage slavery to such an extent that they are strongly limited by the horizons of the latter. Workers experience the economic mechanisms of capitalism as the immediate apprehension of objective forms that lie outside their subjective being, as mere methods of subsistence to which one has to conform. In this way, the proletariat’s material relation with the economic logic of the capitalist civil society is transformed into an ethereal relation to external forms. The visibility of the capitalist economy arises out of the structural invisibility of the political violence that generated its foundational framework, as well as of the overarching network of socio-cultural relations that serves the bourgeoisie through its manifold cruelties. This inability of human imagination to understand the interdependence of capitalist economy on the political violence of the state is part and parcel of the way in which ideology operates. It limits the mental capacities of human beings by socially constructing a collective sensorium that carries out processes of routinized sense-making and shapes comprehension, interaction, and practice. Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León elaborate:

Rather than there being a real, given world outside of ideology, that is then simply distorted through inversion, the world materially delivers itself to us upside down, and this is the primary datum of our ideological experience…material practice formats our perceptual matrix in such deep and fundamental ways that the world is “naturally” delivered to us through the lens of ideology. Instead of simply being a set of illusions or false ideas, ideology operates as an all-encompassing sensorium that emerges from the actual life-processes of homo faber. It composes an entire universe through the collective and historical production of a shared world of sense that is at one and the same time physical and mental. It is the collective historical life-process (der historische Lebensprozess) that forges this sensorium in such a seamless fashion that it is largely rendered imperceptible.

The human imagination is thus essentially entwined with an ideological imaginary i.e. “a collectively produced practical mode of intelligibility that assembles self-evident givens, being at one and the same time a way of thinking, feeling, being, perceiving, and acting. Far from remaining purely conceptual, it is affective, practical, perceptual, and axiological. An imaginary is thus the anchored modus operandi of social agents, which is flexible and varies across the social field depending on the agencies involved in its precise configuration.” In contrast to the ideological nature of human imagination, the rational faculties of human beings interact with reality by constructing adequate ideas that theoretically totalize the given facts through their contextualization in a historical movement of fluid social relations. This means that reason will comprehend the bourgeois political society as a necessary component of capital in which its essence as an exploitative dynamic is expressed, reinforcing the conditions of possibility of surplus-extraction through the repression of non-capitalist possibilities in the realm of civil society. Furthermore, reason understands that the one-sided representation of the capitalist civil society as a sphere of “free”, non-political wage contracts is essential for the continuous expansion of capital, for without this ideological illusion – that relationships in bourgeois civil society are representations of strictly economic exchanges – the commodity-form will fail in forcing subalterns into the entire circuit of capitalist reproduction that generates surplus-value. Now, taking into account that the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism is primarily an ideological one, we need to examine what impact this separation has upon the logic of politics in a capitalist social formation. From the bourgeois viewpoint, politics actually functions as the invisible background of capitalist economics, as the violent underside of the abstract legalism of the market. The centrality of political violence to the field of economic production demands that it be ideologically mystified so that the dialectical linkages between the political power of the state and the economic power of capital can be broken and the character of the labor process can be normatively described as non-coercive and voluntary. This act of normative description is carried out by taking the capitalist separation of economics and politics at face value, without questioning the essence that lies beneath this appearance. As I have already noted, economic capital, unlike the ideological deployment of violence in pre-capitalist social formations, interpellates the subalterns in a matrix of subordination that works indirectly through the molding of their socio-material surroundings and conditions. Once the proletariat has been politically separated from the preconditions of its sustenance, the realization of its life can be carried out only through the presence of capital as a mediator. Thus, instead of an external power, the working class’s own interests with regards to survival force it to sell its labor-power. Todd McGowan writes: “In the capitalist epoch, a bizarre inversion occurs: one’s obedience occurs through one’s isolated particularity…One obeys not by submitting to the domination of an authority’s command but by following one’s own self-interest…Capitalism does not eliminate obedience, though it does eliminate the act of submission to a structure of mastery. Individuals continue to participate in a structure that guides their existence, but they cease to experience it as a structure of mastery.” The coincidence of the proletariat’s individual interest for sustenance with capital’s profit-driven interest for surplus extraction – rooted in the political separation of the immediate producers from their means of production – means that the economy comes to assume a veneer of depoliticized neutrality, with the state’s function of political violence in the capitalist market fading into the background. As soon as the appearance of the capitalist market as a technocratic arbiter of individual interests emerges, bourgeois ideologists discursively entrench this appearance by reconfiguring political society, so that it no longer signifies the coercive complement of capital’s economic power but a synthetic zone of abstract legalism that aids the ostensible market rationalism of bourgeois civil society. Politics no longer refers to the inner component of extra-economic violence that inevitably accompanies the economic power of capital but to a juridified political society that speaks only through the language of the formal equality of otherwise unequal citizens – a language that is itself a reflection of the capitalist market that organizes commodity exchange in terms of the abstract equivalence of qualitatively unequal market actors. The juridical concept of the equality of all citizens before the law, the equal respect for the life and property of each citizen, the equal freedom of association and contract, forms a necessary legal-institutional basis for a system of commodity production that posits materially unequal social agents as abstractly equal “rational” actors that are pursuing their individual interests through the medium of the market. Under a social structure of capitalist accumulation, the representative liberal state enforces this formal contractual equality only to cloak the very real inequalities that exist between the propertied capitalists and the property-less wage-laborers.

For the proletariat, the natural-law contractualism that undergirds politics in a capitalist society – founded upon the ideological depoliticization of the economy and the technocratic erasure of the violent antagonistic social relations inherent to the field of production – results in the systemic delimitation of politics: in its status quoist version, politics sets its boundaries of intervention in an external fashion with regards to the field of production. It considers its area of operation to be the juridified political society of capitalism – a sphere of political existence that is wholly internal to the constraints of the bourgeois state and its institutional apparatuses, functionally bounded by the field of reproduction of the strategic political and social interests of the bourgeois class. Here, we can observe how the apparent alienation and separation of this sphere of bourgeois politics from the material intercourse that takes in bourgeois civil society actually facilitates their ever close intermeshing. The claims of bourgeois political society to a juridical status of an abstract entity that can’t interfere with the market rationalism of civil society leads to a paradoxical non-interventionist stance: state-supported political violence consistently intervenes against opposition to the scientific pretensions of the market so that it can maintain the space within which the ostensibly non-political and self-sustaining mechanisms of the market can work. Political intervention creates the conditions of possibility for a supposedly non-political market that is touted as an entity capable of sustaining itself without further intervention. The lack of intervention of the capitalist state in the free market is based upon political interventions that create the conditions of possibility for that non-interventionism through the elimination of any form of opposition. Bourgeois ideologists want to drive out the paradoxical character of the political state by forgetting the political coercion that constitutes the condition of possibility for the self-regulating market and ideologically consecrating the bourgeois state as a legal guarantor of the rationalism of capitalist civil society. The proletariat demolishes this façade by showing how the rationalism of the market requires as its dialectical counterpart the irrationalism of the political state, how the realization of working class survival through market exchanges is produced by the destruction of non-capitalist options, how the juridified political society’s respect for the so-called scientific nature of the market is actually a mask for coercively eliminating the class antagonisms found in the capitalist labor process. From this, it is clear that the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project is conflictual: to gain consent, the ruling class has to interact with the proletarian hostility arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises economic and ideological power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain a power equilibrium through the creation of apparatuses that deal with subaltern opposition, the organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these oppressed classes. The existence of this duality causes the emergence of two different conceptions of politics: bourgeois politics, which revels in the abstractness of legal contractualism, and proletarian politics, which constantly overflows the barriers of bourgeois politics to highlight the violence that forms an essential substratum of economic exchange. While the former resides in the realm of political society, unwilling to explore how the state is not a legal guarantor of juridical equality but a capitalist enforcer of material inequality, the latter resides in the connective terrain between political society and civil society, constantly highlighting the internality of the bourgeois state’s political violence to the supposedly “neutral” economic power of capital. This form of proletarian politics understands that the enrichment of the political equality promised by the bourgeois state cannot lead to the eradication of exploitation from the economic arena of bourgeois civil society. On the contrary, it reinforces the social legitimacy of the state institutions that are responsible for hiding the essentially violent and oppressive nature of the capitalist economy. Bourgeois ideologists have combatted the counter-hegemonic thrust of proletarian politics by portraying it as an unscientific remainder of pre-capitalism that attempts to politically disrupt the non-political stability of the free market’s invisible hand. As Etienne Balibar notes:

The fundamental point is that from Adam Smith onwards, ‘economic’ discourse, by presenting itself as science and radically divorcing itself from ‘politics’, represented as a remnant of pre-capitalism, and thus instituting the distinction of civil society and the State, provides the different factions of the bourgeoisie with the means of considering, and thus of organizing the unity of their interests as just so many conditions of the accumulation of capital. Everything opposing their mutual interests is called ‘politics’, and everything which leads back to the logic of accumulation, that is, to the command of capital (or money) over labour, is called ‘economics’ At last this provides the means, albeit theoretical, of preventing the interests of labour, or rather of workers, from entering into the conflict of interests between different bourgeois factions, so as to disturb its ‘arbitrations’ (as we say nowadays) and to undermine the mass bases of the State.

To summarize, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, there are two definitions of politics: one is the legalistic one that ideologically reflects the apparent alienation of political society from civil society and the other is the revolutionary one that emphasizes their real interdependence and interpenetration. While the former is based on legal respect for the market rationalism of supposedly scientific bourgeois economics, the latter is based on radical hostility to the scientific and rationalist pretensions of capitalist surplus extraction, highlighting their irrational interrelation with the coercive logic of state-sponsored political violence. These two forms of politics, however, don’t exist in neat separation from one another. To be more precise, revolutionary politics itself has suffered the ideological invasion of bourgeois elements, taking from the latter the notion of the separation of economics and politics under capitalism and radicalizing it in an anti-capitalist direction. This ideological hybridity manifests itself in the form of ultra-leftism, which opposes any form of participation in the movement for reforms. Such opposition emerges from the specific discursive order of that ideology. The appearance of the division of the extra-economic state from the economic labor process – embodied in the ideological mystification of juridical abstractness – is accepted with a radical twist: the separation is now construed no longer as the juridical respect for market rationalism but as the violent subjection of civil society to the dictates of political society. In the case of bourgeois ideologists, the separation of economics (civil society) and politics (political society) is affirmed to maintain the hierarchical subjection of the former to the latter. In the case of ultra-leftwing ideologists, the same separation is affirmed in favor of civil society. It is said that the hegemonic perpetuation of the power of capital over labour requires a state machinery which is divorced from the mass of the people and beyond their democratic control, so the working class, in order to remove the bourgeoisie from their position of dominance and set up a Communist order, requires a form of government through which political society can be reabsorbed into civil society. The privileging of civil society produces a form of anti-politics that regards as futile any kind of participation in the political system of capitalism. In both the bourgeois and ultra-leftwing cases, the terms – economics and politics, civil society and political society – continue to exist in their static state of separation, only their relational ordering is changed. Unlike these two ideologies, Communism destroys the strict isolation of state and society and points out how it is their particular dialectical nexus that constitutes the essence of the capitalist arrangement. Contrary to the propositions of ultra-leftists, capitalism does not involve the separation of civil society and political society, and the subjection of the former to the violence of the latter. Instead, it involves the inextricable intermeshing of the political power of the state and the economic power of capital – the former ensuring the preconditions for the continued existence of the latter. The role of proletarian politics consists in advancing a class struggle in such a way that the working class comes to expose the essential violence of the labor process, showing how it is tethered to the coercive closure of non-capitalist alternatives and is full of irreconcilable class antagonisms. In the normal conditions of bourgeois hegemony, the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie remains latent, or invisible, unavailable to the consciousness of the subaltern, which continues to think of economics and politics in terms of market rationalism and juridical equality, respectively. When the normal exercise of bourgeois hegemony breaks down, when the apparent separation of economics and politics weakens, the confrontational edge of class struggle comes to the fore, with the proletariat openly criticizing political society and civil society as two moments of a dialectical whole, geared towards their exploitation. Politics in the Marxist sense refers precisely to the transition that is effected by the proletariat from one phase of class struggle to the other, the becoming visible of the latent struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat through the destruction of the antinomies of politics and economics. To use the words of Balibar, for the workers’ movement, the reality of politics “is nothing other than the development of the contradictions of the economy…To transgress the limits of the recognized – and artificially separated – political sphere, which are only ever the limits of the established order, politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political). It has, in other words, to get back to the economic contradictions, and gain a purchase on these from the inside.” This “pattern of referring back to the material conditions of politics, which is in turn required for the internal political transformation of those conditions,” means that the proletariat cannot refrain from engaging with the political dynamics of capitalist society. On the contrary, to destroy the separation of economics and politics, the working class has to consistently build a mass movement that defends the living standards of workers and activates the latent class antagonisms in the field of economic production. As part of this, the Communist Party has to also participate in elections so that it can displace the ostensible neutrality of bourgeois political society from within that sphere. Expressed in more general terms, while ultra-leftism privileges civil society and attempts to voluntaristically proclaim a space of proletarian autonomy within that sphere, Marxism recognizes the structural embeddedness of subalterns in the dialectical nexus of political society and civil society and thus builds proletarian autonomy through a concrete movement of political practices that can dissolve that nexus. Bearing in mind how the apparent separation of economics and politics under capitalism weakens the independence of the proletariat, the Communist Party always tries to overcome this separation through all possible means. Insofar that Communism has as its goal the unification of economics and politics, it is both hyper-political, highlighting the intense antagonisms found in both political society and civil society, and anti-political, overcoming bourgeois restrictions to articulate an expansive notion of politics. Once this separation has been overcome, class struggle can replace the capitalist totality, whose dialectical moments are political society and civil society, with Communist totality, whose dialectical moments are formed by the free association of human beings working toward their self-actualization through democratically managed production.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

What is Sociohistorical Neopaganism or Neopagan Marxism?

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 22:02:11 +0000

To understand what Neopagan Marxism is, we need to compare it to other sacred and secular systems in order to understand their similarities and differences. Most Marxists know next to nothing about Neopaganism, and they like it that way. However, the inverse is not necessarily true. The Neopagan movement in Yankeedom largely came out of the feminist sacred movement, which was also political. As we will see, some Neopagans are liberal, but many are radicals. Generally, thanks to Starhawk and Z Budapest, many witches integrate their magical rituals with political activity. As for Marxism, there might be a smattering of Marxists who were pagans, but for the most part, they were isolated and didn’t constitute any identifiable subgroup within Neopaganism. Then, at the turn of the century, feminist Marxist Silvia Federici wrote Caliban and the Witch that brought a Marxist understanding to the witch hunts. More recently, about seven years ago, a practicing Marxist Neopagan named Rhyd Wildermuth began a small publishing house called Gods and Radicals. One of his books was All That is Sacred is Profane: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. In this work, Wildermuth tried to make a Marxian understanding of capitalism understandable to pagans. However, he did not try to make Neopaganism attractive to Marxists. That’s what this article is about.

Overview of Six Theoretical Positions

Table A (Secular and Sacred Belief Systems) shows a full range of six theoretical orientations. The most right-wing of all belief systems are Christian fundamentalists. There are, of course, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, but I will go with Christian fundamentalists since I know them best. At the other extreme are what I call ‘evangelical atheists.’ These can be either liberal atheist humanists (like Dawkins, Dennett, Hutchens, and Harris) or typical hardline Marxists. In the middle of the spectrum are three other kinds of Neopagans: Atheopagans, soft polytheists, and hard polytheists. I’ve developed my own neopagan category which I call ‘socio-historical’ paganism, or Neopagan Marxism. My narrative will cover only some of the comparative categories; the table at the end covers the full range of similarities and differences.

How Christian Monotheists Are Different from Scientists, Marxists and Various Types of Pagans

As different as they are, all or most Christian fundamentalists:

agree to strive for absolute certainty. Spiritual or psychological uncertainly is a sign of sin, that the system is incomplete and/or the work of the devil. All other tendencies accept uncertainty.
have dualistic and mutually exclusive opposites. All other tendencies are polar and turn into each other at certain points.
are the most extreme belief system in terms of exclusivity. There is only one path. All other paths are erroneous or demonic. Socialists and various kinds of pagans, on the other hand, have limited plurality between groups. Socialists will argue with other socialists more than with liberals or conservatives. Scientists will argue with each other but not with people who don’t play by the rules of science. Pagans tolerate plurality within the pagan community, but less with Christians or Muslims.
are the only ones that think the natural world will end in an apocalypse.
think heaven and hell are literal places we go after death. With the exception of evangelical atheists (who think heaven and hell are illusions) all the rest save sociohistorical Marxists treat heaven and hell as psychological states of mind.
see God as transcendent and intervening in history. Pagans, hard scientists, and Marxists agree that nature is self-regulating and immanent. All tendencies other than Christian fundamentalists go beyond Kohlberg’s third or fourth stage of morality which claims morality is based on fear of punishment or convention.
interpret missteps as sin or punishments from God. All the rest think mishaps are due to accident, faulty cognitive interpretations, or explanatory styles, social conditions, or a normal part of learning.
are extrinsically motivated and driven by the hope of going to heaven in the afterlife. This makes it difficult for them to enjoy the present. Rather they are focused on past sins and future hopes. Other secular or sacred beliefs are either mixed or (as with scientists and Neopagans) are intrinsically motivated and very present-oriented.
are the least self-reflective and think in the most concrete ways. They don’t think much about how their actions and words affect others. All the rest are self-reflective but for different reasons.
are also the lowest in mental integration. They are the most likely to cognitively compartmentalize their thoughts and externalize contradictions in their own life by blaming confusion on the work of Satan.
are likely to have some kind of brain damage, either from PTSD in wars, or domestic abuse from parents, or rape.

How Fundamentalist Monotheists Are Similar to and Different from Hard Polytheists

Next to the monotheist fundamentalists, there are what have been called ‘hard’ polytheists, who believe in the literal independent existence of many gods. There are many differences between monotheists and hard polytheists as the table shows, but they both agree that a) spiritual sources are real, b) minds can exist independent of brains, and c) they both deemphasize the neocortex side of the brain. They mostly just argue over whether the gods are singular or plural.

How Evangelical Atheists Differ from Christian Fundamentalists

It might surprise you to find that, on the extreme left of the spectrum, we have atheists, that I am calling ‘evangelical’. The reasons for this nomenclature are the following: a) they generally ignore that there could be a psychology to belief that mediates what is true or not; b) neither can tolerate that the secular and sacred are both necessary to human life. Each asks us to choose one or the other; c) though they both proselytize, evangelical atheists do so to a narrow audience (educated lay people); d) both are literalists with scientists sometimes being physical reductionists and Christian monotheists taking God as literal rather than metaphorical.

How Evangelical Atheists (Liberal Humanists and Hardline Marxists) Differ from Neopagans

For evangelical atheists, the real existence of heaven and hell are dismissed as illusions. Various Neopagans agree that the real existence of heaven and hell is not a place. However, they do not dismiss them as illusions. Rather they are psychologically real, in extreme states of enjoyment and pain.
Because rituals don’t really change the world, scientists and hardline Marxists dismiss ritualism as superstitious nonsense. All Neopagans disagree and argue that mindful rituals are not superstitious.
For scientists and hardline Marxists, altered states of consciousness induced by sacred experience do not last. Various neopagans claim that altered states are remembered, transformed into art, and have developmental impact, such as in coming-of-age ceremonies.
The relationship between evangelical scientists, hardline Marxists, and neopagans is lopsided. Many Neopagans support science, but with rare exceptions, scientists dismiss neopaganism and conflate it with monotheism.
Evangelical scientists say that consciousness is rooted in the brain. Only Atheopagans agree with that. Others say that consciousness is rooted either in society or in the spiritual world.
Evangelical scientists and hardline Marxists are the ones that emphasize only the neocortex part of the brain. The others either stress all three layers of the brain, or only the limbic and mammalian parts.
For evangelical scientists or hardline Marxists, ghosts, ancestor spirits, and fairies don’t exist. Most Neopagans look at them as psychological. Hard polytheists and evangelical Christians think they are real.
Evangelical scientists and hardline Marxists have the company of Atheopagans and sociohistorical psychologists in claiming that humans have not demonstrated scientifically extra-sensory perception. Jungians, hard polytheists, and evangelical Christians believe it exists, but has not been discovered yet.

These eight differences are crucial for understanding the differences between hardline Marxism and the Neopagan sociohistorical Marxism, which I am introducing in this article.

Evangelical Atheists vs Atheopagans

Moving this time from evangelical atheists on the left to Atheopagans (just to the right on the spectrum) there are many important differences.

Whereas for evangelical atheists, altered states of sacred consciousness are short-term epiphenomenon; for Atheopagans these states are psychologically real, if not physically real, and they endure in the form of books or artwork
While Atheopagans agree with evangelical atheists (that physical reality pre-dates mind), Atheopagans make room for the imagination while suspending judgment in order to create a good ritual.
While evangelical atheists deny the value of any religion, Atheopagans believe in a naturalistic religion that is not superstitious.
While evangelical atheists think all rituals are mumbo jumbo, Atheopagans think that a non-superstitious ritual can be very beneficial. For them, the ritual is more important than the belief.
Evangelical atheists treat the limbic and mammalian parts of the brain as if they were buried in our animal past (and the less said about them, the better). Human beings at their best are looked at as exclusively using the neocortex. Atheopagan rituals strive to use all three parts of the brain: body, emotion, and mind.

Squabbles Among the Neopagans

In between these two extremes of evangelical Christian fundamentalists and evangelical atheists are four intermediate positions: Atheopaganism, sociohistorical Marxism, soft polytheism, and hard polytheism. Hard polytheists are different from the other three in that:

gods, goddesses, ghosts, faeries, and ancestor spirits are real independent personalities—not metaphors, sociological projections, nor psychological projections.
the magic that is practiced for hard polytheists has real effects in the physical world. For the others, magic has psychological and sociological impact only.
unlike other pagans, hard polytheists might imagine that minds can exist without brains.
hard polytheists might be more subject to PTSD than Atheopagans and Jungian soft polytheists because there are more working-class people who may have brain damage due to war, domestic violence at home, or rape.
like soft polytheists (and unlike Atheopagans and Marxists) hard polytheists question whether there is objective truth and are more likely to value subjective experience.

Atheopagans differ from hard and soft polytheists in that: a) the scientific method is far and away the best way to know things; b) the physical world is real and independent of mind; c) gods, spirits, ancestors are not real; d) consciousness is a product of the brain. Soft and hard polytheists think there is consciousness linked to a spirit world not requiring brains.

Soft Polytheists

Next to the hard polytheists are the soft polytheists. These folks think that gods and goddesses are not literally real, but rather an expression of the ‘collective unconscious’. Jungians argue that gods and goddesses are part of the collective human psyche in general that cut across all human societies. There are many Neopagan Jungians, like James Hillman and Jean Shinoda Bolen. The soft polytheists who follow Jung are suspicious of science and are less critical of the history of religion than hard polytheists. Jungians tend to be old-fashioned conservatives, whereas hard polytheists are mostly New Deal liberals (with a modicum of socialism and fascism in certain heathens).

Sociohistorical Neopaganism vs Atheopaganism

Sociohistorical Marxists are in the center, disagreeing with Atheopagans on the left and Jungians to their right. Atheopagans and Marxists agree that science is the best way to know things, and that the gods are not real. But they differ in the following areas:

altered states are not just psychologically real as Atheopagans say; they are sociologically real, depending on one’s social class. (There is no class dimension to Atheopaganism that I am aware of.)

while both agree that the understanding of reality should not be literal, Marxists argue that understanding reality is not just the suspending of judgment of an individual. Reality is mediated by the type of society we live in, along with the point in history. Atheopagans are less sensitive that the perception of reality depends on the type of society we live in or the point in history.

further, they disagree about the nature of consciousness. For Atheopagans, the brain is both a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. For Marxists, the brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. To be a sufficient condition, the brain must be engaged in socio-cultural activity. Thus, labor in society creates a mind, and it is the mind that creates consciousness. So far as I know, Atheopagans make no distinction between the brain and the mind.

Atheopagans want to retain an appreciation of religion, calling it naturalistic religion. Neopagan Marxists want to dispense with religion, calling it the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. Neopagan Marxists also understand that the root meaning of the term religion is to bind-back, meaning something was lost. What was lost was egalitarian political-economic relations. All religion is class religion. The alternative to class-based religion is magic, which was prevalent prior to monotheism.

Sociohistorical Neopaganism vs Soft Polytheism

Marxian Neopaganism is critical of Jungian soft polytheism over the nature of consciousness. For Jungians, consciousness is ultimately spiritual (like Plato’s eternal forms). For Marxists, there is no spiritual reality, only a sociohistorical layer around the earth, the noosphere, engaging with the biospheric envelope. Secondly, the collective unconscious lumps the experiences of people in the seven different kinds of society into a universal which flattens the distinctions of the seven kinds of society. For soft polytheists, the methodology for altered states inducements is group or individual guided imagination. Neopagan Marxists argue that group guided imagination can be part of Marxian practical critical political activity.

What is Sociohistorical Paganism?

Sociohistorical paganism has no inconsistency with the tradition of dialectical materialism. It understands that both nature and society are products of dialectical forces of Darwinian natural selection, combined with chance and (with the emergence of the human species) teleonomy, the internal planning of the human species. It also understands human society as evolving as a result of population pressure and depletion of resources, which drive technological innovation as well as economic and political qualitative leaps. It accepts uncertainty as a way of life. Opposites are understood as polar. Because of the conflict between opposites, a new higher emergent synthesis comes about. Unlike traditional Marxism, sociohistorical paganism has no factions to argue with and has no need for loading the language. It does not strive to convert anyone.

Those of us who are sociohistorical pagans respect the entire legacy of the work of Marx and Engels. We also feel that their impressions of spirituality were too sweeping. One of their biggest failures was to not treat polytheism, animism, and magic as very different from Christian monotheism. Neopagan Marxism attempts to repair this failure to engage. Sociohistorical Neopaganism is inclusive of all socialist groups, and welcomes dialogue with Atheopagans, soft and hard polytheism, as well as Evangelical atheists (of which hardline Marxists are one type).

We respect the process philosophy of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and David Ray Griffin in their attempt to argue that there is an internality in nature all the way down. This does not make us pan-psychics since we believe there is an internality (what Whitehead called prehensions) long before there was any consciousness in nature. However, we believe with Engels that there is a dialectic in nature that goes all the way back to subatomic particles, and that evolution must be understood as a spiral with ever-new emergent properties emerging from conflict. Western humanities’ conception of heaven and hell are sociological projection of alienated humanity. When and if humanity creates socialism, it will approximate heaven on earth. This will go a long way towards dissolving infantile notions of heaven as a place to be taken care of or a hell as a place to suffer.

Unlike all other groups, sociohistorical pagans are committed to discovering a fifth stage of cognitive development beyond Piaget’s formal operations. Originally called “dialectical operations” by Klaus F. Riegal, preliminary work has been done by Michael Basseches.

(Dialectical Thinking in Adult Development) and Otto Laske (Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders)

Sociohistorical Neopagans have big plans for rituals. Following the lead of Starhawk and Z Budapest, sociohistorical paganism wishes to incorporate ritual, not only into specific protests and strikes, but also into an ongoing political practice. In addition, we attempt to do once again what the French revolutionaries did: change calendars and populate them with socialist holidays, socialist birthdays, pilgrimages, and rites of passage. We want to bring theatrical practice and collective imagination to socialism.

Unlike hardline Marxists, we want to live completely in the present. We believe that the choice for anyone joining us is not made from guilt or morality, but simply that as people we are irresistible. People want to be like us and want to be part of what we are cooking up. For us, altered states of consciousness in a magical ritual is not some kind of monolithic experience of all members. Different social classes will have different altered states because of their class position. Rituals producing altered states will be opportunities to work through some of the class conflicts between working-class, middle-class, and upper middle-class participants.

Unlike any other group, our perception of reality will depend on the kind of society we come from and the point in history we live in. As I have said in a previous book, From Earthspirits to Skygods the primitive magic-mythology in tribal societies will be very different from the secondary magic of agricultural states. The difference between the high magic of Renaissance Italy is very different from the low magic of witchcraft.

We work with other pagans’ gods and goddesses psychologically and sociologically, even though for us, they are not ontologically real. Ghosts, ancestor spirits, and earth spirits can be claimed by Atheopagans and Jungians to be psychological projections. For us they are sociological and historical projections of human social life and the differences between classes. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses—that they all have strengths and weaknesses—are projections that are worth working with, with the understanding that there is a danger of reification. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses, their identification as departments of life, should be worked in as part of our socialist plans. So, rituals to the god Hermes could accompany socialist transportation plans. Rituals to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, accompany the meetings of socialist farmers.

We agree with hardline Marxists that consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain, but we disagree with some other pagans that consciousness is rooted in nature or in a spiritual world. After the existence of the brain and a central nervous system, consciousness arises (as in bonobos and chimps) as the result of toolmaking, social life, and culture that is the inheritance of social animals. However, self-reflective consciousness is the result of the development of a sociohistorical envelope wrapped around the Earth over the biosphere, which Chardin called the noosphere. Self-reflective consciousness is rooted in sociohistorical activity in creating and sustaining the noosphere.

Lastly, historical sacred oppression is very important to us. Like Neopagan feminist witches, we don’t forget nor forgive what Christianity did during the witch hunts. Neither do we forget nor forgive what the Christians did to the Alexandrian library and how the Church terrorized the likes of Bruno, Galileo and Spinoza. We reject any reconciliation with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and the whole patriarchal 5000-year albatross. Neither are we seduced by Eastern mysticism, whether it be Hindu or Buddhist, cousins of the western patriarchal family. As one feminist titled one of her plays many years ago, Your 5000 Years Are Up. As sociohistorical Neopagans, we neither forgive nor forget. We will treat the rulers of patriarchy with the same sacred hatred as we treat the capitalists in the secular world.

BELIEF SYSTEMS: SECULAR AND SACRED

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post What is Sociohistorical Neopaganism or Neopagan Marxism? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

When People Want Housing in India, They Build It

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 16:32:25 +0000

Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.

It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.

Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, ‘whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle’. The CPI(M) formed committees in thirty wards of Jakkaloddi, a part of Warangal, and began to prepare people for the coming fight. The epicentre of the struggle was land that the government had taken in the late 1970s from an old aristocrat, Moinuddin Khadri, using the Land Ceiling Act of 1975. Rather than distributing this land to the landless, however, the government evicted farmers from part of it and then gave the land to leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party in 1989.

Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on 18 June 2022.

On 25 May 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organise the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3am on 20 June, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Four hundred people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: ‘This site is for the construction of a court complex’.

Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for sixty days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On 26 June, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total.

Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.

The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.

Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.

Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.

Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.

The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin – some 3.6 million residents – held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This – along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.

Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.

These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu (‘inspiration songs’):

We will not move an inch
till we get land for our homes,
a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
We shall fight those who stop us.
On this land, the red flags we raised
stand ready for battle.

Birds nest in the branches.
Insects have homes in leaves.
We, who are born human,
thirst for a roof of our own,
for a patch of land for a home.

Drifting from place to place
in make-shift huts,
the shame of no address to our names.
Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
with the pain of no place to call our own.

Well-healed bosses
steal thousands of acres
in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
For a little patch for which I ask,
the sticks beat me to the edge of death.

You, who have come to ask for our vote:
We demand food and shelter.
We are ready for battle till we get them.
We dare you to stop us.

We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.

The post When People Want Housing in India, They Build It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Lessons Unlearned

Greg Godels — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 17:14:21 +0000

Writing over a century-and-a-half ago, Karl Marx studied the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions that sought to drive a stake in the vitals of the European monarchies and consolidate the rule of the emerging bourgeois classes.

Contrary to his critics — especially the dismissive scholars — he applied his critical historical theories with great nuance and subtlety, surveying the class forces, their actions, and their influence on the outcomes. While Marx conceded that the revolutions were suppressed in the short run, he was able to show how they importantly shaped the future.

Many would argue that Marx’s account of the aftermath of the rising in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the finest example of the application of the Marxist method– historical materialism¹ — to actual events.

It is said that Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British author, who was a colleague in British intelligence of Soviet spy Kim Philby and a notorious windbag, was once asked if he ever suspected Philby, if Philby left any clues to his loyalties. After a pause, Trevor-Roper said that Philby had on an occasion insisted that The Eighteenth Brumaire was the greatest work of history ever written.

More than a clue, and Philby may have been right.

The Eighteenth Brumaire sought to explain a great mystery: How a country undergoing a profound historic transition from one socio-politico-economic order (feudalism) to another (capitalism), could go from the popular overthrow of a monarch to a constituent republic and back again to the establishment of an emperor, Louis Bonaparte, in a few short years.

Marx couldn’t help but find a bitter irony in the fact that the coup installing Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew as emperor mirrored the uncle’s ascension to emperor after the French Revolution. With equally bitter sarcasm, Marx amended the old saw about history repeating itself with the phrase “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Where Napoleon I tragically hijacked the revolutionary process, Napoleon III brought the farcical maneuvers of a dysfunctional bourgeois parliament to a farcical end by creating a farcical empire.

At a time when our own political processes — executive, legislative, and judicial — resemble a crude farce, at a time when opinion polls confirm the popular disdain for these institutions, we may well find Marx’s analysis to be of some use.

Consider ex-President Trump, for example. He, like Napoleon III, represents a mediocrity, only known for his pretensions and his rank opportunism. Trump likes to portray himself as a great president who arose as a savior, an agent for the restoration of US greatness.

Based on nostalgia for his uncle, Napoleon I, the nephew ruled France with the promise of an expanding empire to be feared and admired for its spreading of enlightened ideas; Louis Bonaparte promised to restore the unity of France, lead it towards greatness, and stability.

But are Trump and Bonaparte unique individuals who pushed themselves onto the stage of history? Are they historical accidents? Larger-than-life personalities?

Marx would argue that, in fact, Bonaparte succeeded because he enjoyed the support of a class, specifically the conservative peasantry, “the peasant who wants to consolidate his holdings… those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the empire.” Bonaparte’s supporters seek to save what they have and relive an earlier moment. In short, they want to make France [the Empire] great again. He answered the moment.

Marx explains:

In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above… Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them.

It must be noted that Marx is neither mocking nor condemning the conservative French peasantry for its support of the election of Louis Bonaparte (1849) or his coup (1851). Instead, he is explaining how and why Bonaparte could manage to rule, both legitimately and illegitimately, even after France had declared its second republic. The peasantry was, by far, the largest class. The peasantry had not yet recognized its existence as a class; it could not yet express its grievances, its interests, or its latent power in class terms; it could not produce its own class leaders. And it turned instead to a caricature, a small man with big aspirations, a toy Napoleon.

Like Napoleon III, Trump enjoyed class-based support: segments of both the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. The professionals and small business people who saw “elites” — typically urban elites — as threatening their way of life, culturally and economically, were drawn to Trump over the conventional corporate Republican leaders. Similarly, working-class voters victimized by deindustrialization, twenty-first-century economic crises, insecurity, rising costs of healthcare, etc., looked for someone “as an authority over them,” to send “them rain and shine from above,” that is, a modern-day Napoleon. They could not find that with the Democrats. They thought that they found it in Donald Trump.

Workers in the US have lost what the French peasant had yet to achieve in 1851: “…no community, no national bond and no political organization among them… They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.” Nearly eighty years of red-baiting, business unionism, and Democratic Party supplication after a rich history of class struggle have left the US working class with little class consciousness, with little ability “to form a class.” It is no wonder that Make America Great Again resonated with so many.

Both Louis Napoleon and Trump have their camp followers and thugs. Marx designated Louis Napoleon’s lumpen proletariat group of mischief-makers the Society of December 10 for the role they played in stirring the pot after his election. Trump has his ultra-nationalist, racist trouble-makers as well.

Marx saves his derision for the “so-called social-democratic party,” founded as a coalition of the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers. With the militant revolutionary workers killed, imprisoned, or exiled after the June, 1848 rising waged to establish a social and democratic republic, the workers accepted compromise and the parliamentary road. In Marx’s words:

A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. From the social demands of the proletariat the revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to them; from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie the purely political form was stripped off and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose the Social-Democracy… The peculiar character of the Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not with doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony… This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.

“…within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.” This description of the limits of an incipient social democratic party in 1849 could be applied fairly to the aspirations of the small left wing of the US Democratic Party today. A little more than one hundred fifty years later, workers are still being herded into a party that seeks, at best, the weakening of the antagonism between capital and labor and transforming it into harmony [paraphrasing Marx]. The Democrats assume the votes of the working class and the most oppressed, while intensely courting the support of the urban and suburban upper strata super-voters and super-donors. This has been their strategy since the loss of the reactionary South to the Republicans.

In nineteenth-century France, the proletariat/petty bourgeoisie alliance was short-lived. Faced with a blatant violation of the constitutional limits of presidential action, the alliance allowed its threats of militant action to melt away when Bonaparte called its bluff, revealing a paper tiger.

Marx identified the folly of workers uniting with the petty bourgeoisie:

… instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people with the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it… No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation.

Not to be taken lightly for its defeat at the hands of Bonaparte and the bourgeois party, the petty-bourgeois took consolation with “the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then — then, we’ll show them what we are made of!”

If this sounds eerily like the empty threats of the Democratic Party before the brazen actions of Trump, his friends, and the Supreme Court, then lesson learned!

If we see parallels with the politics of nineteenth-century France and the twenty-first-century US, then we surely are reminded of Marx’s quip that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Surely, only an allergy to history, a blindness to past tragedies, can account for the continuing allegiance of workers and their leaders to a spineless Democratic Party that continually betrays the interests of working people.

Surely, we can do better. Marx thought so…

These reflections were inspired by a recent encounter with Jonathan White’s excellent 2021 book, Making Our Own History, A User’s Guide to Marx’s Historical Materialism, especially chapter 6.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The Spectrum of Fundamentalism

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 17:02:21 +0000

Orientation

When we think of fundamentalism, most of us think of extremely conservative monotheistic religions. But can there be fundamentalism in other fields as well? In his book The Fundamentalist Mind, Stephen Larsen claims that there is such a thing as “scientific fundamentalism”. How well do the characteristics of religious fundamentalism apply to how scientists practice science? At first this seems odd. After all, scientists are trained to be skeptical and do not advocate any promise of an afterlife. Where are the similarities and where are the differences between conservative monotheistic religion and science?

On the surface the sacred spirituality of neopagan goddess religion would seem to be the opposite of monotheistic fundamentalism. After all, neopagans are anti-authoritarian, claim that individuals can have sacred experiences and are in no need of conversion. Yet how might neopagan goddess practitioners be fundamentalists in their own way? Lastly, some claim left wing political movements can have plenty of fundamentalism built into them. After all, they do have holy texts, martyrs, and often treat their followers in an authoritarian way. How far can we see parallels with political movements to monotheistic religious movements?

I will begin with Larsen’s 28 categories through which monothetic fundamentalism can be displayed. Then I will apply his characterization to science, Goddess religion and conclude with political fundamentalism. The texts I will be using are Larson’s What’s So Wrong About Being Absolutely Right? By Judy J. Johnson and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I should point out that testing these groups in terms of fundamentalism in no way means that they are unsuccessful in gaining followers and even that they may do some good.

Christian Monotheistic Religious Fundamentalists

Certainty and dualistic oppositions

One of the major characteristics of fundamentalists is their insistence on absolute certainly and their intolerance of answers that are probabilistic or admitting they do not know. In the case of knowledge, religious fundamentalists are dualistic: you are either right or wrong, just as there are two forces, God and the Devil. This produces thinking that is rigid rather than flexible. Religious liberals, on the other hand, will understand opposites as polar and changing into each other rather than being mutually exclusive.

Literal interpretations and anti-scientific orientation

Next is the retelling of history. For fundamentalists, everything that is written in the Bible is literally true. On the other hand, the followers of the liberal wing of the religion will say biblical stories are metaphors for how humanity should live life. Liberals may also say religious ideas should make room for the latest scientific findings and upgrade their beliefs accordingly. Religious fundamentalists are anti-scientific and see science as their enemy. Another characteristic is how they relate to religious competition. Religious fundamentalists are authoritarian. They believe that other religions are evil at worst and erroneous at best. They are the ones being saved while others have lost their way.

Beginning and ends of time; heaven and hell

Cosmologically, monotheist fundamentalists are catastrophic. They believe that the end of the world will be an apocalypse where they will be saved and everyone else damned. The same dualism pervades where they believe people will go in the afterlife. Heaven and Hell are real places. Liberal monotheists will claim, like Tolstoy or Gandhi, that Heaven and Hell are not physical places but states of mind. When it comes to history, God keeps a keen eye on the doings of humanity and can be counted on to intervene in history and fix things from time to time. Liberal monotheists understand that nature is immanent and self-regulating. God is likely to be a divine watchmaker who wound things up and let humans suffer our own fate.

Conversion process, abortions and assisted suicide

If you haven’t been socialized from birth, what is the process by which you become initiated? For fundamentalists your conversion is catastrophic. You are blinded by light as St. Paul was or you are bullied and pressured by a priest, pastor and parishioners at revival meetings. For liberal monotheists, becoming spiritual is a gradual process of seeing the light through a mystical practice which takes time to reveal itself. Finally, fundamentalists want God to control life and death. They are against abortion and assisted suicide. Liberals argue that humanity should be in control over the birthing process and the conditions under which they die.

Child-rearing and Kohlberg’s stages of morality

Most Christian fundamentalists are from working class backgrounds and are raised by their parents in an authoritarian way. This means that human behaviors are right or wrong, and when you disobey you often get hit. When you do something wrong there is no negotiating and no room for ambiguity. Parents are the boss and there is little sense of gradually letting go of the reigns as the child becomes an adolescent. In terms of Kohlberg’s stages of morality, fundamentalist adults can be as low as stage three, doing things to keep from getting punished or stage four, obedience based on conventionality. There is little interest in going past conventional morality due to exceptional circumstances as when the authorities are instructing people to do immoral things. Therefore, the God of the fundamentalists has the similar characteristics as the child or adolescent’s father.

Emotional life, rituals and motivations

The emotional life of a fundamentalist is a combination of fear, guilt, paranoia, with anger as a cover. The paranoia comes from imagined threats to the rigid order he has set up. Thus there are always devils, heathens, and feminists threatening to ruin Christian life. The fundamentalist is fearful of doing something wrong to offend either his father or God. As a sinner he feels guilty for indulging in simple pleasures. He strikes out at this miserable life with misplaced anger towards others. In his religious life he is carried away by events. He performs rituals mindlessly because he is told to do them, not because he understands the symbology. He is compulsive about the ritual because he relates to it in a superstitious way. If his work life is dangerous, like most workers, he will be superstitious. In situations where he lacks control, he will superimpose a ritual in the hopes of making his work more predictable. Because so much of working-class life is not satisfying, he is extrinsically motivated. He does his work because it is extrinsically motivated, satisfying by his paycheck. The same is true in his religious life. He engages in religious actions in the church not because they are intrinsically meaningful, but as a ticket to heaven in the next life.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

The monotheist fundamentalist thinks in a concrete way. He uses his mind to solve problems, but he doesn’t reflect much on his thinking or his behavior. This applies not only to his religious activity but in relation to his friends and his family. In Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, his is either at a sophisticated level of pre-operational thinking or in concrete operations. Liberal fundamentalists are much more likely to use formal operational thinking that requires self-reflection. In large part this is because most liberal monotheists are either middle or upper-middle class and their jobs require more self-reflective, active thinking. The fundamentalist mind is not integrated, with contradictions not being faced. They tend to cognitively compartmentalize. This means allowing contradictions between one’s morality and one’s practice to exist in separate compartments. They get no “air” where they can to see how they might be behaving in a hypocritical way in the eyes of others.

Sense of humor and getting needs met

A sense of humor is very helpful in living a meaningful life despite the current instability of social life. The ability to laugh at oneself and to laugh with others over the irony of situations makes life more bearable. Most Christian fundamentalists lack the ability to laugh at themselves and with others. They are overly serious about themselves and when they laugh socially it is at the expense of others. In terms of disposition, they are cynical about human nature which supports the theological belief that people are sinners. How do fundamentalists get their needs met? In a contradictory way, with timidity alternating with aggressiveness. On one hand, they are timid about asking for what they want. On the other hand, however, if the situation persists, they will become aggressive and strike out. Since this leads to self-destructive acting out with damages to others, this then calls forth more timidity. They become locked in a self-destructive two-step. Liberal monotheists at their best are neither timid nor aggressive, but assertive. This means saying what you want, trusting the other person to do the same in the hopes of creating a win-win situation rather than a zero-sum game of win-lose.

Attitude towards process and living in the present

In terms of goals, a person can be a “destination” person or a “process” person. Destination is end-state and the process is how you get there. For the fundamentalist, in the case of proselytizing the end is everything and if the means used to get there are inconsistent with the goals that is acceptable because “the ends justify the means.” Questionable means they may be using force, trickery or fraud. For the liberal how something is done is at least as important as the result. If the process is bad the ends will be compromised. This leads to differences between liberals and fundamentalists about how they see time. Liberals are more likely to be present-oriented. They are less likely to blame the past and they have confidence that the future will take care of itself. Fundamentalists are haunted by the past and worried about their future in heaven. They will be least present in everyday life because they have one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Impact on the Brain

As most of you know, the brain is composed of three layers: the limbic brain, the mammalian brain and the neocortex. The limbic brain controls survival (including fight-flight) and reproduction. This is the oldest part of the brain. The mammalian part of the brain controls emotions and interpersonal life. The neocortex controls higher level thinking and language abstraction. All human beings, back to the origins of humanity, have all three operating. However, there is a part of the brain called the amygdala that is largely connected up to fear and fight-flight. Those who experience brain damage can have a permanently impaired limbic system. What can cause brain damage? It can be caused by car accidents, PTSD produced by wars or severe physical beatings, involving head injuries. Now we know that homelife for working-class men and women can be violent. It is not far-fetched that those who experienced brain damage would have an out-of-control amygdala which produces fight-flight reactions that are consistent with the dualistic thinking connected with fundamentalism. We also know that working-class men are also on the front lines of war, and usually come back with PTSD. This is another disorder that can catalyze an out-of-control amygdala. Brain damage like this is not a necessary condition for fundamentalist thinking. Being raised working-class with fundamentalist childrearing along with all the other categories in this section is enough to produce a fundamentalist mind. However, brain damage can amplify a condition which already exists. Please see table 1 for a summary:Is There Such a Thing as Scientific Fundamentalism?

In his book The Fundamentalist Mind, Stephen Larsen wrote a chapter on what he calls “secular fundamentalism” in which he criticizes scientific fundamentalism which includes physical sciences and medical science. He cites the dogmatic materialists who want to reduce the biological and social sciences to that of physics. He writes that the universities in which science is practiced are akin to religious temples. The theoretical controversies within a field of science can result in what he calls “excommunication” or marginalization of some scientists.

Lastly, he cites times in the history of science when new theories were proposed but resisted by scientists and then later shown to be true. Are these factors enough to claim that scientists can be just as fundamentalist as Christian monotheist fundamentalists?

When we compare the criticisms, Larsen makes against the 27 categories of religious fundamentalism, we see the connection is extremely far-fetched. In the first place, scientists are generally upper-middle class which is similar to liberal monotheists. What follows is that:

The parenting style will be authoritative or permissive. This means there will be little chance of PTSD violence that might support dualistic thinking.
Their morality will be somewhat conventional, but they can also be in stages 5 and 6. Like liberal monotheists, scientists will not be trained to accept a passive and obedient kind of morality.
The scientists will think the same as in Piaget’s formal operational stage. If anything, they might have an even more highly developed formal operational thinking because they are trained to be very sharp in statistical reasoning. Liberal monotheists such as ministers or college instructors might not have quite as much on the ball about this.
They are high in self-reflection. Scientists are carefully trained to know when they are not being careful and are taking liberties with the facts.
Degree of mental integration – scientists cannot afford cognitive compartmentalization because it would be too costly to their job if they didn’t recognize when they were thinking in a contradictory or inconsistent way.
Because of their middle class or upper-middle class position, scientists probably like or even love what they do for a living. Dispositionally this would lead them to be moderately optimistic, present-oriented and intrinsically motivated. This is the reverse of the religious fundamentalist cynicism, which involves preoccupation with the past and future and their consequent extrinsic motivation.

Is a scientific experiment a kind of ritual?

What liberal monotheists do in church is a mindful ritual around the meaning of symbols rather than mindless, compulsive or superstitious rituals of monotheist fundamentalists. The closest thing to a scientific ritual is the design and implementation of an experiment. This is a highly complex mindfulness that must remain focused for days and even weeks. Needless to say, any mishaps are understood as mistakes rather than sins. What are the standards for the result of an experiment? Probability is as good as it gets, just as for the liberal monotheists. Scientists do not think in a dualistic way. They are extremely careful and are very comfortable with various middle shades of prediction. They make a practice of quantifying and qualifying. Their language is painstakingly neutral and they are very sensitive to buzz words and loaded language.

Nature as self-regulating, and proselytizing

Scientists do not have holy books, but there certainly are science and philosophy books they respect. However, pointing out where past scientists have gone wrong is a way of life for them. Scientists tend to think that nature is self-regulating. Some are atheists and some are deists but most would not support any kind of divine intervention. The entry into the scientific world would not be characterized as a mystical experience but would be characterized as a gradual improving of skills of practicing the scientific method rather than any kind of conversion experience. Like liberal monotheists, scientists do not proselytize for their field. It is true that Dawkins, Dennett, Hutchens and Harris have thrown down the gauntlet, as Larsen says. But their proselytizing is strictly limited to the educated public. There are no atheists threatening the lives of anyone who is not an atheist.

Because of the usual class position of atheists, they are less likely to have fought in wars and suffered the resulting brain damage to the amygdala, the cingulate or the limbic system. Like liberal monotheists, scientists are not likely to believe in heaven or hell as places.

Science is not reductionistic; importance of falsifiability and a sense of humor

It is true that prior to the rise of complexity theory, the sciences did try to reduce all complex levels of nature to the simple level of physics. But since quantum physics has introduced randomness into scientific theory, physics is no longer deterministic or predictable. Larsen is beating a dead horse as the barn is already open and the horse has left. Contrary to Larsen, science is open to contending paths to knowledge, providing all the contenders play by the rules of science. Scientists are right not to mix scientific ways of knowing with non-scientific ways because the latter do not organize their methodology in a way that they cannot be proven wrong. It is ridiculous to insinuate that this is comparable to religious fundamentalist freak-outs over different religious understandings about the nature of God, the ages of the earth or what happens after death. I would guess that for the most part most scientists support abortion and a minority would support assisted suicide. As for a sense of humor or a lack of it, we know scientists are very serious people, but that doesn’t mean they lack a sense of humor. Anyone who is a scientist would have to have a sense of humor, given that they are constantly dealing with laws of probability and not knowing things for sure.

Can Monotheist Goddess Pagans be Fundamentalists?

What monotheistic goddess worshippers believe

In the third chapter of my book Power in Eden: The Emergence of Hierarchies in the Ancient World, I examined the viability of the claims of Goddess monotheists. I began the chapter with this story that sums up their beliefs:

In the beginning men and women lived in harmony and peace. We were once one with nature and there were few differences between us in social power or wealth. Women had a special place in early tribal societies: their motherhood was revered, they held positions of authority and they practiced forms of magic centered on the worship of a monotheistic Goddess. Figurines of Goddesses have been discovered, proving there was once a great women’s religion. Throughout the Bronze Age, hunters and pastoralists from Central Asia invaded these peaceful societies, creating social hierarchies, wars and the beginnings of male dominance. All of this was later sanctioned by the worship of an otherworldly, transcendent male deity that eventually coalesced to become a monotheistic God. The Goddess was discredited and went underground, being kept alive in later years by peasant communities in the magical practice of witchcraft. Today the Goddess has resurfaced as the focus of women’s spirituality. (54)

Taking my chances teaching a Goddess religion course

A few years earlier when I was still working on Power in Eden, I was asked to teach a class on “The Religion of the Goddess”. Normally I would have declined to teach it because I disagree with virtually all the claims of the Goddess people. But I agreed because the faculty chair was desperate. When I began teaching the first day, I gave the students a hand-out on the characteristics of monotheistic fundamentalism which was similar to Table 1 in this article. They liked my table and agreed that fundamentalist Christianity was pretty much their enemy. But then I asked, “do you think that neopagan Goddess reverence could also have fundamentalist tendencies.” You could hear a pin drop. That was the beginning of a very thought-provoking class for all of us.

Some Slight Fundamentalist Tendencies Among Goddess Monotheists

Social class and parenting styles

How far can we get with Goddess Neopagans when we compare their social class characteristics to the characteristics of fundamentalists? While most Goddess Neopagans are middle class or upper-middle class, there are also working class women artisans and part of the movement. This means there will be some overlap between working class pagan women and monotheist fundamentalist women that will make the comparison more complex than comparing scientists to fundamentalist monotheists. The parenting styles of the parents of pagan women have all three parenting styles – authoritative, permissive and authoritarian. Those working-class women with authoritarian parents might well have been beaten and even suffered brain damage, probably at the hands of their father, triggering PTSD.

Brain Damage and PTSD

In addition, working class women might have suffered rape which might have triggered an overactive limbic system, amygdala and disfunctions of the cingulate. In addition, the prospect of rape might have been a reality for middle class and upper-middle class women as well. So the experience of women growing up could have been terrorizing enough to catalyze dualistic thinking, regardless of social class. While we are on the subject, whereas working class men can be a good bet to have PTSD because they are fighting on the front lines, working class women are not moved to the front lines often, at least in the United States. Therefore, the chance of them having PTSD from war is not as high as working class men.

Loaded language and literal belief in the independence existence of deities

Loaded language, both virtue and vice words, goes well with dualistic thinking. How far is this likely to be the case with pagan monotheists? My experience with pagan women’s use of language, even Goddess fundamentalists, is nowhere near as severe as with Christian fundamentalists. The closest they come is in calling everything they don’t like “the patriarchy”. They use nothing near the litany of fire-and brimstone terminology such as “devil-worshipping, degenerates, heathens” that is present among Christian fundamentalists. Any bad-mouthing of Christianity is more likely to occur when a woman (or man) first joins the movement. It is not a way of life. Once inside the community, members form tight relationships, are happy with their community and are less likely to be throwing stones at competing religions.

How important is it for the Goddess or Goddesses to have real, independent personalities? In other words, how much is the existence of the Goddess to be taken literally? Because paganism believes that whether the Goddess is one or many, because she is immanent in this world, pagans have less trouble than Christian fundamentalists in thinking that Goddesses might be or are psychological projections, or the result of the collective unconscious. Pagans accept that Goddesses can be literal or metaphorical whether they are one or many.

Kohlberg’s stages of morality and Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

In the case of Kohlberg’s stages of morality, most pagan women came out of the counterculture of the 70s and are critical of the authorities was a way of life. It is not hard to imagine that even working-class Goddess worshippers would not take obedience to the authorities of Kohlberg’s fourth stage seriously. In terms of Piaget’s stages of development, Goddess pagan women are involved in the arts and are less likely to use Piaget’s stage of formal operations. Working with clay, drawing, music and dance all goes very well with Piaget’s concrete operations. In terms of ritual, some say the heart of Goddess spirituality is the collective ritual, and the ritual must be mindful for magic is to take place. On this front they are the exact opposite of Christian monotheist fundamentalists.

Attitude towards violence

Attitude towards violence whether at the hands of God or the Christian fundamentalist community is a normal part of Christian fundamentalism. Some pagan Goddess people make a principle out of non-violence in society in part as a carry-over from the sixties peace movement. Goddess fundamentalists are like process philosophers. If the process to getting something is good, there is a good chance the desired end will follow. If the process is bad, it means the Goddess has other plans. But if the process of achieving something is bad or violent, the ends will not be achieved.

However, most neopagans are aware of being persecuted by Christians in the past and are ready to fight, at least legally, when necessary. For pagan monotheists who are revolutionary, armed conflict will be necessary. Pagans are more likely to begrudgingly accept violence as necessary in the realm of nature. Since nature has cycles of creation and destruction, the violence of nature, whether in storms, volcanoes, hurricanes, or in animal-animal violence is gone along with. There really isn’t the revenge component as it is in Christian fundamentalism’s apocalyptic endings.

Ways in Which pagan Goddesses are Anti-fundamentalist

Pluralism, eclecticism, immanence, nature as eternal, human control over life

Pagans are generally pluralists. They accept differences in the community. There is no excommunication among pagans. Many are eclectic and even draw from the liberal or revisionist beliefs of the world religions. There are no cries that other pagan tendencies are false or fallen. Pagans are less willing than fundamentalists to claim that humanity has a special place in life. The idea is to heal the rift between humanity and nature, not to rise above it. Pagan monotheists will argue that the goddess is present on earth now, doesn’t need to be reformed or ask for special help from an external divine force to clean up any messes. Nature is self-regulating and has no need for divine intervention. Most pagans do not think there was a beginning or end to the world. Nature operates in cycles and is eternal. There is no grand cosmic reckoning. Pagans come down squarely on the side of liberal perennialists when it comes to life and death. Goddess fundamentalists, being pro-feminist, are pro-abortion and most believe in the individual’s right to decide to take their life under certain circumstances.

Heaven and Hell as Psychological States – Enchantment is a Gradual Process

Goddess monotheists are much more psychological than monotheist fundamentalists. For example, for Goddess monotheists, heaven and hell are not real places you go after death. They might say, to paraphrase Tolstoy, the kingdom of the Goddess is within you. In other words, we make our own heaven and hell by how we manage our thoughts, feelings, memories, imagination and goals. No one in paganism receives a bolt of lightning from the blue whereby they are converted into paganism. Having magical states of consciousness is a gradual process of practicing, getting control of the imagination and using it to change our state of consciousness. There is nothing sudden or earth-shattering about it. Enchantment is a wonderful, gradual melting that comes over our senses as a result of a good ritual. There is no kicking, begging or screaming about it.

Humor, the senses, sex and the present moment

Pagans, whether monotheists or polytheists have a sense of humor. Their playfulness is worked into the collective creativity of their rituals, which are filled with singing dancing and myth-making. Pagans are serious people but playfulness is necessary when you have to adapt and to go to plan B. So, if an outdoor ritual gets rained out, collective creativity is mobilized. This is a far cry from the obsessive monotheist fundamentalist who has to have everything letter-perfect.

Goddess monotheists happily accept what nature offers in the way of sensual and sexual pleasure. There is no need to bury it, shed it or destroy it. Bodily pleasure also involves enjoying the present. More than Christian fundamentalists, goddess monotheists are intrinsically motivated. This is in part because of their class position – they are usually happy in their work and are not wishing to be somewhere else. They are less haunted about the past or worried about the future. We only have now, anyway. Goddess monotheists are moderately optimistic and not cynical nor do they hope to be delivered to a better place.

Getting needs met and self-reflection

Goddess monotheists generally do not want to play passive-aggressive games to get what they want. Since most Goddess monotheists come out of the feminist movement, or have inherited it from their parents, they are very aware of the games women have been forced to play. Part of their pagan traditions is to overcome these self-destructive games and be straightforward. The self-perpetuating trap of timidity-aggressiveness might apply only to a minority of them. While Goddess fundamentalists might not be very interested in the mathematical-scientific skills of formal operations, they certainly are good at self-reflecting about their actions and how those actions might affect others. Again this is inherited from either liberal or socialist feminism. Lastly, they are not very likely to be accused of cognitive compartmentalizing. Because they are self-reflective, they are likely to be willing to face contradictions and resolve them rather than walling them off and sealing them as monotheistic fundamentalists are likely to do.

Left-Wing Political Fundamentalism

I have decided to focus on left-wing political fundamentalism since it can be interestingly contrasted with Goddess fundamentalism, as well as with science. Right-wing ideas have been seriously presented under the first section on Christian fundamentalism. While I will use Leninism as the political tendency which most resembles left wing political fundamentalism, this does not mean all Leninists groups can be painted with the same brush I have painted in this section. There are exceptions and variations among groups. This section of the article draws from two previous articles I wrote: Political and Spiritual Cults and Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults.

Social class and parenting styles

The social class of Leninists depends on how successful the party is in recruitment. If successful, it will have a working class base. If the party is small, it will be composed mostly of middle-class and a few upper-middle class people. In terms of parenting style, if leaders of the party came from the working class, then their authoritarian parenting styles will make their children ripe to follow the decisions of the Leninist party. If party members are raised middle class, the parenting would include authoritative parents. Permissive parenting of the upper-middle class would hardly be likely for Leninist parents. Permissive parenting is child-centered and treating the child as special would be dismissed as “petite bourgeois individualism.”

Kohlberg’s moral stages and Piaget’s cognitive stages

Since Leninists are socialists they will have no problem marginalizing Kohlberg’s fourth stage of conventional morality. Leninists will categorize conventional morality as “bourgeois” morality and they will be guided by a communist morality. This kind of morality most closely approximates Kohlberg’s sixth stage of universal morality on which morals go beyond the laws of capitalist life. Middle class liberals in Leninist parties occupy work positions such as high school or college teaching which would require using Piaget’s formal operational thinking as would doing carpentry work or engineering. Working class members would use concrete operations.

Brain damage and PTSD

At least in the United States, middle-class Leninists are not likely candidates for PTSD. However, its working-class members may have been hammered by US world wars and have PTSD. That might make them candidates for the party’s practical dualistic thinking.

Loaded language

Leninist language contained many examples of loaded language. There are virtue words like proletariat, class-consciousness, revolution and dialectical materialism. There are loaded vice words such as petite-bourgeois individualism, capitalist, false consciousness, sectarian and opportunist. Orwell was right to say that if you weed out neutral language while introducing virtue and vice works, you will be successful in narrowing the person’s thinking.

Literal interpretation of sacred books

At their worst, Leninists do treat the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin as sacred books. For example, many have presented Marx and Engels’ history of social evolution as unchanged over the course of 100 years, rather than upgrading it with scientific anthropology that has developed over the past 120 years. Only a few fundamentalist Leninists understand that the anthropology of Marx and Engels needs to be upgraded.

Heaven and hell

Like pagans and scientists, Leninists don’t believe in the real existence of heaven and hell. But unlike pagans, neither do they understand heaven and hell as psychological states. Leninists are too practical to see the triumph of the socialist revolution as a kind of heaven. They see it as more likely the result of transitions. Attacks by capitalist intellectuals who claim Leninists are naïve about human nature are misplaced. This criticism is better directed at anarchists.

Rituals

Leninists, like most scientists, see rituals as a mindless, superstitious waste of time. They do not understand how Goddess monotheists can engage in ritual in a mindful and meaningful way. They cannot understand the difference between the superstitious use of ritual by Christian fundamentalists and what Goddess pagans do.

Missionary work/proselytizing

While Leninists are a secret, elite party, it can only succeed by masses joining them to make the socialist revolution. Therefore, unlike Goddess monotheists and scientists, there is an element of missionary work in the way Leninists approach the public. On one hand, the masses are considered naïve but on the other hand are considered potentially heroic and can be saved by joining the party. Those not in the Leninist party are mocked and attacked in a way that monotheist fundamentalists will attack other Christian groups. In reality they are threatened by the competition.

Means and Ends

Like monotheistic fundamentalists, Leninists are destination-oriented. They are likely to justify the means they use even if it contradicts their goal, if the goal can be realized. So, Leninists did not trust workers to self-organize and run the factories themselves. They also repressed the practice of the class they claimed was the most revolutionary in the name of the party that claimed it knew better. In terms of their attitude towards time, Leninists are far-more focused on the past (history), and the future (communism) than the present. The present, instead of being enjoyable, is a kind of purgatory to be gotten through to reach the communist future.

Group inclusivity

Leninists in the United States are notorious for splitting into smaller and smaller groups over one or two different interpretations of history. The Trotskyists are the worst at this. It is very difficult for hard-core Leninists to cooperate with other leftists and they can barely stomach fellow Leninists, let alone anyone else.

The nature of opposites

The philosophy of Leninists, dialectical materialism, claims that opposites are polar rather than dual. That means that opposites turn into each other and “either/or” thinking is understood as simplistic. But in practice, Leninists fundamentalists often cannot think about the things that go on in capitalist society as points on a spectrum, with some more positive than others. Instead, most everything is understood darkly. At the same time, it is difficult for them to admit historical mistakes in countries like Russia, China or Cuba and this isolates them even more from other leftists.

Nature and society as self-regulating; process of initiation

Like pagans and scientists, Leninists understand nature to be immanent, self-regulating and self-sustaining. But unlike scientists, Leninists understand human social dynamics as conflicted but self-regulating and subject to social laws as well. Furthermore, the way in which a person becomes a Leninist is not a sudden, blind transformation. Rather it is a gradual process in which individuals transform themselves by reading, discussion and revolutionary practice. In the control over life and death, Leninists, like scientists and Goddess monotheists, understand that the social world is a human creation and human beings should be in control of the birthing and dying processes.

End of the world

Like monotheistic fundamentalists, Leninists also have apocalyptic endings, as in the case of a revolution which overthrows capitalism. There certainly is a judgment day for capitalists in which their entire system is brought down. However, Leninists, like all Marxists, hope that some of the wealth of the capitalist order is preserved so it can be built upon by communists. Just as Christian fundamentalists were not above torture in converting heretics, Leninists think the only way socialism can be ushered in is through armed conflict. This does not mean attacking heads of state or fighting the police. First, workers take over the means of production of workplaces and sources of energy like oil, water or electricity and turn it into social property. The fighting begins when the police attempt to take back social property in the name of private property.

Motivation, self-reflection, humor

The motivations of Leninists are mixed. There is certainly a Puritanical side to Leninism which drives them into relentless political activity which can lead to burn-out. This can lead them to be extrinsically motivated. This means doing political work they might not enjoy for the triumph of socialism in the end. Both scientists and goddess fundamentalists are more likely to be intrinsically motivated and enjoy what they do.

Unlike Christian fundamentalists, Leninists are extremely self-reflective in examining the relationship between theory and practice, both personally and in terms of the practice of their party. Leninists are theoretically committed to mental integration in terms of noticing contradictions, whether they are dialectical or formal. However, they are likely to be guilty of cognitive compartmentalization when it comes to not facing the limitations of what they are trying to achieve, along with wishful thinking about how mobilized the working class truly is.

Like monotheist fundamentalists, Leninists are overly serious and have difficulty laughing with others or laughing at themselves. They often come across as monkish and dour. Leninists are cynical about the collective creativity of the working class without the help of Leninists. They can be overly optimistic about the general human condition and be slow to understand that the revolution is not always just around the corner.

Conclusion

In Table 2 you will find that there is a significant overlap between Christian fundamentalism and Leninism. Leninists are strongly compatible with Christian fundamentalism in ten of the twenty-seven categories with one category where there is partial overlap. The ten categories are:

Loading the language
Interpreting the holy books literally
Exclusiveness in groups
Apocalyptic end of the world
Acceptance of violence
Proselytizing
Extrinsic motivation
Lack of humor
Destination orientation – ends justify means
Difficulty living in the present. Past-future oriented to time

In the case of Goddess monotheism there are no categories which are strongly connected to Christian fundamentalism and only two categories where there is partial overlap. Science also has no categories where there is a strong correspondence with Christian fundamentalism and only two categories which have partial overlap. This means that if Larson had wanted to pick on secularism and argue that fundamentalism is bigger than religion, he should have picked Leninism, rather than science.

See Table 2 for a grand summary of Christian fundamentalism and the extent to which science, Goddess monotheism and radical-left politics can be understood as a type of fundamentalism.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post The Spectrum of Fundamentalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Debunking Noam Chomsky’s Tirade Against Lenin

Caleb Maupin — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 12:40:33 +0000

“Mixed in with Chomsky’s criticism of US foreign policy … he has the anti-Communism,” says Caleb Maupin. Maupin also refutes Chomsky’s “bullshit” criticism of Lenin.

The post Debunking Noam Chomsky’s Tirade Against Lenin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caleb Maupin.

The Peace Question and Imperialism

Greg Godels — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 14:55:17 +0000

The war in Ukraine is a propaganda war, with all of the belligerents, sponsors, and their allies churning out — through an abjectly subservient media — masses of lies and disinformation. In this regard, they resemble other wars, but with an added dose of shamelessness.

For that reason, it is difficult to discern how the war is being conducted or who has the military advantage at any time. Like all modern wars, atrocity stories abound and losses are wildly exaggerated.

But what separates this war from wars in the recent and not-so-recent past is the near-absence of an organized anti-war movement. It is more than a curious oddity that there are few actions in the streets or campaigns of influence or resistance to stop the mayhem of this brutal war. Sure, there are generic appeals to cut military budgets or oppose war philosophically, but little action to stop this particular war. In spite of the so-called “fog” of war, everyone knows that soldiers and civilians alike are dying in significant numbers, that bodies are ripped apart, homes destroyed, and people dislodged from their homes. No amount of “fog” can hide this.

Of course, there are a few prominent voices — Pope Francis, even Henry Kissinger — who have called for a cessation of fighting and negotiations. And Communists and trade unionists in Italy, Greece, and Turkey have blocked NATO weapons shipments, staged demonstrations, and picketed embassies.

But in most cities, states, and countries, there are few actions directed against the war in Ukraine. And most surprisingly, the leftists in Europe and the Americas, usually leading the way against war, are largely silent. They haven’t even minimally demanded that their own countries stay out of this war.

Instead, they have tacitly or openly sided with one belligerent or another. I have written and spoken on different occasions against taking sides in the conflict. Moreover, I have sought to place the war in the context of classical imperialism and suggested that the left’s support of either belligerent or its sponsors is misplaced, akin to the collapse of left opposition at the beginning of World War I. In that case, the left succumbed to narrow nationalist appeals. In this case, the left is succumbing to a muddled concept of imperialism and anti-imperialism.

Rather than repeat the argument, it might be useful to look at how and why leftists justify their support for one side or the other and refrain from adding their voice to the cause of peace in Ukraine.

It is easy to dismiss those who uncritically support Ukraine. Apart from the rabid nationalists of the “Glory to Ukraine” crowd, who welcome the conflict and hope to draw the Western capitalist countries into a crusade against Russia, there are those who simplistically see the war as a naked aggression with no back story. From ignorance of the post-Soviet Ukrainian history of corruption, reaction, Western meddling and aggression, or from willful collaboration with US and NATO intrigue, these new Cold Warriors seek a Russian defeat and have no interest in an immediate peaceful settlement or concern about the mayhem.

Against them are the more measured comrades who, remembering the Cold War standoff between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, conflate today’s Russia with the Soviet Union. They recognize how the Soviet Union constituted a pole of resistance that countered and sometimes reversed the Cold War imperialist alliance’s designs on the world. US imperialism, the dominant imperialist power at the time, was effectively checked by the Soviet Union from 1945 until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. These anti-imperialists see Russia, in its war on Ukraine, as a similar emerging pole against US imperialism and see Russia’s invasion as an expression of a break-up of the absolute military and economic US dominance of the world established after the departure of the Soviet Union. For them, a multipolar world is in birth.

There are shards of truth in this view, but Russia is not the Soviet Union. It does not share its ideology; rather, its motives replace Soviet internationalism with an aspiring great power nationalism. While it exploits cracks in US global hegemony, it does not offer an alternative vision or unconditional assistance to the victims of capitalism and imperialism. In that regard, Russia is no Cuba, either.

Russia’s foreign policy is capitalist opportunism: friends with Turkey or Israel one moment, in conflict the next moment. Russia aligns with Saudi Arabia when it’s economically profitable, while fighting Saudi proxies in Syria. There are no consistent principles guiding it. Nor can there be for a country that rejected socialism for capitalism. Those who see Russian foreign policy and alliances as progressive are very selective in their examples.

Russia’s leaders readily embrace the capitalist ethos and reject the Soviet project, though they appeal, when needed, to Soviet symbols and traditions when useful.

It may be true that the Russian invasion ultimately will achieve the goals sought by its ruling class. And it may be true that these gains will come at the expense of US imperialism and its ruling class, but how does that move us any closer to a world of peace and social justice? The rivalries remain, the goals of the respective ruling classes remain uncertain and unstable, despite their claims of peace-loving and democracy-seeking; and the danger of conflict remains high or even higher.

There are others who envision the war — insofar as Russia is challenging US power — as a blow for those on the bottom of what we might envision as the imperialist “pyramid” — the developing countries. Jenny Clegg, for example, writing in the Morning Star, sees the development of “competitors” to US dominance as establishing the first steps toward a multipolar world. She correctly notes that multipolarity “is not a policy but an emerging objective trend…”

Further, she sees unequal exchange between the highly developed countries and the developing countries as the principal contradiction — the contradiction defining imperialism and anti-imperialism.

While this center-periphery distinction was popular and influential among independent Western “Marxists” in the era when the working classes in the center — the West — were generally tamed by social democratic opportunism, it was neither particularly insightful nor of continued relevance. Marx went to great lengths to show that exchange, under capitalist relations of production, was not generally unequal — values exchange for values. But those same relations of production always produce and reproduce inequality. The locus of inequality — capitalist exploitation — is embedded in the capitalist system, not in the thievery of unequal exchange.

As Lenin elaborated, uneven development is a feature of relations between people, social institutions, firms in the same industry, between industries, and between countries, and even continents. It is not unequal exchange that accounts for the uneven development, but differences in the pace of development, cultural and social practices, political and other institutions, and most importantly, especially in the epoch of imperialism, the stunting effects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and their legacy.

In the last half-century, technological developments have freed capitalists to move, access, and service the material productive forces — factories, transportation networks, resources — in order to gain access to formerly inaccessible labor markets, cheapening labor in general. At the same time, this development created rising living standards in some developing countries, while lowering them in some advanced capitalist countries.

Consequently, some capitalist countries — like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia — have become powerful rivals to the late-twentieth-century great powers.

The concept of “unequal” exchange as an explanation for the inequality between developed and developing countries (and for the difference between imperialism and anti-imperialism) fails because it implies that should exchanges become equal, that same inequality between states would evaporate. Even more importantly, it suggests that equal exchange — and not an end of capitalism — would signal the demise of imperialism.

To understand imperialism as a conflict between advancing and lagging development based upon the unequal terms of economic activity — a kind of organized thievery — is to misunderstand the nature of exploitation under capitalism. Intense competition between players — big and small — for markets, resources, labor, and capital are the essence of capitalism and imperialism. There is no sharp line between this competition and war.

Clegg wants us to believe that in a multipolar world, with US power diminished, establishing equal exchange will bring forth a period of civil, well-behaved, respectful competition. She insists that this contrast with today’s dangerous world is captured by the distinction between competition and rivalry, a distinction that I think few will find satisfying. In an aside, she explains: “competition is not the same as rivalry — think competing in a race as opposed to deliberately tripping over your rival in that race.” To think that sporting competition doesn’t evolve commonly into no-holds-barred conflict and into violence is surely out of touch with the history of both sports and international politics in the twentieth century.

From the reliance on the now intellectually fashionable and prominent rational choice or game theory to the behavior of capitalist enterprises, from the constant haggling over borders, sea lanes and territorial waters to establishment of military and economic alliances, there is little evidence that capitalist countries are striving for a fair economic playing field with fixed, transparent, and respected rules. “Win-win” is not part of the capitalist vocabulary.

Clegg writes of “the old — US hegemonic power” as having “been in relative decline” and the “new — a more equal distribution of wealth and power” as developing, albeit slowly. While one might happily concede that aspects of US power and influence have been challenged and dampened, while one might add that the US shows many signs of economic, political, and social decline, it does not follow, nor is it likely, that any “new distribution of wealth and power” will be more equitable or just. And most importantly, even if wealth and power were more equitably distributed between countries, there is little reason to believe it would be more equitably distributed within those countries. Clegg’s multipolarity can make no such promises to the working classes.

Finally, there are those on the left who have carried on a lifelong struggle against US imperialism and can only see an enemy of our enemy as our friend. There are few people on the righteous left now alive who can remember a time when the US was not the leading great power and the anchor for the capitalist alliance against socialism, socialism as a legitimate political current, as a rival to global capitalism, and as a pole rallying the forces of anti-imperialism.

Therefore, it is hard to envision the world not benefitting from the defanging of US imperialism, from its fall as a great power. No great power in our time has caused more deadly mischief. But that surely displays a weak understanding of capitalism and its stages of development.

There were nationalist leaders in various countries under the boot of British imperialism in the interwar period who welcomed the rise of Hitler and Tojo, greeting them as possible saviors from hundreds of years of suppression by the British Empire, the leading imperialist of the time.

Subhas Chandra Bose, for example, an Indian nationalist leader who was once president of the Indian National Congress, was so deeply committed to overthrowing British rule in India that he actively and unapologetically collaborated with the Nazis and Japanese in World War II. This myopia is an extreme version of the blinders worn by many anti-imperialists who fail to understand the logic of imperialism and its unbreakable link to capitalism.

Chandra Bose demonstrates the hollowness of narrow nationalism and obsessive self-regard over viewing the world through the lens of class and class solidarity.

The struggle against US imperialism, like the struggle against its predecessor, the British Empire, will ultimately be resolved at home when the people finally refuse to continue paying the price for their rulers’ grand designs. Of course, those oppressed by imperialism play an equally important role, that of resisters; though imperialism like rust, never sleeps. It is an imperative, a demand made by capitalist accumulation — if it is defeated in one place, it will surely find another place to satisfy its lust. This dynamic only finally ends when our world finds socialism. The wishful thinking of a benign capitalism with all participants peacefully on an even playing field is just that — a wishful thought.

Multipolarity — a notion first discussed by bourgeois academics looking for tools to understand the dynamics of global relations — has been adopted by a segment of the anti-imperialist left. While it assuredly describes an actual trend emerging, as Jenny Clegg acknowledges, it has often been presented as an anti-imperialist stage shifting the world balance of forces in the direction of a better world.

I have argued that this is a retreat from classical imperialism as understood by VI Lenin and his followers. In the context of an unstable world in ideological disorder and suffering untold crises, there are no guarantees that the poles that emerge or challenge the post-Cold War super-pole are a step forward or a step back simply because they are alternative poles. Undoubtedly, any resistance that weakens the asymmetry of power that the US holds should be welcome. But we should not presume that every opponent will become a force for stability, justice, and peace. Knowing what we know about the history of capitalism from its first expansionist era accumulating involuntary human capital to exploit the riches of the new world should chasten our expectations about new rivals to US imperialism.

With the fall of the Soviet Union as a backdrop and the uncertainty left in its wake, we should be cautious about anointing any new candidates for the role of arch-rival not only to US imperialism, but to all imperialism as well as its genesis, capitalism.

While the left futilely disputes the victim and the victimizer, working people are dying unnecessarily, suffering horrific wounds, homelessness, and despair — all the products of modern war. Working class lives should not be proxies in ideological debates. Events will decide who has the correct understanding of imperialism, but history will not be kind to those who failed, in the meantime, to oppose the war and to seek a peaceful solution.

The post The Peace Question and Imperialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Common Sense in the Form of Theory

Chris Wright — Tue, 31 May 2022 14:39:38 +0000

In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright¹ to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in itself. In such an academic context, one of the highest services an intellectual can perform is simply to return to the basics of theoretic common sense, stated clearly and concisely. Society is very complex, but, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, insofar as we understand it at all, our understanding can in principle be expressed rather simply and straightforwardly. Not only is such expression more democratic and accessible, thus permitting a broader diffusion of critical understanding of the world; it also has the merit of showing that, once you shed the paraphernalia of most academic writing, nothing particularly profound is being said. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Harvard University Press, 2022) constitutes an exemplary demonstration of this fact, and of these virtues.

Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping “culturalist” critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian “metanarrative” that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (“Orientalism and Its Afterlives”), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said’s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that—as materialists argue—merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world.

The Class Matrix continues his engagement with these issues, this time in the form of a systematic critique of cultural theory, specifically of its inability to explain the sources of stability and conflict in modern society. Materialism, in contrast—i.e., a primary emphasis on such concepts as class structures and objective economic interests rather than “discourses,” “cultures,” “identities,” and “meanings”—is quite capable of explaining society, and can rather easily be defended against the criticisms of (some) culturalists. The book’s admirable lucidity serves several functions: first, Chibber is able to present the arguments of a variety of “culturalisms,” from Gramscians’ to the Frankfurt School’s to those of the post-1970s cultural turn, very clearly and in a way that illuminates the stakes of the debate; second, his eloquent reconstruction of (aspects of) cultural theory lays the ground for an equally eloquent, and much more thorough, exposition of structural class theory, which is shown to have no difficulty (contrary to the claims of culturalists) in explaining the longevity and stability of capitalism; third, the discarding of all unnecessary verbiage and jargon makes it clear just how intellectually trivial these long-running “theoretical” debates are in the first place. One can have a perfectly defensible and sophisticated understanding of the modern world on the basis of a little critical common sense and knowledge of history.

Chibber starts by presenting the culturalist case. Why didn’t the West become socialist in the twentieth century, as Marxists predicted? Evidently Marx had gotten something wrong. In fact, it was argued (in the postwar era), he neglected the role of culture in forming the consciousness of the working class. Mass culture and the diffusion of dominant ideologies were able to reconcile the working class to capitalism, indeed to generate active popular consent for it. This analysis amounted to a demotion of the classical Marxist emphasis on the conflictual dynamics of the class structure—which supposedly would naturally lead to proletarian class consciousness and thereby revolution—in favor of the cohesive functions of mid-twentieth-century culture. Later culturalists took this argument a step further by rejecting the Marxian theory altogether, arguing that culture is actually prior to structure: what people are really presented with are not unmediated structures or objective material interests but “constellations of meaning” (p. 6), social identities, local cultures, contingent processes of socialization that shape how actors understand the many structures they are located in. One cannot (pace classical Marxism) predict behavior from people’s structural locations and the interests they supposedly define, because people first have to interpret structures, a process that is highly contingent and variable. Subjectivity, therefore, is primary, and the objectivity of class structures tends to evaporate.

Chibber’s response to this postmodernist argument, in effect, is that while it is perfectly true every structure is steeped in culture and agents’ subjectivity, this hardly implies the causal inertness of class location. Capitalist institutions don’t exactly impose high interpretive requirements: everyone is capable of understanding “what it means” to be a worker or a capitalist. If you lack ownership of the means of production, you either submit to wage labor or you starve. The economic structures force themselves on you. “[T]he proletarian’s meaning orientation is [therefore] the effect of his structural location” (p. 34). Similarly, the capitalist has to obey market pressures (structures) in order to survive as a capitalist, so he, too, is compelled to subordinate his normative orientation to objectively existing capitalist institutions. In fact, it is the postmodern culturalists who are in the weaker position: how can they explain “the indubitable fact of capitalism’s expansion across the globe and the obvious similarity in its macrodynamics across these regions” without accepting materialist assumptions (p. 45)?

Having dispatched this particular objection to materialism, Chibber moves on to other difficulties. Given the antagonistic relations between worker and capitalist (which Chibber elaborates on in detail), why hasn’t collective resistance, and ultimately revolution, been more common? The obvious answer, contrary to cultural theory, is that the asymmetry of power between worker and capitalist is so great that workers find it quite difficult to fight successfully for their collective interests. The insecurity of the worker’s position (for example, he can be fired for union activity) makes it easier and safer to pursue individualized modes of advancement or resistance. Moreover, the intrinsic problems of collective action—free rider problems, difficulty in securing agreement among large numbers of workers, etc.—militate against class consciousness and collective resistance. Classical Marxists were wrong to assume that the most rational path for workers would always be the “collective” path. In fact, contingent cultural considerations play an important role in the formation (in any given case) of class consciousness—although culture always remains constrained by material factors.

Having successfully and eloquently deployed common sense in his first two chapters, Chibber now turns, in the lengthy third chapter, to an explanation of how capitalism has endured. Here, too, he prefers common sense to the idealistic arguments of many Gramscians and New Left theorists, who pointed to bourgeois “cultural hegemony” and ideological indoctrination as having manufactured consent among the working class. One problem with this theory is its dim view of workers: “Culturalists are in the embarrassing position of claiming implicitly that while they can discern the exploitative—and hence unjust—character of the employment relation, the actors who are, in fact, being exploited, who are experiencing its brute facts, are not capable of doing so” (p. 91). There are, admittedly, other possible understandings of the basis of mass consent, more materialistic understandings, but in the end Chibber rejects these as the primary explanation for capitalist stability. Instead, he argues that workers simply resign themselves to capitalism—they “accept their location in the class structure because they see no other viable option” (p. 106). What Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations” keeps the gears of capitalism grinding on, generation after generation, including in the absence of workers’ “consent” to their subordination.² In short, the class structure itself—the enormous power asymmetry between employer and employee—underwrites its own stability, and there is no need to invoke “consent” at all (even if such consent does, perhaps, exist in certain periods).

There remain a couple of other issues Chibber has to address in order for his defense of materialism to be really systematic. First, what about the old, E. P. Thompsonian charge that “structural theories bury social agency” (p. 122)? Is this necessarily the case, this conflict between structure and agency? No, as long as one acknowledges the role of reasons in motivating people’s actions. “The structure is not reproduced because it turns agents into automatons but because it generates good reasons for them to play by its rules” (p. 123). A structural process may be rather deterministic in its outcome, but it “is generated by the active intervention of social agency” (p. 126). Given the structures of capitalism, people rationally adapt to them, regulating their behavior in accord with them. Structure thus exerts its causal force precisely through agency.

Of course, agency also exists in tension with structure insofar as agents can flout institutional norms or even rebel against particular structures. This point brings us to another question Chibber considers, namely the relation between structural “determinism” and contingency, another favorite concept—along with agency—of the postmodern cultural turn. His argument here is quite rich and nuanced, much too subtle, in fact, to be summarized in a short book review. (It goes without saying that I have merely been outlining his arguments, hardly doing justice to their richness.) One might think that such an austere structuralism as Chibber defends would be unable to account for the contingency of social processes, but through a fairly ingenious analysis he is able to answer this objection, too. Even prima facie, however, the objection doesn’t hold much water, because capitalist relations are evidently compatible with an immense variety of social structures, such that between nations and even within a nation there can be great heterogeneity of local cultures. In a world of infinitely many structures and cultures interacting and overlapping, all of them being activated and enlivened by countless individual free wills, there is clearly a place for contingency on both small and large scales. Materialism can therefore accommodate the “argument from contingency.”

The Class Matrix, in short, is a quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is. They might, perhaps, be able to make the case that there is a greater role for culture than Chibber allows (although he does grant the importance of cultural considerations at many points in his arguments), but they certainly can no longer sustain the claim that materialism is deeply flawed.

In fact, that claim could never have been sustained anyway, because, in the end, materialism—the causal primacy of class structures (and the theoretical implications of this doctrine)—is little more than common sense. The average member of the working class, more insightful (realistic) in many ways than most intellectuals, could tell you about the overwhelming importance of economic institutions. If classical Marxism got certain predictions wrong, that wasn’t because of any inherent flaws in historical materialism; as Chibber shows, it was because the original theorists misunderstood the implications of their own theory. There was never a good reason to think socialist revolution would “naturally” happen as workers “naturally” achieved greater class consciousness. These predictions were but a projection of the hopes of Marxists, not logical entailments of materialism. In our own day, when the historic achievements of Western labor movements have been or are in the process of being destroyed, it is unclear what the way forward is—except, as ever, for working-class self-organization and critical materialist understanding of society. Toward the latter task, at least, The Class Matrix makes a valuable contribution.

See Russell Jacoby’s savage review of Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias entitled “Real Men Find Real Utopias,” Dissent, Winter 2011, for an exposure of the intellectual emptiness of a certain type of “theoretical” sociology.
This argument, indeed much of the book, is anticipated not only, as it were, by common sense (most workers could tell you they don’t embrace their position but simply find it inescapable), but also by a brilliant book Chibber doesn’t cite: The Dominant Ideology Thesis, by Nicholas Abercrombie et al. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980). Incidentally, I myself have grappled with the question of why socialism hasn’t happened yet and have offered a quite different, and perhaps more original, explanation than Chibber. See my paper “Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of Revolution,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 9, no. 1 (2021), as well as the shorter articles “Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism,” New Politics, May 5, 2020; and “Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution,” Socialist Forum (Summer 2021).

The post Common Sense in the Form of Theory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

Art Is a Dream in Which We Imagine Our Future

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 19 May 2022 20:19:06 +0000

On 11 May 2022, an Israeli sniper fired at the head of the veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as she reported on an Israeli military raid on a refugee settlement in Jenin (part of the Occupied Palestine Territories). The snipers continued to fire at the journalists who were with her, preventing them from aiding her. When she finally arrived at Ibn Sina Hospital, she was pronounced dead.

After Abu Aqleh’s death, the Israeli military raided her home in occupied East Jerusalem, where they confiscated Palestinian flags and attempted to prevent mourners from playing Palestinian songs. At her funeral on 13 May, the Israel Defence Forces attacked the massive turnout of family and supporters – including her pallbearers – and grabbed Palestinian flags held by the crowd. The murder of Abu Aqleh, who had been a highly respected journalist for Al Jazeera since 1997, and the violence by the Israeli forces at her funeral reinforce the apartheid nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Palestinian leader Dr Hanan Ashrawi tweeted that the attack on Palestinian flags, posters, and slogans exposes ‘the insecurity of the oppressor’. The assault on these cultural icons, Ashwari went on to explain, shows Israelis’ ‘fear of our symbols, fear of our grief & anger, fear of our existence’.

The raid that Abu Aqleh was covering when she was killed took place in Jenin, the home of Palestine’s remarkable Freedom Theatre. On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis, one of the theatre’s founders, was shot dead not far from where Abu Aqleh was killed. ‘Israel is destroying the neurological system of [Palestinian] society’, Mer-Khamis said, and this neurological system ‘is culture, identity, communication … We have to stand up again on our feet’, he said. ‘We are now living on our knees’.

Front: Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform. Back: Drama students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts rehearse a play in a structure they built themselves.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Eight decades ago, in the heart of China, hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and artists from cities such as Shanghai gathered in Yan’an, which had become a red base for the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 1942, in and around the caves of this city, a serious discussion took place about the paralysis of Chinese culture in the face of three serious challenges: the sclerotic nature of the Chinese feudal system, the viciousness of Western-led imperialism, and the harshness of the Japanese fascist occupation. Cultural workers had to confront these facts of history as well as the historical tasks that they presented. In Yan’an, the debate circled around the confounding assertion that artists could work without confronting the major historical processes of our time. Imagine, for example, a Palestinian artist who works today without being gripped by the force of Israeli apartheid.

The CPC’s head of the propaganda department, Kai Feng, invited artists to gather in the central Party office for three weeks to debate the state of art and culture during the revolutionary war. Mao Zedong, a leader of the CPC, listened to the interventions, made his own commentary, and the following year published Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Our dossier no. 52 (May 2022), Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation, is an assessment of the Yan’an debate and its implication for our times. The dossier, illustrated by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department, looks back at the debates in Yan’an in order to illuminate our conjuncture and insist on the centrality of cultural work for our movements today.

Top: A singing troupe performs the Yangge opera, Brother and Sister Reclaiming the Wasteland. Bottom: Fine arts students take sketching lessons.
Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Artists root their imagination in their lived experiences. The Freedom Theatre in Jenin does not perform plays that are a mirror of café life in Tel Aviv or New York; their plays go deep into the imagination of occupied Palestine. In Yan’an, our dossier explains, ‘urban intellectuals … had to go through their own transformation in order to close the gap between themselves and the peasant masses. This transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum … together, they could turn into an effective political force’.

On 23 May 1942, Mao took the floor at the Yan’an Forum to offer his concluding remarks to the artists and intellectuals that had left cities such as Shanghai and made their way into the interior. Here, Mao said, new forms of life were being created, a new buoyancy that straightened the spines of the people and produced new forms of social life. ‘To arrive in a base area’, Mao said, ‘is to arrive in a period of rule unprecedented in the several thousand years of Chinese history, one where workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the popular masses hold power … the eras of the past are gone forever and will never return’. He meant that the imagination must be stretched to tell stories of and for the newly upright Chinese people. The purpose of art, the intellectuals at Yan’an argued, is to be relevant to these major historical events.

To make his point, Mao quoted the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), who understood these changes and reflected on them in his poetry:

Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers,
Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children.

Mao described the enemy, these ‘thousand pointing fingers’, as the vampirish imperialists and cadaverous feudal landlords. The ‘children’ were the working classes, the peasantry, and the popular masses. Lu Xun’s words show that the artist – the ‘willing ox’ – must never submit to the old granite block of oppression, Mao explained; he or she must be willing to accompany the people in their struggle for freedom.

It is the struggle that enabled the popular masses to stand upright, to refuse to bow down to the centuries of humiliation of seeing their labour subordinated to the accumulation of wealth by the elites. Artistic practice and intellectual activity must reflect these broad changes which are present today in China’s mass campaign to abolish absolute poverty, in Indian farmers’ refusal to submit to the Uberisation of their livelihoods, in South African shack dwellers’ bravery to stand firm against political killings, and in the massive mobilisation of Palestinians at the funeral of Shireen Abu Aqleh.

Yangge singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring Festival celebration.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily [中国青年报]

The debates at Yan’an cleared the way for artists and writers to germinate intense cultural activity, to disseminate new ideas into the cultural domain, to lift the conversation from the day-to-day to new horizons, and to create new political spaces and epochs. This cultural work called upon intellectuals and artists to focus on the future, no longer merely concerned with their own temperament (‘art for art’s sake’), to work for a new horizon, and to inaugurate a new humanity. There was no obligation to collapse their work solely into a political project, since that would reduce their capacity to go beyond the dilemmas posed by the present. Artists and intellectuals needed to support movements, but also to retain the space to create a passionate fervour in society that could fuel a new culture.

Mao’s interventions at Yan’an made it clear that intellectual and artistic activity would not by themselves change the world. Artists and intellectuals allude to reality, draw attention to certain problems, and provide an understanding of them. But art alone cannot remedy all problems. For that, it is necessary to turn to the organisations and movements that churn society into something new. If art forms must carry the enormous burden of political theory and praxis, they are often diminished. Art must breathe in the sensibilities of the working class and the peasantry and breathe out new cultural propositions. Alongside the tide of humanity that refuses to submit to oppression, this leads us into new possibilities.

Malak Mattar (Palestine), Last Scene Before Flying with the Dove to Paradise, 2019.

Asma Naghnaghiye, a young girl who participated in a Freedom Theatre camp, spoke of the beauty of cultural work ‘In one of the exercises in the theatre I imitated a bird who flies above my neighbourhood and then above Jenin and then above the sea. It was a like a dream’. That dream of the future converts the present into a place of struggle.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

News on China | No. 97

Dongsheng News — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 16:01:48 +0000

US and Australia react negatively to China signing a security pact with the Solomon Islands; China’s younger generation had greater confidence; Chinese female directors are having box office successes.

The post News on China | No. 97 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Tectonic Shifts in the World Economy: A World Systems Perspective

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 14:22:00 +0000

Orientation

One of the main problems with Western media (other than their non-stop anti-Russian propaganda), is the narrow and parochial manner in which they conceive world events. Like realists and liberals of international relations theory, they analyze world events two countries at a time, for example, the U.S. vs Russia. They appear to have little conception of interdependence, like Russia, China, and Iran as a single block. Or the U.S., England, and Israel as another block. No state can make any moves without considering the causes and consequences of their actions for their interdependent states. Secondly, these talking heads fail miserably in understanding that conflicts between states are inseparable from the evolution of global capitalism which, in many respects, is stronger than any state. Thirdly, their “analysis” fails to consider that the world capitalist system has evolved over the last 500 years, as I will soon present. We will see that what is going on in Ukraine is part of a much larger tectonic struggle between Eastern China, Russia, and Iran to create a multipolar world while being desperately opposed by a declining West, headed by the United States and its minions.

A Brief History of Modern Capitalism

According to world systems theory, the global capitalist system has gone through four phases. In each phase, there was a dominant hegemon. First, there was the merchant capital of Italy that lasted from 1450-1640. This was followed by the great Dutch seafaring age from 1610-1740. Next, there was the British industrial system from 1776 to World War I. Lastly, the Yankee system which lasted from 1870 to 1970. Note that over these 500 years the pace of change quickened. In the Italian phase, the city states of Venice and Genoa rose and fell over 220 years. By the time we get to the United States, the time of rise and decline is 100 years. All this has been laid out by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long 20th century. In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi also lays out the reasons he is convinced that China will be the leading hegemon in the next phase of capitalism.

Five Types of Capitalism

Historically there have been five types of capitalism. The first is merchant capital in which profits are made by trade, selling cheap and buying dear. This is what Venice and Genoa did, as did Dutch seafarers on a grander scale. Next, is agricultural capitalism, including the slave system of the United States, Britain, and parts of the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. Then, the British invented the industrial capitalism system in which profit was made by investing the infrastructure of society: railroads, factories, and surplus labor from the wage labor system. Lastly, especially in the 20th century, we have two other forms of capitalism. In addition to being an industrial power after World War II, the United States used its industrial power to invest in the military arms industry and relied on finance capital (stocks and bonds).

Destructive Forms of Capitalism

In the later stage of all four systems, making money from commodities or technologies becomes problematic because it becomes unpredictable what people will buy. For example, after the Depression from 1929-1941, the United States got out of the depression by investing in the military. This was so successful that after World War II, capitalists began investing in the military even during peacetime (Melman, After Capitalism). It provided a much more predictable profit as long as countries continued to go to war. This encourages arming your own country or supplying the whole world, which is what the United States does today. There is also finance capital, where banks invest in stocks, bonds and financial instruments rather than infrastructure (as industrial capitalists did). For the past 50 years military and finance capital are primarily where the ruling class in Yankeedom has made its profits.

In the early phases of capitalism, in all four cycles, commodities were produced which required money as mediation, but the purpose was to produce more commodities and technologies. In the decaying part of the cycle, capitalists would rather invest in finance capital than industrial capital because of the quick turn-around in profits. Investing in building bridges, repairing roads, or building schools will surely benefit capitalists in the long run. Smooth supply chains for capitalist profit and a sound education in high school and college would ensure that workers not only know how to do their jobs but that they would be creative-thinkers and innovators. Capitalists these days don’t want to invest in these things, and this is why the infrastructure in Yankeedom is falling apart and the Yankee population cannot compete with students from other countries with better educational systems.

What is World Systems Theory?

World systems theory is a macro-sociological theory of long-term social change which includes economic theory and world history. It is provocative in at least three ways. One, its basic unit of analysis is the entire world-system of capitalism rather than nation-states. Second, it argues that the so-called socialist societies were not really socialist, but rather state-capitalist. Third, global capitalism organizes itself into a transnational division of labor which ignores the boundaries of nation-states. World-systems theory has been used by historians, international relations theorists, and international political economists to explain the rise and fall of nation-states, the increase and decrease in stratification patterns, as well as rise and decline of imperialism. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Terry Boswell have specialized in understanding social movements and the timing and placing of revolutions from a world-systems perspective.

Economic Zones Within the World-system

Overview of the core, periphery

World-systems are divided into three zones: the core, the semi-peripheral, and the peripheral countries. Economically and politically, core countries dominate other countries without being dominated. Semi-periphery countries are dominated by the core, and, in turn, dominate the periphery. The periphery are dominated by both. Part of the wealth of core countries comes from their exploitation of the peripheral countries’ land and labor through colonization.

Core and periphery

The core countries control most of the wealth in the world capitalist system. Workers are highly specialized, high technology is used. It has an industrial-electronic base. They extract raw materials from the peripheral countries and sell peripheral countries finished products. Core countries have the most highly specialized workers and a relatively small agricultural base, whereas peripheral countries have strong agricultural or horticultural bases and have a semi-skilled urban working class. The peripheral countries have relatively unspecialized labor whose work is labor-intensive with low wages. Much of the work done in peripheral countries is commercial agriculture—the production of coffee, sugar, and cotton.

The core countries are the home of the transnational corporations who control the world. Additionally, the core countries control the major banking institutions that provide international loans, such as the IMF and the World Bank. Finally, the core countries have the most powerful militaries. Paradoxically, when core countries are at their peak, their militaries are not very active. They only become more active as a core country goes into decline, as in the United States. Core countries typically have the most highly trained workers. In their heyday, core countries have strong centralized states that provide for pensions, unemployment, and road construction. In their weak stage, states withdraw these benefits and invest in their military to protect their assets abroad as their own territory falls apart. Core countries have large tax bases and, at their best, support infrastructural development.

The periphery nations own very little of the world’s means of production. In the case of African states or tribes, they have great amounts of natural resources, including diamonds and minerals, but these are extracted by the core countries. Furthermore, core states are usually able to purchase raw materials and cheap labor from non-core states at low prices and yet demand higher prices for their exports to non-core states. Core states have access to cheap skilled professional labor through migration (brain drain) from semi-peripheral states . Peripheral countries don’t have a solid tax base because their states have to contend with rival ethnic and tribal forces who are hardly convinced that taxes are good for them and their sub-national identities.

Peripheral countries often do not have a diversified economic base and are forced by the world market to produce one product. A good example of this is Venezuela and its oil. Peripheral countries have relatively steeper stratification patterns because there are no middle classes for the wealth to spread across. A tiny landed elite at the top sells off most of the land to transnational corporations. The state tends to be both weak and strong. States in the periphery have difficulty forming and sustaining their own national economic policy because foreign corporations want to come and go as they please. On the other hand, if a nationalist or a socialist rise to power, the state will be very strong and dictatorial. This is because they are constantly at war with transnational corporations who seek to overthrow them. Since transnational corporations often do this through oppositional parties, those in power are extremely suspicious of oppositional parties. Hence their label as “authoritarian”. In contemporary world systems, peripheries are found in parts of Latin America and in the most extreme form in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Semi-periphery

The semi-periphery contains countries that as a result of national liberation movements and class struggles have risen out of the periphery and have some characteristics of the core. They can also be composed of formerly core countries that have declined. For example, Spain and Portugal were once core countries in Early Modern Europe. Semi-peripheral countries often take over industries the core no longer wants such as second-generation computers, appliances, or transportation systems. Semi-peripheral states enter the world systems with some degree of autonomy rather than simply a subordinate country. These industries are not strong enough to compete with core countries in “free trade”. Therefore, they tend to apply protectionist policies towards their industry. They tend to export more to peripheral states and import more from core states in trade. In the 21st century, states like Brazil, Argentina, Russia, India, Israel, China, South Korea and South Africa (BRICS) are usually considered semi peripheral.

As I said above, the world capitalist system has changed four times in the last 500 years and each time not only have the configurations of the core countries changed but so have the semi peripheral countries in the world systems. For at least half of capitalist world systems, there were some countries that were outside the periphery, including the United States. Semi-peripheral countries are not fully industrialized countries, but they have scientists and engineers which can lead to some wealth.

Which countries are in the core periphery and semi periphery countries today?

The core countries in the world today are the United States, Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian social democratic countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Minor core countries are England, France, Italy, and Spain. Eastern European countries are in the semi-periphery. South of the border, there are four semi-periphery countries: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. More powerful up and coming semi-peripheral states include Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, China, and India. Most of Africa is in the periphery of the world systems with the exception of South Africa (semi-periphery).

Where did world systems theory come from?

Immanuel Wallerstein was a sociologist who specialized in African studies, so he had first-hand knowledge of the reality of exploitation by colonists. He was influenced by the work of Ferdinand Braudel who wrote a great three-volume history of capitalism. Wallerstein was also influenced by Marx and Engels, but he thought their history of capitalism was too Eurocentric. He emphasized that the core countries did not just exploit their own workers, but they have made great profits through the systematic exploitation of the peripheral countries for hundreds of years.

Modernization theory

World systems theory was in part a reaction against the anti-communist, modernization theory of international politics that prevailed after World War II into the 1960’s. Please see the table below which compares world systems theory to modernization theory.

Dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank

Around the same time as world systems theory developed, Andre Gunder Frank developed what came to be called “dependency theory”. This theory also challenged modernization theory’s assumption that countries that were called “traditional societies” were improved by contact with the core countries. He claimed that they were systematically exploited by the core countries, made worse than they were before they had any contact with them. As long ago as 1998, Gunder Frank predicted the rise of China. See his book ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age.

Karl Polyani

Other influences on the world-systems theory come from a scholar of comparative economic systems, Karl Polyani. His major contribution is to show that there was no capitalism in tribal or agricultural civilizations and that the “self-subsisting” economy of capitalism was a relatively recent development. Wallerstein reframed this in world systems terms, with the tribal as “mini-systems”, agricultural civilization as “empires” and the capitalist system as “world economies”. Nikolai Kondratiev introduced patterns he saw in the capitalist world economy that centered around cycles of crisis and wars within very specific time periods.

Interstate System

As I said earlier, in international relations theory, realist and neo-conservative theory and neoliberal theories of the state treat each state as if they were separate units. Applied to today, that would formulate world conflict as a battle between, say, the United States and Russia. Neo-conservative and neoliberal theory treat any alliance between states as secondary epiphenomenon that can be dissolved without too much trouble. Secondly, both these theories operate as if interstate politics are relatively autonomous from economics. To the extent to which these theories mention capitalism, it is the domestic economy of nation-states. Each tries to hide the international nature of capitalism and the extent to which transnational corporations can, and do, override national interests. The ideology of the interstate system is sovereign equality, but this is practically overridden as states are treated as neither sovereign nor equal, especially in Africa.

World systems theory sees states differently. For one thing, nation-states are not like Hobbes atoms which crash against each other in a war of all against all. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, fresh after the Thirty Years’ War, was an attempt to move beyond dynastic empires to nation-states. In core capitalist countries there were never single nation states. The Treaty created a system of nation-states which had rules of engagement, treaties, do’s and don’ts.

Today, between the core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries lies a system of interconnected state relationships. This interstate system arose either as a concomitant process or as a consequence of the development of the capitalist world-system over the course of the “long” 16th century as states began to recognize each other’s sovereignty.

Between these economic zones there were no enforceable rules about how nation-states should act, outside of not impeding the flow of capital between zones. Political domestic elites, international elites, and corporations competed and cooperated with each other, the results of which no one intended. Unsuccessful attempts have been made by the League of Nations and later the United Nations to create an international state. However, nation-states have been unwilling to give up their weapons. Therefore, the international anarchy of capitalist production is still unchecked. The function of the state is to regulate the flow of capital, labor, and commodities across borders and to enforce the structure of market rates. Not only do strong states impose their will on weak states. Strong states also impose limitations on other strong states, as we are seeing with US sanctions against Russia.

Who Will Be the Next World-Economy Hegemon?

Situation in Ukraine

Everything about Ukraine needs to be understood as the desperate clawing of a Yankee empire terrified of being left behind. The U.S. has so far convinced Europe to stay away from Russia and China, but it has nothing to offer. As Gary Olsen said, the Europeans may slowly make deals with Russia and China because they have some sense of where the future lies. So, Western hydra-headed totalitarian media all speak with the same voice: RUSSIA, RUSSIA, EVIL RUSSIA. EVIL PUTIN. Putin certainly had nerve wanting a national economy with its own economic policy. God forbid! But the time is up for Yankeedom and no terrorist police, no military drones, no Republicrats, and no stock exchange jingling with the trappings of divine honor can stop it.

The weakness of Europe

So, if Yankeedom is in decline (and even Brzezinski admitted this) who are the new contenders? Up until maybe five years ago, I thought Germany might be, with its industrial base and its strong working class. But in the last five years German standards of living have declined. It seems that the EU is in the midst of cracking up. There is no leadership with the departure of Angela Merkel. Macron is on the way out in France. All the other countries in Europe, including Italy, are under water with debt. England is the puppy dog of the United States and hasn’t been a global power in over 100 years. Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece could be helped enormously by allaying themselves with Russia and China, but at this point most Europeans have been bullied and complicit in myopically siding with a collapsing United States. There is a good chance the US will drag most of Europe down with them.

Collapse of the core zones?

As we have seen, according to world systems theory, the history of capitalism has had three zones: core, periphery, and semi-periphery. The countries that have inhabited the three zones have changed along with the dominant hegemon over the last 500 years, and we are now in unprecedented territory. There is a good chance that the entire batch of formerly core states, the United States, Britain, France, and the west will collapse and that the core capitalist system will be without a hegemon (with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries). China seems to be about ten years away from assuming that position.

2022-2030 the reign of the semi-periphery?

So, is it fair to say there is a huge tectonic shift where most of the core countries will collapse and the world system will have no core for maybe 20 years? It seems clear that the new hegemon is going to be China. Arrighi and Gunder Frank both thought this. But China is still a semi-periphery country and it might take 10-15 years to enter the core. Meanwhile its allies, Russia and Iran, are also semi-periphery countries. In South America, Argentina had the foresight to sign on the Chinese Belt Road Initiative. Brazil and Chile are still uncommitted to China and occupy a semi-peripheral status. The big country in Asia is India. It is very important to the Yankees not to lose control of India, and they have all the reason in the world to beat war drums in an attempt to demonize China. If a right winger such as Modi can refuse to side against Russia in the current events in Ukraine, will a more moderate or social democratic president of India have the vision to see the future lies in aligning with China? I wouldn’t count on it given the behavior of green-social democrat leadership in Germany.

The only European countries who seem to have made their way through 40 years of Neoliberal austerity, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of fascist parties in Europe are the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. There is no reason why they could not maintain core status, though China would be the leading power.

The new hegemon China and the world-system in 2030

I can imagine the world-system in 2030 could consist of China and the Scandinavian countries in the core, with Russia, Iran, and maybe Brazil, Argentina and Chile on the semi-periphery along with possibly India. I don’t know where to place the US and Europe. Since they are drunk with finance capital, it is unfair to put them in the semi-periphery, which is usually involved in productive scientific endeavors. Yet they are more productive than the peripheral countries. Africa could be the last battleground between the decadent Yankee and European imperialists who live on as neo-colonial crypto-imperialists attempting to either sell arms to Africans or directly set up regimes and enslave Africans to work the mines.

If China is able to develop African productive forces with the Belt Road Initiative, it might be an incentive to calm down the ethnic warfare there. It would be a wonderful thing if the African states could finally control the enormous wealth of their country. We cannot expect too much from China. The best they could do would be to invest in cultivating scientists and engineers to build up Africa as a fully industrialized continent. To me, what matters about China is not arguing whether or not it is really socialist, but that it is doing what Marx liked best about capitalism: developing the productive forces.

The prospects for a world state?

We cannot expect the Yankee state to decline peacefully and not start World War III. Is it possible to have a global capitalist realignment without starting World War III? As Chris Chase-Dunn has advocated for decades, we need a world state that has the capability to enforce a ban on interstate warfare. That is not likely now. The only attempts at this: the League of Nations and the United Nations happened after the misery of two world wars. Both attempts at world state have failed because nation-states would not agree to give up their weapons.

What about world ecology?

But as world systems theorist Chris Chase Dunn points out, a Chinese-centered world still inherits the increasing ecological destruction that has been an inherent part of the world system since the industrial revolution and now the global pandemic. This includes extreme weather (hot and cold), pollution of land and oceans with plastics and the products of industrialization like carbon, flooding from global warming, and desertification of lands due to droughts and monocropping.

What about Marx’s dream of shrinking the ratio between freedom and necessity in the light of ecological disaster?

For Marx and Engels, the dream of socialism was based on abundance. Unfortunately, because socialism first took place in what Wallerstein would call peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, socialism has come to be associated with poverty. An implication that could be drawn under socialism is that people should expect to be poor and share the poverty equally. That is the opposite of how Marx and Engels saw things. They hoped that socialism would first break out in the west in an industrialized country, with an organized working-class party taking the lead. They hoped that the revolution of overthrowing capitalism would preserve its material abundance, technology, and scientific achievements, not tear them to the ground. They wanted to develop the forces of production that capitalism unleashed while abolishing the political economy of private property over means of production. As socialism developed, the collective creativity of workers would shrink the ratio between necessary work and freedom. What does this mean?

This meant that workers would either:

a) work less and produce the same amount
b) work the same amount but produce more
c) work more and produce much more

In other words, workers would have an increase in the number of choices of what to do with their free time because of an increase in the technology and collective creativity to produce more with less. My question is, given the irreversible ecological situation we are in, is it still realistic to expect socialism will continue to be based on abundance? I can imagine that the way China is going, in that part of the world it may still be possible. I also suspect that in the Scandinavian countries it might be possible. The problem is that global pandemics, extreme weather, flooding, desertification, and pollution cannot easily, if at all, be contained within countries that are capitalist or socialist.

How Reliable is World-systems Theory?

I will limit criticisms of world systems theory to those of a political and economic nature. One common criticism is the struggle to do empirical research with a unit of analysis being the entire world system. This is not to say world systems theorists do not do empirical work, because they do. It is more a matter of how to derive meaningful relationships between variables at such a complex level of abstraction. Statistics for individual nation states are easier to manage, although nation-states are not autonomous actors.

Another criticism is that the successes of existing socialist states are in danger of being given the short shrift. Like many in the West, the first line of criticism by world systems theorists of socialist countries is that they are one-party dictatorships. While this may be true, there is good reason why communist parties in power are nervous about the prospect of oppositional parties being used by foreign capitalists to overthrow them. In addition, socialist countries have better records than capitalist countries on the periphery in the fields of literacy (reading and writing), low-cost housing, healthcare, and free education. Please see Michael Parenti, Black Shirts and Reds for more on this.

The third major criticism comes from orthodox Marxist, Robert Brenner. Brenner claims that the emphasis by world systems theorists on the relationship between economic zones comes at a cost to understanding the class structure within and between nation-states. I think world systems theorists are well aware of class relationships, but they choose to focus on the capitalist relationships between states. Lastly, Theda Skocpol argues that world systems theory understates the power of the state in international affairs. The state is not just the creature of transnational capital. States engage in military competition which long s capitalism. State structures compete with each other.

On a positive note, as I said earlier, Christopher Chase-Dunn has done some creative work with Terry Boswell in tracking the timing and location of rebellions and revolutions in the 500 years of the world systems in Spirals of Capitalism and Socialism. In addition, he wrote a very groundbreaking book with Tom Hall Rise and Demise, which challenges Wallerstein by suggesting that there were precapitalist world systems that go all the way back to hunter-gatherers. Also see my book with him, Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Socialism

The post Tectonic Shifts in the World Economy: A World Systems Perspective first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

What Red Book Will You Read This Year on Red Books Day (21 February)?

Vijay Prashad — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 02:04:42 +0000

On 16 February 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Kolhapur, in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Two men on a motorcycle stopped them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them. One of the men laughed, pulled out a gun, and shot the two Pansares. Uma Pansare was hit but survived the attack. Her husband, Govind Pansare, died in a hospital shortly thereafter on 20 February at age 82.

Raised in poverty, Govind Pansare was fortunate to go to school, where he encountered Marxist ideas. In 1952, at the age of 19, Pansare joined the Communist Party of India (CPI). While in college in Kolhapur, Pansare could often be found at the Republic Book Stall, where he devoured Marxist classics and Soviet novels that came to India through the CPI’s People’s Publishing House. When he became a lawyer, Pansare worked with trade unions and organisations rooted in poor neighbourhoods. He read avidly, researching the history of Maharashtra to better understand how to get rid of wretched customs such as the caste system and religious fundamentalism.

Out of his world of struggle and his world of books emerged Pansare’s commitment to culture and to intellectual liberation. Along with his comrades, he set up the Shramik Pratishthan (Workers’ Trust), which not only published books but also held seminars and lectures. One of the most popular programmes organised by the Trust was the annual literary festival in honour of the Marathi writer Annabhau Sathe. In 1987, Pansare wrote a book called Shivaji Kon Hota? (Who Was Shivaji? in the LeftWord Books English edition). He freed the 17th-century warrior Shivaji from the manipulations of the far right in India, which had falsely portrayed him in their books as a Hindu warrior who battled Muslims. In fact, Shivaji was reported to have been benevolent to Muslims, which is why Pansare rescued him from their clutches.

Pansare’s assassination is one among many left-wing writers and political figures. No country is immune to this, with left bookstores being attacked and left publishers being threatened across the world. As Héctor Béjar, the former foreign minister of Peru told us in our most recent dossier, right-wing intellectuals simply do not have the intellectual weight to debate the key issues of our time. They do not have the facts or the theory to make a coherent argument for bigotry or for climate destruction, for social inequality or for their interpretation of history. Intellectuals of the right instead promote obscurantist and irrational thought alongside their other weapons: open intimidation and violence. The rise of neo-fascistic politicians and parties provides a veneer of respectability to the scum who take up guns and rods to attack and kill people like Pansare.

Justice for people such as Govind Pansare is elusive, just as it is for Chokri Belaïd (Tunisia), Chris Hani (South Africa), Gauri Lankesh (India), Marielle Franco (Brazil), Nahed Hattar (Jordan), and far too many others. These were all sensitive people who took the dangerous step to fight for something greater than our present world.

Pansare’s daughter-in-law, Dr. Megha Pansare, sent a message to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: ‘The space for free expression is shrinking in our country. There have been regular attacks on journalists and artists, intellectuals and farmers. We have been compelled to fight to expand the public sphere. It is extremely worrying to see the state patronise religious fundamentalist forces. We must raise our voices to stop the silencing of our voices by guns’.

The International Union of Left Publishers released a strong statement calling for justice for Govind Pansare: ‘Seven years have gone by and yet the police have not gathered hard facts’, they write. ‘The entire world is witness to the rising trend of hate crimes in India and crimes against Indian culture (including the murder of writers). We, the International Union of Left Publishers, stand in solidarity with the families of the victims and we raise our voice in defense of the progressive and humane values of secularism, social progress, and social justice’.

A few years after the murder of Govind Pansare, LeftWord Books in New Delhi began to float the idea of Red Books Day. This would be a celebration of radical books and the people and institutions that make them. Knowing Pansare, he would have been aware that the day after his death was a significant anniversary. On 21 February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto just months before revolutions swept across Europe, which would later be called the Springtime of the Peoples (Printemps des peuples). The manifesto is not only one of the most read books in our time, but in 2013, the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) adopted this book in its Memory of the World Programme. This initiative by UNESCO is intended to preserve humanity’s heritage against the ‘ravages of time’ and ‘collective amnesia’. So, LeftWord Books – along with the Indian Society of Left Publishers – decided to issue a global call for Red Books Day to be held each year on 21 February.

When the first Red Books Day was held on 21 February 2020, thirty thousand people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the manifesto. It turns out that the United Nations had also designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The manifesto was read in the language of the people who were reading it – in Korean when the day began and in Spanish when the day ended. Without question, the largest number of readers of the manifesto on that day were in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where the publishing house Bharathi Puthakalayam and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) included ten thousand people in the festivities. The readings began under the Triumph of Labour statue, erected in 1959 on Chennai’s Marina Beach at the precise spot where May Day was first celebrated in India in 1923. The book was read aloud in the fields by communist peasant organisers in Nepal and in the Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) occupied settlements in Brazil; it was read in study circles in Havana (Cuba) and read out aloud for the first time in Sesotho (one of South Africa’s eleven official languages). It was read in Gaelic at Connolly Books (Dublin, Ireland) and in Arabic in a café in Beirut (Lebanon). Bharathi Puthakalayam published a new translation into Tamil by M. Sivalingam for the occasion, while Prajasakti and Nava Telangana published a new translation into Telugu by A. Gandhi.

In the aftermath of Red Books Day, a group of publishers – invited by the Indian Society of Left Publishers – began to form the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP). Over the course of the past two years, the IULP has produced four joint books: Lenin 150, Mariátegui, Che, and Paris Commune 150. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, twenty-seven publishing houses released a book on the same day, 28 May 2021, in almost as many languages – an unparalleled feat in the history of publishing. This year, the IULP will publish two more books which collect key texts of Alexandra Kollontai (May) and Ruth First (August). The Union is meanwhile developing its principles of exchanging books between publishers and standing together against the attacks against authors, publishers, printers, and bookshops.

Red Books Day is an initiative of the IULP, but we hope that it will become part of the broader global calendar of annual cultural activities. The Red Books Day website allows anyone to post information about their activities for the day this year and includes an art exhibit of Red Books Day posters from around the world organised by Young Socialist Artists. Rather than insist that everyone read the same book, the idea this year is for people to read any red book in public or online. For example, in Tamil Nadu this year’s reading will be Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). Others will read the manifesto or poetry about the human spirit in search of emancipation.

Up in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro and his comrades spent long periods in the evenings reading whatever they could find. When they boarded the Granma from Mexico, they brought guns, food, and medicine, but not many books. They had to circulate what they had: Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin (1949) about the Nazi occupation of Naples and Émile Zola’s terrifying thriller, The Beast Within (1890). They even had a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which was almost the cause of Che Guevara being killed during an air raid.

One of the guerrillas, Salustiano de la Cruz Enríquez (also known as Crucito), composed ballads in the old Cuban guajira style. He would sit by the campfire and sing his poems as he played the guitar. ‘This magnificent comrade had written the whole history of the Revolution in ballads which he composed at every rest stop as he puffed on his pipe’, wrote Che Guevara in his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968). ‘Since there was very little paper in the Sierra, he composed the ballads in his head, so none of them remained when a bullet put an end to his life in the battle of Pino del Agua’ in September 1957. Crucito called himself el Ruiseñor de la Sierra Maestra – ‘the nightingale of the Sierra Maestra’. This Red Books Day, I am going to imagine his ballads and hum his forgotten tune in honour of people like Crucito and Govind Pansare, who keep trying to make the world a better place for humans and for nature.

Warmly,

Vijay.

PS: my red book to read this year is Võ Nguyên Giáp’s Unforgettable Days (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975).

The post What Red Book Will You Read This Year on Red Books Day (21 February)? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

A Short History of the US-Pakistan Relationship

Yanis Iqbal — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 03:04:50 +0000

On January 10, 2022, National Security Advisor (NSA) Moeed Yusuf said, “It [Pakistan] is still not [free from US influence] and I doubt that there is any country which is free from it.” He added that the country does not have any financial independence, being dependent on loans from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other foreign organizations. “When we cannot [fulfill] the demands, we seek foreign loans. When you procure loans, your economic sovereignty is compromised.” These comments are not entirely stunning; they encapsulate the ambivalent essence of the US-Pakistan relationship. While the Pakistani elite greatly enjoys its self-imposed subservience to the American empire, it never just sits back and rest on its laurels. It continuously tries to exploit what little room for maneuver it has within the bond of servility to further more selfish, regional interests – ones which either demand too much from the patron or don’t neatly align with the US’ hegemonic ambitions.

Anticommunism

Unlike the many postcolonial nations of the time which exuded a great degree of interest in the development of an independent project, Pakistan was totally craven; its creators displayed a surprising lack of enthusiasm in the paraphernalia of sovereignty. They were only interested in somehow securing money, regardless of the consequences which the people would have to face later. Every option was on the table. In The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Tariq Ali notes that “the new rulers of Pakistan developed an early communal awareness that to survive they had to rent their country.” Washington was approached as a possible buyer but it rejected the offer to buy Pakistan “as it was busy securing Western Europe and Japan, as well as keeping an eye on China, where the Eighth Route Army was beginning to threaten a Communist victory.” However, this did not stop Pakistan from trying to sell itself.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, continued to consistently market his country as an important ally against Soviet expansionism. Ali remarks that he hysterically “insisted that Soviet agents were present in Kalat and Gilgit in search of a base in Baluchistan.” These same sentiments were shared in a more sophisticated manner by then foreign minister Zafarullah Khan. “[H]e pleaded with the United States to shore up Pakistan, whose people were genetically anticommunist, since this was the best way to protect India against the Soviet Union, which would send its armies through the Khyber Pass.” Pakistan’s persistence in peddling threats about USSR paid off in May 1954 when it signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, through which the US provided resources and training to the Pakistani army, with the general aim of turning the new nation into a pliant Third World state. In September 1954, Pakistan was officially anointed as a crusader against the godless Communists, joining the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization together with Thailand and the Philippines.

Exactly one year later, in September 1955, Pakistan joined another pro-Western organization known as the Baghdad Pact, which included King Faisal’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Britain. As Pakistan chummed up with its anti-Soviet friends, the inflows of money into the ruling class’ pockets increased. From 1953 to 1961, Pakistan received around $2 billion in assistance from the US. These wads of cash, however, did not signify a thoroughgoing bilateral camaraderie, one in which the imperialist benefactor would come to the help of its junior partner at all cost. Apart from acting as another chess piece in the anticommunist game, Pakistan served no other significant function for USA. Therefore, the latter felt no need for fulfilling all the demands of the former. In fact, what happened during the initial years of 1960s was the opposite. In United States and Pakistan in the 21st Century: Geostrategy and Geopolitics in South Asia, Syed Tahseen Raza writes:

The Sino-Indian Border struggle in 1962 paved the way for closer US-India ties because neutral India, desperate to have weapons in the immediate aftermath of Chinese aggression, made a frantic plea for US help. The US was pleased because this was an opportunity to wean India off the influence of the Soviet Union by offering help in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s inching closer with China was not liked by the United States. When American finally decided to give arms aid to India in November 1962, Pakistan was not consulted before as was promised to them and this deeply offended the leaders of Pakistan. The [John F.] Kennedy administration, on the whole, tried to balance the American relationship with South Asia on equal footing and therefore did not view Pakistan as more important than India.

Feeling threatened by USA’s growing closeness with India, Pakistan extracted from the former, on November 5, 1962, a pledge “that it will come to Pakistan’s assistance in the event of aggression from India.” This pledge, nonetheless, did not help Pakistan during the Second Kashmir War (1965) when it undertook dangerous military adventures (Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam) against India. When the war started, the US cut aid to both Pakistan and India. A similar situation developed six years later. When New Delhi decisively intervened in East Pakistan’s civil war in late 1971, Washington was unwilling to directly support the Pakistani army’s Operation Searchlight against Bengali insurgents (though it did send part of its Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal). The country’s eastern wing seceded to form the state of Bangladesh, dismembering Pakistan in a humiliating way. Spurred by this defeat, Pakistan’s governing caste realized that the continued existence of the nation was dependent on nuclear parity with India.

The development of nuclear weapons was smoothed by conjunctural reasons. In neighboring Afghanistan, the communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daoud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from him. In April 1978, the Shah of Iran convinced Daoud to turn against the communist factions in his army and administration. In response to increasingly harsh state repression, left-wing officers in the military stormed the Presidential Palace in Kabul. The government was turned over to Noor Mohammed Taraki, a communist professor who became the President of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan. These developments – which were extensively supported by the USSR – came to be known as the Saur (April) Revolution. The US was terrified. It crafted a subversive plan that made General Zia’s dictatorship in Pakistan a principal node for sending jihadists to Afghanistan. Singularly focused on destabilizing Afghanistan’s communist regime, and, by extension, Soviet Union, USA cared less about Pakistan developing its nuclear programme in the 1980s.

War on Terror

America’s benign attitude toward Pakistan changed with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ultimate end of the Cold war. “[S]ans the American aim of defeating communism as their top priority,” comments Raza, “Pakistan was not given any extra consideration.” The “US Intelligence Report,” which had been indicting Pakistan for its nuclear quest, came to be invoked more frequently. When India conducted its Nuclear Test in March 1998, the Bill Clinton administration tried to prevent Pakistan from following suit, offering the resumption of the sale of F-16 aircraft (which had been frozen by George H.W. Bush when he did not certify Pakistan’s non-possession of nuclear devices) and economic and military aid. But Pakistan demanded more. Raza remarks: “Pakistan wanted tough punitive action against India. When the G-8 meeting on 17-18 May 1998 didn’t take very harsh measures against India in accordance with Pakistan’s expectations, bowing to public pressure, Pakistan decided to go for the Nuclear Test, which it ultimately carried out on 28 May, 1998.”

In response to Pakistan’s nuclear test, the US imposed sanctions, which included restriction of the provision of credits, military sales, economic assistance, and loans. These were, nevertheless, limited in scope and were not sustained. US-Pakistan relations exited this period of downturn in an explosive manner after 2001, thanks to the murky dynamics cultivated by imperialism in Afghanistan. After the USSR left in 1988, Pakistan maintained a strong footprint in Afghanistan to gain “strategic depth” against India, continuing to nurture the Islamist extremism that was earlier used to mobilize jihadist fighters from all over the world against USSR. These actions had severe repercussions. When hardhats of jihadism attacked New York in 2001 to express their disgruntlement with America’s bases in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Iraq and support for Israel, Pakistan was caught in a dilemma. Networks of battle-hardened fighters that it had built along with the USA were now on the attack radar of its imperialist sponsor.

With limited options, Pakistan decided to join the US War on Terror, declaring support for the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul. “By providing the USA with help in the invasion of Afghanistan,” Justin Podur clarifies, “Pakistan was able to save its clients and its own personnel from destruction, as much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda crossed the border to Pakistan or went to ground and Afghanistan was taken over by US-friendly warlords.” This tactical move had its own disruptive consequences for Pakistan’s social osmosis. General Pervez Musharraf came to be accused of treason for supporting the USA against fellow Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This political effect complicated military operations. As the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made the Pakistan army take action against insurgents operating in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, casualties increased, eroding the state’s legitimacy in the region. When Pakistan cooperated with the insurgents on the sly, it faced US threats.

Conflicts

The convoluted workings of the War on Terror have had a destructive impact on Pakistan’s economy. It has lost $150 billion – 41% or two-fifths of the country’s total economy size, more than the $13 billion that it received from the US between 1999 and 2013. Since the US invasion of Afghanistan, more than 80,000 Pakistani civilians, security forces personnel and women and children have been killed in gun, bomb and suicide attacks. On average, every year Pakistan suffered losses of $7.7 billion – more than the country’s total expenditures on education, health and other social safety schemes. With the growing advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan, current Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2021, saying: “Since 2001, I have repeatedly warned that the Afghan war was unwinnable. Given their history, Afghans would never accept a protracted foreign military presence, and no outsider, including Pakistan, could change this reality. Unfortunately, successive Pakistani governments after 9/11 sought to please the United States instead of pointing out the error of a military-dominated approach.”

Scarred by the War on Terror, Pakistan has been frustrated to see USA establish an alliance with India as part of an anti-China containment strategy. The US and Indian elites have found a common interest in countering China; India is embroiled in disputes on its land borders with China and the US and its allies are contesting China’s claim to maritime territories across shipping routes in the Indo-Pacific region. It is against this background that Pakistan has returned to China’s “all-weather friendship,” initiated in the 1960s by General Ayub Khan who felt betrayed by Washington’s overtures to India in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian border conflict. China has become Pakistan’s closest strategic ally, supplying it with modern defense equipment. Pakistan supports China’s stance on Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, and China backs Pakistan on its Kashmir issue with India. Over the past five years, this cooperation has been further cemented by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its local cognate China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), entailing over $60 billion worth of Chinese investments in infrastructure consisting mostly of loans.

Despite the economic heft of China, Pakistan still needs Washington’s support, both to get disbursements of its $6 billion bailout package from the IMF and to be removed from the terror-financing and money-laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force’s “grey list,” a designation that encumbers Islamabad’s global financial operations. War on Terror cooperation had converted Pakistan into a major non-NATO ally of the US in 2004, granting it various military and financial privileges. The designation had also eased Pakistan’s access to IMF facilities. With the deterioration of Pakistan’s relationship with USA, accessing funds has become difficult. In October-November 2021, IMF withheld the release of a $1 billion tranche under an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) to Pakistan until the government agreed to close commercial bank accounts held by the armed forces and other state entities and remitted $17 billion worth of public funds into a single treasury account. It is believed that USA, the single largest financial contributor to the IMF, had a hand in the reform demands.

In a June 2021 interview on HBO’s documentary news series Axios, Khan had said, “Pakistan will “absolutely not” allow the CIA to use bases on its soil for cross-border counterterrorism missions after American forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” To change this policy decision, USA started using IMF monetary policy as a bargaining chip to force cash-strapped Islamabad to agree to Joe Biden administration’s counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. These events highlight the conflictual nature of the contemporary US-Pakistan relationship. And it seems that both the parties have failed to arrive at a proper resolution till now. Yusuf’s criticism is significant in this regard as he was the one chosen for mending ties with the US. He has spent a decade or more in the think tank and security policy circle in the US capital as associate vice president for Asia at the Institute of Peace, a US government-backed institution. The Pakistani government had recently elevated him from the position of Special Assistant to the Prime Minister to NSA to signal seriousness in creating a new rapport with the US. It seems that Pakistan will have to wait longer for such a reset in relationships.

The post A Short History of the US-Pakistan Relationship first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

A Short History of the US-Pakistan Relationship

Yanis Iqbal — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 03:04:50 +0000

Anticommunism

The Sino-Indian Border struggle in 1962 paved the way for closer US-India ties because neutral India, desperate to have weapons in the immediate aftermath of Chinese aggression, made a frantic plea for US help. The US was pleased because this was an opportunity to wean India off the influence of the Soviet Union by offering help in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s inching closer with China was not liked by the United States. When American finally decided to give arms aid to India in November 1962, Pakistan was not consulted before as was promised to them and this deeply offended the leaders of Pakistan. The [John F.] Kennedy administration, on the whole, tried to balance the American relationship with South Asia on equal footing and therefore did not view Pakistan as more important than India.

War on Terror

Conflicts

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

The Uprising of Peasants and Workers in Naxalbari

Omar Rashid Chowdhury — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 17:11:10 +0000

The words were red. And the rifles were red too. It was a time to win back everything that belonged to the people. A flame of rebellion raging against tyranny of the exploiting classes in remote Naxalbari in north-eastern India spread to different parts of the vast land of India, and in its neighboring countries. The uprising in Naxalbari that eventually embattled peasants and workers throughout the subcontinent against onslaught of moneyed classes still reverberates across decades.

The Naxalbari uprising and ensuing rebellion, led by Charu Majumdar, a simple man, had always been either consciously ignored or besmirched in the history of the subcontinent by the bourgeois and a faction of “left” historians. While unapproving bourgeois historians begrudge the apparent “failure” and “ferocity” of the Naxalites, the movement remains a beacon of hope across the sub-continent.

With 2017 marking the 50th anniversary of Naxalbari Uprising, as a tribute of remembrance to the martyrs of the movement, Frontier, the famous independent socialist weekly from Kolkata, has published an anthology of 26 articles and two interviews titled The Age of Rage and Rebellion: Fifty Years After the Spring Thunder. The articles in the collection are presented chronologically. The 239-page anthology is edited by Timir Basu, editor of Frontier, and Tarun Basu.

The authors, many of whom were veterans of the rebellion, recollect and analyze facts, untold truths, challenges, and human emotions that culminated into the movement and continue to fuel such movements across the sub-continent.

The contributors include Bernerd D’Mello, deputy editor of Economic and Political Weekly, Timir Basu, Lawrence Lifschultz, US journalist and South Asia correspondent of Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1970s, and Varvara Rao, eminent Telegu poet and one of the leading social rights activists.

Published in July 2021 by Frontier Publication, the anthology is an ode to an age of rage and rebellion; an age that shaped the form of political struggle for people in the sub-continent. It is not just a collection of reminiscences but depicts a tale of revolutionary ardor, vigor, and absolute dedication that was quite unmatched in the sub-continent’s history of political struggle.

How the Steel was Tempered

“Against incredible odds,” the Editors’ Note reads, “the peasant rebellion in Naxalbari inspired hope and motivated a generation. Hundreds of students and youth threw themselves into building a new society, free from exploitation. But in the end the movement failed to decisively break with the prevailing leftist model of struggle. People, including revolutionaries make mistakes. But they can be corrected, if revolutionary movements including their leaderships, promote the capacity for sober self-reflection and flexibility and avoid dogma. Fifty years later the flame lit by the historic ‘Naxalbari Peasant Uprising’ burns bright. Even though there is an unprecedented right-wing swing in political arena, the spirit of ‘Naxalbari’ reverberates still as one of the greatest social changing events of 20th century. It is the task of communist revolutionaries to analyse it and learn the lessons of both its achievements and its shortcomings for the revolution of the future.”

The Naxalbari Uprising imbued into the then political left and progressive youth a radical way of worldview. It carved out a path that challenged the then existing ideologues and presented a revolutionary way out of the shackles of capitalist and semi-feudal system expropriating profit out of the masses throughout the sub-continent.

As Timir Basu recollects:

It is not enough to call that period a turbulent one; it was a period of tremendous restlessness. After entering the Presidency College, I quite naturally got involved in the student movement. I got attached with the left student movement, although in the campuses of the College and the University of Calcutta, the rightists were holding sway. When we were endeavoring to build up a leftist student organization in the Presidency College, ‘Naxalbari’ was yet to happen. Yet we earned the stigma of ultra-left because we had become vocal against the bureaucratic central leadership.

In the beginning I, like many others, had only a limited conception about revolution, and although I studied much about the Russian, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions, my knowledge of Marxism was extremely poor. ‘Naxalbari’ provided the opportunity for fresh thinking. [“In Search of Maoist Revolution”]

While it has been branded by the bourgeois academia and media as a rebellion ‘lost’, the Naxalbari Uprising with its ideology and practices forged by many frays in both philosophical and practical fronts, has held true to its utmost cause: the ultimate economic and political emancipation of the peasantry and the workers.

After Naxalbari, nothing remained the same as before. What may broadly be called the Naxalite movement went through many trials and tribulations, committed many mistakes and even blunders with tragic consequences in some cases, faced many setbacks and fragmentations, but was not wiped out despite severe state repression. Over time, new thoughts regarding lines of action, and new understanding of the national and international situations emerged within the movement. One fact is, however, certain. No section of Naxalites has become defenders of status quo or of communal polarisation. (Preface)

Even, as contemporary bourgeois history likes to record it as a rebellion ‘snuffed out’, the flame of Naxalbari still burns bright. It burns in the Dandakaranya Forest, it burns in Jharkhand; its philosophy of activism is still vibrant.

Bernerd D’Mello analyzes in his article “Whither Maoist Movement”:

The second phase of the Naxalite movement, from 1977 to 2003, was marked by mass organizations and mass struggles, especially in North Telangana and other parts of the then-province of Andhra Pradesh, and in what was then central and south Bihar (the latter now the province of Jharkhand), as also in parts of what is called Dandakaranya, the forest area situated in the border and adjoining tribal districts of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Orissa. The Bastar region in southern Chhattisgarh slowly began to emerge as a stronghold. Armed squads and village-level militias were organized in self-defense. ‘Land to the Tiller’ and ‘Full Rights to the Forest’ were the core demands, and within the movement, emphasis came to be placed on sensitivity to issues of gender and caste. Especially in Bihar, the Maoist movement, with the backing of its armed squads, combated the upper-caste landlord senas (armed gangs) with considerable success.

Since 2004, with two remarkable mass organizations already in place, the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sanghatan and the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangh — one of tribal peasants and workers, the other, of tribal women — and a Bhoomkal Militia (its name derives from a 1910 tribal rebellion) that feeds into the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, the Bastar region has become a bastion of Maoist resilience. It has successfully prevailed over a state-backed, state-armed private vigilante force called Salwa Judum (translated as “purification hunt”) and has even kept a major armed offensive of the paramilitary and armed police, called Operation Green Hunt, at bay. It has also managed to engage in ‘construction in the midst of destruction’, putting in place Janathana Sarkars, or people’s governments, albeit in embryonic forms, within its guerrilla bases.

People’s struggle, class struggle to be specific in the Indian sub-continent, is now haunted by looming lumpen characteristics of a section of the left and constant onslaught by imperialism. Standing apart from the malpractice of mere adventurism and slogan-mongering, the vanguard trailblazers of the Naxalbari Uprising still continue a political and armed struggle based on a concrete ideology that represents excellence of humane values, honesty and dedication to the greater proletarian causes.

A Class Question

The uprising, in its essence was one of the most radical forms of class struggle led by the masses the sub-continent had ever experienced since Telengana. It forced into fore class questions and equations that were never-before dealt with such ferocity in the history of the sub-continent. The Naxalbari Uprising was also a testament to people’s leadership and dedication to the Marxist-Leninist way of work in its true essence.

The broad strategic objective of the Communist revolutionaries who launched the Naxalbari struggle [was] to liberate the countryside by waging a protracted people’s war and then encircle the cities. … Charu Majumdar further elaborated on the problem of mobilising the backward sections of the peasantry. While insisting on the necessity of secret political propaganda by the party so as not to prematurely expose it to repression, he, however, pointed out that backward peasants would be late in grasping politics under this method. ‘And for this reason’, he wrote, ‘it is and will be necessary to launch economic struggles against the feudal classes. For this reason it is necessary to lead movements for the seizure of crops, the form of the struggle depending on the political consciousness and organisation of the area.’ He further stated that ‘without widespread mass struggle of the peasants and without the participation of large sections of the masses in the movement, the politics of seizure of power would take time in striking roots in the consciousness of the peasants’.¹

Reflecting on tactical and class questions Farooque Chowdhury writes [“The Historic May 25, 1967”]:

Naxalbari is part of a people’s journey to organize a radical change of the society, of the property relations, of the position the exploited the poor-the powerless are pressed down into. A lofty, noble, humane aim it is. It never confused the questions of position and role of the propertied classes and their political power. And, it never attempted to compromise interests of the exploited, and never appeased the exploiting classes. The sacrifice Naxalbari made is the evidence of its courageous and dignified stand it took to defend the exploited. Strategic and/or tactical errors/flaws don’t invalidate significance and contribution of Naxalbari in the political struggle people wage although efforts are there to demean the initiative by condemning only the errors/flaws. The quarter fails to look at the perspective of the initiative and the initiative’s errors/flaws – a wrong way to evaluate any political initiative.

It must be understood that Naxalbari played a defining role in shaping the form and nature of class struggle in the sub-continent. Without considering the underlying class questions, the class-relations and assessing the then and current state of class antagonism in the sub-continent, evaluations of the Uprising will only be incomplete and can often be misleading.

And Quiet Flows the Brahmaputra

From the banks of murmuring Jahnavi to the flood plains of expansive Brahmaputra, the fighting masses of this sub-continent, braving discrimination by moneyed classes for centuries, against extreme expropriation and extortion of people-owned resources, have always held true, true to their spirit of rebellion, progress, and love. The Naxalbari Uprising, in its truest form, not only embraced unequivocally those purest of human values, but sought a radical way toward achieving a functional recognition of those. Not only was the rebellion unique in its way of redefining equations of proprietorship, it forced to surface the evident class struggle that always raged behind the apparent dissociation of the peasants and the proletariat from mainstream politics of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie.

And, while contemporary bourgeoisie history continues to forget and forsake the rising of the exploited, the Naxalbari Uprising still resounds across ages. The tortured, decapitated, cruelly murdered martyrs of Naxalbari still stand in the sub-continent’s history as heroes who challenged a juggernaut, bestial system running on profit and expropriation of masses. The resplendent red of Naxalbari still sings triumphantly of a new age to come, a new age led by people, workers, and peasants.

Omar Rashid Chowdhury, a civil engineering graduate from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and a learner, writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Abhijnan Sen, “The Naxalite Tactical Line”, Naxalbari and After, Vol-2, edited by Samar Sen, Debabrata Pande, Ashish Lahiri, Dec. 1978.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Omar Rashid Chowdhury.

China Eradicates Absolute Poverty While Billionaires Go for a Joyride to Space

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 15:22:10 +0000

Women who migrated to the Wangjia community participate in local activities at the community centre in Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Confounding news comes from the flagship World Economic Outlook report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The report highlights many of the pressing issues facing our planet: disruptions in the global supply chain, rising shipping costs, shortages of intermediate goods, rising commodity prices, and inflationary pressures in many economies. Global growth rates are expected to touch 6% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022, driven by higher global government debt. According to the report, this debt ‘reached an unprecedented level of close to 100% of the global GDP in 2020 and is projected to remain around that level in 2021 and 2022’. Developing countries’ external debt will remain high, with little expectation of relief.

Each year, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath highlights the main themes of the report in her blog. This year, her blog has a clear headline: ‘Drawing Further Apart: Widening Gaps in the Global Recovery’. The rift runs along North-South lines, with the poorer nations unable to find an easy path out of the pandemic-induced global slowdown. A range of reasons cause this rift, such as the penalty of relying upon labour-intensive production, the overall poverty of the populations, and the long-standing problems of debt. But Gopinath focuses on one aspect: vaccine apartheid. ‘Close to 40 percent of the population in advanced economies has been fully vaccinated, compared with 11 percent in emerging market economies, and a tiny fraction in low-income developing countries’, she writes. The lack of vaccines, she argues, is the principal cause of the ‘widening gaps in the global recovery’.

Peasant workers till the land in an organic bamboo fungus company, which was established to help lift Longmenao, a village that is officially registered as poor, out of poverty in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

These widening gaps have an immediate social impact. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s 2021 report, The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. Hunger is intolerable. Food riots are now in evidence, most dramatically in South Africa. ‘They are just killing us with hunger here’, said one Durban resident who was motivated to join the unrest. These protests, as well as the new data released by the IMF and UN, have put hunger back on the global agenda.

In late July, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council held a high-level political forum on sustainable development. The forum’s ministerial declaration recognised that ‘the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbated our world’s vulnerabilities and inequalities within and among countries, accentuated systemic weaknesses, challenges, and risks and threatens to halt or damage progress made in realising the Sustainable Development Goals’. Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the UN member states in 2015. These goals include poverty alleviation, an end to hunger, good health, and gender equality. Before the pandemic, it was already clear that the world would not meet these goals by 2030 as projected, certainly not even the most basic goal of eradicating hunger.

During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that – counter to this general global downturn – China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean? As our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reported last month, it means that 850 million people had climbed out of absolute poverty (the culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949), that their per capita income had increased to US$10,000 (a ten-fold increase in the last twenty years), and that life expectancy had increased to 77.3 years on average (compared to 35 years in 1949). Having met the poverty reduction SDGs ten years in advance, China contributed to more than 70% of the world’s total poverty reduction. In March 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres celebrated this achievement as a ‘reason for hope and inspiration to the entire community of nations’.

First Secretary Liu Yuanxue speaks with a local villager during routine home visits in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Our July study, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, inaugurated a new series called Studies on Socialist Construction, through which we aim to study experiments in the construction of socialist practices from Cuba to Kerala, Bolivia to China. Serve the People is based on ground-level studies of poverty eradication schemes in different parts of China and on interviews with experts who participated in this long-term project. For instance, Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University, told us how the concept of multidimensional poverty is central to the Chinese approach. The concept became a policy through the Communist Party of China’s programme of ‘three guarantees’ (safe housing, healthcare, and education) and ‘two assurances’ (being fed and being clothed). But even here, the essence of this policy is in the details. As Wang put it in terms of drinking water:

How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in the water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met.

Once a policy is crafted, the real work of implementation begins. The Communist Party (CPC) sent out 800,000 cadre to help local authorities survey households to understand the depth of poverty in the countryside. Then, the CPC delegated 3 million cadre out of the Party’s 95.1 million members to be part of 255,000 teams that spent years living in poor villages working towards the eradication of poverty and the social conditions it created. One team was assigned to a village, one cadre to each family.

The studies of poverty and the experience of the cadre resulted in five core methods for eradicating poverty: developing industry; relocating people; incentivising ecological compensation; guaranteeing free, quality, and compulsory education; and providing social assistance. The most powerful lever of these five methods was industrial development, which created capital-intensive agricultural production (including crop processing and animal breeding); restored farmlands; and grew forests as part of the ecological compensation schemes, reviving areas that had become prey to resource over-exploitation. In addition, an emphasis was placed on educating minority populations and women. As a result, by 2020, China ranked first in the world in the enrolment of women in tertiary education, according to the World Economic Forum.

Less than 10% of the people who lifted themselves out of poverty did so because of relocation, which was often the most dramatic instance of the programme. One relocated resident, Mou’se, told us about Atule’er, a village on the edge of a mountain, where he lived before relocating. ‘It took me half a day to climb down the cliff to buy a packet of salt’, he recalled. He would go down the cliff on a rattan ‘sky ladder’, which dangled perilously from the edge of the cliff. His relocation – along with the eighty-three other families who lived there – has allowed him to access better facilities and live a less precarious life.

The eradication of extreme poverty is significant, but it does not solve all problems. Social inequality in China remains a serious problem. These are not China’s problems alone but pressing problems facing humanity in our time. As we move to capital-intensive agriculture that requires fewer farmers, what kinds of habitations will we produce that are neither in rural nor urban areas? What kinds of employment can be generated for people who are no longer needed in the fields? Can we begin to think about a shorter work week, allowing more time to be civic and social?

A local food vendor and user of the Yishizhifu short video platform showcases her cooking in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Eradicating poverty is not a Chinese project. It is humanity’s goal. That is why movements and governments committed to this goal look carefully at the achievement of the Chinese people. Many of the projects in motion, however, take a dramatically different approach, seeking to address poverty by transferring income (as several South African research institutes advocate). But cash transfer schemes are not enough. Multidimensional poverty requires more than this. For example, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme, implemented by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made an enormous dent in hunger in that country, but it was not designed to eradicate poverty.

Meanwhile, in the Indian state of Kerala, absolute poverty fell from 59.79% of the population in 1973-74 to 7.05% in 2011-2012 under the governance of the Left Democratic Front. The mechanisms that led to this dramatic decline were agrarian reform, establishing public health and education, creating a public distribution system for food, decentralising political authority to local self-governments, providing social security and welfare, and promoting public action (such as through the Kudumbashree cooperative projects). Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said recently that his government is committed to eradicating extreme poverty in the state. The next study in our series on socialist construction will concentrate on Kerala’s cooperative movement, focusing on its role in the eradication of poverty, hunger, and patriarchy.

From the countryside to Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

In March, the UN Environment Programme released its Food Waste Index Report, which showed that an estimated 931 million tonnes of food went into waste bins across the world. The weight of this food roughly equals that of 23 million fully loaded 40-tonne trucks. If we let these trucks stand bumper-to-bumper at the earth’s circumference, they would make a ring long enough to circle the earth seven times, or to go deep into space, where billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson decided to go. The $5.5 billion Bezos spent on a four-minute trip into space could have fed 37.5 million people or fully funded the COVAX programme that would vaccinate two billion people.

The ambitions of Bezos and Branson are not life. Life is the abolition of the harshness of necessity.

The post China Eradicates Absolute Poverty While Billionaires Go for a Joyride to Space first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Three Guys and a Podcast Questioning the SOP of the ‘traditional’ Left

Paul Haeder — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 22:20:38 +0000

I was asked to appear on What’s Left?, a podcast put on by three fellows, all identifying as socialist, and all concerned about the shut down of critical thinking, the shuttling of alternative narratives and censoring of plain old questioning paradigms and authorities of any ilk. Their concern covers why questioning the scientism of today’s Corona Craziness is somehow verboten, or why we can’t discuss what the Lockdowns do and do not do, or worse, how the censoring of medical treatments (like ivermectin) — life saving ones — by mass media, left media and by so-called leftists has killed thousands.

They have a more far-ranging repertoire, and in these various podcasts, they take on sacred cows and traditional paradigms coming from “the left.” What is Left; i.e. What’s Left, is something that has been tackled here at DV:

What Is Progressivism? by Kim Petersen

This Is the Left? by Steve Church

Don’t Confuse the Left with the Right But Beware of the False Left by Kim Petersen

What Is (and Is Not) Left-Wing? by Kieran Kelly

The Left: Sleepwalking among the Workless Class by Kim Petersen

A great idea — self-reflective, rhetorical, didactic — turned into a regular twice-a-month discourse with a guest (many times) and these three dudes — Eduardo, Kenny and Andy. Sometimes it’s just the three of them grappling with modernity and history, the collision of left with consumerism, how capitalism is a disease but one we live with or under. Many times, the shows are awakenings, as the three of them come at the respective topics from very defined and diverse backgrounds. Connotation versus denotation, and then all the heralded processed of analytical thinking, and discourse and debate (they do not always agree on issues or spins).

There is a refreshing openness to what the three do, and how many times the topics are picked out of a bucket one week while then the three go about researching each topic to bring some construction to the podcast. They lean into discovery, and how their own more or less generalized collective social justice ethos dovetails into the realities of Xenophobia, Colonizing minds, collective delusion, and, yes, why leftists in general have a slew of topics they just will not venture toward, or worse, topics for which leftists will not entertain multiple discourses and perspectives around, albeit, what we see now, a cancelling, or censoring of discussion and debate, de facto or overtly pronounced. Like a house of cards, lies and ameliorating toward some cherished false balance or invented purity come tumbling down.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to the passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.

— Zosima makes this speech to Fyodor Pavlovich in Book II: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Here, recent shows:

JUL 17, 2021 — Biden’s Sleight of Hand in Afghanistan

JUL 10, 2021 — Abolish the Police! I Mean, Defund the Police! Never mind, Fund the Police!

JUL 3, 2021 — Haeder’s Reimagining Sanity – Batty Bioweapons, 5G, Star Wars

JUN 26, 2021 — The Lowdown on Higher Ed

JUN 19, 2021 — Secret Societies and the New World Order

JUN 13, 2021 — What is the New World Order?

Even Kenny was interviewed a while back on the show — What’s Left? interviews Kenny Zepeda on his journey from Guatemala to the United States and from liberal reformist to socialist revolutionary. Previous What’s Left? Episodes Kenny on revolts in Chile and Latin America, Kenny on Climate Change Nicaragua and Fake Socialism, What’s Left? Kenny Z.: The Revolutionary Road

Their first episodes dealt with myriad of issues — beginning August 2018

Sacrificing Everything for Nike
Prison Strike 2018!
Interview with a Pro-Capitalist Anarchist
What’s Left of Abortion Rights?
Is the U.S. Turning to Fascism?

As teachers, Andy and Eduardo have been dealing with lockdowns and Zoom doom rooms for educating (sic) youth. They are dealing with fellow teachers who have taken the Covid-19 pill that has turned them into Covidians.

They are concerned about the censorship of leftists who might question the bioweapon theories, or promulgate them, citing USA DARPA and other nefarious actors in higher ed, industry, etc.

The Jab, Star Wars, and the Bubble Net of Digital Gulags

In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish. — Klaus Schwab

That was May 22, 2021. The episode was great, far-ranging and with my own brand of frenetic fervor, and, alas, it was taken down from YouTube:

“Pulled from YouTube”: Mantra of Our Age by Paul Haeder, July 13th, 2021

I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines … My concern is I know there are risks but we don’t have access to the data … We don’t really have the information we need to make a reasonable decision.

— Dr. Robert Malone, “Inventor of mRNA Interviewed About Injection Dangers“

Now, I will give readers the entire interview I did with them, via email, here, to give the reader a decent look at three very different men and their narratives, their avocations, their work now, and what makes them tick as socialists-Marxists.

They have moved into the Fourth Industrial Revolution to what is a new world order.

For me, I was asked to handle the ungainly topics of Covid-19 as a bioweaponized monster, possibly put into the world intentionally by USA, and then 5G and 6G, what that means to public and environmental health, and then tying in the militarization of space as part and parcel of the pogrom.

Now, I believe Andy at first gravitated to me because I am an unapologetic communist, and that is a refined term in some sense since I’m not espousing a communism that has been bastardized by USA, by the media, even by some history.

Tolerance is another buzzword, and for all those gigs I worked where I questioned the management, the deans, the presidents, provosts, the managers, the editors, et al, well, this country is propaganda central, wink and a nod, smoke and mirrors, and triangulating those who doubt the goals of management and the leadership — triangulating us out of the discussion, the discourse, hence, the death of critical debate/thinking/questioning.

Now, I don’t see on What’s Left?, 163 episodes, a deep look at some of these shenanigans, in the world, and not just Rogue State USA. Israel.

That in a nutshell is the death knell:

Here, a far-ranging discussion on Israel and on the Covid program:

Listen to Julianne Romanello, Gilad Atzmon, and Jason Bosch go deep into “ideological and spiritual thoughts that have turned our world into an open air prison.” This sort of show, well, scrubbed, and right along the lines of looking at this concept of “chosenness, and then at the work of Leo Strauss, Athens & Jerusalem, Noahide fundamentals, the origin of Zionism and many other crucial topics most intellectuals insist to avoid…”

These are the times, but they were the times for me a long time ago, when I was 13, questioning cruise ships knocking over coral reefs, or bulldozers destroying the Sonora, or the Vietnam War narratives, and it just continued every place I ended up as a worker: the people “in power” are lunatics, for the most part. On one level, sure, let’s do some trauma informed care, but in the end, this society’s underbelly — USA, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia — has to be questioned!

Education, since all of us are educators, that is, with the What’s Left? reference, is amazingly entrenched in indoctrination and deadening of critical thinking:

And, the narrative around Israel and what’s happening globally, well, that is shut down all the time:

ESSENTIAL READING:

Microsoft, Google join Whatsapp lawsuit vs. Israeli spyware developer
Stuxnet: The Israeli-American Computer Virus That Started Cyber-Warfare

Identified by Google, an Israeli spyware company has enabled government hacking of social media and email accounts of over 100 journalists, activists, and others.

The American Federation of Teachers, all those colleges and universities, and K12 ordering everyone to get an mRNA experimental treatment (sic), they will use the tools of oppression, from Google to Israel’s hacking and tracking and ripping up tools. Andy did a live event, with social distancing (sic), even masks, outside, with parental permission, on circuits. The honchos at his school in the Mission District of San Francisco came down hard on him. We know the feeling, Andy, we being the royal “we.”

Check out an interview of Andy on Left Lockdown Skeptics — “Fighting lockdown in California: A US teacher speaks”

Q & A for Paul Haeder

Paul Haeder: What is “What’s Left?” and how did it come about?

Eduardo: Oh, golly… I think, for me, it started back in 2017 in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right rally” in Charlottesville as I was attempting to politically make sense of the times and debate a childhood friend of mine on a public social platform. I had watched many Oxford debates before and wanted to do something similar. I really thought my friendship was on the line. Fortunately, Andy had come along at that time and shared with me he was interested in taking our own café political discussions online. So, we had a long conversation about the idea of “What’s Left?” and its intention. Something we both agreed on early on was to have open, honest discussions about our personal politics and ideas. We wanted to create a space for alternative points of view that challenged the mainstream Left. We had noticed there was a growing tribalistic way of thinking on the Left that seemed to cancel all deviant political discourse. Hence, “What’s Left?” came into being.

Andy: Eduardo and I started “What’s Left?” 3 years ago. For me, I had been politically frustrated at not having an outlet for discussing my own political ideas and thoughts that came up as events happened. At the same time, I watched YouTube channels on groups of friends who would get together and review movies or video games. They seemed to have fun doing that and I approached Eduardo about trying to do the same thing but with politics. I have always enjoyed talking with Eduardo and I trusted him to be passionate and honest about his beliefs (just as I was trying to be). It has been both rewarding and fun despite YouTube’s censorship nonsense.

Kenny: I joined the show a couple years ago. I first joined Andy and Eduardo in a conversation about the events unfolding in Nicaragua in 2018. From then on, I participated as an occasional contributor regarding Latin America related topics until I was approached to contribute on a weekly basis.

PH: “What’s Left?” is composed of three hosts. Can each of you share your background?

Kenny: I’ve been a restaurant worker and a manager at a small mom and pop restaurant in San Francisco, CA. most of my working age life. I grew up in Guatemala until the age of 12 when we emigrated to California. Much of what has informed my road to Marxism has to do with lived experiences such as migration from Guatemala to the U.S. A , my father’s dealing with immigration and eventual deportation, attending public school in San Francisco, entering and dropping out of UC Berkeley, growing up around sex work, growing up in a U.S. backed military dictatorship in Guatemala among other things. The search for answers that actually make sense has shaped my life and led me to Marxism.

Eduardo: I was a “cross cultural kid” having lived in México with all of my tías/tíos, abuelitos and primos, then as I got older went to public school in San Francisco, CA. I would study in San Francisco then spend my rather long summers back home. It was an atypical Latino experience of back and forth. I cannot say I had the common undocumented Latino experience for most families in the USA. I mean most families are not crossing the border over skies multiple times a year. So, it shapes one in a way. But I would say my 18 years as a Jehovah’s Witness had the most impact in my life. I would read forbidden literature late into the wee hours, be curious of all things deprived of me and learned never to trust ANY person, organization or ideology claiming to be the “right way.” I will say it fulfilled my desire to be of service to others. It was just an awful sort of service of conversion. Although, I did teach many illiterate people how to read over that time. I found another way to fulfill that void when I witnessed the massive anti-war protests of 2003 and joined the school walkouts. From there it was joining many Lefty movements and campaigns, such as supporting progressive candidates. I think my skills as an organizer and activist of rallies and protests, though, were sharpened by Occupy Wall Street and protests against GMO companies. Those experiences have influenced the way I think and do things. If I had to label myself, I would say I am anarchist-leaning-syndicalist-Leftist-libertarian. If you have an issue with that mouthful, too bad.

Andy: I am a school teacher in San Francisco (who lives in Oakland). I have been teaching science (physics and chemistry) for over 20 years. I have been a Marxist for that long as well. I have been in socialist organizations and active in my union over that time. Currently, while still active in my union, I am pretty much a solo communist trying to find a political community to work with. “What’s Left?” has been a big part of rebuilding that community.

PH: What for you are some of the more compelling topics and issues you all have covered?

Andy: I think the one episode that stands out for me is our interviews with Eric Lerner (part 1 and part 2) challenging the notion of the Big Bang as a theory that explains our current universe. This was such a surprising issue for me and uprooted a core premise of my beliefs in an area that caught me completely off guard. At the same time, it explained the nagging sense I had that there was some real problems with these things like dark matter and dark energy. So these episodes, for me, symbolize the way my world has been continually shifted and uprooted as I take this political journey with Eduardo and Kenny. It also symbolizes my attempt to use truth as my North Star, not ideology.

Eduardo: Oh, there are so many. But I think I’ll go with what has recently changed me in many ways. The topics around the Internet of Things with Alison McDowell, and, what I call “my COVID journey”, the reopening schools debate as well as the vaccines. It’s been a rollercoaster and re-traumatising being rejected and attacked on a personal level from friends on the Left who disagree with everything we have recently discussed. I also realize we have to discuss unpopular topics or say more than “We oppose Trump!”.

Kenny: For me, the show has been instrumental in processing and dissecting a number of topics, but most especially everything related to the pandemic. I’ve been particularly captivated by the fast encroachment of tech into our lives and the implications it will have for dissenting working class voices.

PH: What topics would you like to cover in the future on “What’s Left?”

Kenny: I’d love to continue covering relevant topics to fellow workers, in ways that are accessible and not elitist, in the hopes that we can spark interest in thinking outside the parameters chosen by our ruling class. I would definitely love to continue tracking the implementation of the techno-fascist world being built in the name of social justice with rhetoric of inclusion. I’d love to continue processing the implications of current events outside the mainstream manufactured narratives.

Andy: “What’s Left?” has really been a labor of love, and we have pretty much been able to interview the people and cover the subjects we want. I would say that I hope that it can increasingly become a locus of organizing for me as I try to build a community of parents, teachers, activists and even students who are prepared to join me in fighting the implementation of the 4th industrial revolution in education.

Eduardo: We have to continue covering on-the-ground workers’ experience and any significant mobilization. However, if it’s slow and there isn’t much going on currently, I’d like to delve into more labor history and revolutions. Hopefully that will inspire more workers to organize.

PH: Your channel has experienced a lot of censorship with YouTube taking many of your videos down and threatening you with “community strikes”. How has this affected your channel? How has it affected you personally?

Eduardo: The ruthless censorship of YouTube and big social media platforms is outrageous. I don’t understand how we can criticize China and North Korea for their censorship when we have it going on here as well. The recent strikes on our channel have been eye-opening. I just don’t get why it hasn’t been for others. I wish our channel could reach more people. Unfortunately, we started at a time when the play of algorithms has been used against us. On a personal level, sometimes it feels discouraging because I imagined we would reach more people. Andy and I discussed from the beginning, though, that our intention wasn’t to gain “followers” or “subscribers” for popularity contests. I just hope our political conversations reach more folks as we see people really relieved to have found us when they write to us on our blog. They feel connected and not so alone anymore.

Kenny: I suspect that regardless if we are straight up taken down, the algorithm gods will manage our content’s diffusion. In my perspective, this is only the beginning of the even more dystopian doctored sense of ‘reality”. YouTube’s censorship hasn’t affected me personally in any significant way. At least not now. I expected it in some form or another. It does shed some light into the fast approaching dystopian future. The censorship and political isolation in my community is another story.

Andy: YouTube’s censorship is bullshit. It has definitely been a disruption to getting our message out on YouTube, but from what I understand, even without the censorship, YouTube’s ‘algorithm’ has kept our channel in check. But, I think one good thing about it (if you can call it that) is that it has forced me to really challenge my beliefs in pushing me to speak my beliefs in the face of censorship or isolation. Of course, I want our channel to be seen by more people, but not at the expense of us staying true to our vision of “What’s Left?” is a place where people can speak honestly. So, I am going to stick with honesty and let YouTube decide for themselves if we can do so there. If not, I am content with the idea that we will find other places to have our discussions.

PH: Given the sort of culling of discussion and debate and information flow back and forth being by the elites, what would you tell students who might ask you why all the websites and podcasts and videos are coming down?

Andy: As a teacher, my political focus has always been on organizing and talking with other adults (co-workers and parents). The best way to help students organize is to be a model for them in my pursuit of getting us adults to wage a fight for our collective liberation. I have found this road a difficult one, but I do not think I can teach my students anything about the fight for our own liberation unless I engage in that pursuit with my fellow workers right now. I do talk with students who ask me about my beliefs but I rarely use the classroom as a vehicle for getting my politics out there, although I will facilitate discussions when they come up to see what students’ ideas are.

Eduardo: I think there are enough great episodes from Black Mirror to ease the conversation into the idea that we are increasingly approaching a dystopian future if we don’t organize to intervene. From there, I would share and facilitate discussions around the culling of our political freedom of speech. But I think it goes beyond the classroom. So many educators want to contain or effect change within the confines of the classroom. We have to organize together alongside them to create the change we want to see.

Kenny: I’m not a teacher/educator. I’ll sit this one out.

PH: If you were stuck with a stranger on an elevator and could only talk briefly, how would you describe the core of your political beliefs?

Kenny: I’m highly suspicious of power and strongly believe in the power of community. I think capitalism rewards antisocial behavior and it’s inherently coercive. Capitalism cannot be contained with legislative reform as advocated by liberal ideology. I think we live in a world technologically capable of sustaining organized human life and only a socialist revolution can and must take over the wealth workers create for the good of the masses and away from the truly privileged few. Capitalism, through its inherent violent and competitive nature, cannot bring about a world of peace and abundance for the masses. Only a revolution that suppresses wage slavery and other coercive and destructive mechanisms of capitalism can change the course of the cataclysm ahead of us. The profit motive must be obliterated out of production. What we produce must serve life, NOT profit.

Andy: I am a Communist. I believe the collective working class is the only force that can make a revolutionary change of our current system, Capitalism. Capitalism is the organized theft of our labor by a minority and is at the root of virtually all the problems we see in society today — war, racism, sexism, environmental destruction and the deep isolation and alienation all workers feel. The only way out of this is a socialist revolution that eliminates the profit motive for production and establishes worker’s rule through mass working class democracy.

Eduardo: I am an anarchist-syndicalist-Leftist-libertarian-anti-capitalist. I don’t claim to have the answers. I don’t know what is the best approach. I am skeptical of many things. But what I do know is that the current system that we are living in isn’t working for us. It’s detrimental and we are going to suffer greatly if we don’t put a stop to this system. I believe we have to organize as workers and see that the Leftist identity politics isn’t getting us anywhere. We can’t be shutting down or shutting out other people because of their political positions. We have to challenge them and we have to continue sorting it out together… but by working together.

PH: Are you a pacifist, and if so, why, and if not, then what, and why?

Eduardo: I want to say yes. I dream of a world where our revolution could be achieved in such a way. Unfortunately, I am struggling seeing how that could become possible. The capitalist class and all people with power have waged violence on us. They have started this fight and are willing to massively destroy us if we don’t defend ourselves. I still have a lot of conflicting feelings over this topic.

Kenny: “For the oppressor, peace is the absence of a response to their violence.” I think history has been sanitized to make us believe fundamental change arrives through Disneyfied slogans and appealing to the morality of the oppressor. Capitalism is inherently violent, and it attempts to have a monopoly of violence in the hands of the police/military and other coercive institutions. If we pretend to rattle the cage of power, we have to be ready to respond to the unleashing of the institutions built to protect a violent system. We have to be able to contend with their monopoly of violence. My mother taught me to exhaust all the means necessary to avoid violence, but she also taught me some abusers can only be pushed out of the way by punching them in the face when you must.

Andy: No. I believe we will ultimately need to be armed to liberate ourselves from Capitalism. A class war will be necessary and I do believe violence has a role in workers’ experience of liberation (such as anti-colonial struggles or anti-occupation resistance). We live in a system where two great classes are in opposition to each other (Capitalist and Worker), and we live under their violent boot every second of every day that Capitalism exists. This system will require violence to uproot it. The better we are organized, the less violence required, but we must recognize our struggle as a war if we are to understand both the stakes and the seriousness of the struggle we are engaged in.

PH: Where do you see the world in 20 years?

Andy: I believe in the possibility of working class revolution, but currently I don’t believe we will make it happen in time. I think Capitalism is headed to its 3rd global war which will embroil China, United States, Russia, Europe, and India as the major players in a life and death struggle to see who will control the globe (and secure maximum profits, resources and markets for itself). Unless stopped (and I believe working class revolution is the only way to stop this inevitability), we will have a war that will go nuclear and kill billions and likely destroy the world enough to push all of us back into feudal existence at best. I think some of the sci-fi depictions we see in “The Road” or “Mad Max” are pretty good descriptors of where things are headed. That’s what I see for us in the next 20 years unless we do something to stop it.

Kenny: I think we need a global workers’ socialist revolution with the most decisive battle happening in the economic north. The U.S., the world’s dominant hegemon, is being challenged and will continue to be challenged as it overextends itself. All empires suffer a violent end. The U.S. threatens to bring the entirety of organized human life down with it. Cooperation in capitalism is only a tenuous illusion. The illusion of cooperation will be exposed as the major powers come into a competitive clash under the pressures of dwindling resources and markets.

Eduardo: It’s unfortunate that I don’t think the world will get any better if we don’t do something about it now. My view is quite grim. Alison McDowell has been on our show many times and has shown us how fast the fourth industrial revolution is accelerating. I fear we are losing a part of ourselves, our humanity. But I think we each have to continue this lucha one step at a time.

PH: Define what it means to be a human?

Eduardo: To be human is to be of service, to think, to understand we are linked and interconnected. In the USA there is a strong selfish individualistic culture. Where I am from people live together communally as families and neighbors for years, if not forever. I fear we have lost that in many ways here. I think we can only come to an understanding by building those long-term relationships to understand such values as compassion, care and love beyond our immediate selves.

Andy: Being human means being free to both express yourself, be yourself and through that find out who you truly are. But humans are social, so society must be free to have free associations so that a community can likewise be free to find and express itself through the free participation of its individual members. At the root of being human is being free to be yourself and free to associate with whomever best fits your true self.

Kenny: Being human is the ability to understand processes beyond our individual survival. Being human is the ability to understand how our destinies are inter-connected with other life forms. Being human is the recognition that we are social beings and that our individual well being rests on the well being of our communities and our environment both locally and globally.

PH: What does community mean to you?

Kenny: Community is a pillar of humanity.

Eduardo: Bees come to mind. I mean I can think of many animal examples we could admire for their systems of communities. We can be more than that. I think we would not allow much of what is happening, such as the destruction of our environment, the occupation of lands and other profit-driven acts if we felt that pull and tie to one another. If we work together, if we think of all our comrades/companions, we would build a stronger and brighter future.

Andy: A community is a set of people I trust enough to be my true self with. A community is a collection of people who make worthwhile the sacrifice of my time and abilities to make that community stronger and more able to bring the best out of all of its members. A true community celebrates and strengthens its individual members and is strengthened and celebrated by the individuals who compose it.

PH: What have been some of your biggest influencers in your life to have gotten you where you are now? And, exactly where are you now?

Andy: Politically, my development as a Marxist who tries to blend my ideas (theory) with practice, I would say my friend, Brian Belknap, has been the most significant influence. Personally, there are many people I could cite, but I think I would put my decision to engage in counseling over the last 15 years as the most significant decision to help me integrate my current self with my past self and integrate my political self with my personal self. In terms of historical political influences, I would put the major ones as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg as the biggest influences who help me orient myself as I try to make my way in the confusing journey of trying to change the world.

Kenny: My mother has always advocated for the marginalized by putting her well being in harms ways. She influenced me by showing up for others and for justice. My mother inspired me to speak against inhumane and despicable acts and to side with the weak and abused while advocating for myself. Even though she never engages in theory, my mother has always been a communist in practice. A passionate enemy of maliciousness.

Eduardo: Oh so many… Noam Chomsky helped me make sense of world politics. How wars, greed and power trips make these empires run the world. Christopher Hitchens gave me a way to leave my former Jehovah’s Witness life. Subcomandante Marcos, from the Zapatista movement, was an inspiration early on and provided the hope that class/native action can happen. Though small, they have achieved something that you won’t find anywhere in the USA. I think these are the top three figures that have paved the way for me.

Note: We’d like to thank Paul Haeder for the opportunity to share our story and our thoughts on Dissident Voice. If you like what we have to say and want to talk to us on “What’s Left?” feel free to contact us at: what’s left?

At a 1969 Students for a Democratic Society conference, a 27-year old graduate of the University of Chicago’s Law School, Bernardine Dohrn, proposed:

The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement.

The post Three Guys and a Podcast Questioning the SOP of the ‘traditional’ Left first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

What do you really know about U.S.-Cuba relations?

Mickey Z. — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 02:47:18 +0000

The need to possess Cuba is the oldest issue in U.S. foreign policy.
— Noam Chomsky, Excerpted from Rogue States, 2000

When you watch the latest news stories about unrest in Cuba, are you relying on critical thought to process them, or are you lazily falling back on decades of deeply embedded propaganda about Castro, communism, etc.? Are you familiar with your country’s history with Cuba? Are you open to accepting that God’s Country may have committed atrocities far worse than anything you’ve been told about the Cuban regime?

If you claim to hate communism, do you ever ask yourself why? Is it based solely on official textbooks, news stories, and flag-waving speeches by U.S. politicians? Do you know what communism actually is? Can you differentiate between communism, socialism, Marxism, etc.? Do you know for sure that genuine communism has ever actually existed in practice?

My point here is not to defend or condemn or even juxtapose communism and capitalism. I’m not a fan of either and I pledge no allegiance to Cuba. I do, however, pledge allegiance to context, nuance, perspective, and truth. For example, when you assess current Cuban society, it cannot be accurately done without factoring in six decades of the U.S. embargo. FYI: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that the ongoing embargo costs the U.S. economy $1.2 billion per year in lost sales and exports, while the Cuban government estimates that the embargo has cost the island itself $753.69 billion. To discuss Cuban politics, culture, or economics without factoring in the blockade is an act of intellectual dishonesty.

But there’s more — much more. The history of Cuba features a litany of abuses rained down upon it by its powerful neighbor to the north. To follow is just a small sampling to keep in mind whenever you decide to spout off about the current situation.

In 1897, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” His wait lasted less than a year. February 15, 1898, was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in onboard the U.S.S. Maine. “At 9:40 p.m., the ship’s forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water,” writes author Tom Miller. “Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that were, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”

By the time the sleeping giant was jarred into alertness by the Maine explosion, Cuban and Filipino rebels were already fighting Spain for independence in their respective lands. The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. “Yet,” writes Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”

“At a certain point in that spring, McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war,” adds historian Howard Zinn, “and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention.”

American newspapers, especially those run by William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. “Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war,” says historian Kenneth C. Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, Remington reported that he could not find a war. “You furnish the pictures,” Hearst replied, “and I’ll furnish the war.”

Spain was easily defeated, the legend of Teddy Roosevelt was manufactured whole cloth, and the Cubans (and Puerto Ricans) found themselves exchanging one colonial ruler for another. In the Philippines, where U.S. soldiers were ordered to “Burn all and kill all,” over the next decade, six hundred thousand Filipinos were eventually wiped out… all to the war cry of “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”

These myths do more than justify actions at the time. They become part of our concept of our country and get exhumed and pressed into service when needed. These myths survive despite careful studies that expose reality. For example, in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by “spontaneous combustion inside the ship’s coal bins,” a problem common to ships of that era. Oops…

Today’s perception of Cuba has little to do with the fabricated heroics of one of the faces carved on Mount Rushmore. Since 1959, it’s mostly been about Fidel Castro and his legacy. The Cuban Revolution, the ensuing U.S. blockade, and events like the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis have all been documented — in varying degrees of veracity — elsewhere. We know much less about the lower intensity U.S. assaults on Cuba… and even if we did, they are automatically justified by an ever-ready catalog of Castro’s atrocities (real and imagined) and his ties to the USSR.

Under Castro, explains Noam Chomsky, Cuba was portrayed as “an agent of the Kremlin, bent on taking over Latin America and taking over the United States.” The communism angle, combined with Castro’s authoritarian rule, lent free reign to U.S. policy planners to sell Castro as the devil in our backyard. Effective agrarian, educational, and medical reforms were all cleverly omitted from any discussion about Cuba. The focus remained on the communist in charge… keeping the public distracted from what was being done behind the scenes by their own government.

The Cuba Project, a.k.a. “Operation Mongoose,” was initiated by the Kennedy administration in January 1962 with the stated U.S. objective of helping the Cubans “overthrow the communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.”

“What has happened is a level of international terrorism that as far as I know has no counterpart, apart from direct aggression,” says Chomsky. “It’s included attacking civilian installations, bombing hotels, sinking fishing vessels, destroying petrochemical installations, poisoning crops and livestock, on quite a significant scale, assassination attempts, actual murders, bombing airplanes, the bombing of Cuban missions abroad, etc. It’s a massive terrorist attack.”

The U.S. demonization of Castro and subsequent aggression toward communist Cuba since 1959 is a blueprint of spin and deception and served to strangle the revolution in its infancy. “The world will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone,” says historian William Blum.

Right about now, I can hear some of you bellowing about Castro aligning with the Soviets. But the Cuban leader did come to Washington in April 1959 to discuss relations between the two governments. A different course could’ve been chosen by the Home of the Brave. Instead, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to meet with Castro. He was too busy golfing in Georgia so he sent Vice President Richard Nixon in his place. The rest, as they say, is history. But, then again, Cuba has never really stood a chance.

For a glimpse into how the U.S. views Cuba (and other nations in that geographical area), consider what Marine Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler said all the way back in the 1930s.

Calling war “possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious” racket of all, in which “profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives.” Summing up his career, Butler explained: “I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

As far back as the American Revolution, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams announced that U.S. control of Cuba was “of transcendent importance.” This brings us back to today’s headlines.

You may despise communism (or what you believe communism to be) with every fiber of your body. That still shouldn’t prevent you from suspecting that the current upheaval in Cuba is part of a covert plan by the U.S. government — made easier by the recent spread of cellphone use in Cuba. Let’s go back to the description of Operation Mongoose: “Overthrow the communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.”

By “live in peace,” the Land of the Free means: Exploit cheap labor, turn the island into a hot vacation destination, and poach whatever intellectual resources we can from the Cuban in terms of military, science, etc. (just as the U.S. rescued Nazi war criminals after World War II to create the CIA and NASA). As you watch the latest news coming out of Cuba, keep in mind that the U.S. has overtly or covertly overthrown dozens and dozens of foreign governments over the past century or so. It’s never about spreading freedom. It’s always been about conquest and power. Things will stay this way if we continue to willfully let the corporate media program us.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

News on China | No. 57

Dongsheng News — Sat, 03 Jul 2021 17:24:26 +0000

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

News on China | No. 56

Dongsheng News — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 01:31:13 +0000

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

USA’s Sordid Role in Afghanistan

Yanis Iqbal — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 03:17:16 +0000

The situation in Afghanistan remains bleak. In late April 2021, US President Joe Biden announced an apparent withdrawal from the Central Asian country. However, the facts on the ground indicate that America’s longest war has merely been downsized. 16,000 military contractors and more than 1,000 US troops will stay in Afghanistan; aerial bombardments, drone strikes and Special Forces missions will continue.

Meanwhile, Taliban has been intensifying its attacks on provincial capitals, districts, bases and checkpoints across the nation. In the period of June 4-10, 2021, 263 Afghan security forces and 56 civilians were killed by the Taliban; at least 11 districts were captured by the group. The Pentagon is already considering seeking authorization to carry out airstrikes to support Afghan security forces if Kabul or another major city is in danger of falling to the Taliban.

Amid all the bloodshed and chaos, a central question arises: how did Afghans get caught between two exceedingly lethal military forces – one that uses suicide bombers and the other employing pilotless, heavily-armed drones? Responses to this issue are fraught with historical amnesia. People generally ignore the fundamental role of the American empire in giving rise to the current reality in Afghanistan.

Communist Revolt

In 1964, King Zahir Shah attempted to contain growing resistance against his monarchical rule with a constitution, initiating a process called “New Democracy.” This gave rise to three different political actors: (1) the communists, organized in the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which split into two factions in 1967, Khalq (masses) and Parcham (flag); (2) the Islamists, with Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami becoming the main organization from 1973; (3) constitutional reformers (such as Muhammad Daoud, cousin of Zahir Shah, whose coup of July 1973 abolished the monarchy).

Daoud’s repression of theocratic elements pushed them into exile where they collaborated with the Pakistani Jama’at-i-Islami and the Saudi Rabitat al-Alam aI-lsiami, to topple Afghanistan’s secular regime. Domestic instability, corruption and an unwillingness to implement land reforms led to a communist coup in 1978. The immediate trigger was the police’s decision to act against a huge protest march; left-wing officers in the military – on the asking of the PDPA – stopped the police and turned over the government to Noor Mohammed Taraki, a communist professor who became the President of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan. These developments – which were extensively supported by USSR – came to be known as the Saur Revolution.

Imperialist Destabilization

The communists’ policies of secularization and economic modernization soon incurred the wrath of reactionary mullahs and feudal landlords. The anti-communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to read. The fundamentalist Afghans opposed to this were supported by a triumvirate of nations – the US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. In July 1979, Jimmy Carter administration decided to aid forces fighting the Soviet-backed government, with the goal, as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, of “giving the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Pakistani weaponry and training, Saudi financing and American political backing strengthened the mujahedeen attacks. By midsummer 1979, the PDPA government controlled perhaps no more than half the country. Growing territorial loss was exacerbated by the resurfacing of the longstanding split within the PDPA between the Khalq (led by president Taraki and his minister of national defense, Hafizullah Amin) and the Parcham (led by Vice-president Babrak Karmal). Prominent Parchamites were sent as ambassadors to various far-flung countries, and many lower-ranking ones were shot.

Throughout 1979, the Afghan government repeatedly requested the USSR to intervene militarily to save the communist government from a reactionary, US-backed uprising. The Soviet leadership was not keen to get directly involved since this would have meant a significant loss in diplomatic clout. The turning point came when an intense power struggle erupted between the leading Khalq members, Taraki and Amin.

Amin gained the upper hand, removing Taraki from power and ordering his death on September 14, 1979. This instance of infighting within the Left forced to Soviets to reassess their strategy vis-à-vis Afghanistan. They had considered Taraki more reliable than Amin, and were justifiably afraid that the internal fragmentation of the PDPA was damaging the efforts to defeat the jihadist insurgency. Thus, on December 25, 1979, the first Russian troops crossed the border into Afghanistan. This was exactly what Brzezinski had been hoping for.

The Russian leaders fell headlong into the trap. The entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan transformed an unpleasant civil war funded by Washington into a jihad, enabling the mujahidin (“holy warriors”) to appear as the only defenders of Afghan sovereignty against the foreign, infidel army of occupation. Brzezinski soon appeared posing for photographs in a Pathan turban on the Khyber Pass and shouting “Allah is on your side”, while Afghan fundamentalists were being feted as freedom-fighters in the White House.

Rise of Taliban

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the alliance of states that had backed different factions of the mujahedeen fragmented. Islamabad did not want any socially representative government of reconstruction, preferring – with US and Saudi support – to impose its own pawn, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, on the country. The result was a cycle of civil wars, punctuated by ephemeral ceasefires. Hazaras (backed by Iran), Ahmed Shah Masud (backed by France), and the Uzbek general Dostum (backed by Russia) resolutely opposed Pakistani plans.

When it became obvious that Hekmatyar’s forces were incapable of defeating these varied forces, the Pakistan Army shifted its backing to the students it had been training in religious schools in the North-West Frontier since 1980. These students eventually became the Taliban. Formed in 1994 under the tutelage of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (lSI) and General Naseerullah Khan (Pakistan’s Interior Minister), the Taliban comprises southern Pashtun tribes who are united by a vision of a society under Wahhabism which extols a form of Islam (Tariqa Muhammadiya) based on an ultra-dogmatic interpretation of Quran.

On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul. The Clinton administration endorsed its takeover as the best prospect for restoring “stability.” The next day Taliban killed the communist President Mohammed Najibullah, expelled 8,000 female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the mujahedeen closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.” His comments prove all too accurate today.

By the time the American establishment woke up, at the end of the 1990s, Taliban had established its government in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden – himself funded and supported by the CIA in the 1980s – freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him. Angered by Taliban’s insubordination, the US invaded Afghanistan and then occupied it for decades, resulting in the current situation.

The US’s partial pullover from Afghanistan forcefully foregrounds the futility of imperialist interventions. In its quest to mold Afghanistan according to its own desires, America has left a murderous legacy – the creation of a jihadist Frankenstein, the conversion of an entire country into a charnel house, the rising toll of civilian casualties and the imposition of a government of thieves, embezzlers, and neoliberal functionaries. A decisive end to these brutalities does not seem to be on the cards for Afghanistan.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults: Sullivanians from Hedonism to Group Terror

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 19:45:38 +0000

Photo Image: FilmDaily

Orientation

My Purpose

A few months ago, I wrote an article titled “Political and Spiritual Cults“. My purpose was to show the commonalties among all cults, whether they are political, spiritual or psychological. In this article I want to narrow the focus to discuss a left-wing psychological cult, the Sullivanians, a countercultural organization that made its mark on the Upper West Side of New York City between 1970 and the early 1990s. Why bother to do this? Because as a socialist I have to face that any socialist organization I join, whether it be social democratic, Leninist or even anarchist has the potential to become a cult. The more we know about the conditions under which cults emerge, the more we can combat them.

Overcoming Media Biases Against Cults

When mass media compares cults members to the general population, cult members are portrayed as:

Mentally unstable
Less educated
Lonelier
From the poor and working-class backgrounds
Physically intimidated into joining
Brainwashed
Drawn from criminal elements
Less moral as people

Research has shown none of this to be true.

Plan of the Article

For the most part I will be following the architecture I built in my previous article, including what is a totalistic institution; the ten characteristics of cults; the stages cults go through; the mechanisms of control in each stage; why people stay; what kind of qualities the leaders have and what is the impact of leaving on cult members.

I will be adding a short section on the theoretical assumptions of the Sullivanians at the beginning. For each of these units I will say something about how it applies to the Sullivanians. Besides my article, I will be referring to two books on the Sullivanians: Amy Siskind’s sociological analysis, The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism and a book by a participant, Artie Honan How Did A Smart Guy Like me….For my general understanding of cults, I owe the most to Margret Singer, Janja Lalich, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad.

Theoretical Assumptions

The Sullivanian Institute was a spin-off organization that broke away in 1957 from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was sensitive to the social side of psychological dynamics and among other insights blamed the nuclear family for the formation of the ideal capitalist consumer. Both Dr. Jane Pearce and Saul Newton took these criticisms of the nuclear family much further. In 1963, Pearce and Newton coauthored a book called Conditions of Human Growth. In that book they identified the family as socially isolating the individual from developing healthy relationships with friends, especially in adolescence and adulthood.

Open-ended friendships, both sexual and otherwise, were the way out of the infantilization of the nuclear family and the road to maturity. For them, friendships are the first potential of experience of love between equals. A big part of therapeutic work was to get their patients to expand their friendships as they withdrew from their families. Newton and Pearce considered the desire for the security of exclusive relationships among their patients to be a neurotic symptom. In fact, one of the first things on the agenda of the Sullivanians therapists was to separate the patients from their parents. On the whole the two foundation stones of the Sullivanians community were:

To break from their family of origin
To have non-monogamous sexual relations among friends

What is a Totalistic Institution?

Calling an organization a cult has more to do with how an organization is run than what people believe. Cults are a subcategory of organizations which includes mental health institutions, prisons, army barracks, orphanages, and religious institutions such as monasteries. As opposed to this, in what Erving Goffman calls “pluralistic institutions”, people come and go as they please in and out of various institutions throughout the day as they go from playing one role to another. Within each institution, the group dynamics and power relationships vary. An individual can have great control in one area and little control in another. What produces critical thinking within the individual is the habit, whether conscious or unconscious, of comparing one institution to another, each with their strengths and weaknesses.

In totalistic social formations, all institutions are rolled into one. Economic exchanges, livelihood, sacred beliefs, political dynamics, living situations and sexual encounters are all concentrated within a single institution. In the more extreme institutions like prisons or in the military, working and play activities are done all at the same time, in the same place with uniform expectations. Boundaries between inside and outside are rigid. The authorities are centralized and there is little room for feedback. There are surveillance systems, spying and little privacy, and this breeds insecurity and paranoia.

Sullivanians as a Total Institution

The Sullivanian community was divided into four tiers. The four therapists at the top were Saul Newton, Joan Harvey, Ralph Klein and Helen Moses; a secondary tier of therapists in training; a third tier of psychotherapy patients and lastly, community members who were friends of the people in the first three tiers. When the Sullivanians morphed into the Fourth Wall Theatre community in 1977, the fourth tier were people living in Manhattan who came to see the plays, often from poor areas of the city. The biggest factor that made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution was the collapsed boundaries between the tiers. Members of all tiers were invited to have sex with each other, including therapists with clients, clients and those in therapy training. Sleeping alone was considered an interpersonal failure. Furthermore, the therapists ignored confidentiality and talked openly about the problems of their patients. The most important people – the therapists – knew everyone else’s business and encouraged others to be spies to report on any dissatisfactions anyone had with the leadership. This led to mistrust among people in the second and third tiers as well as paranoia.

The Sullivanians were not as rigid as a prison or an army barracks. Community members worked at different jobs and they lived in different apartment buildings. However, all households occupied most of an apartment building and each household apparently consisted only of members of the Sullivanian community. These households made enough money to hire people from the outside to cook, clean and babysit. House members had regular meetings in which they talked about household problems but also about their lives. Members also knew each other’s weaknesses and these weaknesses got back to the leadership in one way or another.

The dependency of community members on the leadership ran deep. Therapists in training were dependent on leadership economically to provide them with referrals. People were dependent personally for their identity through therapy. Interpersonally they played together, lived together and in the 1980s, did political work together. All this supported the authoritarian control by the leaders and made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution.

Ten Characteristics of Cults

From my previous article on cults, I named ten characteristics.

It emerged out of a political, economic or ecological crisis.
It recruited young adults between 17 and 24 of middle-class and upper middle-class origins who were likely to be undergoing some developmental crisis in their personal lives.
It has an authoritarian, charismatic leader.
It has a revolutionary, dualistic ideology.
It possesses a social-psychological array of tools for luring in new members and sustaining their commitment.
It lacks mechanisms for critical feedback from the membership.
It requires a small group of lieutenants to isolate and keep atomized the membership through spying so that no coherent opposition can form.
It develops rituals, myths and celebrations that allow the group to mark time.
It demonizes outside groups that are in competition with the cult.
It has rigid, terrorized boundaries that make it extremely difficult to leave.

Sullivanians’ Characteristics of Cults

It is not true that the Sullivanians cult emerged as a reaction to a political, economic or ecological crisis. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the economy was not contracting. It was possible for community members to work at low paying jobs in the arts, have leisure time and still make the rent, especially because of group living. However, the decline of the Sullivanians community in the 1980s was definitely connected to contracting economic conditions where rents skyrocketed and jobs in the arts shrank. AIDS and the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island added to the group paranoia.

The Sullivanians did appeal to upper middle-class adults. They weren’t in any serious psychological crisis. They were relatively healthy adults who were attracted to an alternative lifestyle including art. music, theatre and dance. Sexual exploration was part of the counterculture and not unique to the Sullivanians. In Saul Newton they had an authoritarian working-class leader who was once a member of the Communist Party and claimed to have fought in the Spanish Civil War. Both men and women in the community agreed he was charismatic. Newton was also erratic and explosive and most members were scared of him. There were no institutionalized feedback mechanisms for criticizing the leadership. Complaining behind his back was dangerous because of surveillance and could easily get back to the leaders.

Although Newton was either a Stalinist or a Maoist, in the first nine years of the community, he was not heavy-handed politically. It was in the descendent phase when the nuclear meltdown occurred, the AIDS epidemic spread and Yankeedom had become more conservative in the 1980s that his Stalinist or Maoist politics became more hard-edged. Relations between the Sullivanians and other leftists became increasingly hostile, and their political ideology became more dualistic and sectarian. Here is where the characteristic of the demonization of outsiders took place.

The psychological array of tools for drawing people in and holding them was pretty straightforward. In all cults, sex is used to control people. However, in most cults sex flows one way, from the members to the leaders. Among the Sullivanians sex among members was immediate and expected. Secondly, unlike other cults, women were encouraged to have more than one partner at a time. Besides immediate and sustained sex for both men and women, there was the opportunity to work with therapists on their problems and to do so for a low fee, compared to the much higher going rate. Thirdly, friendships were made quickly and developed through household living arrangements. Fourthly, the Sullivanians were very supportive of the members developing their creativity. Siskind points out that many of them became famous in the arts, filmmaking, and dance. The Sullivanians were also a utopian community, so joining it helped people to feel that they were a special group, superior to others, in addition to being part of a movements which was going to overthrow capitalism.

Symbolism and ritual were a strong part of the Sullivanians community. They played hard together at parties and vacations, but this was all secular enjoyment. There was no celebration of revolutionary holidays or the singing of the Internationale, as we might expect of an aspiring socialist community. Neither was there a dramatic change of identity based on change of hair or clothes that I found.

Stages of Cults

As I said in my article Political and Spiritual Cults:

In their book, The Guru Papers, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad identify two stages of cults: the proselytizing stage and the apocalyptic paranoia stage.

In the proselytizing ascendant stage, the guru sees the possibility of realizing his ambitions. The group is touted as being at the cutting edge of new knowledge. Outsiders are welcomed although they are treated with a kind of benign superiority. In the ascendant phase, the guru rewards the enthusiasm of his followers and grants them positions which have opened up within the hierarchy. The tone of the community is celebratory. The guru is accessible to the public and is charming and playful. In terms of the recruitment, this is the “honeymoon phase”. The focus is to expand the organization and the emphasis is on the present.

The apocalyptic, paranoiac, decadent phase is when the numbers of recruits have leveled off and explanations need to be found. The public is now seen as too stupid and blind to acknowledge the merits of the cult. In the declining stage, the message becomes pessimistic, with a doomsday “I told you so” tone. Outsiders cease to be welcomed in a spirit of satisfying their curiosity. Rather they are seen as enemies out to destroy the organization. Part of the descendent phase also involves the guru making more grandiose claims while promising to invoke occult power. The membership begins to have doubts.

Sullivanians’ Stages of Cults

The Sullivanians definitely went through these stages. Siskind, in her sociological analysis of them, calls the proselytizing phase the “Halcyon Years” from 1969-1978. Siskind calls the apocalyptic phase “the Revolutionary period of 1979-1983. Between 1984 and 1992 there was a steep decline in membership. In the first period the emphasis was on the psychology of the individual and their full development, including taking classes and the practice of the arts. The full enjoyment of life through sex, friendship, creativity and community was all supported. They also had a comedy club run by a very talented member, Luba Elman who was also responsible for early theatrical productions which later turned into the Fourth Wall Theatre Company. Between 1970 and 1974 the Sullivanian community grew at a steady rate of 100 new members a year, culminating at a peak of 400 in 1974. Political relations with other leftists had some tension but that did not stop cooperation in large protests.

There were four shock waves which were scattered across the landscape of the Sullivanian community between 1977 to 1983 that turned it from growing, hopeful community into a more stagnant, paranoid and isolated community. The first was the driving out of Luba Elman as the organizer of the Fourth Wall Repertory Company and her replacement by therapist turned playwright and actress, Joan Harvey. Both she and her partner Saul were dictatorial in their expectations of the members of the stage crew and everyone else in the Fourth Wall community.

Another very dramatic event was the Fourth Wall takeover of the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. The previous company refused to leave the building although the lease was up. They were forced out in an orchestrated attack, with waves of Fourth Wall people invading the building. Some took over the stage sets, rebuilt them with the carpentry and electrical skills of the Fourth Wall community. Two hours after the initial takeover, 160 more members came to support the takeover and guard the building. Then they set up an elaborate security system to guard the building. The violent nature of the whole process must have affected the moral of people. Artie Honan, one of the chief organizers of the takeover, said: ”Looking back, I feel that this was a senseless act of violence. Something I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been taking direction from Saul. (What’s a Smart Guy Like Me…) I doubt he was alone in these sentiments. Later he said I was preoccupied about having to organize security coverages …I had no time to reflect on the experience or to think about how it ran against the grain of my values. Lack of time to think is characteristic of all cults.

A third major event was the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. This spread fear in the community. It led to a panic in which 200 community members en masse fled to Florida to avoid radiation. This event turned the Sullivanians into an explicitly political community as Saul’s Maoist orientation came to the fore. House meetings went from every day discussions about household and personal problems to political book readings and discussion groups. It was in this period that Saul implemented a Maoism anti-intellectual campaign in which community members would renounce their class background in group self-confession circles.

A fourth major event was the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. This directly impacted the size of the community and the sex-economy of the organization. The Fourth Wallers were naturally wary of having sex with outsiders and limited the sexual activity to the already existing members. Since, on average, the women outnumbered the men two to one, the shortage affected the women more than the men. There was even a Male Chauvinism campaign within the community to force the men to have sex with women who didn’t have partners! Please see Table A for a contrast between the two stages within the Sullivan community

Characteristics of Sociopathic Leaders

In their book Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias identify fifteen characteristics of a sociopath that could apply to a cult leader. Here they are:

Glibness and superficial charm
Conning and maneuvering
Grandiose sense of self
Pathological lying
Lack of remorse, shame or guilt
Shallow emotions
Incapacity to love
Sensation seeking
Impulsivity and lack of behavioral control
Early behavior problems with juvenile delinquency
Scapegoating
Promiscuous sexual behavior and infidelity
Erratic work history of fits and starts
Materialistic lifestyle
Criminal and entrepreneurial versatility

Saul Newton as a Sociopath

As repulsive as Saul Newton might be to you and to me, he did not have all fifteen characteristics of a sociopath. I will begin by eliminating the characteristics he did not possess. We know very little of his history, so we don’t know anything about whether his teenage behavior might be categorized as juvenile delinquency or whether he had an erratic work history. From my reading I did not find instances of sensation-seeking. He put members in the Sullivanians community in risky situations, but he seemed to be sure that he and any of his wives were well-protected. It would be unfair to characterize him as having shallow emotions. He had problems controlling his anger, as in beating his wives. There is nothing I’ve read that indicated that Newton showed any deep emotion but anger. It is reasonable to say he was emotionally repressed, rather than being shallow.

Criminal and entrepreneurial creativity in cults usually means if one cult group fails and goes bankrupt, the leader wheels and deals and repackages himself with a new name and organization as Werner Erhard did. As far as I know, Saul Newton did not do this. He stuck with the Sullivanian community all his life. Lastly, a “materialistic lifestyle” is a very vague term. How many cars, boats, planes and houses does a leader have to possess to qualify as being materialistic? From my reading, I would classify Newton as upper middle-class, akin to a doctor, lawyer or architect living on the Upper West Side of New York City. He and his wives had their own chefs, childcare providers and shoppers. He owned a brownstone building. Newton lived well, but he didn’t have seven Cadillacs, as Rajneesh had. He did not own any boats or planes, nor did he buy other buildings and deal in real estate. He did not have the lifestyle of L. Ron Hubbard, Reverend Moon or Werner Erhard.

However, Newton had all the remaining characteristics of a sociopath big-time. He had superficial charm, and as I said earlier, both men and women characterized him as charismatic. He clearly was conning and manipulating the community all his life. He got them to take over a theatre building, told them who could and couldn’t date and set up an elaborate surveillance system for tracking people while convincing the members to do all the work. He maneuvered with Joan Harvey to oust Luba Elman from the Fourth Wall community and put themselves in the leadership position. He seemed to be a pathological liar, meaning he lied so much he lost track of the boundaries between truth and falsehood. There is no indication in either of the books I read that he has the slightest regret or remorse for anything he did. Neither were there any examples in which Newton claimed to love anyone. He was not loved by community members, but feared. In a small funeral gathering in 1992 not a single member of the Sullivan community showed up.

Newton definably had a grandiose sense of himself. What kind of person would have put himself at the head of a psychotherapy organization with no degree in the field or even having been in therapy himself? He was almost compulsively promiscuous. He had no problem asking his female patients for sex as part of the sessions. At the end of his life when he was suffering from dementia, he continued to see clients even when his memory was failing him. Newton was clearly impulsive (at least around getting angry) and could not control himself. However, in other situations he was extremely deliberative as he plotted and schemed to manipulate community members. Lastly, he was always blaming community members when things didn’t go right. He showed no power of self-reflection in seeing how his behavior was partly responsible for anything.

Reasons People Stayed in the Community

Why do People Stay?

Lalich and Tobias lay down the following most common reasons people stay in cults:

Attachment to new beliefs
Cognitive dissonance
Entrapment
Peer pressure
Exhaustion from overwork allows little time for objectivity or self-reflection
Burned bridges separate members from their past
Being ridiculed and called names by cult members is very painful
Fear for your life
Guilt and embarrassment over having participated in the group to begin with

From the two books I’ve read about the Sullivanians, I would say virtually every one of these psychological conditions were operating. In the early years, the major belief centered around a conviction that their nuclear family was the major part of their problems. Giving up their belief would mean facing they were dupes who then burned their bridges and hurt their families badly. It would definitely cause cognitive dissonance. Community members were clearly entrapped. Most spend anywhere between 5 and 20 years in the community, forging deep friendships. They spent hundreds of hours in therapy and in the last years of the community, that was not cheap. For many, their livelihoods were dependent on the community and their living situations were all tied together. It is completely understandable they would not want to cut their losses.

There was a great deal of peer pressure to stay in the group. It was difficult to think clearly about whether or not to leave when they could not easily discuss openly their reservations about staying. They could never be sure if what they said would get back to the leadership. In addition, by the early 1980s, the economy was contracting, requiring members to work longer. Also, Newton was becoming increasingly demanding of members to be available for work on the Fourth Wall community. As Artie Honan says many times in his autobiography, there was little time to reflect on the big picture. Most were like frogs in slowly boiling water. They couldn’t see what was happening to them.

Unlike other leftist cults, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of name calling, but Saul Newton was brutal about getting rid of any community member he felt was too much trouble and, perhaps more painfully, community members executed his wishes. People were kicked out of the community quickly, often told they had 24 hours to leave their group housing situations. In at least one instance a person’s things were thrown in the street. Ex-members were shunned and ignored in public and the Upper West Side of New York is not a place to easily find anonymity.

Saul Newton was a violent man. He beat his wives and occasionally publicly punched a few of the men in the community. The violence he used in orchestrating the takeover of the theatre was probably never forgotten by anyone. When one of Saul’s psychological proteges decided to leave, upon Newton’s instruction he was followed, grabbed from behind and held over the subway tracks.

If members decided to leave, they had little in the way of a support system. Their families were heart-broken, angry and some members were disowned. The road back was unknown, lonely and full of doubt. There was no recovery groups from cult in those days. I don’t really know that the Sullivanian community felt a sense of guilt upon leaving the way members of other cults might. If a member got into the cult early, in the good days of the first seven years, those memories must have been breath-taking, intense and not easily forgettable compared to whatever normal life followed. It was the period from the early 1980s on they might have felt regretful about.

Aftermath for Cult Members

In their book Cults in Our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich identify five major areas of life ex-cult members have to deal with:

Practical everyday life
Emotional volitivity
Cognitive inefficiencies
Theoretical instabilities
Lack of a social network

How Ex- Sullivanians Members Managed Their Lives in The Aftermath

Practical, everyday life

The two books I read on this subject do not have much information about how group members managed after the community broke up. Most of what follows will be what I would call reasonable speculation. In the area of everyday living, I believe the Sullivanians did better than ex-members of other cults. For example, Sullivanians had to find work to support themselves while in the cult and they succeeded in landing jobs in the arts or doing technical work. While ex-members who became therapists were dependent on referrals, this was not a community that was totally dependent economically. The same was true about managing money and finding an apartment. Members had practice in doing these things even when in the cult. While the Sullivanians were not provided with their own medical and health care, as upper middle-class urbanites they would not go without health and medical care as many members of other cults did. All this doesn’t mean they did not suffer. But compared to other cults, the climb back up might not have been as steep.

Emotional volatility

In terms of emotional volatility, I suspect the Sullivanians were more like other cults in that members suffered from PTSD, insomnia and dissociation at times. I don’t think difficulty concentrating or flashbacks were part of the psychological processes they had to constantly fight off because there were not that many bad experiences. I don’t believe a loss of a sense of humor was a psychological condition. Membership in households provided opportunity for play and laughter. It wouldn’t take much to bring them back. Depression over loss of the Sullivanian community and its vision must have been great. Before the community as a whole broke up, Saul‘s treatment of those who left would give them every reason to fear for themselves and their loved ones.

Cognitive inefficiencies

Many members of other cults have trouble thinking critically when they leave. Especially in spiritual cults which place a great deal of emphasis on meditation, and other altered states of consciousness, where critical thinking is frowned upon. Some young members of cults never learned to think critically. They simply did not know how to set up spread sheets for weighing the pros and cons of different job offers, school choices or romantic partners. After being in cults which for years explained causes and consequences by good and evil forces, it is difficult to reason about complex causes and intended and unintended consequences. I don’t think members of the Sullivanian community ran into these problems much. While they suspended judgment and criticality when under the spell of the leadership, they had to make analytical and comparative judgment while at work, with their partners and at house meetings when they were away from the leadership.

However, there is one area of cognition which must have been difficult and that is de-toxifying their vocabulary. All cults control their members thinking by narrowing the complexity of their language. When the leaders train someone’s vocabulary to use virtue and vice words, they are training them in dualistic thinking. Dualistic thinking makes people more controllable. This definitely went on in the Sullivanian community. It would take time to reintroduce previously “banned” vice words and repressed virtue words.

Theoretical instabilities

The overwhelming majority of cults are spin-offs from major theoretical schools in the fields of spirituality, politics or psychology. Spiritual cults might be spinoffs from Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity. Political cults may draw from the work of Marx or Lenin. Psychological cults may have drawn from Freud, Jung or Humanistic psychology of Maslow. Upon leaving the cult, the ex-cult member is in a theoretical no-man’s-land. Does the psychological cult member whose leader drew from Freud therefore reject Freud completely or are they able to separate Freud from the cult interpretation of Freud? In the case of spirituality, can a member of the Hindu cult like the Hari Krishna’s reject the cult but hang on to Hinduism? In the case of the Sullivanians, Saul Newton was probably a Maoist. Can ex- Sullivanians separate Maoism as practiced by the Sullivanians from Maoist groups in general? Will they remain Leninists and switch from Mao to Stalin? Will they remain Leninists and become Trotskyists? Will they become democratic socialists?

A more extreme strategy is to reject the field entirely. So, a follower of a spiritual cult may become an atheist. A member of a political cult might become anti-political or apolitical. A member of a psychology cult might join a group that is anti-psychological, such as Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who led the movement against his own field. This may be a good choice because you are starting from scratch. This may also be a bad choice because you are starting from scratch with no infrastructure. There are no easy answers.

Lack of a social network

As I mentioned earlier, leaving a cult is devastating for a support system. Most cult members have burned bridges with their family and friends, church and clubs they were once a part of. However, relative to other cults, with the Sullivanians the situation may have been different. I can imagine that anybody who left the cult in the early 1980s when the community was still functioning well would have a rough time. However, once the community itself was disbanded, it was a different story. Why? Because the members of this cult had lived together for years unsupervised directly by the leadership. They played together, they made art together and they made love together, hard and often. These types of connections are easy to remember and hard to forget. Artie Honan says he is still Facebook friends with many former members. He also reports that in 2007, they had a reunion in Harlem. One hundred and fifty people came. Considering the Sullivanians peaked in membership in 1974 at 400, this turnout shows there is something of quality in this community that superseded Saul Newton and the rest of the cult leadership.

How the Sullivanians Compared to the Experience of Other Cults

I have a number of reasons for suspecting that the Sullivanians had it better than other cults. In the first place, they did not emerge out of an ecological, economic or political crisis. Neither did they come into the cult at an impressionable age of late teens or early twenties. My sense is that most members were in their mid to late 20s when they joined and were probably more grounded. That meant people were less desperate when they joined the group. Secondly, unlike most, if not all cults, the sexual economy was far more horizontal. Members slept with each other, not just with the leadership, as in other cults. Thirdly, women were as sexually free as the men. Though Saul Newton was definitely patriarchal, women still had many sexual relationships with their peers, just as the men did. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, the social networks that were built had relative autonomy from the leadership, especially in the living situations. This allowed them to form subgroups with their own experiences, independently of the leadership. In most cults, subgroups are not allowed to form. It was these experiences in subgroups that made it possible not to lose complete touch with each other after the Sullivanians broke up as an institution. It made it possible to have a reunion 15 years later.

The Socialist Political Spectrum: Which Tendencies are Most Likely to Form Cults

So, what does the fate of the Sullivanians tell us (if anything) about which tendencies on the political spectrum are likely to form cults? Are Leninists, democratic socialists and anarchists all equally likely to form cults or are some more likely to form than others? Remember earlier I said that the key element in determining a cult is not the beliefs but rather how the cult was organized. In addition, charisma, by itself is not enough to institutionalize a cult.

A good example of a socialist organizer who was charismatic but never turned his group into a cult was Murray Bookchin. I met Murray 50 years ago on the lower East Side of Manhattan and I can testify that he had a great deal of charisma and a significant following among young hippie anarchists. This continued as he moved to Vermont to teach and founded the Institute for Social Ecology. But the Institute for Social Ecology or any other organization he was involved in did not became a cult because the egalitarian principles of anarchism blocked this from happening.

It would be unfair to characterize the Sullivanians as a pure political group. It was not a real political group until the 1980s. Yet the leader of the organization, Saul Newton, was a Maoist and during the last years of the group, he did use Maoist tactics like self-confession of the members’ class backgrounds, along with criticism and self-criticism. In my previous article, a major focus was on a group called the Democratic Workers Party which definitely was a cult with a Leninist focus. What about other Leninists groups?

In their hostile analysis of Leninist organization, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth identify five other Leninist groups that were either cults or might have at least cultlike characterhoods. Harvey Jackins’ Reevaluation Counseling and Fred Newman’s New Alliance Party and social therapy, Gerry Healy; Ted Grant and Gino Perente also led organizations that had cult-like characteristics which were either Stalinist or Trotskyist in orientation. Each received a chapter’s attention in the book On the Edge.

Tourish and Wohlforth summarize their book:

Each and every Marxist Leninist grouping has exhibited the same cultic symptoms: Authoritarianism, conformity, ideological rigidity, fetishistic dwelling on apocalyptic fantasies. Not all Leninist groups are full-blown cults. However, we have yet to discover one that did not have some cultic features (213).

As Lenin spelled out in 1910 in What is to Be Done, socialist ideas were to be introduced to the working class from the outside by professional revolutionaries drawn largely from the middle class. They view themselves as a chosen people, the possessor of a gnosis beyond the grasp of ordinary folk. Therefore, a separate organization is in order, tight discipline is required and superhuman sacrifice is demanded from members. Democratic centralism is required so that all members publicly defend the agreed positions of the party, whenever opinions they might hold to the contrary in private. (214) The communist front organization is particularly suited to political cult-manipulation (216).

In contrast to this, the organization of the Democratic Socialists of America has loosely associated chapters and the whole organization is opposed to any kind of authoritarian organization. In fact, they organized themselves intentionally so they would have no resemblance to Leninism.

Qualification

I do not mean to imply that Leninism is not successful as a political tendency in the world. Russia, China and Cuba have all offered working class people significant improvements in their lives by way of steady employment, good wages, safe and reasonably priced housing, free healthcare and literacy over the last 100 years. With the exception of Sweden between the 1930s and the 1970s, social democracy has not had a good track record with the poor and working class. As for anarchism, it certainly had a great deal of success in revolutionary movements in Russia, Spain and recently in Rojava. The problem with the anarchists is that it is harder to tell what successes have carried over after the revolutionary period ended.

The issue in this article, however, is not how successful each of the three socialist tendencies are in the end. Which group is most likely to use cult-like methods to get there? It is clear to me that Leninism has the most cult-like potential according to the criteria in this article.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults: Sullivanians from Hedonism to Group Terror first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Put the Banks Under State Control!

Trotskyist Platform — Wed, 12 May 2021 01:13:53 +0000

In recent years, the ripping off of customers, deceit and even outright fraud practiced by Australian finance sector businesses has gained much attention. Four years ago it was revealed how CommInsure, the insurance arm of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), had refused to make promised life insurance payments to heart attack survivors. They “justified” this by using a definition of a heart attack that was so dodgy that even some people who had such a severe heart attack that they had to be resuscitated were denied their entitled pay outs! Such devious practices have been undertaken by finance sector enterprises big and small – from the big four banks and insurance giants to brokers and loan enablers and to retail businesses that hand out loans. As a result the banks, insurance companies and the brokers and others connected to them are widely hated by the masses. With good reason! Yet finance sector institutions have a decisive influence on society. For it is they who determine how credit is distributed and credit is absolutely critical to the running of modern economies. Especially at this desperate time when this country and much of the world face both a public health emergency and economic collapse, it is vital that credit is allocated in ways that can best respond to the COVID-19 virus threat and into areas that can best ensure that the jobs and wages of millions of working class people are guaranteed. Yet would you trust the lying, greed-driven bosses of the banks and insurance companies to do this? You would be totally nuts if you did! We need to put all the banks and insurance companies under state control! In other words, we need to nationalise the finance sector.

In late 2017, there was so much anger built up against the banks, insurance giants and brokers that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, realising the need to “restore the credibility” of the finance sector, finally acceded to widespread demands for a royal commission into the banking and insurance industry. That Royal Commission revealed more details of what many of us already knew. Banks were giving secret commissions to brokers to entice them to get home buyers to take out home loans with their particular banks. Banks hid these payments in order to trick their customers into believing that their customers’ “own” brokers were “independent.” But, actually, the payments that these brokers received from particular banks gave them an incentive to get people to take out mortgages with these same particular banks even if that was not the best option for the broker’s customer. And the brokers did this in spades! Moreover, since the commission received by the broker got larger the bigger the loan taken out by their customers, the brokers, with a nod and a wink from the banks paying them, often pushed their customers into buying a more expensive house than they could actually afford. That is part of why household debt is so frighteningly high in Australia.

One of the aspects of the finance sector industry that was exposed is the practice of charging clients fees for no service. Banks and insurance companies and their financial planning and superannuation subsidiaries were found to be charging people “advice” and “service” fees for their investments and superannuation accounts but then providing no advice at all. Put simply, the banks and insurance companies were downright stealing from hundreds of thousands of their customers. AMP, NAB, CBA, ANZ and Westpac were found to be the worst offenders. The amount that these companies stole from their customers through fees for no service was officially estimated to be well over a billion dollars. The real figure could be even higher. Moreover, some of these institutions had even knowingly continued to charge their customers fees for no service … after they had died! The fees would then be paid out of the estate of the deceased customers – in other words, be paid largely by the close relatives of the deceased customers, most often their spouses and children. The Commonwealth Bank even knowingly charged one of their dead clients fees for “financial planning advice” for more than a decade after they died! Meanwhile, insurance giant AMP continued to charge some of their dead customers life insurance premiums.

A Slap on the Wrists for the Swindling Banks and Insurance Companies

The banking royal commission and the media coverage surrounding it tended to focus on atrocities committed against small business owners, farmers and other middle class customers – especially upper-middle class ones – or against better paid workers able to acquire substantial savings. Indeed, under the capitalist system the big capitalists – at the apex of which stand the bank owners – rip off the small-scale capitalist exploiters and all of them, while leaching the most from wage workers, skim off also from the middle class, even from the upper middle class. Yet, the people most hurt by the thieving greed of the banks and insurance companies are average income workers and especially lower-paid, casual and unemployed workers. They are the people most hurt by the banks charging large set fees as these fees often make up such a big proportion of their modest savings. It is poorly paid workers, retrenched workers and long term unemployed workers who are also the most burdened by the extortionate interest rates charged by banks in credit card accounts. It is the low income of these people which pushed them to get into debt in the first place, while the cruel interest rate they must pay off with their debts plus their meagre incomes ensures that many have little possibility of ever paying off these debts. And often desperate for credit, casual and unemployed workers, low income single mothers and people with disabilities are the most vulnerable to being ripped off by loan brokers and short term credit providers handing out loans with exorbitant interest rates.

The banking royal commission did hear about how insurance companies were using aggressive telemarketing and deceptive policies to rip off Aboriginal customers, many struggling on low incomes. It was told of how insurance companies operating in remote Aboriginal communities took advantage of language barriers and Aboriginal people’s tendency to be friendly and polite to sign up on the phone Aboriginal people to life and funeral insurance that they neither truly consented to nor even needed. One of the enterprises exposed for pushing unnecessary funeral insurance on Aboriginal people is the “Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund” (ABCF). With its name including “Aboriginal Community” and its use of a rainbow serpent image, ABCF gave the impression that it was an Aboriginal community-run organisation. But it was not! It was a private, profit-driven company that was neither owned nor managed by Aboriginal people. However, ABCF used the trust gained by the appearance of being a community-run organisation to push Aboriginal people into forking out large amounts for funeral insurance that they did not need. Thus ABCF often signed up healthy young Aboriginal woman in their twenties and early thirties for funeral insurance. They even pushed thousands of Aboriginal parents into getting funeral insurance for their babies in schemes that would cost up to $100,000 over a lifetime! ABCF owners then quietly excluded families of Aboriginal people who died from suicide from receiving payouts, thus ensuring that they would not to have to pay claims of a very large proportion of the insured children that actually did die young.

The banking royal commission did also hear snippets about the massive exploitation of low-income people by businesses handing out consumer leases and so-called payday loans – where people are lent money until their next pay check at massive interest rates. Aboriginal financial counsellor, Lynda Edwards, also told of how car dealers took advantage of the necessity for cars in remote areas to sell Aboriginal people dud cars with ultra-high interest loans. A report published a year ago by Flinders University detailed how one Aboriginal customer was made to pay $52,000 for an $18,000 car at an interest rate of 35% despite the fact that the over-priced used car stopped working long before the loan was repaid! Indeed, the royal commission was told of how some Aboriginal people had been charged even higher interest rates for car loans, rates of 48%!

Yet the nature of the Royal Commission was such that it did not compel those involved in such scams and high-interest loan pushing to defend their actions. As senior counsel assisting the commission, Rowena Orr QC, explained: “We will not be considering consumer leases, payday loans or in-store credit arrangements in these hearings because they do not fall within the terms of reference of the commission.” Put simply, the Royal Commission was not meant to truly protect the interests of low-income people from the predatory behaviour of banks, insurance firms and retail business owners. To the extent that the banking royal commission was not entirely about “restoring the credibility of the finance sector” or simply about allowing the furious masses to vent steam in a way that does not actually harm the interests of the finance industry bigwigs, the investigation was aimed at curbing the excesses of the bank owners in the interests of other sections of the capitalist class – including retail sector bigwigs, “small and medium size” enterprise bosses and big farm owners – as well as the more privileged sections of the middle class that the upper class rely on for social and political support. After all, the state in capitalist countries is an executive committee for managing the affairs of the capitalist labour-exploiting class as a whole. At times they have to slightly clip the wings of even their most powerful section – the finance sector bigwigs – in order to ensure the interests of the rich ruling class as a whole. But even here the Royal Commission’s impact was minimal. Sure, there were some stunning revelations of the depth of the banks and insurers’ greed and deceit. Several finance sector CEOs and directors also had to resign from their positions in the wake of the revelations and, mind you, then take away multi-million dollar severance pay and shareholdings, thank you very much. Yet Royal Commission head, Kenneth Hayne, did not recommend one single charge against any specific finance sector boss despite the fact that the hearings of the commission plainly showed that banks and insurance companies had stolen and swindled well over a billion dollars from hundreds of thousands of their customers. Instead, the commissioner handed over 24 recommendations to the regulators over instances of misconduct and charged them with the responsibility of considering any action. However, he refused to even name the people and institutions involved. And over a year since the final report of the commission was handed down, not a single finance sector boss has been charged let alone been put behind bars. Meanwhile, even after having promised to implement nearly all of Commissioner Hayne’s recommendations, the government has yet to even introduce legislation to turn several of the recommendations into law.

The more important point is that Commissioner Hayne’s report only recommended cosmetic changes to the finance sector. Cold calling of financial products over the phone was recommended to be banned and mortgage brokers would be required to act in the best interests of their customers (as if that is going to actually happen!). However, the economic power, profitability and overall impunity of the finance sector corporations will be largely untouched. In fact, the bank owners were so delighted with the outcome of the Royal Commission that the first stock market trading after the commissioner handed down his final report saw the share prices of the big four banks skyrocket by almost A$20 billion – their biggest one day rise ever!

The limp recommendations of the Royal Commission are, indeed, what the right-wing Australian government always intended to be the outcome. Indeed, the Liberal government was so intent on enhancing the reputation of the bank bosses that shortly before the Royal Commission was announced, they and the bank heads arranged for the bank bosses to send a letter to the government themselves calling for the Royal Commission! This enabled the government to put the bank bigwigs in good light by saying that the banks themselves wanted the inquiry. Indeed, the relationship between bank owners and the government is so cosy that the letter from the heads of the big four banks to the government calling for the Royal Commission was first sent in draft form to the then treasurer, Scott Morrison, to be vetted by him before being made an official letter the next day! Let’s not forget that the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who, kicking and screaming, called the Royal Commission was himself the owner of an investment banking firm and later a managing director for the Australian arm of U.S. banking giant, Goldman Sachs.

In order to appease their working class base and appeal to widespread middle class public opinion, the ALP Opposition has been more critical of the banks than the Coalition government. But let us remember that when they were in government previously from 2007 to 2013, when some of the most blatant fraud by the finance sector companies was being committed, the ALP also did nothing to stop it. Today in the wake of the Royal Commission, the ALP only called for implementing its weak recommendations. Nothing more. The ALP are certainly not calling for putting the banks under state control or even under greater regulation. After all it was the former Hawke-Keating ALP government that carried out the biggest deregulation of the finance sector in Australian history. They removed the cap on the interest rates that banks could charge for home loans and abolished other controls on bank interest rates. In short, the Hawke-Keating Labor government freed up bank owners to do whatever it takes to maximise profits regardless of the consequences to society. Most harmfully, they also privatised the formerly state-owned Commonwealth Bank.

While the ALP is a party with a working class base, its futile program of trying to improve the lot of workers while accepting the capitalist order means that it necessarily needs to collaborate with – and ultimately kowtow to – that apex of capitalist power, finance capital. Thus, the ALP’s ties to the bank bosses are not far behind those of the conservatives. The investment banking firm that Malcolm Turnbull established, referred to above, was actually set up in a partnership with none other than former NSW ALP premier, Neville Wran, and Nicholas Whitlam – the son of former prime minister and ALP icon, Gough Whitlam. The bank was actually called Whitlam Turnbull & Co Ltd. Today, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, who has done so much to deceive the population by being the chief apologist for the bank bosses is former Queensland ALP premier, Anna Bligh. Meanwhile, during the last financial year that disclosures of political donations have been revealed, 2018-19, the ALP received more than $2.5 million from Westpac alone! They were also given $50,000 from the main body representing general insurance firms, the Insurance Council of Australia, as well as plenty of other big donations from individual insurance companies and other banks. And that does not include the large amount of political donations that are disguised or hidden.

Of course, the banks and insurance companies also made big donations to the Liberal Party too. The Insurance Council of Australia gave them $27,500 and Anna Bligh’s Australian Banking Association the same amount. For its part, CBA donated $55,000. Westpac Bank donated a hefty $82,500 to the Liberals but that pales against their $2.5 million donations to the ALP during 2018-19. Likely, the Westpac bigwigs knew that they already had the Liberals fully in their bag!

The Myth that the Big Corporations are Owned by “Everyday Australians” through Our Superannuation

The problem isn’t simply that the banks and other finance businesses sometimes engage in open theft from their customers and other deceptive conduct. It’s the normal working of these enterprises that is the main problem. Banks make their money by extracting fees from account holders and primarily by charging a higher interest rate on the loans that they give out than the rate that they pay depositors. And they leach a lot of money that way! In the 2018-19 financial year, the “big four” Australian banks and the three biggest Australian-owned insurance companies, IAG, Suncorp and QBE, together extracted nearly $29 billion from us and that’s not including the huge amounts also grabbed by smaller banks and insurers as well as by mortgage brokers, consumer lease providers and payday cash operators. And that was considered a bad year for them! All this money extracted by the finance sector businesses is like an extra tax on the masses. But it is a tax where the proceeds don’t go into the public budget but into the hands of the wealthy finance sector business owners. If we note that there are currently about 9.8 million households and then do a quick calculation we find that the biggest four Australian-owned banks and largest three Australian-owned insurers are leaching $3,000 in profit, on average, from each household every year. To put that in perspective, that is more than one in five dollars of what an unemployed single person receives in the Newstart Allowance (if one excludes the temporary increase to the Newstart Allowance granted during the Covid-19 pandemic)!

Most working class and middle class people are only too aware that “The Banks” are ripping us off. But who do we exactly mean when we talk about “The Banks” that leach from us. Most of us think of the CEOs and the directors that award themselves huge salary packages. And with good reason! Last year, Westpac’s CEO took home over $5 million, ANZ CEO Shayne Elliot even more and IAG CEO Peter Harmer topped the lot receiving a five and a half million dollars package. And that was all in a year when the bank bosses, aware that they were under the spotlight, wanted to pretend that that they were feeling contrition for their devious deeds by awarding themselves lower payments than usual!

Yet as obscene are the payments are to the bank executives, that is still only a small percentage of bank profits. Where else are banks gigantic earnings going? Certainly not to their rank and file employees! So let’s take a look at Australia’s biggest bank, CBA. Last financial year CBA had a total operating income of $24 billion. Some of it they spent on equipment, wages, occupancy and operating costs. Most of their income then, after paying tax, ends up as profit for their owners. Nearly $8.5 billion to be precise. Of that nearly a billion went to beef up the assets of the bank to help its owners make greater profits in the future and $7.6 billion was given as dividends to the banks shareholders, i.e. to the banks owners. That’s who is taking most of the wealth extracted from the masses by the banks. By contrast, the more than 48,000 employees of the CBA received $5.5 billion in salaries and superannuation, which is a lot less than the shareholders received for doing absolutely no work at all. The amount received by the bank employees is also less than a quarter of the bank’s overall operating income. And of these more than 48,000 employees, the majority of them, the rank and file employees – say at least 40,000 of the workers – would each receive small slices of the salary cake while the managers and executives each take gluttonously big slices. After all, the bank’s top executives and other directors (there are just 20 of them), alone were paid $40 million last year; and that is counted as a “staff” cost. By contrast the average salary package, including superannuation, of CBA’s other employees is $114,000 – which is 40 times less than what the CEO took home. Moreover, when you exclude the managers and others in the top 20% of highest paid staff who would bring up that average income number, one would find that the annual wage of the vast majority of CBA workers wouldn’t be much more than – and in many cases less than – $75,000 and certainly well below $100,000. Moreover, to the bank bigwigs, these bank workers are expendable. As soon as the bank bosses decide that they can make a still higher profit with fewer workers, they will throw into the dole queues the employees whose hard work has allowed bank executives and big shareholders to acquire such immense wealth. Over the last several years, the bigwigs of the big four banks have together retrenched tens of thousands of workers. In late 2017, then NAB CEO, Andrew Thorburn, infamously announced the axing of 6,600 jobs at the very same time that he gloatingly announced that the bank had made a whopping annual profit of $6.6 billion.

So, who then are the shareholders who are reaping the rewards of the banks’ ripping off of the masses’ money? The finance corporations’ bosses and their bigwigs try to sell us the line that their companies are owned mostly by superannuation funds and through the dividends distributed to these funds their profits end up going to “ordinary, everyday Australians.” Nothing could be further from the truth! But before exploring this point in more detail, it is important to here make a point about superannuation more broadly. Superannuation, as a means of distributing income to the aged, in contrast to pensions, is not fair. It is not fair not only in practice but in the very concept of it.

Under the superannuation system a proportion of people’s income (9.5% of their gross wage currently) when they are working goes into their personal accounts which gets managed by superannuation companies and is then accessible when they retire. So a worker on the minimum wage in a full-time job gets $3,467 of superannuation put into their account each year. By contrast, the Westpac CEO last year received $44,320 in superannuation payments, nearly 13 times more than a worker on the minimum wage gets. Many bosses get even more. Last year, the CEO of Australian-owned mining giant, BHP, received a staggering $425,000 in superannuation payments – that’s more than 120 times greater than what a worker on the minimum wage gets! By contrast if you are a worker unfortunate enough to be either unemployed or one of the increasing number of cash in hand workers or a domestic worker or a casual worker who gets only a few hours in a month of work you get no super whatsoever. Yet it is precisely these people who need higher payments when they are aged because they would have much less savings and assets than people who had been receiving higher superannuation contributions. Moreover, the superannuation system reinforces the discrimination in employment affecting women, Aboriginal people and migrants from African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. For in addition to the gender pay gap that women endure, the racist discrimination that causes Aboriginal people to have a much higher rate of unemployment than the broader population and the greater propensity of migrants to only be given lower paid jobs, women and migrants are much more likely to be in non-super receiving cash in hand and domestic work jobs than their male and Australian-born counterparts.

There is one rationale for superannuation – that wealth produced today needs to be set aside for when we have an ageing population in the future – that does have validity. But this should be addressed by making the bosses pay into a single, common pension fund out of which aged pensions can be paid equally to all of the elderly. Instead of the system of low pensions supplemented by people’s individual superannuation accounts, there should be much higher pensions for all and no individual superannuation. At least when a group of people are at an age when none of them are working, they should finally get paid equally! The current system, instead, carries through all the terrible inequality when people are of working age through to when people are retired.

So given how unequal people’s superannuation balances are, even if it were true that the banks and other big corporations are owned mainly by superannuation funds this would be grossly unfair. However, the truth is even more inequitable. For it is the very rich who own most of the stocks of the banks and other big companies. Superannuation funds own just a minority. How small a minority? Let us calculate that here using publicly available data. Given how much mythology there is about superannuation funds owning corporations, we will show each stage of the calculation. According to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, i.e. the industry body of the superannuation companies themselves, at the end of December 2019 these funds had a total of 1.9 trillion dollars in assets of which 22.0% was invested in Australian equities (https://www.superannuation.asn.au/resources/superannuation-statistics , accessed 3 April 2020). That comes to a figure of $418 billion for the total holdings in the Australian share market by the superannuation funds. Now the total market capitalisation of the Australian share market at the same time, the end of December, was $2339.71 billion (see https://www.gurufocus.com/global-market-valuation.php?country=AUS and scroll to 20 December 2019 in the graph “Australian Total Market Cap”). That gives the proportion of the shares in the Australian stock market owned by domestic superannuation funds at just 17.9%. That is a lot less than one in five shares.

To see the significance of this truth that local superannuation funds own just a minority of major Australian corporations, let us consider the following scenario. Imagine in the year 2022, after having to prune their profits slightly in 2019 following the exposure of some of their fraudulent practices and the lower profits that they could expect in the coming two years in the wake of the COVID-19 induced recession, the banks seek to raise their profits back to the extreme levels of a few years ago. Through hitting their customers with still higher fees and by charging a high interest rate on the loans they lend out relative to that which they give to depositors the banks raise their profits by, say, an extra $10 billion. Now the bank bosses and their many apologists in parliament would then spin the line that these higher profits are a good thing as they end up in the pockets of “ordinary everyday Australians” through the dividends being accumulated by superannuation funds investing in the banks. However, if all these additional profits end up being distributed as dividends to shareholders and assuming that the percentage of bank shares owned by Australian super funds is about the same as the overall proportion of Australian stocks owned by these funds, just $1.79 billion of these extra share dividends would go to these funds. Even less would make their way into actual superannuation accounts. For the superannuation companies would take a healthy portion of the dividends as commissions and fees – and as we know even as advice fees when they give no advice! And guess what, many of these superannuation companies are themselves directly owned by banks or insurance companies. So part of the bank profits supposedly going into superannuation funds end up going back to the bank and, thus, into the pockets of its big non-superannuation shareholders. The amount actually going to the superannuation accounts of the public may be closer to $1.4 billion. Yet, to get to this scenario of higher bank profits, we have paid out $10 billion in extra fees and higher interest payments. So, excluding the big shareholders of the banks, the public end up much worse off overall, worse off by about $10 billion less the approximately $1.4 billion that we reclaim in higher returns on our super; i.e. we together end up about overall $8.6 billion worse off. And it is working class people who would suffer the pain disproportionately. For a low-paid worker, while paying the higher fees and higher interest rates paid by others, gets very little back in the way of higher returns on their superannuation and many workers none at all.

While we are dealing with this subject, the same analogy would apply to the issue of wages and profits. If the bosses managed to drive down our wages throughout the economy so that they collectively make a $10 billion higher profit than they otherwise would, the apology that business leaders give, that this ends up back in workers’ pockets through increases to their superannuation, is completely false. Wage and salary earners would collectively end up about $8.6 billion worse off. And again the pain would be borne most by lower paid, cash-in-hand and unemployed workers. So, the next time a co-worker, who has been influenced by ruling class propaganda, tries to tell you that higher profits for banks and other corporations is good for us, please, please, please educate them about the reality!

Who are “the Banks”?

So now that it is clear that we are not the indirect owners of the banks through our superannuation funds, who then are the actual owners of these hated corporations? The second lie that apologists for the banks promote, other than the one about superannuation funds, is that the banks are simply owned by “ordinary, everyday Australians” – so called “mum and dad shareholders.” This is actually an even bigger lie than the first one! Why? Firstly, most working class people don’t have the significant savings that would enable them to invest in the stock market. Low paid workers, unemployed workers and casual workers struggle to replace worn out clothes, deal with high electricity costs, pay the rent and often keep up with credit card debts too, let alone save significants amounts of money. Meanwhile, more decently paid workers often spend most of their working life paying off their home mortgage. Far from the majority of the working class being able to invest in shares, the reality is that household debt in Australia is at record levels. A small layer of better paid, more skilled and often older workers do sometimes invest in shares or alternatively in wealth management schemes that in turn invest in shares. However, most of the people holding shares are members of the capitalist, business-owning upper class and the more comfortable layers of the middle class – especially high-paid, upper-middle class professionals. So the “mum and dad shareholders” who supposedly hold most of the banks should more precisely be referred to as the “affluent mum and dad shareholders.” However, even this tells only a small part of the story. For average middle class shareholders – and even the upper middle class ones – while they are large in number only hold a very small portion of bank ownership. To see this, let us have a look at the latest annual report, the one for 2019, for Australia’s largest bank, CBA. According to the bank’s own report, those owning less than a 1,000 shares, who make up nearly three quarters of shareholders, own just one in ten of all shares. Now, given that the share price of the bank at the time that those figures were quoted for (15 July 2019) was $81.06, any one shareholder who was not in this category, i.e. was a shareholder who had more than 1,000 shares in the bank, had more than $81,060 invested there. These big investors who each invested more than $81,060 in the bank own 90% of the bank. Few workers and average middle class people could afford to put that kind of money in the shares of one company. Moreover, even amongst the upper middle class and wealthy capitalists who own most of the bank shares, it is the latter who own the lion’s share. Thus, the people and institutions who own more than 5,000 shares – that is who have the spare cash to invest more than $405,000 in the shares of just one company – own over two-thirds of the CBA. Moreover, the top 20 shareholders alone own nearly half the bank!

So who then are these very rich individuals owning most of Australia’s banks? That is censored information! The wealthy own much of their stakes in the finance sector through other banks acting as nominees for them. In other words, these rich investors get other banks to hold shares on their behalf in a way that hides their own identities. Without exception, in Australia’s big four banks at least the top six shareholders in each bank are these bank nominee holders. In the case of ANZ, all the top eight shareholders, who own 57% of the bank, are these nominee holders. That about typifies the nature of “democracy” within capitalist countries. The ruling class talk a lot about “transparency” but really it is only things that don’t matter too much that are transparent whereas the really important stuff is hidden from the masses. So here we have the most powerful economic institutions in the country, the ones who decide how credit is distributed and whose combined assets of $3.4 trillion (for the big four banks alone) are almost twice the country’s entire annual GDP … and we don’t even really know who owns them!

We do, however, know a few things about the major owners of the Australian banks and insurance companies. One thing that we do know is that they are rich Australians rather than people from overseas. CBA, for instance, is nearly four-fifths Australian-owned. You can bet that among the major owners of the banks and insurance companies, hidden through bank nominee holders, are many of Australia’s richest 200 people – capitalists whose combined wealth last year was found to be a staggering $342 billion! So if you managed to break through the secrecy wall of nominee holdings you would surely find that among the major shareholders of the banks would be people of the ilk of Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, James Packer, Anthony Pratt, Clive Palmer and Kerry Stokes.

The $160 million mega-yacht bought in 2017 by financial executive John Symond. Symond is one of the largest individual shareholders of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ultra-rich Australian owners and executives of Australia’s banks and other finance sector companies leach billions off the masses while the institutions that they control misdirect credit away from the areas most needed by working class people.

Where there is greater transparency is in the holdings of the executives and directors of these finance sector corporations. And they do have big shareholdings. ANZ CEO, Shayne Elliot, held nearly $5 million of shares in that bank. IAG boss, Peter Harmer, owned an even larger stake in his corporation, owning $7.6 million of shares. However, compared to the murky holdings held in secret by nominee companies, even these huge numbers are pretty small. One big bank shareholder who is not hidden behind a nominee company is the couple, Barry and Joy Lambert, who at the time of the CBA’s last annual report owned a whopping $220 million dollar stake. Joy and Barry Lambert are indeed, by the way, a “mum” and a “dad” – and these are precisely the type of “Australian mums and dads shareholders” that own the lion’s share of this country’s banks and other major corporations!

The Big Banks, Big Insurers and the Owners of Smaller Finance Companies

What about the institutions holding major stakes in the big finance corporations – that is, other than the companies acting as nominees for others? One such institutional investor, which is among the top twenty shareholders of each of Australia’s big four banks as well as of the big insurers, Suncorp and QBE, is Netwealth Investments. If we look at the last annual reports of these big finance corporations, we find that at that time, Netwealth held a total stake of $814 million in them. Now Netwealth Investments are a wealth management firm, so they are largely investing the money of other capitalists and upper middle class individuals in the big finance corporations. But Netwealth also takes a big chunk out of the money invested through these shareholdings as commissions and management fees. And who owns Netwealth? More than half of it is owned by the joint managing directors of the firm, Michael Heine and his son Matt. The last published Australian rich list has the family holding a combined wealth of more than $1.5 billion. As we can see, a big part of this wealth comes from grabbing a share of the profits that the banking and insurance corporations leach out of all of us.

So there you have it, the big banks and insurance companies act as a big collective feeding trough for capitalist pigs. Different capitalist exploiters come to put their snouts into the mega-earnings extracted by the big banks and insurers. And when they do so, they get a huge feed. The last CBA annual report, for example, boasted that shareholders gained a total return on their investments of 21% in just one year. That means, for instance, that the Lambert family’s stake in the bank would have given them a $46 million return in just one year … and that from doing no work whatsoever! By contrast a full-time cleaner doing hard and especially crucial and dangerous work at this time of pandemic will get 1,200 times less than this and only if her boss actually pays her the minimum wage.

The Heine family who own Netwealth are one of many owners of smaller finance sector businesses that have made a fortune by engaging in a similar kind of parasitism as the big banks do. At least fifteen of the people on Australia’s list of the richest 200 people extracted much of their money by running such enterprises. You very often see these people being interviewed on ABC current affairs programs related to the economy, which is worth noting for anyone who thinks that the ABC is substantially fairer and more independent of capitalist influence than the tycoon-owned media outlets. Among the finance sector bigwigs are Hamish Douglass, the biggest shareholder of wealth management firm, Magellan Financial; Jeff Chapman, owner of Bennelong Funds Management; Graham Tuckwell, owner of investment management firm, ETF Securities; David Paradice, owner of Paradice Investment Management and Kerr Neilson, the billionaire who owns the main stake in Platinum Asset Management. Supporters of public housing may recognise the latter name. Neilson was one of the ultra-rich people who notoriously bought up former public housing and publicly-owned buildings in Sydney’s inner-city Millers Point after the right-wing NSW government drove out low-income working class tenants and sold off the housing to wealthy individuals and speculators. In 2018, Neilson bought up three historic dwellings in Millers Point, known collectively as the George Talbots Townhouses, for $5 million.

The $30.5 million Point Piper mansion bought in 2014 by Nick Langley, owner of investment management firm RARE Infrastructure. Australia’s banks and other finance sector companies are largely owned by filthy rich capitalists and not by “everyday mum and dad shareholders.”

Another filthy rich owner of a finance sector corporation is the boss of buy-now-pay-later company, Flexigroup, Andrew Abercrombie. Abercrombie is also a Liberal Party powerbroker and major donor and is notorious for having stridently supported right-wing extremist, media commentator Andrew Bolt, when Aboriginal people took legal action against Bolt over vile racist slurs. Recently, Abercrombie was in the news after a high-society party that he hosted at his extravagant chalet in the US Aspen ski resort became the source of COVID-19 infection clusters after several of the super-rich guests refused to self-isolate and after returning to Australia spread the disease acquired at the party to Melbourne, Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and Sydney.

Many of the finance sector bosses in Australia’s rich list run businesses that not only make profits from operations here but also leach profits from people overseas. That is to be expected from major components of a ruling class that is not only capitalist but imperialist. However, as well as making profits from their own operations, these owners of smaller finance sector companies stand alongside mining magnates, media moguls and industrial capitalists in grabbing hefty slices of the loot extracted by the operations of the big banks and big insurers. This is both through their own major shareholdings in the banks – like those of the Lambert family who made their initial wealth through Barry Lambert’s previously owned financial planning company, Count Financial – and through gaining a big slice of the dividends from bank shares received by the funds that they manage. In this sense, the big banking and insurance companies operate like a legal, crime syndicate. Different, loosely connected capitalists come together through these corporations to jointly loot the masses.

Nationalize the Banks! Nationalize the Entire Health System!

The banks extract money from the masses in four different ways. The first two ways are obvious: through charging interest and fees and through exploiting the mental labour of their own workers. Thirdly, by lending to those buying investment properties, banks, from the interest that they receive, gain a share of the rent extracted by greedy landlords from tenants. There is also an important additional way that banks extract their revenue. For banks, insurance companies and investment managers put some of the money under their control into the shares and bonds of other businesses. In the case of banks they also make loans to these other firms. These other business bosses, whether they be those of manufacturing firms, retailers, developers, telecommunication and IT firms, transportation companies, mining corporations or agribusiness operations in turn make a profit through exploiting their own workers. Part of the wealth extracted from these workers is then returned to the banks as interest on loans and on any bonds held by the banks and also returned to finance sector firms more broadly as dividends on the stocks that they hold in these other companies. In this way, the owners of the finance sector companies gain a share of the profits exploited from workers throughout the economy.

This role of the finance sector – and the banks in particular – in the whole economy points to perhaps the biggest problem with the capitalist-owned finance sector. It is not simply that they leach from the people, it is also the way that they allocate credit and financial resources. And like everything else they do, they allocate credit almost solely on the basis of what can bring them the highest returns. That is partly why there is so much speculation in the housing sector and so little affordable housing available, both to buy or to rent. Banks know that they can gain much higher and more secure returns by giving loans to wealthy people buying multiple holiday homes and speculative high-end investment properties than to lend for the construction of cheaper housing for working class people to buy or to rent. Similarly, banks would rather allocate loans and investments to climate change-inducing coal mines and fossil fuel power stations that have little long term future than to focus their credit allocation into renewable power projects even if the former bring only slighter higher and more secure returns to the bank. Meanwhile, the profit-driven mode of the banks mean that medical research in Australia can struggle to get funding unless the chances of an immediate profit-making breakthrough are immediate. Yet medical science cannot but advance except through the trialling of many different ideas, only a tiny proportion of which will end up being used. Similarly in Australia, important technological development and scientific research – especially in basic sciences where the monetary benefits are not immediate – struggle to get bank loans or investment. By contrast, casino operators and advertising firms – who produce no net benefit to society but instead only help one lot of business owners to get richer at the expense of their rivals (and then vice versa!) – don’t seem to have any trouble raising credit.

One of the growing number of people in Australia forced to sleep the streets. A major reason for the large amount of homelessness is that Australia’s profit-driven banks, rather than directing credit to the building of public housing and housing affordable for the poor, divert credit to more lucrative high-end housing projects as well as for speculative housing investments.
Photo credit: ABC

If the misdirection of credit causes terrible problems in “normal” times, it can be literally fatal at a time of public health emergency and economic implosion like we are experiencing right now. Although, as we go to press, the rate of new infections in Australia appears to be slowing, people continue to die from COVID-19 and, what is more, the threat of much greater virus spread will emerge once social distancing measures are eased. That is why immediately, we need financial resources directed to urgent medical research to help find vaccines and better treatments for COVID-19. We need this research not only for the few projects seemingly most likely to bring financial profits in the future but for a wide range of research. That includes work into developing any non-vaccine treatment methods for the virus. Such research into treatment methods can be hugely life-saving but its results are also likely non-patentable and would bring the researchers – and thus their bank creditors – no real financial rewards. Even more urgently we need loans directed to particular manufacturers that are able to very quickly turn their factories into making personal protective equipment, infra-red thermometers, virus testing kits and ventilators. We also need credit being allocated into areas that will help reduce the level of job losses and at the same time direct jobs into areas that would aid the virus response – for instance by making home delivery of groceries and food more widespread. Yet the only way any of this has even a chance of happening is if control of the organisations that have the power over lending – that is, the banks – are taken out of the hands of their profit-driven owners and brought under state control. This gives the potential to plan the allocation of financial resources to both respond to the virus threat and avert economic collapse. For such planning to be effective, the banks really need to be run together as a single national entity. Modern computing technology and big data make that quite simple whether or not the banks actually operate under one logo. In summary what we need is the nationalisation of the banks and their conversion into a single state-run bank. We need that right now and we need that all the time!

Putting the banks under state control is not the only thing that the working class masses need right now. To respond to the COVID-19 threat we need health resources mobilised in a planned way. The government has announced that it would requisition the resources of private hospitals to deal with the crisis. But this measure is partial and predicated on a massive bailout of private hospital owners. In contrast to the Morrison government’s half-baked hospital plan we need the immediate nationalisation of the entire health system – including not only private hospitals but smaller health facilities like pathology labs. This must remain even after this epidemic is over. Having a big part of the Medicare budget going into the bank accounts of greedy private health operators – for example, Medicare pays 75% of the schedule fee of private patients – as opposed to the actual treatment of patients not only drains the public budget but means that less resources are available for the long overdue tasks of increasing the number of available public hospital beds and public health nurses and reducing the waiting times at public hospitals. Furthermore, for the level of one’s access to health care to depend on the “logic of the market” – in other words how much money one has to fork out for health care – goes against the needs of the working class and all principles of decency. The irrationality of having health facilities being run by for profit operators has been proved during this COVID-19 crisis by the fact that private health care operators like Healthe Care in March stood down, or laid off, hundreds of nurses at a time when the virus was spreading rampantly and nurses were needed more than ever.

The section of Australia’s population most vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 is the well over hundred thousand homeless people. This includes not only those forced to sleep the streets but those “couch surfing” in the homes of friends and relatives. With so many people thrown out of work or stood down on reduced or no pay, homelessness is set to skyrocket. The government’s tentative six-month moratorium on evictions does not provide adequate security to tenants. There are so many loopholes that landlords are already evicting tenants. Moreover, current measures do not stop landlords and estate agents from pressuring tenants to pay rent even when they have little income. Therefore, there must be a six month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants from now. We also need an immediate halt to the sell-off of public housing and for homeless people to be housed in public housing dwellings slated for sale. This will help but will not in itself be enough to house all homeless people. Therefore, we also need a massive increase in public housing. Another crucial reason why we need more public housing is so that low-income women can move away from any abusive relationships and know that they will still have a roof over their heads if they do so. This is an even more urgent matter now than ever as COVID-19 restrictions are leaving women copping domestic abuse in situations where they are more socially isolated and, thus, more vulnerable to violent attack. But new public housing cannot be built fast enough right now in the midst of a pandemic. Therefore, the state must requisition the unoccupied holiday homes and investment properties of people owning more than three homes and convert them immediately into public housing.

We must also demand that the millions of casual workers in this country be immediately granted permanency with all the rights of permanent workers – including being granted guaranteed minimum work hours and sick leave. This is necessary to both protect the rights of casual workers and to ensure that such workers have no compulsion to risk their own well-being and that of others by going to work when ill. Similarly, we must ensure that all workers be granted special paid pandemic leave for self-isolation, quarantining and treatment if they may have COVID-19, or to care for ill family members. The government’s new scheme only allows for unpaid leave which for many low-paid workers will not only cause hardship but may push them to try sticking it out at work when they could be a risk to themselves and others.

At this time of economic crisis, temporary migrant workers and wage-working international students are the hardest hit section of the working class. Many have lost jobs or are casual workers who have suffered big cuts to the number of shifts that they get and, like most casual workers, the government’s much touted scheme to pay bosses of businesses that have lost significant revenue to retain workers will not help them at all. Moreover, unlike all other workers they will not get any Centrelink payments and international students are not even covered by Medicare. This is outrageous! These migrant workers face destitution and many now not only have no money to return to their home countries but cannot even do so due to travel restrictions. That is why it is absolutely urgent that we demand that all workers resident here get the same rights as people who are citizens. Full citizenship rights for everyone who is here! Moreover, in counter-position to the government’s JobKeeper scheme that will still allow hundreds of thousands of workers to lose their jobs while giving a windfall to many bosses, we must fight for jobs for all through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits.

Such an agenda can only be won through working class-led struggle. Although, at this moment, it may even be from the point of view of the overall interests of the capitalist class partly rational to put the banks under state control in order to avert an economic collapse, the exploiting class will resist any demands for such measures, not least because such a nationalisation would immediately pose the question that if the capitalist owners cannot be trusted to run the banks themselves then why shouldn’t the banks and the rest of the economy be taken completely out of their hands and put into public ownership. As a crucial part of any working-class fightback the workers movement must champion the cause of all other sections of the oppressed. In particular the working class must support Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state killings of black people in custody, a movement that has been injected with renewed energy in the wake of the mass anti-racist resistance struggles in the U.S.

Mass struggle at this time of pandemic is, of course, difficult. However, let’s not forget that the working class movement has had to struggle in the past – and often in the present too in not only openly capitalist dictatorships but to some degree in the so-called “democracies” as well – in difficult conditions where protests, strikes and leftist political activity have faced repression or even been outright outlawed. This time of virus-related restrictions is, of course, very different in that we ourselves uphold – and actually actively promote – genuine social-distancing measures. However, like in times of intense of police-state repression, it is still a matter of finding ways to overcome major obstacles. We certainly don’t need to come up with all the ways that we can have an impact here. Politically active working class people will themselves come up with suitable methods – the masses are very innovative and that has been proven over decades and decades of struggle.

State-Controlled Banks and COVID-19 Response: A Case Study

If anyone wants to see why we need to put the banks under state control they should look at how the finance sector works in the world’s most populous country – and Australia’s biggest trading partner – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In China all the major banks are nationalised. And that was part of why the PRC was so effectively able to respond to the COVID-19 threat. Although China was the place where the virus – whose exact origin remains unknown – first spread in a really big known way, the PRC was able to respond so effectively and quickly that today in China, and even in the city of Wuhan, the former centre of the outbreak, people are again socialising, starting to resume eating out at cafes and restaurants, travelling long distances on public transport, slowly returning to tourist sites, working at factories and other works sites and gradually returning to full school operations. More importantly, the PRC’s response has been so successful that per million residents, far less people have died from the virus in China than have died in wealthier countries that have had much, much more time to prepare for the virus spread. Thus, the number of deaths per resident as of July 18 is already 45% higher in Australia than in China, 133 times higher in the U.S. than in China and in Switzerland, the country famous for its free-wheeling, scantily regulated capitalist banks, the number of deaths per resident is already 71 times higher than in China.

It is important to see why the PRC has been able to respond so effectively to the virus threat. In particular let us see how having a nationalised banking sector made a difference. Crucially, as soon as it become apparent just how contagious and deadly the then newly discovered virus was, China’s banks started supplementing PRC government outlays to firms to boost production of – or in many cases to entirely switch over the output of their operations to produce – items crucial to the epidemic response. Such products included surgical masks, goggles and full protective suits for medical workers, face masks for the public, COVID-19 testing kits, ambulances, disinfectant and ventilators. Within two weeks, PRC banks had already lent out tens of billions of dollars in very low interest rate loans to support the production of these items. By March 13, the amount that the PRC’s state-controlled banks had lent out to contain the impact of the virus had grown to $330 billion!

Left: Medical workers in full head-to-toe, spacesuit-style protective gear at Wuhan’s Fan Cang Makeshift Hospital in February 2020. Right: Medical workers at Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital. Australian health workers have usually not been provided with the same level of protective gear that medical workers in China have been equipped with. Often the faces and necks of Australian health workers are left exposed and sometimes they are only equipped with normal face masks rather than surgical grade N95 masks. As a result, the coronavirus transferred from infected patients to medical staff at Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital causing an outbreak that took eleven lives. Moreover, as of 21 July 2020, 429 health workers have been infected with COVID-19 in Victoria alone. The capitalist system is unable to ensure the switching over of production to meet pandemic response needs anywhere as decisively as a system dominated by public ownership, like that in the PRC.
Photo credit (photo on Right): Mitchell Woolnough

The production of pandemic relief goods – especially PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for medical workers – is absolutely vital in the fight against this pandemic. Unfortunately, in the very early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, before it was realised just how contagious the virus was – and even what it was – and how crucial was the need for protective gear, many medical staff in Wuhan became infected with the virus and also spread it to other colleagues, and several of the infected staff later died. In late January, with a large number of ill people pouring into Wuhan hospitals the hospital system in Wuhan was obviously overwhelmed and there was a shortage of protective gear, medicine and equipment. However, before long, with PRC manufacturers, armed with cheap credit doled out at lightning speed by her nationalised banks, rapidly switching over to producing protective gear, all nurses, hospital cleaners and doctors in China were wearing full space-suit-style head-to-toe protective gear. As a result, not a single one of the more than 42,600 health workers who travelled from other parts of China to Hubei Province to aid the virus response became infected, let alone died from the disease. By contrast, the capitalist countries with their private, profit-driven banks have not been able to equip their health workers with PPE effectively. Capitalist banks resist any loans that do not guarantee them a sizable and secure return. Moreover, they would also take considerable time approving any loans made for epidemic response as they ponder and calculate what they can get out of lending large amounts to any particular project for manufacturing epidemic prevention materials. In Australia, any switching over of production to aid the pandemic response by manufacturers is happening way too little and way too late. Therefore, even though authorities in countries like the U.S., Australia and Italy have had the big advantage of knowing for several weeks, if not months, just how infectious the virus was before it spread widely in their own countries, they have not even been able to ensure adequate protective equipment for their health workers. In the U.S., many nurses have had to resort to wearing home-made “protective gear,” like garbage bags, as poor substitutes for personal protective equipment. In Italy, as of April 17, at least 159 medical workers had died from COVID-19. Apart from the personal tragedies here, the effects of health workers becoming infected is devastating for the overall pandemic response. It means that large numbers of medical staff are not able to contribute to the response effort as they languish in quarantine, while other doctors and nurses, before they are identified as having COVID-19, end up passing on the virus to other medical staff and to patients who have come in for non-COVID-19 illnesses. In Australia, the failure to be able to outfit all health workers with the head-to-toe PPE that China’s nurses, doctors and janitors are equipped with has meant that as of July 18 over 400 nurses, doctors and health workers in Victoria alone have been infected. The failure to provide adequate PPE for health and aged care workers is also a key reason for the deadly virus spreads in North-West Tasmanian hospitals and in the Christian-run nursing home in Sydney’s Outer West that took the lives of 30 people between them.

Build toward the Future Confiscation of Banks, Industry, Mines, Communications Infrastructure and Agricultural Land and their Transfer into Public Ownership

It is not only in responding to the direct virus threat that the PRC’s nationalised banks have come into their own. To avert mass layoffs and economic shocks during this pandemic, China’s banks have sacrificed profits by rolling over and extending loans to hard-hit firms and self-employed people and by lending large amounts of money at low interest rates to assist enterprises to re-start production with the curbing of the epidemic spread. In a similar way, the PRC’s nationalised banking sector played a crucial role in allowing China to sail through the late noughties Global Recession as they lent huge amounts of money to finance high-speed rail lines, water conservation projects, environmental projects and the massive construction of low-rent public housing.

Yet it is not just during a crisis that the advantages of the PRC’s state-controlled finance sector is apparent. These Chinese banks have been directed to ensure that their lending practices are in lockstep with the PRC’s “Homes Are For Living In, Not for Speculation” policy. Thus, they have provided much credit to support public housing construction. Moreover, very different to Australia’s profit-obsessed banks, China’s banks charge any family seeking a bank loan for buying a second home a much higher interest rate than they charge those buying their first home, while they don’t lend at all to anyone trying to buy a third home. More broadly, China’s state-controlled banks are directed to lend to projects that may not be very profitable for the banks but which are important for the society and for the people’s economic development. Thus, these banks have specially lent to research and development projects in areas that are important for that country’s future economic progress like nanotechnology, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, advanced electronic hardware, aircraft research etc. Meanwhile, given that the PRC state has identified environmental protection as one of its three principal tasks, alongside poverty alleviation and curbing financial risks, the banks have directed a significant part of their lending to projects aimed at curbing water and air pollution. In particular, by supporting renewable energy projects with credit, they have helped China to become the world leader in renewable energy, with more than three times the installed solar power capacity of any other country and more than twice the wind generation capacity of the next biggest wind power producer. However, the most crucial practice of the PRC’s nationalised banking sector is its support for the country’s poverty alleviation drive. Over the last several years, as part of the PRC’s drive to lift every resident out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020, China’s state banks have lent literally hundreds of billions of dollars to poverty alleviation projects in poorer parts of the country. Many of these projects involve renovation of shantytowns and upgrading of infrastructure in impoverished and remote parts of the country as well as supporting community-based aged care facilities provided for lower income residents. Crucially, the PRC’s state-controlled banks have also provided credit for the development of job-creating industries in poorer, rural parts of the country including food processing operations, agricultural co-operatives, rural tourism and renewable energy projects. Partly as a result of such support for her poverty alleviation drive from her nationalised finance sector, China remains on track to achieve her poverty alleviation target by the end of this year despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is important to be aware that the PRC’s banks are not just state-controlled, they are overwhelmingly also state-owned. Thus, each and every one of China’s big four commercial banks are state-owned. Indeed, even if we include all the medium-sized banks in China, we find that majority state-owned banks so dominate the PRC’s finance sector that there is really only one significant sized bank – China’s tenth largest bank – that can be considered to be truly privately-owned; and even in that one case state-owned companies have recently become its largest shareholders owning around a quarter of the bank. Moreover, in addition to her commercial banks, the PRC has three massive, 100% state-owned policy banks whose lending is completed devoted to projects that are deemed in society’s overall interest. Two of these policy banks in particular, the China Development Bank and the Agricultural Development Bank of China, whose combined assets would make them China’s second largest bank, have been at the forefront of lending to support China’s poverty alleviation drive and more recently for the pandemic response effort.

There is a notable difference between banks being merely state-controlled and being actually state-owned. For one, even if banks are state-controlled, if they remain privately-owned their wealthy owners will act as a constant pressure on the state pushing for the banks to be run largely according to the profit motive as opposed to according to social needs. Secondly, if banks remain only state-controlled their massive profits would still be flowing into the hands of their largely ultra-rich owners rather than into the public budget. Remember, last year, in a “bad” year for them, Australia’s big four banks alone leached $26 billion in profits. To be sure, if they became state-controlled their profits would drop somewhat as their lending and investment becomes partially re-directed away from areas that simply bring the highest return. Nevertheless, even if their profits were halved as a result of being placed under state control, that’s still $13 billion that could go into the public budget if these corporations were only brought into state ownership. How much badly needed public housing could we get with that?! Well, actually, we can calculate that. According to the government’s own figures (see Table 18A.43 in the appendix of Excel spreadsheets under Part G, Section 18 of the Report on Government Services 2020 in the Australian Government Productivity Commission website https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2020/housing-and-homelessness/housing), the average annual cost of a public house unit, including the capital cost, is $39,714 per dwelling. So if we had even half the current profits extracted by the biggest banks in Australia go into the public coffers we could support an extra 327,340 public housing dwellings which would easily more than double the existing stock of public housing. That could really solve the problem of homelessness and make good strides towards addressing the extreme shortage of low-rent housing in Australia.

That is why what is finally needed is to confiscate all the banks, insurance corporations, superannuation companies, wealth management firms and securities businesses from their ultra-wealthy owners and bring them all into state-ownership. This should be accomplished without giving any compensation to the big shareholders. However, to avoid unnecessarily antagonising the middle class, the stock holdings of the numerous small shareholders who together own a tiny fraction of these corporations can be bought out. Since the superannuation firms will be confiscated too, workers won’t need to worry about losing their super when the banks get taken. They will still get their retirement funds from the now publicly owned providers and with less eaten in fees by billionaire finance sector bosses to boot. However, the retirement payment system will progressively be switched from one based on individual superannuation accounts to one based on a higher and equal pension for all.

Our agitational demand to put the banks under state control, that is to nationalise the banks, that we made in the headline of this article, is not in itself a call to confiscate the banks and put them into public ownership. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin made a similar call some six weeks prior to the working class seizure of power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution. As Lenin explained:

It is absurd to control and regulate deliveries of grain, or the production and distribution of goods generally, without controlling and regulating bank operations….

The ownership of the capital wielded by and concentrated in the banks is certified by printed and written certificates called shares, bonds, bills, receipts, etc. Not a single one of these certificates would be invalidated or altered if the banks were nationalised, i.e. if all banks were amalgamated into a single state bank…. whoever owned fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on.

— V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, September 1917

Lenin’s Bolsheviks made the demand for the nationalisation of the banks in this period as an urgent measure to control economic life at a time when Russia’s masses were being struck down by mass unemployment, disorganised industry and terrible shortages of food and other staple items. However, the revolutionaries also understood that by showing the masses the need to take the control of the banks out of the hands of the capitalists they were thus leading working class people to the conclusion that they ultimately need to also take the ownership of the banks from the capitalists. Indeed, in the period after the October Revolution, the new workers government of Soviet Russia confiscated the banks along with the railways, industries and agricultural land and transferred them into public ownership.

Putting the banks under state control or even confiscating the finance sector, while a vital measure, does not solve all problems – not even the most urgent ones. So while we need state banks to lend to certain manufacturers to aid them to switch their operations to produce vitally needed pandemic relief goods, if the manufacturing bosses still can’t find a way to make a big profit out of those operations, even with low-interest loans, they are very unlikely to change over their factories; and if they do many would do it too slowly or only in a token way to gain positive publicity. So we need to have a perspective of confiscating not only the finance sector but also taking the key industries, the mines that produce the raw materials, transport and distribution means, power, communications and other infrastructure as well as construction out of the hands of the profit-driven capitalists and placing them into the collective hands of the people. In China it is not just their banks that are under state-ownership but all their key sectors. As a result when there was a need for firms to switch over their production to make pandemic relief goods, the relevant state-owned enterprises not only got access to cheap credit to assist them but were basically ordered to make the conversion. That is why you have all sorts of Chinese industries, seemingly unrelated to making protective and medical gear, contributing to China’s pandemic relief effort. For example, state-owned Shanghai Three Gun group, China’s biggest producer of underwear, is now producing more than one million masks per day.

What a society where public ownership plays the backbone role can do was seen most clearly in the way that the PRC built two large brand new hospitals from the ground up in less than two weeks when the number of people getting seriously ill from COVID-19 started surging in late January. The challenge in building these hospitals in Wuhan so quickly was especially steep given that these specialist infectious disease hospitals, unlike other hospitals, needed to have negative pressure wards to ensure that the air leaving wards with the infected patients is ejected safely rather than seeping out to potentially infect hospital workers and others. The first of these hospitals put into service, the 1,000 bed Huoshenshan (“Fire God Mountain”) Hospital was built in just 10 days. The second, the 1,600 bed Leishenshan (“Thunder God Mountain”) Hospital was put into service just days later. And it was thousands of workers organised through the PRC firms under public ownership that played the key role in pulling off these amazing feats. Financing for the project was provided both from the central government and by the 100% state-owned policy bank, the China Development Bank. The design of the hospital was performed by the CITIC General Institute of Architectural Design and Research, a subsidiary of the giant PRC public-owned conglomerate, CITIC. The actual construction of the hospitals was undertaken by the Third Engineering Bureau of state-owned China State Construction Engineering, the largest construction company in the world. Meanwhile, China State Grid organised 260 workers in around the clock shifts to ensure that the power connection was ready in time. Communications within the hospital and a stable 5G internet connection was achieved within 36 hours through a collaborative effort of China’s state-owned communication giants China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Tower. Meanwhile, CT scanning equipment and X-rays were provided by Shanghai United Imaging, a high-tech firm jointly held by a range of PRC state-owned firms.

18 February 2020: One of the first two patients to recover from COVID-19 at the Leishenshan infectious disease hospital in China’s Wuhan says farewell to nurses and doctors. The specialised 1,600 bed Leishenshan Hospital was built in less than two weeks by the Third Engineering Bureau of China State Construction Engineering, one of China’s huge socialistic state-owned enterprises.

Right now the mass of working class people in Australia does not yet appreciate the need for the confiscation of the banks and industry from the capitalists and their transfer into public ownership. The very most politically advanced workers and leftist activists do understand that this is what is needed. However, ruling class propaganda has been able to tentatively convince the majority of working class people that private ownership of the economy should be “respected.” Nevertheless, right now there is widespread distrust of the banking system at the very same moment that many working class people are very worried about the pandemic, about whether they will have a job and about their ability to pay rent and buy essentials. That is why we today emphasise the call for the nationalisation of the banks as a slogan around which to mobilise united front struggle that will, on the one hand, demand this immediate measure necessary for both the COVID-19 response effort and to protect the masses from unemployment and poverty and that will, on the other hand, in the course of their struggle to win this demand, point working class people towards the ultimate need for the confiscation of the banks and all key sectors and their transferal into public ownership.

We Need a Workers State

If powerful working class struggle were able to force the capitalist government to nationalise the banks, the question then becomes posed: who would be administering this now state-run finance system? Sure, a finance system under state control would face more mass pressure to run its operations according to people’s interests than privately owned banks do. However, would you trust the anti-working class Morrison government or the desperate-to-not-scare-the-capitalists-Albanese led ALP to ensure that a state bank would actually serve the masses rather than the big end of town?

The problem is not simply the government but the bureaucracy. No matter the political stripe of who sits in ministers’ chairs and who wins elections, the fact is that the same layer of high-ranking state officials who have been allowing the finance sector corporations to fleece the public will still be the ones “regulating” them. The “regulator” of the finance sector, ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) has been so deferential to the finance industry bosses that even the limp Royal Commission criticised it for its “softly, softly approach” to illegal activity by the banks. However, ASIC is not going to fundamentally change. If you see who leads it, even now after getting a slap on the wrist from the Royal Commission, you will know why. ASIC’s leadership remains people with strong ties to the finance sector bosses and other corporate bigwigs. Thus ASIC chair, James Shipton, spent ten years as the managing director of various divisions of the Asia-Pacific office of American banking giant, Goldman Sachs. Of the six other commissioners who lead ASIC, one previously had senior roles in NAB and ANZ (and does anyone expect him to now go hard on them?!!), two had been top bosses of other finance services companies and one had been most recently CEO of the Myer Family Company.

Yet, it is not only their leaders’ previous links to the corporate bosses that tie state institutions like ASIC to the capitalist class. For one, the wealth that these ASIC heads would have acquired when they were high fliers in the banking and broader corporate world – and the ensuing investing of part of this wealth that they have no doubt made into shares and/or share-investing wealth management schemes – would make them very much identify their interests with those of the big end of town and not with working class people. Moreover, since wealthy business owners control the economy and, thus, largely determine who gets hired and at what pay, they can, without even saying a word, entice senior bureaucrats at state institutions with the prospect of future lucrative jobs at their companies should they “respect” their interests; and, in effect, threaten these state officials with being locked out of future employment prospects should these bureaucrats dare step on their toes. One only has to look at who are the directors leading the big finance sector companies and other corporations and one will see how this works. Let’s take ANZ bank as a case study. ANZ’s David Gonski, prior to being appointed chairman in 2014, had been a top official of a number of Australian state bodies. He had been head of the Future Fund which directs government investments into long-term projects. From 2010 to 2011 he also headed a government commission to look into education funding which produced the well-known Gonski Report. In the year prior to becoming ANZ chairman, Gonski had also been appointed to ASIC’s External Advisory Panel and actually continued there until last year. Consider this: say Gonski had, if he hypothetically wanted to, tried to direct Future Fund investments in a way that actually benefited working class people rather than the corporate owners, had in his Gonski Report called to slash public funding for private schools rather than agree to perpetuate it and while on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel pushed for a severe crackdown on the banks, does anyone think that ANZ’s big shareholders would have then appointed him their chairman? And wouldn’t being aware of how his future career prospects in the corporate world are affected by how he acts while heading state institutions colour his conduct when being a high-ranking Australian state bureaucrat? Actually, Gonski is not the only ANZ boss who had been on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel. One of ANZ’s top executives had previously been Vice-Chair of this ASIC body and the current chairman of Suncorp is still on that panel, all of which highlights further the links between ASIC and the finance sector bosses that they supposedly “regulate.” Meanwhile, an ANZ director had previously held the top bureaucrat position, Secretary, in both the Australian Department of Finance and the Australian Department of Health. This director, Jane Halton, is currently also one of the ten council members that lead the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the state defence think tank notorious for being the most fanatical force promoting Australia’s military build up and its war-mongering hostility to socialistic China. This also highlights the fact that some capitalists hold key positions in the state machinery even while they are still directors of corporations. Thus, one of the NAB’s directors, is also a director of Infrastructure Victoria. Moreover, the chairman of the NDIS, Helen Nugent, is also a director of insurance corporation IAG. So if disabled and ill workers are wondering why they often face intrusive interrogations from the NDIS and sometimes even cop bullying threats to cut them off the Disability Support Pension just know this, the boss of the NDIS is a director of one of the leaching insurance giants who holds over $220,000 worth of shares in that corporation (according to their last annual report) and is paid by them almost a quarter of a million dollars a year for basically attending a meeting every 16 days (on average) and reading some reports. Prior to being appointed NDIS supremo in 2017, Nugent had been up until 2014 a director of Macquarie Group for 15 years. And controversially, the NDIS has awarded Macquarie a contract to build disability housing for them while Nugent actually conducts her leadership of the NDIS in an office rented from Macquarie!

Left: One of the ANZ Bank’s super high-paid directors is Jane Halton. As well as also being a director of James Packer’s Crown Resorts, Halton is one of the ten council members that lead the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the government defence think tank notorious for being the force most fanatically promoting Australia’s military build up and its aggressive military posture. Through shared occupancy of leading positions, personal ties and the economic dominance of capitalist corporations, Australia’s capitalist class ensure that all state institutions are subordinate to their interests. Right: One of the many unarmed civilians being murdered by Australian SAS special forces troops in Afghanistan. This particular war crime took place in May 2012 in Uruzgan province. The unarmed person being executed in cold blood was a man in his mid-twenties known as Dad Mohammad, a married father of two young children.

The intertwining between the capitalist bosses and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy extends into state institutions crucial to shaping the ideological direction of society. Thus, much of the leadership of the universities is held by corporate bigwigs. The chancellor of UTS is, for example, none other than the chairman of CBA. Meanwhile the deputy chairman of the broadcaster SBS, George Savvides, is a director of IAG, while another member of the nine-member board that sets SBS’s direction, Peeyush Gupta, is a director of NAB. This is worth knowing in case anyone is tempted to believe that SBS is any more “independent” of the capitalists than the Murdoch media or the commercial TV and radio stations.

Through their economic power and wealth, the capitalists not only ensure that the upper ranks of the state bureaucracy are tied to them by thousands of threads – if they are not actually personally holding these positions themselves – they also subordinate to their interests all the other coercive bodies of the state. This includes the legal system. ASIC have not only been extremely timid when facing the banks because of their ties to the bank bosses. That is, of course, very true. However, part of the reason for ASIC’s prostration is that they are downright intimidated at the prospects of taking on the banks in the courts. Since the courts are biased towards the corporate bigwigs and since the bank bosses have enormous financial resources to hire the best, most expensive barristers and to fund expensive court proceedings and appeals, ASIC fears losing expensive court battles with the banks.

Left: Former Commonwealth Bank of Australia top executive, Annabel Spring. She had been responsible for some of the sections of CBA most responsible for charging customers fees for no service and for setting up dodgy insurance schemes with contracts so tightly worded that customers were basically ineligible to claim anything on the policies. In 2015, the then CBA wealth boss bought a Centennial Park trophy home (Centre) for nearly $10 million from one of NSW’s top judges, Antony Meagher (Right). Meagher is a judge at the Court of Appeal of the NSW Supreme Court, the highest court for civil matters in NSW. The high-paid judges, bureaucrats and other officials at the top of Australia’s state organs share much in common with the corporate bigwigs and have numerous financial, social and familial ties to them.

That is why alongside agitating for putting the finance system under state control, we need to fight for people’s supervision of the banks. We cannot trust state institutions tied to the capitalists to regulate even a state-controlled finance system. Therefore, we must demand – and indeed assert – inspection of all commercial bank transactions and big accounts by committees consisting of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside of representatives of other unions and mass organisations. Such committees can call in financial experts as consultants to help make sense of information but the great advantage of having class-conscious finance sector employees involved in these inspections is that they themselves understand all the terminology of the finance world. These working peoples’ committees can then collate the information and highlight the key results – as well as egregious cases of fraud and manipulation by the very rich – to the public in a form easily understood by the masses. In that way the people can know to which businesses and which sectors credit is being lent and what is the proportion of housing loans going into homes for the debtors to actually live in as opposed to for the sake of housing speculation. Moreover, we will be able to finally discover who the exact owners of the finance sector corporations are. We will also be able to expose which wealthy capitalists have been hiding their true income to avoid tax and by how much. Similarly, the extent to which corporate bosses have been ripping off the public budget when acting as contractors for state projects as well as bribery of state officials by the capitalists can be exposed.

Thus, a state-controlled finance sector where working people’s committees make transparent to the masses the operations of a united state bank will enable the masses to exert enough pressure to have some control over this key pivot of a modern economy. Yet this will only be some control. For as long as the state as a whole – including its key coercive organs of the courts, the police, the prison, army, the regulators and the broader bureaucracy – remains the existing capitalist state that has been created and built up to serve the interests of the wealthy business owners then any attempt to exert workers’ control over the economy will face sabotage and obfuscation through bureaucratic means. As Leon Trotsky, leader of the Fourth International, which at the time (albeit with some mis-steps) continued the fight for the revolutionary internationalist program that guided Lenin’s Bolsheviks, emphasised in The Transitional Program, the program that the Fourth International adopted in 1938 at a time of acute capitalist crisis in the lead up to World War II:

“… the state-ization of the banks will produce these favourable results [large scale industry and transport directed by a public bank to serve the vital interests of the workers and all other toilers] only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

This is the goal that we must advance towards: the sweeping away of the capitalist state and the construction of a new state to serve the interests of the working class and all the other oppressed. The building of such a workers state is needed not only to ensure that any state bank truly operates for the masses but as the pre-condition necessary to enable the confiscation of all the backbone sectors of the economy and their transferral into socialist, that is public, ownership. For while the capitalist class, in a crisis, may, to save their system as a whole, nationalise some sectors and in other cases may acquiesce to some nationalisations as a concession to powerful working class struggle, they will never accept the wholesale dispossession of their ownership of the economy unless they are actually deposed from political power.

China’s Bank’s are Genuinely under Public Ownership because the PRC is a Workers State

It took the revolutionary overthrow from power of the capitalists, the agricultural landlords and the henchmen of Western imperialism in 1949 to enable China’s banks, industry, mines and agricultural land to be transferred into collective ownership by the people. The 1949 Revolution was a heroic struggle in which tens of millions of agricultural labourers, poor tenant farmers and workers directly participated. However, although this great revolution brought the toiling classes to power, because the revolutionary forces were heavily based on hard-to-unite tenant farmers (unlike the 1917 October Revolution that was based on united workers organised through elected workers-led councils) who, while suffering common exploitation by greedy landlords, nevertheless produced for themselves and competed in the markets to sell their produce, the new society had to be held together and administered from above. The ruling middle class bureaucracy, while they still had to administer the society in the interests of the victorious toilers, did so in an imperfect way and in a manner that ensured their own privileges. In the late 1970s, the bureaucratic PRC government, faced with the need to boost production and in the face of intense pressure from the surrounding capitalist world, turned to pro-market reforms. In the following years, a sizeable private sector has developed in China, far in excess of the partial concessions to a private sector that can sometimes be needed in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism. This has brought with it some of the vices of capitalist society such as inequality. Nevertheless, the socialistic public sector still thoroughly dominates the key means of production in China.

Moreover, the fact that the PRC is a socialistic state and the mostly smaller private businesses rely on state-owned giants for raw materials, transportation and energy means that even China’s private sector is sometimes constrained to partially serve broader social goals. If we compare China with capitalist countries, we find that the relationship between private bosses and the state are the very opposite of each other. In Australia, Indonesia, India, Italy or the U.S., the capitalist state and its officials suck up to the rich capitalists who are the real power. In contrast in Red China, the private business owners that do exist suck up to the workers state and are desperate to show their deference to the socialistic order. As a result, during this COVID-19 pandemic even some privately-owned businesses contributed to the relief effort. Indeed, even greedy capitalist billionaire, Jack Ma, with rumours swirling that he was forced to retire last year to try and head off being cracked down upon – as has deservedly happened to so many other high-flying capitalist exploiters in China before him – tried to win favour with authorities by making significant donations to the pandemic response.

However, the existence of a too large private sector remains a problem in China. Although the PRC was able to mobilise its state-dominated economy to very quickly and effectively build hospitals and produce urgently needed items for the pandemic response, the fact is China would have been able to respond even faster had the proportion of the economy under state ownership been even higher. And that would have saved still more lives. Moreover, the existence of a sizeable capitalist class with wealth and influence presents a mortal threat to China’s socialistic system. These capitalists are not happy that they are largely cut out of the most profitable sectors of the Chinese economy like the banks, the oil and gas companies and the other strategic sectors. They resent being pressured to sometimes sacrifice their profits for the social good. These frustrated capitalists are, thus, constantly seeking to expand their tenuous “right” to “freely” exploit labour unrestricted by any constraints. Moreover, many of these capitalists quietly harbour more ambitious aims. They are waiting for the moment, during some sort of social or economic crisis, when they can make a bid for power. They know that they will have the full backing of the capitalist powers around the world in this endeavour.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the already intense hostility towards China of the U.S., Australian, British, Japanese, German and other imperialist rulers rise to still higher levels. These imperialist ruling classes have engaged in a hysterical campaign of lies to blame socialistic China for the pandemic spread. The capitalist rulers fear that their own working class masses will compare China’s effective and successful response to the virus threat with their own flawed and ineffective response and will thus draw the conclusion that the socialist system is superior and needs to be fought for in their own countries. This is, in fact, the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers. But for the very same reason that the capitalists hate the fact that the world’s most populous country is under socialistic rule – and is actually proving that socialism works – the working classes in the capitalist world should defend socialistic rule in China. For the existence of the PRC workers state – despite all its bureaucratic deformations, its concessions to capitalists and its resulting fragility – makes the struggle for working class rule in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world stronger. That is why the workers movement must oppose the Australian regime’s military build up against China and her socialistic North Korean ally, must stand against the U.S. and Australian Navy’s military’s provocations against China in the South China Sea, must oppose Australian support for anticommunist forces within China (from the far-right Falun Dafa outfit to the pro-colonial, rich kid rioters in Hong Kong) and must resist the Australian regime’s attempts to intimidate and silence pro-PRC voices within Australia – including those of pro-PRC Chinese international students. Right now we especially need to refute all the China-bashing lies being spread over the COVID-19 pandemic. We also need to explain to the masses that for all the incompleteness of China’s transition to socialism, the fact that public ownership plays the backbone role in her economy was what made the PRC so effectively able to respond to the virus threat. In doing so we will at the same time motivate the need to fight here for a system of public ownership based on working class rule, i.e. a socialist system.

However, working class people will not be won to seeing the need for socialist revolution simply through hearing explanations of its necessity. The masses learn mainly through participating in – and drawing lessons from the experience of – struggles for their immediate interests. That is why all those who understand the need for a socialist future must fight to build such campaigns. At the same time, we must work hard to ensure that these struggles for immediate gains are waged in such a manner as they teach the working class to distrust all the parties and factions of the capitalist class, convince the masses to trust only their own power, place no reliance on any institutions of the capitalist state and are based on slogans that advance the working class towards the conclusion that they will in the future need to take both the economy and state power into their own collective hands. Today that means building struggles to fight for the nationalisation of the banks and for the winning of jobs for all through forcing companies to hire (and in many cases re-hire) more workers at the expense of their profits.

The Program of Nationalization of the Banks vs the Green Party’s Agenda

If anyone thinks that urgently needed measures like the nationalisation of the banks can be won merely through the parliamentary process, one has only to look at the agenda of the current parliamentary parties to see why not. Of all the parliamentary parties the Australian Greens have been the most critical of the current banking system. So their program deserves to be given some scrutiny. The Greens call for more regulation of the banks. As a policy principle, they say that, “Publicly-owned financial institutions should form a key component of Australia’s banking sector”, without offering any program about how that would arise. But they fail, even now during this time of public health and economic emergency, to call for the nationalisation of the banks. At most their agenda amounts to a return to the system that we had before the Hawke-Keating reforms of the 1980s and 1990s – and in some ways not even that since the Greens do not call for the reimposition of state control over bank interest rates. Yet, while the banks were slightly more constrained in their operations before the Hawke-Keating reforms, they hardly operated even then in the service of the people. They were still largely driven by the imperative to maximise profits.

A major part of The Greens agenda for turning back the clock is to split up financial planning and superannuation operations from the banks. However, the banks themselves are doing this now in the wake of bad publicity. Indeed, in good part they have already completed this. Last year Westpac sold off its financial advice arm BT Financial and CBA sold off its financial planning arm, Count Financial. The Greens hope that making the banks smaller will reduce abuses by them. However, the new broken up or sold off, but still massive, corporations will still be run for profits. Moreover, the new wealth management corporations will likely be significantly owned by the very same very rich people – yes and through those “bank nominee” fronts – as the banks are. The bank owners quite happily pursued this break up option because by separating out its wealth management arms that had a particularly bad reputation, their banking operations can be shielded from the foul publicity arising from the openly fraudulent practices of the financial planning operations.

Much of the remainder of The Greens practical program for the finance sector like calling for “effective regulatory supervision to enforce prudential regulation” is very similar to what the limp Royal Commission recommended. Overall, The Greens platform will not fundamentally change the way the financial system operates. Banks will still be run largely on the profit motive and will still have freedom to decide who they lend to and at what rates. And many working class people couldn’t care less if the banks own wealth management operations or not because they have little money to put into these funds anyway! So even though The Greens say in the abstract that the “banking and finance industry should serve the broader public interest”, their actual program will not get anyway near this. The reason that The Greens’ agenda cannot come even close to advocating what is really needed to begin to make “banking and finance industry serve the broader public interest,” that is the nationalisation of the banks, is that such an agenda can only be won through working class struggle against the capitalist class. But The Greens cannot truly promote such an agenda as their party includes and appeals to all classes – including capitalists. Owning operations in areas like renewable energy, services, online business, hospitality, tourism and the arts, the full-blown capitalist exploiters that support The Greens feel that the Greens push to favour their sectors over fossil-fuel and energy guzzling sectors would dovetail with their own business interests. Sure, these capitalists accept a more far-sighted view of the threat of climate change than coal mining bosses do. But they are still capitalists who exploit workers! To even speak of nationalisation of any sector would scare these “enlightened capitalist” exploiters as it would make them fear that their own operations could face nationalisation next. Meanwhile, playing a very prominent role in The Greens are well-heeled, upper-middle class professionals. This latter chunk of Greens supporters are, to be sure, somewhat “progressive” minded. But, just like the actual capitalists in The Greens, this does not stop them from having considerable sums put into wealth management products – who in turn invest this money in shares (including bank shares) – or into their own direct shareholdings. So, they would not be too thrilled about any measures that could radically slash the profits of banks.

This same dilemma faces The Greens more broadly – an abstract wish for less inequality and a more “people-oriented society” but no program that would deliver this. Take, for instance, the signature policy of The Greens and its new leader Adam Bandt: “A Green New Deal.” They say that the aims of this “Green New Deal” are “tackling social and economic inequality,” reducing underemployment, increasing wages, having more secure jobs, giving young people more hope of buying a house and ensuring action to beat the climate crisis. OK, but The Greens say this would be achieved through “a government-led plan of investment and action.” However, any reduction of inequality requires struggle against the exploiting class by the working class masses. Government investment in social programs and “clean jobs” requires someone to pay for such measures which requires a struggle against the capitalists to make them pay. The Greens do not even mention this crucial element of class struggle without which talk of building “a caring society” is meaningless. They want to make capitalist society fairer without standing up to capitalist power. And how could they when actual capitalists play a significant role in their own party! Without challenging capitalist power, any government spending and policies will inevitably bend to the demands of this powerful class. That is why when The Greens have actually been in office they have administered society in a way barely different to the other pro-capitalist parties. As part of a coalition with the ALP, the Greens had two ministries in the Tasmanian governments from 2010 to 2014 that cut the jobs of hundreds of nurses, closed public hospital beds, reduced funding for ambulance services, slashed funding for public housing maintenance, cut public sector jobs and reduced public sector pay increases below inflation. In his portfolio as minister for Education and Corrections in these governments, then Tasmanian Greens leader, Nick McKim, oversaw a prison system with substandard conditions for prisoners and tried to close 20 public schools before angry mass opposition forced him to back down. Meanwhile, the Australian Greens counterpart in Austria proved the commitment of this brand of politics to the anti-working class status quo by earlier this year joining in a government coalition with the right-wing, anti-union and anti-immigrant Austrian People’s Party.

Therefore, while we support action to fight for certain particular policies that Bandt has also advocated – like dental into Medicare and free education – we oppose overall The Greens and Bandt’s program of refusing any challenge to the power of the capitalists, while greening capitalism, under a “Green New Deal.” Remember how The Greens’ platform, including the Green New Deal, does not even call for the nationalisation of the banks. Unfortunately, however, much of the far-left in Australia have been cheering The Greens program. The Socialist Alliance have been the most enthusiastic. The Solidarity group are not far behind, only adding that “Adam Bandt’s Green New Deal won’t be won through electoral dead end.” The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) meanwhile ran an editorial in the February 17 issue of their paper, The Guardian, that pushed for overall (albeit qualified) support for Bandt’s Green New Deal, even while very correctly acknowledging that The Greens are a bourgeois party. This despite several contributors to their newspaper insightfully and convincingly attacking the Green New Deal agenda last year. Thus, in the 19 September 2019 issue of the CPA’s newspaper, an article titled “Socialism or perish” rightly argued that “we should be openly and loudly challenging the ideas put forward by many young climate activists and NGO groups who argue for a `Green New Deal’ or other policies that amount to the greening of capitalism.” In effect, in response to such points, the February 17 CPA editorial raises the argument that supporting the Green New Deal would be a united front with The Greens. Here they confuse agreements between communists and one or more reformist tendencies within the workers movement – which may include Laborite union leaders, “democratic socialist” groups and mass social democratic parties based on our unions (of which the ALP is a very right-wing version) – to launch particular united-front actions, or a series of actions, when common demands arise (like supporting a strike for higher wages or a protest march against right-wing welfare cuts) with ongoing support, however qualified, for the program of a bourgeois party. In the former case, building workers’ united front actions, when it is advantageous for the overall struggle to do so, will result in increased class struggle of the working class against the capitalists and an opportunity for communists to explain to the masses the need for more deep-going attacks on the power of the capitalists. However, in the latter case, a “people’s front” alliance between leftist workers parties and a bourgeois party (that is, a party like The Greens that does not even see itself as a party for workers’ particular class interests and which includes – and is thus subordinate to – members of the dominant capitalist class), the effect is to retard class struggle by promoting the notion of salvation through a supposed “progressive” wing of the exploiting class. Now it must be said that those nominally Marxist groups that promote The Greens party’s signature platform do in their own right call for class struggle against the capitalists and for policies that do begin to challenge capitalist influence, like calling for the nationalisation of the banks. However, promoting the platform of a bourgeois party like The Greens and seeking an ongoing alliance with such a party undercuts the class struggle aspects of these left groups’ own agenda, because it ties the workers that they influence to a section of the capitalists and, thus, also promotes the illusion that the masses can win concessions without struggle against the exploiting class.

The Struggles of Today that Can Blaze the Path to a Socialist Future

There is another reason why genuine socialists should not be promoting The Greens party, in however a qualified form. For The Greens are just as much as the Liberal-Nationals, the ALP and the far-right One Nation Party part of the Cold War drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country. Indeed, Greens NSW upper house MP, David Shoebridge, has been just as fanatical in inciting hostility to the PRC workers state as the likes of hard-right Coalition politicians like Peter Dutton, Andrew Hastie, Tim Wilson and Eric Abetz. Although Shoebridge seems to be today rejecting the far-right conspiracy theories about the World Health Organisation and China, he has spent the last several years energetically promoting other far-right conspiracy theories against China, including the ridiculous claims that China is executing members of the extreme right-wing (and rabid Trump-supporting) Falun Dafa group to harvest their organs.

Left: Filthy rich developer and tech capitalist, Graeme Wood, has donated millions to the Greens including Australia’s largest single, individual political donation. The Greens embrace of such capitalist exploiters among their ranks and donors ensures that despite objecting to the inequality of the current society and despite being critical of Australia’s financial sector, the Greens recoil from any sort of class struggle opposition to the capitalist exploiting class or any call for the nationalisation of the banks. Instead, the Greens only offer a toothless strategy of liberal middle class pressure and parliamentary manoeuvres to try and ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism. At the same time, on fundamental issues, the Greens often line up with the rest of the capitalist class – including vehemently supporting the Australian rulers’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Centre: NSW Greens upper house MP, David Shoebridge, hosting a rally supporting the extreme right-wing, pro-Donald Trump, Chinese opposition outfit, Falun Dafa in its propaganda campaign against Red China. Shoebridge has been among the most fervent supporters of this anti-communist campaign. Right: Notorious far-right Liberal Party federal MP, Craig Kelly, speaks at a similar Falun Dafa event.

The harm done by The Greens’ support for the anti-communist drive against the PRC does not only consist of the anti-Asian racist violence that it is fuelling and the blows against the Chinese workers state that it is landing. For by attacking the world’s largest socialistic state, The Greens, no matter what else they may say, are assisting the Australian ruling class to trick the masses into believing that there is no real alternative to capitalist “democracy” and that a socialistic state dominated by public ownership would be a nightmare. In other words, The Greens’ opposition to Red China makes them an enemy of the fight for socialism in this country.

That The Greens, a party that many young leftists have hopes in, and the Labour Party, the party that retains the support of most workers, have agendas that support the ruling class drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country, that fail to call for putting the banks under state control and which accept the “right” of capitalists to sack workers whenever it is most profitable to do so proves that we need to build a new workers’ party that will truly serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed. Such a party would refuse to restrict its program to what can be tolerated by the capitalists but would, instead, lay out an agenda based on what the working class and all the downtrodden actually need. Instead of feeding into the nauseating talk, that we are hearing so much of lately, that we are “all in the same boat”, the workers party that we need would be based on a clear understanding that the interests of the working class are counterposed to those of their capitalist exploiters. Thus rejecting “national unity” with the capitalists, such a party would instead fight for the closest possible alliance between the working class in Australia and the working classes of the world. In summary, the workers party that we need must be an authentic communist party like the Bolshevik party that led the Russian Revolution. We in Trotskyist Platform work hard to contribute to the building of such a party. We understand that such a party will be built in the course of laying out a perspective based on militant class struggle in the course of joining in actions that fight for the urgent needs of the masses. Today, at this time of public health emergency, massive unemployment and growing immiseration of the masses that means agitating and mobilising to demand: Put the banks and insurance companies under state control! For the complete and permanent nationalisation of the health system! For jobs for all workers through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits! Permanency for all casual workers! Grant the rights of citizenship to all migrants, refugees and international students! For a six-month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants! Requisition the unoccupied dwellings of people owning more than three homes and convert this immediately into public housing!

24 July 2020: Woolworths workers on a picket line as part of a 24-hour strike. Five hundred workers at Woolworths’ warehouse in Wyong, NSW took the action to demand decent pay and conversion of long-term casuals to permanency. We need militant class struggle to win permanency for casuals, to force profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits, to win the nationalisation of the banks and to fight for a massive increase in public housing.
Photo Credit: United Workers Union

See bibliography here.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Trotskyist Platform.

Solzhenitsyn: Everyone’s Pain in the Neck

Eric Walberg — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 02:46:22 +0000

When you are too close to something, someone, you are not the best analyst. Your feelings get in the way. You reveal more about who you are than who or what you love/hate. But you can see better from afar. That sums up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, despite accurately predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being instrumental in achieving that, was deeply flawed in his understanding of his nemesis, provided really bad advice on how to extricate the huge Eurasian, multinational entity from its many crises, and contributed to the suffering of, in the first place, his beloved Russians. Hardly the most Christian act for the devout soul he claimed to be.

Live not by the lie! is a great sound byte, but lacks any prescription about how to live, and how to get rid of the lies. His prescription was to break up the Soviet federation, keep only the Slavic bits, ethnically cleanse the whole complex web of life, privatize everything (slowly!), keep the safety net, and cut the military budget. That’s more or less what happened, but everyone (except US-Israel) was unhappy with the results. Amazingly, he insisted all the time that he was not interested in politics, that he was ‘above politics’, but, oh yes, politics must be based on morality and don’t forget to destroy communism. Let the reader who expects this book [Gulag] to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. The lady doth protest too much.

Yes, morality trumps politics. But that is the US liberal rally cry, too. Biden would agree, though US presidents despised Solzhenitsyn, and from Ford (Solzhenitsyn is a goddam horse’s ass), to Reagan (Solzhenitsyn loved him), right up to Bush II, refused to fete him at the White House. And who has a good word for US pious human rights activism? The results of US ‘morality’ in politics has been a disaster. Solzhenitsyn was blind to his own highly politicized life and work, even as he fired off diatribes to the Central Committee, the Writers Union, sundry western media, blinded by intense anticommunism, which did nothing to improve the lot of his people, a biblical figure like Samson, who brought the temple crashing down around, killing one and all.

Solzhenitsyn led a truly remarkable life: humble beginnings, university, war, prison camps, return to Moscow, writer, dissident, Nobel prize, celebrity abroad, triumphal return, the ear of Putin. When I first heard his voice when he hit the world stage in 1974, he was a bete noire for me, expelled in 1974 by the Soviets, celebrated by imperialists, THE angry anticommunist. A dour, unpleasant face, scraggly beard. Women were attracted to his grim, macho, crusader energy, but I suspect he didn’t have any real friends.

Babyboomer truth

The 1970s for my generation were heady days: the liberation (not ‘defeat’) of Vietnam brought a long overdue realism to East-West relations, the flowering of detente. Though the Soviet Union by then did not attract the fervent left-wing enthusiasts of the 1930s-40s, its longstanding policy of peace and disarmament was finally embraced, not only by young people, but even by US politicians! The Soviets had been proven right: imperialism is nasty business, and mercifully the US was in a rare period of remorse, even repentance, for its warlike behavior. Solzhenitsyn would have none of this.

Despite his hysterical soap opera, I ‘caught the bug’ and became a sovietophile, fascinated at the real, live experiment to build a noncapitalist modern society. I learned Russian, studied Russian/ Soviet history, trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. No question, lots of chaff, but lots of nuggets of a better way too. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was jarring and so full of anticommunist hatred, it felt like, it was a replay of the odious McCarthyism of the 1950s. When he was soon dismissed by everyone as a reactionary crank, I put him aside, wanting to see and judge Soviet reality for myself. I did, and was both disturbed and, despite misgivings, confirmed in my belief that socialism was the way forward, and that the Soviet Union, though flawed, was the key to that future, hardly ‘radiant’ but not a prison full of unhappy slaves. Then Afghanistan, Gorbachev, and — poof! — the Soviet Union was gone. No key. No future. Thatcherism. TINA. The collapse of the left, invasions, wars, arms race ad infinitum.

What went wrong? One of the worst things about the Soviet Union had been its state-imposed atheism. I witnessed the Soviet Union at its most smug, prudish, and at the same time, paranoid in the 1970s. Revolutions were succeeding, mostly, in Africa (Ethiopia, Angola), Asia, but Maoist China and the dissident movement challenged Sovietism. Though economic frustrations were pressing, there was no room for debate about the radical reforms which clearly were needed. Intellectual life required lip-service to orthodoxy. Yes, lies. But what politicians speak the truth?

Roschild-Clausewitz truth

Despite all this evidence, I knew that any positive future for mankind required some kind of socialism. Marx (Solzhenitsyn’s advice to Soviet leaders was to chuck Marx) taught me that. But how to get there? Russia’s revolution ultimately failed. Christianity was already down there with the Russian revolution as a failure, reduced to irrelevance under capitalism. My own journey since then led me to Islam, as much a radical shift as becoming a communist. Unlike Christianity and Judaism (at least in their present form), Islam is still against usury. And reading about the Prophet while in a hospital bed in Tashkent in the 1990s, after ‘the Fall’, showed me a world figure almost for the first time, as our western upbringing, whether Christian or secular, has no room for such a real life revolutionary.

The Judaic prophets, followed by Jesus and Muhammad, and the nineteenth century secular prophet of revolution Marx, rejected usury and interest, as representing ill-gotten gain, with good reason. Marx condemned this mode of extraction of surplus as the highest form of fetishism, based on private property and exploitation of labor. They all rejected this exploitation on a moral basis as unjust, insisting that morality be embedded in the economy, a principle which was abandoned when capitalism took hold. While Judaism and Christianity adapted, Islam did not. (All of this seems to have passed Solzhenitsyn by.)

Interest, and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause of the current world financial crisis; A corollary to Rothschild’s dictum about money and politics (Give me control of a nation’s currency and I’ve got control of its politics), and Clausewitz’s dictum about politics and war (War is the continuation of politics) is: Bankers determines politics in the interest (sic) of waging war. Interest is the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars today in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis. QED.

And what stands in the way? However beleaguered? Islam. AND it is under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy Islam. Just as the socialist world was, from the get-go, under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy any shred of communism. I finally started to read some Solzhenitsyn. (I’m a sucker for Nobel prizes.) Cancer Ward (1965) was thought-provoking, well written, critical but without Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of the system swamping the text. It turns out it was almost published in 1966 in the Soviet Union, but the neoStalinists in the leadership stalled it until Solzhenitsyn gave up and went into high gear with his jeremiad.

Then I struggled through some of Gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s first wife Natalia Reshetovskaya in an interview with Le Figaro in 1974, called Gulag merely a collection of camp folklore, an unscholarly study of a narrow theme blown out of all proportion in West. Solzhenitsyn used facts that supported his preconceived notions. Gulag is very uneven, hardly a text worthy of the highest literary award. I dare anyone to read Gulag‘s three volumes. This Nobel gift is surely the most underread, especially by Russians. It does have merit, but more as the story of how suffering leads to transcendence, belief in God. Solzhenitsyn is a born-again Orthodox Christian and his subsequent work is infused with this spirituality. Gulag was just something Solzhenitsyn had to do before he got on to his real love – Russian history. His August 1914 is up there with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but was dismissed in the West as ‘medieval rubbish’.

Yes, Stalinism was a blight on humanity. But that one tyrant doesn’t disprove the iron logic of socialism. The things that Hitler did right (full employment, control of the economy and money supply, connection with the land, uniting the nation) are all socialistic. I was more struck by Solzhenitsyn’s transformation in prison, his and other prisoners’ belief that prison is where they felt free-est, that they are grateful for it. Freedom is not ‘more consumption’. On the contrary, it is freedom from things. The key to freedom and happiness is self-restraint. The paradox of the golden rule: liberty points the way to virtue and heroism. Liberty devoid of responsibility is the road to ruin. If we shirk responsibility, evil triumphs. Great message, but Solzhenitsyn is now remembered, if at all, as the dour Gulag guy. Without the hope.

Could i keep it up? The day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet–the hard, rocky bottom which is the same for all–was the beginning of the most important years in my life, which put the finishing touches to my character. Life is more than just the physical day-to-day reality. Our relationships take place on a different level too. The fortunate few are graced with this kind of insight.

Suddenly, the reactionary crank who shouted ‘live not by the lie!’ until the Soviet walls came tumblin’ down, loathed and despised by both communists and capitalists, was making sense. His message of spirituality and hope is universal.

Default to truth

Truth sayers are never popular, and are usually unpleasant people. Harry Markopolos, the man who exposed Madoff, is a classic example. A ‘quant guy’, only numbers, so as not to make a ‘Neville Chamberlain mistake’. He had solid proof of the financial theft going on, but was dismissed as a crank until Madoff had, well, ‘made off’ with millions, and the whole banking system collapsed in 2008. All his efforts had little effect and no one remembers him. Unlike Markopolos, Solzhenitsyn had the trump card of anticommunism that allowed this unpleasant truth teller his (brief) moment of fame in the West.

We have an inner program in our make-up to default to truth.You give the benefit of the doubt, often accepting lies in the interest of social harmony, the compassion gene. A survival mechanism. People are excellent judges of who is telling the truth (90% of the time). Only 10% of the time do we mistakenly accuse someone of lying. Solzhenitsyn came to believe that everything was a lie in the Soviet Union, that citizens were too stupid or brainwashed to see that. One of those 10%.

Solzhenitsyn is the classic truth sayer. But his truth was flawed. He was even sued (successfully) for libel in 1983 for implying that a notorious American publisher of smut, Alexander Flegon, had KGB connections. He was fixated on destroying the Soviet system, to replace it with what? a theocracy? Certainly not western consumerism. The result of his Reagan-like anticommunism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was worse than he imagined it would be, and led to the ‘third time of troubles’ 1985-2000 (no 1 in 1600, no 2 in 1917). Mr Truthie whined, went home in the aftermath, was politely ignored, then became a grudging fan of Putin. So Solzhenitsyn and I came to the same view, but mine from a Marxist perspective, which according to Solzhenitsyn is evil and wrong.

Solzhenitsyn’s rapid eclipse in post-Soviet Russia suggests that Russians were/are quite capable of seeing the great lie that lay at the root of his great ‘Truth’: communism was not all bad and was superior to the West in many ways. 60% of Russia believe that 30 years after its collapse. Solzhenitsyn became a comical figure in Moscow — a sort of The End Is Nigh, sandwich-board old man with feet of clay.

Enlightenment truths

Solzhenitsyn was right about the real problem being the Enlightenment, ‘materialism’ and godlessness. Yes, communism was/is the logical end of the Enlightenment game. Get rid of the exploiters and we all live happily ever after (or, for Solzhenitsyn, as prisoners in a living hell). And it’s wrong to divorce morality from political, to dismiss categories of Good and Evil from our discourse. There are fundamental truths. My Rothschild-Clausewitz clincher in the first place.

But his understanding of Marx must have been from rigid Stalinist textbooks, because Marx’s ‘materialism’ is an indictment of capitalism, a freeing of humanity from material cares, needs. And that’s precisely what Solzhenitsyn is after too. Solzhenitsyn was a communist true believer but a bad Marxist. His prescription from his retreat in Vermont was ‘defeat the godless communists’. No room for detente, no tolerance for the Evil Empire. Ironically, Reagan was talked out of any special meeting with Solzhenitsyn at the White House by Kissinger, despite Solzhenitsyn’s approval of Reagan. (By then, Solzhenitsyn’s fervent Orthodox Christianity was an embarrassment to everyone, including evangelical Bush II.)

So the Soviet critique — that Solzhenitsyn was a dupe of the imperialists — was more or less true, as Solzhenitsyn had no use for imperialism of any kind and yet relied on the imperialists to destroy communism. He loathed communism and approved of capitalism. Solzhenitsyn was wrong about communism = evil, but not about his broader critique of the Enlightenment.

Islamic truths

Solzhenitsyn gave no thought to Islam, even though it was clear to all that a genuine theocracy, Solzhenitsyn’s implied ‘good society’, came about on the Soviet Union’s southern border, even as the faux communist utopias (both the Soviet Union and Afghanistan) were disintegrating. Shia Iran pretty much fills Solzhenitsyn’s checklist. Though persecuted, Iran was distant enough and with a strong enough culture to resist the capitalist trap, and its 1979 revolution was overwhelmingly popular, unlike the mini-revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, which was really more a palace coup.

On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn was recommending that the Soviet government abandon its Muslim republics and unite only the ‘good’ Slavs. No room for Islam in Solzhenitsyn’s god’s earthly kingdom. The most Solzhenitsyn did was to taunt the West after 9/11, describing radical Islam as an understandable reaction to western secularism and inequalities of wealth. But by then no one was listening.

Contrast this with Iran at the time, where the revolution reached out to likeminded (i.e., anti-imperialist) nations, including the Soviet Union. In 1988, just a year and a half before he died, Ayatollah Khomeini reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, in a gesture of anti-imperialist solidarity. This was at a time of war against Iraq and continued subversion of Iran by the US and Israel. The Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize the new Islamic government in 1979, but Khomeini ruled that close relations with atheist Soviet Union were not Islamic, and then the Soviet Union sold arms to both Iraq and Iran during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, as if to prove his point. But as religion became acceptable in Gorbachev’s perestroika, Khomeini sent Gorbachev his only written message to a foreign leader. An Iranian delegation to Moscow brought a sincere offer of support to the faltering Soviet leader. The Ayatollah warned him not to trust the West, which should have been crystal, crystal to Gorbachev, as the last Soviet troops were retreating in a hail of US-made bullets, as Afghan basmachi (the Soviets’ term for 1920s mujahideen) were downing Soviet helicopters with Reagan’s gift of Stinger missiles. Khomeini: “If you hope, at this juncture, to cut the economic Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any ill of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase.” Gorbachev dismissed the offer as interfering with Soviet internal affairs.

What was Solzhenitsyn doing then? He was exhorting Reagan to kill as many commies as possible. So who is the religious leader genuinely committed to peace? Solzhenitsyn had fewer illusions about the West at this point, but his illusions about socialism/ communism were alive and well. He was soon bemoaning the post-Soviet oligarchy, but his tears were crocodile tears. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran are already playing key roles in establishing a new anti-imperialist reality, building on the first step taken by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988. The world’s problems will only be solved based on a new geopolitical reality with Russia and Iran at its heart, the kernel of truth in the Ayatollah’s historic gesture in 1988. No thanks to ‘apolitical’ Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was wrong about socialism, wrong about nonSlavs and non-Christians, but right about the godless West, and the need for morality to be the foundation of our economics, politics, art. His writings are ‘true’ only if you believe that (and if you ignore his anticommunism). The West couldn’t abide Solzhenitsyn’s fire-and-brimstone Orthodox Christianity, his denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism (though it loved his anticommunism). The West can’t abide Iran’s fire-and-brimstone Islam, its denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism, and, what’s worse, its enmity with US-Israel. Which, to remind the reader, was the basis of Soviet foreign policy, which was why it had to be destroyed. And just like communism, Islamic resistance to imperialism must be destroyed. Solzhenitsyn’s vision was of a religious leadership of society. But Solzhenitsyn is no perennialist. It’s my (Slavic Orthodox) road or no road.

Solzhenitsyn denounced the West for its immorality and said we must return to a truly Christian society. Everyone laughed at him. Couldn’t he see that the West was godless? But the current crises are making it clearer every day that Solzhenitsyn was right about a moral foundation for our society. And it is Iran that is an important experiment in building a new world order with spirituality at its core, much like the secular Soviet Union was in its day, but minus God. Both have a wealth of experience to share. They were/are not the ‘enemy’. We are our own worst enemy, and we must repent and atone for our sins. Amen.

Is Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 more robust than Russia’s 1917? Is it perhaps the logical end of the Enlightenment journey from capitalism to communism? That nagging suspicion of mine about legislating atheism being, well, wrong suggests to me that Iran has a fighting chance. That is if US-Israel don’t succeed in destroying it first. As for Solzhenitsyn’s hope for a Christian moral Russia, that’s at least as iffy. By the late 1980s, Christianity was restored and Russians flocked to churches to be baptized. But interest soon waned. Since 2017, atheists have gone from from 7% to 14% of the population. Is it the fault of Soviet godlessness or just the same drift to godlessness everywhere (except the Muslim world)? After an initial flurry of baptizing in the 1990s, Orthodoxy never really caught on. But both nationalism and Islam are alive and well in Russia.

My biggest gripe with Solzhenitsyn is the way he interprets Truth as a thing, an end, that a Word can vanquish Evil. No! Truth is the process of bring thought, action into harmony with the divine will (Stoicism), the dialectic of history (Marxism). There are moral values underlying our actions, and if the actions are in harmony with God, with the world, that correspondence will be true. But Solzhenitsyn’s equating the Soviet Union with Evil, and (once he had experienced it) the West too, and then the new Russia, suggests the flaw, the great lie, in his thinking. In his Nobel prize speech, Solzhenitsyn whines about solipsistic writers, exhorting writers to imitate in microcosm the original creator’s making of the real world, to sense more keenly the harmony of world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it, to communicate this to mankind. Great stuff, but he’s hoisted on his own (anticommunist) petard. His rueful attitude to post-Soviet Russia suggests his truth was conditional, subjective, after all. Where is God’s will in post-Soviet reality, Russian or the West? His fetishizing the old (Russian, of course) saw: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, my foot. How about ‘5 chess moves ahead well analyzed’, ‘don’t shake the boat’, ‘a stitch in time’?

Peasant truth

Solzhenitsyn was a master of media manipulation. He delayed his return to Russia until 1994 and then came via Alaska to Magadan, considered the capital of the gulag, as a member of the zek nation-within-a-nation. He kissed the ground and intoned: “Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy ground. The need for purification comes from repentance for both individual and national transgressions of the Soviet era.” Then by train, with lots of pit stops along the way, the BBC in tow.

But he was given a dose of his own truthiness at one Siberian stop by a babushka: “It is you and your writing that started it all and brought our country to the verge of collapse and devastation. Russia doesn’t need you. So go back to your blessed America.”

Unfazed, Solzhenitsyn shot back: “To my dying day I will keep fighting against the evil ideology that was capable of slaying a third of my country.” Solzhenitsyn saw — with horror — that communism has remained in our hearts, in our souls and in our minds. But Russians complicit in Soviet ‘evils’ (i.e., everyone) resent this self-righteous jeremiad.

Heritage Foundation’s Ariel Cohen strips Solzhenitsyn’s vision bare: “This revived orthodox world view makes Russia closer to China and the Muslim world. The Polish pope was shunned, but the ayatollahs, Hamas and even Chinese Godless Communists are embraced. Catholicism and Protestantism are declared alien, while Islam is hailed as an ‘authentic’ religion of Russia.”

There are bits of truth in both these thrusts, and self-serving lies. Use your own judgment of who’s really telling the truth.

And compare Solzhenitsyn’s fate with Vaclav Havel, whose life had a similar trajectory as writer, dissident and underminer of socialism, and who became figurehead president of a Disneyland NATO satrap. In contrast, and to his credit, Solzhenitsyn refused such token public political plums (he refused Yeltsin’s offer of the Order of St Andrew from a state authority that had brought Russia to its present state of ruin) and predicted: “If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the US will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

My truth — thinking 5 chess moves ahead to try to align with the universal moral truth – tells me he’s finally got it right.

This article was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 at 7:46pm and is filed under Capitalism, Christianity, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, History, Islam, Judaism, Russia, Socialism, The Soviet Union.

Why Middle-Class Left Liberals Should Dump the Democratic Party: Finding Common Ground with Socialists

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 21:22:59 +0000

Many of you in the middle class are opposed to socialism. You still think there is some chance for you under capitalism and you fear that the socialists will take what little you have and divide it among the shiftless and thriftless. You need not have the slightest fear. The socialist has no use for your small capital; it would do (them) not the least good. (They are) after the earth, the trusts, and the machinery of production. Besides, soon you will have nothing to divide. When the big capitalists get through with you, you will be ready for us. You may not be ready yet, but you are ripening very rapidly. When you have been stripped of what you have, when you have become proletarians, when you have become expropriated, you will be ready to join us in expropriating the expropriators.

— Speech by Eugene Debs over 100 years ago in Chicago about the middle-class fear of socialism

Orientation

Almost five years ago I wrote an article in Counterpunch: “Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party.” In that article I challenged the blithe interchangeability of the words “liberal” and “democrat”. I tracked eight historical changes of liberalism from left-liberal, to centrist-liberal to right-center liberals (neoliberals). I also argued that the words liberal and democracy are used interchangeably by liberals, even though it wasn’t until the 20th century that liberals were clearly for democracy (translated as universal suffrage for white males).

The problem with my article as I see it today is that I lumped upper middle-class left liberals with middle-class liberals. Two years later I wrote another article called “The Greater of Two Evils: Why the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for 85% of the U.S. Population.” In that article, I outlined how, since the 2008 crash, the social classes whose wealth grew were the ruling class, the upper-class and the upper-middle-class, constituting about 15% of all social classes. Everyone else was doing worse, including the middle-class.

In my first article I slurred the differences between the upper-middle-class and the middle-class, advocating for both classes to get out of the Democratic Party. I have since come to see (as I will get into later) that the upper-middle-class has done very well under the umbrella of the Democrats and it is not in their material interests to leave. This is no longer true of the middle-class. Historically, the material interests of the middle-class and the upper-middle-class has more in common with each other than the working-class. In other words, the difference between news anchors, lawyers, senior managers on the one hand and high school teachers, librarians and supervisors on the other hand are more differences of degree than kind. After all, they all did mental work, as opposed to the physical work of the working-class. However, in the last 50 years middle-class life has gotten far worse than the life of the upper middle-class. It has gotten bad enough to be able to say it is closer to the working-class. Whether they realize it or not, for middle-class left liberals, the Democratic Party has left the building 40 years ago.

My claim in this article is that:

Middle-class FDR liberals need to leave the democrats and be part of building a new party
Middle-class left liberals need to form alliances with the working-class and the poor, not the upper middle-class
The new party should advocate for socialism

What follows is why this should be so.

Difference Between FDR Liberals and Neoliberals

Left liberal values

Left liberals are broadly for the following. They are pro-science as well as for investing in scientific research and development as well as investing in infrastructure. They are for the separation of church and state as well as for the use of reason in problem-solving, such as raising children through what is called “authoritative parenting”. They support the matriarchal state: universal health care, unemployment, pensions, food stamps and a minimum wage automatically raised to keep up with inflation. They expect the state to intervene in the economy to soften the hard edges of capitalism, following a Keynesian economic policy. They are committed to gradual change and a lessening of race and gender stratification. Left liberals support an expansion of unions. This left liberalism has been present in the United States for roughly 40 years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s. Since then, Democratic Party has slid further and further right to the point that their platform today is a center-right neoliberal party which embodies none of these values. The problem is the collective denial left liberals have in ignoring this fact.

Right-wing neoliberal values

Neoliberals are directly opposed to the matriarchal state. They support the economic policies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Hayek with minimum state involvement in the economy. Neoliberals have withdrawn funding from long-term science programs. They have presided over the rise of New Age thinking initiated by Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy. Neoliberals have become extreme relativists championing the rise of identity politics which began in the early 1970s. Neoliberals have lost hope and have failed to bring the principles of the Enlightenment forward. They have abandoned investment in profits made on manufacturing and instead make their profits on the defense industry, arming the entire world. Under their rein most of the remaining profit is invested in finance capital.

Neoliberals have presided over the destruction of unions over last fifty years. They have stood by and watched the full-time, well paid secure working-class jobs disappear. Work hours under neoliberalism have gone from 40 hours per week to at least 50 hours per week for those lucky enough to be employed full-time. In general, the standard of living has declined in the US so that the next generation can expect to make less than their parents. It’s no accident that credit cards became available to the working-class in the early 1970s, so workers didn’t have to directly face the fact that their standard of living had declined. The civil rights movement spoke to what minorities had in common with organized labor, which was low-cost housing and fair wages. Today we have individualist identity politics where being recognized for your identity along with using politically correct language is all that is asked for. In the 1960s, community college was free. In the last 50 years the cost of college education is so high that student debt appears to be debt for life.

Neoliberals have supported the explosion of the prison-industrial complex which has expanded many times over since the 60s despite the rate of crime going down. The police departments have been equipped with military weapons that make the equipment of police prior to the 1970s pale in comparison. They have presided over the growth of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies which now have control over our physical and mental health. The official diagnostic manual was 50 pages in 1950. Today the same manual is well over 1000 pages. Today upper-middle-class parents are no longer authoritative but instead are practicing a form of “permissive parenting”, which easily results in spoiled, narcissistic children, with helicopter parents fretting endlessly over their little darling’s self-esteem. Please see Table A for a comparison.

Differences Between Middle Class and Upper Middle Class

Not everyone is middle-class

In the United States, most people think of themselves as middle-class. Last time I checked 80% of the working-class mistakenly thought they were middle-class. Why? Because in Yankeedom, it’s an embarrassment to be working-class. So too, upper-middle-class people, nervous about being seen as well-to-do, play down their wealth. Nevertheless, there are real parameters around what it means to be middle-class, as I’ll get to. But first the social class composition.

Social class composition

Based on the work of William Domhoff, in his books Who Rules America and The Powers That Be, the ruling-class and the upper-class together compose about 5% of the population. They live off stocks and bonds and don’t have to work. Their investments are principally in oil, mining, the military and banking. They have been characterized as “old money” and are mostly Republicans.

The upper-middle-class is about 10% of the population. They make most of their money off scientific innovations like computers, internet and electronics. They are called “new money” and are mostly Democrats. Upper-middle-class people are also doctors, lawyers, architects, senior managers, scientists and engineers, as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities.

The middle-class consists of about 25% of the population. Occupational examples include high school and grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle managers, self-employed artisans and tiny little mom-and-pop operations. The middle-class is at the bottom rung of the Democratic Party not well-represented at all.

The working-class is about 40% of the population and consists of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled working-class include carpenters, welders and electricians, wait-staff and store clerks who are likely to vote Democrat. Their interests are not represented by the Democratic Party either. The semi-skilled are bus drivers or train operators and along with unskilled are less likely to vote. The last 10% consist of what Marx called the “lumpenproletariat” who live by their wits as prostitutes, hustlers, gamblers or those on welfare. These folks are not likely to vote either.

Income is not the most important determinant of social class: the nine dimensions of social class

When most Yankees try to understand social class, the first thing they think of is how much income a person has. But this is only one of the nine dimensions of social class, and not the most important one. Most of these dimensions are covered in the work of Marxist Erik Olin Wright as well as some of the followers of Max Weber. The first dimension of social class is technical, and this consists of three parts: a) the proportion of mental and physical work the job requires; b) the amount of independence or interdependence the kind of work involves; and c) the proportion of the work that is mechanical rote work versus creativity. So typically, a good upper-middle-class job will involve mental work, be independent from others and involve creativity. At the other end of the spectrum is unskilled working-class labor which predominantly involves physical labor and working with other people, while the work itself is repetitive. Other social classes have various combinations in between.

The second dimension of social class is political and economic authority relations. This consists of two sub-categories. The first is the degree of power the person has over resources, tools, goods and services. A capitalist has control over all these things. Workers usually have control over none of them, except that skilled workers might own their own tools. The second sub-category has to do with the proportion of order-giving and order-taking involved. The owner of a company gives orders and takes no orders. His workers take orders and don’t give orders. Middle-class people in corporations may give orders to workers but must take orders from senior management. This category is simply – who gets to boss around who and under what conditions.

The third dimension of social class is mobility. How easy is it to move up or down the class hierarchy both within one’s lifetime or across generations? The fourth dimension of social class is resources. Most people think of resources in terms of income. But wealth also includes assets such as inheritance, real estate, stocks, bonds and property. Sometimes upper-class people may work only part time, but it would be deceptive to make sense of their class position by some part-time job when they have an inheritance.

The fifth dimension of social class is education. This consists of the number of years of school completed as well as the quality of the school attended. The sixth dimension of social class is status. This is the degree of prestige in which one’s occupation is held by others. One reason why income is unstable as an indicator of social class is that some workers can make a good deal of money, such as unionized garbage collectors, but have low status. Conversely, an adjunct college instructor can have high status among the Yankee population but make significantly less money than a garbage collector.

The seventh dimension of social class is lifestyle and consumption patterns. This has four sub-categories. The first is health – birth and death rates. As many of you know, working-class people die on average seven years younger than people in the middle and upper-middle-classes. The second sub-category is how people dress, their speech patterns, body mannerisms and manners. The third sub-category is their recreational habits – whether they ski, play baseball or go bowling. The last sub-category is their religious beliefs. Religions are class divided. In the case of the protestants, there are the Unitarians, Episcopalians and Presbyterians near the top and Baptists and fundamentalists at the bottom.

The eighth dimensions of social class is the degree of awareness people have of their social class. Generally, the upper class and the ruling class are extremely class conscious and are very fussy about who is allowed into their circles. The upper-middle-class and the middle-class tend to be less class conscious. In countries other than the United States, the working-class is very class conscious. But here in Yankeedom, workers see themselves as “temporarily indisposed millionaires”. The last social dimension of class is the ability to take collective action. Capitalists at the end of World War II and soon thereafter organized a big campaign to win back the allegiance of workers. The ruling class has exclusive clubs in which they organize class strategy. The World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg group are examples. At the other end of the spectrum, when workers join unions or strike, they are showing class consciousness. No social class fits neatly into each dimension. There are what Wright calls “contradictory class locations” where a person is caught between two classes either between generations or within their lifetime.

Why does class count?

Why have I gone over the dimensions of social class in such detail? One reason is to show that upper middle-class people and middle-class people are not interchangeable. They vary in the technical division of labor, authority relations, class mobility, resources, education, status, lifestyle, degree of class consciousness and their willingness to take collective action. They also differ in their attitudes towards the meaning of work, as well as in their attitudes towards time and eating habits. If we want to suggest that the middle-class should break its alliance with the upper middle-class and get out of the Democratic Party, we have to expand and deepen their differences as I am starting to demonstrate.

Summary: two reasons why middle-class left liberal should get out the Democratic Party

Summarizing, the first thing we needed to do is to establish that the Democratic Party is a center-right neoliberal party which has next to nothing to do with being left-liberal. This is reason A to get out of the Democratic Party. The second reason is that the Democratic Party serves the interests of the upper-middle-class not the middle-class. The most obvious indicator of why the middle-class should no longer align themselves with the upper-middle-class is to understand what has happened since the crash of 2008. Both Thomas Piketty and Richard Wolff argue that the “economic recovery” was very class specific. The rulers, the upper class and the upper middle-class have done considerably better in that “recovery”. All other social classes, including the middle-class, have done worse. The middle-class, economically and in other dimensions, is far closer to the working-class than it has ever been. Reason B to get out of the Democratic Party.

But can these two classes really get along? There is a built-in tension and discomfort about doing mental work and physical work; there are differences in the degree of status in the two classes’ occupations. If we want to move middle-class people and working-class people closer together, we have to understand their commonalities and where the tension points are in their differences.

Similarities and Differences Between Middle Class and Working Class People

Similarities

The biggest similarity between the two classes is a decline in the standard of living. This includes income, work stability, increase in hours worked and lack of benefits. Another commonality is sports. Working-class people and middle-class people can unite around being fans of baseball, football and basketball professional teams. In terms of music, rock or country rock might bring these two classes together. Another commonality is that both classes have what sociologists have defined as achieved status. Unlike the upper classes, they usually do not come into life with an inheritance. Lastly, both classes see hard work as a virtue.

Differences

One of the major differences between these two classes is that middle-class people make their living primarily by doing mental and/or supervisory work. Working-class people make their living primarily with their hands and their bodies. A second major obstacle to overcome is that middle-class jobs usually have higher status. The third difference is that middle-class people often give orders to working-class people, but the reverse is not the case. This can lead to jealousy and resentment among working-class people. Middle-class people are very individualistic and not likely to organize as a class. There is likely to be tension between the classes when the working-class agitates to start a union or take strike action. There are also differences between the classes around the meaning of work. For working-class people, the meaning of work is less important than the money and material benefits. Some middle-class people might trade off a higher paying job for work that seems socially redeeming to them.

In terms of resources middle-class people today are likely to own their own home and have stocks and bonds. Working-class people’s assets are usually a car and possibly a home. Mostly they do not own stocks. Whatever savings account they have, that is it. There are also differences in their health conditions. Working-class people are likely to have eating, drinking and smoking problems and middle-class people are healthier. Working-class people are more likely to go to gambling casinos and play the lottery. Middle-class people see that as a waste of time and money.

Another tension point is education. Usually, middle-class people will have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, while working-class people will have no degree or an associate degree at best. Middle-class people will dress, speak and have manners that will be different from the working-class, and this will produce class tensions. Middle-class and working-class people will attend different religious denominations. Working-class religious services invite submission, confessions of being a sinner as well as altered states of consciousness like speaking in tongues, singing and dancing in the church aisles. In middle-class religions, there is less pressure to make you feel like you are a sinner. At the same time, sermons are designed to appeal to what is reasonable rather than to force you to have a revelatory experience which alters one’s state of consciousness.

Middle Class People Meet Socialists

Surely you are kidding

Let’s suppose middle-class left liberals have enough doubts about the Democratic Party because they are no longer New Deal liberals, and they’re starting to see that the party no longer looks out for middle-class interests. Let’s assume that economic, political and ecological disasters will continue to plague capitalism, and somehow a third party – a mass party – has emerged founded on socialism and is getting up a head of steam. This party has some working-class support as well as some union support. What would it take for middle-class left liberals to join?

Fears Middle-class Liberals Have About Socialists

Dictatorship and one-party rule

In its propaganda war with socialism, capitalists inevitably point out some of what it perceives to be the dictatorial tendencies of communism – in Russia, China and Cuba – as the archetypal example of socialism. What it does not do is study the conditions under which one-party rule occurred and what the authorities were up against. I am not going to get into pros and cons of this here because this kind of socialism – whether Stalinist or Maoist – is only one type of socialism. There are six types of socialism. Starting from the right and moving leftward there are social democrats and then three kinds of Leninists – Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyists. Continuing leftward, there are left communists or council communists and the anarchists. In my efforts to convince middle-class liberals of the feasibility of socialism I will address as much as I can what most or all of these types are in agreement on. For now, let’s just say that dictatorial rule is not a foundational principle of socialism, even for the Stalinist and Maoist parties that have been called dictatorial by capitalists.

Furthermore, I think it is ludicrous for members of the Democratic Party to complain about the one-party rule of socialists when in Yankeedom there are only two parties. The Democratic Party is hardly democratic when it only serves the interests of the about 10% of the population (Republicans serve the ruling and upper classes) and leaves over 85% with no representation at all. The party I call the “Republicrats”, representing 15% of the population, is one party, the party of capital.

Confusion of personal property with social property

We socialists have a running joke on our Facebook posts, mostly in reaction to over-the-top conservatives who think we want to abolish personal property. We say “yes indeed, we are coming for your tooth brush.” That perceived threat is accompanied by imagining that socialists are all having group sex. But seriously, when we socialists say we want to abolish private property we only mean social property. We want to abolish capitalist control over water, food, energy systems, tools, all the necessities that people need to live. We don’t believe resources that everyone needs in order to live should be privately owned. On the other hand, personal property will remain with the individual as it would under capitalism.

Discouragement of innovation

Capitalism has a very shallow and narrow understanding of human nature. Capitalists imagine that people are lazy at heart and unless the carrot is held in front of people – the prospect of being a millionaire – they will do nothing. Further, they look at the types of “leisure” activities a working-class person enjoys after another 50-hour work week and take those as representing what human nature is really like. For example, on Friday night the worker wants to play cards. On Saturday he watches a ball game and have a few beers and on Sunday he sleeps in. For the capitalist this is lazy. What the capitalist thinks is that if workers did not have to work, then playing cards, watching football, drinking, getting laid and sleeping is all he would ever do. What the capitalist doesn’t understand is that the entire weekend is not leisure at all. Its recovery from the week and preparation for the new week.

Under conditions of socialist work, alienation would be minor – and I am being conservative here. The natural collective creativity on the job will arise. People will work less, perhaps 30 hours a week at first. Because workers will control the workplaces as well as decide what to produce, how to produce it, how much they should work and how they will be compensated, work will be a joy, not a curse as under capitalism. There will be plenty of room for innovation, in fact, much more than under capitalism where most workers are imprisoned in wage labor and told not to be curious and not have their own ideas about how things should be run.

All this collective creativity gives the lie to the ridiculous capitalist notion that people want socialism because they want “free stuff” with no contribution. All socialist plans have a budget and decisions have to be made about what and how the budget will be spent. No one will “get out of working”. What the capitalist cannot imagine is that under socialism people will want to work. The idea of not working would be painful – not liberating.

Equality of poverty

In its heyday, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party was a socialist society which produced great material wealth. The socialist countries that have been showcased by capitalists as poor – the Soviet Union, China and Cuba – were only poor during certain times of their existence. What capitalists fail to inform us of is that before the socialist revolutions, as Michael Parenti points out, those countries were even more poor. What material wealth does exist in capitalist societies has taken hundreds of years to build up. In China today, absolute poverty was eradicated within 40 years.

There will be far more innovation than existed under capitalism because under socialism the workplaces will be controlled by the workers and workers’ activities will be guided by an overall plan. To cite one instance, before Yugoslavia was destroyed by capitalists, Yugoslavian productivity under worker self-management was higher than in any capitalist country. The same was true during the Spanish Revolution under worker self-management in both industry and in agriculture.

People are naturally greedy

Cross-cultural research on happiness has found that there is a direct correlation between money and happiness when people move from poverty to a middle-class life. However, the movement from middle-class to upper-middle-class and beyond is no longer correlated to happiness. In other words, people who are upper class or upper-middle-class are not any more likely to be happy than are middle-class people. This gives the lie to the capitalist notion that people are greedy and that everyone secretly wants to be a millionaire. What is more likely is that people want to be middle-class. They want basics in material security. After that they want other things; creativity on the job, to be able to contribute to society and to be recognized for their work, to mention only a few things.

Socialists will want to abolish religion

I admit that the state socialist attempt to decree the abolition of religion was a big mistake. I also think that doing so was contrary to the principles of materialism Marxists aspire to. While I stand firm in the ontological belief that there are no gods or god, at the same time I understand the degree to which people wish to hold on to religion as an expression of their alienation of social life. As generations pass and prosperous ways of life become normalized, I predict three things will happen. First, more people will become atheists. Secondly, those who continue to believe in religion will notice that the nature of the gods, or god, will change. The gods or god will blend more with the nature we know because social life will be more likely to begin to resemble heaven on earth. Third, the fundamentalist religions that plague many working-class people will disappear because the working-class will no longer consider themselves sinners or need fire and brimstone to make things right.

Commonalities Between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Need for a mass party

We socialists think you’ll agree with us that we badly need a mass party that can speak to the needs of the 25% of us who are middle-class and the 40% percent of us who are working-class. This party will develop a program and a step-by-step plan for implementation of the plan over the next 5, 10 and 15 years. It will be a dues-paying party and we will implement methods for getting input into what the plan will be. The issues will be prioritized, and everyone will have a say in carrying out the plan. Once the plan is set, people will be able to sign up for tasks they agree to carry out over the course of weeks and months. In addition to a thirty-hour work week, approximately five hours per week will be devoted to this “political” work.

Massive support for Unions

We socialists know that you left liberals have supported unions from the 1930s to the early 1970s. However, we also know that it was under liberal presidents that the best organizers of unions, the communists and the socialists, were drummed out of unions in the 1950s. This limited the vision of unions as they turned into “business unions”. We also think you should be very upset with the neoliberals in the Democratic Party who have not supported unions for the last 50 years, causing union representation in Yankeedom to be now less than 10%. We hold neoliberals directly responsible for the fact that wages, working conditions and job security are pretty much last in the industrial capitalist societies. The vision of unions needs to be built back up to the ways of the Industrial Workers of the World who saw unions as workshops for how to run a society, not merely a way to sustain and improve everyday working conditions.

Society can be engineered

Like you, we socialists agree with the great project of the Enlightenment that a better society can be engineered by its members. Unlike conservatives, we do not accept that social organizations should be ruled by kings, aristocrats, priests or any traditional authorities. Neither do we think society is some kind of reform school in preparation for the next life. We also don’t think society is best governed by the automatic preservation of traditional institutions that have been here the longest. Like you, we agree in the notion of progress.

The value of science and technology in producing a society of abundance

Like you we are very disappointed and angry that capitalists have chosen to invest their profits in warfare and in finance capital rather than in scientific research that could make our lives better. We also think you should blame the neoliberals for allowing this to happen over the course of the last 50 years. As socialists we have always felt that the scientific method is the best way to know things and that science is a crucial ingredient in Marx’s call to “develop the productive forces”. For us, the creation of socialism was never any kind of sacrifice or doing with less. Nor are we unrealistic about human nature. We fully understand that the foundation of socialism has to be the production of more than enough wealth to go around. With abundance in place, there is no motivation for stealing or wanting what others have.

The value of the state overview

We socialists are in complete agreement with the value you hold about the importance of the functions of the matriarchically state. We also think it is important that the matriarchal state take over the realm of overall planning. This does not mean that all social production and distribution is centrally planned with no feedback from the local and regional levels. We see the relationship between the three in a dialectical manner. The local and regional levels feed up to the state level what products and services are needed. The state incorporates our feedback but then makes adjustments based on the fact that at the local and regional level we cannot see the whole. Once the state produces an over-all plan, that is then fed down to the local and regional levels. It will no doubt take a number of times for there to be a smooth “cybernetic” rhythm established.

Micro-level – the value of cooperative learning and authoritative parenting

We socialists are well aware that you middle-class left liberals have always supported public schools. Some of the more visionary of you might have had the money to send your children to a Montessori school. Some of you might have heard the name Lev Vygotsky and associated him with cooperative learning, which is used in Montessori education. What you probably were never told was that Vygotsky was a communist and he and his followers, Alexander Luria and Aleksei N Leontiev, founded a whole school of psychology, the “socio-historical school of psychology”. They developed a theory of cooperative learning that has been applied not only in school settings but in the design of social intelligence tests, the development of theories of cognitive development and in working with the deaf. Vygotsky’s work could be massively applied to the fields of social psychology, and possibly to therapy, as one group in New York City is currently doing.

Lastly, we admire the way that many of you have raised your children using authoritative child-rearing methods. You have avoided both extremes in child rearing. On the one hand are the authoritarian methods of conservative child rearing which raises children who are repressed, frightened and lack curiosity. On the other hand, it is the permissive parenting of upper-middle-class neoliberal parents that has turned out a generation of narcissistic, entitled, ungrateful brats who are the product of neoliberal schooling where the focus was on raising self-esteem in every school program. We think the authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian) method with its flexible structure, welcoming of dialogue, appeal to reason, rather than emotion is the best way to raise children. We are on the same page with you.

Deeper Differences between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Commitment to an antiwar international policy

We socialists have always been against wars because we know they are usually turf wars between capitalists about resources and that it is the workers and the poor people who do the fighting, not the capitalists. As far as wars go, we know that your class has supported the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. Beyond the 1970s you seem to have treated these wars with less enthusiasm except for perhaps, the war on Iraq. As it stands now, the capitalists in Yankeedom not only make a fortune in military warfare to “protect our borders” but they also arm the entire world. If counties decided to end their wars the capitalists here would be destitute. These wars need to end, not just because of the senseless deaths at home and abroad, but for pragmatic reasons. All this money could go into the trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructural work that is left undone. Suppose the military was employed on these infrastructural projects. Suppose the military was employed to build low-cost housing in every city. Living in a society of abundance requires the reinvestment in the military from wars abroad to infrastructure and natural disaster relief at home.

Anti-imperialist international policy

We socialists are also against imperialist wars where capitalists invade other countries to steal their political or economic resources, land and labor to make a profit. This can be most blatantly seen in Africa. Yankeedom also continues its imperialist ventures in Latin America, regularly attempting to overthrow governments there. Why? For the simple reason that freely elected governments (socialist or not) may have the nerve to set their own economic policy, which might not necessarily be friendly to transnational corporations.

Yankee capitalists want to rule the world and they don’t want any competition.

China, Russia and Iran refuse to tow the line and have formed an alliance. The Chinese represent the best hope of the world now. Why are they such a threat to the United States? Because they are making a profit through building infrastructures, not just in China but in other parts of the world. China, Russia and Iran have also withdrawn from the US dollar as a use of international currency, which costs the western banks in significant loss of profits. Yankee capitalists are slitting their own throats, and ours as well, by acting like big-shot imperialists fifty years after their time has passed and their own territory is falling apart. As middle-class people we think you can see that nothing good can come from this and we need to rebuild our own society.

Dismantling the Deep State

Unfortunately, most middle-class people don’t know any more about the FBI and the CIA and what these organizations do to promote themselves, including what is on television and in movies. The FBI has upended or ruined the lives of socialists for decades. Their role in undermining the New Left has been documented in David Cunningham’s book There’s Something Happening Here. The CIA is in a class by itself, the world’s most powerful terrorist organization. I will limit myself to three books: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford; The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stoner Saunders and The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. Funding for these organization should be ended, and the sooner the better.

Class Dismissed, Where Left Liberals Missed the Boat

For socialists of any stripe, social class has been the foundation for understanding capitalism. The capitalist class makes its profits by exploiting the working-class. As Marx points out, workers produce all the wealth, but they are given only about 40% in the form of wages (the first four hours of their labor) which allows them to support themselves. But the worker works another 6 hours. Who gets the value from that? The employer. The employer uses the rest of the surplus value produced by the worker to pay the middle-class managers, pay landlords for the use of plant and set aside funds to pay the state in taxes. They claim the remainder of the surplus as profit. Middle-class people have stood structurally between the working-class and the capitalists, giving orders to workers, taking orders from capitalists. There are other social classes as I’ve discussed earlier but the major dynamic is between the capitalist and the worker.

Middle-class people, like most other classes, do not talk about this because class is about political and economic power between groups. It is uncomfortable and middle-class people among others have been afraid to discuss this. Why? Because they feel guilty, that maybe it is their fault they have a better life? Maybe they owe the workers something? Middle-class people need to get over this, because the fact is, you are sliding south, in the same direction as the working-class. In fact, you now have more in common with working-class people than upper middle-class people.

Race relations: Social Movements vs Individualist Identity Politics

Strange as it may seem, middle-class people have been more comfortable talking about race than class. After all, many middle-class people prided themselves as left liberals by supporting the civil rights movement. This was a social movement in which racial minorities joined together to fix objective conditions such as higher pay, better housing, legal rights. I suspect most of you did not know that Martin Luther King, a paradigm of middle-class respectability, was a socialist.

However, since the mid 1970s, but especially from the 1990s on, race relations have turned from a social movement into something different. Identity politics is a psychological spin-off from the civil rights movement with a very different agenda. In the hands of upper middle-class, neoliberals of all colors, including lawyers and university professors, identity politics has been used to win political seats in the Democratic Party. They do this by focusing on the rights of individuals to recognition, the right to be called a certain pronoun and rights to declare being offended by this or that innuendo. Identity politics has crippled the ability of working-class and middle-class people to form alliances by dragging meetings through competitive battles as to who is more offended than whom. When an organization as corrupt as the ruling class Democratic Party starts babbling about “white privilege” it’s time to get off that sinking ship. The mess that race relations are today is made worse by the upper middle-class neoliberals seizing on identity politics. Here is yet another reason to dump the Democratic Party and any alliance with the upper middle-class. A terrific short book that lays out the limitations of identity politics is Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider.

Democracy is economic and participatory more than political representation

Middle-class left liberals in the 20th century have thought of democracy as synonymous with voting. Democracy was having the right to vote for one of the two major parties. For socialists this is a sham. Both parties are ruling class parties and workers have nothing to say about what candidates are running and what they will do after the election. For us, democracy is economic. We think it is ridiculous to imagine we live in a democracy when we go to work to be bossed around from beginning to the end of the day by the employer. For us, democracy begins and ends in the workplace. Workers should have a say in what is produced, how it is produced, where it is distributed, how long we work and how we are compensated. In addition, within socialism democracy is also present by its involvement in city planning. This includes participatory planning councils at the local level, participating in setting agendas and deciding how city revenue should be spent. Under socialism, political parties will still have their place, but they will operate under direct democracy, not representational democracy.

The future of capitalism

All socialists are against capitalism except for some right-wing social democrats who believe in a mixed economy. For us, capitalism is a system plagued by crises and inherently unstable. Various Marxist crisis theorists have developed theories about how and why capitalism will end. Even non-Marxist political economists have theories about how it will end. Please see my article “Name Me One Capitalist Country That Works: A Thirty Year Reckoning” for more sources. Where I think we can agree is that capitalist profits should not be made on wars, or on fictitious capital. It is the neoliberals, not you, who have made profits on fictitious capital and wars over the past 50 years. Rather, capitalist profits should be made on the production of goods and services. We still think that eventually capitalism will fail even if it only produces goods and services, but we can’t convince you of that until we are further down the road.

What is the place of competitive markets? Some of you might feel that having markets is a better mechanism for quickly finding out what people need and how those goods and services have been delivered. As Michael Parenti writes in Black Shirts and Reds, the central planning mechanisms in the USSR were no bargain. At the same time, we know that during the Spanish Revolution, the workers and peasants self-organized in industry and on farms for 3 years, covering millions of people and had better production records than the Spanish government had before the revolution. So, our choices are more than choosing between the state and the market. In the new society perhaps there might be a minor place for markets instead of state planning or worker planning, but the markets should never be among the major players. We can do better than markets.

• Published first in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce’s website.

This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 2:22pm and is filed under Capitalism, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, Deep State, Democracy, Democrats, Disinformation, Economic Inequality, Elections, Employment, Exploitation, Identity Politics, Infrastructure, Karl Marx, Labor, Labor Theory of Value, Neoliberalism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Socialism, The “Left”, Unions, United States, Wage, Working Class.

There Are So Many Lessons to Learn from Kerala

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 15:32:27 +0000

Gopika Babu (India), Community, 2021.

In Kerala (population 35 million), the Left Democratic Front has been in the government for the past five years, during which it has confronted a number of serious crises: the aftereffects of Cyclone Ockhi in 2017, the Nipah virus outbreak of 2018, the floods of 2018 and 2019, and then the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Kerala’s health minister, K.K. Shailaja, has earned the nickname the ‘Coronavirus Slayer’ because of the state’s rapid and comprehensive approach to breaking the chain of infection. All polls indicate that the Left will return to the government, breaking an anti-incumbency trend in the state since 1980.

Vijay Prashad speaks to Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac about the upcoming legislative elections in Kerala, courtesy of Peoples Dispatch.

To better understand the great gains made by the Left Democratic Front government over the past five years, I spoke to Kerala’s Finance Minister T. M. Thomas Isaac, a Central Committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Isaac begins by telling me that the switch back and forth between the Left Front and the Right Front, as he called it, has ‘cost Kerala a lot of social advancement’. If the Left wins again, he says, it will ‘be in power continuously for ten years. That is a sufficiently long period to leave a very substantial imprint upon Kerala’s development process’.

The general orientation of the Left’s approach toward Kerala’s development, Isaac said, has been ‘a kind of hop, step, and jump’:

The hop, the first stage, is redistributive politics. Kerala has been very noted for that. Our trade union movement has succeeded in having significant redistribution of income. Kerala has the highest wage rates in the country. Our peasant movement has been able to redistribute landed assets through a very successful land reform programme. Powerful social movements which pre-date even the Left movement in Kerala, [and] whose tradition the Left has carried forward, have pressurised successive governments which have been in power in Kerala to provide education, healthcare, [and for the] basic needs of everyone. Therefore, in Kerala, an ordinary person enjoys a quality of life which is much superior to the rest of India.

But there is a problem with this process. Because we have to spend so much on the social sector, there won’t be sufficient money [or] resources for building infrastructure. So [after] a programme of social development spread over more than half a century, there’s a serious infrastructure deficit in Kerala.

Our present government has been very remarkable in meeting the crises, ensuring that there is no social breakdown, ensuring that nobody in Kerala would go hungry, and [that] everybody will get treatment during COVID times and so on. But we did something more remarkable.

Junaina Muhammed (India), Green Kerala, 2021.

What the government did was to build the state’s infrastructure and begin to pivot to another economic foundation. The amount needed to upgrade the infrastructure is staggering, about Rs. 60,000 crores (or $11 billion). How does a Left government raise the funds to finance this kind of infrastructural development? Kerala, as a state within India, cannot borrow beyond a certain limit, so the Left government set up instruments such as the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB). Through the Board, the government was able to spend Rs. 10,000 crores (US$1.85 billion) and ‘has produced a remarkable change in the infrastructure’. After the hop (redistribution) and infrastructural development (step), comes the jump:

The jump is the programme that we have placed before the people. Now that infrastructure is there, [such as] transmission lines, assured electricity, industrial parks for investors to come and invest, we will have K-FON [Kerala-Fibre Optic Network], a super-highway of internet owned by the state, which is available to any service provider. [It ensures] equal treatment to everybody; nobody will have an [undue] advantage. And we are going to provide internet to everybody. It is the right of every individual. All the poor are going to get broadband connectivity for free.

All of this has provided a background for us to take the next big jump. That is, we now want to change the economic base of our economy. Our economic base is commercial crops, which are in serious crisis because of opening up [to ‘free trade’], or labour-intensive traditional industries, or very polluting chemical industries and so on. Therefore, we realise now, industries which are of our core competence would be knowledge industries, service industries, skill-based industries, and so on. Now how do you make this paradigm shift from your traditional economic base to the new [one]?

Kadambari Vaiga (India), High-tech School, 2020.

What will the new economic opportunities be for Kerala? First, because of the shift to the digital platform economy, Kerala will now develop its IT industry with the immense advantages of the state’s high literacy rates as well as 100% state-funded internet connectivity that will soon be available to the entire population. This, Isaac said, ‘is going to have a tremendous impact upon women’s employment’. Second, Kerala’s Left government will restructure higher education to promote innovation and deepen Kerala’s history of cooperative production (the example here is the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society, which recently rebuilt an old bridge in five months, seven months ahead of schedule).

Kerala aims to go beyond the paradigms of the Gujarat Model (high rates of growth for capitalist firms, but little social security and welfare for the people), the Uttar Pradesh Model (neither high growth nor social welfare), and the model that would provide high welfare but little industrial growth. The new Kerala project would go for high but managed growth and high welfare. ‘We want to create in Kerala [the basis for] individual dignity of life, security, and welfare’, Isaac says, which requires both industry and welfare. ‘We are not a socialist country’, he reminds me; ‘we are part of Indian capitalism. But in this part, within the limitations, we shall design a society which will inspire all progressive-thinking people in India. Yes, it is possible to build something different. That’s the idea of Kerala’.

A key element in the Kerala Model is the powerful social movements that grip the state. Amongst them is a mass front of the hundred-year-old communist movement and the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), which formed forty years ago in 1981 and which has a membership in excess of ten million women. One of the founders of AIDWA was Kanak Mukherjee (1921-2005). Kanakdi, as she was called, joined the freedom movement at the age of ten and never stopped fighting to emancipate our world from the chains of colonialism and capitalism. In 1938, at the age of seventeen, Kanakdi joined the Communist Party of India, using her immense talents to organise students and industrial workers. In 1942, as part of the anti-fascist struggle, Kanakdi helped found the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (‘Women’s Self Defence Committee’), which played a key role in helping those devastated by the Bengal Famine of 1943 – a famine created by imperialist policy that resulted in as many as three million deaths. These experiences deepened Kanakdi’s commitment to the communist struggle, to which she devoted the rest of her life.

To honour this pioneer communist, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dedicated our second feminisms study (Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle) to her life and work. Professor Elisabeth Armstrong, who was a key contributor to this study, recently published a book on AIDWA, which is now out as a paperback from LeftWord Books.

Today, organisations such as AIDWA continue to lift the confidence and power of working-class and peasant women, whose role has been considerable in Kerala and in the farmer’s revolt, as well as in struggles across the world. They speak out not only about their suffering but also about their aspirations, their great dreams of a socialist society – dreams that need to be built alongside other instruments such as the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala.

This article was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2021 at 8:32am and is filed under Activism, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, Economy/Economics, India, Labor, Socialism.

All the Cannons Will Silently Rust

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:41:17 +0000

Chittaprosad (India), Peace, undated.

Our year has been eclipsed by the pandemic, the rush of a virus paralysing societies across the world. Some governments offered smarter, more scientific, and humane approaches to the pandemic; many (but not all) of these have been governments with a socialist orientation. Amongst them is the Indian state of Kerala, tucked into the country’s south-west with a population of 35 million and governed by the Left Democratic Front (LDF). Kerala’s Health Minister KK Shailaja was later celebrated as the ‘Coronavirus Slayer’ for her leadership within a government that puts the needs of the population ahead of profit and superstition.

It is not as if there have been no cases of COVID-19 in Kerala, nor that there have been no deaths; it is rather that the government operated in a measured, swift, and deliberate way to inform the public, to use the government machinery to test the population for COVID-19, to carry out contact tracing, to isolate and treat the infected, and to take all possible measures to flatten the curve. Furthermore, as a result of a long history of organised public action in the state – often led by the communists and social reformers – trade unions, cooperatives, student and youth organisations, women’s organisations, and others operated in a very disciplined way to provide information and relief to the public.

https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Video-1.mp4

In early December, Kerala held local body elections across the state. The communists won more seats in these elections than all the seats won by the opposition. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the Indian government in Delhi under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the centre-right Indian National Congress, which is the main opposition in Kerala, ran a vicious campaign against the Left, including harsh personal attacks directed at Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The media – controlled almost exclusively by the major private corporations – led the attack on the Left and ignored new initiatives pushed by the Left in this remarkably difficult period.

For instance, the corporate media ignored the inauguration of thirty-four new public schools for the ‘Centre of Excellence’ project, which resulted in the slow return of children from expensive private schools to the revamped state schools. If they did report the initiatives, such as the building of about 250,000 homes for the working class and the indigent through the ‘Life Mission’, the media focused on mischievous allegations that charity money from the United Arab Emirates had violated foreign exchange regulations. These unfounded attacks shaped the harsh context of these local body elections.

PP Divya leads a protest in solidarity with Indian farmers.

Kerala’s Left went into this election with a series of important advantages. First, over the course of a century of struggle and governance, the communist movement has driven an agenda to improve the living conditions of the people, including by promoting health, education, and housing, and has inculcated a tradition of public action. Second, it was the Left that initiated a people’s planning campaign twenty-five years ago; this process enlivened the local self-government bodies and made them crucial platforms for public action and for the development of the Left alternative. Third, the current Left Democratic Front government has an exemplary record of managing crises that predates the pandemic, such as the catastrophic floods and the outbreak of the Nipah virus, both of which struck the state in 2018. Fourth, the Left’s mass organisations in the state are alert to the needs of the people and are often found working to provide relief, to fight against social indignity, and to fight to expand the rights of people. This was most clearly visible during the pandemic, when student, youth, women’s, workers, and peasant organisations delivered food and medicine to the people, built public washing facilities, and assisted local governments with testing, tracing, and enforcing the quarantine. It was this mass work that provided the best antidote to the virulence of the corporate media.

It was out of this remarkable mass work that the Left chose its candidates for the local body elections, most of them very young and a large number of them young women leaders from across the state. Below are short impressions of five of these new elected officials.

Reshma Mariam Roy writes in her diary

Reshma Mariam Roy won her seat from the Aruvappulam grama panchayat (local self-government at the village level), which had been represented by the Congress for the past fifteen years. Reshma turned twenty-one, the minimum age to contest these polls, the day before she filed her nomination. She is a member of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), both mass organisations of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and a leader in her college union. During the pandemic, Reshma had worked for the ‘helping hand’ programme started by KU Jineesh Kumar, another Left youth leader and the local representative to the state legislature; through the programme, they aid anyone who required it during the lockdown. During her campaign, Reshma kept a diary, in which she noted down the frustrations and demands of the people. She was happy that the Left gave young people the opportunity to run in these elections. ‘If people have a good opinion of me after five years’, she said, ‘that is the real victory’.

Arya Rajendran marches during the campaign

Arya Rajendran, twenty-one years old, is the president of Balasangham, an organisation of a million children that works to promote scientific and secular values in children that was set up on 28 December 1938 in Kalliasseri, Kannur (Kerala); its first president was the young communist (and later chief minister of Kerala for eleven years) E.K. Nayanar. Arya, a member of the SFI, sat for her final college exams at the same time as she campaigned for her seat on the Thiruvananthapuram city council. ‘Local bodies are the nerves of the democratic process of Kerala’, she said. ‘It is important that we have young people committed to the cause of democracy being elected to office. It is through local office that we can make sure that everyone benefits from the Left alternative being developed in the state’.

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PP Divya campaigns in Kannur district

PP Divya, at thirty-six-year-old, is already a veteran in the communist movement. She is a leader in the DYFI and the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and is a district committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She had already been a member of the district panchayat (council) since 2015, but now she has been re-elected and is expected to become the president of the district council. Not only has Divya been a key person in the fight against COVID-19 in her district, but she has led from the front to make basic improvements in daily life there and has led protests in solidarity with the farmers’ revolt that has gripped India.

Afsal campaigns in Malappuram

E. Afsal, like Reshma and Arya, is a leader of the SFI. At age twenty-five, he won from the Mangalam ward of the Malappuram district council. Afsal, Reshma, and Arya walk in the footprints of KV Sudheesh, who was a student leader and an elected office holder of the Kannur district council. On 26 January 1994, Sudheesh was stabbed to death by members of the fascist RSS, which is connected to India’s ruling BJP.

P. Prameela, who won a landslide at Pilicode, returns to work the next day

Comrade Prameela, who works as an agricultural wage labour, was one of the 58% of women who won seats in this local body election. Prameela is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of the directors of the board of the Kodakkad service co-operative bank, and a leader of AIDWA. She won more than 90% of the votes to take a seat on the Pilicode panchayat.

In 1976, the communist poet Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan wrote Kannurkkotta, or ‘Kannur Fort’, a poem that reflected his hope that the old can fade away and the youth can bring forth a new world. Ramakrishnan was president of the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (the progressive writers’ association) and an elected member of the state assembly (his candidacy supported by the Left).

All the fortresses will become antiques.
All the cannons will silently rust.
All the sultans will run away into the dark caves.
My children, who are not sleep deprived,
Will witness curiously all these events.

They will witness these curiously because they will not be fixated on the past. With names like Reshma, Arya, Divya, and Afsal, they will set aside the cannons and the sultans to construct a democratic world. And we will be walking right beside them.

Chilean Embraces Environmental Ethos on Oregon Coast

Paul Haeder — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 14:29:19 +0000

Before heading over to interview this subject, I was thinking of a possible epigraph for the piece. One from a Chilean:

Discovery is not seeing what there is (that is impossible at any level), but rather allowing oneself to converge towards a continually freshly-created reality.
― Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Neef, From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics

Then I thought –Why not a female Chilean poet?

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.
— Gabriela Mistral

Maria — In Newport

I meet Maria Sause at her upstairs one-bedroom apartment along a gravel road east of Newport. She’s been renting it for four years from the couple who owns the property who also occupies the residence below her.

Sause tells me her education now at age 78 continues unabated and full-throttle without all the encumbrances tied to trying to raise a child (she has one son), working to survive, and returning to Chile to take care of a dying mother and ailing father, and living with a dynamic Chilean poet leftist in a rural area of that country. “I am belatedly educating myself.”

Gabriela Mistral

As we talk on a warm fall day, Maria explains her current interest is attempting to define “fascism.”

She’s reading Michael Parenti, and asks me, “Is he a reliable source?” I laugh, telling her I’ve been reading him since I was a young college student in Arizona, interviewed him once for one of my newspaper gigs 20 years ago.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force. ― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

I’ve run into Maria several times over the past two years of my time in Lincoln County. She is a member of the group, Lincoln County Community Rights, which has lobbied for a ban on aerial spraying of clear-cuts (and any other land) with pesticides that are linked to ill effects on humans and animal life.

She believes in the right of a community to determine what practices are safe and which companies should be allowed to do business within the community. The basic gist of her belief system is that companies and governments must be held accountable to the people to ensure public health, safety and security are maintained.

This may sound like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro espoused, but in reality, many communities in the USA before the turn of the 19th Century had restrictions on which company could or could not be allowed in a town to do business.

Her own narrative and her zest for knowing the lay of the political landscape make her a real find on the Oregon Coast. She also is a painter.

Four Days after the Nazi Invasion

As fate would have it, her life and this interview might not have come to fruition. Maria’s father, Franta (Francisco), left Czechoslovakia a scant 96 hours after Nazi Germany took over her parents’ homeland (March 15, 1939).

The Czech family line, originally Kraus, goes way back: “I just got in touch with a second cousin three years ago who has completed the family tree. The Kraus family goes back to the late 1700s in Czechoslovakia.”

Maria is an avowed anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist. Her early days in Santiago, Chile, with her industrialist father (he was a licensed medical doctor from Czechoslovakia whose credentials were not recognized in Chile) was one of personal challenge since he was a highly intelligent but dictatorial man.

Given his tough demeanor, her father was prescient enough to have sent his wife, Lisbet Erica Hirsch (maiden name), to England in 1938 before things got ugly in Europe.

Maria and I talk about history, about the saga of her Jewish heritage and roots. Her Kraus family line was virtually extinguished — 54 members on her father’s side (and an unknown number on her mother’s side) were exterminated in places like Auschwitz. Nazis processed professional Jews through the town of Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto established by the SS during World War II.

My father in his youth belonged to several left movements. Maybe it was the shock and trauma of losing parents and the entire family that turned him into a rightwing conservative.

Maria and her sister were sent to private schools outside of Santiago in the 1940s and 50s. Her parents split when she was one and a half years old and the legal battle for the children put them into a children’s home. After Maria turned six, her father took the girls to live with him, and eventually remarried when Maria was 12.

Her own diaspora as a secular, non-practicing Jew is what she herself initiated once she hit age 19 and her father approved of Maria leaving Chile to study at the San Francisco State College. She stayed with an aunt and uncle. That residence lasted six months before Maria was out on her own, working, going to school and eventually marrying.

Pablo Neruda

Summer of Love

Maria talks about her vibrant circle of friends and compatriots now in Lincoln County. At 78, she has good friends and the Lincoln County Community Rights organization is a lifeforce. She has three grandchildren from a single offspring, Christopher (55), who is in Portland but has lived in Tempe, San Francisco and Chile.

As a writer, I measure lives through their formative years and their young adulthood as stepping stones into aging.

Maria’s sister died young, age 47, of ovarian cancer. Maria went to Israel to assist her sister through the dying process. She has two nephews in Israel, aged 56 and 54. They’ve kept in touch, she says, but going to Israel is out of the question for her: “I can’t stand what Israel does to the Palestinians.”

Maria has gone to school to learn English literature as an avocation to becoming a public-school teacher, which she tried her hand at as a single mother raising Christopher, who graduated from Newport High a long time ago.

That lesson, after having gained a master’s in education in a one-year intensive program at Portland’s Reed College, was tough: the challenges of behavioral issues with K12 students and the way things are run in public education were enough to turn her off substituting.

She says working as an English-Art-Journalism teacher at Siletz High School was a hard lesson. “The kids just ate me up, I wasn’t prepared for all the behavioral issues. I gave the principal my resignation after two years.”

We then turn the pages of her life back, to when she was growing up in Chile and her closest friend was an active member of the communist party – Ursula Sternsdorrf. All of Maria’s intellectual curiosity was kept from her conservative father, who was forced to leave the Nazi advance and the imminent death camps to became an industrialist in Chile.

We jump to her first emancipation – coming to California. Three weeks after arriving in San Francisco to go to school, “I met that anarchist poet, Edward Sause.”

When Maria returned to Chile to attend a wedding, her father was about to let her return, even going as far as contacting the American Consulate to put pressure the government to keep her in Chile.

The three groups of people who could not get a visa to leave Chile, she shares, were: adulterers; communists and mentally retarded people.

She was three months pregnant when she married Edward. “My husband was a wonderful person, that is, when he was sober.” Just a few years in, they ended up divorced, and Maria was raising a young boy while getting work in offices.

“I was incredibly influenced by my father. He had a strong personality. I wanted to be on good terms with him.” But the way she lived her life was contrary to her father’s belief system and worldview.

Her pathway to Newport is circuitous – meeting her San Francisco State College Shakespeare teacher who was fired for his support of the 1968 student strike. He was Edward van Aelstyn, who ended up in Northern California and lived in his family’s house which burned down. In 1977, he ended up in Newport with his family where he helped set up Red Octopus Theater and Teatro Mundo.

Chile

“You don’t push other people under in order to get yourself afloat.” – Maria’s credo

She ended up sharing a house, in 2007, with her former Shakespeare teacher, van Aelstyn.

But even that journey is both circuitous and interesting:

She was back in Chile taking care of her father (who died in 1997) when Maria fell in love with Cesar Retamal. He had lived in many places, including studying in East Germany as a machine builder. He had been imprisoned in Chile by the Pinochet junta. He was an activist, a communist and blacklisted in Chile. The country’s American-backed dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, plays a central role in Chile’s history.

Cesar, like thousands of students, professionals, and union activists, was “disappeared” and tortured in one of the hundreds of “torture houses” Pinochet’s secret police had set up throughout Chile.

Cesar escaped because he knew one of the guards, Maria recounts.

“This is a period of time when I had an enormous education,” she said.

After her father’s death (her mother had died years earlier), they ended up with inheritances (both Maria and Cesar got separate amounts). Shortly thereafter, they ended up looking for land in the South of Chile: near Temuco, about 675 kilometers from Santiago. The couple eventually built their dream home at the foot of the Andes.

“We built a house which I designed and made a scaled-down exact model of it.” Four months later, the cabin-like home was built by locals. Great gatherings of friends and acquaintances were common there. Politics were central to the parties.

Cesar ran a construction business, and she ended up doing translation work – technical, engineering reports, environmental impact reports, and process papers. These included multinational companies, such as Rio Tinto and Anglo American.

She says she learned a lot doing that type of work. She recalls working on a report enlisted by the Bolivian government focusing on privatization of water for the city of Cochabamba through a consortium to include the British private company, International Waters.

It was a dialogue between the British company and Bolivian government.

Interestingly, Cesar’s construction outfit was involved in building small plain homes that the Chilean government had guaranteed every citizen could have access to.

Cesar and Maria split amicably in 2006. The house and land they both still own, and Maria said she also has six apartments in Chile that are rentals which have not seen any income since the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Oregon — Tillamook State Park

Rolling Up Her Sleeves to Preserve Forests

“I have a love-hate relationship with Oregon,” she tells me. “It’s got a reputation for having an environmentally minded government. Yet it’s clear industry runs the state.”

She recalls John Kitzhaber, when he was governor, saying he couldn’t do anything about the clearcutting and aerial spraying in Oregon because “my arms are tied by the timber industry.”

“Pre-emption laws are made whenever government and industry see the people are rising up against their projects,” she said. “A government that protects industry at a higher level than it protects the safety of the people is unconstitutional.”

This concept of having a fundamental right enshrined by the Constitution that allows people to decide locally on issue of health, safety and the environment, is held dearly by Maria Sause.

She has witnessed the devastation caused by total forest removal in her own neck of the woods where she lives in small above-garage apartment on acreage along Fruitvale Road. The stumps are emblematic of her own fight and LCCR’s fight against clearcutting.

The Lincoln County aerial ban was reversed September 2019, which means timber companies began spraying glyphosate, Atrazine and 2,4-D (an ingredient in Agent Orange made infamous in Vietnam) near where she lives.

Oregon forest

“Right where I live, they clear cut an enormous parcel of the forest.” Interestingly, her life-long avocation of painting reflects thick forest, open sky and clear-cut landscape.

Both Maria and I talk about our socialist leanings and beliefs.

Maria laughs when she tells me of the construction business she and Cesar embarked upon. “We made sure everyone got the same wages. Cesar and I were working without pay. We did not have any business background.”

The administrators/owners were leftists and the laborers rightwing. She laughs hard at that dichotomy.

She tells me that the fight for a community bill of rights, reversing these state pre-emption laws and having communities determine their health, safety and sustainability takes time.

Maria Sause is no fly on the wall, no Pollyanna, and certainly has certain gravitas in the community. She’s up on the issues why the Liquid Natural Gas proposed port in Coos Bay, Jordan Cove, is wrong for that community and the state.

She alludes to the youth around the world, and especially in Newport, protesting for climate action. She applauds them.

In the end, her goal with LCCR is “to provoke structural change in government. In that sense, education is key to “give people the opportunity to see government is not really there to protect their safety.”

Santiago, Chile

This is why I am here in Newport. I have good friends. I can do my painting. Work on community rights. People have to rise up for their most fundamental rights.

I pose the question bout if she were to die and have a tombstone, what would be inscribed on it: — “We don’t know why we pass through. Let no step we take while here be wasted.”

The country is still collectively traumatized by the ugly years of Pinochet – 1973 to 1990.

Any reader should be able to piece together this grandmother’s “philosophy. Interestingly, she is clear that her concept of work involves having fun. “I can have as much fun working as doing something conventionally called entertainment. Work can be, and should be, entertaining and entertainment, for me, can be something that requires effort and is difficult to do.”

As an environmentalist, Maria has a clear and simple message about how we are more than just stewards of the planet, and more than just the managers of the earth’s beauty, which so many call man’s “resources.”

There are a lot of things we, as a species, shouldn’t do. We unfortunately learn about them as we witness ourselves doing them and causing harm to other species and our own. So, what I think we as a species have to do on Earth today is retrace our steps in many ways, and start living in a way that allows other species to live and flourish, even if that means relinquishing many comforts, we take for granted today.

Penguins in Chile!

The post Chilean Embraces Environmental Ethos on Oregon Coast first appeared on Dissident Voice.

“Dictatorship” and “Democracy” as Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda

Bruce Lerro — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:12:32 +0000

ORIENTATION

In my last article I showed how the word “totalitarian” was used as a loaded vice word to attack the Soviet Union after World War II and to red-bait communists around the world. The use of the word totalitarian began in the 1930s, but even before then in the 1920’s, the word “dictator” began to surface in order to explain another political response to the crisis in capitalism. We will study the use of this term from the 1920s to the end of World War II, although, of course, the word dictator is still used for propaganda purposes today against socialist governments.

If I were to ask 95% of the Yankee population, “Is Putin a dictator” almost all would say “yes”. If I were to ask “Is Maduro a dictator” I would get the same response. But if six months ago I were to ask “Is Trump a dictator” the answer would be mixed. This is because the CIA controlled political propaganda machine saves the word “dictator” for foreign countries, inevitably the head of socialist or communist states. But here in Yankeedom we don’t have dictators, not even Donald Trump.

Within the same time period, the 1920s, the word “democracy” was also manipulated to mean different things at different times but for the same anti-communist reasons. In the first half of this article I will discuss the propagandistic use of the word dictator and in the second half I will discuss the propagandistic use of democracy. For the section on dictatorship, I will be drawing mostly from Dictators, Democracy and Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy 1920s-1950 by Benjamin Alpers. For the section on democracy I will be using mostly The Crisis in Democratic Theory by Edward Purcell Jr.

THE UNITED STATES FLIRTS WITH DICTATORSHIPS IN THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930S

In the 20s the U.S. press praised Mussolini for bringing political order to Italy. So relieved was the U.S. press at Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 that few journalists bothered to report his hostility to democracy or his radical left past. From Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922 to mid-1930s, dictatorship was seen sympathetically on the left (Stalin’s dictatorship) as well as the right. The same praise was given to Stalin’s first 5-year plan. As Mussolini’s prestige rose in the U.S., Stalin was seen as accomplishing wonderful things by labor representatives, public health workers and engineers.

In a 1932 interview with Mussolini, the press packaged him as a model for the US as “what a real dictator would do”. Here is an excerpt from Barron’s editorial section: “Whether we are quite ready to admit it or not, sometimes openly and other times secretly, we have been longing to see the superman emerge… Of course, we all realize that dictatorships and even semi-dictatorships in peacetime are quite contrary to the spirit of American institutions and all that.”

Rather than rejecting the fear that “it can’t happen here” the sociologist Robert Lynd suggested that the capitalists secretly desired a dictatorship.

Dictatorship and the Great Depression

The coming of the depression made dictatorships more attractive. Mussolini received a favorable reception by capitalists as a dictatorship seemed like an efficient way to deal with labor unions, economic depressions and a way to organize an economy along non-socialist lines. In the early years of the Great Depression, dictatorship was an important political fantasy. The image of a dictator was a great man, one who was able to lift himself to prominence despite humble beginnings.

Dictatorship was understood as a personality and not part of a political structure. The dictator was the ultimate “doer”. Liberals bent over backwards explaining why dictatorship did not make it the opposite of democracy. Dorothy Thompson argued that good dictators can save democracy; bad dictators can destroy it. In the middle of the 1930s, 33% of unemployed engineers agreed with the need for a dictator.

In 1932-33, the necessity for a dictator in the US spread to the movies, including two Hollywood films. In the documentary movie Mussolini Speaks, no reference is made to fascist brutality. The film celebrates Mussolini’s enormous control of the crowd. In its initial run at the New York Place Theatre, it received critical and popular success. In 1933, the New York Times gave it an enthusiastic review.

The film Gabriel over the White House advocated dictatorship in the US. In it, a dictator tells Congress it has turned its back on the people. The dictator solves the problems of unemployment and organized crime. The newspaper magnet, Randolph Hearst, collaborated with this film. It was a hit at the box office but encountered mixed reviews. The problem was that the film hit theaters just as the Yankee longing for dictators was coming to an end. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 ended Mussolini’s popularity in the US. During the social and economic crisis of the 30s, U.S. analysis had briefly hoped that dictatorship might offer a more efficient way to unify and organize capitalism. As the costs of dictatorship rose in the late 30s, sociologists and historians, instead of blaming capitalist chaotic economic relations for interest in dictators as forces of order, blamed the masses for the existence of their now demonized dictators.

Roosevelt, Hitler and the end of the romance with dictators

While there were a minority of conservative groups that greeted Hitler’s rise with an anti-communist sigh of relief, the arrival of Hitler to power in 1933 ended the flirtation with dictatorship as a virtue word. After 1935, business journals began to equate fascism and communism. By the 2nd half of the 30s, dictatorship became an evil word. In 1927 “dictator” had enough favorability to have a car named “dictator”. The name of the car was recalled after 1937. In the early 1930s dictators were seen as either heroic (Mussolini) or horrific (Hitler), but each was admired as a man who single-handedly tamed the unruly masses and restored honor to the nation. By the late 1930s dictators were thought of as one-sidedly negative. Dictatorship became a loaded vice word. Dictators were subjected to pop psychological analysis or treated as buffoons, as in the movie of Charlie Chaplin or in the Three Stooges. In fact, Chaplin’s film on Hitler was the highest money-making film in the U.S. between 1933 and 1942.

In the United States the right-wing even accused Roosevelt of being a dictator throughout his term. There was a mocking phrase “Third Reich, Third International, Third Term” slogan for him. Even in 1937, 37% feared Roosevelt was becoming a dictator. In 1938 the figure rose to 50%. So, in the 1920s and early 1930s, dictatorships were seen as a temporary solution to social problems; whereas in the late 1930s dictatorships appeared to be the cause of social problems and perpetuated by mass media and the masses.

The absence of fathers promotes desire for dictators (Roosevelt)

One theory had it that American family life was in trouble. The need for more than one income put women in the workforce and this undermined the role of the father. There had to be some authoritative figure to be looked up to. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats provided this substitute. The dream of defeating Hitler through the patriarchal authority of Roosevelt backed by supportive women was present in a number of American films. In the novel, The President Vanishes, fascism comes to America, but it was overcome by a strong leader and the backing of a good woman.

Hollywood’s first attempt to deal with German politics was in the novel, Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada (1932). It contrasts the stable bonds of matrimony against chaotic political action. It presents dictators as produced by rifts in the social fabric. Improved family life offered the best opportunity to mend it. In Sinclair Lewis’s It can’t Happen Here a populist demagogue with fascist overtones, along with a core of “white-shirts”, win the election. Minutemen seized Congress and abolish political parties. A resistance formed, called “New Underground”, was led by a Yankee individualist who saves the day.

THE AUDIENCE ITSELF IS THE DRAMA: DICTATORSHIP, CROWDS AND MASSES 1936-1941

Up until now, dictatorship was focused in the individual dictator and had little to do with the masses. But by the late 1930s there was a shift from the personality of the dictator to a crowd-centered explanation of modern dictators. If in the early 30s Americans were fearful or hopeful of a single man asserting himself and ruling the country by his will, in the last half of the decade the personality of the dictator was dethroned as an explanation for the existence of dictators. It was the crowd or the masses that produced dictators. In the early 1930s, dictatorships paid little attention to the political actual organization of the dictatorships except for a very few groups. By the late 1930s there was much more attention paid to the social situation dictatorships emerged out of.

Cynical Views of the Public

Dorothy Thompson suggested that public opinion, not any desire on the part of the president, was responsible for the danger posed to democracy. In the play by Archibald MacLeish, Fall of the City, with Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith, the message was that people invent their oppressors. Masses wish to believe in them; they wish to be free of their freedom. The leader is a projection of the masses wanting to be dominated. Dictatorships don’t end once the dictator has disappeared. What explains the dictator? In the early 1930s fascism was the tyranny of a minority. But by the late 1930s fascism was understood as the work of the crowd. In the early 1930s order was understood as a good thing, something that restored chaos. Order was understood in mechanical images such as the machines of Henry Ford and Fredrick Taylor. But by the 1930s, the order of a regimented crowd became a dangerous thing. By the late 30s bad order existed because people desired regimentation, fanatical chanting and saluting in unison.

Just as the bomber squadron — powerful, ordered, cruel and devoid of autonomy — was the dominant representation of the dictatorial forces of Europeans in war, so the regimented crowd, standing or goose-stepping, became the prevailing image of European dictatorships in peace. The word “mob” had taken on new meaning with the rise of Al Capone. The FBI projected a view of Nazis and Communists that was similar to popular notions of organized crime: a vast secret network running a racket that was political as opposed to criminal. In real life, mobs are disorganized social bodies of individuals with no coordination. Fascist or communist crowds were hyper-coordinated and the opposite of mobs.

For extreme conservatives, the most obvious explanation for the rise of the regimented crowd was nationality. The American Legion’s response against communism was a call to cut European immigration quotas by 90%. In other words, Italians and Germans as ethnicities were believed to be more likely to produce crowd violence than the respectable English or Norwegians.

Crowds vs Masses

What did this new kind of crowd look like? In the 1930s, crowds were understood as a minority of the population, arising spontaneously, chaotic, but having a short-term lifetime. They had a diffused attention span and were not very efficient. Crowds in the early 30s were predominantly male and crowds had to be in the same place at the same time. Because of this, members of crowds could easily be dispersed, jailed or deported. However, once the individual left a crowd they returned to their normal behavior as individuals.

Modern communications technology, specifically the radio, allowed crowds to be called into existence even when people were not physically gathered together and when the speaker was at a great distance. This crowd was now a mass, focused and much more long-lasting. Further, an individual as a member of mass does not leave his mass mind when he leaves a crowd or turns off his radio. He maintains a crowd mind even when alone. Masses in the late 1930s constituted a majority of the population who voluntarily joined, were regimented, could move efficiently. Masses arose with the decline of all intermediate groups and voluntary associations. In the late 1930s masses were mostly male, but women were out and seen in public.

Sympathetic Views of the Public

Frank Capra found his own independent film production in 1939 which dealt with the regimentation of crowds. In both Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra makes the press responsible for creating public opinion. Capra was a conservative Republican, but it was not only conservatives who blamed mass media for the rise of mass men. In War of the Worlds, Orson Welles wants to spread democracy by exposing the hold mass media has on people. In Citizen Kane, Wells wants to turn the audience into investigators instead of relying on mass media.

Raymond Cantril studied the public reaction to War of the Worlds, but Cantril did not blame mass media. In his Invasion from Mars in 1938, it was not because of mass media that people were duped. It was their willingness to believe they were being invaded. Some people lacked the critical thinking ability to disbelieve what the radio was telling them. On a psychological level, formal education would discourage a willingness to believe. At the same time, the timing as to when they tuned into the broadcast was an important situational factor in explaining the masses’ reaction.

More importantly, Cantril concluded that social stress explains the rise of dictatorships. His conclusion was that economic hardship is the cause of the rise of dictatorships and makes people less rational. Unstable political and economic institutions are responsible for that and this results in the cultivation of ignorance, intolerance and abstention from democratic processes.DEMOCRACTIC THEORY

The Reality and the Fantasy of Democracy

A number of years ago, according to a UN conducted analysis of democratic processes, Yankees ranked 29th in the world. Something like 28% of the population does not vote and another 24% is ineligible to vote. The Yankee public is known around the world as not wanting to talk about politics. When asked, roughly 2/3 of Americans say they want more than two parties. Yet, if you asked soldiers why they were fighting you would be told they are fighting for democracy. How can there be a democracy with only two parties from which to choose? If you ask the general public if they live in a democracy, they will say yes. How can this be? The answer is that the virtue-word “democracy” has been worked into the anti-communist propaganda machine whereas “totalitarian” and “dictatorship“ are used as vice words, which are counter to the virtue word “democracy”.

Traditional Jeffersonian Democracy

In the United States, the first theories of democracy, Jeffersonian, literally meant the rule of the people. Democratic processes supposedly took place in face-to-face town-hall meetings and discussions. The population was imagined to be intelligent and informed. Their decisions were based on conscious and rational thinking processes. Whatever the place of emotions, they were toned down. People were expected to know their self-interest and the way they made their political judgments were thought to be by weighing the pros and cons.

Skepticism of Democracy: Merriam, Lasswell, Wallas and Lippman

By the second decade of the 20th century, “the people” were not seen in such a favorable light. Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell challenged the rationality of human nature and the practicality of a government where the people ruled. Both believed that politics should be the study of how small groups dominate. They thought that politics should be about the study of the influential minority. In the 1920s there was a great controversy over how to interpret the terrible scores of Yankee soldiers on IQ tests. The dominant schools of psychology such as Freud and the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon argued that people were driven by the irrational forces located in the unconscious. Graham Wallas and Walter Lippmann both argued that the ideal human society would be if a few intelligent leaders directed the majority. According to them, the public does not process political events as they happen objectively but though past experiences. Lippmann said in his book Public Opinion, that town-house democracy could no longer work. From the late 19th century, thanks to mass communication, people now have to rely on newspapers and political propaganda for their sources. For Lippmann, the best we can hope for is an elite democracy. He became even more right-wing as he aged, suggesting that people should not be taught to meddle in public affairs.

Lasswell suggested that deep hatreds within the families of Yankees were sublimated into public life. Individuals were thought to be a bad judge of their own self-interest. Free and open discussions obscured rather than clarified problems. Another indicator that the public was not trustworthy came from a study of Chicago politics in which it was found that half the public did not vote. As we saw in the first part of this article, Yankee elites flirted with dictatorship as their skepticism for democracy grew. It wasn’t until the rise of Hitler that they began to defend democracy ideologically, if only for propagandistic purposes.

Cowin and Eliot put a smiley face on public indifference. They argued that the reason people didn’t vote was because they were satisfied with the system! Some said the indifference of people to principles was a crucial factor in the success of popular government. Non-voting kept the public from being divided sharply into coalitions. Given the fickleness of public opinion, those who did vote ensured that no impassioned commitment (god forbid) would mobilize large numbers for a sustained confrontation. In other words, apathy is good because it keeps people from having ‘extreme” opinions. Besides, people are too busy to be bothered with politics.

It rarely occurred to any of these theorists that the reason that over half the people do not vote was that, at least for working class people, there was no one to vote for because both parties were controlled by the ruling class. Instead, they avoided this problem completely, by comparing it to the totalitarian system of the Nazis. John Dewey tried to make democracy akin to a scientific experiment which: a) denied absolute truths; b) remained intellectually flexible and critical; c) valued diversity, and; d) drew from competing subgroups as a base. Dewey tried to link democracy to science, not considering that masses of people do not apply scientific methodology to politics. Dewey was setting the table for the political pluralism of the 1950s.

Schumpeter’s Competitive Elitism

In 1942 Joseph Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which became one of the foundation stones for the pluralism of Robert Dahl over a decade or so later. For Schumpeter, power configurations are stable and in the long run, they do not change. What is democratic is not the extent that people are involved but rather the centrality and stability of political leadership. The state was not an expression of the people’s will but an independent and well-trained administration. The political culture is fractured. People not only have different wants but different values and methods of achieving them. This is why democracy must be concentrated in the leadership. Schumpeter agreed with Le Bon’s theory of crowds, so he thought people were easily influenced by demagogic leaders, advertising, fads and fashions. Politics is dominated by party politics which have little to do with the public. Schumpeter argues that the intermediate groups, the voluntary groups so dear to de Tocqueville, really were not significant. In reality, there was no significant mediation between the state and the individual. At this point, you might think “what does this have to do with democracy?” Schumpeter says that elites have different interests and the voters have the power to vote in or vote out elites.

The Tough-minded and Tender-hearted Politics

Competitive elitism is the bad conscience of the pluralists of the 1950s. Competitive elitism is based on the realism of Max Weber. Pluralist political science was based on the softer sociology of Emile Durkheim. The relationship between competitive elitism and pluralism is like the relationship between Freud and most of his followers. Anna Freud, Adler and Ernest Jones tended to soften Freud and dress him up in his Sunday best. The same can be said about the political relationship between Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes is the hard-core pessimist, while Locke preserves some parts of Hobbes but softens him into a respectable liberalism. In other words, Schumpeter, Weber, Freud and Hobbes were pessimistic realists. The pluralists with the aid of Durkheim were the tender- hearted liberals like Locke and orthodox psychoanalysts.

Pluralism of V.O. Key, Dahl, Truman and Lindholm

On the surface it appears that competitive elitists are the opposite of pluralists. After all, unlike the competitive elitists, according to David Reisman, power in Yankeedom is situational and mercurial rather than consisting of stable power blocks. V. O. Key, Jr., one of the most influential political scientists of the post-war era, says there is a wide dispersion of power in his book Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups. The belief that American society was pluralistic led to a revival in the 50s of the group theory of politics, drawing from Arthur Bentley’s 1908 book The Process of Government. Unlike the competitive elitists, Dahl argues that there are overlapping interest groups with equal access to power, because power is always changing. The pluralists think that the public can mobilize itself to be a force to be reckoned with. Competitive elitists think this is naïve.

This third relativist democratic theory was essentially a defensive doctrine. It emphasized civil liberties, but minimized the problems of social and economic inequality. Another pluralist, David Truman, in his The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion, assumed that the US had already succeeded in its democratic goal. Social scientists were more concerned with problems of conserving what already existed. They devoted more and more research to the problem of stability rather than change. For pluralists, the nation states do not have independent power as they do with the competitive elitists, but they are mediators of public demands. The public does not have a fractured set of wants, methods and values. Rather Yankees are united by the constitutional rules of a supportive, rather than combative political culture.

The most influential and persuasive advocate of realistic democratic theory was Dahl’s book, Preface to Democratic Theory in 1956. According to Dahl, in American government, majorities rule through pressure groups which were the empirical basis of democracy. Dahl and Lindblom argued that economic problems depend not upon our choice among mythical grand alternatives like socialism or communism, but by a gradual tinkering method. Being rational meant that all ideologies were mythical and have to be abandoned. Pluralists supported the “end of ideology” belief of the 1950s. The very concept of a realistic democratic theory implied that reality, not an ideal, was the primary criterion of both theoretical validity and legitimate political action. It deprived democratic theory of its traditional critical function.

Since ideal and empirical theory were conceptually and unconsciously fused, reality became the standard for both systematic analysis and ideal behavior. Reality became the standard to evaluate ideals rather than ideals being the standard by which to judge reality. The pluralists admit that there is a passive citizenry, but there is also an active citizenry which is sufficient for political stability. Lastly, for the pluralists, intermediate associations of neighborhoods, religious groups, clubs, trade associations, political clubs mediate between the individual and the state.

What draws the pluralists into the orbit of competitive elitists is that each has completely given up on Jeffersonian democracy. They have also given up on the idea that the electoral process is itself undemocratic. There is no talk about having candidates that actually represent the lower classes or that the electoral college is a damper on the popular vote. The system is acceptable as it is. It’s just a matter of convincing people to believe in it.

Pluralism did not fare well in the 1960s because it could not explain racism, poverty and war. With no hesitancy, it assumed that Yankeedom already was the democratic ideal. Pluralism imagined that only absolute, authoritarianism, and rationalism could be ideological. They couldn’t imagine that pluralism, empiricism, and pragmatism could themselves be ideological. But books like The End of Ideology can itself be an ideology for liberal anti-communism.

DID CAPITALISM PRODUCE DEMOCRACY? ARE THESE WORDS INTERCHANGEABLE?

Capitalist rulers never seem to tire in reminding us that capitalism is responsible for creating democracy and that socialist societies are never democratic. What this ignores is the 20th century examples of capitalist political economies that prospered without democracy including Hitler’s Germany, South Korea, Taiwan after World War II and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Secondly, there is no necessary relationship between prosperity and capitalism. Most of the countries on the periphery of the world-system today (mostly Africa) are capitalist run in an authoritarian manner that have low Gross National Products.

But what about the origins of capitalism? Weren’t capitalists responsible for the beginnings of democracy? The short answer is no. According to Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, the bourgeoisie wrested its share of political participation from the royal autocracy and aristocratic oligarchy, but it rarely fought for further extension to the classes below them once its own place was secured. When the bourgeoisie was fighting for power against the king and the aristocrats it recruited the lower classes. But once in power themselves, they did not support lower class inclusion. Their contribution was to establish parliamentary bodies between the king and the people rather than to accept the rule of a king alone. Parliamentary bodies are not necessarily democratic. As Marx once called them, they are the “talking shops of the bourgeoisie”. Even by World War I only a handful of countries had become democratic: Switzerland, 1848; France, 1877; Norway 1898 and Denmark 1915.

Historically it was the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie — merchants, craftsman, farmers — who were responsible for the movement towards democracy. Further, it was the industrialization process that transformed society in such a way that it empowered subordinate classes to make it difficult to politically exclude them. It was capitalist development that transformed the class structure, strengthening the working and middle classes and weakening the landed upper class. It was not the capitalist market that made political life more democratic. Rather it was the contradictions of capitalism. It was the growth of the working class and its capacity for self-organization that pushed for a breakthrough to suffrage, at least for white males. It was the rising militancy of the unions and the threat of socialism that pressured capitalists to include workers in the voting process and institute a semblance of formal democracy.

LIBERAL CONSPIRACY: MODERNIZATION THEORY AS ANTI-COMMUNIST DEMOCRACY

Our strategy must be …both global, embracing, every part of the world, and total, with political, psychological, economic and military considerations integrated into one whole.

— International Development Advisory Board Partners in Progress, 1951 (David Rockefeller: Head of International Development Advisory Board)

While American pluralism was the norm for domestic democratic theory, students of comparative politics were making pluralistic democracy the norm for their analysis of nation-states throughout the world. As the US became involved in a Cold War, they wanted research to help them understand what Gabriel Almond called political development of nations, through what Almond called “political culture”.

The major book I will be using to take us through this section is Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Almond’s comparative politics was a significant aspect of modernization theory, part of a vast integrated anti-communist project that began after World War II. In fact, the very creation of the MIT Center for International Studies was the result of top-secret anti-Communist propaganda project in the fall of 1950. As Gilman says, modernization theory represents the most explicit and systematic blueprint ever created by intellectual elites for reshaping societies throughout the world to counter Soviet communism. Arthur Schlesinger said modernization theory represented an American effort to persuade what were then called “Third World” countries to base their revolutions on Locke, rather than Marx.

Many of the key figures in modernization theory were children of missionaries like Lucian Pye and David Apter. Their sense of wanting to save the world (from communism) no doubt impacted their study of comparative politics. Almond and Rostow claimed that communism was a form of psychopathology and Rostow called it a “disease”. Rostow is considered the most hawkish anti-communist of the modernization theorists. He decided at 16 his life purpose was to construct a theory of economics and history capable of countering Marx. During the war he first worked for the OSS, a predecessor to the CIA.

In the hands of Lucian Pye and Walt Rostow, modernization theory would represent liberalism’s attempt to enter the world of political ideology, as an alternative to both fascism and communism. An added twist was to dissolve their liberal ideology and pretend that it was neither liberal nor ideological. They made believe they had no ideology. It’s just what was reasonable, a “vital center” of the political spectrum. This masking of liberalism became part of the End of Ideology orientation of Daniel Bell.

Modernization theorists were elitist, liberal anti-communists, not populist, right-wing McCarthyites. In practice this project was part of a containment policy against the Soviet Union. They set a dominant social scientific paradigm, and found sponsors like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford and other foundations to set up think tanks and eliminate rivals in various academic disciplines. Please see Table B for all the tentacles of this anti-communist project.

Rostow’s theory of modernization was a unilinear theory of social evolution going through five stages: 1) traditional societies; 2) preconditions for take-off; 3) take-off; 4) drive to maturity, and; 5) age of mass high consumption. All other disciplines in Table B went along with Rostow’s theory.

What all these interdisciplinary projects had in common was either assumptions or assertions that:

All premodern societies — hunter-gatherers, simple horticulture, complex horticultural, herding, maritime societies and agricultural states — can be lumped into one category of “traditional societies”.
All nation-states are internally. There is no influence (such as colonialism) on traditional societies by modern societies. They are premodern because they are superstitious and lack initiative.
All societies are inevitably moving towards industrial capitalist societies (though they never named it as capitalist). The use of the term “transition” suggests that there are no crises, no reversals, no other roads possible.
All “mature” modern societies are industrial capitalist.
Fascism was not an expression of modern society but premodern “residues”.
Communism was not a candidate or a road to be taken as a stage. It was premodern.
The United States and western Europe already achieved maturity and they were not going back.
Capitalism and democracy were used interchangeably.
Capitalism as an economic system is never named. It is replaced by euphemisms such as “markets” or “business” or loaded virtue words like the “free market” or “free enterprise” if they are feeling defensive.

CONCLUSION

In order to justify its existence as an industrial capitalist society, capitalists in western Europe and the United States need propaganda to censor or demonize alternatives to its rule. In the realm of language, its job is to narrow the frame of political and economic reference to two choices. For this purpose, it deploys key loaded language words for the purpose of working people up. On one side are the socialists and communists who are demonized with words such as totalitarian or dictatorial. On the other side are the loaded virtue words like democracy, the free market or free enterprise. In order to break away from the narrowing of the political focus we need to neutralize and define key terms which open up rather than narrow our political and economic choices.

• First published in Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post “Dictatorship” and “Democracy” as Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Wise People Know That Winning a War Is No Better Than Losing One

Vijay Prashad — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:42:53 +0000

Dedicated to Soni Prashad, 1929-2020, who spent her life looking for a better world.

US President Donald Trump and his ‘war council’ – led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – have amplified their aggression against China. What began as a trade dispute in the 1990s has now escalated into the United States making an existential challenge against China.

The threat against China is made not for irrational reasons, but for perfectly rational ones, which are laid out below in our Red Alert no. 9 (also available as a separate download from our website). These have to do with the emergence of China as a major economic and technological power. What most rankles the US ruling class is that the various hybrid war techniques to weaken or overthrow the government are simply not available. The only means at the disposal of the United States to hold on to its power – chillingly – is armed force.

For the past several decades, the US has conducted a trade war against China. There are two key issues that worry the United States: first, a trade imbalance that benefits China, and, second, the growth of the Chinese technology sector. Techniques that the US has used against China include: pressuring China to revalue its currency against the dollar, pressuring China to prevent ‘piracy’ on intellectual property in order to slow down its domestic intellectual property developments, and pressuring China to slow down or cease its Belt and Road Initiative.

The US has now begun a war against the Chinese economy. The attempt to isolate Huawei and ZTE from their suppliers and their markets will have a debilitating impact on the growth potential of the Chinese economy. The US has sanctioned roughly 152 companies that make chips and other products for Huawei and ZTE. Increased bans – through the US government’s Clean Network initiative – would prevent US companies from using Chinese cloud services and undersea cables, and it would ban Chinese apps from appearing on app stores. The US government has increased pressure on other countries to join in this campaign.

The US government has increased its military pressure along the eastern rim of China. This includes the 2017 revival of the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the US), the creation of the US’ Indo-Pacific Strategy (its key document from 2020 is called ‘Regain the Advantage’), and the development of a range of new weaponry, including cyberweapons. This military power has come alongside hostile rhetoric against China, with attention focused on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan, and the depiction of the coronavirus pandemic as a ‘China virus’. Evidence is not as important here as the use of older racist and anti-Communist ideas to demonise China.

Liu Xiaodong (China), Wedding Party, 1992

Why is the US increasing its pressure against China?

China’s technological advances could result in a generational advantage over the West. China’s scientific and technological developments came because of the country’s investment in higher education and in its ability to transfer technology from firms that entered the country to manufacture goods. In 2018, Chinese scholars for the first time published more scientific articles than their colleagues in the US, and Chinese firms filed more patent applications than US firms. Chinese tech firms have now produced products that appear to be ahead of US, European, and Japanese products. Examples for this include 5G, BeiDou (a better mapping technology than GPS), high-speed trains, and robots.

Faced with US pressure, China has crafted an independent trade and development agenda. Since the world financial crisis, China began diversifying its economy from reliance upon the US and European markets to build up its own internal market and to increase engagement with the Global South. The immediate projects that developed included the Belt and Road Initiative, the String of Pearls Initiative, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Forum. The Chinese government has also begun to pay more attention to the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). These moves come alongside a remarkable poverty eradication programme.

Currently, China is highly dependent on imported energy – such as gas from ASEAN nations, Australia, and Qatar. The China-Russia 6000kms ‘Power of Siberia’ pipeline will bring 38 billion cubic metres of natural gas, a substantial increase to meet the demands for the 90 billion cubic meters consumed by China. In 2014, Russia’s multinational energy corporation Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation signed a $400 billion for a thirty-year deal.

Increasingly, China has attempted to build institutions outside of Western-controlled trade and development architecture, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (founded in 2014). As part of this, China has committed to de-dollarisation; China has proposed to hold its reserves and to conduct trade in currencies other than the US dollar. This is a long-term but inevitable development, and one that threatens the overall role of the Wall Street-Dollar complex. China’s cooperation with Russia is most advanced in this arena, with about 50% of Russia-China trade conducted in roubles and yuan (Russia owns about 25% of the global yuan reserves). Both Russia and China are divesting themselves of their dollar reserves. In January 2020, Russia sold $101 billion, or 50%, of its dollar reserves and moved $44 billion into Euros and $44 billion into yuan. The yuan, however, represents only 2% of global currency reserves.

Against the eastward expansion of NATO and the emergence of the Quad, China and Russia have crafted a military and diplomatic Eurasian security bloc. This is evident in the arms deals and the military exercises, but also in diplomatic coordination. For example, Russian and Chinese foreign ministry spokespersons Maria Zakharova and Hua

Chunying said in late July that they would join efforts in combatting the information war against China and Russia. Chinese diplomats have taken a more forthright attitude in their statements; they have been dubbed the ‘wolf warrior diplomats’, an allusion to a popular film where a Chinese soldier from an elite Wolf Warrior troop defeats a group of terrorists led by an ex-US Navy Seal.

Clearly, the US has found that Chinese leadership has been unwilling to go the Gorbachev road – namely, to surrender the Chinese model to the will of the United States. There is no possibility that the Communist Party of China will dissolve itself. The Chinese middle class – possible fodder for a ‘colour revolution’ – does not have any appetite to overthrow the government. It is content with the direction of the government and sees that its government has improved living standards and has been able – unlike Western governments – to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic (as we write about in a series on ‘CoronaShock’). A Harvard University study shows that the government led by the Communist Party of China has increased its approval from 2003 to 2016, largely because of the social welfare programmes and the fight against corruption pushed by both the Communist Party of China and by the Chinese government. The overall approval stands at 93%.

Zhong Biao (China), Paradise, 2007

What contradictions does the US war project face?

Chinese economic developments – such as the country’s capacity to outspend the US in development aid to outbid Western firms in trade deals – has produced alliances between China and key capitalist sectors in countries that have otherwise been secure US allies. Examples of this are amongst sections of the capitalist class in the Philippines and Sri Lanka, where Chinese investment has been welcomed.

The Chinese state has intensified its intervention in the tech sector inside China, with a $14 billion private and public fund to support tech developments. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) – China’s top chip company – had an initial public offering (IPO) in Shanghai which netted $7. 5 billion. As a consequence of such funds and its own scientific developments, China will soon be able to bypass the US chip firms.

China’s economic capacity continues to exert pressure on fragments of capital in different countries. For instance, Australian mining companies rely upon China to buy iron ore from Australia. These companies lobby Canberra not to take too hostile a position against China. Roughly one third of Australia’s total exports go to China; these include soy, barley, meat, fruits, gas, and the raw minerals. The Australian government is forced to acknowledge these concerns, even though it has a longer-term perspective than the short-term profit concerns of the mining conglomerates. China has already hedged its bets, increasing purchases of soy and meat from Argentina and Brazil, and it will likely buy more mined goods from Brazil (Brazil’s Vale is using massive ships to carry mined goods to China).

The US military is stretched thin between the conflicts in Venezuela and Iran, and now in China. The US Navy has had four secretaries in a year, part of the chaos in the Trump administration. As a consequence, the US Navy has complained about the lack of ability to handle so many theatres of war at the same time. China has developed sophisticated defence mechanisms, such as cyber warfare techniques that have the ability to shut down US communications, starting with their satellites, and such as their Dongfeng missiles, which are capable of hitting the US navy ships that are in the South China Sea.

The eighth century Chinese poet Li Bai wrote of the ugliness of war; as far as war is concerned, nothing has changed over the centuries.

Soldiers smear their blood on the dry grass
While generals map the next campaign.

Wise people know winning a war
Is no better than losing one.

To break the embargo on factual news on China, please subscribe to receive News on China from the Dong Feng Collective; these weekly digests are the best way to remain informed about developments inside the country.

This article was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2020 at 5:42pm and is filed under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, COVID-19, Economy/Economics, Health/Medical, Militarism, Science/Technology, Trade.